Examination of Witness (Questions 40-59)
1 DECEMBER 2004
RT HON
CHARLES CLARKE
MP
Q40 Paul Holmes: Is it not true that
where that co-operation takes place it is almost entirely between
a secondary school and what used to be called their feeder primary
schools? There is very little between secondary school and competitor
secondary school, which is what they are all becoming in the system
now; they are all competitors.
Mr Clarke: I really do think that
is the reverse of the truth. It may be your experience in Chesterfield
is different to mine. In Norwich we have a situation where three
secondary schools and the local FE college have made a joint appointment
to run jointly the 14 to 19 curriculum between those schools and
you actually have a situation—I personally have seen it—where
the parents are going to talk to a teacher and the teacher actually
says "That school over there has a better course on this
than we do. Maybe you ought to think about doing that, or doing
it in our school" or whatever. I think those kinds of collaborations
will become increasingly common. In fact it is one of the things
I hope we will emphasise in our response to Mike Tomlinson's report
on 14 to 19. There will be the odd school which will say it is
going it alone, trust them and so on. That will be absolutely
counter the general trend of what is happening.
Q41 Chairman: May I push you on this?
When you said I raised the term "baron" in my speech
yesterday, I regret it. I meant more busy managers.
Mr Clarke: I may have misunderstood,
I am sorry.
Q42 Chairman: I did in a weak moment
use that term. More appropriately I should have said a busy manager
of a school, a head, a principal. I find in my visits to schools,
large comprehensive schools, the principal, the head is absolutely
fully committed, 100% of their time, to running the school. They
say to me that they are too busy to deal with partnerships and
a whole network of schools and have collegiates. It is a lovely
idea but they need someone to do it. Most of them say they want
a really good local education authority to do that sort of thing.
When you said, if these people do not co-operate, if they are
not co-operating with other schools someone is going to do something
nasty to them like not give them enough funding -
Mr Clarke: As much.
Q43 Chairman: —as much funding,
the only people who can do that are you in the department. It
is not going to be local education authorities. They do not have
the power to do that. It is going to be a direct relationship
between you and individual schools.
Mr Clarke: The key problem at
the moment from this point of view, if you are a school head—and
I am sure they say to you what they do to me—is that they
have a whole range of billing streams and initiatives they have
to deal with from a whole range of different bodies. They have
the LEA doing it in certain areas, they have the Learning and
Skills Council, they have DfES standard fund money, they have
to bid on a whole set of different criteria and they get up propositions,
whether it is for Excellence in the Cities or for the behaviour
strategy or the school sports, whatever, and they have to find
an approach to do that. How do we respond to this? I have to say
I plead guilty to this government having created many of these
funding streams. Why? Because we wanted to incentivise and encourage
particular forms of behaviour. Now is the time to say that actually,
having done that, without reducing the quantum of money, we want
to get it into one dialogue, one approach. Your head in Huddersfield
will talk to Calderdale and to the person from the DfES and to
the LSC in one conversation, saying this is what they want to
do, that is what they want to do. We have been trialling this
as an approach and people are very positive about it. It has a
large number of benefits and one of the parts of that conversation
will be how well you are working with other schools or colleges
in your particular locality and what you need. If the head then
says in that conversation that they would love to but they cannot
run the place, it is just all too much, they do not have time
to talk to the school down the road or wherever it might be, then
that collaboration will say it is terrible and they have to find
a way of making that work better in whatever way. In fact—again
I cannot speak for Huddersfield because I do not know—a
lot of dialogue is taking place between heads. I should say it
is at an unparallel level. I take the point about the feeder primaries;
that is true. I do think it is also between secondary schools
and secondary schools and secondary schools and local colleges.
I admit that I am talking anecdotally rather than systemically,
but I could provide a large number of anecdotes of where
those co-operations are happening.
Q44 Chairman: Does the Labour Party and
the Labour Government not traditionally believe in locally elected
democratic politicians having some say in what happens in these
things?
Mr Clarke: That is why the council
has a say. Now we are going back to the conversation with Mr Jackson.
My offer to local government is: work with me in a partnership
and we will see whether we can get more money and more responsibilities
going through the democratically elected local authority rather
than having our various bypassing structures which exist at the
moment. It is possible to do that. The compacts we have with local
government give many more possibilities in this.
Q45 Chairman: You seem to have a lot
of work to do to persuade people like the Local Government Association.
Mr Clarke: Not as much as you
might think. I have a regular meeting with the Local Government
Association on an all-party basis and I went to the Local Government
Association conference in Newcastle to discuss this. There is
a lot of opinion in local government, of all parties by the way,
which is very sympathetic to the type of approach I have just
described. It is true to say that there is some opinion—you
are quite right—which says "Keep off our lawn. We run
our schools. Just give us the money and that is it". One
has to make a judgment as to whether that is an acceptable state
of affairs. I could not put my hand on my heart and say that every
democratically elected authority in Britain has done an absolutely
stunning job in running the schools in its particular patch. I
could say that I completely agree with the question as you phrased
it, which is that it is vital there is an important role in running
the local education system for the democratically elected local
authority and for councillors. I agree with that completely. The
question is: what is that role and how does it relate to whatever
national imperatives there are as well?
Q46 Chairman: You seemed to be most interested,
or perhaps a little defensive, yesterday in the Queen's Speech
debate.
Mr Clarke: Defensive?
Q47 Chairman: At the time of the speech
of Stephen Dorrell, when he suggested that the real relationships
between the new foundation schools and indeed the academies were
basically Conservative policies which you had brushed up and shined
up a bit; they were really the same policies. This is a pretty
dramatic step, both in terms of the number of academies you want
to roll up, but also to sticking on foundation schools. You are
introducing a piece of legislation in this Queen's Speech which
means with one meeting a school can decide they are going to become
a foundation school. They will own the property, they will own
the whole, I think I said, caboodle. Perhaps I shall regret that
like the "barons". Basically you are going to take them
into the same sort of status as post-16 institutions, are you
not?
Mr Clarke: Firstly, I thought
Stephen Dorrell made a very good speech yesterday.
Q48 Chairman: He seemed to irritate you.
Mr Clarke: He did not irritate
me at all. I thought he created more questions for the Conservative
Party than he did for the Government; let me simply put it like
that. He made an intelligent speech on this matter which, with
the exception of Mr Gibb, was unusual from the Conservative benches
yesterday. It was an intelligent speech and he was trying to make
the analysis in a variety of different ways both on education
and health. As I said in the speech, the specialist schools are
a lineal descendant of one or two of the things, the CTCs and
so on, which the last Conservative Government did and we have
tried to develop that approach. The whole point about the grant-maintained
approach was that it was designed as something which was to be
elitist in concept. It was designed for some schools but not others.
It is like the approach to grammar schools, for example. Our whole
approach on this is universal in style: universally trying to
go to specialist schools, universally encouraging people if they
wish to do so to go down the foundation route. The issue which
really needs to be addressed is that if you look at the resources
in a particular school, whether it is a landed property or whatever
else it might be, why should a school not have that and be able
to say how they should use it in the best way. Is it the case
that it is going to be taken away from the public interest? It
is not. The property, for example, cannot be disposed of without
first going back to the LEA, if that was the route you went down.
Getting the decisions to use this resource for improving the education
for the children of that particular school must be the right way
to go.
Q49 Chairman: You are going to have some
time to persuade even your colleagues in the Labour Party about
that. One of the things we face in education all the time is the
dynamic of demographics, where people live, where people go to
school, it is a changing pattern all the time, dramatically in
some of our cities. Some cities grow, move to the west from the
east and so on. If you petrify the system so that every school
owns what it stands on, where are you ever going to get the ability
of anyone to say the pattern of schooling is changing, we have
to close some schools, perhaps sell some for redevelopment, even,
if you accept academies, build an academy here? Where are you
ever going to get that strategic ability to do it with all the
barons sitting there saying it is their plot of land and you cannot
do it. You have not been very successful with FE, have you? They
are on their own.
Mr Clarke: I shall make an FE
point separately, if I may. The point you just made is a genuine
and correct point. It is the most serious criticism of how we
are envisaging this. There are demographic changes. We get new
developments; we get people leaving certain areas and so on. It
is absolutely right that there needs to be a strategic impact
on that which is why I am going back to the answer I gave Mr Jackson
earlier on. The LEA does have that strategic responsibility to
carry it through. Is it the case that by having more foundation
schools, for example, the LEA is not able to exercise that role?
I do not accept that at all. I simply do not think it is the case.
The most powerful measure of demographic change is pupil numbers.
If there are no pupils in that particular area, then the situation
will be that the school cannot sustain itself in that position
in the model you are describing. That will be under any system:
what we have now, what we have in the future. It will still continue
to be the case. It is pupil numbers which are the key element
in the whole process. As far as further education is concerned,
that is a much wider and more substantive debate. Further education
through our Success for All programme is facing up better than
some people acknowledge to the imperatives of the moment in these
questions. There still remain FE colleges which are not facing
up to this in the way that they need to. There is a lot of debate
in FE about how to take that forward and deal with it in that
way.
Chairman: Can I hold it there? I was
really talking about the independence of that sector compared
with how foundation schools will develop. We will hold that there.
Q50 Helen Jones: Secretary of State,
you said in your answer earlier to Nick Gibb that what we do in
education should be based on research and we all agree with that
in the Committee. What research did the Government do to show
that putting money into academies would produce better educational
outcomes than putting that money into redeveloping existing schools?
Mr Clarke: Academies are in many
cases redeveloping existing schools. They are on that site, they
are dealing with a school which has historically been very unsuccessful.
The whole point about the academies programme is to be a tremendous
booster in an area where educational attainment has been very
low. They are not going into the leafy suburbs to give the examples,
they are going into inner city areas to try to take that forward.
The components of the academy, namely the structure of the school
governors, the way in which the new capital money is there, the
teaching methods which are used, all of those things have been
the subject of various central research. If you are saying, which
is the case, that because we only have a very small number of
academies at this moment, by definition you cannot have had a
research programme to look at that relatively small number of
academies before moving forward, that is true. On the other hand
I would say that a proper scientific assessment of the impact
of academies could not meaningfully take place for two or three
years at least, probably six or seven years of a school cohort
going through, to assess what happened. If I am asked to say we
should just stop everything and come back to it in seven or eight
years' time, you just cannot operate in that way. Where you are
right is that it is an obligation on me to look at the components
of an academy and ask whether there is evidence of the particular
elements, take for example brand new buildings, improved quality
of education. I would say that does stack up, but I would not
accept an argument which simply says you do nothing until six
or seven years down the line from where we are.
Q51 Helen Jones: Can we look at those
components? Clearly one of those components which is very unusual
in the education system is the private sponsor arrangement whereby
for putting a small percentage of the cost of the academy the
sponsor gains an extraordinary amount of influence. What is the
educational benefit of that?
Mr Clarke: If you go through most
of the academies so far, you will see a significant education
improvement, even by comparison with the predecessor school, in
each of those areas. The education benefit is the engagement of
the sponsor who is really trying to take it forward. There are
different types of engagement. Some of the sponsors are networks
of schools, some are individuals, there are different people operating
in different ways. If you talk to the sponsors, which I have done
a lot, their motivation is to improve educational performance.
That is why they are involved in the whole process.
Q52 Helen Jones: I am sure that is the
motivation. What we are trying to establish is whether it works.
Is there any research evidence to show that it is the engagement
of the sponsor which produces an improvement in outcome rather
than other things such as more money going into the school, more
teachers and so on?
Mr Clarke: I am certain that it
is the case that it is not simply resources. Let us just remember
in the case of the academies that there are not extra revenue
resources compared with comparative schools locally. The extra
resource has been capital in most cases and, as you correctly
say, the sponsors' money which has been capital money is a relatively
small proportion of the total of capital which has gone in. On
the revenue basis, there is no significant difference between
the revenues for an academy and for other schools in the locality.
The issues of more teachers and so on are not tested in that academy
context. There is evidence, by the way, that more revenue money
does tend, for example in Excellence in the Cities, to deliver
better results. I would argue—and this goes back to research
conducted literally decades ago—that it is the leadership
ethos structure of the school which determines its results. There
was a tremendous report a long time ago, I cannot remember its
exact details, which actually said that the key thing was the
ethos leadership drive in the school. It did not matter what it
was, but there had to be consistency and coherence over behaviour,
discipline, everything else right through the whole approach.
I think the academies are working to that end and the involvement
of the external sponsor has helped that to happen in quite significant
ways.
Q53 Helen Jones: You mentioned leadership
and the ethos of a school. Bearing in mind that there is a great
deal of public money going into schools, are there any sponsors
which the DfES would find unacceptable? Should sponsors have an
influence on the teaching, to the extent, for instance, that they
do in Emmanuel and King's, where we are allowing creationism to
be taught in our schools. Is that acceptable in terms of public
policy?
Mr Clarke: That is not correct
either. Perhaps I could just do a note for the Committee on the
question of those particular schools as there is a great deal
of confusion about this[1]Firstly,
the national curriculum is taught in all schools; they teach the
national curriculum in those schools and that is how it operates
in science as in other areas. There is no sense in which children
in those schools are somehow brainwashed to believe that creationism
is the right way. By the way I am totally against any concept
of creationism. I think it is a crazy way of looking at things.
The idea that schools are operating in that way is completely
wrong. I do not have it with me, but if you would permit me I
could drop you a short note on this particular aspect[2]It
is a widespread concern, but it is not well founded. It is not
the case that in those schools that is what is happening. There
are fears about it which have been whipped up in a variety of
different areas, for example in Doncaster when an academy was
being considered in that area. I do not think it is substantial.
What is impressive about the schools has been their improved educational
performance.
Q54 Helen Jones: Can we look at that
improved educational performance? There is evidence, is there
not, that while some academies have improved their performance
by serving very deprived communities well, that is not true of
all of them. Is it not the case for instance that King's expelled
37 children in its first year, far more than all the other schools
in that town and that the proportion of children in that school
claiming free school meals has fallen substantially? Would you
agree that it is easy for a school to improve its performance
if it gets rid of any children who are difficult to teach? Is
that really what we want?
Mr Clarke: Again I need to write
to the Committee about this.[3]
My understanding is—and I do not have the figures in front
of me—that more pupils were excluded by the prior school
from that site than by the current school on that site. I would
need to check this out because I do not want to mislead the Committee
and that is why I am asking whether I might write a note on this
question. I do not think it is the case that they have, as it
were, excluded their way to success by comparison with previous
schools in the area. Secondly, I was not aware, but I will check
it in the light of what you have said to me, about the proportion
of children with free school meals going down in that particular
area. Just look at the improvement in educational performance
for children getting good GCSEs. It has gone up absolutely massively
at that school and that is why parents want to go to the school
and take it forward. Do we not care about that? Do we not put
that in the balance in this discussion at all?
Q55 Helen Jones: Yes, we do care about
that, but the point I was trying to make to you is that there
are various ways of improving educational performance. What we
would want to be assured of as a Committee is that these schools
are improving the educational performance of children who are
in very deprived areas—
Mr Clarke: Of course.
Q56 Helen Jones: —and not simply
sending their problems elsewhere in order to do that. Would you
agree that if they were doing that, that is not what we are trying
to achieve.
Mr Clarke: I do agree and the
reason why academies are in a sense a diversion from the whole
debate is that it is a very small number of schools out of all
the secondary schools in Britain. I can point to specialist schools,
also controversial I know, and say that I think they have raised
standards very substantially where they have been. In many cases
academies are taking on a qualitatively different level of problem
because they are often operating in communities where there has
just been an absolutely endemic level of low achievement and low
participation. The problems they are taking on are very substantial.
I should say there are academies which are not succeeding initially
in overcoming those problems. There is also a significant number,
far more, of academies which are succeeding in overcoming those
problems. You are right and I accept the challenge you set down
for me correctly. It is precisely: are the academies in the areas
where they are of very low educational attainment succeeding in
improving educational attainment in that locality and thus hopefully
intervening to end a cycle of despair which has been the situation
in many of those areas. That is the question to put. As you imply
with your question, we will not know the answer to that for some
considerable period of time and it will be a matter which is constantly
scrutinised, and rightly so, from that point of view. What we
can say initially is that there have been some initial very, very
positive steps in the academies.
Q57 Helen Jones: If we do not know the
answer to that—and I accept your point that it takes some
time to know the answers to these questions properly—how
then did the Government decide how many further academies it would
need? Where did these figures come from of 60 in London and 200
overall?
Mr Clarke: We analysed both the
geographical areas and the schools where there were the lowest
levels of performance. I do not have the figures in front of me
but my recollection is that there are 400 secondary schools in
the country which are lower than the level which we regard as
appropriate. We considered how we could get a boost into those
areas. We set a target, which looked as well at the overall financial
position capital programme that we had, to see what a reasonable
balance to achieve was. That is why we set the target of 200 by
2010. In the case of London, it was a very scientifically based
approach; more so than elsewhere in the country. As a result of
the London challenge, we have very, very careful co-operation
with the 32 London boroughs about which schools in which particular
localities need this kind of investment. In fact already I am
very, very encouraged. There are people who are saying they will
send their child to the local school rather than go private in
ways which were happening before. We are seeing people who had
really given up on some of the educational opportunities for their
children feeling there were real possibilities. Round London there
is a large number of children from all social backgrounds who
have been sent away from London to go to schools around the London
ring and who are now coming back towards schools in their particular
localities. That is a very, very positive aspect and that is how
we got the 60 figure for London as such.
Q58 Helen Jones: It is a bit of a leap
in the dark though, is it not? We still do not have the research
to show whether putting money into the academies is better than
putting money into other schools. We are rolling out this programme
without the research to justify it.
Mr Clarke: When we are talking
about putting money in, academies get no extra revenue money at
all compared with any other school in a particular locality.
Q59 Helen Jones: Indeed; but we are using
money to set up a different type of school.
Mr Clarke: On the capital side
more money is going in and it is self-evident almost that to have
a brand new school with brand new facilities and all the rest
of it lifts possibilities in those areas compared with the case
before. It is only a small part of the overall Building Schools
for the Future programme which goes right through the whole area.
The academies programme has attracted tremendous controversy and
interest in what has happened. Let me be very explicit. I think
that the fact that a number of sponsors, donors, whatever you
call them, are ready to commit to educational improvement for
some of our poorest communities is a good thing not a bad thing
and I welcome it. I do not say "Go away, you are a millionaire,
we are not interested in you doing this". I think getting
their engagement is positive and it is important. For Socialists
and those of us on the Committee who describe ourselves in this
way, it ought to be something we applaud: the commitment of people
right across society to the education of people in the most deprived
communities in the country.
1 Note: See (SE4). Back
2
Note: See (SE4). Back
3
Note: See (SE4). Back
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