Examination of Witness (Questions 100-119)
1 DECEMBER 2004
RT HON
CHARLES CLARKE
MP
Q100 Mr Jackson: I want to ask a rather
heretical question. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford nearly
40 years ago, lots of my contemporaries were going into education
as teachers in state schools. I do not think anybody now at Oxford
or Cambridge goes into state school teaching and there is a problem
about recruitment of teachers in terms of the quality of degrees,
the level of them and so forth. We all know that there are real
difficulties, particularly in some subjects. Does the Secretary
of State see any connection at all between that development and
the developments over the last 40 years in school structures and
school admissions policies?
Mr Clarke: I must admit that I
have not looked at this particularly from the Oxbridge or even
Oxford angle, but I do not really recognise the picture. I do
not think it is the case that people are not going into state
education. I think that large numbers are going into state education
and we want to encourage more to. The work of Simon Singh, for
example, the mathematics writer and his proposals in getting maths
and science undergraduates to act as teaching assistants in schools
from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and many others, is
actually leading those individuals to say they will go into teaching
for a period because it really is exciting compared with what
used to be the case before. I do not really accept the central
proposition. I will have a look at the statistics to see whether
it is borne out.
Q101 Chairman: The best research on this
is contrary to Robert Jackson's view that it is none. It is less
than we should like, but graduates from Oxford and Cambridge and
other fine universities do go into teaching. The best report on
this is the Sutton Trust report which does say that too many go
into the independent sector and not enough go into the state sector.
Before we move to the last section, what worries the Committee,
particularly when we took evidence on secondary, is when the Government
seems to be using weasel words about things, when we have a minister
in front of us, a Minister for Schools, who can defend "structured
discussions" as not really being interviews. It just seems
to me that if we want to be considered credible, not only by people
who support the party you and I belong to, but also by people
out there, when they see clearly that this is Sir Humphrey at
work, "Minister, for God's sake don't call them interviews,
call them structured discussions", it undermines the quality
of the debate on education. Surely that is wrong?
Mr Clarke: If that were the case,
I would accept it. Maybe I am guilty of weasel words. I certainly
try not to be guilty of using weasel words and try to address
these questions. We try, maybe we do not succeed, to have straight
discussions about what all these situations are. You can get into
a very legalistic issue of what is an interview and what is a
structured discussion, it can be tested in the courts if one wishes
and go through this process, but I do not really accept the description.
We are trying very, very hard, even the Sir Humphries or Ms Humphries
are working very, very hard, to talk in a clear way about these
questions.
Q102 Chairman: Let us give you another
example. You know this is my opinion, because I aired it in the
debate on the Queen's Speech yesterday. Whatever view you take
of grammar schools— and I personally have taken a view that
the Government was probably quite right to go round the issue
and get on with improving the 95% of schools which are not involved
with this. If you actually look at the way in which consultation,
the grammar school balance takes place, the evidence given to
this Committee shows that it is awful. It goes against any notion
of fairness. Yet, on the one hand, as I said yesterday, you could
have one meeting and a school could become a foundation school;
that is it. Whether you believe in this or do not believe in it,
if people want to challenge what happens at 11-plus in a particular
area it is palpably unfair and you still preside over a system
which you know is unfair, we know is unfair, but you will not
do anything about it.
Mr Clarke: Firstly, I do not accept
the comparison between a foundation school decision and a decision
to go for selective admission of this type. I think they are qualitatively
utterly different types of decision.
Q103 Chairman: Perhaps.
Mr Clarke: Therefore different
processes arise. Secondly, if you decide you are going to abolish
grammar schools, you have three ways you can deal with it. You
can do it by national statute, you can do it by giving the local
authority the power to do it or you can do it with the local community
in some sense taking a decision on this. The decision we have
taken, rightly or wrongly, is that it should be a decision for
the local community and that is why we have the process. One can
then ask what the best process is and that is one of the points
to which you are referring in this conversation. To which I say:
I understand the point which is being made, but it is not easy
to find a significantly better process. You can make criticisms
of particular procedures which are used in this case and I understand
the criticisms the Committee has made, but getting to a better
process is by no means straightforward in trying to see what might
be a better way of doing it. That is why we have responded as
we have to your report.
Q104 Chairman: So you would like us to
come up with an alternative.
Mr Clarke: I always look very
carefully at what the Select Committee says on any subject. I
am not requesting you to come up with an alternative. I am saying
that the reason why we did not go down the path of changing this
was because we could not immediately see a better process for
local decision taking in this area.
Q105 Chairman: You are out of your comfort
zone really, are you not?
Mr Clarke: Out of my comfort zone?
Q106 Chairman: As a government, not you.
It is better to leave it alone. It is just too prickly an area,
is it not? That is the truth. You know that it is an unjust sort
of system. You would really like to change it, would you not,
if it were up to you?
Mr Clarke: I am very happy with
the state of affairs that we have. In answer to Mr Holmes earlier
I described the decision we took in 1998 about moving this line
or not. I accept that people can quite legitimately have different
views about moving the line, moving back the other way or extending
or whatever, but I think the line we took was the right line.
Chairman: We do not want to make a meal
of it because we want to cover some 14 to 19 issues before we
finish.
Q107 Mr Turner: Do you think all teachers
should have experience of all types of school and all types of
pupils?
Mr Clarke: That is an unattainable
ambition.
Q108 Mr Turner: But a reasonable ambition.
Mr Clarke: Unreasonable because
it is unattainable. For example, the idea that every teacher should
have experience of all primary school, inner city, work-based
learning and everything in between is not attainable and therefore
not reasonable. What I do think, if you are asking me simply about
14 to 19, is that the single biggest challenge we have as between
schools, colleges, work-based learning and so on, is how to get
some experience across the whole range of teachers in this area.
That remains a significant weakness of the system.
Q109 Mr Turner: This is an overlap question.
Some paper or other which came before us, and I cannot remember
what it was, suggested that teachers should have that broader
experience and I realise it is unattainable in pure terms. However,
your objective of handing what you now call hard-to-educate and
what I thought at the time you called excluded pupils, spreading
them out among all schools, means inevitably that they are spread
out among all teachers. I think Mr Jackson's point was that some
teachers are well able and well prepared to teach motivated pupils
and able pupils and some are well prepared and well able to teach
less able pupils, not such academic pupils. To demand that whole
range of capacity in each individual teacher excludes a lot of
people from the teaching profession.
Mr Clarke: I agree with you. However,
if you take an average secondary school of 100 to 150 teachers,
it is precisely the question of leadership in that school to decide
which teachers are best equipped to deal with which pupils and
which groups of pupils, where, as you correctly say, different
teachers will have different strengths and different weaknesses.
Deploying them to the area where they will make the biggest effect
is precisely the job of leading the school in a positive way.
That is why I was jibbing. I took the question slightly the wrong
way; I was not understanding you clearly enough. I was jibbing
at the idea that you could have a super teacher who could cover
every conceivable form of teaching. That is not a realistic or
reasonable ambition. A bit wider experience can be beneficial
and it should be encouraged. There are various devices which people
are looking at to do that.
Q110 Mr Turner: But not to the extent
that it excludes people from the profession who might have a very
worthwhile contribution to make.
Mr Clarke: Of course; absolutely.
Q111 Mr Turner: When Mr Tomlinson came
before us the other day he told us that one of the reasons why
he has made some of his proposals was that he thought basic skills
in literacy and numeracy were absolutely key and therefore a student
should not be able to get an examination pass if they were unable
to demonstrate those basic skills. Do you think that that is a
weakness of the existing GCSE?
Mr Clarke: Weakness is too strong
a word. I thought you were going to ask me whether I agreed with
his view, which I do.
Q112 Mr Turner: I thought you would.
Mr Clarke: I hope that our White
Paper early in the New Year will focus on this core skills question.
Do I think this is a weakness of the existing GCSE? I think the
extent to which it happens varies subject by subject. I would
not make a generic remark of that type.
Q113 Mr Turner: He said that these things
should be tested at GCSE.
Mr Clarke: At the age of 16.
Q114 Mr Turner: I think he said that
marks should be deducted at GCSE.
Mr Clarke: Yes, he did.
Q115 Mr Turner: Do you agree or disagree
with that?
Mr Clarke: I agree with that.
Q116 Mr Turner: Why do we have to wait
until your decision and the implementation of the Tomlinson proposals
before those changes are made in GCSE?
Mr Clarke: I shall publish my
response to Tomlinson early in the New Year; hopefully in January.
This will go through all of these and will include a detailed
timetable of how we intend to approach implementation of the Tomlinson
report. It is quite true that there are some aspects that we can
look to implement earlier than others in what is carried through.
I can say to the Committee that this core skills question to which
Mike Tomlinson referred is a key question for us to get right
and to address early rather than late. What I am keen to avoid,
and it is a big issue for educational reform everywhere, is a
sense of permanent revolution at what is going on. It is quite
difficult to make the judgments as to how quickly you make change
in any of these areas. In fact the single most difficult judgment
out of Mike Tomlinson's report is what to implement when, what
decisions to take now, what decisions to leave until 2006, for
the sake of argument, and so on.
Q117 Mr Turner: May I ask a couple of
questions about sixth forms. On the one hand we have a policy
which is that those high performing specialist schools without
sixth forms will have new opportunities to develop sixth form
provision. On the other hand we have LEAs in some places and LSCs
more widely which seem pretty bent on amalgamating sixth forms,
in some cases transferring all sixth form provision into FE. Do
those two different approaches rest conveniently together?
Mr Clarke: I do not really accept
the description. There is a very wide range of post-16 provision
in terms of the school/FE balance across the country. Our view
is that we need more diversity and that is why we take the view
we do, for example, about school sixth forms and taking that forward.
I am optimistic actually that very creative approaches are being
followed. I can think of three schools in rural Norfolk, for example,
which are 11 to 16 schools where there is a key issue. There has
been a battle about which of them would get a sixth form and how
it would be and they are actually coming to a view, working with
the local college, that the three schools and an FE college—this
is not the group to which I was referring earlier—will jointly
establish a sixth form provision which will work together in these
ways. These are towns about 10 to 15 miles apart. I think we will
find much more creative approaches in this area which will be
very positive and that is why I continue to emphasise the collaborative
aspects of what is happening.
Q118 Mr Turner: Would it be a fair signal
that if you get rid of all the sixth forms and then you have a
high performing specialist school, that school would be entitled
to open its own sixth form?
Mr Clarke: Yes. The answer is
yes. We are saying that the basic position is in an area where
there is a very low level of sixth form provision and where you
have a successful school, for example a successful specialist
school, and where educational attainment has been low, that there
would be a presumption in favour of such a school being able to
establish a sixth form. Not a right, but a presumption. It is
in the process that it would go forward. The LSC[6]would
do it in this context.
Q119 Mr Turner: Right; the LSC would
decide. Earlier on you pled guilty to creating all these funding
streams and you referred, I though in a fairly derogatory manner,
to the exclusion of Connexions and Learning and Skills Councils
from local democratic accountability. Am I right in concluding
that you think those funding streams should continue to be reduced?
Mr Clarke: Firstly, I am in favour
of continuing to reduce the number of funding streams and that
is the approach we will follow. Secondly, the point I was trying
to make is that the history of local government in this country
from the establishment of the NHS, which was established as the
NHS, not the local authority service, to the Manpower Services
Commission, which then became the LSC, to the Connexions service
and so on, has actually been about the central state bypassing
local government because it did not have confidence in local government
to operate in those areas. The challenge I set is to ask whether
it is possible to get local government taking more of the responsibility
in these areas, which would require local government accepting
in those areas more of an acceptance of the overall position from
national government and what it is seeking to achieve.
6 The decision about whether a school can open a sixth
form under the presumption is actually taken by the School Organisation
Committee and not the LSC. Back
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