Examination of Witnesses (Questions 202
- 219)
THURSDAY 13 JANUARY 2005
PROFESSOR HARRY
BRIGHOUSE, DR
PHILIP HUNTER
CBE AND MR
MARTIN WARD
Q202 Chairman: Could I call the Committee
to order and welcome our witnesses this morning to help us with
our inquiry into what we call Choice and Voice issues. We are
looking particularly this morning at how some of these arguments
relate to the field of education, and we are delighted to have
with us Professor Harry Brighouse of the University of Wisconsin,
Dr Philip Hunter who is the Chief Schools Adjudicator, who I was
delighted to know in a former incarnation when you were Director
of Education in Staffordshire, and Mr Martin Ward, who is Deputy
General Secretary of the Secondary Heads Association. Thank you
very much for coming and for your very useful notes that you have
sent to us before hand. We hope we are going to have an interesting
discussion because you do not all take the same view on these
matters, which is why we wanted to have you along. Would any or
all of you like to say anything by way of general introduction,
some initial points?
Professor Brighouse: Maybe it
would help if I said a couple of words.
Q203 Chairman: Perhaps give us a
central proposition just to get the juices going early in the
morning.
Professor Brighouse: I thought
my remit was to talk a little bit about the evidence concerning
choice in the United States but also to talk a little bit about
the kind of choice scheme that you might use. The first thing
I want to say is a note of caution, not about choice in particular,
but about educational reform in general. Choice and vouchers in
the US are talked about a lot of the time by proponents as if
they are some sort of magic bullet. You get it all in place and
you are going to get these fantastic improvements in test schools,
et cetera. My reading of the actual evidence of the way things
have worked out in a whole variety of schemes is that this has
not worked like that. There have been various kinds of benefits
from various kinds of schemes and no benefits from some others,
but what is generally the case with school reform is that you
cannot expect that a reform is going to get you massive gains
of whatever it is that you want to gain. Most reforms get you
fairly small incremental gains, and, of course, those compound
over time and it is worth doing it, but you should not anticipate
from any kind of reform that you are going to get some sort of
great transformation in the kinds of outcomes. That was the first
thing I thought I would say. The second thing, the evidence about
choice in the United States is mixed and it is also very hard
to learn from. I said this in the paper that I sent out. If you
want to do what some people call policy borrowing, you do not
want to adopt a policy, you need to adapt it: because policies
are carried out in very specific conditions and the specific kind
of political or institutional environment in which a reform is
adopted has an enormous impact on what kinds of result the reform
gets. My case study, I suppose, is the Milwaukee case. In Milwaukee
they adopted a quite radical voucher scheme targeted completely
to low income parents where the parents could send their kids
to private schools with the state paying for it. I am a supporter
of the scheme. I think it has been basically a good thing. It
has not had a tremendously exciting impact on schools, but it
seems to have had some impact on achievement. The contextual conditions
which have enabled it to do the good it has done are just not
present in the UK. In the US private schools cost about half as
much per pupil as state schools. In the UK they cost about twice
as much per pupil as state schools. It is also the case that selection
is just not an ingrained part of the culture of schooling in the
US, either private or state schooling, and so it was easy to get
especially the Roman Catholic schools that participated to accept
a scheme in which they were not allowed to select kids. They are
not allowed to select on the basis of ability, they are not allowed
to select even on the basis of behaviour, previous behaviour.
I do not envisage in the next ten years the emergence of a private
sector in the UK which works at half the cost of the state schools
and is happy to accept a scheme in which they are not allowed
to select kids. What you need to do if you want to look at these
kinds of programmes and get the kinds of outcome that they have
got is figure out how to adapt them to the environment, and so
my recommendation is to do that within the state system here.
The adaptation would be an adaptation which did not use private
schools, used only state schools, but made state schools a bit
more vulnerable than they currently are to the choices of parents.
Q204 Chairman: I was tempted to come
back, but let us have the opening gambits and then we will pick
it all up. Martin Ward.
Mr Ward: I think the points that
I would want to make to underline that are in the paper I have
submitted are, first, that there are other choices than of school,
and those other choices may well be more important and significant
for the young people and their parents in reality, although we
tend to be obsessed with choice of school. Given that we are obsessed
with choice of school, I spent most of the space I had in the
paper talking about that, but it is worth underlining the point
that that is essentially an urban obsession rather than being
common throughout the country, especially, of course, a metropolitan
obsession, and in many rural areas, or in small market towns where
there is only one secondary school, there is no effective choice
of school for parents of 10 year olds as they are looking to the
next phase. In those circumstances most of those parents use the
local school and are very content with it; and where there is
dissatisfaction it is because parents have been offered a notional
choice which they have then not been able to exercise in the way
that they want. They have been told: "You have got six schools
to choose from", and they have said, "I will have that
one then", and have been told, "Sorry, it is full";
and that is when parents tend to become very dissatisfied with
the school process.
Q205 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Dr Hunter.
Dr Hunter: My central proposition
is that there are two perfectly legitimate and sensible objectives
for government, for local government and central government. The
first is to improve schools, particularly schools that are not
performing terribly well, and that does two things: first of all,
it raises standards, improves the education for lots of children,
but, secondly, it increases choice, because it means that more
schools are favoured by parents who will then want to send their
children there. That is the first legitimate objective. The second
one is to try and enhance choice per se. You can do that.
There is a lot of choice in education already, but there are things
that you can do from time to time, and that improves choice and
that is a good thing to do, but it does not, it seems to me, have
an impact on standards. You do not raise standards by setting
out to improve choice.
Q206 Chairman: Thank you for that.
That is the point I wanted to pick up immediately with Professor
Brighouse. Are you telling us that all the evidence (especially
that in the US) is that choice by itself is not a great driver
of improved standards? When the Committee visited the United States
last year and we went to North Carolina the evidence that we were
given, and I think you referred to some of the published material
we saw, suggested that in that situation the development of Charter
Schools had had a positive effect on standards both in those schools
and in the rest of the public school system. Are you telling us
as a researcher that the idea that choice is a route to improve
standards and improve quality is not right?
Professor Brighouse: No, I am
telling you to be cautious about your expectations. Let me say
a word about the Charter School example. My colleague, John Witte—I
think I am allowed to tell you this—sent me an email just
before I came over very tentatively saying our Charter School
study— He is doing a very large Charter School study that
is showing some interesting competitive effects. In Caroline Hoxby's
paper on the Milwaukee scheme what she claims is that the Milwaukee
scheme has driven up standards in the public schools. I am sorry,
state schools. There is this terminological problem: when I say
public I always mean state. He is saying something similar is
happening in his Charter School study. One of the problems is
that there are lots and lots of Charter Schools. Every state that
has Charter Schools has a different Charter School charter. It
has got a different set of rules. So really it is not the case
that there are Charter Schools; there are 26, 28 different phenomena,
there are 28 different sets of legislation. It is also the case
that Charter Schools in most of the states tend to emerge from
dissatisfaction within a particular school district. So you tend
to get Charter Schools not because the state has said, "We
want to have a whole bunch of Charter Schools", but because
it tends to be enabling legislation that says, "You can have
some Charter Schools if you can put forward the right conditions",
and then people from the bottom up say, "We want to have
a Charter School here to do this or to do that". In those
conditions you might get genuine improvements. What is difficult
to know, even when you get improvements, is whether it is the
choice or whether it is the intervention of fact, whether it is
the excitement of a new programme. I am saying be cautious, I
am not saying that you do not get benefits or that it will not
look as though you will not get benefits.
Q207 Chairman: Does not the exit
option, which is a form of competition, by itself lever up standards.
If providers know that people can go elsewhere, does that not
have a built in driver towards increased performance within it?
Professor Brighouse: Let us go
back to Milwaukee again. What is not clear from Caroline Hoxby's
study is whether that is the mechanism that is going on or whether
there is a different mechanism at work. If that were definitely
the mechanism, I think you could have a general expectation that
in normal conditions the option of exits, the fact of choice would
drive up standards somewhat, but we do not know whether that is
really the case. Her study does not distinguish between inter-school
competition, competition between schools, and political competition;
so what may be happening in Milwaukee, and just watching what
has been going on it has looked like this, is that you have a
superintendent and a fairly well organised political coalition
which is responding to the voucher scheme by trying to be more
innovative, trying to drive up standards. These are the things
they might have wanted to do anyway, these are the things they
might have been trying to do anyway, and maybe the voucher scheme
has made it easier for them to do it, but that is different from
a proper market working. It is not clear that it is the market
itself driving up standards; it may be a sort of competition between
the market and the political facts that is pushing up standards.
Q208 Chairman: Let me move on and
ask Mr Martin Ward next: when I read what you wrote and listening
to you, you do not like all this kind of stuff very much at all.
What I really want to ask you is if choice, as you say, in most
places does not exist because that is not how it is in many rural
and, you say, school town areas, and if where it does exist you
say that it raises expectations that it cannot fulfill and causes
problems, why do we not simply go to a system very much like the
mainstream American system where people get assignment to schools?
Would that not be more straightforward? Let us not go through
the myth of choice, let us just tell people where they are going
to go to school?
Mr Ward: That perhaps would be
a better arrangement. I do not think that it is one that we would
want to advocate at the present time and starting from where we
are. There has been a period when the whole notion of choice has
been sold very heavily to the public at large and to parents in
particular to an extent that it has become very uncomfortable
to oppose it in a total way, in the sort of way that you are suggesting.
I suspect that many of our members would prefer a return, if you
like, to a system like that—where there was relatively little
choice in any sense promised or offered to parents, but that one
simply took one's child to the nearby school. "This is the
school to which you go." You live in the catchment area of
such and such high school, so your child goes there. As I say,
many of my members would prefer that. By no means all of them;
and certainly some of them are sold on the notion of choice, competition
between schools and so forth. I guess that the point that I made
to begin with is just an observation that if you go to Saffron
Walden, or Market Harborough, or Driffield, that sort of size
of town where there is one school, effectively that is what everybody
does—their children get to 11, they go to the first school—and,
if you ask the parents in those schools are they satisfied with
them, the answer will almost invariably be, "Yes", and
the sort of satisfaction rating that those schools have got is
at a level that most commercial organisations which are driven
by competition would love to have. They get a great deal of support
from their parents and they are generally very well regarded.
Of course, if there is a monopoly there may be complacency, and
one has to accept that, and I would accept that certainly there
will be instances where schools in situations like that are resting
on their laurels and not doing as much as they could to improve
matters because life is comfortable and they do not have any competition.
That is the down side of it, but the upside of it is just to observe
that where there is less choice, on the whole people are more
satisfied.
Q209 Chairman: One way of tackling
the down side is to have published information, league tables,
those kinds of external pressures, but you say you are against
those as well.
Mr Ward: We do not like the league
tables. It is not that we dislike the notion of publishing information
and making parents and young people more aware of what the circumstance
is. What we set our face against is the particular way in which
that has been done in recent decades where, for a start, the league
tables are published in a very simplistic way as a league table,
the implication being that you can somehow sort a very complicated
set of organisations like schools out into a single pecking order
against one criterion. Yes, you can, but that is extremely misleading.
It is not, in fact, helpful to the parent who is looking for which
school to send their ten year old to next year.
Q210 Chairman: Let us try one more
thing on you, which is that, as you rightly say, much of the problems
concern urban areas and that is where the school choice issue
presses greatly: London is the acute case, as you can see in the
appeal figures. Surely in areas like that we do have choice, we
have choice by estate agents. Are we not looking for other models
of choice that will get us round the fact that there is something
like a 30% house premium around popular schools so, in fact, we
do ghettoise education in urban areas. Is it not proper to look
for mechanisms that will break out of that?
Mr Ward: Yes, I think it probably
is. The notion that there is some sort of covert process going
on is one that does concern us. In particular, as I said in this
paper, it concerns me that some schools, effectively, are in a
position to select their pupils even though there may be no overt
or properly worked out mechanism by which they are doing that;
and that clearly raises extra dangers that that selection will
be done in an unfair and unhelpful fashion. Therefore, and I come
back to the point that Philip Hunter made, it is very important
that all the schools in those areas should be acceptable to the
parents. That may be a rather idealistic solution, but it would
certainly be very helpful if we did not have such a sharp pecking
order as we do in a number of urban areas, and in London in particular,
where parents almost feel that if they do not get their child
into the first school or the one or two schools which are deemed
to be superior then they have failed and their children will in
turn fail. That is never the case, in actual fact, but parents
do feel that. If we can improve all the schools to the point where
they are content to use the school that is nearest to them, then
that would be a better solution. Therefore, we would feel that
there is a need, moving on somewhat slightly to the diversity
point, not so much to create different types of school from which
parents can choose, but to make sure that different types of experience
are available to young people in all the schools so that parents
and their young people have the really meaningful choices, which
is the choice of what to study and how to study it.
Q211 Chairman: I want to bring colleagues
in, but I just want to bring Dr Hunter in first so that we have
all had an opening shot. Can I try the question on you? One idea
that is put forward again particularly for the urban areas, that
we might simply have a system where anybody can apply to any school
and we have a kind of lottery that enables people to get in. Again,
something which happens in the United States with, for example,
the Charter Schools and seems to be accepted. When the Committee
went to the United States we were surprised at the idea that the
lottery was used as it was conspicuously the fairest way to allocate
school places where there was over-subscription. Philip Hunter,
you say in your note to us that you do not like this because it
promotes traffic congestion. Surely that cannot be a clinching
argument against giving people more access to all schools?
Dr Hunter: No, I do not use that
as a clinching argument, but say as an aside normally parents
do not like the roads being clogged up by children buzzing between
schools across towns. We have a system where anybody can apply
for any school, and the problem arises with those schools that
are over-subscribed, and schools can, and do now in England, use
lotteries on occasions. We approved a lottery in Brighton, I think,
a couple of months ago, so there is nothing to stop a school using
a lottery if that is what it wants to do. I think the problems
with it are twofold. The first is that you want to see admission
criteria for schools that parents can look at and get a pretty
good idea about whether it is worth applying for that school or
not. Using distance or the catchment area or feeder primaries,
or what have you, as the tie-breaker means that a parent cannot
guarantee whether they get into that school if they apply for
it because they do not know who else is applying, but they can
get a pretty good idea from past experience about whether, if
they put their name down for that school, they would get in, and
that seems eminently sensible. With a lottery you cannot do that,
and I think that is a disadvantage. The second is, of course,
that many schools want to be neighbourhood schools, wanting to
respond to the needs of their neighbourhood, and I think it is
very difficult to say to a parent, where there is a neighbourhood
school trying to do that, "You cannot get in there because
someone from seven miles away has been chosen instead of you."
I think there are certain circumstances where it is possible to
argue, sensible to argue, that there should be a lottery, but
I think in most cases distance of some kind, catchment area or
feeder primaries, something like that, seem to be a more acceptable
way to parents.
Q212 Mrs Campbell: I think the point
that none of you have addressed is the point that the Chairman
made to you about middle-class catchment areas around good schools,
which certainly happens in the city that I represent, so there
is a huge house premium if you choose to buy a house near a good
school, a good secondary school particularly. It does not seem
to me that this is very fair. You are giving choice to some people,
you are giving choice to the parents who can afford to pay that
extra premium for their home near a good school, but you are not
giving a choice to other people who finish up in areas where the
schools are not so good. Do you want to comment on that?
Dr Hunter: I would just say that,
of course, that happens to some extent. I would question some
of the figures, I think, that some estate agents have come up
with, about the 30% business. I think a lot of that is associated
with things other than the school, but people choose to buy houses
where they buy them, and for lots of reasons, and it is true that
the school is one of them, but it seems to me it is a question
of what you are trying to achieve. You either want to see neighbourhood
schools which are responding to the needs of their particular
neighbourhood, and that works very well in large areas of the
country, I have to say, if you look at Cannock, for example—
Q213 Chairman: Just to take an example!
Dr Hunter: There are a number
of schools there. It is quite true that some of those schools
find it easier to get higher examination results than others,
but you only get into a real problem if there is a sink school,
and that is a real problem and it is a real problem in parts of
Hull and Stoke and other parts of the country, but you have to
tackle that problem. You cannot improve a school by forcing parents
to send their children there. It just does not work. You have
to find more money to spend on those schools, you have to train
the teachers, you have to give them support, sometimes you have
to close them down, but that is the way to tackle it, not through
the admission system.
Q214 Mrs Campbell: I am interested
to hear what Mr Ward has to say to that?
Mr Ward: A process very similar
to that was used certainly in the City of Hull, and Philip Hunter
has just mentioned it. Hull has got major problems now. I know
Hull—I used to live and work there—but back in the
1970s, and through into the 1980s to some extent, they operated
a system very like that in which all the young people aged 10
were assessed and they were then allocated to schools in such
a fashion that at least nominally all the schools had a similar
intake in terms of ability. That was deeply unpopular with parents
and young people to the point that it eventually had to be abandoned
because many young people were making longer journeys than they
strictly needed to make and their parents would say, "Why
is it that my child at the age of 11 has to get on a bus and be
driven all the way across the city to such and such a school?",
and they were not, on the whole, very impressed by answers along
the lines of, "We are balancing the intake in all the different
schools."
Q215 Mrs Campbell: If I can interrupt
you for a moment. That is one model. I do not think I would propose
that model. The sort of model that we saw in the United States
is where parents choose a school, choose a Charter School. If
that school is over-subscribed, then the school's allocation of
pupils depends on a lottery; so you are only getting people allocated
to the school who have chosen that school in the first place.
Why can we not use some sort of system like that? It would overcome
this problem that we have of schools in, shall we say, good areas
being attended by children from middle-class families who probably
have a number of educational advantages anyway. In my area, at
one school I have got half the parents who are FRSs. You would
expect the school to be good under those circumstances?
Mr Ward: Yes. I do not think we
would have any objection to the use of a lottery system as such.
The objections are the ones that Philip Hunter has already made,
that it clearly does increase the amount of travelling that is
going on. There are ecological objections to that. I appeared
before the Transport Select Committee last year when they were
looking at travel to school, because they are trying to reduce
the distance that children travel to school, and, other things
being equal, we would all prefer that that distance be reduced
for those reasons and also because it is wasteful of the time
of the children concerned to be making longer journeys than they
strictly need to make. The other point is that it is that much
more difficult for parents to plan to have any expectation of
what the outcome of that lottery will be. I suppose we could overcome
that by conducting the lottery a long time in advance, and parents
would then be able to plan for at least a year, say, before the
actual transition took place. I do not think we would oppose lotteries
as such, but we would still prefer, and I am sure most school
leaders would prefer, to have a system in which there is a set
of local schools and essentially there are four or five primary
schools and the children from those schools move on to the secondary
school. That also makes the transition at age 11, which is already
difficult for children, rather easier than if they leave the primary
school to one of a whole lot of different secondary schools so
their friends go elsewhere and they arrive at a secondary school
that is trying to coordinate an intake that has come from 40 or
50 different primary schools with the different experiences that
those children have had.
Professor Brighouse: I am much
more sympathetic than these guys are to the problem. What we have
in the States, the normal method of allocating children to school
is that wealthy people get the school of their choice, which is
the one that they move to be near, and everyone else gets the
one they had to live near because that is where they could afford
to live; and if a wealthy person does not like the school, (a)
they can exercise the pressure that middle-class people are very
good at exercising anyway to get the kid moved or to get them
into a better situation at school, and (b) if it does not work
they can get out, they can go to a private school. You did not
even mention this. If I am really unsatisfied, I have enough money
that I can send my kid to a private school, I would not, just
to tell you. We have choice, we already have choice. It is just
part of the system in that system; it is just choice for one set
of people. Other people's kids, their children are allocated to
school by the school district, which makes the choice for them.
There are lots of studies in the UK of the way that parents choose,
and there are lots of studies which show—their researchers
do not put it this way but this is what they mean—that middle
class educated parents make good choices and working-class, uneducated
parents make less good choices. That is irrelevant to equity.
What is relevant is whether those parents make worse choices than
the state does, not whether they make worse choices than middle-class
parents do. In many parts of the United States I am absolutely
convinced that the state makes worse choices for working class
kids than their parents would. It systematically does it with
respect to all sorts of conditions that poor people have to face,
and I am sure it does it for their kids and their schools. I think
it is a serious problem. It is not a serious problem in some places,
but it is a serious problem in others. It is also true that the
problem with the lottery, and I am a big advocate of lotteries—I
think we should introduce them and that should be a way kids are
allocated to school—but there is a problem with them in
the neighbourhood school problem, and it is the one that Phillip
mentioned, which is that it is hard to plan your life around them
because you have no idea basically, it is completely random whether
your kid gets into the school you chose.
Q216 Mrs Campbell: If I could interrupt,
you could take away an element of uncertainty by saying that if
one child from a family is allocated to a school by a lottery
then subsequent siblings will automatically go to that school?
Professor Brighouse: Where lotteries
are used in the States every single instance of a lottery that
I know of has a sibling rule. I have never heard of one that does
not have a sibling rule. That is always part of the lottery. The
other thing, and this is expensive, is to build in extra capacity
to schools, just build in extra capacity so that if a school gets
100 more people wanting to go to it than it anticipated, it can
take them. Building in spare capacity is going to be unpopular
with the Treasury, it is also going to be unpopular with the newspapers
because they will say there are all these empty places; the government
is spending all this money on places that we are not filling.
If you want schools to work like a market, if you really want
to replicate something like a market, you need spare capacity,
and you also need to have mechanisms for closing schools, schools
which nobody has chosen or hardly anybody has chosen. There should
be no school in which more than 50% of the kids did not choose
to be there. Maybe if it is like that for one year it is okay,
but if it is like that for any length of time, it should be closed,
and it should be closed regardless of what system we use, but
if you are going to be able to close schools, you have to have
capacity in other schools and you have to build in this capacity
for fluidity, and that is expensive.
Q217 Mr Prentice: If you allow popular
over-subscribed schools to expand capacity you may be destroying
the very thing that makes the school attractive to parents in
the first place?
Mr Ward: If I could come in, Chair.
I think that is right. The consequence of a free competition would
tend to be, presumably, that the successful schools will grow
and grow. It may be that they would then become elephantine and
unpopular and that would balance matters. In practice, I suspect
that they would become elephantine but would continue to grow
so that there would be a tendency to have fewer, larger schools,
and that, I do not think, is a consequence that many parents would
prefer. On the whole, if you ask parents, other things being equal,
they prefer their children to be in smaller schools, but, of course,
the schools are slow to turn—they are like super-tankers,
they do take a long time to turn around—and they are large
capital items. It is difficult then to follow a fashion. If you
are making motor cars and everybody this year decides they want
green, you put lots of green paint in the sprayers and everybody
has a green car; there is no particular problem about that. It
does not matter. If we all decide to drive green cars that is
not something that would concern anybody, I do not suppose, but
if in a town where there are four or five schools everybody decides
they are going to go to school A and that means that over a period
of time the other four close, we will have an enormous school
which, in fact, will be unsatisfactory for everyone.
Dr Hunter: Just a couple of points,
just to finish off the lottery first. I ought to say that I am
not against lotteries where that seems a sensible thing to have.
It is just that there are very few schools that have chosen to
go down the lottery route, and I think I can understand why they
have done that, but, as an adjudicator, if a school comes along
with a lottery and wants to put it in, clearly one would sell
it on its merits. The question, I think, for you, as a Committee,
is, if you like, who decides that there should be a lottery? Is
the Government going to decide that there shall be lotteries everywhere,
despite what head teachers and governors and other people might
want locally? I would advise that these things ought to be settled
locally so that schools can respond to their local service providers.
If that happens to be a lottery, that is fair enough.
Q218 Chairman: Hold on for a second.
A school that is sitting in one of these nice areas, not necessarily
with half the parents with FRSs, but in a decent area, a good
school, it is doing all right. The system is working for that
school. It has no incentive to start experimenting with lotteries
to get other kinds of people in; it wants the people that it has
got; it gets to the top of the league table.
Dr Hunter: I think that is a very
good point. We have these things called admission forums, which
is the place they ought to be discussing this sort of thing and
ought, in my view, to have some powers to be able to get stuck
in if that is a system that seems to work for the whole area.
At the moment they do not have any power, and I would like to
see them have more powers to do that.
Q219 Mrs Campbell: You were suggesting
that individual schools should have that choice?
Dr Hunter: Yes, they do have that
choice.
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