Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 324 - 339)

TUESDAY 18 JANUARY 2005

MR CHRIS PALMER, MR TONY HOWELL AND MR TIM BOYES

  Q324  Chairman: We are delighted to have Tim Boyes with us, who we saw informally this morning at his school, Queensbridge. We enjoyed the visit hugely, and have been talking about it ever since. Thank you for coming along this afternoon. Until Tony Howell arrives, we have Chris Palmer, Senior Policy Officer. We would like to continue the discussion that we began informally this morning; then formalise it and think about some of the over-arching issues that were involved. What we are trying to get our heads around is this. Everyone now seems to be signed up to the proposition that more choice is a good thing, that it gives more power to people inside public services; that the more we personalise services and the more we can allow people to choose for themselves what they want the better. We would like to explore what that means for a major school system like Birmingham because in our informal discussions this morning we were hearing that this is not without its problems. It might be easier and fairer to start with Chris because we have had a go at the school level already. Can you understand why a head teacher like Tim—and I am not putting words in his mouth—might find choice a bit problematic?

  Mr Palmer: I can do indeed. If you are talking about which schools children go to, then in most respects parents and children themselves do not actually have a choice. I do not believe you can simply choose one school over another, in the same way that you choose, say, one mobile phone supplier over another mobile phone provider. That is not the way that it works. They cannot simply choose a grammar school because they want a grammar school, or a Catholic school, or even say a specialist language college just because they want that. That is not the way that the system works. What has been created is a system in which there is a variety of schools, what the Government might call "diversity", but having a variety of schools does not equate with parents having a choice. When it comes to which school you go to, choice is an illusion rather than reality.

  Q325  Chairman: Is it not the case that if you have lots of different kinds of schools, therefore the menu of choice is expanded?

  Mr Palmer: You can have lots of different types of schools, but those schools have a particular intake. Sometimes they will make selection by ability, as in the case of a grammar school; at other times they will be accepting pupils because of their geographical proximity to the school—where they live. If, for example, you wanted your child particularly to go to a specialist language college, that may well not be possible because the school is so far away and you simply do not, as a parent, stand a chance of getting your child into that school, even if they are prepared to make a long journey across the city.

  Q326  Chairman: In Birmingham is it not something like 85% of parents who do get their first choice?

  Mr Palmer: It is 95.59% of parents who can get a school of their choice but it is only about 65% who get their first choice.

  Q327  Chairman: The national figure was 85, but Birmingham is lower than that.

  Mr Boyes: But when they are making their choices, they have some realism about what is possible, and know that if they make stupid choices they are wasting a valuable strategic choice which is not really a choice.

  Q328  Chairman: So in a sense this is not a real expression of choice; it is an expression of condition of choice.

  Mr Boyes: Yes.

  Q329  Chairman: Even so, the figures are substantial enough to make us think that most people are getting reasonably satisfied. Just this week we had Professor Harry Brighouse, Tim Brighouse's son, who is a leading educational expert, telling us that he thought a life built around second choices was pretty good, and if people were getting their second choices, that was not a bad thing to get in life. We should not be too sniffy about this, should we?

  Mr Palmer: The only point I am trying to make is that when I came to "choose" a school for my son, my choices in practice were very limited, and geographical proximity is a much stronger determinant than most other things.

  Q330  Chairman: I am sorry to press you, and I think we are getting into an argument now, but in a city like Birmingham, as in any other big urban area, where you have loads and loads of schools now, of increasingly different types, and people are used now to travelling across the city for all kinds of purposes—leisure and sport—and movement around the city is quite usual, the idea of looking at what is on the menu for secondary schools—potentially people have quite a large range if they can get in. So we have a pattern of distribution that reflects as far as possible what people think they want from a school. That produces consequences: some schools benefit and some schools suffer. Some schools are in high demand and therefore get all the benefits of that; and schools in lower demand get all the disbenefits of that. That, surely, is just what this system does for us? Unless we can think of another system, this is what we are stuck with, is it not?

  Mr Palmer: I would like to turn that argument around slightly. I would say that a major strategic task is to make all schools a good choice, to make all schools a good school to go to, so that we do not end up in the situation that David Milliband described before he left the DfES, where the poorest parents in most deprived areas have the worst schools. That is no kind of choice at all. If choice is to be in any sense meaningful, and if the variety of schools is to be in any sense meaningful, it has to be based on all schools delivering good basic education across the board. That is the basis for any kind of choice.

  Q331  Chairman: I think everyone would sign up to the proposition that we want every school to be a good school, but that does not help us, does it?

  Mr Palmer: Sometimes the expansion of so-called successful schools and allowing them to grow ever bigger actually works against other schools maintaining high standards. It actually works against other schools doing well.

  Q332  Chairman: There is evidence, though, which we have seen, that says the possibility of exit in fact does improve standards in the school that could be exited from.

  Mr Palmer: I am not aware of that evidence myself, but I am not doubting it.

  Q333  Chairman: But it is not implausible, is it?

  Mr Palmer: It is not implausible that you could find a school feeling under pressure and therefore needing to make changes in order to maintain its position in a market place, but it would be my contention that the most successful schools in expanding would also end up taking probably the most able pupils and have the broadest distribution of different types of pupils, ending up with the other schools perceived as less successful, and perceived as less desirable schools to go to, ending up with pupils that other schools did not particularly want.

  Q334  Chairman: Looking at Birmingham—and Tim this morning gave us a nice map showing his school and the whole cluster of the city around it, plotting the other schools, which brought all this sharply home—if you could reconfigure the way in which school choice operates in Birmingham to produce consequences that you think might be more desirable than the ones we have now, how do you want to do it?

  Mr Palmer: The other point I would want to go on and make—and in this sense it has taken the issue away from the debate about choosing a particular school—is that it is possible to go a lot further towards establishing choice within schools and through the collaboration of a partnership of schools working together. We are reaching a situation where one individual school or college for that matter cannot, in and of itself, meet the full level of demand that real choice in the education system would demand, which implies that schools, colleges and other providers work together collaboratively. In other words, we would lead away from an education system that is driven primarily by supply. I remember that when my child went on to Key Stage 4, he could "choose" his options so-called, but in actual fact he could only choose particular things that a particular school could offer and balance out in school staffing. What we are talking about is creating a system that is led by a demand side rather than by the supply side, because in that way you can begin to develop real choice. What that effectively moves away from is that notion of one child just going to one school, but one child getting an educational offer that is delivered by one, two, three schools, a college and other providers working in partnership. That is the way we have to head if we are going to start achieving real choice in education.

  Q335  Chairman: This is the cross-over moment.

  Mr Howell: Excuse me.

  Q336  Chairman: While you are getting your breath, can I ask Tim if he wants to come in on this point.

  Mr Boyes: Chris has very usefully and moderately stated some of what we were talking about this morning. I have to inject a little bit of anger at the assumption that choice is here and choice is a good thing, and what we do to tinker with and cope with the realities of choice, because choice itself perpetuates or exacerbates inequality if there are not checks and measures in a system where people do not have equal power in the choosing. To quote the folk from housing, it is about an unequal playing-field. Because we are working with an unequal playing-field, because the resources of my school do not match the resources of the grammar schools because of the inequality of inputs and history, if you have unbridled choice you are going not only to perpetuate but exacerbate inequality. That means that in Birmingham there are more than 30 schools that have over 76% of their pupils—and I know because I am no.30—in the poorest quintile of society—in that one school put together, with between 30 and 50% of our kids on the Special Needs Register. Schools cannot function like that.

  Q337  Chairman: Mr Howell, you understand what we are talking about.

  Mr Howell: I do understand.

  Q338  Chairman: Let me try this one more time, and then I will bring other colleagues in. Schools live by catchment areas, do they not? That is a curious concept because we have just come from talking to the primary care trust in south Birmingham, and there it is all about how they are going to liberate people from their local suppliers. They are going to have the choice of four or five different providers all over the shop. Is one of the problems that we are attached to this catchment area issue, particularly in urban areas where people travel quite freely? We know that in a sense this is selection by estate agents, and we know that people say there is a 30% cost premium around certain school areas, so you segregate just by social geographical patterns. One way of loosening up the system would be to allow anybody to go anywhere potentially. Would this be a better way of doing it?

  Mr Howell: I have had conversations with other civil servants and politicians about this very issue because the reality is that some schools live by catchment areas, particularly primary schools and some secondary schools. People often said to me when I first came to Birmingham, "Why are you going to Birmingham? They have got grammar schools there!" I said: "They have got more than grammar schools; they have faith schools, single-sex schools, comprehensive schools and now specialist schools." The reality is that the catchment area is only one of the driving forces around choice of school. If you are a Roman Catholic, then the faith criterion takes precedence over others. If you apply and pass the  test to go to a grammar school, that takes precedence. In fact, we have lots of children travelling significant distances across the city, similar to the London situation, but we do not have separate boroughs. Children do travel for secondary school. That then interacts with the whole issue around catchment areas, because there are also some community schools which are very popular, and it is absolutely right that house-price premium is effective there, to the extent that there are local children that cannot get into a local school. They have to travel, but they are travelling to schools that their parents never expressed a preference for. There are relatively few of those in Birmingham, but there are some. There I think there is a myth about choice because the interaction both with explicit selection for certain schools, and the whole issue about getting into popular schools, which skews the demography of the pupils going to other schools and actually mixes this up in a rather unfair way. We are trying to deal with that by getting schools to work together in collaborations, partly because young people, particularly at secondary age, will have access to a broader range of curricula than they have in any single school; and Mike Tomlinson has acknowledged that no single school can meet all the individual needs of all its children. It is also one of the ways in which we improve schools because people will be happier to go to a local school if the school is good. One of the ways we improve schools in Birmingham is by getting them to collaborate with other schools, and to share staff. The King Edward's Foundation operates some very highly rated schools and I asked them this: "Within our collegiates within collaborative arrangements with our secondary schools, what is to stop six very bright mathematical students in a community school accessing the very high-quality courses in your schools in the King Edward's Foundation?" They said: "Absolutely nothing." Choice is not about the choice of school, it is the choice of courses for the young people, and we are a little bit more fluid about that, because that is what true personalisation entails.

  Q339  Mr Prentice: Can boys travel to girls' schools to access those courses?

  Mr Howell: Boys can travel to girls' schools once that door has been opened up. For example, one of our very successful girls' schools, which is a community school and a specialist school, now also has boys in the sixth form.


 
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