Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
MR DON
TOUHIG, BRIGADIER
ANTHONY BRISTER,
MS LIZ
CASSIDY, MR
DAVID WADSWORTH
AND MS
KATHRYN FORSYTH
2 MAY 2006
Q260 Mr Holloway: When are you aiming
to have it in place?
Mr Touhig: Obviously we give the
support as rapidly as we possibly can.
Q261 Mr Borrow: I think it would
be helpful if you could get your Department to let the Committee
have a note giving details of what level of service for Service
personnel in Afghanistan was available on what date so we could
see the progression of building from nothing to a mature state
so the Committee are in a position to consider whether that was
adequate or not.
Mr Touhig: I can happily do that
if that helps, Chairman.[1]
Indeed, one of my colleagues has just passed me a note that when
on operation in Afghanistan three years ago he had internet access,
telephone access for 20 minutes, as soon as he was there. Clearly
there is more work I need to do in order to give you a full picture
of this.
Q262 Chairman: It may well be that you
could be more reassuring than you have been able to be today.
If you could give us such a note that would be extremely helpful.
Mr Touhig: Yes.
Chairman: Thank you very much. This issue
of identifying Service children is one which we have been touching
on briefly during the course of the morning. Robert Key.
Q263 Robert Key: Thank you, Chairman.
Minister, what is a "Service child"? We learn from the
report and accounts that there are some 10,000 pupils being educated
in SCE schools but that is not the be-all and end-all, is it,
the Service child is going to extend beyond that? I do not just
mean because you have got some at boarding school in England and
so on. I am thinking particularly of Germany. The Committee was
told that older children are perceived to be rather neglected
because nobody is quite sure who is responsible for them when
they get older. At university, for example, is there any responsibility
taken for Service children and their welfare?
Mr Touhig: I think there is an
issue surrounding youngsters from the age of 16 who might leave
education and families are on a posting somewhere, in Germany
or wherever, and there are issues about their ongoing education
and employment that we are conscious of. David, you and I have
discussed this, I do not know whether you want to add to it.
Q264 Robert Key: Could I ask specifically,
to be helpful, could you explain to the Committee how you handle
university admissions advice and further education advice on the
one hand, and, secondly, what mechanism is in place for careers
advice for children leaving Service schools?
Mr Wadsworth: Probably better
than you would find in most English LEAs. When I took on this
job the Careers Service, replicating what had happened in the
UK, had been tendered out and was run by Wiltshire who seconded
folk into Germany and Cyprus. Two or three years ago that contract
was due to come to a close and we took the decision that because
of the whole 14-19 and beyond debate that was going on at the
time we did not know what we wanted and I was unwilling to enter
into a contract which would bind me to certain things when over
the horizon 14-19 went off in a different direction. So we brought
back the Careers Service in-house so that we do have a Careers
Service which looks after the whole gamut of what you have just
said. It looks after careers advice for school leavers and higher
and further education. There is a careers adviser based in each
of the SCE high schools and one shared between the two in Cyprus.
Their remit also extends to those who have left school but remain
overseas with their families. The Chairman asked me to be succinct!
Chairman: Many congratulations. You have
left us flabbergasted.
Q265 Robert Key: That is fine, but
in a submission from the Department for Education and Skills to
the Committee it said that there had been provisional agreement
from their minister that a Service children's marker should be
included in the Census for 2006-07 but this was later rejected
because it considered the potential burden of collecting the data
would outweigh the benefits of doing so. So DfES has washed its
hands of this problem, has it?
Mr Wadsworth: We are moving back
to the PLASC area, are we not?
Q266 Robert Key: We are.
Mr Wadsworth: It took us a lot
of effort to get the DfES to agree that we should be part of PLASC
anyhow, but we succeeded 12-18 months ago. At the same time we
were saying surely you can put into the PLASC pro forma another
field where you could identify someone as a Service child, and
that suggestion was rejected at that stage. Probably as the Brigadier
may have hinted earlier, he and others are revisiting that because
without that data the whole concept of how we can measure progress
as well as assist folk with forecasts of how many people are going
to turn up, this, that and the other, is flawed.
Robert Key: There is also another aspect
of this which has been brought to my attention. We are all used
to the idea of governors of schools but you do not have that same
system in your Service schools although I think I am right in
saying you do have—
Chairman: Are you moving off the issue
of the identification of Service children?
Q267 Robert Key: No, I am not, I
am sticking with it, Chairman, but they are rather linked. The
government of schools has a role here for parental input as well.
I think that governors and, are they School Advisory Committees?
Mr Wadsworth: That is their title.
They will change title because we revamped the terms of reference,
which is in the brief somewhere, from September to become School
Governance Committees with slightly sharper teeth but still short
of what you would find from a governing body in the UK.
Q268 Robert Key: So will this improve
the way in which schools are perceived to look after the interests
of older children? Is there a role there for the new governors?
Mr Wadsworth: I think the concerns
that were relayed to you from Germany were not so much about the
older children in schools but about older children once they had
left school and were not in employment, that was the focus. The
answer to the question you have asked is probably not. What I
think will happen for the older children in schools, who as part
of a youth forum are expressing that they do not think they have
got quite enough independence, this, that and the other, is things
will move within schools because of the youth forum, particularly
in Germany, rather than the Governors Committee.
Q269 Chairman: I would like to come
back to this identification field in the PLASC data before we
move further into your area, if you do not mind. Mr Wadsworth,
you said that eventually the decision was taken not to include
that field because the potential burden of collecting the data
would outweigh the benefits of doing so.
Mr Wadsworth: I think Mr Key said
the second part of that and I said the first part of it.
Q270 Chairman: Why was it not included?
Mr Wadsworth: I do not know.
Q271 Robert Key: We need a DfES minister.
Brigadier Brister: I can shed
a little bit of light on it. SCISS and members of DfES recently
met on this issue and in essence the reason being given was that
because as a percentage of the children in schools there are so
few Service children in schools in England as an entity they were
not prepared to have the burden of this being a specific identity,
but we have the impression they are prepared to re-look at this
if there is sufficient pressure.
Q272 Chairman: Brigadier, would you
accept that such an identification would be so important to the
children and would be comparatively easy to comply with that it
is very important that such an identification should be made?
Brigadier Brister: Naturally I
feel passionately about the education of Service children, as
you would hope I would. It would be hugely useful to us to have
that information and I would very much like to have that information.
Q273 Chairman: Am I right in thinking
that without that information much of the thing that we have been
discussing for the whole of today, as Mark Lancaster and Adam
Holloway have suggested, has been largely anecdotal because we
do not have the statistics?
Brigadier Brister: Indeed. Until
we have that we cannot do proper study and proper analysis of
most of the issues that we have been discussing. It is absolutely
key.
Q274 Robert Key: When the Committee
went to Germany, not connected with this inquiry but in connection
with Afghanistan, we went to Rheindahlen and what used to be Bruggen,
I cannot remember what it is now. I talked to a number of teachers
there and I was concerned to discover whether or not Service schools
were receiving the same benefits of improved funding as in local
authority schools in the United Kingdom and the answer was it
was all very difficult. I wrote to you, Minister, asking you about
this and you very kindly told me in a letter dated 19 December
last year that: "Service children's education funding is
arranged and agreed through the Department's short-term planning
process" and you were satisfied that there was good funding
here. But then you went on to point out that it was extremely
difficult to make any proper comparison and you had become conscious
that there was a catching-up problem here, and you said: "Most
recently, this has been through the additional funding gained
in STP O3, which has enabled SCE schools to catch up in a number
of areas, most notably information communications technology provision.
The Secretary of State for Defence wrote to colleagues in the
DfES and the Treasury a year or so ago about the importance of
close liaison on new educational initiative" and I asked
you specifically about the question of extended schools initiatives
and you said: "SCE are currently looking into the possibilities
that the extended schools initiative offers and, where believed
appropriate and feasible, will consider the introduction of such
programmes". What has been the outcome of those discussions
with DfES ministers and are the benefits of the extended schools
programme going to reach SCE schools?
Mr Touhig: I have not had an update
on that.
Q275 Robert Key: I would be very
grateful if we could have a written update.
Mr Touhig: I will follow this
up this afternoon and you will have a letter from me giving you
what you ask.[2]
Q276 Robert Key: Thank you, I am grateful.
Does the state education system neglect the needs of Service children,
looking at it rather the other way round? In other words, coming
back to this question of the numbers of Service children in state
schools, and you have already alluded to the fact, Brigadier,
it is not right across the whole country, it is a small number
of education authorities who have a large proportion of Service
children in them, do you feel that those education authorities
are fully up to speed with and conversant with the needs of Service
children or should we be putting more pressure on our education
authorities to take it more seriously?
Brigadier Brister: I think it
would be unfair to say that they are not doing their best for
Service children, I think they are doing their best for them as
they do for all children. Many of them are aware of the special
circumstances of Service children and the fact that the admissions
policy makes special reference to the issues of Service children,
as does the special educational needs guidance. Generally there
is an understanding of the difficulties faced by Service children.
What schools and local authorities have to do is to cope with
everyone they have got within the funding that they got. On the
whole, what they are not able to do, I suppose, is to make special
provision for Service children but they make provision as best
they can within the resources they have. Clearly it is our responsibility
to make sure that we educate local authorities and local schools
so that they understand as much about our children as possible.
We do our best to do this and we liaise, as I have said, with
local authorities and schools and CEAS in particular have a role
to play here. Particularly in the areas where there are big concentrations
of Service children, clearly Wiltshire, North Yorkshire and Hampshire,
there is an understanding but the issue revolves around the ability
of schools to do more.
Q277 Chairman: I think Mr Wadsworth
has told us, correct me if I am wrong, that the children educated
by the SCE in Germany, for example, do get higher budgets per
child, do they not?
Mr Wadsworth: The answer is quite
complicated. If we take the comment in the Budget Statement, the
average spend on a child in the UK is about £5,000, which
I think is what the statement was. I have got some figures here.
At the moment the United Kingdom Budget Statement is an average
of £5,000 per head and our current position is that the average
for an SCE child is marginally ahead of that, but that includes
the costs of COLA, maybe Boarding School Allowance and so forth.
If we strip out those elements to try to make it comparable, the
SCE per capita cost is about £4,300. That sounds as if we
are slipping behind. If I may come back to Mr Key's question about
the extended schools, that is part of a bid for Parity 2. The
comment you read out was about a lump of money we were given in
2003 which covered ICT but also covered the special needs programme
which I referred to earlier. If we were to get Parity 2, which
is basically to catch-up yet again, particularly in areas like
14-19 that we spoke about when you were in Germany, our figure
would come out at about £4,900. That sounds as if we are
still behind. That does not surprise me too much because the United
Kingdom average will encompass primary and secondary school children
and, on the whole, a secondary school child's per capita cost
is much higher than a primary school child. We, of course, are
a predominantly primary school based organisation, we have few
secondary aged pupils or the higher cost of secondary aged pupils.
If you look at that, a figure of £4,900 compared with £5,000
does not surprise me. We would be roughly on a par.
Q278 Chairman: Minister, is there
any sense that when the Chancellor of the Exchequer increases
the budget dramatically for education, as has been happening over
recent years, the education of Service children has to be fought
for within the Defence budget and that it is often quite difficult
for the educational budget for Service children to be set against
the needs of defence requirements?
Mr Touhig: This is a matter that
I raised and discussed recently as I prepared for this session
because you will know, Chairman, that before coming to Defence
I was a Wales Minister and we have such things called Barnett
consequentials as a result of any additional government spending
then passed on to devolved administrations. At the present time
this does not work so far as we are concerned. It is a matter
I have just touched on and I intend to go back to because I do
not want to see our Service children in any way appear to be disadvantaged
as a result of the country's ability to provide additional funding
for education.
Q279 Chairman: So this is unfinished
business?
Mr Touhig: Yes. As far as I am
concerned it is unfinished business because it just came up as
I was discussing in preparation for coming to this Committee.
It is a matter that we would have to discuss with colleagues across
government. It had not clicked with me before then that the extra
monies that were announced do not flow through in the way that
they do in England and to the devolved administrations. Over four
years parity funding will cost an additional £46.5 million
to be found by the MoD. The gap will be wider with any further
educational grants that the Chancellor was to provide. There is
an issue there but I have only just started to focus on it and
it is something I want to go back to.
Chairman: I am glad you will. Thank you.
1 Note: See Ev 74 Back
2
Note: See Ev 75 Back
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