Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

MR DAVID BELL AND MR JONATHAN THOMPSON

14 JUNE 2006

  Q40  Mr Wilson: It does appear to me that despite you sitting there and citing those examples that there has not really been a break in the generational cycle that seems to have developed, longer than the period of this government, in those areas where essentially poor education and life chances have been passed from one generation to the next. Nothing I see happening in education at the moment is actually breaking that cycle. I see education as the only way of those children getting out of the circumstances they find themselves in.

  Mr Bell: I absolutely agree with that point. Education is crucial. We know that thousands more children are achieving the expected levels in literacy and numeracy at the age of eleven. We know that more and more young people are staying on but we know we have more to do for their education. More and more young people are achieving the benchmark of five A plus to C grades at GCSE. All of those things are assisting in doing what it is that you are describing. I would be the last person to sit here and suggest that the kind of inter-generational problems that you have described are easy to crack. They are not; of course they are not. I think those policies and approaches taken together demonstrate that the Department is absolutely committed to trying to do the very best for those young people and their families.

  Q41  Mr Marsden: Can I take you back to the new arrangements for 2008-09 and to that initial consultation? This Committee in its last Report on the whole issue expressed a considerable amount of interest. Was there a particular reason why this Committee was not asked to contribute to that initial consultation?

  Mr Thompson: The simple answer is that it was a mistake. We should have consulted you and we thought we had, but it appears we had not and we have to apologise for that. As David said earlier in one of his answers our consultation on the terms of reference for that review was with a wide number of groups and it clearly should have included the Committee and it did not so we have to offer you that apology.

  Q42  Mr Marsden: I am sure there will be other opportunities as we drill down into some of the detail, and particularly perhaps to pick up some of the issues that this Committee in specific funding terms has commented on in the past. One of the ones that we have commented on in the past and I want to touch on again today picks up some of Jonathan Thompson's remarks about looking closely at the link between funding and deprivation, and that is the whole issue of funding issues to do with children with transience and mobility. In your Department gathering I hope not dust but a little bit of reflection are two reports on this issue by Sally Dobson. When your predecessors came before this Committee last October I questioned them on what you might or might not do in that context. The then permanent secretary said there were no plans to change the existing situation. Given what you have said and given that this is actually an issue and that you, David, in your previous role as Chief Inspector of Ofsted, must be well aware that this is an issue for a significant number of schools—inner city schools, schools with a high number of ethnic minorities, seaside and coastal towns—is it not about time that you looked very specifically at this link in the context of 2008-09 in terms of the funding stream?

  Mr Bell: We have looked at this one but I think our conclusion is that there are two specific problems with distributing funding to local authorities on the basis of that mobility measure. First of all it is a surprisingly widespread phenomenon so we actually think that inclusion of a mobility factor would not have much overall impact on the dedicated schools grant. Secondly—this is probably the hardest point—the actual data that the Department currently collects is not sufficient or is not a robust enough indicator. I think that is a very serious point because if you are going to fund according to any element you have to have an indicator that people actually respect and see as fairly applied. All the research on this has been looked at very carefully within the Department and all the research suggests that we cannot get that kind of robust indicator.

  Q43  Mr Marsden: I accept, not least in your battles with the Treasury, that robust indicators are always very important, but is it not possibly the case that it is also in some degrees inconvenient for you to have robust indicators on this issue because it would mean you would have to open another funding stream which you do not have. If you are not going to go down that route, what are you going to do to address the very real issues in those areas that your own Department has had identified by the reports that I have referred to?

  Mr Bell: I can assure you on the robust indicator point this is not one that is in a sense constrained by the Treasury, this is a very real issue. I can speak from some experience on this one given my time in Newcastle when there were some schools with huge turnovers but to try to nail down what kind of indicator you would have used to measure that would have actually involved the schools concerned in a phenomenal amount of additional paper work and bureaucracy. I think you always have to bear that in mind. I think Jon can give some consolation on this point.

  Mr Thompson: We have looked at the advice which was initially available to us and what we would now like to do is take that into account in the deprivation indicators review as part of our longer term review of school funding. It may well be that there are other indicators that we can use which are more robust which take into account the deprivation of those individual children, which we could then use in terms of distributing the schools grant. It may be there is a different way of tackling the issue through the use of those deprivation indicators.

  Q44  Mr Marsden: There is some degree of consolation in that but the issue will not go away. Can I suggest, therefore, that if you are looking in that area that you discuss obviously very closely with colleagues in the community but also with the Social Exclusion Minister, not least because the Social Exclusion Unit is now, as we learn, to be relocated outside of Number 10 and therefore the involvement of the Social Exclusion Minister and that aspect of government in terms of what you decide is very important.

  Mr Bell: Yes.

  Q45  Mr Carswell: I would like to build on some of the things that Gordon was saying. There is a huge unfairness and inequality in the current system. I know this from representatives of a local authority in Yorkshire who showed me some data. They showed that per pupil terms there are enormous inequalities. You have said there are problems with getting robust indicators and whatever, but the question I really wanted to put to you is, if you were to come up with a formula based on various factors—age, location, social deprivation—and this formula showed you what every pupil in the country could expect to receive in terms of funding from their local authority, would that allow you to give every parent in the country a legal right to request and receive control over that share of LA funding? Up until now the great stumbling block to doing that has been people saying what constitutes their share of local authority funding. If you came up with a formula surely you could open the door to doing that.

  Mr Bell: Do you mean their share at a level of individual school or the level of the individual pupil?

  Q46  Mr Carswell: Pupil.

  Mr Bell: It is a requirement on local authorities in relation to what we publish to demonstrate per pupil spending in their schools. Any parent can look within the local authority area what is spent in any particular school and the decisions about the allocation within a local authority area are decided through the funding forum arrangements. As you rightly point out, if you want to make those comparisons from one place to another you can also make those comparisons. I think you are, however, beginning to touch on the issue of a national funding formula. There has always been a debate about on the one hand having something that is perceived to be fair nationally yet on the other hand not trying to prescribe to a particular area what should be spent. I think the balance of the argument has always been that we want to ensure that the totality of expenditure on schools is secured by the dedicated schools grant and then there is a good degree of local discretion about how that money is then allocated and what decisions are made locally. I think that is where we are at the moment in relation to your question.

  Q47  Mr Carswell: I am not talking about a national funding formula, I am talking about something which would be extremely localist because rather than having the national funding formula which is not the answer—I am against that—but as a local issue it would be giving people a legal entitlement to request and receive from the LA their share of funding; it would actually be devolving to an even lower tier, directly to the people.

  Mr Bell: I think you are perhaps in the territory that Mr Wilson described in relation to direct funding in relation to a voucher system.

  Q48  Mr Carswell: I am not using that term.

  Mr Bell: I know you are not, but I am trying to understand the distinction between them.

  Q49  Mr Carswell: A legal right and a legal entitlement to request and receive.

  Mr Bell: I am not quite sure what added benefit you would get from that.

  Q50  Mr Carswell: Choices.

  Mr Bell: There are obviously a lot of choice mechanisms already in the system. The system is such that every school will get its allocated share and parents have the freedom and right to know how that money is spent from school to school. Obviously because of a variety of choice mechanisms and levers in the system that does drive the distribution of funding between schools because the more successful schools inevitably attract more students which attract more money.

  Q51  Mr Carswell: Under the current system all too often the people end up having to follow the money as allocated by the so called experts at the LA. With this system the money would follow the pupil.

  Mr Bell: I think it is really important to deal with the point about the so called experts at the LA. The arrangements for agreeing the distribution of funding in a local authority have to include representatives of all the schools in the area.

  Q52  Mr Carswell: That is okay then.

  Mr Bell: I think it is a counter point to the argument that it is all about LA experts. I think this is an agreement at local level about how money is distributed. There are some broad rules, for example the majority of the funding has to follow the pupils. It is a proper engagement of those who are on the receiving end of fund decisions, ie head teachers and school governors. That seems to me entirely consistent with the local spirit.

  Q53  Chairman: You are a Scots, are you not?

  Mr Bell: Yes. I sense a World Cup question here.

  Q54  Chairman: No, I would not ask you if you were going to be supporting Trinidad and Tobago, but have you ever mused what more expenditure you could give to schools if England were beneficiaries of the Barnet formula

  Mr Bell: No, I have never mused on that point.

  Chairman: Perhaps it is something some of you may consider at some stage.

  Q55  Jeff Ennis: Could you tell us what the current funding gap is for a student studying in a school sixth form as compared with an FE college?

  Mr Bell: The gap was 13%. The previous Secretary of State announced at the AoC conference last November that that gap had dropped to 8% and there is a proposal that that drops a further 3%. We are moving in the direction of trying to equalise further between school sixth forms and colleges. You might say that that has not gone the whole way but I think that then becomes quite an important issue in relation to the 14-19 reform. I think the movement that has been made now is getting us closer between the funded schools and further education. I am sure the system is going to change as a result of 14-19. I think we are going in the right direction but we have to look at it quite fundamentally.

  Q56  Jeff Ennis: I do feel a certain amount of frustration given that almost two years ago now I asked Charles Clarke what the gap was then and it was then 7%. He told this Committee nearly two years ago that the gap would be closed in three years, in other words in just over 12 months. We are not going to hit that target, are we?

  Mr Bell: We are not going to equalise the funding in 12 months, no.

  Q57  Jeff Ennis: What priority does this particular problem get now with the Department, given the fact that the Department has actually failed to hit our previous Secretary of State's targets? You intimated to me that we are actually down in the right direction; we are going to close it with the passage of time down to 3%. How high a priority does it have with ministers?

  Mr Bell: It is a very important priority and I hope you would have recognised in the Further Education White Paper the priority that is given not just to the funding issue—and I do not in any sense under-estimate the significance of that—but also about further education more generally. There are some difficult choices, as we know, about quite where you put the money when it comes to post-compulsory education. I can absolutely reassure you that it does have priority. There have been a lot of arrangements to ensure that we get and keep more young people in further education through things like Education Maintenance Allowances through to expanding our Apprenticeship programme and so on. There has been a lot of priority given to it, but I accept the point that the funding issue remains one that causes great concern.

  Q58  Jeff Ennis: In Barnsley, for example, 85-90% of the kids go to an FE college which has central provision and I do not think it is fair that kids in Barnsley should be funded 13% less than other LA areas for sixth form provision.

  Mr Bell: I can only repeat the point about trying to move over time.

  Q59  Jeff Ennis: Do we have any sort of research in terms of the impact it is having on pass rates or exam success between students who are studying in school sixth forms as opposed to FE colleges?

  Mr Bell: We will have the data but I do not have it to hand. I could get it in relation to the achievements of students studying in different post-16 institutions, whether that is a college, a school sixth form or a sixth-form college. We can get that but I think you are perhaps asking a slightly different question, can we draw some direct connection between the funding and the outcomes and I suspect we do not have that but I will undertake to look at that. We have the raw data about who achieves what and where, but not data in relation to what you spend and what you get. [2]



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