RT HON ALAN JOHNSON MP

19 JULY 2006

  Q160  Mr Wilson: Have you any indication for the Committee as to what direction that might take?

  Alan Johnson: You will have to wait for the outcome. We will consult you very closely on the review.

  Mr Wilson: Thank you, Chairman.

  Q161  Chairman: Secretary of State, we have had evidence to this Committee that there is already some good research on how you more accurately look at social deprivation rather than just free school meals. There is stuff out there, so in a sense there is challenge that you could as a department move quite fast on this to become more focused.

  Alan Johnson: Okay.

  Chairman: Mainly university research, as we understand it. We want to move on to education expenditure and the CSR. Stephen.

  Q162  Stephen Williams: Good morning, Secretary of State. We have mentioned the CSR once already and you have described that as the next stage in the permanent revolution in government. Do you think in this forthcoming CSR that education will be the top priority for the Chancellor?

  Alan Johnson: The Chancellor has made it quite clear that education is a priority.

  Q163  Stephen Williams: A priority not the top priority?

  Alan Johnson: Well, I forget whether he said "a" or "the", but it is a priority nonetheless, and that is very reassuring to me.

  Q164  Stephen Williams: In 1997 the Government, of which you are a part, was elected on, "Education, education, education", but if you look at the increases in public expenditure since 1997, it is health that has actually got the lion's share. In 1997 there was a gap of 0.7% of GDP in health's favour, and in the current year it has widened to 1.6%. In your negotiations with your cabinet colleagues are you expecting to maintain that gap at a constant level, or are you resigned to the fact that health will continue to be the Government's top priority?

  Alan Johnson: We did, indeed, say, "Education, education, education", and I think John Major said his priorities were the same but in a different order at the time! I saw your point about this. I do not particularly go along with this, that if education is our priority then, if you compare health and everything, we have to show the same percentage increase. It depends on what you are seeking to tackle and the issues you are seeking to tackle. Transport was one of the issues. In actual fact I think your figures stop short of the last year, I think, where that would be rebalanced, but our priority is education. It is not just all about spending money. A lot of it is about spending money but it is not all about spending money, it is about the concentration on attainment, it is about the concentration on ensuring that we are focusing on children from a very young age rather than waiting until they get to school, on issues like 14-19 where you get the cliff edge at 16. There is a financial tag to that but it is not all about money.

  Q165  Chairman: When you say "your figures", can I make clear, you are not talking about Stephen's figures, you are talking about our Committee's Report figures.

  Alan Johnson: Which came from us, you are going to tell me. Yes, okay.

  Q166  Stephen Williams: You have obviously studied the transcript of our last session with your Permanent Secretary carefully, and you may have noticed that I also asked the Permanent Secretary about projected figures for the future. Since 1997 there have been in real terms increases of around about 4.6% a year for education, but the Institute of Fiscal Studies have suggested, based on the information currently available, that in future increases will be around 3.4% per annum, so there is going to be deceleration in increased expenditure for education, so we will not have the "land of milk and honey" which I think you mentioned earlier. Do you accept that figure, that there is going to be a fall-off in increases for education expenditure, and what are the implications of that given what Mr Wilson was asking you about this long-term aim of raising public expenditure in the state sector to match the independent sector?

  Alan Johnson: I cannot see beyond the Comprehensive Spending Review. What I can see is that the expenditure in my Department this year is 60 billion and next year will be 64 billion. That is an incredible uplift in just one year. The Chancellor's long-term aim would depend on the financial situation at the time, the demographics, all those issues. I know it is going to be a stroked bat that will be used quite often during this session, but I really cannot predict what is going to happen after the Comprehensive Spending Review.

  Q167  Stephen Williams: But you accept that the CSR itself in 2008-11 is going to be very tight for your Department relative to the largesse your predecessors had?

  Alan Johnson: Yes, a point I have made before.

  Q168  Stephen Williams: Given that type of situation, what are your personal priorities to achieve out of this CSR?

  Alan Johnson: I think this uplift from 60 billion to 64 billion, which will be something like a 52% increase since 1997, not 1999, we have to ensure that we get the best value for money for that huge increase in expenditure, and that is going to be a big focus of what we are doing. We have to ensure that public money is used in that way, and this is not us dictating this from the Tower of Mordor, or whatever, the schools are up for this as well. So, there is a lot to be done there, and we lock in all of that. I have just come from the DTI where we had a very different spending situation, and to be in a department where you have had that increased expenditure, you are going to get another four billion next year, you are 52% up in the last nine years and the prospect of more real terms increases is a place where many secretaries of state in education over the years would love to have been.

  Q169  Stephen Williams: To repeat my question, what are your personal priorities out of that increased expenditure?

  Alan Johnson: We will have to get the CSR over with first. We have to decide our priorities as part of that. Of course, that is a discussion I will be having with the Treasury as we go through the CSR.

  Q170  Stephen Williams: The Committee has just completed and published its Report on special educational needs. I know the Department has not responded to that yet, but can we have some assurance from you that SEN will get quite a high priority within your discussions and your bids for extra expenditure?

  Alan Johnson: SEN, I think, will always be a priority. I think "looked after children", and it probably will not register on the Richter scale because there are only 60,000 of them, their treatment has been pretty dreadful by successive governments, and I think that is a priority but it is not a hugely expensive priority just to concentrate on some of the problems that a corporate parent has with these children as opposed to real parents.

  Q171  Stephen Williams: I think we all agree that education has had large amounts of public expenditure squirted into it since 1997. Are you confident that value for money is being delivered from that increase in expenditure in terms of the outcomes in literacy and numeracy on other measurable outputs?

  Alan Johnson: Eight weeks in, I cannot say I am absolutely confident. I am confident that we have got the mechanisms in place to ensure that we get value for money, but, as I say, I think there is going to be a real push to ensure that. I would want to have studied the situation far more into that 4.3 billion—the point that David Chaytor was making earlier—before I say I am confident that that is happening.

  Q172  Stephen Williams: Do you think it is quite hard to measure productivity in your Department? In the private sector if you train your staff better, if you buy a machine probably more widgets come out and they are of a better quality at the other end. How are you able to be confident that we have got better educated children and well educated students and graduate workforce as well at the end of all this extra expenditure?

  Alan Johnson: You can be confident because it is measured, the results are published and it can be seen. Going back to David Chaytor's question, whether we are getting the savings in line with our ambitions, particularly under Gershon, then it is the National Audit Office, it is the Public Accounts Committee, it is the Office of Government Commerce and all the usual channels, but it is more difficult. Widgets are easy. Education, as it should be, is much more complex.

  Q173  Chairman: Is not it true, Secretary of State, that this question of measuring productivity is at the heart? On the one hand our Committee's Report did point out that it was not just the relationship between health spending and education spending but that also overall there is a forecast plateau of expenditure, and while I take your response to Stephen Williams on that as a positive response, if we cannot measure productivity, people are going to say, "Look at the money we have put in", and we would not question that, would we, but what our constituents would say is, "Show us the value. Show us that that has been productive", and if you do not have a good measure of productivity you make yourself vulnerable.

  Alan Johnson: I accept there is a point about productivity, but just running through these, you know them well. Primary schools, English 79% attainment against 63% in 1997, 75% in maths against 62%. In London at secondary school level an incredible turn around of five GCSEs. 32.3% of children in Inner London got five decent GCSEs in 1997, and now it is 50.2%. Thirty-six thousand extra teachers, 90,000 extra support staff, capital expenditure that is absolutely extraordinary: 700 million being spent in our schools in 1997, 6.5 billion this year rising to eight billion next year. I think the public understands full well what this means for education. They do not need a measure of productivity. We do, I accept, but in terms of whether they have faith that that investment is worthwhile and producing results, the statistics are clear.

  Q174  Paul Holmes: You quite rightly talk about the extra money and capital and so forth that has gone into education. One way of measuring the output would be rising literacy standards and rising exam passes. One of the criticisms that employers make, it is not the one that the newspapers tend to pick up on, when they are recruiting people, whether direct from schools or from universities, is that people are not flexible enough, they are not able to work in teams enough and these are not things that can be measured by how many exam passes and what grades somebody has got. Yet you go to Scandinavia they would argue that there it is the other way, that the children they produce are much more free-standing, mature and independent. Have you got any thoughts on that and how you measure that sort of outcome?

  Alan Johnson: Yes, we had an interesting session in our ministerial meeting last Friday about non-cognitive skills. There is an issue here. Part of what we are doing, and I do not know whether this Committee will know about the SEAL Programme (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning). I was in Nottingham yesterday talking to primary school head teachers. 50% of primary schools have now adopted this. In Nottingham they have adopted it with knobs on because they have got particular social problems.

  Q175  Chairman: Graham Allen's great campaign.

  Alan Johnson: Absolutely, and seeing it first hand. So the idea of SEAL it is to work on those aspects of team working in primary schools. I think issues like citizenship are very important as well, and what we are trying to do as we work up to 14-19 diplomas is introduce an element of this, because, I think you are absolutely right, employers are increasingly pointing to this as a difference, and the reason why they are pointing to it as a difference is because, in my patch and probably yours, lots of workers are coming from Poland and Eastern Europe who have these kinds of skills instinctively and so it is becoming a bigger issue.

  Q176  Paul Holmes: One of the things that you must have heard teachers say when you refer to teachers saying that league tables are a problem, both at junior and secondary level, is that the pressure to get better and better results partly squeezes out the sort of team working and cognitive thinking work that takes more time but does not reflect in something that hits a league table. I was in Stockholm with Graham Allen earlier this year, for example, looking at some of the early years there. Graham came specifically to look from that point of view, were we squeezing out of our young children those sorts of personal social skills in favour of league table results.

  Alan Johnson: This was the discussion we had yesterday with teachers, not just head teachers but teachers, and the majority of them thought it was not either/or, it was not non-cognitive skills verses exams and tests, it was an add-on, it was to actually help children in primary schools to get to the right level of Level 3 and Level 4. For kids in Nottingham it was very important for them to acquire those skills so that they could go on to achieve in literacy and numeracy, and I think the add-ons were the majority, but I accept there are issues here. The stress there must be being involved as a teacher, the joy and satisfaction as well, I know, so I am not here to say it is something they can absorb. SEAL is very new and it is very important that we get the right feedback. Of course, the idea of it is that it is embedded right across the curriculum. It is not a half an hour a week to look at non-cognitive skills, you actually do it in the way you teach the whole curriculum.

  Q177  Paul Holmes: I remember back in 2000 when I was still teaching, we had somebody from the DfES come to talk to us in a secondary school about what was going to happen in literacy and numeracy in the primaries, and when they were talking about what was going to be built, we were saying, "But with the national curriculum requirements, how can you put the time into doing that?", and he said, "We will disallow it. We will remove a lot of those strictures from the national curriculum on junior school teachers so we can deliver the literacy and numeracy programme." Are you coming to a point where you have to remove some of the other pressures to allow more freedom to teach these other skills?

  Alan Johnson: I do not think there is way of doing that at Key Stage 3 to free up for 14-19. I would not go as far as thinking that there is a specific problem there. Certainly yesterday's discussion did not lead me to that view, but if there is an issue, as I say, we have got a very good social partnership here, we get good feedback from teachers through their trade unions and through other methods.

  Q178  Paul Holmes: One final question on this question of how you measure the output. Are there more sophisticated ways than just exam results? David Chaytor was talking about if you are giving primary teachers non-contact time, which they have never traditionally had, but you cannot then, two or three years down the line, see some sort of increase in educational attainment, how do you measure whether that is worthwhile? Another way of measuring might be if you had a lower turnover of primary school teachers leaving the profession because they are so ragged and worn out, that that would justify providing non-contact time rather than an increase in literacy, for example. Are you looking at other ways of measuring the success of these initiatives?

  Alan Johnson: I think that is a valid point. I instinctively feel that it must be right to have that non-contact time, but it is going to have to prove itself, maybe in reduced wastage and reduced turnover. I certainly think we ought to monitor the situation but without making teachers feel that it is somehow under threat. I just think it is the right thing to do. Everything you heard and we heard about the pressures on teachers meant that they could do better at teaching if they had some time to analyse, plan and prepare.

  Q179  Paul Holmes: So you will be talking to teachers' unions and to head teachers about how you measure the success of non-contact time, for example?

  Alan Johnson: It is essential to talk to the unions, yes.