RT HON ALAN JOHNSON MP

19 JULY 2006

  Q180  Fiona Mactaggart: You said in reply to an earlier question that the improvements in results was the best evidence of improved productivity of the Department and the success it has had, but I have received a lot of evidence that the emphasis on results has meant that many educational institutions focus on the children just below a boundary, and I was wondering what you were doing about the consequences of that, because it means that groups of children are missed out, so just pushing them across from Level 3 to Level 4, for example, at Key Stage 2, those are the children who get focused on. What are you doing about that?

  Alan Johnson: It is not something that I have particularly picked up. Incidentally, when I said about attainment, I did not say it is the best mark of productivity, I said I think it is the best example to the public, or information to the public, about taxpayers' money being spent wisely. Productivity, I accept, is a different issue. I would like to know more about the point you are making. Our approach has to be personalised learning, not just looking at statistics and saying that 5% are not at the right level at Level 3, therefore there must be a single solution to get them back on track to Level 4. We have to look at the specific problems, and personalised learning to me means concentrating on the specific needs and concerns of individual children to get them up to that required level.

  Q181  Fiona Mactaggart: Do you think you are going to have a way that you can describe these cohorts of children in a more personalised way? At the moment the information that we get is rather crude. You talk about lowering social class achievement gaps, but there are other big differentials, race and particular racial groups and so on. Are you going to find ways of describing the kind of journey of groups of children in a way that people can see it better so that you can see which schools are doing what well?

  Alan Johnson: I hope so, and I hope Christine Gilbert's work on personalised learning will help us to do that. That is certainly my concept.

  Q182  Fiona Mactaggart: To follow up the point that you were making about seeing, what do you think about the nursery teacher who is told that she cannot have the SEAL documents and resources because they are designed for people in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2?

  Alan Johnson: I think the younger you get to these kinds of non-cognitive skills, as doubtless Stockholm would have demonstrated, the better it will be. We have introduced it at primary school level because there was a specific reason there. You are looking at me mischievously. I do not know where this nursery teacher stems from, but probably from Slough.

  Q183  Fiona Mactaggart: Slough.

  Alan Johnson: Okay. Let us look at how it works at primary school level before we can decide whether to put it elsewhere.

  Chairman: I do not know how we can record a mischievous look. Never mind. Rob Wilson.

  Q184  Mr Wilson: I am interested to explore this issue of spending or investment and the relationship to standards. How close do you think that that relationship is? For example, synthetic phonics, where it has been tried out, has made a huge difference to attainment standards by children, not just in literacy but in numeracy as well. That has not involved any real additional spending or investment, as such. I just wondered whether you have explored that sort of relationship in detail?

  Alan Johnson: Not in detail, but you make a very good point. The point that I was trying to make to Stephen Williams, that actually concentrating on educational and improving education is not all about spending money, I accept that, but certainly, capital expenditure, you can see the stark results. In my constituency there were so-called Horsa classrooms in 1997 for children, a temporary arrangement in 1944, I think it was, still there in 1997. So there is a very clear effect there, because when children are taught in better surroundings with better equipment and good books, I think there is a clear correlation. Other aspects, I agree, and the work of the Rose Report on phonics is something that is very exciting and not particularly expensive.[4]

  Q185 Chairman: Can I put you straight on that a little. The thrust of our Report on phonics was actually teaching children to read. What we showed was that the evidence suggested that any intensive form of teaching children to read seemed to work, and the best form was assessing what was right for that child. Some children responded to one technique and others to another. We found two things out of that. One is that teachers in their training were not trained properly to teach children to read, and that was one of our prime recommendations. We were rather amazed, some of us, that your Department seems to have gone rather overboard with this synthetic phonics, because there has only been one study on the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in one part of Scotland and we wanted more research not just suddenly taking up the latest fashion. So, intensive help for those kids that are struggling with reading does work, but we still, I have to say—please come back to me on this—we are a bit worried about how enthusiastically you have embraced synthetic phonics.

  Alan Johnson: That is another piece of reading for me, I think. I will have a look at your Report.

  Q186  Paul Holmes: On that point, the one study that has really assisted us was from Clackmannanshire, and as I recall the figures now, it was a very small authority with something like only 18 junior schools and they intensively trained all the teachers involved. All the people we had from your Department were pointing out that if you tried to do that across the whole of England, for example, the implications of taking every single teacher and training them to that level would have very significant financial implications. The other thing about the synthetic phonics schemes is, if you were doing them to the exclusion of other things, which the enthusiasts were telling us, you had to buy entire new reading schemes, junk everything you had got virtually and buy entire new reading schemes. So, if you want to do that across a country the size of England, there are massive financial implications. As the Chairman said, the implications of Clackmannanshire partly was that if you took a group of teachers from 18 schools and gave them intensive training, intensive anyway for teaching kids to read, then you would see an improvement in results because what works works and enthusiastic teachers can make things work in all sorts of different ways?

  Alan Johnson: There appears to be a difference between Committee Members here.

  Q187  Chairman: We still have the scars of that too. Last one before we move on to research funding. There is a massive programme of rebuilding schools, building new schools and refurbishing old schools, and none of us would in a sense criticise that wonderful programme. We do not want to see kids in awful conditions. Our Committee is looking at sustainable schools as a major inquiry, but as this vast expenditure takes place, do you think we are getting the proportion right between building new schools and designing what goes into those new and refurbished schools?

  Alan Johnson: Yes, I hope so. The whole philosophy between the local education partnerships that will be responsible for BSF is that it is not just someone going in, sticking up a building. Education informs everything, the shape, the design and the ICT that goes in there with the involvement of the local authority, of people who have a background and a track record in producing iconic, good buildings. This is, as you rightly say, so crucial, such a huge expenditure, every secondary school in the country being refurbished or rebuilt and a fair stock of primary schools. It cannot just be done on the basis of sticking up buildings and hoping for the best. We have to ensure that everything is integrated and coordinated. That is what we are trying to do through LEPs.

  Q188  Chairman: We have to go beyond boasting there are banks of computers and white boards, some of which unfortunately teachers do not know how to use. Some of the information we have had from Microsoft, BT and others is that there is a lot of very good information about new ways of teaching children to learn and perhaps the Department is rather lagging behind.

  Alan Johnson: I will look at that. I hope not.[5]

  Q189 Chairman: How are your own IT skills?

  Alan Johnson: Poor to appalling.

  Chairman: Perhaps we can all join together and improve them.

  Q190  Mr Marsden: In the Budget there was an announcement that the Research Assessment Exercise for assessing university funding was going to be replaced with a system based on metrics. As you know, the consultation document has been already published on that, but it is a rather narrow consultation document in that it focuses not so much on the merits of change but more on the process of introducing metrics. Do you think it makes sense to be arguing for the introduction of a system that has generally already agreed more than half of the subjects currently funded for research, particularly the humanities and social sciences, and more than half the number of the academics and lecturers involved and a metrics system that will not be fit for purpose?

  Alan Johnson: I have some history on this because when I was Higher Education Minister we published the Roberts Review. Gareth Roberts recommended moving a long way towards a metrics based system. We are doing this in the best way possible, running the traditional RAE alongside a metrics based system and using that to inform where we go to next. I think there has been a lot of discussion about this over many years and, when I was Higher Education Minister, I was amazed quite frankly that we spent all this money and took up all this time—something like 82 different panels and committees—on something that could be done much more quickly. Our joint objective would be to maintain the excellent research base we have in this country. I went through the arguments. You have been through them, I know. It was pretty tedious stuff in the sense that it got very techy but I do believe that we need to move away from peer review and we need to have a better system. Running the two systems alongside each other which can reassure people who are worried about what the objective is here—i.e., does it mean putting all the money into a few universities around the south east—will give reassurance.

  Q191  Mr Marsden: You are obviously reading my mind. You are absolutely right. I can understand your world weariness with it. There has been an immense amount of discussion about the RAE, the problems and difficulties of it and indeed about the extent to which there are all these problems about assessment and all the rest of it. Many of those criticisms have focused on the narrowness and mechanical nature of the RAE as it is at the moment. Does it make sense to be moving to a system which, at least on the basis of what is included in your consultation document, looks as if it is going to move more to a tick box culture and an assessment of a number of pages of things submitted? How are we going to assess whether any of these changes have a beneficial impact on UK research's reputation internationally or not?

  Alan Johnson: Gareth Roberts did make the point about metrics. You could run a metrics system without peer review and get good results. I am not sure of the answer to your question. I would want to see these two systems running side by side. I would want to see the correlation and the outcome. That is the best way to do this rather than to leap from RAE to a metrics based system, to see how they operate and to see the similarity.

  Q192  Mr Marsden: Given that this has been introduced, what research has your Department commissioned to look at the potential impact of this change? I make that point because the direction of travel, the buzzwords that we all like to use these days, internationally appears to be in the opposite direction.

  Alan Johnson: Australia.

  Q193  Mr Marsden: Australia and Hong Kong. In addition, there is an issue in terms of the concentration in universities on research where the evidence again from the States suggests that the travel is in the other direction and is becoming more diffuse and not more concentrated. Academics will argue about these things until kingdom come but would it not be a good idea to do a little bit of risk benefit analysis on it?

  Alan Johnson: We will be doing some research on this. That is the whole reason for running the two alongside each other. I am a fan of metrics.

  Mr Marsden: Would your Department be able to come back to the Committee in due course and give us details of what this research is going to be, how you are going to carry it out and evaluate it?

  Q194  Chairman: You have not been bounced into metrics by the Chancellor, have you?

  Alan Johnson: Maybe the other way round.

  Q195  Chairman: Why was it announced in the Budget?

  Alan Johnson: We had the Roberts Report in 2004. We had the 10-year Science and Innovation Framework which I was involved with as a DTI minister. It has hardly been bounced. This has been around for a while. What was in the Budget was the next steps on the 10-year Science and Innovation Framework. It is quite right, if you set a 10-year framework, you have to have the steps along the way. I refute the argument completely that this is somehow the Chancellor pushing this. The Chancellor is in a good place on this.

  Q196  Mr Marsden: You will be relieved to know that I am not going to pursue the issue of what the Chancellor's views are or are not. I am going to move on to the views of the people at the coal face, the lecturers, the academics, the support staff who currently work under RAE and will be affected by this. The UCU, who are launching their own major consultation exercise at the moment, have pointed out that under the present system there has been a very strong concentration of research funding in a small number of departments and institutions. They make the point—I would like your comment on this—that we ought to be questioning whether we fund past performance rather than potential capacity building. Is there a danger that by entrenching funding, whether it is by a metrics system or by the RAE system, in a few very tight universities you are not going to stop the small and medium sized research enterprises growing in other universities, particularly the post-1992 ones?

  Alan Johnson: That would be a concern. The objective must be to fund excellent research wherever it takes place. I do not agree that this change is to lead to a concentration onto the so-called club. You know who I am talking about.

  Q197  Mr Marsden: You are talking about the post-1992 universities, the Russell Group, losing out.

  Alan Johnson: No, I am not talking about them losing out. I disagree that this is a process that will lead to Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge and one other—

  Q198  Stephen Williams: Bristol?

  Alan Johnson: No, not Bristol.

  Q199  Chairman: Imperial, University College, London, Oxford and Cambridge.

  Alan Johnson: That is right, that that is going to lead to all research being concentrated. The Chairman put it more eloquently than anyone I have heard on this about a gang of people marching into Number 10.

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