Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 12 OCTOBER 2005
SIR DAVID
NORMINGTON, MR
STEPHEN KERSHAW
AND MR
STEPHEN CROWNE
Q1 Chairman: Sir David, can I welcome
you again. It is really nice to see you and we hope you have had
a good summer.
Sir David Normington: Not bad,
thank you.
Q2 Chairman: You are the link in
terms of continuity in the Department. We have seen Secretaries
of State and Ministers move on on a regular basis. How many Secretaries
of State have you seen in your time now?
Sir David Normington: It depends
how you count them. Since I have been Permanent Secretary or Secretary,
I am on my fourth, but David Blunkett and I only overlapped by
three weeks.
Q3 Chairman: You have been in post
how long—four and a half years?
Sir David Normington: Four and
a half years, yes.
Q4 Chairman: So you are the continuity,
whereas Ministers come and go.
Sir David Normington: Yes, well,
they have done.
Q5 Chairman: So it is a heavy responsibility
on your shoulders. As you know, this is a wide-ranging session
where we really ask you about the value for money that our taxpayers
are getting out of this increased amount of money that the Government
has been putting into education generally, into education and
skills, and we were looking at the run of expenditure on education.
There is no doubt that if you look at the run over this period
since the Prime Minister talked about education three times, we
can see the run from 1998-99 starting at 4.6, 4.6, 4.8, 4.9, 5.3
and 5.6, a steady increase and if you track it with health, you
see of course the increase from 5.4, 5.4, 5.36, 6.2, 6.77 through
to 2004-05. Then all the predictions change and health expenditure
carries on increasing year by year and education is tailing off
and plateauing and indeed some fear there will be a decline. Is
that something that you feel happy about?
Sir David Normington: Well, it
is continuing to increase, but it is just not increasing as fast,
is it. Over this spending period there continued to be increases
and they are real terms increases, ie, they are on top of inflation,
so the investment goes on and the commitment is to get ahead of
the proportion of GDP spent, the average on education, so the
expenditure goes on. It is not increasing as fast as health, but
that has been true actually all through this period.
Q6 Chairman: It is interesting, is
it not, that in three elections the Prime Minister says the priority
is education, but when we look at these figures the priority in
terms of taxpayers' money is health, not education?
Sir David Normington: Well, we
have had this conversation before and it is not all about money;
it is about how it is spent and there have been very substantial
increases in education expenditure, but it is also about, as we
will no doubt get on to, what you do with it. Obviously it has
been spent differentially as well. There have been very large
increases on schools within those overall sums and lesser increases
in other areas.
Q7 Chairman: Which bits of the spend
are you more concerned about? What do you think have been the
successes and which have been the ones that still worry you in
terms of value for money out of the increased investment?
Sir David Normington: Well, in
terms of performance, I think it will always be the case that
the performance will lag the investment, and particularly in the
first few years there was a lot of investment to catch up. If
you ask me what I am proudest of in terms of performance, I think
that, despite all the qualifications we might want to make, school
performance, both primary and secondary, is dramatically up over
this period and I think that has been money well spent because
that is the investment in the future. I think that where we have
not yet made significant impact is in the performance of young
people who do not go to university beyond 16. If you look at our
performance there, those statistics have remained. The more people
are staying on, those statistics in terms of what people are achieving
have not gone up very much and that is why the Government is putting
a lot of emphasis on the 14-19 age group in this period because
we still have to convert the school performance into success in
further education and training.
Q8 Chairman: So you are saying that
there is a relative success of improving the education system
through pre-school through to 16, but you are still unhappy about
staying-on rates in that 16-19 area?
Sir David Normington: I am saying
that at last we are beginning to see improvements in staying-on
rates. What we have not yet seen is very significant improvements
in the attainment of 16-19-year-olds. We have seen improvements
in A-levels, but not in vocational qualifications. We have seen
some, but that is not yet matching international comparisons.
Q9 Chairman: I happen to agree with
you in terms of the relative success of the investment, but why
is it, do you think, that people outside do not seem to share
that? If you listen to the Today programme and the presenters,
the package, you get the impression that nothing is going right
in education and then you pick up a copy of The Times and
nothing is going right, there have been no successes and this
investment is not working. What is it? Is there a conspiracy in
the BBC that does not like you or something?
Sir David Normington: I would
not dream of saying there is a conspiracy. I do not know. It is
very disappointing. If you just take one of these figures which
is literacy at 11, there has been, I think it is, a 17 percentage
point improvement over the period since 1997. We are 6% short
of the target that we have set. Now, you can write that story
in two ways really. You can say, "What a disaster. They have
missed the target", or you could write it as a 17% improvement.
I think all the time we have a half-full/half-empty issue here
and I think it depends on where you take your stance really as
to whether you write that as a half-empty story or half full.
It seems that the half-empty stories are always the ones that
catch the headlines and it is frustrating. It is very frustrating
to me and my colleagues because actually we are really proud of
what has happened.
Q10 Chairman: Is it not the case
though that there is a view out there, so do you just have poor
communications in the Department? Do you work hard on communicating
with the media in terms of getting your message across or has
Gershon been cutting your staff so badly you cannot communicate
so much?
Sir David Normington: No, we work
very hard on our communications. We have reduced our communications
function a bit, but not to the extent that we cannot communicate.
I think the most powerful communicators are going to be the people
who are actually doing it and the people who are benefiting. We
need to get the parents to be noticing it and we need to get the
teachers to be confident about their achievements, and what we
have, particularly in schools, is quite a lot of confidence that
individual schools are improving, but nobody believes that that
is system-wide, so we have this huge gap between what parents
and teachers think of their own school and what they think of
the system as a whole. We have the greatest difficulty convincing
people that there is a national improvement here. We go on trying.
Q11 Chairman: You have my sympathy.
I understand I have been blacklisted by the Today programme
because I will not go reliably enough and castigate the Government
on all occasions, so I have some sympathy there. Can I just push
you a little bit though on higher education. If you look at the
run of figures, the expenditure is very impressive in pre-school,
it is impressive in school through to 16 and even in the FE sector
it is better than one expects when one listens to some of the
voices in the education sector. Higher education is still the
smallest increase across the piece.
Sir David Normington: I think
that is true, yes.
Q12 Chairman: Now, some of our colleagues
in Parliament have recently been to India and China, and indeed
the Higher Education Minister has recently been to India, and
were absolutely terrified by the amount of investment they are
putting in over there. Is it good enough that HE is still not
getting a fair share of the investment?
Sir David Normington: Well, I
think you have to decide where your priorities are. After all,
there are some parts of the HE sector which have done exceptionally
well. There is a huge investment in science and in fact that is
perhaps the greatest investment in science facilities and science
research. We are now maintaining the unit costs per student and
are committed to doing so over the period to 2010, but of course
the real answer to you, Mr Chairman, is that this is why we are
looking for alternative sources of funding and why the Government
is in quite controversial circumstances introducing tuition fees
because that will raise extra money for the universities. In fact
it looks as if it is going to raise about £1 billion, £300
million or so of which will be recirculated into support for poorer
students which is a terrific outcome actually, but £700 million
or so, and these are very broad figures, will be increased investment
in universities. I think all across the education system, in fact
all across the public services, you have to be looking at how
much the State can do and who else should be contributing if they
are benefiting. That is a particular issue in higher education
where there are lots of returns to the individual from taking
a higher education course.
Q13 Chairman: What do you think is
the main theme of the Department for this Parliament? What do
you hope to achieve that is different from what has been going
on over the last few years?
Sir David Normington: Well, you
should really put that to the Secretary of State, I guess.
Q14 Chairman: But what is your interpretation
because you have a White Paper coming out imminently, in the next
couple of weeks?
Sir David Normington: I think
that there are many things that we will be doing to embed things
already announced and let's be clear about that. We have not talked
about pre-school investment in childcare which is an enormous
programme, but the absolute priority in this period will be in
the 11-19 phase. The Schools White Paper which will come out in
a few weeks will be about schools generally, but it will have
a lot to say about secondary education. And we will have more
to say later about how we are getting on to implement what was
said before the Election on the 14-19 phase. So actually raising
standards of attainment, raising the diversity of choices open
to the students in that phase, trying to put vocational education
on a par with academic education, those are things that we will
be focusing on. Actually the reason for doing that is because
that is where the historic weakness of the UK education system
is, as we were saying at the beginning.
Q15 Chairman: Are you going to carry
on on this path of centralisation of the education system? You
are getting rid of local education authorities and you are driving
things. On the one hand, you are saying that all schools are going
to be independent and they will have this tremendous different
status than they have had in the past, but at the same time this
sort of diktat is going out centrally from the Department that
really you see a very centralised system.
Sir David Normington: Well, we
do not think that is what we are doing. We do not think we are
writing local authorities out of the picture and the Secretary
of State has already had something to say about that. We are on
a path to delegate more from the Department to regions and localities,
particularly to front-line institutions. I know people have a
view that the Department for Education and Skills is a highly
centralising force and we are trying to shed that image. If you
want a parallel trend over this period, it will be about devolution
to the front line, much less control, much more security over
school budgets with much more freedom for them to spend that money
on the things that they think are necessary.
Q16 Chairman: If you are in charge
of the school fund and it comes directly from the Department with
no real intermediary, that is a central government/local school
relationship with no intermediary, is it not?
Sir David Normington: No, the
local authorities will continue to set the local formula and will
decide how the money is to be spent locally within national guidance.
What we are actually doing in this from 2006 is ring-fencing the
money for schools within the local authority settlement and it
will become part of my budget, that is true, it will be called
the Dedicated Schools Grant, but actually the distribution of
it will be done locally. The decisions about the distribution
will be done locally.
Q17 Chairman: You and I know that
there is a degree of unhappiness about these changes. You and
I know that in local government people are saying that a major
service has been taken away from them. That is what they are saying
and they are scaling down their education staffing dramatically,
so come on, there is a real difference, a real qualitative change,
a dramatic change in how we are delivering education in our country.
Sir David Normington: Well, of
course there are some people who are unhappy with it, that is
true, and it is certainly the case that local taxation will not
contribute in future to the degree it has in the past to schools
and it will be funded centrally, so that is true and there are
people who are unhappy about that. We would say that there remains
lots of discretion at local authority level and, importantly,
we, with the ODPM, are beginning to redefine the role of the local
authority as a commissioner of services for children. Actually
many local authorities are very interested in that and the best
ones are actively engaged in discussing that. The Secretary of
State made a speech about this at the beginning of September,
and of course it did not get any publicity, but for those who
were really interested, it had a very warm reaction from local
authorities and they were really pleased that we were beginning
to define clearly that we did think the local authorities had
a role. The role is to be champions for children and to be champions
for the community, but it is not to run schools.
Q18 Chairman: Sir David, you and
I know also that this whole new funding regime came out of chaos
and it came out of a panic in your Department over school funding
two years ago. Is it a good way to make policy, that you have
a crisis, you have got the Today programme and the press
running with stories and then suddenly you bring in a new system
for school funding because you are in a panic? It is almost as
bad as the Dangerous Dogs Act. You have been in for five years.
Is this a calm and reflective way to change policy?
Sir David Normington: Actually
I think it is really because what we did after the problems which
we discussed here before was we tried to stabilise the position
by ensuring that every school was guaranteed a minimum increase.
That was the system which we put in place immediately after those
problems that you describe. What we then moved on to was trying
to find a way of securing the school budgets. One of the problems
about where we have been is that you announce what the money is
for schools and then it is possible locally for that money not
to be spent on schools, and that is a problem for schools as well
as for national governments giving priority to education. So this
system is designed to say, "This is the money for schools",
and it actually is, and then to provide schools with security
over a period and eventually, we hope, over a three-year period
that they know what their budgets are going to be. They have never
had that before. This living from pillar to post is very destabilising
to the management of a school and it stops us saying to them,
"You need to manage your budgets better and you need to deliver
some bigger outputs for those budgets", so we are trying
to secure stability in the funding system. You can trace this
a bit from those problems in 2003, but this decision was one that
we took in the five-year strategy context a year or so ago.
Q19 Chairman: After eight years we
are getting it right, are we?
Sir David Normington: I am sure.
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