Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40 - 59)

WEDNESDAY 12 OCTOBER 2005

SIR DAVID NORMINGTON, MR STEPHEN KERSHAW AND MR STEPHEN CROWNE

  Q40  Tim Farron: So when the A-levels are good, Ruth Kelly goes on the radio and when it is a school with special measures, it is the LEA that gets the blame?

  Sir David Normington: No, we take responsibility for the successes and failures in the system, but we always say, which is true, that it is the schools that are delivering both the successes and the failures. It is what they do that really matters.

  Q41  Tim Farron: I am obviously concerned about outcomes in the end and whatever the process of this is, there surely must be some assumption as to what the outcomes are likely to be. Clearly it would appear that the Dedicated Schools Grant and the new system in general will ensure more popular schools are rewarded less quickly and less for their popularity and less popular schools will be hit less and less quickly for their unpopularity and those unpopular schools that make successful attempts to turn things around will be encouraged to do so in a slower and less effective way. Are these the Government's intentions?

  Sir David Normington: I do not think any of that is right actually. The Government's policy is to allow popular schools to expand and to set aside capital to enable that to happen faster than it has. The Government's policy is also to ensure that where a school is weak or failing, there is faster action taken so that schools are not left lingering, which they sometimes have been in the past. I think that the conversation we have just had about money following the pupil, the money will follow the pupil, but it is just that in reality to take the money away from a school just like that is a big problem for a school. The reality of how you manage a school is that if your numbers fall, you cannot get the costs out fast enough, so if you take the budget away from them, the school would be in terrible difficulty. Therefore, all we are doing is just dealing with that, as far as I can see, and it will still be the case that money will follow the pupil and that we will be encouraging popular schools to expand and providing capital money for that to happen.

  Q42  Tim Farron: I have a final question of particular concern to the constituency I represent. What work has the Department done on the likely outcomes with regard to small rural schools, particularly those with falling rolls, of these changes?

  Mr Crowne: One of the great strengths of the local formula system we have is that local authorities with schools in that position can, with a great deal of discretion, design a local system which will be fit for purpose in those circumstances. We have been very careful when we have been designing the minimum funding guarantee and so on to ensure that that discretion is still there. Indeed quite a lot of authorities with large numbers of very small schools have very distinctive arrangements for funding those schools. That is because such a high proportion of their costs are fixed compared with larger schools. Therefore, I am confident that the current architecture, the architecture that we are introducing certainly does not reduce the ability of the local authority to design a locally fit-for-purpose system and indeed I think in some respects it increases it.

  Sir David Normington: Well, we do have falling rolls in some places and they are quite sharp in some parts of the country and that is obviously raising issues about—

  Q43  Tim Farron: But they are not as a result of schools failing; they are as a result of communities dwindling and the schools do not need to be punished for that.

  Sir David Normington: It is the result of school demographics really and also movements of population actually from north to south in many respects.

  Q44  Chairman: If you have got so many fewer pupils coming through because of the sharp demographic downturn, most of our electors would say that the budget should go down if you are educating less children.

  Sir David Normington: And that is what happens of course in the end.

  Q45  Chairman: Is it? On a previous occasion one of your members of staff told us that you could save 50,000 teachers' salaries. Because of the demographic downturn, are we going to see that sort of scale of saving?

  Sir David Normington: I do not know if it is that scale, but it is certainly the case that primary school numbers have been falling and that is moving through into secondary. It is quite sharp in some places rather than others. It is not very sharp at all in London, and in fact there are some increases. It is a question of what you do with the money. The money does come out. If there are not the pupils there, you do not eventually get paid for them and that happens relatively quickly. The question then is: what do you do with that money? Up until now the Government has taken the view that you should put that back into the education system to improve elements of teachers' development or school development.

  Q46  Mr Wilson: Sir David, can I just explore the impact of some of the new funding arrangements and go down into some of the detail. Can I refer you to the document which was sent to us by Jacqui Smith, the Minister for Schools, in particular, if you go to the section on school budgets where she talks about giving schools stability and certainty and under bullet point two where she talks about a single count date for schools in January. Now, I am not convinced that you have thought through the implications of this particular policy because, as I understand it, many LEAs have a three-point entry system particularly for reception children, which includes the Easter intake. For a three-point entry school, this could mean a projected deficit in the region of about £80,000 in the financial year 2006-07. Now, that would obviously cause severe financial difficulties and many schools would not be able to deal with a deficit of that sort, so really what I am asking you is can you clarify that? Am I missing something or has the Department looked at that in detail?

  Mr Crowne: I think it is very important to distinguish two things here. One is that we needed to establish, and we have established, with a complete consensus amongst local authority representatives and school heads what should be the basis for us to distribute money to local authorities with DSG and we had to have a single consistent basis for doing that. Quite separately, the local authority then needs to have a basis for producing the pupil numbers that will guide the local distribution and what we are basically saying is that we need consistency at both levels. Whatever option you go for, and there is a wide variety of practice out there of local distribution, there will be some complications of the kind you have identified. The key thing is to get some consistency and then locally to work out how you deal with the complications. No system is going to be free of those complications. We have road-tested this and are road-testing this with a large group of local authorities. We are not finding that we are getting under-predicted consequences of what we are doing. The message coming back from local authorities essentially is that these changes are manageable, but of course one of the key things we are doing for next year and the year after is testing out the basic elements of this new system and we will be reviewing that operation, but at the moment I think I can give you the assurance that, based on the work that has been done and the feedback we are getting, we think the system is manageable.

  Q47  Mr Wilson: So you are setting up the problems for the LEAs to deal with?

  Mr Crowne: Not at all. The local authorities already have the issue of how they count pupil numbers and how they deal with unpredictability and changes; they do that already. What we are saying is that we are trying to get to a system with more consistency in it based around really what is agreed to be the best practice in local authorities and that is actually well worth doing in its own right and local authorities have learnt a lot in this process.

  Sir David Normington: It is just important to say that local authorities have been distributing money to schools for a long time of course and they will continue to. They are very familiar with these local patterns and they will continue to be. The reason for having a local distribution system is precisely to deal with these different patterns which impact differently in different places because there are a lot of different systems for when pupils are admitted and so on, but they are used to dealing with that.

  Q48  Mr Wilson: The message you are giving me is that it is manageable and the message I am getting from schools is that it is not going to be manageable, so I think there needs to be some further thinking on that. Can I move you on to special educational needs because again that is an area I am particularly concerned about. For example, inclusion means that schools are accepting a growing number of children with very challenging behaviours and also disabilities. Currently, as I understand it, statementing allows 26 weeks for a statement to be issued and the statement currently cannot be backdated. Am I correct in saying that?

  Sir David Normington: I think that is right, yes.

  Q49  Mr Wilson: That means a child can be in a school for seven months before there is any support for that child and when a statement does finally arrive, there are only 20 hours allowed in terms of full-time support for that child. That means the schools are left facing a choice of either not providing support in advance of a statement being issued, which has a detrimental effect on the rest of the pupils in the class, or instigating large-scale cuts in other parts of the school. Now, that obviously is another massive problem and either the Government is going to fund properly inclusion or it is not and I would like to know which it is going to do.

  Sir David Normington: Well, there is a lot of money going into supporting children with special needs and statements are only the top level of a system which provides different levels of support for children with different sorts of needs. I am not sure that the changes we are making actually make this better or worse. There is always an issue about how we get support to children with the greatest need and I would not say that the system is perfect, but I do not think that the changes we are making will actually make that different.

  Q50  Mr Wilson: Why is there no backdating of funding with regard to these statementing issues? Seven months is a lot of money for a school.

  Mr Crowne: The answer has to be that the process of statementing defines the entitlement of the child to the level of provision and the process of statementing looks at the needs and works out what is required in that case, but, as David has said, this sits on top of other monies which local authorities have a lot of discretion about how to distribute to deal with all of the pupils with lesser special needs who would not qualify for statements and indeed for those pupils who are going through a statementing process, and you are right, it can take some time. When you have got complex special needs, it takes understandably a while to work out what the right kind of provision is. I think the answer has to be that you have to look at the budgetary arrangements in the round and what we would expect local authorities to do is make sure that individual schools facing those kind of challenges do have access not only to the money that goes with the statement, but other resources for SEN which deal with those children for the statement date.

  Sir David Normington: Quite a lot of that money goes to the local authorities so that they can distribute it. Obviously you cannot distribute it evenly among schools because it has to follow particular types of pupils.

  Q51  Mr Wilson: In the responses to the written questions which we sent to the DfES, in response 1.4 it says that the base will be the 2005-06 spending total. Does that take account of money local authorities are spending on schools this year over and above the money provided by the Government?

  Sir David Normington: Yes.

  Q52  Mr Wilson: The £28 billion?

  Sir David Normington: Yes, it takes that as the starting point.

  Q53  Chairman: You will know, Sir David, that we are embarking on an inquiry into special education.

  Sir David Normington: I do.

  Q54  Chairman: One of the frustrations when we look at it is people who say that it takes so long to get a statement and then if they need an educational psychologist or, heaven help us, if they find they then need a different kind of psychological treatment, that is a nightmare area for most constituents. Of course perhaps the problem would be better if we saw more schools taking their share of SEN and problem pupils and I am sure you will have been as upset as we were by the Sutton Trust Report this week where so many state schools, top-performing state schools take such a small number of such pupils at all. You may have been disturbed by that.

  Sir David Normington: Well, of course I was not surprised by that. Of course it looked just at the 200 top schools, I think.

  Q55  Chairman: Comprehensive and grammar.

  Sir David Normington: Where 161 of which were grammar schools and 39 were comprehensive, so it is not really a comment on the whole system; it is a comment on the top-performing schools.

  Q56  Chairman: You know very well that we said earlier this year in our Report on admissions that unless you grasp the nettle of admissions and make the code on admissions obligatory, not something you just take note of, you all the time will get schools, especially faith schools, dodging their responsibilities. You know that.

  Sir David Normington: Well, we are going to say something about this in the White Paper. I am very familiar with the point. On the SEN issue, I actually welcome your study because I suppose that throughout all my time in this area, both before this as Director General for Schools and now, the issues that are the most difficult are the issues of special needs. We have always had people coming to the Department unhappy with the treatment they are getting and fighting for their children. It is distressing and it is very difficult to deal with. I understand that if you have got a child with special needs, actually you do not really care what the system is like, but you want the best for your children. The system sometimes involves parents having to fight the system and I think that is difficult and I am sure that is what the discussion will be about around this committee table.

  Chairman: We will meet again.

  Q57  Mr Marsden: Mr Crowne, I wonder if I can take you back to the schools forums which you were talking of a few moments ago. If the schools forums are going to have all these expanded responsibilities, where are the resources going to come from?

  Mr Crowne: Schools forums have been there for a couple of years now. The best practice we have seen is actually for local authorities themselves to provide the services that they need relatively straightforwardly actually. What schools forums need above all is clear information and up-to-date data and in a form which is useful to them. They are not particularly labour-intensive operations.

  Q58  Mr Marsden: That is what we have been told in the past about school governors.

  Mr Crowne: I understand the risk you are alluding to. We have spent quite a lot of time talking to schools forums over the last few months because we have been keen to learn about what people's experience of them actually is and where they are perceived to be more or less successful. I think it is quite clear to me that where they are seen to be more successful, they are based upon a really open and supportive relationship with the local authority.

  Q59  Mr Marsden: You are not worried that in the wake of the inevitable scaling down of some local authority functions in the light of the Dedicated Schools Grant local authorities may prove unwilling or unable to provide those resources?

  Mr Crowne: That is not what we are seeing on the ground. I would not say to you that every local authority is an exemplar of best practice, I do not think we can say that yet, but I am confident that there are now a substantial group of authorities within which the schools forums are doing an extremely good job and the relationship between the forums and the local authorities is a strong and good one.


 
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