Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 12 OCTOBER 2005
SIR DAVID
NORMINGTON, MR
STEPHEN KERSHAW
AND MR
STEPHEN CROWNE
Q100 Chairman: You give them a budget,
do you not?
Sir David Normington: Partly although
they are mainly employer-led bodies and therefore they really
ought to be in the places where those industry sectors have their
main focus. I am not sure they are all focused in London, some
are.
Q101 Chairman: Can we have a note
on that because, seriously, some of us are very disappointed about
the speed with which the Lyons Review is being implemented. [4]When
we come back to Gershon we are concerned and worried because on
the one hand we want good quality administration in your Department
and if it came to it we would defend you against the cuts as long
as you can prove to us we are getting value for taxpayers' money.
You have got to be honest with us, Sir David, and if you want
us to defend your position we will do it but we are not going
to put up with what I have called "smoke and mirrors"where
Gershon is there and the Lyons Review is there but we do not see
much change.
Sir David Normington: I would
like you to support the changes we are committed to. I do not
want you to defend me against the efficiency savings. I think
they need to be made. I think any organisation ought to be able
to find this level of efficiency savings. I am completely committed
to reducing the size of the Department. It is part of the conversation
we had earlier about doing less at the centre. I would like support
for that. We are halfway through a programme of reducing the DfES
by 31% in staff numbers. That is my figure, I put it forward,
and I am very happy to defend it to anyone, including my own staff.
Q102 Chairman: And the qualitative
change that both the Prime Minister and the Tomlinson Report wanted
that you became a more strategic Department; that really is working?
Sir David Normington: I believe
it is working.
Q103 Chairman: What is the evidence
that you are more strategic now than you were a year ago?
Sir David Normington: It is not
a finished task. I can describe quite a lot of examples. We have
had a lot of conversations about school budgets where we are trying
to devolve decisions to a local level and to do less at the centre.
I do not know whether you want me to go into specific examples
but I can do if you like. I will take just one.
Q104 Chairman: Sir David, the worry
we have is here you are diminishing the role of LAs, local authorities
in education, and you are devolving to schools, which pulls a
very important centralised responsibility onto your Department
at the same time as you are going to be more strategic and cut
down your numbers. Sometimes that all just does not seem to add
up very well.
Sir David Normington: I think
it does add up perfectly because what we are trying to do is to
put the schools at the heart of the system and only put in place
above and beyond the schools those functions that can best be
done there. I think schools get a lot of burdens placed on them
from a great superstructure of organisations which often send
out lots of communications to them, including us. We are trying
to cut all that down. Part of that is taking out the admin costs
at local authority level, at NDPB level and at departmental level.
I would defend that to anyone because it must be better for the
schools.
Q105 Chairman: Some of us look at
one particular part—post-16 education—and see this
enormous growth of the learning and skills councils. This is a
very large empire and the word on the street seems to be that
soon you are going to have a parallel body to the learning and
skills council for schools because you are going to have to create
some sort of intermediary. Is that a realistic fear?
Sir David Normington: No, I do
not think that is going to happen. I do not have a plan and I
do not think we have a plan at all for putting another body in
place between us and schools. On the Learning and Skills Council,
of course they have just announced they are going to reduce their
staffing by 1,300 from 4,700 to 3,400, remembering that includes
their head office and all their 47 local offices, so that is quite
a big cut. This is happening, it is real, and the difference will
be felt.
Q106 Mr Marsden: I just wanted to
comment and ask Sir David on the point about the Learning and
Skills Council—and I speak as one of the people who sat
on the original Standing Committee on the Bill that set it up—one
of the problems with it is that it has been too centralised and
it has not been devolved sufficiently and not had key strategic
people in the regions making decisions in relation to the LSC.
In relation to the broad point that the Chairman has been making,
would it be possible—and you refer to your commitment to
moving posts out of London and the South East—for you to
give this Committee a list of the people who have so far been
moved out of London and the South East, who you expect to be moved
and out and, perhaps most important of all, what their grades
are?
Sir David Normington: I do not
know I can do the grades bit but I can certainly give you the
numbers. I do not think we have in detail all the grades but I
will do my best to answer you on that. [5]
Q107 Mr Marsden: You appreciate why
I make the point about grades because we are talking about strategic
devolution as well as nuts-and-bolts devolution?
Sir David Normington: I understand
that and I will try and give you as much of that information as
possible. [6]The
Learning and Skills Council though, just to pick up that point,
would accept your criticism that it has been too centralised.
The agenda it has just announced is all about having effective
regional input and more effective (strategic if you like) people
at local level, and certainly people who can engage at the right
level with colleges but within the overall envelope of reducing
the total number of staff. So they are on that case quite hard.
Q108 Mr Wilson: You might not be able
to answer this question now. It may be something you can add to
the note you are going to send the Committee later on. You say
you are making substantial job reductions. I would be very interested
to see whether your expenditure on consultants and contractors
and other forms of temporary work arrangements is increasing as
a result of the staff reductions you are making and whether there
is any real reduction overall.
Sir David Normington: I do not
have the precise figures but I am very familiar with the point
about consultants. I am not in the business of increasing expenditure
on consultants to mask the cuts in civil servants. That is not
what we are about. I will certainly provide you with what detailed
information I have. [7]I
want to say one thing about consultants and that is there are
consultants and consultants. We employ quite a lot of people from
the education system—schools, colleges, universities—on
short-term contracts to help us with particular jobs. They are
often categorised as consultants. They are not consultants in
any normal sense of the word. It has been a big drive of mine
to have many more of those people helping us short- and long-term
so we can change the nature of the Department. I will explain
this in the note. [8]It
is really important that they do not get cut off. If they are
coming out of their school for a day or two obviously we have
to reimburse them for that. There are quite a lot of them. Then
there are the other consultants as well, what we might call the
"real" consultants, and sometimes it is important to
use them, they have a place. I do not think it is acceptable to
use them as a way of getting round efficiency savings and in any
case we are having built into our budgets cuts in resources, so
that ought to stop us doing that anyway. I am quite clear about
this. We have just been audited. The National Audit Office have
looked at this. We have produced our own booklet with the National
Audit Office on this so we are completely on this case.
Q109 Mr Wilson: You say in your written
answers to this Committee of the DfES that "our efficiencies
are in the main efficiency gains", which to me sounds highly
dubious, being the sceptic that I am about these things. Could
you be specific about how it is going to be apparent to either
this Committee or the public how you are going to make those £4.3
billion-worth of savings over the 2004 figure?
Sir David Normington: I will ask
Steven just to come in but I promise you we will be absolutely
transparent about this. We have put on our website our whole plan
of how we are going to achieve this and we will publicly account
for it. A new system is being set up through the National Audit
Office to check this.
Mr Kershaw: The first thing is
that we have published a technical note (which I think the Committee
has had and your adviser has certainly seen) which sets out in
considerable detail the 40 different strands through which we
are going to try and achieve our efficiency gains. [9]The
point about efficiency gains, to re-emphasise, is that this is
not about cutting resource out of the front-line. All but £261
million of our £63 billion spend is front-line funding now,
so it is not about cuts out of the front-line and that is what
we mean by saying it is efficiency gains. It is freeing up the
system and using its existing resource in a range of more powerful
ways. The point about producing a technical note is it sets out
the different strands, it explains how each one will deliver efficiency
gains and in some cases real efficiency savings of one kind or
another, it says how we are going to monitor that, and what kind
of data we will need from the system and in other ways to demonstrate
it. All of that has been agreed and validated with the Treasury,
the National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce.
In each case it is said how we will publish the data about how
we have got on. So there is a huge body of information there about
how this is going to be done and how it will be published and
made transparent over time. Some of that the Department itself
will do, some of it will be cross-government and will be done
with the Treasury at various points. I think there will be a considerable
amount of information over the next few years about how we have
made progress against each of these strands.
Q110 Mr Wilson: Can I just be clear about
this, that the National Audit Office will effectively be the external
evaluation of the efficiency savings?
Mr Kershaw: Yes.
Mr Wilson: Excellent.
Q111 Mr Chaytor: You have a target
for stopping young women from getting pregnant and for stopping
them smoking during pregnancy and now you want to ban their children
from eating sausages. Are these the right sorts of priorities
in the public service agreement targets?
Sir David Normington: I do not
think we have a target for sausage eating. Sausages are fine if
they are made from the right things.
Q112 Chairman: There is no target
for a reduction in junk food?
Sir David Normington: Not yet.
I think this is quite an interesting question. We have some trouble
measuring that progress. However, since we are in the business
of protecting children, we know that they are protected if their
mothers do not smoke during pregnancy so we are entitled to have
a public policy about that. It is very difficult, as you can see,
to measure progress to it. I think that it is right to have that
up in lights. Even if I did not think that was right it is Government
policy to do that. I think similarly with teenage pregnancy, it
is a very serious issue for this country. Compared with most other
countries we have one of the highest rates in the world and the
consequences for those children and families of course go on from
generation to generation sometimes and I think the State is entitled
to take a view of that and, through persuasion, to try to persuade
teenagers not to have early pregnancies. That is all I think you
can do; you can persuade, you can advocate; you cannot stop it.
Q113 Mr Chaytor: You do not have
a PSA target, for example, relating to school admissions and compliance
with the current kind of practice or number of appeals that are
referred to the adjudicator? In light of your comments earlier
about the forthcoming White Paper and the role that admissions
policy might play in that, do you think there may be an argument
in the next round of PSA targets for including something specifically
on admissions?
Sir David Normington: I do not
know, I doubt it. What we have been trying to do is to focus the
high-level targets on outcomes and I would not really want to
move us to inputs and process. I think we have been able to move
to outputs. Where I think your comment is interesting is if you
take the schools standards. Some of what we have done in recent
years is to look at value added, in other words, who goes into
school at 11 and what their achievements are and where the children
get to at 16 or 18, which takes account of the type of children
and where they come from and what their entry point is. That is
how I think if you are going to use inputs you should use them.
It is a more sophisticated measure than an absolute outcome target,
but I would not want to move to input targets. I think it is right
for us to have underneath these headline targets a series of indicators
about how things are doing, so you could have indicators for other
issues.
Q114 Mr Chaytor: On the question
of outcomes, not all the PSA targets are specifically to do with
easily measurable outcomes. For example, if we look at PSA target
14 on participation in higher education, there is a figure for
increasing participation but then it says and "we will bear
down on rates of non-completion". "Bearing down"
is not exactly an outcome is it?
Sir David Normington: Of course
you pick on the one that is not an outcome-based target.
Mr Chaytor: There are one or two others.
Q115 Chairman: And you tried to achieve
6 out of the 11?
Sir David Normington: Well, it
is of course true that some are still process targets because
it is very difficult to get an outcome target for higher education
and we thought we needed some way of measuring—
Q116 Mr Chaytor: The rates of non-completion
are specific targets, are they, in the 10%?
Mr Kershaw: Can I just say that
underneath the PSA again is another version of a technical note
for each PSA which says in a lot more detail how different components
ought to be measured. So, you are right, in its own terms that
is a fairly broad and non-specific target. "Bearing down"
is a rather vague phrase but the technical note underneath sets
out in more detail what that actually means.
Q117 Mr Chaytor: Could I just ask
something on the question of success or failure of the targets.
About half the 2002 targets were not achieved. Do you take that
as evidence of poor performance of the Department or of poor target
setting?
Sir David Normington: I have to
take my share of responsibility for not hitting the targets. After
all, we accepted the targets in the first place and when we set
them we believed we would get towards them or closer to them,
so I have to accept my responsibility for that. I do not think
I ought to say otherwise. You have picked on two which I think
are very difficult targets—the teenage pregnancy and smoking
in pregnancy target. I think it is very difficult to make as fast
progress there as we need to in the target. I think there are
some targets that are particularly tough. I will give you another
one. The GCSE target was a 2% increase a year. There has never
ever been a year when there had been a 2% increase in a year.
So actually that was a really tough target and we have not hit
it. We have increased year on year but we have not hit that 2%.
Yes, I think it was a tough target, probably too tough actually,
but nevertheless the targets do provide pull through the system
and are important for that purpose. I go right back to the beginning
of the conversation which says what is half-full or half-empty.
We are 6% short of the target on Key Stage 2 literacy. We are
up 17%. I think the targets have pulled us up that much by providing
that ambition and focus but, no, we have not hit the target yet.
Q118 Chairman: What about truancy;
are you missing or hitting your target? There has been a lot of
press coverage of that one.
Sir David Normington: Of course
our target is about attendance and we are on course to hit the
attendance target. The reason it is about attendance is because
of course what is authorised and unauthorised absence, which is
what lies underneath this, is subject to local decision. All the
advice we had from the system was you should measure who is at
school and try to increase the number of people at school and
the time that they are spending at school, and we are on course
to hit that target.
Q119 Chairman: So the coverage in
the press is wrong?
Sir David Normington: The press
is not wrong on that. Beneath that, unauthorised absence has been
increasing a bit. I would say the reason for that is partly—and
truancy is a problem and no-one denies that—is because we
are asking head teachers to bear down on unauthorised absence,
and therefore they have been refusing to authorise it. We have
quite a lot evidence of that.
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