Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 559)
WEDNESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2005
DR PHILIP
HUNTER
Q540 Jeff Ennis: Yes. You are leading
me on to my next question: What do you read into the fact that
so many of these appeals are successful? Does that not mean we
are looking at the tip of the iceberg here and that we do need
to beef the situation up?
Dr Hunter: I think that most of
the ones that we uphold are in schools that have simply not understood
the code, have not read it properly, have not taken proper account
of it—have not understood it really. In a small number of
them—and it is a small number, but it is important—a
school has deliberately decided, if you like, to get into the
business of selecting the children that it wants to take.
Q541 Jeff Ennis: Would there be any
category of school that fell into that particular situation more
than others? Would that be community schools or specialist schools?
Dr Hunter: I do not think so.
Perhaps I should not say this but I think it is down to the head
teachers as much as anything . . . no, it is not actually. Chairs
of governors sometimes get inflated ideas—I should be careful
what I say—about what they are doing. So it is personalities,
individual personalities. You still have a number of schools which
have fallen out with a local authority and the relationship is
still pretty sour. It is in instances like that that you get the
problems.
Q542 Jeff Ennis: There is one thing
on which I very much agree with you. You said earlier that all
schools should be treated the same. I agree with that. Given that
sort of maxim, why should academies not be encouraged in the admissions
process? In your opinion, should they be included?
Dr Hunter: That is a matter for
you. I am not sure I am allowed an opinion on that, but, if I
were allowed an opinion, the answer would be yes.
Q543 Jeff Ennis: The local admissions
forum, are they toothless tigers? Are they something that need
to be beefed up?
Dr Hunter: If you look at the
international position—in America, France, Scandinavia—in
most countries, the area board (in our case the local admissions
forum in the local authority) are more powerful than they are
in this country. I think there is a lesson to be learned from
that. Certainly I would like all local authorities to have this
duty or understanding about what they are doing and I would like
schools to understand that they do really have to take seriously
what a local admissions forum says.
Q544 Chairman: Dr Hunter, I would
like to tease you out a little on something you referred to earlier,
when you said it was down to individual chairs of governors and
heads. Is that true? Is there not a category of school that seems
to be more able to exclude certain kinds of pupils than others?
Faith schools and the work coming out of the Sutton Trust, for
example, is suggesting that, in a context in which such a small
percentage of the population in the United Kingdom attend church
regularly, when you look at the number of parents getting their
children into faith schools there really is something going on
which we have to be straightforward about, do we not? If there
is this very big difference in the entry into faith schools and
how that compares with the community they serve, there is something
going on which is evading your scrutiny, surely.
Dr Hunter: I honestly do not think
so. I do not perceive any huge difference in faith schools, foundation
schools, community schools or whatever in terms of what generally
they are doing. It clearly is the case that there are more foundation
schools which have fallen out with their local authority than
community schools, for example. That is the history of the thing.
That is the case. Two of our number have been diocesan directors
of education and they are pretty tough cookies. They have been
trying to make clear to their schools that they have to observe
the code and so on. So it is down to personalities.
Q545 Chairman: So it would not worry
you, if there were more research emerging about the difference
between the intake to faith schools or other schools and the community
they serve. You would not look at that and say that is a systemic
concern.
Dr Hunter: I do not think so.
You first of all have to make your mind up whether there are going
to be faith schools or not. We have made our mind up as a nation
that there are going to be faith schools. I do not see anybody
not having faith schools in future. It is probably the case that
people attracted most to faith schools . . . It is not actually
the case, come to think of it. I mean, I know plenty of faith
schools that deal with inner city areas just as community schools
do. It may be the case that there is a geographical difference
in the distribution of these schools which has made a difference
of one kind or another. I do not think I would regard that as
systemic.
Q546 Mrs Dorries: Do you think it
is healthy that any group of parents, of any faith, can call for
a school to be established? Do you think it is right that parents
will be given those sorts of powers?
Dr Hunter: That is a decision
which is for you and for the Government, not for me. I am very,
very anxious not to get into the politics of all of this. I do
understand—
Q547 Mrs Dorries: Is that a political
question?
Dr Hunter: I think it is.
Q548 Chairman: Let us see how Dr
Hunter interprets it.
Dr Hunter: I am interpreting it
as a question that I must be careful about and not get "plodging"
around in your territory about. I think it probably is. My job,
as an adjudicator, is to work within whatever framework you have
set out. The White Paper is saying, as you say, that parents should
have this power: you, as MPs, are either going to approve that
or not and I will work within whatever you decide.
Q549 Mrs Dorries: So you cannot have
an opinion on that.
Dr Hunter: I do not think I ought
to have an opinion on that, frankly. It may be the case in two
years time that one of these cases is referred to an adjudicator,
and it may be the case—I have been there and know all about
it—that it gets judicially reviewed, and you turn up in
the High Court and some barrister says, "Hang on a minute,
that is what you said two years ago. You had made your mind up
before you had got to it." I am very anxious not to be put
in that position.
Q550 Mrs Dorries: All right. I will
stick to the questions then. The NUT argues that the proposals
in the White Paper could lead to a two-tiered admission system.
Do you agree with that? Do you think that is a good thing? It
is hard to argue against it.
Dr Hunter: I do not think it is
a good thing if it does lead to a two-tiered admission system.
My reading of the White Paper is that that is not where it is
going. My reading of the White Paper is that it is heading on
a path in between. It is trying to maintain a line which is somewhere
in between the two extremes of view that it might have held. I
am comfortable with my reading of the White Paper.
Q551 Mrs Dorries: Would you not agree
that you could have in one geographical area schools which will
set a particular admission policy, which will attract a particular
child, and therefore will leave the other group of children to
go to other schools which will have perhaps a less strict admissions
code. Schools will be able to select by interview. Apparently
schools will not be able to select by academic ability, but I
would be very surprised if schools do not find a way round that.
Surely it would lead to a two-tier system, would it not?
Dr Hunter: If you have a decent
local authority that is on the ball, it will have reviewed those
admission arrangements every year, and if it feels that that is
not within the terms of the code it will object. If it is, as
you have described it, then an objection of that kind would be
upheld by an adjudicator.
Q552 Mrs Dorries: Do you think the
admission authorities are going to find themselves with an avalanche
of objections? Is your job going to be made a lot busier by this?
I can see parents are going to be objecting to the code and to
the way various schools interpret it: the fact that somebody wants
to get their child to a particular school but cannot because the
code has been administered in a different way from another school.
Do you not think there is going to be this avalanche of complaints
from parents?
Dr Hunter: If it is made clear
to schools that becoming their own admission authorities does
not mean that they have total freedom to do exactly what they
want and does mean they have to continue to act within the code,
it does mean that they will have local authorities around them
observing that they are doing, monitoring what they are doing
and objecting if they feel that what they are doing is not within
the terms of the code. If they are told all of that and that is
their perception, then it will not lead to a huge increase in
demand from our services.
Q553 Mrs Dorries: But the code can
be incredibly flexible. It is down to interpretation: the way
the schools interpret it, the way the local authority interprets
it. One local authority could have a completely different interpretation
from another and be less rigid or more rigid. There is a huge
amount of flexibility within this code.
Dr Hunter: I have to say I do
not perceive that. It is our day-to-day job to receive an objection,
hold it up against, if you like, the template of the code and
see whether it conforms or not. When you are doing that, it does
seem to me that the code is reasonably clear. I admit that there
are individual cases where schools have tried to get round it.
My experience is that when they have tried to do that and there
is an objection we have upheld the objection. As I say, we uphold
100 a year of these things.
Q554 Mrs Dorries: Do you think the
code in itself offers enough protection to children from lower
socio-economic groupings, for example? I do not see any provision
within the code—and I could be wrong—that says schools
have to taken their fair share of children with special educational
needs or their fair share of children on free school meals.
Dr Hunter: Oh, yes.
Q555 Mrs Dorries: Do you not think
schools will find a way around that?
Dr Hunter: Certainly as far as
special education needs (and, now, looked-after children) there
are regulations which say that, where a child with special educational
needs has got a named school, that school has to take them. It
is going to be the same now with looked-after children. Those
two categories of children are well protected. There is not some
regulation or whatever that schools must take a certain proportion
of children on free school meals or what-have-you, and that is
because schools operate in very different circumstances from each
other. I think it would be difficult to have blanket rules of
that kind across the country. As you know, there are certain areas
of London, for example, which have banding systems and those systems
seem to work very well. They would not work, frankly, in most
of the suburbs and in most of the counties.
Q556 Mrs Dorries: The local authorities
have more control now, they are both the commissioners and the
providers of education, without the trust school system and the
few foundation schools, and yet we do know that the top 200 schools
have the lowest proportion of children with special educational
needs and with free school meals. If that exists now under a more
rigid system, I cannot understand how you would have such confidence
in a system which is going to be more flexible.
Dr Hunter: I keep returning to
this idea of perception. I remember as a chief education officer
ten years ago saying that the way we were going to operate as
a local authority was to treat all schools as if they were foundation
schools. It seemed to me that was the best way forward. It established
the best relationship with head teachers and with governors and
the rest of it. It is what the Government are now describing in
their White Paper as local authorities acting as commissioners
rather than, if you like, running their own schools. It seems
to me that the White Paper does raise important matters of governance
of schools, of who schools should be accountable to, whether they
should be accountable to national government, local government,
business, parents or what-have-you. That is an important debate,
but that is a debate, if I may say so, for you, not for me. You
go and have that debate, let me know what you have decided, and
I will administer whatever it is that pops out at the end of it.
I am not getting into that debate.
Q557 Chairman: Dr Hunter, if some
schools band and others accept children depending on the distance
from their home, how does the local authority know in advance
that every child is going to get a place?
Dr Hunter: I think it works on
experience and what happened last year and how the thing works—and
it does work in most areas. You see very, very good admissions
booklets: this is what happened last year; these children got
in last year—a very clear indication to parents about what
would happen this year if they applied
Q558 Chairman: To go back to our
original exchange, surely, in order for each school to be its
own admission authority, in order to comply with the statutory
obligation, to send a child to school and to have a place to receive
that child, you are saying really that the local authority must
have the statutory duty to override the local schools.
Dr Hunter: I am saying that a
local authority must have that statutory duty as it has now and
there must be enough clout around the system to enable that authority
to carry out its statutory duty.
Q559 Chairman: Is that clear enough
in the present arrangements, in the present statutory system?
Dr Hunter: I think it probably
is. If it is not, then it ought to be made clearer than it is
and maybe there is something there that you want to take up wit
the Secretary of State. I do not know. I am very clear that the
two duties, on the parent and on the local authority go hand in
hand and there must be enough clout in the system to make sure
that the local authority can carry out its statutory duty.
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