Examination of Witnesses (Questions 567
- 579)
WEDNESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2005
PROFESSOR SIMON
BURGESS, PROFESSOR
STEPHEN GORARD
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN MICKLEWRIGHT
Q567 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
John Micklewright, Professor Stephen Gorard and Professor Simon
Burgess to our proceedings. Stephen, you are an old hand at this.
Professor Burgess, have you been in front of the Select Committee
before?
Professor Burgess: No.
Q568 Chairman: I do not think you
have Professor Micklewright?
Professor Micklewright: No.
Q569 Chairman: We will not make it
a daunting experience. You have seen us in operation before and
we are here to gather information and evidence. Thank you for
sparing the time from your very busy schedules. I do not think
any of you have yet pulled stumps in your particular universities.
I know if you were at Oxford or Cambridge you would have finished
a couple of weeks ago but you have proper terms in your universities,
do you not, you work the capital well? Right, shall we get started
then. You know what we are about, we are looking at the White
Paper and its essential elements, what drives it, the principles
and also the particular recommendation within the White Paper.
In a strange way we are almost doing a preleg inquiry before the
"leg" is in front of us. We are doing the preleg inquiry
on the White Paper in one sense. We have been very grateful for
the great deal of information and prior information you have given
to this Committee. Can I start off then with you Professor Gorard
and ask what is your evaluation of the White Paper in terms of
its own objectives? Do you think it is going to succeed in delivering
on improving standards in schools using diversity and choice?
Professor Gorard: It is a big
paper and there are many different chapters on different things.
Obviously my research touches on several of the chapters but if
we concentrate on the school admission arrangements for the moment,
I am afraid I find it confused. I would not be a regular reader
of White Papers but I find it difficult to see a coherent, sustained
argument from the aims and objectives that are suggested at the
beginning to the actual policies that were presented at a lower
level, so that was my overall summary.
Q570 Chairman: Professor Burgess,
Professor Micklewright, what are your views in those terms?
Professor Burgess: I would not
disagree with those comments. My research is focused on school
choice and in regard to that I think there are some welcome things
in the White Paper and also some things that I think may be disadvantageous.
Q571 Chairman: What would you welcome?
Professor Burgess: I welcome the
support for allowing kids from poorer families to operate choice
quite possibly as successfully as more affluent families do. I
worry about the greater freedom given to trust status schools
in deciding their own admissions to some greater degree than they
do now.
Q572 Chairman: Were you not reassured
by the Chief Adjudicator whom we heard just now?
Professor Burgess: To some degree.
It is clearly setting out the procedures in the way they work.
Myself and possibly my colleagues here were looking at how outcomes
turn out in terms of the data and perhaps they are not quite as
reassuring.
Q573 Chairman: Right. Professor Micklewright?
Professor Micklewright: I am a
statistician rather than an educational specialist but the views
I hold are similar to those of Professor Burgess. At the moment
I think it is difficult to see exactly what some of the implications
will be in practice from the principles that are laid down in
the Paper.
Q574 Chairman: But you are great
internationalists, you know what is happening internationally,
you have done a lot of comparative work as well as your individual
research. We have been told by those who should know that even
in terms of the statistics we have got absolutely the best possible
group of people in front of this Committee at this moment. In
terms of how you view both comparative data and the research that
you have carried out, how do you think this Government and all
governments are performing in terms of delivering a high-quality
education to the roughly 25% or 30% of children in schools that
seem to underperform? Stephen, do you want to start with that
one?
Professor Gorard: Yes, I suppose
just a short bit of background then. I think that the long-term
historical trends educationally in this country (and I think across
Europe where I have been doing my comparative work) are that standards,
as far as it is possible to measure these, are rising, that schools
are becoming more mixed, opportunities are becoming fairer, and
gaps in attainment between different groups of students are becoming
smaller. The long-term historical trends are quite good. I think
the position of the UK, and England in particular, is not bad
in international terms despite some of the stories and crisis
accounts going around about problems. To some extent you could
attribute (although it is difficult because we have not done any
experimental work) the relatively good position in terms of gaps
in attainment by groups and school mix to the comprehensive school
system which was comprehensive in organisation and then comprehensive
in delivery through the national curriculum, in a way that some
of our French counterparts are now envying. If I have a concern
that I would share with Simon it would be that some of the proposals
in the White Paper are in danger of threatening that relative
position of the United Kingdom and England because once you have
accounted for the geographical factors of the intakes to the schools
that Phillip Hunter was alluding to, then the largest determinant
statistically of the intakes to schools and the segregation between
schools in terms of different groups and in terms of the attainment
groups is the local pattern of school diversity. By diversity
I mean schools which are autonomous from LEA control. It may not
be a causal mechanism but there is a strong statistical association.
Q575 Chairman: There was a bit of
research by you particularly, Professor Gorard, which when I finished
reading it, it just seemed to me that part of the argument is
that whatever system you have—and you take in students and
you shape them up in terms of a variety of educational experiences—the
educational experiences do not seem to make much difference.
Professor Gorard: Clearly it does
make a difference to the individuals. I think perhaps what you
are referring to is what differential progress is made in different
schools under different systems. That goes back to the question
of why do we care about the school mix; why should we care whether
children are or are not clustered with children who are similar
in different schools; why should we care about the two-tier admission
process, and so on? My argument is, yes, I do not think academically
there is much evidence that it makes much difference. I think
the key issue is the experience of the children in the schools
as a mini society. Emerging international evidence—and it
can only be indicative at this stage—is that who you go
to school with affects your sense of social justice because the
children of course are not seeing school as something that is
a means to an end, they are seeing it as a society so their expectations
of what society should be like are shaped by their experience
in school. The mix of children and the range of opportunities
within the school affects what they see society will be like,
so that is why I think it matters.
Q576 Chairman: I am not suggesting
political ideology here but is there an ideology in that on Page
2 of the briefing paper you gave the Committee, you say "market
policies undermine welfare states". Can you expand on that?
Professor Gorard: I suppose they
are different processes to try and achieve similar things. I am
not sure they necessarily work very well together. A welfare state
is one that is intended to redistribute opportunities to help
the most disadvantaged and I am not sure that market forces are
capable of doing that.
Q577 Chairman: You would describe
the aspirations in the White Paper as a desire to bring in market
forces to a greater degree in the educational system in England?
Professor Gorard: No, as I think
I said when I started out, it did not strike me—and it is
probably just me being a poor reader—that there was an overall
coherence to it in the sense you could say yes it is about market
forces. As I think other speakers have already alluded to, there
are many, many bits of it which I think are extremely good policies,
but they seem to be wrapped up with things that are based on false
assumptions and so on. So I found it very difficult to come up
with an overall conclusion.
Q578 Chairman: Could you help us
during the answers you give today to tease out the better bits
and the worst bits?
Professor Gorard: I can do that.
Q579 Chairman: Do you want to give
any of them now?
Professor Gorard: I have grouped
them under two main questions. One is why should we care about
the school mix, and I will leave that for the moment, and the
key one, if we do care about the school mix, is how could we reduce
segregation. I think the mention of banding, which I guess has
been politically sensitive, is really interesting. I think if
it is handled properly—so it is area banding—it has
been shown to be very effective in reducing social segregation
between schools. What I would worry about is the fact that it
would impose extra tests and extra administration. So I think
there is a way, but I guess here I am disagreeing with the last
witness, that you could adjust the intake to schools using existing
data, data that is already collected by the annual schools census,
and use that to set guidelines for proportions that were related
to the local area not to the school and certainly not, as with
the CTCs, in relation to the applicants to the school. It would
have to be in relation to the local residents, the potential users
of the school. I think the idea of strengthening co-ordinated
admissions, and trying to use the same processes and the same
criteria as far as possible would help reduce segregation. I really
like the idea of extending free travel. I think there was an inconsistency
in previous policy in telling poor families that "you no
longer have to go to your local school if it is a poor one, you
can go to another one, but if it is not the nearest school, if
it is not the one in your housing estate then we are not prepared
to pay for free transport". That anomaly has been overcome
and I would really welcome seeing evaluation of the possibility
of providing bussing to schools for all children, mainly for its
educational impact or school mix impact but perhaps also for environmental
and other reasons. I really like those aspects. I think the expansion
of popular schools—and in a sense, as I have alluded to
earlier, I do not think good schools are necessarily the most
popular schools—is a good idea. Those are three or four
different things because what you are doing then is you are using
funds to fund surplus places rather than appeals because the two
things are in tension. If you reduce the number of surplus places
you are going to get more appeals and if you increase the number
of surplus places you have more freedom in the system and you
have fewer appeals. It is a question of what you want to spend
your money on.
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