Examination of Witnesses (Questions 580
- 599)
WEDNESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2005
PROFESSOR SIMON
BURGESS, PROFESSOR
STEPHEN GORARD
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN MICKLEWRIGHT
Q580 Chairman: The expansion of existing
successful schools is very expensive, is it not? We have had evidence
to the Committee that if a school of 900 loses 150 pupils it could
easily go into a spiral of decline. On the other hand, if the
school up the road takes on another 150 pupils it might ruin or
certainly undermine what makes it an excellent and popular school.
Professor Gorard: Hence market
forces are in contention with the welfare state. You can have
a planned economy for schools or we can allow parents to choose.
If we allow them to choose we have to find extended transport
arrangements and allow schools to expand to meet demand.
Q581 Chairman: Any similar comment
from Professor Micklewright?
Professor Micklewright: Well,
the evidence I have submitted to you is more on the international
picture of how the system we have now in England compares in its
outcomes with those in other countries. I entirely agree with
Stephen Gorard that this sort of evidence, which he has also produced
himself, contradicts scare stories or anecdotal caricatures of
how England compares with other countries both in terms of levels
of social segregation and levels of attainment within schools.
Nevertheless, I think those international comparisons are useful
to the extent they show how much our current system is a different
outlier in the degree of parental choice and school choice across
the group of rich, industrialised countries and shows us features
of the school systems of those countries that seem to be driving
very much greater levels of social segregation, which we would
be well advised not to try and go down that route. I do not think
the White Paper is intending to—and I am talking here about
the division between vocational, technical and academic schooling
in Germany or Austria—and I think it would be very difficult
to interpret the emphasis on specialist schools in the White Paper
as being a firm move in that direction.
Q582 Chairman: But this Select Committee
has visited a number of countries over the five years that I have
chaired it and what we find in almost every country we have gone
to—France, Germany, the United States—is that there
is a percentage of students that do not seem to be able to get
the quality of education they deserve, that they deserve in terms
of their ability particularly, and no society that we have been
to seems to have the ability to address that. I agree with you
entirely and I think many members of the Committee would agree
with you that we are doing reasonably well (although we are not
complacent) but is not the White Paper really trying to address
that 25% to 30% and how successfully is it trying to address that
25% or 30% of under-achievement which is surely linked to the
fact that at 16 we have more children dropping out of education
than almost all the other OECD members?
Professor Micklewright: That has
been a long-standing problem for 30 years or more since comparative
data has been collected. It is one where the problem is reducing
but it is still there and one could argue about the size of that
group that is not getting the quality of education, whether it
is 25 or 30, whether it is 10 or 15, but I do not think that is
the issue.
Q583 Chairman: Where would you put
it?
Professor Micklewright: I would
not put it at any one of figures because I think it is very difficult
to define in an absolute sense what is a good educational system.
I think Stephen Gorard is right in the points that he has made,
and other witnesses too, and you even managed to extract from
the Chief Adjudicator some comment on the positive features, maybe
I am wrong on that, such as the issue of school transport, I cannot
remember exactly what he said, but the key point that he made
is that greater choice for some should not be at the expense of
that of others. That is the key point to keep ramming home and
battering away at the Government on.
Q584 Chairman: Professor Burgess?
Professor Burgess: The first thing
to say is international comparisons of levels of attainment is
not something that I have worked personally on so I do not really
want to offer an opinion on that. In terms of looking at levels
of school mix and school segregation and so on there are two things
I would want to say. One is if you compare areas of this country
with selection and without selection the levels of segregation
of pupils in areas without selection are way lower than they are
in areas that still retain grammar schools, so we can take from
that the move from a grammar school system to a comprehensive
system has reduced quite markedly the levels of social, ethnic
and also ability segregation. In comparing the UK with other countries,
one of the obvious comparators is the US and levels of segregation
there are far higher than they are here.
Chairman: Stephen?
Q585 Stephen Williams: Can I just
ask some questions about the effect of parental choice on the
social composition of schools. To what extent do you think parental
choice on its own does affect the social composition of schools,
leaving aside other factors?
Professor Burgess: One thing we
have done in our research is look at different areas of the country,
different local education authorities and areas where there is
greater choice in the sense people can easily reach more schools,
we find higher levels of sorting and segregation in terms of a
measure of attainment, Key Stage 2 schools, and so on, also in
terms of eligibility for free school meals, and in terms of ethnicity,
so what we are taking from that is the greater levels of choice
that we have had in the system in the last couple of years is
leading to greater segregation.
Q586 Stephen Williams: Right. Do
you think it has changed over time? In the paper we had from Professor
Gorard and your colleague Professor Fitz, who is not here, there
is a quote from the TES in 2002 which just to summarise
it says that schools now are even more socially stratified than
the old grammar schools and secondary moderns that they replaced.
Do you think that is a fair comment?
Professor Gorard: Obviously not
because the paper argues quite strongly against that. There is
volatility but the long-term historical trends, perhaps disappointingly
for this Committee, as far as I can see, seem to transcend particular
policies and particular administrations. There seems to be greater
common movement. An important element in choice is to distinguish
between choice and diversity because choice and diversity often
roll together, they trip off the tongue quite nicely together,
but I think they are two separate things. Choice, as far as we
can see, has had no segregating effect on schools so that when
you feed in what we know about all of the schools we have done
analysis for in the last 12 or 13 years now—of all the secondary
schools in England—local geography is the key thing that
determines intake of schools, who can get there, what are the
characteristics of potential students. After that, diversity would
probably be the biggest thing, so autonomy from LEA control and
that in a sense is almost independent of the type of schools,
whether it is faith-based, Welsh-medium, grammar schools, selective,
foundation and so on. There are three areas that pertain. Banding.
With banding, segregation is far less, even within a system of
choice, and areas that have strict catchment area adherence generally
have higher levels of segregation than those that allow elements
of choice. So you could argue again—and there is no experimental
evidence, very little evaluation but by trawling through the data
we have found it—that choice by itself not linked to diversity
does not harm and maybe slightly reduces segregation. But you
have to look at it in terms of that long-term historical trend.
I worry when people talk about things like that Sutton Trust study
about the top 200 schools having fewer students with disadvantage
and so on because obviously you have got to look at what the causal
mechanism is. I think commentators are attributing the goodness
to the school partly on the basis of the student intake rather
than the other way round. It is not that students from disadvantaged
backgrounds are being excluded systematically from good schools.
It is just that the definition of a good school for the Sutton
Trust and many commentators takes no account of the intake of
the school, which is why the value added analysis and what that
shows is absolutely crucial.
Q587 Stephen Williams: Can I look
at the differences between neighbourhood schooling, or catchment
areas as you have just referred to it as, and expansion of choice.
In both the papers of Professor Burgess and Professor Gorard they
talk about affluent clustering or "selection by mortgage"
if you have neighbourhood schooling, and it is argued in both
that to some extent that choice could lead to a more diverse social
structure within schools. Profess Burgess, you are an economist
and can I summarise crudely roughly what you are saying. You are
saying that if popular schools were able to expand you would have
a more diverse intake, but in the real educational world, popular
schools are not like factories producing widgets in competition,
they cannot expand their places in the same way, so is this a
real choice in between two different structures—
Professor Burgess: I think there
are clearly practical problems in terms of popular schools expanding.
I think the distinction I would really like to be clear is between
neighbourhood schooling where everybody goes to their local school
and choice-based schooling where the schools are more or less
the size that they are now and they do not change very much, and
then a choice basis with much more flexibility in terms of school
size. If you compare neighbourhood schooling with choice plus
flexibility, I think neighbourhood schooling would produce and
does produce much more clustered, segregated communities and schools,
for the obvious reason that some people can afford to live near
those schools and others cannot. If you have a system of choice
but with fixed numbers of places in good schools and bad schools,
then somehow or other if through that system some families are
better at working that system than others, again you end up with
segregation. The appeal in principle of school choice is that
it can break the key link between which school you go to and your
family income. That is the goal that is worth looking for. That
is only going to work if places in popular schools can be increased
and can expand. Practically there are obviously problems. You
cannot build a whole new set of classrooms in a few weeks. I think
some of the issues are around how there are different ways of
increasing places in popular schools. One is simply you build
more classrooms or whatever, but to the extent that the things
that make the good school good are transferable then you could
potentially achieve the same end by allowing the popular school
to run another school, if, for example, it is management, if it
is ethos and leadership, and so that may be transferable without
being diluted too much. If, on the other hand, it is the peer
group that makes the good school good then that clearly would
be diluted and it may be that schools are using the practical
difficulties of "we cannot build another classroom"
to cover the fact that they do not really want to expand because
they worry they would no longer be a good school.
Q588 Stephen Williams: Whether they
want to expand is evidence we have had previously from Sir Alan
Steer when he was here on an entirely different subject and the
Chairman asked him a question about whether he would want his
popular school to expand and he quite clearly said no he would
not (summarising what he said) so I think there is something in
that. Do you think there is any evidence as an alternative to
that that a head teacher would want to take over essentially a
failing school a couple of miles away?
Professor Burgess: I do not know
of any hard evidence on that and I imagine it is going to vary
both with the answer to my question of what makes a good school
good and in terms of the characters and ambitions of head teachers.
Professor Gorard: There was the
Popular Schools Initiative in Wales in the 1990s so there is evidence
of what happens if you allow popular schools to grow because that
is what happened.
Q589 Stephen Williams: What happened
in Wales?
Professor Gorard: The popular
schools did want to grow, although not all of them, and they were
not all allowed to. I think there are lessons you could learn
from it which are both positive and negative.
Q590 Chairman: Are big schools good
for children? We had an interesting discussion about Schumacher—he
had Welsh connections, did he not—and "small is beautiful".
Would this not lead to great big schools in which kids feel alienated?
Is there any research about the benefits of having a smaller rather
than larger school?
Professor Burgess: No, not that
I know of. It certainly does not mean there is not any, but none
that I know of. A big school does not need to be on a single site.
It could be a school on several sites.
Professor Gorard: The evidence
I know of is about teaching units. That has been the key element
of consideration rather than the size of the school.
Professor Micklewright: One can
see the arguments both ways. I think the argument you are implying
is that people feel happier in a small school but a large school
clearly provides greater choice of subject matters and areas and
the ability to combine at secondary level all manner of A-levels
one with the other.
Q591 Chairman: It would be interesting
to see if there was any research around size.
Professor Gorard: The research
I know of is around the way in which parents make choices. They
prefer to have small schools which is to some extent why you might
be able to take the handle off the size of the school because
in a sense they would not grow to unwieldy sizes if parents, as
far as one can see from the evidence, do not want large schools.
Q592 Chairman: So you see the argument
for expansion as a stimulus rather than anything else?
Professor Gorard: Yes.
Chairman: Sorry, Stephen.
Q593 Stephen Williams: I know there
are other people who want to come in, Chairman, so I will just
ask one question. Right at the end of your submission, Professor
Burgess, paragraph 21, there is a quite separate comment where
you say because Trevor Phillips has concerns about ethnic segregation
in schools this would be an "unfortunate time" to encourage
new faith schools, which does not flow from the rest of your paper.
Would you look to expand on that?
Professor Burgess: It is a serious
point. Some other work that I have done with a colleague from
Bristol, Dr Wilson, and Dr Ruth Lupton suggests that schools are
on average acting to increase residential segregation in terms
of ethnicity. Given the concerns that Trevor Phillips has expressed
and the events around these, creating a system which encourages
a lot of schools that are essentially mono-faith is possibly not
a great idea right now.
Q594 Chairman: Is it not better for
those faith schools that are in the private and unregulated sector
to come into the state sector or not? It is not as though they
do not exist.
Professor Burgess: Indeed. I am
not sure of the answer to that.
Chairman: Right. Roberta?
Q595 Dr Blackman-Woods: I wanted
to ask a couple of questions about social mix, I think to Stephen,
going back to a point that you made a while ago about why we are
trying to do that, you were saying a positive aspect of the White
Paper was the possible bussing of children from poorer backgrounds
to give them wider choice. Is that because we know that if you
reduce social segregation you increase standards? I am trying
to see what the end goal is. Is the end goal just to have social
mix so the society you were describing in schools as a society
is an end in itself? What is the impact of that on standards,
because although I can see there is a very strong argument for
children from poorer backgrounds who are performing less well
that you might want to do that, but there would be a very strong
counter-argument which said if there was a school with a very
narrow selection it would do very well? I want to hear the arguments
of why we are reducing social segregation in standards terms.
Is there an argument?
Professor Gorard: Yes, there are
some sources of evidence, and I think the last two rounds of PISA
studies that have been published have suggested there is a relationship
between national standards of education, national attainment,
and the extent to which the national schools systems are mixed.
That came as a surprise in the 2001 study because most people
felt perhaps with some of the North European systems that actually
selection and dividing up children into streams would lead to
higher standards but also higher segregation. I think now most
analysts have been convinced at the very least there is no relationship,
and that you do not have to sacrifice school mix in order to get
good standards. There is even some suggestion that a positive
mix and attainment are correlated, but these are incomplete data
at national level.
Q596 Dr Blackman-Woods: So more work
has to be done on this, but would that not then be a very strong
argument against very narrow selection whether it is by faith
or private schools having an intake from quite a wealthy selective
group of parents?
Professor Gorard: As far as I
have seen, and I have done a review of it relatively recently,
I have never seen any convincing evidence that selecting students
means that those students do disproportionately better than they
would have done in an alternative system, certainly not in a way
that is not then compensated for as a cost for people who have
been deselected. You have got to look at the system as a whole.
My point about travel at one level was a relatively simple one.
There is a tension between the national policy which says "you
can pick any school you like within reason" and the local
one that says "if you pick any school that is not your nearest
school or your allocated catchment area school we are not going
to pay for transport to it". So basically it was choice for
people who could afford their own transport. I welcomed it [extended
travel provision] primarily for that reason. It may have an impact
on standards but I think it is less likely.
Q597 Chairman: What would you say
to a colleague of mine who in that particular regard said, "I
can see a lot of kids getting on buses to go out of my constituency
but not a lot getting on a bus to come into my constituency."
What would you say to him?
Professor Gorard: You have to
decide what the level of bussing is and where the margin is going
to be. If it is done within local education authorities we are
not necessarily talking about bussing outside authorities. It
might be that you use school districts in some cases, where there
are not small unitary authorities which are actually smaller groupings.
We are not talking about what are the geographical parameters
for this. There are areas with low population density, for example
in South West Wales, where children are entitled to be bussed
across LEA boundaries and they maybe bypass six or seven schools
because they are going to Welsh-medium education. Again you can
look at the evidence on that and what that is doing.
Q598 Chairman: Professor Gorard,
the experience of a lot of Members of Parliament would be in town
centre constituencies and city centre constituencies when there
has been a kind of view amongst many parents that the grass is
greener indeed up the valley, outside, a little bit further, and
that this great desire, as we saw in Birmingham when we spent
a week in Birmingham, to get away from schools in the city centre
and pursue whatever the rationale of that was to move out. Indeed,
we saw most of the comprehensive state schools in the centre of
Birmingham closed and then enormous distances being travelled
by pupils being bussed and being taken in their parents' vehicles
across the city. Is that not one of the dangers of this?
Professor Gorard: Yes, I think
that is one of the things you would see from the very limited
evidence of the Popular Schools Initiative in Wales. In an inner
city like Cardiff you have got a northward drift and much larger
schools in the north of the city and less in the south where there
were high levels of poverty. You have had that transit. Although
segregation has reduced, it has led, presumably, to an increase
in travel distances.
Q599 Chairman: Also here we have
a Government that wants city academies to regenerate the poorest
parts of our towns and cities at the same time as we are introducing
something you could argue that will take more pupils out of the
central city and urban areas. Are the two policies conflicting?
Professor Gorard: I am not convinced
they are. I would have to go away and think about that a bit more.
The thing about academies, in so far as we can see from the limited
evidence we have from the years so far, is that they have been
successful in the terms I understand they were set up for, which
is the rebadging of the school preventing that flow out, so they
have changed the nature of the intake. The problem is I do not
think that has been celebrated as much as it should have been
because certain commentators have had to at least convey the impression
that they are still dealing with the same pupil groups as they
did before, otherwise that would explain their increase in results.
I think we should forget about the standards issue for a minute.
I do not think they are producing better results with the current
pupils. I think they are changing the nature of the pupil intake.
If the academies were chosen correctly in the first place, and
one or two have not been but most of them were, they are the most
disadvantaged schools in the most disadvantaged areas. If they
are turning around their intake they are reducing social segregation
and reducing the very flows you are frightened we would see. I
would like to see that celebrated more because I think that can
actually work in with the idea of allowing increased travel.
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