UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 633-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION & SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

SCHOOLS WHITE PAPER

 

 

Wednesday 30 November 2005

CLLR ALISON KING, CLLR JAMES KEMPTON, MR STEPHEN MEEK

and MS CHRISTINE DAVIES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 83-186

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education & Skills Committee

on Wednesday 30 November 2005

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods

Mr David Chaytor

Mrs Nadine Dorries

Tim Farron

Helen Jones

Mr Gordon Marsden

Mr Rob Wilson

________________

Witnesses: Cllr Alison King, Chair, Cllr James Kempton, Vice Chair, and Mr Stephen Meek, Children and Young People Board, Local Government Association, and Ms Christine Davies, Director of Children's Services, Telford and Wrekin, gave evidence.

Q83 Chairman: Can I welcome our four witnesses, Stephen Meek, Alison King, Christine Davies and James Kempton and say that we are very grateful that you could join us at quite short notice. This Committee is determined to give a thorough appraisal to the education White Paper and, of course, the White Paper impinges very much on the rights and responsibilities and powers of local government in respect of education, so we are grateful for your attendance today. I am loath to ask all of you to say something to kick us off, but when we get into the question session it is better if someone leads and one or two people respond rather than every question all four people responding. Would one of you like to say something to get us started or would you like to go straight into questions?

Cllr King: Given the opportunity to say something, Chairman, I would like to say that there are aspects of the White Paper that we in local government welcome, of course - the commissioning role, the end of the term "LEA", which a lot of us have not been using for quite some time because we like to feel that the whole of the local authority is involved in the education of children, not just one department, and, of course, we welcome the emphasis on improvement: improving the ability to support failing schools, improving on the ability of parents to be involved in their children's education, improvement of academic standards, improvement on the behavioural front as well. We are very keen to see those things in the White Paper, and very pleased, but we do have some concerns, as I am sure you are aware. We are worried that there is an inconsistency in the White Paper that on the one hand local authorities are given a much stronger role and more responsibility, in fact, to deliver for children and young people in their area, and on the other hand we have increased autonomy for schools, and the two do not seem to link in every way they could. We are also concerned, of course, about the ability to deliver on Every Child Matters, which is something that we are going to be judged on, and we are rather concerned that some of the schools in our areas will not necessarily feel that they have the sort of obligation that in fact we believe they should have and that the legislation believes they should have. I will finish just by saying, the focus on structures rather than on standards is something that is of concern to us because we are heavily focused on improvement. There is also, of course, the issue of choice as it relates to rural areas and whether this is a White Paper that covers the entire country and produces the same sorts of results for children right across the land.

Q84 Chairman: Thank you very much for that introduction. Could I start by asking you: your initial reaction to the press release that we have seemed to be, along the lines that you have just said, pretty positive about the White Paper, but, as you read the White Paper and re-read it what seems to be rather unclear is what are the rights and responsibilities and powers of local government? The boundaries do not seem to be very clear coming out of the White Paper. Do you share that uncertainty? Perhaps you can help us and tell us what you think the boundaries are between local government and the other players, especially schools.

Cllr King: As I said in my opening remarks, we are concerned at the slight incoherence in the White Paper dealing with the role and the responsibility of local government and the way that we would be able to, for instance, intervene very early if we knew that a school was experiencing difficulties. There is not always great clarity about how we would address the issues that would arise and how we would in fact either bend the boundaries or breach the boundaries. Perhaps I can defer to Christine, because she, of course, is a practitioner who has probably got some very good examples of where she believes things are likely to get difficult.

Ms Davies: Thank you very much, Chairman. I think that much of the content of the White Paper is excellent. I think it was unfortunate that the language that promoted the White Paper suggested to the wider public and to schools that they should be much more independent from other schools and from local authorities, and this is the very time when, in order to secure five outcomes of the Children Act and to secure school improvement, we need to have schools right at the heart of that agenda, and if some schools believe that they do not have a responsibility for community well-being and all children and young people in their area, that is unfortunate. I think the areas where we have most concern are in the areas of admission - and I am sure the Committee will want to touch upon that - the area to secure the outcomes of the Children Act, whereby we need all schools to be working with all local services and the local authority, particularly those that suffer the greatest disadvantage in need, and in order to secure school improvement we need schools to be working with other schools and the local authority, because all of the evidence from years and years of work in both shire authorities and urban authorities is that no one school alone can secure all that it needs for its children, its parent, its community and raising standards entirely in isolation. I think the area of admissions, Every Child Matters and the well-being of children generally are the issues of concern.

Q85 Chairman: Would you say that for those of us who conducted an inquiry into Every Child Matters and the Children Act, this is a very big responsibility, I have to say, for this Committee but for local government it is a far-reaching responsibility across several government departments. If you take that responsibility with the responsibilities that will be yours if and when this White Paper becomes a Bill and an Act, is that an increase of the role of local government if you add it all together, or is it a decrease? How do you see it? Is it a diminution of local government or is it an enhancement of local government?

Ms Davies: It is undoubtedly, if carried through effectively, an enhancement of local government, and it is only local government that can bring all services and partners together and wrap services around children, schools and families and also to understand the needs of local communities. It is only local government, working in partnership with all other agencies and services, that can secure those ends, and, in my view, it is a critical role, it is an enhanced role and, without an effective local authority holding the strategic ring on behalf of children and all local communities, can the Every Child Matters agenda be delivered, and in local authorities across the land the improvement in outcomes for children demonstrates how critical the role of the local authority is.

Q86 Chairman: Can I ask the elected membership then: if that is the case, if you look at the people who are now going to be involved in very powerful ways, there is going to be the schools commissioner, there is going to be the chief schools adjudicator, there is going to be Ofsted, and there is going to be the Learning and Skills Council at another level. There is going to be a large number of non-elected people as part of the mix. We are not prejudicing your answer, but there are a lot of non-elected people with very powerful roles coming out of this White Paper into the Bill. Is that a concern and a worry for you?

Cllr King: Yes, it is. Could I ask my fellow elected member, James Kempton, to respond on this one.

Cllr Kempton: It is obviously a concern, because we value very highly the relationship we have with local parents and the communities that we serve, and the fact that decisions are taken off to an adjudicator, for example, is a concern; but, on the other hand, I think we would fully endorse the role Ofsted has, coming in as an entirely independent scrutineer of what is happening, and, however you regard it, a scrutineer of what is happening. I think what we would say, though, is that in the sense that Ofsted comes in to look at what local government is doing, maybe one of the checks and balances in the system is exactly that, but where local government is exercising its own autonomy it is exercising that under the scrutiny of Ofsted, and some elements that are currently proposed to be assigned to a schools commissioner, for example, we think could be given to local government to implement and Ofsted to review as part of their general review of local government through joint area reviews and also through the CPA process and the Audit Commission. Therefore, I think there are opportunities there to possibly speed a line from the proposals. Another area that we have had major concerns about is the role of the Learning and Skills Council in relation to post 16 education. I think what we see in the White Paper is a shift in the right direction, which is now talking about a partnership between the LSC and local government for that area, but I think we have made the case for some time, and many people are agreeing with us, that the idea that you can have joint leadership of the 16-19 phase is potentially quite difficult both in terms of delivering the outcome to young people but also for schools and colleges to know who to look to in the final analysis. Is it local authorities with links with local community, with schools and with the local business community, or is it the LSC which will still retain the financial strings to pull services in the direction that they would like to? I think there is a real danger in that dual leadership role that is envisaged here.

Q87 Chairman: So you would like a lot more clarity before this White Paper became a Bill and an Act?

Cllr King: I would say, Chairman, that whatever system comes out of all these deliberations and out of the legislation, we believe that it needs to be simple, transparent and have an element of local accountability, but that needs to be at the right level as well; and we feel that more layers that you bring - the more layers of people, the more layers of non-accountable bodies - the more the potential for confusion and complexity and, of course, expense, and we all have to have a mind to that too. I think that what we risk is bringing in, as you have identified, any number of other layers, other people, other roles, that really are not going to help parents through what is already a fairly complicated maze. We would like to see that complicated maze simplified, and I think that has to be one of our prime objectives in all this: because not all parents are equipped to cope with the sort of problems that the education of their children throws up and they often want good, sound, straightforward advice with a good, sound, straightforward system available locally to help them. We are, of course, as Christine has said, looking at a network here, a family of schools. Schools have a great deal of autonomy already. We could be in a position where we are looking at an autonomy too far when we start to worry about schools considering whether they will supply a service to their local communities, not how they will supply a service to their local communities. We look at schools, we have federations of schools, amalgamations of schools, all sorts of clustering of schools for particular purposes, and those sorts of things are best arranged locally. We have a responsibility across a wide area. I cover a very large shire county and the arrangements that we have there are agreed upon locally, but you cannot always rely upon individual schools to have the time or the wherewithal or sometimes the motivation to bring about these sorts of arrangements, but that is why we feel that probably more local input and local accountability so is crucial.

Chairman: Thank you for those opening responses to my questions. Tim Farron

Q88 Tim Farron: Good morning. Do you welcome the new powers to intervene in respect of failing schools, and do you feel that the White Paper gives you confidence that local authorities will be given the tools to intervene swiftly and urgently?

Ms Davies: Yes, we certainly welcome the powers to intervene, and to intervene at the earliest possible opportunity. I think if you look at the Ofsted reports on the effectiveness of local authorities, you will see that much school improvement has been driven by local authorities that support and challenge at the earliest possible stage. I think where we would have one concern, though, is the expectation about failing schools, that schools that are facing the most difficult of circumstances can be rectified within one year. It is absolutely right that it is children's one chance of education and that where there is poor performance it should be remedied in the shortest possible time, but experience shows that actually it takes sometimes a little longer than one year to rectify a school in difficulty. I can give an example, if I may, please, which is one that the Department for Education and Skills would use. In Telford we have one of the country's most poorly performing schools and we placed it in a federation with the country's most highly performing school, Thomas Telford. Within the first year, although there was considerable evidence of improvement and parental aspiration and motivation rose significantly, school standards were not seen to improve by the end of the first year; in fact they declined. By the end of the second year, however, because of all the work that has been undertaken in the school, that school has improved by 34 per cent in terms of the number of A-stars to Cs, and the number of parents who want to go to that school has quadrupled. In effect, it took two years, not one year, but the expectation that we turn schools round quickly is absolutely right and those powers are welcomed.

Q89 Tim Farron: You feel you have been given the tools to do so in the White Paper?

Ms Davies: We currently have the tools to do so. Those tools, however, will need to be available to us whatever the category of school, and I think there has to be a concern that academies, for example, are not necessarily subject to the same levers of support and challenge as other schools in the local area. It will be critical if we are to secure the well-being for all children and young people and their parents that those tools are available to us to use and there is demonstrated success for all schools in the local area regardless of category.

Q90 Tim Farron: The White Paper talks about local authorities becoming the champions of choice, diversity and fair access. Do you think that the White Paper provides you with the power to do those things? As a kind of supplementary, I represent a rural constituency. If you live in Coniston your second nearest school is a 15-mile drive down country lanes and a ferry ride away. How do you fulfil that role generally but specifically with regard to rural areas?

Cllr Kempton: Choice, diversity and access are probably at least two different issues.

Q91 Chairman: Only two!

Cllr Kempton: Choice and diversity maybe are interlinked, but I think access is a different one. If I start with access, I think we have got major concerns, as we have already indicated, over the whole area of admissions and what is proposed here. The idea that we work with a code of practice to which schools have regard but one which they can chose to ignore is one about which we have some concerns.

Q92 Chairman: You do not agree with the Select Committee's report earlier this year?

Cllr Kempton: We think there should be a statutory code to which schools are bound, and you will have seen the very recent comments by the school adjudicator, who said from his perspective that "schools need to be reminded that admission arrangements are drawn up for the benefit of local parents, not for themselves. We are still seeing too many cases where arrangements are not clear enough. We are also still receiving cases where schools are accused of selecting children by ability and social group", and I think that is under the current set of admission arrangements where there are clearly a number of different admissions authorities in which local authorities are significant players. The idea that we will move to more admissions authorities and that move will address the concern of the adjudicator in a positive way, I think is something we do not actually believe. We think having more admissions authorities will lead to more cases where the adjudicator believes, and where parents believe, because they are making complaints to the adjudicator, that there is an accusation of children being selected by ability and social group; so we have a particular concern over that. Local authorities are significant complainers to the adjudicator over admission arrangements at the moment. I think there were 74 complaints in 2003/2004. Sixty of those were upheld, 14 were partially upheld and none were thrown out. I think there is evidence out there that the current arrangements are not necessarily working in the interests of young people and their parents, and our concern is, if you to move a more diverse system where local authorities have a less significant role, it could well be harder for parents in working their way through the complexities of the system, and the opportunities for people to manipulate their system seem to us to be increased rather than diminished. What we would like to see, clearly, is a system where there is a statutory code that people and schools are bound by but which local authorities have a role to enforce locally. I think rather than where there is a fear of things going wrong there is a complaint to the adjudicator to decide and that takes quite a long time, we would like to see a position where local authorities, where they think something has gone wrong, could put that right and the school would then have the right to appeal if they felt that the action was inappropriate. I think that would be a much fairer and a much quicker system rather than the rather elongated position we have got at the moment, which only works against the interests of young people where something is not right.

Q93 Chairman: I will move on, because there are a whole range of issues, but thank you for that. What do you think the future for currently centrally provided services might be? We are looking at people referral units in particular, given that they will provide a role if the local authority is to go. Will PRUs now be attached to schools, and, if so and either way, will it improve matters?

Ms Davies: I think to some extent there is something of an illusion in the White Paper in the description of local authorities being purely commissioning bodies and not providing any services or areas of support: because for those children who present the greatest challenge, or have the greatest need, there has to be a safety-net and there has to be provision to meet their very specific needs, and by and large, for children who have really difficult behavioural problems, understandably, the vast majority of schools are not equipped to meet their needs, and, in all likelihood, local authorities will need to continue to secure either a range of private providers or provide people referral units and, where it is necessary, special schools for children with very severe and complex learning disabilities and difficulties, and so I think the local authority will continue to be both commissioner and provider. What the local authority has to be able to secure is a school place and a first-class education for every child regardless of ability and need. If I can add one more point to James' response. I think we would like to see an additional duty on all schools to cooperate with the local authority and other schools in the local area to find every child a school place, and that is particularly important for children who are hard to place, for a range of reasons, have special educational needs or present the greatest challenge.

Q94 Chairman: Thank you for that. You have moved on to the area of special educational needs and you have talked in general about how you think the reality will be, that the provider role will stay to an extent, but what confidence do you really have that the White Paper will permit that? I suppose in general terms I would be interested to know what you think the future for special educational needs will be under the White Paper and service provision. I am looking at you; it does not need to be you.

Ms Davies: There is obviously the code of practice in place for pupils with special educational needs, and the vast majority of children with special educational needs are and should continue to be educated in their local schools or in their reasonably local schools. It will be absolutely vital that all schools, regardless of category, not only are under a moral obligation to cater for the broad range of special educational needs but actually have a duty to cater for a range of special educational needs. There is no doubt in the White Paper, there is no intention that pupils with special educational needs should not be catered for in trust schools, or foundation schools, or community schools. I think where we will have a concern, however, is the arrangements around academies, that there is no requirement for an academy to be named in the statement of a child with special educational needs, and I think that to us is a serious flaw. All schools must take responsibility for children with special educational needs and schools will continue to need the support of a highly effective local authority and specialist support services - behavioural support, learning support, speech and language therapy, and so on - if they are ably to meet that range of needs.

Q95 Mr Marsden: Christine, I wonder if I could briefly pull you back to the pupil referral unit situation. You have indicated your assumption, or your hope, that local authorities would retain a significant role in that sphere. Is it not the case that pupil referral units are critical for dealing with local authority-wide issues, such as behaviour, truancy and attendance, and what is your estimate of how successful you would be able to perform that role if, in fact, these units were devolved to individual schools or into clusters of schools?

Ms Davies: Personally I would have no concern about the responsibility for pupil referral units and any specialist provision being devolved to either an individual school which is servicing the needs of the wider community or to a cluster of schools, but the local authority has to have both the power, the influence and the levers in place to ensure that there is a breadth of provision across a local authority area. We will not be able to have a situation where money is devolved to schools to meet a range of special educational needs for those schools to take a decision unilaterally to use that money in different or other ways: because if that happens, self-evidently there will not be the provision in place to meet the needs. It is the duty of the local authority to secure full-time education for children who are permanently excluded from school. It is absolutely vital that the local authority has both the resource, the capacity and the duty to hold a group of schools to account to provide that.

Q96 Mr Marsden: Are you saying, in those circumstances, that it would be appropriate and necessary actually to ring-fence that funding for PRUs?

Ms Davies: Yes, I am. I am saying very clearly that if there are individual schools or groups of schools who have the capacity and the will to provide for that broad range of needs - if finances are to be devolved to them for that purpose - the local authority must need to be sure that they will provide for the needs for which they have the money.

Q97 Mr Marsden: Perhaps I could now take some of the broader implication of expenditure, and I put this question particularly to the elected members: one of the traditional duties of local authorities as been the duty to avoid unreasonable public expense, which has a fine Victorian sounding ring to it. What are the implications in practice? Are there any of the White Paper proposals that might affect your ability to do that avoiding of unreasonable public expense?

Cllr King: I suppose it depends on the definition of the word "unreasonable", does it not?

Q98 Mr Marsden: Indeed?

Cllr King: We can probably argue about that forever, unreasonable public expense.

Q99 Mr Marsden: What about transport, for example. That is a key issue for you in a rural area, is it not?

Cllr King: It is. I was going to say that local authorities, of course, tend to spend over and above what the Government has told them to spend on educational services in their area. I think the most recent figure is about £200 million across the country spent on children in schools, which shows a level of commitment, and I do not feel, certainly speaking from my own authority's point of view, that we would ever regard that as an unreasonable amount of money, money that we have spent over and above. Obviously transport is a particular difficulty and particularly, as you have identified, in rural areas. I think my authority's school transport bill is 24 million and rising.

Q100 Mr Marsden: I have driven across the roads of Norfolk, so I know what it is like when you get to the north of the county particularly?

Cllr King: Yes. Personally, I would much rather see that money spent on school improvement than on bussing children all over the county. This is a significant difficulty for us when it comes down to choice of school. I am sorry, we are getting back to choice again, but it does say in the White Paper that a child should have a choice of three schools within a six-mile radius. In parts of my area, and this not unusual, you could be very lucky to have the choice of one school within a six-mile radius?

Q101 Chairman: We will be coming back to choice.

Cllr King: So the costs associated with transporting children large distances are extremely worrying, and apart from the financial cost you are, of course, removing children from their natural communities in order to bring this about and a lot of parents will not be happy with that, will not see that as a real choice at all. That is me from a rural perspective on the sort of costs that we are concerned about. James is from a more urban area.

Q102 Chairman: James, you are from the rural parts of Islington?

Cllr Kempton: Very rural parts. Sadly, though, the Islington farm is not in my ward, but it is very close to it! I want to pick up the issue about expansion and the presumption for expansion. You started off, Chairman, talking about the confusions and inconsistencies in the White Paper, and I think this is one of them. The presumption for schools to expand and for schools to expand with sixth-forms, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the role of local government in tempering those aspirations with regards to the needs of the local area, and, I guess, the question is whether this makes financial sense. Where we have got surplus capacity in the secondary system already of something like quarter of a million spare places, surplus capacity in the primary system of nearly half a million places, I think there is a real question-mark over whether expansion is the right thing to do. It may be the right thing to do to respond to parental demand, but whether it remains financial good sense to spend money on building new buildings on one school site and leaving those buildings empty on another school site, or whether it might make better financial sense to spend the money that would have gone on expansion or would have gone on transport on helping to raise standards of achievement for those less popular schools which generally are less popular for standards issues rather than ethos issues I question.

Q103 Mr Marsden: Leaving aside whether it is a good thing in theory, in practice is the White Paper too optimistic about how quick it would be to make the transition from one failing school to one brand new working school and the cost and expenditure associated with that?

Cllr Kempton: Chris has given an example of a federation which was able to deliver in two years but not one. I think we could give you examples of where there have been proposals for academies that take very many years to set up. In term of the interests of young people in the area, there are other interventions that will deliver much more quickly than building new schools.

Q104 Mr Marsden: Can I ask you, James, one of the issues that the White Paper really does not mention a great deal at all is the issue of the impact of transience in schools. Certainly this is a big issue for my local authority. I assume, given it is Islington, it is a big issue for your local authority as well.

Cllr Kempton: Yes.

Q105 Mr Marsden: At the moment there is no dedicated funding stream to cope with the consequence of transience for local authorities, but you still have to do so even under the present circumstances. Are you worried that that situation would become more difficult or less difficult under the new White Paper?

Cllr Kempton: In financial terms, the Association of Local Government has lobbied on a cross-party basis to make sure that there is a financial aspect for mobility. That is not necessarily a view that all authorities would share, but I think there are clearly those within local government who share the view that we need to provide some financial support for transience and the effect it has on schools and pupils; but I think in terms of the White Paper you are right, it may be that what is described as personalised learning would help in this, because tabling learning to the needs of pupils will, I think, help to address the needs of pupils who are quite mobile, but I am not sure that there is very much else in the White Paper that addresses that issue.

Q106 Mr Marsden: Schools have more independence from local authorities. The local authority's ability, as it were, to make sure that they take their fair share of the burdens in terms of transience, as, indeed, with special educational needs, will be restricted, will they not?

Cllr Kempton: I think there is an issue about placing children. I would not necessarily make the assumption that just because someone is mobile they are necessarily vulnerable, but clearly a lot of the mobile population are children whose learning may be behind because of either difficulties with finding a placement in a school or because of the turnover. I think there are questions there in relation to admissions and whether these are some of the less popular pupils that schools will either find attractive or unattractive and whether the code of practice would protect that. Going back to the point that you were talking about before on PRUs, you were exploring the issue about PRUs as institutions, but what is important to authorities, I think, is the ability to reintegrate the pupils into mainstream education and the authorities that have been very successful - and East Sussex springs to mind - where they have had a great success in reintegrating pupils who have been excluded from other schools, I think that is to the benefit of the pupils; but that can only work if you have all schools signing up to a code of practice which says that they will take pupils who have been excluded from other schools to give them a fresh start, where the necessary support is available and where they know that the appropriate facilities are available, where that does not necessarily suit the needs of that child or where the fresh start in the new school does not work out; but if you have schools opting out of that system, it just means you have difficult pupils circulating around a smaller number of schools, and that makes it harder.

Cllr King: James has talked about transience and the difficulty that causes. We also have large pockets of economic migrants in certain parts of the country from other parts of Europe, notably Eastern Europe, huge numbers of children coming into our schools who are not bi-lingual, and that places an enormous stress on schools, usually in fairly specific geographical areas. The amount of effort needed to get those children imbedded in the system, get their language skills up to where they should be so that they can then, of course, improve their education and get the required outcomes, the need is very intense and we do not feel that the White Paper is addressing this at all, because there is a significant, of course, resource issue behind this, "resource" being taken in its widest meaning.

Chairman: There is a very familiar pattern in West Yorkshire, I have to say. I want to move on to diversity of school provision. We will come back to some of these because obviously these issues overlap.

Q107 Mr Wilson: Good morning. The White Paper says, "Every school needs to be free to develop a distinctive ethos and to shape its curriculum, organisation and use of resources." At the end of this process we are going to have academies, foundation, trusts, community schools and others as well. Do you think we need any new legislation to allow these schools to exist or have we got the legislation in place?

Cllr King: I have not exactly noticed a rush to trust status across the country, although that has been available already to schools.

Q108 Mr Wilson: What is the difference, in your view, between foundation schools and----

Cllr King: Not a lot, in my view. I do not think fragmentation of the system is particularly helpful, because again, to get back to what I said earlier, it does create huge complexity and a lot of uncertainty for the recipients of the education service and for the parents. I am more concerned, and this may be a naive aspiration, about making all schools good schools so that we do not have to go through these structural hoops. I do not necessarily think that calling a school a different name and hoping that someone will come forward as a sponsor to create a trust school, or whatever, is necessarily going to always have a positive impact upon education. It does create a huge diversity of provision. I remain to be persuaded that this is going to achieve the ends of an improved outcome for children, improved educational attainment.

Q109 Mr Wilson: So the short answer to that is, no, you do not think there is any new legislation?

Cllr King: No, I do not.

Ms Davies: All of the legislation for schools to attain foundation status is in place, and it is very difficult to understand the distinction between the proposed trust schools and the existing foundation schools, as Alison has said. There is little evidence across the country, urban and shire authorities, where schools have sought foundation status because the vast majority of schools really appreciate and welcome the support that they receive from local authorities and from neighbouring schools, and again it is only local authorities who can broker the supportive arrangements that exist between schools.

Q110 Mr Wilson: Have you had any indications of how much take-up there will be of this new trust school status?

Cllr Kempton: I think it is difficult to say, but what we can say is that the presumption in the White Paper is that new schools have to be trusts or academies, not community schools, and what we see at the moment, as you have heard, the general feeling in the education system is schools are happy with the status of community school and we would certainly to like see the option of community schools being available for new schools alongside those other options so that people are not being shoe-horned into a structure set by the White Paper; they are being allowed a diversity of structure as appeals to that institution. What is key, I think, to us is not so much what you call it but that all schools are treated equally, that there is no unfairness in terms of admissions and that we have the opportunity, as we said earlier, to support and challenge schools in our local areas irrespective of their status, because that is what will drive up standards in schools, and we have got the evidence that local authorities are intervening successfully at the moment.

Q111 Mr Wilson: Do you think trust schools will affect the academies at all?

Cllr Kempton: I think it is difficult to know how the target for 200 academies sits alongside the notion of trust schools, particularly given what I have said earlier about expansion and the falling roll position; so I think it is difficult to know how many new schools will be coming on stream. Certainly there will be parts of the country where new schools will be happening, but I think this is one of the areas where the White Paper and the Government's intentions are unclear.

Q112 Mr Wilson: Going back to the content of your previous answer, you obviously feel that there should be room for new community schools as opposed to other schools. Given the thrust of government policy the way it is at the moment, do you think that schools that choose to remain community schools will be disadvantaged in any way?

Cllr King: I would certainly hope not.

Q113 Mr Wilson: Hoping is not the same as what you actually think will happen.

Cllr King: I cannot answer for the way that the final legislation is implemented across the country, but I do not think that any local authority would be seeking to disadvantage a school within its area because it remained a community school.

Cllr Kempton: The area that worries me is in terms of capital. We have been huge supporters of Building Schools for the Future, but we know that Building Schools for the Future timescales have been expanded, the amount of money available to individual schemes is less in practice than it appeared. I think the idea that some of this capital is going to be set aside either for the parents' pot, I think it is called, where there is parental demand for the new schools but they are not necessarily on stream at the moment, where academies are being set up and where new schools are being established. Clearly, unless there is an increased pot of financial resource on the capital side, it will disadvantage existing schools and the plans that they have and whether they expect themselves to be in the BSF order of priority. It is sort of self-evident that unless there is more money there will have to be cut-backs and constraints in the existing capital programme, and I think that will disadvantage schools.

Ms Davies: There will be a disadvantage to community schools if the admission arrangements are not secure and robust. At the moment the White Paper suggests that all schools, including trust schools, have to have regard to the code of practice on fair admissions. It is our contention that that is too weak a requirement and actually we would like to see that strengthened so that all schools have a duty to adhere to the code of practice in order to secure fair admissions. The consequence of not doing that is that potentially some schools will elect not to have those children who present the greatest challenge, which will include children with special educational needs, it will include some children who have behavioural difficulties, it will include those children who are in the looked-after system, and, if that happens, that will mean that some schools take a disproportionate number of those young people, and that will be unfair to those schools in terms of the challenges they will face and it will be profoundly unfair to those children who have most need.

Q114 Mr Wilson: We are advised that spare places cost local authorities about £10,000 per extra place within the authority area. Obviously there is a desire for expansion in schools in the White Paper. How do you think we are going to be able to make that work with the potential financial implications of surplus places elsewhere?

Cllr Kempton: There clearly is a conflict in that area, and we touched on it before when we were being asked about value for money in the system. I think what it would be helpful to understand is some of reasons for the demand for expansion of some schools over others. It may be that other options can address those concerns, and so the option of federation or the option of schools working together helping to drive up standards may be an issue. It may be that the issue is to do with new communities being established or being expanded and the distance being travelled by other people, and in those circumstances there will have to be changes. The record shows that there have been something like 500 expansions over the past few years, so there are changes going on in the schools system - it is a dynamic system - and what we want to be clear about is that expansion is the best option in those circumstances. It may be that there is a lot of local pressure for the expansion of one school or for a new school. That may not work out as the best option, but I think what we would say is that local authorities are best placed to hear the arguments and to find a way through them. In some cases, I guess, we would say it may be that the local authority has to say, no, and I think we need clarity within the White Paper. We must retain the right to say no, with the appropriate appeals procedures on that, but generally I think what we hope to do and what we do in practice is work with local communities to find the right solution, and setting up a new school or expanding a successful school is sometimes the most obvious thing to do but it may not be the thing that serves all children in that local area best.

Q115 Mr Wilson: I asked the Secretary of State when she came before us about that very point, about expansion of schools, and she said that there would be a presumption in all cases in favour of expansion of schools. How do you feel about that?

Cllr Kempton: That is one of the areas that we have some concern about, because the Secretary of State has also said that she is looking to local authorities to explore other options to make sure we get the right solution for the local area. I think those two statements do not necessarily fit entirely together. I think this goes back to the concern that we have about whether these additional powers for local authorities stack up as coherent and as sufficient levers in the system to deliver a local education system which meets the needs of the local community. I think you are right, there is a significant concern in this area.

Q116 Chairman: Is it not the truth that the White Paper and some of the statements that have come from ministers have scared a lot of people in local government, whereas if you look at them in detail, and there are going to be a lot of countervailing powers to easing school expansion - I mentioned all the unelected bodies - they are all going to have a bite into this before expansion takes place. Is that not the truth?

Cllr King: I think it is true. I think there was an enormous amount of hype around at the beginning, saying the White Paper is going to remove schools from local authority strangle-holds, the strangle-hold of town halls. I think "strangle-hold" and "town halls" are phrases that fit together very well in the tabloid press, but it actually is not accurate.

Q117 Chairman: But all the press is now tabloid!

Cllr King: Sometimes they all turn into tabloids, yes, but I do not think that is universally the case. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the amount of intervention in the day-to-day running of schools does not, in fact, come from local government but from central government. When I go into my local head's office and see the enormous bundle of mail that still seems to come through, a lot of it now, thankfully, electronically, from DfES, I see just what it is that local heads have to cope with on a daily basis. They tend to feel in many areas that their relationships with their local authority are very positive and very helpful and enable them to feel, particularly in the case of small schools, or smaller schools, that they are part of a network, they are part of a family, and they have someone to whom they can turn for support and advice when they need it and that there is somebody on hand. I think that is a very important role and it is certainly one that should continue.

Q118 Chairman: You want that spelt out in the legislation?

Cllr King: Yes. I would like this spelt out in the education. I can feel Christine nodding next to me, but it is terribly important, because, as I said right at the beginning, we feel that the accountability of schools to their local communities is hugely important. Of course, people like James and myself are the buffers in many instances, and also the messengers, as it were, and most of us are schools governors, and so we are very closely involved with education in our own areas, and I never get messages from the schools where I am on the governing body that they feel that they are being throttled by the local authority at all. Occasionally there are spats, as there is in any sort of relationship, of course, but that is not, generally speaking, my experience or the experience of schools.

Cllr Kempton: I wanted to expand a little bit. I think if you went to talk schools in Kirklees they would say they value their local education authority or their local council very highly and the support they give. If you went to places like Moseley where the local authority has been driving up not very good standards at one point and has got a whole set of collaborative arrangements in place, I think they would say they value their local authority and would say that none of this would be in place without the work that they have done. If you went to Wolverhampton, where they have got a very impressive 14-19 offer brokered by the local authority, they would say, "None of us individually could have done that but we recognise that what we have created here together is better than we could all individually have offered." So I think there is a very real sense around the country that the role of local authorities, where it is not about challenging school autonomy but where it is about working with schools as schools grow independent in relation to deciding who they employ, how they spend money and what goes in the classroom, I think where there is a recognition that that is the strength of schools, but the strength of local authorities is about making sure that the schools serve all children in the local area well and in working towards school collaboration I think that is highly effective.

Q119 Chairman: But, James, there is a danger of getting too rosy a picture of local governments. Some of us know of local governments that seemingly fail to deliver the quality of education that we would expect for the children in our communities, and Ofsted has a whole history of having to go in and we have had the Department having to send in independent people to run local authorities when it goes wrong. It is not all rosy.

Cllr Kempton: It is not all rosy, and Islington is a case in point where there was intervention and a year after intervention Ofsted came back and said that the tide had turned. Tomorrow in Islington we are going to be signing a new contract with our outsourcing partners, CEA, on the basis of a voluntary agreement because the Department has rescinded intervention powers in my authority on the basis of proven track record of success. I think what the evidence shows is that something like 43% of authorities have the highest grading or have improved in terms of education services. There is, I think, a real sense of movement in the right direction. There will be some authorities who are still working towards the standards that others have achieved, but I think we are not looking at a sector where education is in crisis as far as local government is concerned, we are looking at a track record of improvement and success across the board.

Q120 Helen Jones: If it is correct, and I think you are right, local authorities have to balance the needs of various parts of their communities, how do you feel about the proposal that elected local authorities can be overruled on school expansion, on the provision of new schools by a schools adjudicator who is not accountable?

Ms Davies: Can I relay to you a conversation that I have recently had with all of our schools, and in Telford we have every kind of category of school you could name? They are extremely concerned about this, particularly in relation to the expansion of schools. Their concern is that if successful schools are encouraged to expand exponentially, the danger is, first of all, that those schools cease to become as effective as they are because there is an optimum size for highly successful schools and what worries them more, and this includes the most successful schools, is that the schools serving the most challenging areas will wither on the vine because the vast majority of parents will, if encouraged, want to see their children going the most successful schools, and those schools serving the most challenging areas, their populations will fall, and it is exactly in those communities where they require the very best of education; and so all the schools in my local area are very concerned that an external body will have the responsibility potentially to overrule the local authority holding the strategic ring, not the strategic ring in splendid isolation, but the strategic ring in partnership with all schools in the locality.

Chairman: In passing, would it show my age if I said I was very impressed at an early stage of my career when reading a book by Schumacher, called "Small is Beautiful"? Perhaps it will be required reading in the Department!

Q121 Mr Chaytor: The new strategic powers that the White Paper gives to local authorities do not apply to 14-19. Are you satisfied with the fairly ambiguous arrangements between local authorities and LSEs that cover 14-19?

Cllr King: I think that is causing us a great deal of concern, and the LGA has included this aspect in its lobbying strategy. We feel that again it is a recipe for terrible complexity and confusion because we have 14-19 and 16-19 and two different sets of people responsible, one accountable, one, of course, not accountable. Also, of course, if you have got the local authority who has been dealing with a child through the school system from the very earliest days, they do tend to be able to follow that child through and they have a very significant input make into further education. Fourteen to nineteen, or whatever, I think that there is a very significant role there for the local authority to play. We believe that having two sets of people with strategic responsibilities for this age group is a potential for disaster, and we are lobbying very had to have a single strategic partner for that particular stage of education because to us it makes absolute sense.

Q122 Mr Chaytor: There is actually a third element here, is there not, and that is the class of individual schools who expand?

Cllr King: Yes.

Q123 Mr Chaytor: How do you feel about that and do you think that needs to be constrained if there is any concept of strategic planning?

Cllr King: Well, can I defer to Christine who might like to talk about the experience in her area and the sixth form.

Ms Davies: Given the needs of the future workforce for both academic and vocational education, the only way that you can actually in a local area provide for that diversity of need is for local schools and local further education colleges and sixth-form colleges to be working collaboratively together in order to provide a broad matrix of curriculum offer, which actually all children and young people need, not just a few children and young people. By and large, it is local authorities who have brokered those arrangements with their schools and their local colleges and, where it is working well, supported, encouraged and enabled by the LSC, but the reality is that it is the local authority that has that ongoing relationship with schools and colleges that have enabled that broad offer to come about. There are excellent examples across the country of where the 14 to 19 curriculum is genuinely taking effect where you have got groups of schools who have a common timetabling arrangement with local colleges and where you have young people moving from institution to institution to take up the pathway that they need.

Q124 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask specifically about the presumption in favour of the opening of new sixth forms by successful specialist schools. The logic of your argument is that you would be completely opposed to that.

Ms Davies: I think "completely opposed" is perhaps stating it too strongly. The collaborative arrangements between schools and colleges will be seriously undermined if one or two schools in a local area make a decision unilaterally that they will open a sixth form and provide what is often in school sixth forms a narrow range of courses, thus meaning that the sort of overall capacity of a local area to provide 14 to 19 education is diminished, and the experience of many young people and parents is that the local school sixth form is not necessarily the best place for 16 to 19 education to be delivered to meet a broad range of needs.

Q125 Mr Chaytor: Does that argument apply equally to the opening of new 11 to 18 academies?

Ms Davies: That argument would apply to the opening of new 11 to 18 academies if those academies were not prepared to play their full role in the network, the family of schools, and that holistic provision in a local area. Where those academies are playing their full role, then there is no fear. It is not the category of school that poses the difficulty; it is the style, the ethos and the delivery of that school which can either support the family of schools and the holistic offer in the area or undermine it.

Cllr Kempton: I think you are right to focus on this area because one of the key challenges we have in the education system is staying-on rates at 16 and I think we are disappointed in what the White Paper has got to say on that issue. We do not think the challenge is answered by providing more academic A level opportunities in a traditional sixth form and whether it is in an academy or somewhere else. Where that is addressed is, I think, in some of the proposals that Mike Tomlinson produced about curriculum reform and the LGA warmly supported his report and we were disappointed that it has made less progress than we hoped. I think the issue here is about curriculum choice rather than institution choice so that the opportunities are there for the 47 per cent of people who are not getting five good GCSEs and it is about giving them opportunities, and I think we would say that those opportunities are best served by a breadth of opportunity at 14 or 16 and that breadth of opportunity has been successfully brokered in some areas by LEAs and we see that as the future rather than a future where schools are narrowly focused on the pupils on their roll from 11 to 18. Therefore, I think the choice as far as the curriculum is concerned and the broadening of that is something we fully support.

Q126 Mr Chaytor: Do the arguments about school autonomy and diversity apply equally to primary schools as they do to secondary schools?

Ms Davies: Every primary school, as does every secondary school, has its own distinctive ethos and distinctive character, to quote David Blunkett when he was Secretary of State.

Q127 Mr Chaytor: Should it be an object of policy to increase the differences between those individual characters?

Ms Davies: The vast majority of primary schools want to, and do, cater for the needs of their local children in their local area and I think that the vast majority of primary headteachers would say that they have no need to take on different and discrete categories in order to continue to meet that broad range of needs. The vast majority do it very successfully. Their request is only for continued support of the local authority and more money, not a change of category.

Q128 Mr Marsden: The White Paper talks about a school commissioner for trusts and says that the school commissioner is to be a champion for the trusts, is to be a link person with local authorities and also to be a monitor and referee. The LGA, in the written evidence, you have said that you are concerned about the contradictions in that role and you have asked for the commissioner to be independent of government, but do you think it is a necessary role in the first place?

Cllr King: No, I do not personally. I do not think it is a necessary role at all because of course local authorities are expected to be the champions of parents and children and their educational opportunities, so why do we need to have a commissioner of a particular type of school? I think it is, and again I keep going back to this, adding to the layers, adding to the complexities, adding to the confusions. I think if you have got a person or a group of people who are there expected to be champions who are going to be tested regularly as to the level of provision that they are overseeing, I think that should be adequate. I really do not think that having a commissioner or a tsar of trust schools, whatever you like to call it, is necessarily going to be effective or necessary.

Q129 Mr Marsden: You may or may not agree with that, but assuming that you have thrown out the role of champion, is there a role for someone, whether it is a school commissioner or otherwise, who would actually monitor and, if you like, be a standards commissioner for the new trust schools?

Cllr Kempton: Do you mean a different role in relation to what Ofsted will have for those schools in terms of monitoring them?

Q130 Mr Marsden: Yes. I assume the Government, in setting this up, is thinking, "This is a new category of schools and we need to make sure that they keep up standards and we also need to make sure they are successful", hence the promoter role, which I think is where the confusion comes. If I can ask the question in a slightly different way, do we need someone in the initial stages to monitor and to be a referee for trust schools other than Ofsted?

Cllr Kempton: I think we have great confidence in Ofsted in terms of looking at the standards of schools. The only argument would be to have a commissioner who is responsible for structures in schools rather than standards and I think we do not warm to the idea, as you have picked up, on that issue. We think that local government is best placed to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of parents in an area when it comes to expansion of federation or new types of school and we would expect local authorities to be held to account by the regulatory regimes for that.

Q131 Mr Marsden: So you think it is another unnecessary layer?

Ms Davies: I think where we are really most concerned about the introduction of a schools adjudicator is in relation to delivering the Building Schools for the Future programme which, as you know, is the Government's £2.2 billion invested in secondary schools across the country. The Building Schools for the Future programme can only be delivered where the local authority is the client, having a vision for its locality which is fit for purpose, supported by all the schools in the local area, and that is the local authority's job with all of its schools. The very real danger if the schools commissioner is interpreted in one way is that there will be some kind of mechanistic checklist which says, "In your vision for schools in your area, you have to have an academy, a trust school, a single-sex school", and so on. I know I am being somewhat crude, but if the schools adjudicator's job is to promote trust schools and academies, you can see this very real danger and that completely undermines the vision and the delivery of BSF for a local area because it will not necessarily be fit for purpose

Q132 Mr Marsden: Are you then worried, in the light of what you have said, that, whatever the intentions, the reality of the schools commissioner is that he or she would end up as another agent of central government micromanaging the system?

Cllr Kempton: The proposal that this will be a civil servant rather than an independent person points in that direction. As we have said, if there is to be such a role, we would like them to be independent, but we do not think that the role is required.

Mr Meek: As far as we can tell, there is no intention to legislate for a schools commissioner, so I am assuming there would be no additional powers above and beyond simply the championing sort of advocate role for trust schools. I do not see that it could be given any powers to sort of oversee standards elsewhere, so I would just repeat the point that what we want to be held accountable for is standards, not for the tick box and I do not see that the commissioner could have a role beyond that.

Chairman: This is all very useful, but we must press on and have a look in some more depth at choice.

Q133 Helen Jones: The White Paper places on authorities a duty to promote choice and diversity and the assumption is that one assists the other. Do you have any evidence to offer the Committee that a greater diversity of schools actually helps to meet more parents' first preferences for schools, bearing in mind what was in the survey of the TES recently which showed, for instance, in Barnet that there was a wide diversity of schools and only 52 per cent of parents get their choice and in Oldham 99 per cent do? Do you have any evidence to offer us that would help with that?

Cllr King: No, only the evidence that you have already referred to which I read in The Times Educational Supplement a couple of weeks ago where they were making the point that increasing diversity of provision and increasing fragmentation leads to more problems rather than solving them when it comes to children being able to access the school that is their first preference or even their second, I understand.

Cllr Kempton: I guess I am forming the role of flying the flag for London, but if you look as a case study at the pan-London co-ordinated admissions which have recently been brought in, supported by the DfES, but led from local government, the evidence is that 90 per cent of applicants got a place at one of their preferred schools and ----

Q134 Helen Jones: Sorry, but that is not the same as getting your first choice of school, and we need to be clear about that.

Cllr Kempton: I understand that, but the question is whether you are happy with your second choice or whether there is only one choice as far as you are concerned. What this shows to me is that by getting the system right, it is possible to meet more parents' aspirations than having an uncoordinated system which is the direction we appear to be moving in. Certainly in the London case, 40 per cent of children, fewer were without a place at the same stage compared to the previous year and I think that has got to be right because obviously our concern is that parents get their first choice of school, but our concern is also that children have a school place at all and it is about reconciling those two and making sure that as many as possible get a place in a preferred school as opposed to an allocated school.

Q135 Helen Jones: There is always a difficulty, is there not, in reconciling parental preferences and meeting the needs of the community as a whole? Now, under the proposals in the White Paper that successful schools would be allowed to expand, how do you believe local authorities could manage that system, bearing in mind schools do not exist in isolation and there may well be another school down the road which is then contracting? What would be the effect on other children in the area? Choice is not a one-way street, is it, and there are other people affected?

Cllr King: No, and what is a benefit to one person may be a total disadvantage or disbenefit to somebody else. I think Christine is best placed to answer this because she has already referred to the ability of local authorities to encourage federations of schools instead of just looking at expanding one particular school, looking at a different way of managing this situation within a community because you can end up offering no improvement in choice for a lot of parents at all by talking just crudely, saying, "We are going to expand this school", because you can terribly disadvantage some groups of children.

Ms Davies: There is a variety of ways of better meeting parental choice and aspiration than necessarily expanding schools rapidly and, thus, closing other schools equally rapidly and they are through network learning communities, collaboration, amalgamations; there is a whole raft of ways. Progressive local authorities are brokering these arrangements across the country and, if I can just reiterate the point I made previously, many highly successful schools do not want to expand exponentially and rapidly and they are concerned about the effect of schools that are seemingly less popular serving the most challenging areas and the effect on those schools and, therefore, meeting the needs of those local communities.

Q136 Helen Jones: I understand that, but the question is a little wider than that, if I may say so. Let's say that a school is permitted to expand under the White Paper, as we were discussing earlier, so it may take 100 or 150 more pupils than the school down the road, so what happens to the pupils in the school down the road, given that that school will be using funding and, therefore, staff? You do not have a way, as local authorities, to deal with that, do you, now that all the money is passported to schools?

Ms Davies: The consequence on the school down the road which is less popular is exactly as I describe; it would potentially wither on the vine. I think that is very important. We are currently able to hold the ring on school expansion and the planning of school places. That is the role of a local authority and it is a duty placed on us and actually it is also a duty envisaged in the White Paper, that the local authority should continue to be responsible for the planning of school places, and I do not think the White Paper envisages a free-for-all whereby schools can expand without due regard to the planning of school places across the local authority.

Q137 Helen Jones: But the assumption is in favour of expansion in the White Paper, is it not?

Ms Davies: My understanding of the White Paper is that there may be a presumption in favour of expansion, but that there are the necessary checks and balances in place, I hope.

Mr Meek: Just to follow up on that point, I think Christine is right, that there are statements in the White Paper that give us some reassurance that the local authority role to be the strategic manager remains, but I think what we would be looking for from legislation is clarity around the definition of the presumption. On what basis can the presumption be resisted because a presumption is a sort of dangerous thing if it is not very clear what the rules of the game are and if the presumption is that you can expand regardless of the impact on the surrounding schools, regardless of the strategic plans, regardless of efficiency in managing financial resources, then that is not right, but that is one of the critical things for legislation.

Q138 Helen Jones: If I can ask another question about parental choice, the White Paper also envisages a situation where parents want to set up new schools. Again the presumption is in favour of the parents. Now, I have asked a number of questions about who in that case the local authority would have to consult before making the decision on that. What are the implications, in your view, of that for a local authority and, in your view, who should be part of the discussion on that? I think this is probably going to be a rare event, but I would be interested to know who should be consulted because we are told that the local authority will have to respond to parents and provide the consultancy if they can show the demand, so is it clear to you how that demand should be shown and who should be involved in this consultation?

Ms Davies: I think that there is a distinct lack of clarity in the White Paper about this issue and the vast majority of parents actually do not want to have the power to open or close schools. They want to have as much information as they can have available to choose schools for their children and as much information as they can have available to help their children when in school. There is no detail given about who to consult, but if there was going to be a parental lobby to open a school, and I think it is more likely there would be a parental lobby to close a school rather than open a school, then you would need to consult all parents in that local area, both present and future because a parent is only a parent for a fixed term in terms of school age. The very real danger of course is that it is likely that only the highly articulate and highly motivated parents will have the confidence and the competence to raise issues about opening new schools and whilst of course no parent should be debarred from having a view about education, the views, the needs, the aspirations of those who are less articulate, less confident and less competent will also need to be taken fully into account. Therefore, you have to have at the end of the day somebody who is holding the strategic ring and being an advocate not only on behalf of the articulate parent, but also being the advocate on the part of the less articulate, less confident parent.

Chairman: It sounds a very revolutionary tool for the future if we take it out of the context of the question that was asked and confine it to grammar schools and the future of grammar schools. Christine, I hope it will not come back to haunt you when we do an inquiry on that.

Q139 Mr Wilson: Just on an earlier question about this presumption in favour of expansion, which I asked about earlier, one of the key things I believe you will be taking into consideration is, therefore, surplus places that are left as a result of expansion, yet the Prime Minister said only a few weeks at Prime Minister's Question Time that there can be no account taken of surplus places and there will certainly be none in the future. How does that square?

Cllr King: It does not.

Q140 Mr Wilson: Have local authorities continued to take account of surplus places up until this time?

Cllr King: Yes, we have to.

Cllr Kempton: We need to take account of them bearing in mind the future demographic change which may be up or down.

Q141 Mr Wilson: So the Prime Minister is wrong?

Cllr Kempton: What I am saying is that local authorities are taking account of demographic changes to ensure that they have got a school system that can meet those needs and where those changes are increasing, like somewhere like Milton Keynes, they are taking account of those and making sure they have got the right number of places available.

Mr Wilson: So, just to be clear, local authorities are today still taking account of surplus places in their area, despite what the Prime Minister has told the House of Commons?

Chairman: Sorry, could you articulate that a bit more? I thought it was commonplace that at the moment local authorities have that responsibility. Could you draw that out?

Q142 Mr Wilson: Well, the Prime Minister was asked directly whether surplus places continued to be taken into account by the local education authority and he said, "Absolutely not".

Cllr Kempton: Well, there is no surplus places rule that says you have to have five per cent or ten per cent surplus places. There is no rule that says the number that you have, but clearly any authority is taking account of the future needs of their area. If the numbers are declining in the area, then we will be looking to see how we could amalgamate schools or work to having the right number of schools to deliver it. It is in no one's interest to have a school which is half empty; that does not deliver good education for the children or provide ----

Q143 Mr Wilson: Yes, but specifically if a school wants to expand and there were surplus places elsewhere, a local authority might be minded to say, "Because there are places elsewhere, we won't allow that school to expand". What the Prime Minister is saying is that they cannot take account of that as part of what we have been discussing today.

Cllr Kempton: I think what is more likely to happen is a local authority would say, "Why is there pressure to expand in that school?" Surely this is, as we have been having, a discussion about that school, but it is also a discussion about why some schools are less popular and this cannot just be a debate about the school that wants to expand or where there is pressure for new schools, but it has to be a debate where the schools are unpopular or where they are not delivering good-quality education. That is where the intervention powers of local government are required and where we think that the White Paper gives enhanced powers which is why we are welcoming that aspect of it.

Q144 Chairman: Where it is possible is that I have always understood in my own local authority, Kirklees, that my local authority had a duty and certainly a responsibility they carried out of assessing across the local authority where they have got more places and a shortage of places. I thought that had always been the case. Is it not, Alison King?

Cllr King: Yes, it is. The responsibility of the local authority is that we have to match the number of places available with the number of children coming through the system. As James has said, we do not want to see schools that are half empty and you certainly do not want to wind up in a situation in which that becomes even worse. We know that across the country school rolls fluctuate and we know that the demographic trends are that we are going to have a reduction in the number of children coming into the system.

Q145 Mr Wilson: But presumably one is a school organisation plan and what I am specifically referring to is when parents in an area want a good school to expand and the local education authority looks across the authority and says, "Well, no, because there are places here, here and here that could be filled by these pupils". I think that is slightly different.

Cllr King: Yes, it is slightly different and perhaps we go back to my statement that perhaps we should ensure that all schools are properly performing schools and are good schools so that we and the parents are not left in this situation. What happens is that of course schools, as has already been said, from which there is an exodus tend to wither on the vine. You have to remember that there are children in those schools and they could be in those schools for quite a long time while they are in decline.

Q146 Mrs Dorries: Christine, I would just like to come back to something you said a bit earlier. You said, I think and please clarify for me, that in the new trust schools, as they are envisaged, the vast majority of children with special needs could be catered for within those schools. Is that right?

Ms Davies: Yes, and it is not just trust schools. The vast majority of special educational needs can be catered for in mainstream education, provided the ethos of the school is conducive to meeting those needs and provided the school has sufficient resources and support to meet those needs. I did not say all special educational needs.

Q147 Mrs Dorries: I just wondered how you squared that with the fact that 27 per cent of children on the autistic spectrum who are in the mainstream in any one day are excluded from school.

Ms Davies: We could have a debate about how you define "autism", but actually the vast majority of children who are on the autistic spectrum, if their needs have been assessed as being best met in the local school and that school is sufficiently supported and resourced, then those children are very well catered for, and I could give you some very good examples of where children's needs are being met. There undoubtedly are some children, and they are not just autistic children, but a range of special needs, where mainstream education is either not appropriate or it is appropriate, but the school, for one reason or another, is not able or not willing to meet those needs appropriately.

Q148 Mrs Dorries: Not willing is quite an important point actually because whilst the Secretary of State says that the Education White Paper is about driving up standards and that those drivers are going to be the parents, and this Paper is a lot about giving power to parents, if you were a group of parents, 95 per cent of parents, in a trust school whose children do not have special needs, would there not be a tendency for those parents, who are going to be given such greater powers now in terms of the running of the schools, to decide perhaps that they were not going to take children with special educational needs? On the issue of choice, I would just like you to clarify what choice the parent of the Asperger's child or the autistic child is going to have, given that the special schools now, as you said yourself, are moving towards the more very extreme complex needs and the children who need 24-hours-a-day care, so what should we say to the parents there?

Ms Davies: The evidence is that where those schools are very effectively meeting children's special educational needs, they are also most effective in meeting the needs of all children because there is real thought going into curriculum differentiation, teaching styles, the level of support that is needed classroom to classroom, subject area to subject area, and it is absolutely vital that parents of all children, including those with Asperger's syndrome, do have an element of choice, but it must be choice that is grounded in the reality of which institutions are best able to meet those specific needs and -----

Q149 Mrs Dorries: Christine, can I just interrupt you there. Do you actually believe then that if the Education White Paper is implemented as it stands today, given that we do have the special schools closure and the transferring of those special schools that we have to the 24/7 children who need the intensive care, are you actually saying to a parent of a child who is today struggling to get their child into a school when the local authorities have control that, when parents have control, it is going to be as easy and it is going to happen? Do you really think that when parents have control of the schools, the special needs children are going to have the places? Do you really believe that?

Cllr King: I was just going to reflect on the fact that there are areas where mainstream schools have attached to them SPELD units, special educational and learning difficulties units.

Q150 Mrs Dorries: Some do.

Cllr King: Some do, yes, and I think this is perhaps the way for the future for a lot of the children, such as the ones you are describing, because it is perfectly possible to integrate children with Asperger's and autistic spectrum disorders generally and children with other special educational and learning disorders, whatever you like to call them, into mainstream schooling with the support of specialists within the unit.

Q151 Mrs Dorries: Having a lot of knowledge of Asperger's and autism, might I disagree with that because unfortunately those children are robbed of the ability of being in a mainstream school just by the nature of their condition, so I would disagree with that.

Cllr King: Well, can I just respond and say that that situation does not exist across the country. There are different practices around in different local authorities and I know some SPELD units very well, I am also very involved in autistic disorders and I am a trustee of the local Autistic Society, so I do understand the worries that parents have about how their children are going to be educated and how vulnerable they will be in mainstream settings. There are situations, however, that do exist and that operate very successfully. Of course what a lot parents are worried about, parents of the mainstream children, if you can call them that, is that the academic standard of the school will be depleted if they have one of these units set up, but experience does not show that that is always the case. In fact in the school that I have most experience of, it has not been the case at all and the whole thing has been very, very successful, but it takes a lot of planning and a lot of work to get it to that stage, but there is no reason why it should not exist. I think your worries are well founded because very often prejudice rules the decision-making process rather than sensibly thought-out logic.

Q152 Mrs Dorries: That is absolutely my concern with the parent power in schools, that prejudice will rule and these children with SEN will end up nowhere, given the situation that is happening in schools at the moment.

Ms Davies: I understand your concern about children with Asperger's Syndrome. If, for instance, you come to Telford, you will see mainstream schools working and supported by special schools, working with the National Autistic Society, and you will find that the whole spectrum of children with Asperger's Syndrome or the autistic spectrum, their needs are well met, but they are not met by one institution, they are met by a group of institutions working together with the local authority services. My second point is that we will be in very dangerous territory, you are absolutely right, if it is left for a parent body to determine which children go to that school and which children do not go to that school for all the reasons that we do not have to go over. Children that are less popular in schools are often less popular with other parents and that will be a very dangerous situation. I will reiterate the point I made very much earlier about academies. I think there is a very real concern on the part of the Local Government Association and local government generally that academies have the right to be refused to be named in a statement of special educational need. We cannot have a situation where one category of school is under no obligation to meet the needs of children with special educational needs when all other categories of school are.

Q153 Mrs Dorries: With the admissions criteria, schools are going to be able to select by interview, if they wish. Regardless of the parent body, if schools are selecting by interview or have a selection criterion which is not in the statutory code of admissions practice, how do you think children with special educational needs will fare in that circumstance? I am just thinking of the autistic child who goes into a headteacher's office and wrecks it within five minutes of getting in there. Is the headteacher going to give that child a place?

Ms Davies: I think potentially, and some schools will behave very honourably and others perhaps less honourably, but potentially there are some children with special educational needs and disabilities who are more popular in other schools, so those children who perhaps have a hearing disability or visual disability or a physical disability, those children will be deemed to be able to have their needs met, but there are other children, those children in the looked-after system, those children who present with behavioural difficulties for one reason or another, who will be deemed to be "less popular" and I think it is those children whom interviewing as a means of selection will seriously disadvantage.

Q154 Dr Blackman-Woods: I am going to ask some questions about quality and come back to a point Alison made earlier. We know that some schools are considered unacceptable by a significant number of parents and my question is really: should the White Paper be focused on bringing all schools up to a basic standard rather than encouraging different types of schools?

Cllr King: Yes.

Q155 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you, therefore, think that already local authorities are doing enough to improve schools in their area?

Cllr King: I would say yes and there is research to show that the role of local authorities in raising school performance, improvement, attainment, et cetera, has been absolutely critical. There is any amount of evidence around about that and the National Foundation for Educational Research have done some very recent work on it. I think the local authorities are committed to improving standards in their local area. If they are not, they certainly should be because we are looking at the needs of the next generation, very, very important, and I think that the means that we use, the improvement guidance advice in our local inspection units, whatever you like to call them, however they are billed, are seen as a most important tool to raising school attainment levels, and I think it would be the odd school that would not actually make use of that sort of system, an outside person coming in to give an evaluation and an assessment, a trusted outside person with whom they have an ongoing relationship and who constantly monitors their progress and constantly supports the teaching staff in their quest for improving the service that they have on offer. I think it is most important.

Cllr Kempton: If you take the evidence from Ofsted, it is that the number of failing schools is reducing really substantially, so the question is not so much perhaps about what goes on in the classroom that is about raising standards, but what goes on in the wider lives of those children. Clearly I think under Every Child Matters that is absolutely central to the role of local government for the future, so we are about to get a new duty under the Childcare Bill which we very much welcome. To narrow attainment gaps for the youngest children and giving them the best start in life is clearly a really substantial step in this direction. Working to address some of the other issues in their lives, whether it is overcrowding at home, whether it is problems with parental support or parenting, whether it is drug or alcohol abuse, whether it is being known to the criminal justice system, all of those issues are what is going to transform education in the broadest sense and those are all areas where local government and the interventions that we can bring together are highly crucial. I think we are getting to the point where just improving little by little what goes on in the classroom, which we clearly can do, will make a difference, but the really substantial differences, I think, are going to come from addressing some of those things which happen in children's lives either when they are younger or when they are going through the school system which impact on their learning.

Q156 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think that is an interesting point. I am glad you have raised Ofsted because the Ofsted report said two additional things: one, that there are still too many failing schools; and, two, that a lot of schools are coasting. Indeed a lot of the thrust of the White Paper is about the fact that schools are coasting, so I will put the question back to you again. If you are doing such a good job raising standards, why do we still have so many failing schools and why do we still have so many schools that are coasting?

Cllr Kempton: Well, I will probably let Christine come in in a minute, but local authorities have responsibilities for failing schools and I think the evidence shows that where we have intervened in failing schools, that number has reduced. We have not got it to where we want it, but we are working well and the evidence shows that generally, as I said before, local authorities are performing better now than they have ever done, so the additional powers to work with coasting schools that the White Paper brings, I think, are very welcome and we would anticipate that in a few years' time you can look back and see the effect that that has had of local authorities working with schools. It is, I think, an issue to do with school autonomy, that we have to respect the rights of schools, as autonomous institutions, to make decisions for themselves, other than at times when they are in crisis, and we work very effectively with many schools, but it is about getting the right balance of when you intervene and when you stay out. I think the cumulative effect, as I say, of these powers and of the new relationship with schools will, I hope, achieve the changes that we all want to see in that area. It is not, as you say, quite where we want it to be, but the direction of travel is, I think, very positive and I think Ofsted acknowledges that too.

Q157 Chairman: But you can understand the Prime Minister's impatience, can you not, in the sense that there are still around about 30 per cent of the children in our country that do not get the education that he thinks they should get? Indeed if you look at staying-on rates at 16, it is still awful and if we take the OECD average. Arguably, is there not a bit of complacency here? You have been in charge of education for yonks and it has not really delivered to those people most in need there.

Cllr Kempton: I do not think there is complacency, but what there is, I think, is a concern that structural change is not the answer and we are being faced with a set or proposals again about structural change when the sort of interventions that we know will work are the ones I have talked about already which are to do with the wider children's lives as well as the interventions in supporting schools that are not doing very well. It is not about saying that just because you create a different category of school, somehow there will be less propensity to fail because they have the label "academy" or "trust school". I think what we are looking at is the systems that can be put in place to help local authorities support and challenge.

Q158 Dr Blackman-Woods: I noticed you said in your submission that, although you agree with what the White Paper is trying to achieve in terms of driving up standards, you do not think this is the route and you want them to be more radical and this White Paper is not sufficiently radical, so what would you have liked to have seen in it that is not there?

Cllr Kempton: Well, I am very happy to take that, but, Christine, did you want to come in on this?

Q159 Chairman: So it is not radical enough and you have said so, but why not? How would you make it more radical?

Ms Davies: It needs to be radical in the sense that it needs to be robust because, you are absolutely right, whilst there are some schools where for some children their improvement is not sufficient, in the vast majority of local authority areas, performance has been raised year on year and there are some excellent examples in Liverpool, Blackpool, Durham, Sheffield, Telford, Knowsley, all the way across the country where actually performance has been raised year on year. You are absolutely right, this is where we need to be more radical, that actually all local authorities must match the best in terms of performance. Without local authorities, you would not have had the primary strategy, the Key Stage 3 strategy, behaviour and attendance 14 to 19, et cetera, delivered, you would not have had it delivered in the way that it has been delivered. In terms of being more radical, it is very important to understand how, where and why the most effective local authorities have worked well with their schools and we need to be learning from those local authorities and learning about that relationship between the local authority and the school because it is not just about challenge and support, but it is about what I call "mess and mire, fire, plague and pestilence". The local authority's role in driving up school improvement is complex and it needs to be understood what it looks like on a day-to-day basis. What the local authority needs is not the heavy hand of the local authority intervening in schools, but it is the local authority having a sufficient lever to go into a school and talk with a school's governors and with the teachers in order to address areas of need as well as identifying where there is best practice and sharing it. We welcome the White Paper suggesting that we have those levers in schools which are failing. We continue to need those levers in schools which are coasting.

Q160 Chairman: Alison King, do you want to come in on that?

Cllr King: I have nothing to add to what Christine has already said.

Q161 Chairman: I am intrigued that you are calling for more radical action from the Government and I just wondered what your take on that was.

Cllr King: Yes, well, I think the whole issue is so important that anybody would feel that this probably in certain areas did not go far enough, but there is no one magic bullet, there is no one magic solution to the problem here, and really what it involves is, as Christine says, an enormous amount of hard work by local authorities, a good relationship between local authorities and the schools for which they will still have a significant responsibility and of course a significant responsibility towards parents and children in their areas. I think that if nothing else concentrates the mind, that certainly will. Certainly, for local representatives, education and the placing of children in particular schools is a very keen interest. I get an awful lot of calls about it in my area and people are always keen to talk about education, about standards and so on and so forth, and of course transport and all sorts of other things, all very, very important. I think, as Christine said, the opportunity to have the levers and powers to make what we are going to be responsible for something that means something positive is absolutely critical and that is the way I would like to see the White Paper develop. I think in many cases, no, it perhaps does not go quite far enough and, in that respect, I am very worried, as you know, about the levels of bureaucracy that could creep in here that do not actually, I think, have much benefit to the whole picture, they do not add a lot of value to the whole picture. I think we need to have a rigorous system, I think we need a very robust approach to admissions and I think we need a robust approach to schools. Looking at what they provide for their communities and making sure that they deliver on that, to me, is key here and I do not quite think we have got it right in this version of the White Paper and I think that is something that really needs to be considered.

Q162 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think I still want some convincing that there is recognition that a step change perhaps needs to be made. I did look yesterday at some local authority websites and it was really difficult to find information on school results. They were usually there somewhere, but sometimes you had to go into the individual schools, sometimes not, but it did lead me to question how high school results and standards are on local authorities' agendas. What really is being argued here is that the cosy relationship that you described earlier is not quite working and what we need is some contestability in the system and I just want your views on that.

Cllr Kempton: Picking up the point on radical, I think what would be radical is assessing schools against the five Every Child Matters outcomes rather than, as the White Paper is proposing, to assess schools, as you are suggesting, only on issues to do with achievement and maybe behaviour. I think if you are assessing schools against those five outcomes, that will be very radical and you would not just be saying to us, "I couldn't find the school results or the league tables on your website", but you could be finding data about how healthy children are and what their progression rates are into training or into jobs or university. I think it would be radical to look at those levels of intervention so that where schools are, for example, working with parents on community education, that is seen as contributing to the outcomes of children, not necessarily the children in the school at that moment, but for the future of their communities. I think it would be radical and important to give local government the responsibility for education from 0 to 19 and then, instead of looking at just the results at 16 or 18, what you would be assessing local government on is whether all young people were progressing at 16 and were not in education, employment and training and whether they were progressing on to the jobs and careers or university. I think it would be radical to be looking for that sort of data as well. I go to many schools and ask them about progression rates and it is very difficult for them to know exactly where young people have ended up, so I think it would be radical to know that. I think what also would be radical is to have these measures applied to all schools so that we are not trying to divide it into a balkanisation of schools of one type or another, but all schools are trying to deliver to the same set of objectives and we can hold them to account properly for that, but recognise that there is an aspect to do with league tables, GCSE results and pieces of paper, but it also has to do with social education, has to do with the other Every Child Matters outcomes and it has to do with progression into a working group of relationships and a successful life ahead of them.

Cllr King: Could I finally say that I do not think the term "cosy relationship" is necessarily what we seek to achieve because, to me, that implies a level of complacency and connivance which is not at all helpful for children and I would prefer the term "challenging relationship", and that needs to be challenging in both directions. That is when I get back to my issue of having a robust system with high levels of expectation locally and that means high levels of expectation again across the board, involving the parents too, and that has not always been the case and that is going to be one of the major challenges as a result of this legislation and the way that we make sure that parents are fully on board and fully supportive because that has not always been the case in the past, not right across the board.

Chairman: I want to have a good look at admissions in this last 15 minutes.

Q163 Mr Chaytor: The White Paper is absolutely silent about the role of admissions forums. Do you see that as meaning that the admissions forums are on their way out along with the school organisation committees or is there possibly a radical, new role for admissions forums in the future?

Cllr King: I would hope not to see the end of the school admissions forums because what worries me about the White Paper is the prospect of possibly each school becoming its own admission authority and having a plethora of arrangements that do not necessarily ensure that children get the right sort of choices about the level of education that they receive. I think having a local admissions forum is a very important part of ensuring that children and their parents are heard when it comes to expressing a preference and finding a school that fits with that.

Q164 Mr Chaytor: So exactly how would you see them operating in the future? If there is a greater number of individual admissions authorities, not necessarily 23,500, but if there is a greater number, how would you see the role for them?

Cllr King: I would rather see a lesser number.

Q165 Mr Chaytor: Of admissions authorities?

Cllr King: Yes, I would because I think at the moment, as I say, to have schools having the right to be their own admissions authority, I think, is going to create terrible difficulties, so I would prefer it to be more local. Christine may have something to add on this.

Ms Davies: Yes, I think that the more admission authorities you have in a local area, obviously the greater complexity there is for both parents and the schools themselves, but even more is the need for a highly effective admissions forum where all those admissions authorities come together in one place and actually devise a system of admissions which is fair and transparent, where each admissions authority is in effect holding all other admissions authorities to account, so where there is more, there is greater need. However, absolutely critically I think whatever system you have locally, the code of practice on admissions has to be mandatory on all admissions authorities and there has to be a duty on all schools to work with the local authority in finding every child a school place.

Q166 Mr Chaytor: Before asking about the code of practice, coming back to the forum, do you think the forum then should be not just the clearing house, but the mechanism that approves individual admissions policies?

Cllr King: Yes, I do because I think that whatever system produces the greatest clarity, the greatest accountability and is the most relevant to a particular size of area is the one that we would want to use and I think what Christine said earlier about there not just being guidance, but almost being a statutory requirement to have certain admissions policies, I think to beef it up rather more than is suggested in the White Paper would be very helpful.

Q167 Mr Chaytor: But is it not in the nature of a code of practice that it is advisory or can you think of another code of practice that is actually contained within primary legislation?

Cllr Kempton: I cannot, but I think there is an issue about whether the Secretary of State agrees or does not agree with the rules of the adjudicator, for example, and we know the famous (?) case where that did not go in the way that the local community wanted it to go.

Q168 Mr Chaytor: Yes, but we are talking here of one or two individual cases, are we not? It is very, very rare that the Secretary of State gets involved with this. The issue, the real question, it seems to me, is: is it in the nature of a code of practice that it can only be advisory? If you believe it should not be advisory, then presumably it follows that we need something more than a code of practice and we need something enshrined within legislation, within the Bill

Cllr King: That is right.

Cllr Kempton: Which would be about not selecting on ability and not selecting by interview or whatever.

Q169 Mr Chaytor: Well, there is a different issue of the content of the code from the legal status of the code surely. Just leaving aside the content, I just want to be clear about what the LGA think. Should it no longer be a code of practice and should it be enshrined in primary legislation?

Cllr Kempton: We think it is for you to determine, as the law-makers, how best to ensure that it sticks, but we want something that sticks.

Cllr King: We want something more robust than is in existence at the moment.

Ms Davies: I think we are deeply concerned about the words "have regard to" because it seems to us that that allows the opportunity for some schools to disregard.

Chairman: We have had plenty of evidence about that.

Q170 Mr Chaytor: In terms of content of the code, the White Paper talks about fair access and fair admissions. Are there particular criteria in the code as it stands now that you think are unfair?

Cllr Kempton: I think the key issue for us is that we have a code so that everyone knows where they stand, but we also are concerned, I think, that, where there is a code, it does not allow schools to indirectly discriminate or directly discriminate, should they want to, either by ability or social group, and those are the key things for us.

Q171 Mr Chaytor: Do you think that the admissions forum could actually be given the power to challenge schools that it deems to be in breach of the code? Alison talked about challenging relationships earlier on. Should this extend to the role of the admissions forums?

Ms Davies: I think that one has to understand the complementary responsibilities of the local admissions forums and the admissions adjudicator because the system that is in operation at the moment, which is actually a very fair and robust system, is that the admissions forum determines fair, transparent admissions across a local authority, understanding the requirements of admissions authorities. If schools then choose not to wish to abide by the admissions forums' decisions, they have the responsibility to go to the admissions adjudicator. Equally, and we have done this in Telford, where schools blatantly disregard the admissions forums, for instance, in the admission of looked-after children, we have gone to the admissions adjudicator and the admissions adjudicator, as is the evidence across the country, has chosen to support the collective view of the local admissions forums. I think that robust relationship needs to continue to be in place, and will need to be in place if there is a great complexity of admissions authorities.

Q172 Mr Chaytor: Finally, could I ask about the question of choice and admissions, and the transport issue really. The Government is trying to enhance parental choice by making it easier for some children to travel further to different schools, but it does not seem to want to enhance parental choice by giving children a right to attend their nearest school. Do you think there is a contradiction there?

Cllr King: Yes, it is rather contradictory.

Q173 Mr Chaytor: How can that be resolved?

Cllr King: There has always been this difficulty about whether it is parental choice or parental preference. Obviously choice is not choice if you pick a school which then says it is full for the particular year to which you want to admit your child. There will probably always be a situation where children do not attain their primary choice in some parts of the country because the places are not available in the area where their parents wish them to be educated. That is something with which we really have to wrestle. As Helen said earlier, the results of the survey carried out recently showed that there was wide disparity across the country in the percentage of children who were able to attend schools that were their or their parents' first choice. That is something that we really have to address. I do not think it is necessarily going to be addressed by this idea of bussing children all over the place either.

Q174 Chairman: Six miles is not really all over the place, is it?

Cllr King: It can be; it depends where you live. Six miles on a dual carriageway route seems a lot shorter than six miles on a twisty road. I do not want to harp on too much about rural areas because I noticed Ruth Kelly said to you that 85 per cent of children did have this choice available, but my concern is with the 15 per cent of children who do not have that. That is still quite a significant percentage. This is something with which we all have to wrestle, and it is going to be the responsibility of local authorities to make sure that places are available where they are required. Whether we will ever get to the wonderful condition of having 100 per cent of children getting their first choice, I do not know, I think it is a little unlikely.

Q175 Mr Chaytor: The local authorities' responsibility for school place planning is made more difficult where you have a number of admissions authorities that do not admit children on their doorstep.

Cllr King: Yes.

Q176 Mr Chaytor: Would it be a valid criterion within the code to include an obligation to admit children from the immediate catchment area?

Cllr King: I think so because there are a lot of parents who want their children to be educated within their own communities.

Q177 Chairman: How would that impinge on grammar school entry?

Cllr King: We do not have grammar schools in my area but Christine does. May I hand over to her?

Ms Davies: We do have every category of school, including two single sex grammar schools. Of course, the catchment area for the grammar schools is wider than the catchment area for other schools that most immediately serve their local area. Again, through the admissions forums, there is an understanding that the catchment area has to be wider and different for those two schools.

Q178 Chairman: All of you, certainly three of you, criticised the new arrangements for Academies that could not have children referred to them in a statement of special educational need. That is true of grammar schools too, is it not? Let us put it bluntly: grammar schools do not take their fair share of those on free school meals, we know that from the Sutton Trust review research lately, they do not take many special educational needs pupils and looked after children. That is the truth, is it not? Should these rules apply in other schools?

Ms Davies: That is the truth and I think there are a number of us who, if we were starting with a blank piece of paper, would not set up something called grammar schools necessarily, but grammar schools exist and grammar schools are meeting the needs of their children very effectively.

Q179 Chairman: But not those with special educational needs or children on free school meals for some reason. I think the Sutton Trust said 13 per cent free school meals in the community, even in rural parts of the country, such as Alison King represents, and three per cent in the schools. That is strange, is it not?

Ms Davies: It is certainly true, and your evidence is correct, that because of the nature of the grammar school, they do not necessarily take the same range of special educational needs or the incidence of free school meals as other schools. Some schools do, but grammar schools are like all other categories of schools, they are not ----

Q180 Chairman: It is something that is strange because you have had quite a go at Academies not having this role but we leave grammar schools out there in a special category, do we not?

Ms Davies: Yes.

Q181 Mr Chaytor: Does the same argument apply to faith schools? Many Anglican or Catholic primary schools admit children of all different faiths because they happen to be living on the doorstep, why does the same principle not apply to Anglican or Catholic secondary schools who exclude children who are living on the doorstep?

Cllr Kempton: As far as local government is concerned, you will get a variety of views about these issues. We are free to give our personal views, but we would not necessarily have an LGA position. What we would want to be clear about is if there was a looked after child in the locality who was maybe a Roman Catholic, we would expect them to go to their local Catholic school and for that to be secured in the same way as if they were in the locality we hope they would be secured as a first preference a place in their local community school. It is about making some of those pragmatic but realistic choices in relation to these issues. What we hope is that for all schools that are maintained by the state, there is clarity about what their admissions arrangements are. What we fear is exactly the point you are talking about, that when you move to a different number of admissions authorities you will get different criteria creeping in, and that is exactly the thing we want to avoid. Whether or not we think that the status quo is acceptable, what we do not want to see as we get more admissions authorities is the diversity of admissions arrangements increasing.

Q182 Chairman: Time is running out. Can we bounce on to you one last short question and one rather big one. Are you worried about the implications in terms of ownership of property, land, that seem to me to be rather unclear in the White Paper?

Cllr King: If I can answer that because my authority is going through two very substantial PFI bids for schools because we are changing the age at which children transfer from primary to secondary, bringing it down to 11 - it has been 12 - and we are doing away with middle schools. We have used a 25 year PFI project in order to enable us to bring in the necessary capital for the new buildings and facilities and so on and so forth. I do not think schools ever anticipated that the responsibility for this would rest with anybody other than the Local Education Authority, as it was at the time that this was all going through. I think that some local authorities have indicated to schools that they will have to pick up the revenue costs of their PFIs through their own budgets, which will probably have shaken some schools rigid. Given the choice, and a lot of authorities give schools the choice already about how they run their premises and so on, a lot of them choose to stick with the local authority and have some sort of pooled property arrangement because they do not see the role of the school or the governors as running their own facilities management. The two things go hand-in-hand. Some schools may welcome this with open arms, it very much depends on the individual school. As a representative of a local authority that is about to have a very long lasting PFI project go through to its conclusion, I have significant concerns about whether we are going to be forking out for 25 years. We might have thought to deal with it rather differently had we thought all schools were going to be encouraged to take on their own responsibilities.

Ms Davies: Right at the end of the White Paper it does suggest that where trust schools, for instance, take on the ownership of land and assets, if those land and assets are subsequently to be released, they are released back to the local authority.

Q183 Chairman: But schools wheel and deal and buy and sell.

Ms Davies: Absolutely. I think where your point is very well made, and there is a real danger, is in Building Schools for the Future because that is self-evidently a local authority-wide scheme and there is an affordability gap, there are financial liabilities. It would not be in the local authority's interest to invest significantly in transforming secondary schools to be left with a financial liability which it cannot afford any longer because the resources are elsewhere. It is absolutely critical that within the regulations the financial liability rests with schools where schools have chosen to become trust schools and consequently own their land and assets.

Q184 Chairman: I want to get my big question in and it is the very last question, I am afraid, because I am enjoying this session very much. What aspects of the White Paper do you think have got to be in the legislation? What is your priority? What should be in? What needs to be in?

Cllr King: What needs to be there? I am very concerned about the issue of choice and producing real choice. I am very concerned about the issue of admission and, as has been said by colleagues, the issue of the leverage that we have as local authorities on schools in order to achieve improvement in attainment levels and staying on levels and all those things. Because I have been around a fair amount of time with the LGA dealing with the children's legislation and Every Child Matters, I am particularly concerned that we do not create a structure that is going to make it even more difficult for us to deliver the integrated services to children and the improvements that will bring because some of this White Paper does not actually address those sorts of issues. We lobbied very extensively, as I am sure you will remember, Chairman, for the duty to be laid on schools to co-operate as it has been laid on so many other bodies to co-operate.

Q185 Chairman: Schools and GPs.

Cllr King: GPs are self-employed so it is a difficult situation, but we are expecting health to be firmly on board in the broadest sense. I would hate us to see at the end of this legislative process anything put in place which is going to make our job more difficult. It will not just be our job, it will be the outcomes for children and young people which will not be as good. I do not want us to replicate the difficulties that have been created in the past by gaps in the system and by so many people being responsible in their own little separate areas not coming together to work for the same people, because they are all dealing with the same people. For me, that is one of the most important features of this. We have had a lot of legislation involving services for children and young people with a wonderful vision at the end of it but, please, do not let the legislation that comes out of this process be a stumbling block, it must be legislation that makes the delivery of Every Child Matters a reality. Schools, because they deal with every young person, are an integral part of this, a key part of this, and we do not want anything to be put in place which makes that a more difficult situation.

Cllr Kempton: What I would like to see is a clear commitment to ending the DfES's stranglehold over schools rather than local government's stranglehold. I would like to see a clear commitment to school autonomy in that, but that is also about autonomy not just from local government but from DfES. We are very comfortable with our role as providers/champions for children and parents and we want to make sure that the schools are properly autonomous. I would also like to see clarity about the autonomy over how schools deliver the outcomes, not whether they deliver the outcomes. Clarity on those points would be really good. Alison has raised the issue about fair admissions and that has clearly got to be there, but I would also like to ensure that there is real accountability and if we have trust schools - I prefer not to move in that direction - they have clear accountability to the local community. Finally, I would like to sort out the confusion of the 14-19 agenda because I think that will not deliver for young people. Clear strategic leadership within local government rather than the LSC or shared leadership will be the thing which transforms those staying on rates at 16.

Ms Davies: There are three areas: we have talked about admissions; duty to comply with the code of practice; the duty to work with the local authority and other schools to ensure that all children have a school place. The Every Child Matters agenda is critical. I agree with everything that Alison said. There is a duty in the White Paper to promote community wellbeing and positive race relations. We would like to see that duty extended, that all schools should use their resources to secure the five outcomes of the Children Act and work with the local authorities and other schools to meet the needs of all children in their area. My final plea would be around the language that surrounds all of these debates. We should stop talking about independents and talk about self-managing schools, but the emphasis should be on co-operation and all taking collective responsibility for children and young people. We all need to improve the language that surrounds local authorities, there cannot be any complacency. The language which suggests that local authorities have a stronger hold on schools is extremely damaging. It is untrue and it is lowering the level of morale and the capacity of local authorities to deliver the complex agenda that is being set out for them.

Q186 Chairman: It has been an excellent session, we have learned a lot. Thank you very much for giving of your time. I am sorry about the long bells and some of my colleagues who had high questions in Question Time had to leave a little early. Thank you, again. Your first response that we had was written very close to the publication of the White Paper, if you are going to reassess that after your consultation closes, can we have a copy of that as early as possible.

Mr Meek: You can have something today.

Chairman: Perfect. Thank you for your attendance.