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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 633-vi House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
WEDNESDAY 14 December 2005 DR PHILIP HUNTER PROFESSOR SIMON BURGESS,
PROFESSOR STEPHEN GORARD and Evidence heard in Public Questions 498 - 639
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Wednesday 14 December 2005 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods Mr David Chaytor Mrs Nadine Dorries Jeff Ennis Helen Jones Stephen Williams Mr Rob Wilson ________________
Witnesses: Dr Philip Hunter, Chief Schools Adjudicator, gave evidence. Q498 Chairman: Dr Hunter, what a delight to have you back with us. It is about a year ago since you were here. Dr Hunter: It is indeed. Q499 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming back. There is even more of a focus on your role now than there was a year ago. I think of this morning as one wise man followed by three wise men; and next week we have the two ministers and we then start writing up this inquiry into the White Paper. This is a very important session for us. Do you want to say anything to start, or do you want to go to questions? Dr Hunter: No, I will go straight into it, if that is all right by you. Q500 Chairman: That is what I like to hear, straight into the inquisition. What is your opinion of the White Paper? Dr Hunter: I think I would rather not get drawn into giving a general opinion of that kind. Q501 Chairman: Doest it affect your job? Dr Hunter: Clearly we have been through it and there are some areas in which it will affect our job. There are a few additional tasks for us to take on but most of them seem to be well within the sort of remit that we have now. We exist to resolve disputes. I think that the new tasks they have lined up for us are of that kind. We have had slightly fewer cases thrown at us during the last year, so we have some spare capacity, and I think there is no problem in taking on the sort of things that they have in mind for us. Q502 Chairman: You have said you are there to resolve disputes, but you cannot resolve disputes that you do not know about. One of the criticisms of your role in the past, when we did the former inquiry, was that a lot of people are not aware of their rights to complain to you and so there is a lot of frustration. If people are more articulate and more knowledgeable they can come to you, and other people cannot. Dr Hunter: I understand that and I have a great deal of sympathy with it. Indeed, we have said to the Department this year that it would be a good idea if they reminded local authorities of their duties to review admission arrangements for all schools in their area every year and to object if they found that those arrangements did not in their view meet the Code of Practice. It seems to us, looking at the cases we have had in the last couple of years, that there are some local authorities that are doing that, but we very much suspect that there are some that are not. The Department wrote around all local authorities a couple of years ago, and I think it is time they did so again, or even made it more overt than that and perhaps put a clear duty on local authorities to do that every year. Q503 Chairman: Local authorities are not doing their job properly at the moment. Dr Hunter: I suspect that some of them are not. Clearly we have no proof of that because we do not see the ones that are not referred to us, but it does seem to us that we are receiving fairly large numbers of objections from some authorities and we hear anecdotes, if you like, about schools that have arrangements that seemed to us not to meet the terms of the code and yet we have not had an objection. Some authorities must, we think, not be doing their job properly and we would like to see a clear reminder to them that they should be doing it. Q504 Chairman: So it could make your job much more effective if there were a duty on local authorities to have that role. Dr Hunter: I think that would represent a fairly powerful machinery for making sure that schools do observe the code and keep within it. Q505 Chairman: You saw the inquiry that we did last year. One particular head - it still sticks in my memory - when asked why she did not have any looked-after children, why she did not have any children with special educational needs and hardly any who have free school meals, looked at me and said, "I took note of the code" and obviously implied: and then ignored it. Did you ever follow up that particular school or that particular head? Dr Hunter: No, I did not follow up that particular school, because, as you know, we do not act on an initiative of that kind; we need an objection. But, as you know, the Department this year are proposing to take from the code into regulations the need for schools to put looked-after children on the top of the list. I do not know whether that was a response to what you said or where that came from but clearly somebody is taking note of that and I think that is right. We have received a fairly large number of objections to schools not properly dealing with looked-after children in the last couple of years. We have upheld them all. When you get a situation like that it probably is better that it is removed form the code and put in regulations. Does your role there apply to all schools or are there some schools exempted from that? Dr Hunter: That applies to all schools. Q506 Chairman: Grammar schools? Dr Hunter: Grammar schools, foundation schools - except for academies. If there is a complaint about academies, that goes into the Department. Q507 Chairman: Right. Okay. It applies to grammar schools. Dr Hunter: It applies to grammar schools. Q508 Chairman: Good. Should your role not be more forensic? You know what is going on across the country. You are one of the most experienced people in the whole of the education sector. You are hearing this is going on or you look at the stats or you read the Sutton Trust reports about how there is a very big difference between the top performing state schools and the comparison with how many free school meals pupils they take in comparison to the number in the community which they serve. Should your role not be more forensic? Should you not say, "Look, I've got to do something about this"? Dr Hunter: Our job is to resolve disputes within the terms, within the framework of legislation and statutory guidance laid down by Parliament. That is what our job is and we cannot stray from that. Q509 Chairman: Would you like to be more powerful? Dr Hunter: I do not think so. We are not a police force; we are not an inspection force. We do not have the staff to be that. We have a very small - down to nine next year - number of adjudicators - very high powered, and I think very able, but we are resolving disputes. That is what we are for and I think that is where we should remain. The job of policing all of this is clearly between the Department and local authorities. If there is a need for more police, then it is one of those that should be getting stuck in. Q510 Chairman: I really do not want to drag you into the politics of this - this is not the point of this Committee. Dr Hunter: Oh, good. Q511 Chairman: I know the BBC is not always 100 per cent accurate, but you are quoted as saying in a BBC news press release that you thought the system might be better if all schools ran their own admissions. Is that an accurate quote? Dr Hunter: Well, it is not a complete quote and perhaps I should tell you entirely what I said. I am saying that it is for Government and for you to decide what functions should be performed by national government, in terms of regulations and in terms of the Code of Practice; what functions should be performed by local authorities and the admissions forum; and what functions should be performed by schools. Foundation schools and aided schools do not have better or more competent head teachers and governors than community schools. All schools, in my view, should be treated the same. That means that all schools, all governors and head teachers, should have a role in the admissions process, but it should be a role which is clearly delineated by the national Code of Practice, national regulations and by whatever is decided local government and the admissions forum should do. Q512 Chairman: Is there not a real problem with that suggestion, in that every parent in this country has a duty to send their children to school and if you take away a local government role to make that duty a possibility then someone has to guarantee that a child ends up in a school If you have all these independent admissions authorities, what happens to the child who is not accepted into a school? Dr Hunter: That is why I say it is very important that national government and local government or the local admissions authority have a role and why the schools have to operate within the framework set down by them. Clearly, if a school wants to act in a way which means the local authority cannot perform its duty to provide places for local children, then somebody has to step in and put that right. We have had, over the last couple of years, not many but a small number of cases where a school has wanted to withdraw from part of its traditional catchment area - and, surprise, surprise, that tends to be the area where most of the difficult to teach children live - and the local authority has objected to that. Where that has happened, we have always upheld the objection, because we are very clear about a local authority's duty, and the arrangement does not work if the parent's duty is not matched by the local authority's duty to provide places and if those two do not gel together, work together. Chairman: Dr Hunter, that has been a very interesting opening. Could I ask David to come in with a question. Q513 Mr Chaytor: Dr Hunter, are there things that are not in the White Paper that you think should be in there, things which would improve the way in which you can do your job at the moment. You have mentioned the duty on local authorities to ensure admission. Dr Hunter: Sure. I think there are probably two things that would help. One is the duty of local authorities or the clear statement that the duty exists. That is important and I think that is probably the most important general one. The other thing that would help somewhere - and this is a rather technical point - would be to clear up the misunderstandings I think there are in the legislation about what happens when we get a case which affects somebody's religion. Where that happens, under section 90 of the Act we refer it to the Secretary of State. It is not always clear when we get an objection whether it affects somebody's religion or not and we spent a lot of money last year on lawyers trying to sort out whether four or five cases should go to the Secretary of State or should stay with us. That needs to be sorted out. My way of sorting that out would be to leave them all with us, and I have to say I do not think the ministers would object terribly to that because I do not think they are very keen on taking these cases. I do not think the churches would object either. There is another point that I think it would help to sort it out. There are things like - and this has been agreed already, I think - the ability to make our decisions stick for three years unless we deliberately say we do not want them to stick that long. That helps. Q514 Mr Chaytor: Why only three years? If yours is a valid decision, why should it not be permanent? Dr Hunter: I do not see why not. I think circumstances often change within three years and three years is probably enough. It is irritating, I have to say - and we have had some cases like this - if you make a determination and the school observes it for one year and then comes back the next year and does exactly the same thing. That is intensely irritating. I think if it has stuck for three years then the school will probably have forgotten it by then and learned to live with whatever it is. But one could make it longer than that if one wanted to. Q515 Mr Chaytor: Do you think the general direction of the White Paper is likely to lead to more disputes referred to your office or fewer disputes? Dr Hunter: It is very difficult to say at the moment. We have been thinking about that clearly, but it depends really on how the thing is perceived, I think, by the schools. It is quite clear that there are extreme positions, if you like, about admissions around the place. I am not sure anybody is advocating this, but one could certainly see a position in which all schools were set completely free, there was no Code of Practice, there was no adjudication, they were just told to get on with it, and they could set their own admission arrangements absolutely independently. Clearly if that happens - and you will be hearing more about this later on this morning - you get this segregation between the schools. What happens is that oversubscribed schools drift upmarket. That is the natural way that organisations work, I think - it is nobody's fault, it just happens - and you will be hearing more about that later this morning, I guess. So that is one extreme. The other extreme is where you could advocate that all schools have exactly the same intake, a balanced intake, everybody has the same distribution of ability, the same social distribution and all the rest of it, and that would clearly restrict choice. Reading the White Paper, it seems to me it has gone somewhere in the middle. It is saying it is going for choice - and that has to be a good thing: people want choice - but it is saying it is going for choice as long as that can be achieve without interfering with other people's choice, without being unfair, and without interfering with educational standards. That seems to me to be eminently sensible. It is neither of those extremes and I feel quite comfortable with that position. Q516 Mr Chaytor: But that does not answer the question. The question is: Is that position likely to trigger more disputes, because the White Paper argues the rhetoric of choice but puts in some measures that put constraints on choice? Is it not likely to increase greater levels of frustration and more appeals to the adjudicator? Could I also ask: has your office's workload increased or decreased in each year since it was established? Dr Hunter: It increased enormously about a couple of years ago, when the new Code of Practice came in and when this letter from the Department went round local authorities. It went up from about 100 cases a year to 250 cases a year. It has gone down again this year - and that is a good thing: we do not want to see too many disputes around the place - so there is some slack in the system now. Going back to your point, I am trying to say that it depends how schools perceive being their "own admission authorities". If they perceive that as saying they are totally free, they do not have to work within the code, they do not have to cooperate with other schools around, they do not have to subject themselves to adjudicators and all the rest of it - and there are some foundation schools (we have mentioned one this morning) and aided schools which do think that - then clearly there are going to be more objections. But if they are told very clearly that they have to work within the code, that is evident. Q517 Mr Chaytor: So it comes back to the legal status of the code. My understanding is that you had argued against the code being mandatory. Dr Hunter: No. Q518 Mr Chaytor: What is your position on that? Dr Hunter: My position is that as the code stands at the moment it cannot in toto be turned into some sort of regulation. It just does not work, because bits of it are saying that you can add catchment areas, you can have bigger primary schools. You cannot make a regulation which covers that. But you can - and this is your territory - you and the Secretary of State - can take bits of it and make regulations about those bits - just as last year the bit which was in the code about looked-after children was translated into a regulation. The difference between the code and regulations is that, where you have a regulation the assumption is that there is no exception to that regulation; were you have a code you always have to assume there is an exception somewhere. There may be elements of the code where you decide, where the Secretary of State decides, there shall be no exception. It is quite easy in those circumstances to turn that into regulation. But it is not the whole code; it is picking out bits where you ----- Q519 Mr Chaytor: Leaving aside the bits that could be turned into regulations, do you think the requirement of schools simply to have regard to the code overall is sufficient? Or do you think there should be a tighter guideline; that, for example, they should be required to act in accordance with or should be required to comply with the provisions of the code? Dr Hunter: I think you can tighten up the words. I am not a lawyer so I am not absolutely clear about what this means in legal terms, but I think you can ratchet it up a bit from "have regard" to "act in accordance with" or something like that. I think that would probably require a complete re-write of the code. I do not know, maybe that is what the Secretary of State has in mind. Q520 Dr Blackman-Woods: Dr Hunter, I think from what you were saying earlier that you have some sympathy with the choice agenda or extending the choice for parents. Would you say that you think the Government is right to put more emphasis on parental choice in the White Paper? Dr Hunter: Yes. I think people want choice. I think central government, local government, schools ought to respond to that as much as they possibly can, as long as they do not run into the difficulties of giving one group of people choice at the expense of another group. The Government seem to have this in mind. They are talking quite a lot about making sure they are not giving choice to articulate, well-educated parents at the expense of parents who perhaps are not as geared up to working the system. I think that is absolutely right. But extended choice I think is right provided you have some safeguards. Unbridled choice can lead to some difficulties, and you need to keep your eye on that, but, as long as you do keep your eye on it, the general tenor of it is right, I think. Q521 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you think it is possible to communicate to parents the complexity of the choice that is now going to be available and the limitations that might also be attached to the choice? As far as we can see it is still going to be the case that parents have the right to express a preference rather than be guaranteed a place in the school of their choice. I am just wondering how that is communicated clearly so that you do not get lots of objections. Dr Hunter: I think it is difficult to keep this balance between saying, "Look, as a government" or whatever "we are trying to extend choice but we are aware that we cannot extend it to everybody." It is inevitable that whatever system you have, however much you extend popular skills, whatever steps you take, there are going to be some schools that are oversubscribed and there are going to be largish numbers of parents at the end of the day who are disappointed. We have to try to make sure that those parents believe they have had a fair hearing, have had a fair deal, that the system is clear, fair and objective, and then I think they will understand that choice is not available to everybody but they have been dealt with fairly. That balancing act of saying we are trying to extend choice but we are trying to be realistic about what it means in practice, I think, is quite a difficult one, and it is one that the Government and you are trying to reach. Q522 Dr Blackman-Woods: Do you think it is possible? is my follow-up question. Dr Hunter: I really do not know. I think you just have to keep on trying. It seems to me that you do not stop trying to extend choice because it is a rather difficult act to carry out. My guess is that the vast majority of parents actually understand what it is all about. There are some who deliberately choose not to, but most people understand that if you have a limited system then you cannot ... I have said this before and I will say it again: many, many schools are popular because they are small and the parents who apply for those schools would be horrified if they all got in because the school would turn out to be twice as big as they thought it was going to be. Most parents understand that. I think the other thing I would say - and I said this last time - is that there are degrees of choice. Catholic parents, on the whole do want their children to go to a Catholic school, but if there are two Catholic schools in the area then they have a preference. They feel strongly about the first choice, if you like, but not so strongly about the second. Q523 Helen Jones: I would like to press you, if I may, Dr Hunter, on what you said earlier about what would happen if all schools became their own admissions authority and the effect of that on a parent's duty to send a child to school - to cause a child to be educated, shall we say. How do you imagine a law could be drafted to allow local authorities to allocate a child to a particular school at the same time as schools were their own admissions authorities? Dr Hunter: I think the checks and balances are in place now. If it were me - which it is not - I would get shot of this term altogether about admission authorities - it seems to get in the way; it gives some schools a misleading impression of what their powers are. And I would return to what I said before, that if the Government and you decide what you want carried out at a national level, local level and school level and then make all schools the same, I would not call them all admission authorities, I would just call them schools and say they have certain powers. Q524 Helen Jones: Let us not quarrel about the terminology, but the White Paper envisages that there will be no new community schools; schools will be responsible for their own admissions. I am asking you, as the schools adjudicator, how you would then draft a legal duty on local authorities to compel the school to admit the child if that child could not be found a place. Is that not a recipe for constant litigation? As a lawyer, I am all in favour of more work for lawyers, but it does not sound a very efficient way of running an education system. Dr Hunter: It will work, I guess, in the same way as it works now. I mentioned before that we have had cases where a school is wanting to withdraw from part of a catchment area and where the local authority felt that if that happened it would not be able to carry out its duty because there would be a hole in the middle of the authority and there would not be places for those children. What if that authority were to object to us and we upheld that objection? That is the sanction. That is the safeguard. Q525 Helen Jones: You are saying that in that case the local authority would have to refer the case to you, as the adjudicator. Dr Hunter: Yes. Q526 Helen Jones: Before that child has found a place. How long would that take, do you think? Dr Hunter: We deal with cases in six weeks, but that would be done before the application process had started. Schools decide their admission arrangements and authorities object to them 18 months ahead of the admissions process. Q527 Helen Jones: We are not talking about admissions arrangements here, we are talking about a particular child who could not be found a place. That might be for various reasons; that might not be 18 months in advance. Dr Hunter: On individual children of that kind there is already provision for the Department to direct a local authority to accept a particular child. That is there already. Q528 Chairman: Did you say a local authority or the Department? Dr Hunter: The Department. Q529 Helen Jones: The Department could direct a local authority. Dr Hunter: No, direct a school. Q530 Helen Jones: You did say a local authority. Dr Hunter: I am sorry. Q531 Helen Jones: So it would have to go up to the DfES. Dr Hunter: Sure. Clearly you can strengthen the role of local authorities in various ways if you want to, but these are matters which you are reaching towards, if you like. Q532 Helen Jones: That is not what is envisaged in the White Paper as currently drafted, is it? Dr Hunter: The White Paper as currently drafted, as I understand it, takes account of these provisions that there are there now, either for authorities that are worried about schools changing their admission arrangements to be corrected, if you like, through the adjudicator system, or, if they are ending up with individual children, the Department/the Secretary of State to direct the school to take the child in. Q533 Helen Jones: Thank you. Dr Hunter: Those are the safeguards that are there. There are some authorities - I think Essex is one of them - which have 75 per cent of the schools that are foundation and aided schools. I do not perceive there to be a huge problem in Essex that is not in other parts of the country. Q534 Chairman: So you think the system is working pretty well as it is? Dr Hunter: I think it can always be improved and I think that the idea of constantly trying to improve choice is right. And may I say that the very best way to improve choice is to improve schools, so that all schools become better and more parents want to send their children there. That is the best way to improve choice. That is what I guess all governments are trying to do. Chairman: Thank you, Dr Hunter. We are moving on now. Q535 Jeff Ennis: Dr Hunter, how much were you and your department consulted on the proposals contained in the White Paper on your expanded role? Dr Hunter: We were asked about individual points. There are certain things to do with trust schools and so on, and we were asked about whether they seem sensible. It is not our job and we keep a million miles away from having a view about whether trust schools or foundation schools or whatever are good things or bad things. That is your job and we do not want to get into that. Q536 Jeff Ennis: No, no, I am on about the function of your department that needed to be enhanced within the White Paper regarding your role as a schools adjudicator. Dr Hunter: On the technicalities we were consulted and we have said that we can deal with that. Q537 Jeff Ennis: You are comfortable with the blueprint of the White Paper as far as concerns your responsibilities. Dr Hunter: I am comfortable with what is in the White Paper. We can deal with the duties that are proposed for us. Q538 Helen Jones: You have already pointed out to the Committee that you have nine staff in total dealing with 20,000-odd schools. Does that not appear to be a certain degree of tokenism in terms of taking admissions seriously and appeals? Dr Hunter: First of all, we do not deal with individual appeals. That is dealt with at local authority level. It has been enough so far to deal with the cases that are referred to us. If there are more coming to us, then it is, frankly, very easy to appoint more adjudicators. We have come down from 16 to nine in the last three or four years, simply reflecting demand. We are all part time. It is a pretty attractive job, frankly, and there are plenty of ex chief education officers and inspectors out there who would gladly take it up if we needed to have a few more. Q539 Jeff Ennis: You mentioned in an earlier answer that you saw trends in the number of appeals, that it peaked and then it started going down this year, etcetera. You did not mention what the results of the appeals were, whether many were in favour of the appellant or vice versa. What is the ratio? Dr Hunter: On admission we had, I think, 150 last year of which we upheld about 100. It was the same the year before. We have been upholding about two-thirds of them, which does of course mean that 100 schools a year or whatever are getting it wrong. Q540 Jeff Ennis: Yes. You are leading me on to my next question: What do you read into the fact that so many of these appeals are successful? Does that not mean we are looking at the tip of the iceberg here and that we do need to beef the situation up? Dr Hunter: I think that most of the ones that we uphold are in schools that have simply not understood the code, have not read it properly, have not taken proper account of it - have not understood it really. In a small number of them - and it is a small number, but it is important - a school has deliberately decided, if you like, to get into the business of selecting the children that it wants to take. Q541 Jeff Ennis: Would there be any category of school that fell in to that particular situation more than others? Would that be community schools or specialist schools? Dr Hunter: I do not think so. Perhaps I should not say this but I think it is down to the head teachers as much as anything ... no, it is not actually. Chairs of governors sometimes get inflated ideas - I should be careful what I say - about what they are doing. So it is personalities, individual personalities. You still have a number of schools which have fallen out with a local authority and the relationship is still pretty sour. It is in instances like that that you get the problems. Q542 Jeff Ennis: There is one thing on which I very much agree with you. You said earlier that all schools should be treated the same. I agree with that. Given that sort of maxim, why should academies not be encouraged in the admissions process? In your opinion, should they be included? Dr Hunter: That is a matter for you. I am not sure I am allowed an opinion on that, but, if I were allowed an opinion, the answer would be yes. Q543 Jeff Ennis: The local admissions forum, are they toothless tigers? Are they something that need to be beefed up? Dr Hunter: If you look at the international position - in America, France, Scandinavia - in most countries, the area board (in our case the local admissions forum in the local authority) are more powerful than they are in this country. I think there is a lesson to be learned from that. Certainly I would like all local authorities to have this duty or understanding about what they are doing and I would like schools to understand that they do really have to take seriously what a local admissions forum says. Q544 Chairman: Dr Hunter, I would like to tease you out a little on something you referred to earlier, when you said it was down to individual chairs of governors and heads. Is that true? Is there not a category of school that seems to be more able to exclude certain kinds of pupils than others? Faith schools and the work coming out of the Sutton Trust, for example, is suggesting that, in a context in which such a small percentage of the population in the United Kingdom attend church regularly, when you look at the number of parents getting their children into faith schools there really is something going on which we have to be straightforward about, do we not? If there is this very big difference in the entry into faith schools and how that compares with the community they serve, there is something going on which is evading your scrutiny, surely. Dr Hunter: I honestly do not think so. I do not perceive any huge difference in faith schools, foundation schools, community schools or whatever in terms of what generally they are doing. It clearly is the case that there are more foundation schools which have fallen out with their local authority than community schools, for example. That is the history of the thing. That is the case. Two of our number have been diocesan directors of education and they are pretty tough cookies. They have been trying to make clear to their schools that they have to observe the code and so on. So it is down to personalities. Q545 Chairman: So it would not worry you, if there were more research emerging about the difference between the intake to faith schools or other schools and the community they serve. You would not look at that and say that is a systemic concern. Dr Hunter: I do not think so. You first of all have to make your mind up whether there are going to be faith schools or not. We have made our mind up as a nation that there are going to be faith schools. I do not see anybody not having faith schools in future. It is probably the case that people attracted most to faith schools ... It is not actually the case, come to think of it. I mean, I know plenty of faith schools that deal with inner city areas just as community schools do. It may be the case that there is a geographical difference in the distribution of these schools which has made a difference of one kind or another. I do not think I would regard that as systemic. Q546 Mrs Dorries: Do you think it is healthy that any group of parents, of any faith, can call for a school to be established? Do you think it is right that parents will be given those sorts of powers? Dr Hunter: That is a decision which is for you and for the Government, not for me. I am very, very anxious not to get into the politics of all of this. I do understand ---- Q547 Mrs Dorries: Is that a political question? Dr Hunter: I think it is. Q548 Chairman: Let us see how Dr Hunter interprets it. Dr Hunter: I am interpreting it as a question that I must be careful about and not get "plodging" around in your territory about. I think it probably is. My job, as an adjudicator, is to work within whatever framework you have set out. The White Paper is saying, as you say, that parents should have this power: you, as MPs, are either going to approve that or not and I will work within whatever you decide. Q549 Mrs Dorries: So you cannot have an opinion on that. Dr Hunter: I do not think I ought to have an opinion on that, frankly. It may be the case in two years time that one of these cases is referred to an adjudicator, and it may be the case - I have been there and know all about it - that it gets judicially reviewed, and you turn up in the High Court and some barrister says, "Hang on a minute, that is what you said two years ago. You had made your mind up before you had got to it." I am very anxious not to be put in that position. Q550 Mrs Dorries: All right. I will stick to the questions then. The NUT argues that the proposals in the White Paper could lead to a two-tiered admission system. Do you agree with that? Do you think that is a good thing? It is hard to argue against it. Dr Hunter: I do not think it is a good thing if it does lead to a two-tiered admission system. My reading of the White Paper is that that is not where it is going. My reading of the White Paper is that it is heading on a path in between. It is trying to maintain a line which is somewhere in between the two extremes of view that it might have held. I am comfortable with my reading of the White Paper. Q551 Mrs Dorries: Would you not agree that you could have in one geographical area schools which will set a particular admission policy, which will attract a particular child, and therefore will leave the other group of children to go to other schools which will have perhaps a less strict admissions code. Schools will be able to select by interview. Apparently schools will not be able to select by academic ability, but I would be very surprised if schools do not find a way round that. Surely it would lead to a two-tier system, would it not? Dr Hunter: If you have a decent local authority that is on the ball, it will have reviewed those admission arrangements every year, and if it feels that that is not within the terms of the code it will object. If it is, as you have described it, then an objection of that kind would be upheld by an adjudicator. Q552 Mrs Dorries: Do you think the admission authorities are going to find themselves with an avalanche of objections? Is your job going to be made a lot busier by this? I can see parents are going to be objecting to the code and to the way various schools interpret it: the fact that somebody wants to get their child to a particular school but cannot because the code has been administered in a different way from another school. Do you not think there is going to be this avalanche of complaints from parents? Dr Hunter: If it is made clear to schools that becoming their own admission authorities does not mean that they have total freedom to do exactly what they want and does mean they have to continue to act within the code, it does mean that they will have local authorities around them observing that they are doing, monitoring what they are doing and objecting if they feel that what they are doing is not within the terms of the code. If they are told all of that and that is their perception, then it will not lead to a huge increase in demand from services. Q553 Mrs Dorries: But the code can be incredibly flexible. It is down to interpretation: the way the schools interpret it, the way the local authority interprets it. One local authority could have a completely different interpretation from another and be less rigid or more rigid. There is a huge amount of flexibility within this code. Dr Hunter: I have to say I do not perceive that. It is our day-to-day job to receive an objection, hold it up against, if you like, the template of the code and see whether it conforms or not. When you are doing that, it does seem to me that the code is reasonably clear. I admit that there are individual cases where schools have tried to get round it. My experience is that when they have tried to do that and there is an objection we have upheld the objection. As I say, we uphold 100 a year of these things. Q554 Mrs Dorries: Do you think the code in itself offers enough protection to children from lower socio-economic groupings, for example? I do not see any provision within the code - and I could be wrong - that says schools have to taken their fair share of children with special educational needs or their fair share of children on free school meals. Dr Hunter: Oh, yes. Q555 Mrs Dorries: Do you not think schools will find a way around that? Dr Hunter: Certainly as far as special education needs (and, now, looked-after children) there are regulations which say that, where a child with special educational needs has got a named school, that school has to take them. It is going to be the same now with looked-after children. Those two categories of children are well protected. There is not some regulation or whatever that schools must take a certain proportion of children on free school meals or what-have-you, and that is because schools operate in very different circumstances from each other. I think it would be difficult to have blanket rules of that kind across the country. As you know, there are certain areas of London, for example, which have banding systems and those systems seem to work very well. They would not work, frankly, in most of the suburbs and in most of the counties. Q556 Mrs Dorries: The local authorities have more control now, they are both the commissioners and the providers of education, without the trust school system and the few foundation schools, and yet we do know that the top 200 schools have the lowest proportion of children with special educational needs and with free school meals. If that exists now under a more rigid system, I cannot understand how you would have such confidence in a system which is going to be more flexible. Dr Hunter: I keep returning to this idea of perception. I remember as a chief education officer ten years ago saying that the way we were going to operate as a local authority was to treat all schools as if they were foundation schools. It seemed to me that was the best way forward. It established the best relationship with head teachers and with governors and the rest of it. It is what the Government are now describing in their White Paper as local authorities acting as commissioners rather than, if you like, running their own schools. It seems to me that the White Paper does raise important matters of governance of schools, of who schools should be accountable to, whether they should be accountable to national government, local government, business, parents or what-have-you. That is an important debate, but that is a debate, if I may say so, for you, not for me. You go and have that debate, let me know what you have decided, and I will administer whatever it is that pops out at the end of it. I am not getting into that debate. Q557 Chairman: Dr Hunter, if some schools band and others accept children depending on the distance from their home, how does the local authority know in advance that every child is going to get a place? Dr Hunter: I think it works on experience and what happened last year and how the thing works - and it does work in most areas. You see very, very good admissions booklets: this is what happened last year; these children got in last year - a very clear indication to parents about what would happen this year if they applied Q558 Chairman: To go back to our original exchange, surely, in order for each school to be its own admission authority, in order to comply with the statutory obligation, to send a child to school and to have a place to receive that child, you are saying really that the local authority must have the statutory duty to override the local schools. Dr Hunter: I am saying that a local authority must have that statutory duty as it has now and there must be enough clout around the system to enable that authority to carry out its statutory duty. Q559 Chairman: Is that clear enough in the present arrangements, in the present statutory system? Dr Hunter: I think it probably is. If it is not, then it ought to be made clearer than it is and maybe there is something there that you want to take up wit the Secretary of State. I do not know. I am very clear that the two duties, on the parent and on the local authority go hand in hand and there must be enough clout in the system to make sure that the local authority can carry out its statutory duty. Q560 Chairman: In a sense, you are saying - and I welcome what you are saying - that quite a few people have got into a bit of a tizzy over this, when the Prime Minister has talked to large numbers of hundreds of independent schools within the state sector with their own admission arrangements, that that is not really a very dramatic change. Dr Hunter: That is not my reading of where the White Paper is going. I may have read it wrong, I do not know, but I read the White Paper as somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, if you like, of where it might have gone. As I say, I am quite comfortable with that. Q561 Chairman: So schools will still have that responsibility to respond to you and local authorities having that statutory duty to intervene. Dr Hunter: That is the way I read it. Q562 Mr Chaytor: Could I just come back to the question of choice and transport. The Government's interpretation of the best means of extending choice in the White Paper is through encouraging more parents to travel further to get a place at a school that currently they would be unable to obtain because of the transport problems. The converse does not seem to apply; that is to say, there is not the right of parents to secure a place in their nearest school. Do you think there ought to be? Dr Hunter: In my experience, the thing that infuriates parents most is when they want to send their children to a local school and cannot get in because the school has decided to do something else. That is the thing that really infuriates parents most. I think anything that strengthens the idea that if you want to go to your local school then you should have some sort of priority, is the right thing. Whether the physics of making it a statutory right would work, I do not know. I suspect it would be rather difficult to make that work physically, but certainly the idea of giving people priority in their local school, if that is where they want to go, is something I would support very strongly. Q563 Mr Chaytor: That ought to be in the White Paper as well, if the system is correct. Dr Hunter: Yes. I had seen that, may I say, in the code of Practice. I am sure it is in the Code of Practice and it was certainly in the last Code of Practice and the one before that, so that it is firmly embedded in the system somewhere. But it perhaps did not come through in the White Paper very strongly. Q564 Chairman: In order to have a fair and objective and clear set of admission arrangements are you saying that the White Paper is good enough for you or is there anything extra you would like to add as it is transformed into a Bill? Dr Hunter: I have read the White Paper and the draft Code of Practice together, but perhaps that was the wrong thing to do - and, given what is happening to the draft Code of Practice, it may have been the wrong thing to do. Certainly in the Code of Practice there is firmly embedded the notion that parents who wanted to send their children to local schools should have priority. If that is not in the White Paper somewhere, then I would like to see it there. I had just assumed it was perhaps. Q565 Chairman: So, clear, fair and objective. The one difference you would make is a greater emphasis on the ability of parents to send their child to the local school. Dr Hunter: I would want to see that there. I am just wondering about the word "greater" because I think it is there already, but, if it is not there already, I would like to see that - because my experience tells me that that is what parents say makes them most angry, if they cannot do that. Q566 Chairman: Dr Hunter, have we asked you all the right questions or is there anything else you want to tell the Committee that could help us make this White Paper a better White Paper? Dr Hunter: No. I think I have had a very fair hearing and I am very grateful to you for understanding. Chairman: It is a very great pleasure to have you in front of the Committee again. Thank you, Dr Hunter.
Memoranda submitted by Simon Burgess and Stephen Gorard Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Simon Burgess, University of Bristol; Professor Stephen Gorard, University of York; and Professor John Micklewright, University of Southampton, gave evidence. Q567 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor John Micklewright, Professor Stephen Gorard and Professor Simon Burgess to our proceedings. Stephen, you are an old hand at this. Professor Burgess, have you been in front of the Select Committee before? Professor Burgess: No. Q568 Chairman: I do not think you have Professor Micklewright? Professor Micklewright: No. Q569 Chairman: We will not make it a daunting experience. You have seen us in operation before and we are here to gather information and evidence. Thank you for sparing the time from your very busy schedules. I do not think any of you have yet pulled stumps in your particular universities. I know if you were at Oxford or Cambridge you would have finished a couple of weeks ago but you have proper terms in your universities, do you not, you work the capital well? Right, shall we get started then. You know what we are about, we are looking at the White Paper and its essential elements, what drives it, the principles and also the particular recommendation within the White Paper. In a strange way we are almost doing a preleg inquiry before the "leg" is in front of us. We are doing the preleg inquiry on the White Paper in one sense. We have been very grateful for the great deal of information and prior information you have given to this Committee. Can I start off then with you Professor Gorard and ask what is your evaluation of the White Paper in terms of its own objectives? Do you think it is going to succeed in delivering on improving standards in schools using diversity and choice? Professor Gorard: It is a big paper and there are many different chapters on different things. Obviously my research touches on several of the chapters but if we concentrate on the school admission arrangements for the moment, I am afraid I find it confused. I would not be a regular reader of White Papers but I find it difficult to see a coherent, sustained argument from the aims and objectives that are suggested at the beginning to the actual policies that were presented at a lower level, so that was my overall summary. Q570 Chairman: Professor Burgess, Professor Micklewright, what are your views in those terms? Professor Burgess: I would not disagree with those comments. My research is focused on school choice and in regard to that I think there are some welcome things in the White Paper and also some things that I think may be disadvantageous. Q571 Chairman: What would you welcome? Professor Burgess: I welcome the support for allowing kids from poorer families to operate choice quite possibly as successfully as more affluent families do. I worry about the greater freedom given to trust status schools in deciding their own admissions to some greater degree than they do now. Q572 Chairman: Were you not reassured by the Chief Adjudicator whom we heard just now? Professor Burgess: To some degree. It is clearly setting out the procedures in the way they work. Myself and possibly my colleagues here were looking at how outcomes turn out in terms of the data and perhaps they are not quite as reassuring. Q573 Chairman: Right. Professor Micklewright? Professor Micklewright: I am a statistician rather than an educational specialist but the views I hold are similar to those of Professor Burgess. At the moment I think it is difficult to see exactly what some of the implications will be in practice from the principles that are laid down in the Paper. Q574 Chairman: But you are great internationalists, you know what is happening internationally, you have done a lot of comparative work as well as your individual research. We have been told by those who should know that even in terms of the statistics we have got absolutely the best possible group of people in front of this Committee at this moment. In terms of how you view both comparative data and the research that you have carried out, how do you think this Government and all governments are performing in terms of delivering a high-quality education to the roughly 25 or 30 per cent of children in schools that seem to underperform? Stephen, do you want to start with that one? Professor Gorard: Yes, I suppose just a short bit of background then. I think that the long-term historical trends educationally in this country (and I think across Europe where I have been doing my comparative work) are that standards, as far as it is possible to measure these, are rising, that schools are becoming more mixed, opportunities are becoming fairer, and gaps in attainment between different groups of students are becoming smaller. The long-term historical trends are quite good. I think the position of the UK, and England in particular, is not bad in international terms despite some of the stories and crisis accounts going around about problems. To some extent you could attribute (although it is difficult because we have not done any experimental work) the relatively good position in terms of gaps in attainment by groups and school mix to the comprehensive school system which was comprehensive in organisation and then comprehensive in delivery through the national curriculum, in a way that some of our French counterparts are now envying. If I have a concern that I would share with Simon it would be that some of the proposals in the White Paper are in danger of threatening that relative position of the United Kingdom and England because once you have accounted for the geographical factors of the intakes to the schools that Phillip Hunter was alluding to, then the largest determinant statistically of the intakes to schools and the segregation between schools in terms of different groups and in terms of the attainment groups is local patterns of diversity. By diversity I mean schools which are autonomous from LEA control. It may not be a causal mechanism but there is a strong statistical association. Q575 Chairman: There was a bit of research by you particularly, Professor Gorard, which when I finished reading it, it just seemed to me that part of the argument is that whatever system you have - and you take in students and you shape them up in terms of a variety of educational experiences - the educational experiences do not seem to make much difference. Professor Gorard: Clearly it does make a difference to the individuals. I think perhaps what you are referring to is what differential progress is made in different schools under different systems. That goes back to the question of why do we care about the school mix; why should we care whether children are or are not clustered with children who are similar in different schools; why should we care about the two-tier admission process, and so on? My argument is, yes, I do not think academically there is much evidence that it makes much difference. I think the key issue is the experience of the children in the schools as a mini society. Emerging international evidence - and it can only be indicative at this stage - is that who you go to school with affects your sense of social justice because the children of course are not seeing school as something that is a means to an end, they are seeing it as a society so their expectations of what society should be like are shaped by their experience in school. The mix of children and the range of opportunities within the school affects what they see society will be like, so that is why I think it matters. Q576 Chairman: I am not suggesting political ideology here but is there an ideology in that on Page 2 of the briefing paper you gave the Committee, you say "market policies undermine welfare states". Can you expand on that? Professor Gorard: I suppose they are different processes to try and achieve similar things. I am not sure they necessarily work very well together. A welfare state is one that is intended to redistribute opportunities to help the most disadvantaged and I am not sure that market forces are capable of doing that. Q577 Chairman: You would describe the aspirations in the White Paper as a desire to bring in market forces to a greater degree in the educational system in England? Professor Gorard: No, as I think I said when I started out, it did not strike me - and it is probably just me being a poor reader - that there was an overall coherence to it in the sense you could say yes it is about market forces. As I think other speakers have already alluded to, there are many, many bits of it which I think are extremely good policies, but they seem to be wrapped up with things that are based on false assumptions and so on. So I found it very difficult to come up with an overall conclusion. Q578 Chairman: Could you help us during the answers you give today to tease out the better bits and the worst bits? Professor Gorard: I can do that. Q579 Chairman: Do you want to give any of them now? Professor Gorard: I have grouped them under two main questions. One is why should we care about the school mix, and I will leave that for the moment, and the key one, if we do care about the school mix, is how could we reduce segregation. I think the mention of banding, which I guess has been politically sensitive, is really interesting. I think if it is handled properly so it is area banding it has been shown to be very effective in reducing social segregation between schools. What I would worry about is the fact that it would impose extra tests and extra administration. So I think there is a way but I guess here I am disagreeing with the last witness that you could adjust the intake to schools using existing data so data that is already collected by the annual schools census and use that to set guidelines for proportions that were related to the local area not to the school and certainly not, as with the CTCs, in relation to the applicants to the school. It would have to be in relation to the local residents, the potential users of the school. I think the idea of strengthening co-ordinated admissions, and trying to use the same processes and the same criteria as far as possible would help reduce it. I really like the idea of extending free travel. I think there was an inconsistency in previous policy in telling poor families that "you no longer have to go to your local school if it is a poor one, you can go to another one, but if it is not the nearest school, if it is not the one in your housing estate then we are not prepared to pay for free transport". That anomaly has been overcome and I would really welcome seeing evaluation of the possibility of providing bussing to schools for all children, mainly for its educational impact or school mix impact but perhaps also for environmental and other reasons. I really like those aspects. I think the expansion of popular schools - and in a sense, as I have alluded to earlier, I do not think necessarily the most popular schools - is a good idea. Those are three or four different things because what you are doing then is you are using funds to fund surplus places rather than appeals because the two things are in tension. If you reduce the number of surplus places you are going to get more appeals and if you increase the number of surplus places you have more freedom in the system and you have fewer appeals. It is a question of what you want to spend your money on. Q580 Chairman: The expansion of existing successful schools is very expensive, is it not? We have had evidence to the Committee that if a school of 900 loses 150 pupils it could easily go into a spiral of decline. On the other hand, if the school up the road takes on another 150 pupils it might ruin or certainly undermine what makes it an excellent and popular school. Professor Gorard: Hence market forces are in contention with the welfare state. You can have a planned economy for schools or we can allow parents to choose. If we allow them to choose we have to find extended transport arrangements and allow schools to expand to meet demand. Q581 Chairman: Any similar comment from Professor Micklewright? Professor Micklewright: Well, the evidence I have submitted to you is more on the international picture of how the system we have now in England compares in its outcomes with those in other countries. I entirely agree with Stephen Gorard that this sort of evidence, which he has also produced himself, contradicts scare stories or anecdotal caricatures of how England compares with other countries both in terms of levels of social segregation and levels of attainment within schools. Nevertheless, I think those international comparisons are useful to the extent they show how much our current system is a different outlier in the degree of parental choice and school choice across the group of rich, industrialised countries and shows us features of the school systems of those countries that seem to be driving very much greater levels of social segregation, which we would be well advised not to try and go down that route. I do not think the White Paper is intending to - and I am talking here about the division between vocational, technical and academic schooling in Germany or Austria - and I think it would be very difficult to interpret the emphasis on specialist schools in the White Paper as being a firm move in that direction. Q582 Chairman: But this Select Committee has visited a number of countries over the five years that I have chaired it and what we find in almost every country we have gone to - France, Germany, the United States - is that there is a percentage of students that do not seem to be able to get the quality of education they deserve, that they deserve in terms of their ability particularly, and no society that we have been to seems to have the ability to address that. I agree with you entirely and I think many members of the Committee would agree with you that we are doing reasonably well (although we are not complacent) but is not the White Paper really trying to address that 25 to 30 per cent and how successfully is it trying to address that 25 or 30 per cent of under-achievement which is surely linked to the fact that at 16 we have more children dropping out of education than almost all the other OECD members? Professor Micklewright: That has been a long-standing problem for 30 years or more since comparative data has been collected. It is one where the problem is reducing but it is still there and one could argue about the size of that group that is not getting the quality of education, whether it is 25 or 30, whether it is ten or 15, but I do not think that is the issue. Q583 Chairman: Where would you put it? Professor Micklewright: I would not put it at any one of figures because I think it is very difficult to define in an absolute sense what is a good educational system. I think Stephen Gorard is right in the points that he has made, and other witnesses too, and you even managed to extract from the Chief Adjudicator some comment on the positive features, maybe I am wrong on that, such as the issue of school transport, I cannot remember exactly what he said, but the key point that he made is that greater choice for some should not be at the expense of that of others. That is the key point to keep ramming home and battering away at the Government on. Q584 Chairman: Professor Burgess? Professor Burgess: The first thing to say is international comparisons of levels of attainment is not something that I have worked personally on so I do not really want to offer an opinion on that. In terms of looking at levels of school mix and school segregation and so on there are two things I would want to say. One is if you compare areas of this country with selection and without selection the levels of segregation of pupils in areas without selection are way lower than they are in areas that still retain grammar schools, so we can take from that the move from a grammar school system to a comprehensive system has reduced quite markedly the levels of social, ethnic and also ability segregation. In comparing the UK with other countries, one of the obvious comparators is the US and levels of segregation there are far higher than they are here. Chairman: Stephen? Q585 Stephen Williams: Can I just ask some questions about the effect of parental choice on the social composition of schools. To what extent do you think parental choice on its own does affect the social composition of schools, leaving aside other factors? Professor Burgess: One thing we have done in our research is look at different areas of the country, different local education authorities and areas where there is greater choice in the sense people can easily reach more schools, we find higher levels of sorting and segregation in terms of a measure of attainment, Key Stage 2 schools, and so on, also in terms of eligibility for free school meals, and in terms of ethnicity, so what we are taking from that is the greater levels of choice that we have had in the system in the last couple of years is leading to greater segregation. Q586 Stephen Williams: Right. Do you think it has changed over time? In the paper we had from Professor Gorard and your colleague Professor Fitz, who is not here, there is a quote from the TES in 2002 which just to summarise it says that schools now are even more socially stratified than the old grammar schools and secondary moderns that they replaced. Do you think that is a fair comment? Professor Gorard: Obviously not because the paper argues quite strongly against that. There is volatility but the long-term historical trends, perhaps disappointingly for this Committee, as far as I can see, seem to transcend particular policies and particular administrations. There seems to be greater or common movement there. An important element in choice is to distinguish between choice and diversity because choice and diversity often roll together, they trip off the tongue quite nicely together, but I think they are two separate things. Choice, as far as we can see, certainly had had no segregating effect on schools so that when you feed in what we know about all of the schools we have done analysis for in the last 12 or 13 years now of all the secondary schools in England, local geography is the key thing that determines intake of schools, who can get there, what are the characteristics of potential students. After that, diversity would probably be the biggest thing, so autonomy from LEA control and that in a sense is almost independent of the type of schools, whether it is faith-based, Welsh-medium, grammar schools, selective, foundation and so on. There are three areas that pertain and banding and segregation is far less even within a system of choice, and areas that have strict catchment area adherence generally have higher levels of segregation than those that allow elements of choice. So you could argue again - and there is no experimental evidence, very little evaluation but by trawling through the data we have found it - that choice by itself not linked to diversity does not harm and maybe slightly reduces segregation but you have to look at it in terms of that long-term historical trend. I worry when people talk about in things like that Sutton Trust study about the top 200 schools having fewer students with disadvantage and so on because obviously you have got to look at what the causal mechanism is. I think commentators are attributing the goodness to the school partly on the basis of the student intake rather than the other way round. It is not that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are being excluded systematically from good schools. It is just that the definition of a good school for the Sutton Trust and many commentators takes no account of the intake of the school, which is why the value added analysis and what that shows is absolutely crucial. Q587 Stephen Williams: Can I look at the differences between neighbourhood schooling, or catchment areas as you have just referred to it as, and expansion of choice. In both the papers of Professor Burgess and Professor Gorard they talk about affluent clustering or "selection by mortgage" if you have neighbourhood schooling, and it is argued in both that to some extent that choice could lead to a more diverse social structure within schools. Profess Burgess, you are an economist and can I summarise crudely roughly what you are saying. You are saying that if popular schools were able to expand you would have a more diverse intake, but in the real educational world, popular schools are not like factories producing widgets in competition, they cannot expand their places in the same way, so is this a real choice in between two different structures --- Professor Burgess: I think there are clearly practical problems in terms of popular schools expanding. I think the distinction I would really like to be clear is between neighbourhood schooling where everybody goes to their local school and choice-based schooling where the schools are more or less the size that they are now and they do not change very much, and then a choice base with much more flexibility in terms of school size. If you compare neighbourhood schooling with choice plus flexibility, I think neighbourhood schooling would produce and does produce much more clustered, segregated communities and schools, for the obvious reason that some people can afford to live near those schools and others cannot. If you have a system of choice but with fixed numbers of places in good schools and bad schools, then somehow or other if through that system some families are better at working that system than others, again you end up with segregation. The appeal in principle of school choice is that it can break the key link between which school you go to and your family income. That is the goal that is worth looking for. That is only going to work if places in popular schools can be increased and can expand. Practically there are obviously problems. You cannot build a whole new set of classrooms in a few weeks. I think some of the issues are around how there are different ways of increasing places in popular schools. One is simply you build more classrooms or whatever, but to the extent that the things that make the good school good are transferable then you could potentially achieve the same end by allowing the popular school to run another school, if, for example, it is management, if it is ethos and leadership, and so that may be transferable without being diluted too much. If, on the other hand, it is the peer group that makes the good school good then that clearly would be diluted and it may be that schools are using the practical difficulties of "we cannot build another classroom" to cover the fact that they do not really want to expand because they worry they would no longer be a good school. Q588 Stephen Williams: Whether they want to expand is evidence we have had previously from Sir Alan Steer when he was here on an entirely different subject and the Chairman asked him a question about whether he would want his popular school to expand and he quite clearly said no he would not (summarising what he said) so I think there is something in that. Do you think there is any evidence as an alternative to that that a head teacher would want to take over essentially a failing school a couple of miles away? Professor Burgess: I do not know of any hard evidence on that and I imagine it is going to vary both with the answer to my question of what makes a good school good and in terms of the characters and ambitions of headteachers. Professor Gorard: There was the Popular Schools Initiative in Wales in the 1990s so there is evidence of what happens if you allow popular schools to grow because that is what happened. Q589 Stephen Williams: What happened in Wales? Professor Gorard: The popular schools did want to grow, although not all of them, and they were not all allowed to and think there are lessons you could learn from it which are both positive and negative. Q590 Chairman: Are big schools good for children? We had an interesting discussion about Schumacher - he had Welsh connections, did he not - and "small is beautiful". Would this not lead to great big schools in which kids feel alienated? Is there any research about the benefits of having a smaller rather than larger school? Professor Burgess: No, not that I know of. It certainly does not mean there is not any, but none that I know of. A big school does not need to be on a single site. It could be a school on several sites. Professor Gorard: The evidence I know of is about teaching units. That has been the key element of consideration rather than the size of the school. Professor Micklewright: One can see the arguments both ways. I think the argument you are implying is that people feel happier in a small school but a large school clearly provides greater choice of subject matters and areas and the ability to combine at secondary level all manner of A levels one with the other. Q591 Chairman: It would be interesting to see if there was any research around size. Professor Gorard: The research I know of is around the way in which parents make choices. They prefer to have small schools which is to some extent why you might be able to take the handle off the size of the school because in a sense they would not grow to unwieldy sizes if parents, as far as one can see from the evidence, do not want large schools. Q592 Chairman: So you see the argument for expansion as a stimulus rather than anything else? Professor Gorard: Yes. Chairman: Sorry, Stephen. Q593 Stephen Williams: I know there are other people who want to come in, Chairman, so I will just ask one question. Right at the end of your submission, Professor Burgess, paragraph 21, there is a quite separate comment where you say because Trevor Phillips has concerns about ethnic segregation in schools this would be an "unfortunate time" to encourage new faith schools, which does not flow from the rest of your paper. Would you look to expand on that? Professor Burgess: It is a serious point. Some other work that I have done with colleagues from Bristol, Dr Wilson and Dr Ruth Lupton, suggests that schools are on average acting to increase residential segregation in terms of ethnicity. Given the concerns that Trevor Phillips has expressed and the events around these, creating a system which encourages a lot of schools that are essentially mono-faith is possibly not a great idea right now. Q594 Chairman: Is it not better for those faith schools that are in the private and unregulated sector to come into the state sector or not? It is not as though they do not exist. Professor Burgess: Indeed. I am not sure of the answer to that. Chairman: Right. Roberta? Q595 Dr Blackman-Woods: I wanted to ask a couple of questions about social mix, I think to Stephen, going back to a point that you made a while ago about why we are trying to do that, you were saying a positive aspect of the White Paper was the possible bussing of children from poorer backgrounds to give them wider choice. Is that because we know that if you reduce social segregation you increase standards? I am trying to see what the end goal is. Is the end goal just to have social mix so the society you were describing in schools as a society is an end in itself? What is the impact of that on standards, because although I can see there is a very strong argument for children from poorer backgrounds who are performing less well that you might want to do that, but there would be a very strong counter-argument which said if there was a school with a very narrow selection it would do very well? I want to hear the arguments of why we are reducing social segregation in standards terms. Is there an argument? Professor Gorard: Yes, there are some sources of evidence, and I think the last two rounds of PISA studies that have been published have suggested there is a relationship between national standards of education, national attainment, and the extent to which the national schools systems are mixed. That came as a surprise in the 2001 study because most people felt perhaps with some of the North European systems that actually selection and dividing up children into streams would lead to higher standards but also higher segregation. I think now most analysts have been convinced at the very least there is no relationship, and that you do not have to sacrifice school mix in order to get good standards. There is even some suggestion that a positive mix and attainment are correlated, but these are incomplete data at national level. Q596 Dr Blackman-Woods: So more work has to be done on this, but would that not then be a very strong argument against very narrow selection whether it is by faith or private schools having an intake from quite a wealthy selective group of parents? Professor Gorard: As far as I have seen, and I have done a review of it relatively recently, I have never seen any convincing evidence that selecting students means that those students do disproportionately better than they would have done in an alternative system, certainly not in a way that is not then compensated for at a cost for people who have been deselected. You have got to look at the system as a whole. My point about travel at one level was a relatively simple one. There is a tension between the national policy which says "you can pick any school you like within reason" and the local one that says "if you pick any school that is not your nearest school or your allocated catchment area school we are not going to pay for transport to it". So basically it was choice for people who could afford their own transport. I welcomed it primarily for that reason. It may have an impact on standards but I think it is less likely. Q597 Chairman: What would you say to a colleague of mine who in that particular regard said, "I can see a lot of kids getting on buses to go out of my constituency but not a lot getting on a bus to come into my constituency." What would you say to him? Professor Gorard: You have to decide what the level of bussing is and where the margin is going to be. If it is done within local education authorities we are not necessarily talking about bussing outside authorities. It might be you that have school districts in some cases where there are not small unitary authorities where they are actually a smaller group. We are not talking about what are the geographical parameters for this. There are areas with low population density, for example in South West Wales, where children are entitled to be bussed across LEA boundaries and they maybe bypass six or seven schools because they are going to Welsh-medium education. Again you can look at the evidence on that and what that is doing. Q598 Chairman: Professor Gorard, the experience of a lot of Members of Parliament would be in town centre constituencies and city centre constituencies when there has been a kind of view amongst many parents that the grass is greener indeed up the valley, outside, a little bit further, and that this great desire, as we saw in Birmingham when we spent a week in Birmingham, to get away from schools in the city centre and pursue whatever the rationale of that was to move out. Indeed, we saw most of the comprehensive state schools in the centre of Birmingham closed and then enormous distances being travelled by pupils being bussed and being taken in their parents' vehicles across the city. Is that not one of the dangers of this? Professor Gorard: Yes, I think that is one of the things you would see from the very limited evidence of the Popular Schools Initiative in Wales. In an inner city like Cardiff you have got a northward drift and much larger schools in the north of the city and less in the south where there were high levels of poverty. You have had that transit. Although segregation has reduced, it has led, presumably, to an increase in travel distances. Q599 Chairman: Also here we have a Government that wants city academies to regenerate the poorest parts of our towns and cities at the same time as we are introducing something you could argue that will take more pupils out of the central city and urban areas. Are the two policies conflicting? Professor Gorard: I am not convinced they are. I would have to go away and think about that a bit more. The thing about academies, in so far as we can see from the limited evidence we have from the years so far, is that they have been successful in the terms I understand they were set up for, which is the rebadging of the school preventing that flow out, so they have changed the nature of the intake. The problem is I do not think that has been celebrated as much as it should have been because certain commentators have had to at least convey the impression that they are still dealing with the same pupil groups as they did before and that explains their increase in results. I think we should forget about the standards issue for a minute. I do not think they are producing better results with the current pupils. I think they are changing the nature of the pupil intake. If the academies were chosen correctly in the first place, and one or two have not been but most of them were, they are the most disadvantaged schools in the most disadvantaged areas. If they are turning around their intake they are reducing social segregation and reducing the very flows you are frightened we would see. I would like to see that celebrated more because I think that can actually work in with the idea of allowing increased travel. Q600 Chairman: So the Government has got academies right? Professor Gorard: I think they have but we do not see evidence of why they are working because most of the commentary from the DfES and from the Government has been they are achieving higher standards with the same students, which is patently not the case. What they have done is change the nature of the student intake. Q601 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think that is a critical point but I suppose what I was trying to get at is whether increasing the social mix in itself will drive up standards because it is something that I think is underpinning the White Paper and I think you are saying, yes, there is some evidence for that. Professor Gorard: A small amount. Professor Micklewright: May I come in on that. I have interpreted your question as being that the purpose of transporting students around would be to either improve the social mix and/or to improve school standards, possibly both with the social mix, but my understanding and my reading of the proposal in the White Paper is not that. It is simply if you are going to give more choice to parents then you should give more choice to all parents and enabling children to move around is going to be part of that. The level of choice that parents have at the moment is already high in England, as one might measure in different ways. Professor Burgess's work has shown the proportion of children who do not go to the nearest schools is over half not going to their nearest school. Our work shows that the percentage of children that say they are going to a better school than others in the area is higher in England than other OECD countries, and substantially higher than in many. Viewed in these ways there is quite a lot of choice already but the issue is who is exercising that choice. Our work again shows that taking that measure you have just mentioned, the percentage of children who say they are in a school which is known to be better than others in the area, that more children coming from more educated family backgrounds respond positively to that question than those from other backgrounds. Q602 Helen Jones: I think, as Professor Gorard said quite rightly, choice and diversity are often run together and they are not the same thing but they are run together in the White Paper. There is a lot about choice and diversity. Do you have any evidence to give the Committee that those two things working together - diversity of schools and the choice offered to parents - drive up standards? Is there any evidence for that? Professor Gorard: No, no evidence at all. The analysis I have done would suggest that there is by and large no relationship to the outcomes from schools (and we have to use rather gross measures like public examination outcomes because in order to get large enough studies we are not going to be able to administer other tests of competence and so on) in terms of examination outcome. By and large, schools deliver the outcomes but it will be predicated on pupil intake to school. Obviously the teachers do a good job of taking the students through the school, the students are transformed by the schools, but what we cannot necessarily do is identify which schools are doing particularly better or worse than others. There is certainly no consistency over time. One of the things that concerns me about the White Paper is it is talking about closing weak schools. I am not convinced we are scientifically able to identify weak schools. We are actually talking about popular and unpopular schools which is a different issue. Q603 Chairman: What is the point of Ofsted then? Professor Gorard: Are you trying to get me into trouble? Q604 Chairman: Sorry, what did you say? Professor Gorard: Are you trying to get me into trouble? Q605 Chairman: Ofsted tells us there are 200 underperforming schools and they have got to do something about it dramatically. Professor Gorard: I have not looked at the recent figures. The last time I looked at the schools that were being put through special measures and so on, they were disproportionately inner city schools with high levels of disadvantaged children and so on. In the White Paper it talks about special schools taking children exclusively with disabilities and special needs being disproportionately failing schools. You could accept that as a true finding but a sceptic might say possibly something is wrong with the analysis there that says, yes, it is schools that take poor kids, yes, it is schools in inner city areas, yes, it is the schools with high levels of special educational need that are doing badly and, yes, it is the schools in the leafy suburbs that are doing disproportionately well. Q606 Chairman: The Prime Minister always comes back and says, and Ofsted says that taking like for like and the same kind of level of disadvantage some schools do much better with their pupils than others. Professor Gorard: I am afraid I have never seen evidence of that. Q607 Helen Jones: If I could continue, Chairman. In your opinion would having more admissions authorities, in other words each school being its own admission authority, lead to greater social segregation amongst pupils? If you have any evidence on that, what do you think produces that? Is it because we do not have a proper admissions code of practice or is it social influences? Do you have any data that would predict possible outcomes for what is proposed in the White Paper? Professor Micklewright: I think the Chief Adjudicator's answer to the same question was spot on, that if the schools are forced to adhere to a code of practice and recognise that the rules of the game have not chosen that way, then the increased choice that they may have on paper may not mean a great deal in practice, of an unfavourable kind. Q608 Helen Jones: But the code of practice at the moment is something they have to have regard to, is it not? Professor Micklewright: Sorry? Q609 Helen Jones: At the moment schools only have to have regard to the code of practice. Are you saying that if that was given greater force then it would not lead to greater segregation or are you saying currently there is no evidence that the system ---? Professor Micklewright: I am sorry, I am not qualified to judge on that but it seemed to me as a lay person in this area on the regulations that the answer the Chief Adjudicator gave was a very sensible one, but you are the better judge of that than me. Q610 Helen Jones: Professor Burgess? Professor Burgess: The evidence that we have is if you compare different areas of the country where schools are in a more competitive environment or a less competitive environment and in places where schools feel pressure from more alternative schools nearby to them, then sorting and segregation is higher in those areas. That does not cut directly to your question but if we move to a situation where schools act more competitively, they have more freedom, then that does suggest that we would expect to see more segregation. That is one of the elements I mentioned right at the beginning about the trust status situation which I would find worrying. I wonder if I might also --- Q611 Chairman: Why is that, given that foundation schools already exist? Professor Burgess: There are not that many of those, therefore if we moved to a situation where almost all schools have a trust status we would move into a situation which is going to be much more competitive from the point of view of schools. I wonder if I could make a response to the previous question about social mix and travelling and so on. I think part of the issue about social mix is that it is a euphemism for which schools poor kids get to go to, and typically poor kids get to go to less good schools, so changing the social mix is connected to this issue of whether kids from poorer families get a fair crack of the whip of going to the better schools. Again the appeal of allowing greater choice is that it might well bring that about. Q612 Helen Jones: Can I just take you up on that because is this not a result of the confusion between school outcomes and effective teaching? When we talk about better schools are we not often talking about schools that have the more motivated and easier to teach pupils? There is a difference between that and schools which produce good outcomes even for pupils who might be disadvantaged or more difficult to teach, is there not? Are we not confusing the two? Professor Burgess: In the data that I looked at the only outcomes we have are scores in the national exams, key stage 2, 3, and GCSEs and so on. Your distinction is absolutely right between the raw scores that schools produce, the GCSEs, and also the value added they add to kids relative to the scores that pupils are coming into. I do not think it is a straightforward question which we should be looking at because in terms of what parents can see and what parents can make a choice on, the basis of the school league tables and performance tables were until very recently purely in terms of GCSEs. I think most (not all) parents are well aware of those. Thinking about value added, statisticians disagree on how to measure it. It is quite complex to try and measure and to understand. It is not clear to me that parents can make decisions based on that very straightforwardly. They may well have their own view of what schools do on the basis of talking to people but in terms of league tables and so on it is that that is clearly measured. Q613 Helen Jones: I understand that. What I was trying to get at is if we allowed popular schools to expand, do we have any evidence that they would continue to produce the same outcomes? In other words, are they popular because at the moment they are producing good outcomes but that is because they have a lot of pupils who make it quite easy? As an ex-teacher I know that it is very easy to teach bright, well motivated children. Is there any evidence from elsewhere internationally to show that they would continue to produce as good outcomes as they expand or would it be as they had to take children who are more difficult to teach they might do very well with their own children but overall the outcomes would not look as good? Professor Burgess: There are two points there. One is we have evidence to suggest that schools that produce high value added produce that high value added for all of the kids in that school, so it is, roughly speaking, constant across the low key stage 2, middle, and so on. The second point is what changes as the peer group changes? For statistical, technical reasons it is really quite hard to truly estimate the peer group effects. There is a little bit of robust evidence on this that suggests peer groups are important but it is not case that there is a vast wall of studies that say that peer groups are or are not important. Helen Jones: If the outcome of what is proposed was greater social segregation in schools, do you have any evidence on what will be the effects of that from anywhere else? Does it matter academically? Does it matter socially? What does it tell us? Q614 Chairman: Who wants to take that? Professor Gorard: Yes, I was hoping to come in on your previous question but I will pick that up then. Q615 Chairman: Come in on either. Professor Gorard: The research that we have done suggests that areas where there are more autonomous schools, the schools that are able to make their own admission arrangements, are more segregated, once you have taken the geography and the population into account than equivalent areas. Obviously we cannot therefore be sure that there is a causal mechanism but the changes over time would suggest that schools making their own admission arrangements is related to increased social segregation. The problem we have got of course is this is not happening in random areas. The areas that have more autonomous schools are self-selecting so there is a problem there with the analysis. There are various ways in which we could posit a mechanism for the segregation, so for example some of the schools are using supplementary forms after the original one and some schools are actually conducting interviews with parents and so on. This is not to suggest that these are being intentionally selective but there might be some mechanism whereby, at least inadvertently, the schools are being covertly successful. Q616 Helen Jones: "All the people like us" factor. Professor Gorard: It is all sorts of things we could imagine could happen and it is an interesting area to investigate. I think the work of Anne West at the LSE touches on that, so it would be worth looking at that if you wanted to pursue that. The autonomous schools include the voluntary aided and the voluntary controlled schools in our study and it is the other ones that appear to be related to increased social segregation. In relation to some of the comments made in the previous session it is important to realise when we are talking about segregation that we are talking about the extent to which pupils are clustered in relation to the potential users of the schools, not in relation to some overall picture, so that if you had, say, a faith-based school that was inner city the fact that it had a high level of disadvantage is not in itself evidence that it is not segregated. It has to be looked at in relation to the area around it and the evidence is that all of the faith-based schools take fewer than their fair share of disadvantaged students although many of them, particularly Catholic schools, are in areas of quite considerable disadvantage and therefore in raw score terms they are taking quite high levels of disadvantage, but that is not what I mean by segregation. Q617 Helen Jones: I understand. Can I ask you one last question about the international comparisons. It was said earlier that countries which have overall good national outcomes in education have schools which tend to be fairly mixed socially. Now, can you enlighten us a bit, is that because they are in societies which are perhaps less socially segregated in terms of housing and so on or is it because there has been a definite effort to produce social mix? I am thinking of places like Finland where the Finns say, "What is the problem? Everyone goes to their local school." Do you have any evidence on that? Is it a result of social factors or is it deliberate educational planning? Professor Micklewright: I do not think we have the evidence. I think you are absolutely right to raise that issue as one where it is too easy to point to crude differences across countries and say that country has better attainment, that country has a less segregated system, so it must be cause and effect, but that is not the case. Q618 Chairman: Many people are talking about the research on Sweden. What is your evaluation of that? Sweden has been very much talked about in terms of the research that shows that greater diversity and greater choice has led to greater segregation. Is that right? What is the right interpretation of the Swedish work? Professor Burgess: The research that I know of is a reform in Stockholm City where I am not sure it is correct to describe it as an increase in choice. My understanding of the reform was that they moved from a system where a child had priority at its local school to a system where schools admitted on the basis of grades, so schools could choose on the basis of prior exam scores of the children. Unsurprisingly, that led to a dramatic change in the degree of segregation by ability in different schools. I think this is still on-going research so things may well change but it did not seem to have a big impact in terms of where people lived, in terms of neighbourhoods. Chairman: David Chaytor knows more about this than most people in this Committee. David, do you want to come in there? Q619 Mr Chaytor: I would have done had the Committee agreed to my suggestion that we should visit Sweden, but the Committee decided not to! Could I pursue the point about international comparisons and ask Professor Micklewright, in the table you provided in your paper clearly the Scandinavian countries have lower levels of segregation but is it the case that all of those Scandinavian countries perform well in the PISA reports regardless of the relationship between the school system and the nature of society? Professor Micklewright: I cannot remember exactly. I think that is the case, that they perform well in terms of average attainments and also in terms of restricting the inequality of attainment, but I would advise you to be very cautious about drawing the implication that is because they have less segregated schools systems. Q620 Mr Chaytor: Sure. Accepting it might be difficult to draw conclusions about the impact of the system of schooling in Sweden or Finland, there is one part of the United Kingdom that is right at the bottom of the segregation index and that is Scotland, so is it not possible to make assessments of the impact of a less segregated schooling system in Scotland compared to a more segregated schooling system in England because we are talking about essentially two parts of the United Kingdom rather than the difference between the UK and Scandinavia? Professor Micklewright: Yes, it is a more fruitful avenue to pursue. At the moment in our research we are not at the stage where we can draw definitive conclusions to say "England is more segregated than Scotland because ..." but you are right in thinking that, yes, other things are more equal between Scotland and England than they are between England and Sweden. Q621 Mr Chaytor: We presumably have outcome data for Scotland in terms of GCSE scores, A level scores, post-16 participation rates as well. How do they compare generally with English outcome measures? Professor Micklewright: Of course a lot of the outcome measures are different. They do not have GCSEs or A levels, and the staying on rates are difficult to think of because of the different structure of post-16 education. I do not think it is worth speculating on that at the moment. I will put it another way, I have not got the evidence to comment on that at the moment. Professor Gorard: The Centre for Economic Sociology at Edinburgh is running a programme of home/international comparisons which may provide the data to answer the question. There are clear differences between the home countries that have to be taken into account first. One obvious one between Scotland and England is the proportion of students in the fee paying sector. It is negligible at below one per cent in Scotland, and that obviously is going to make a difference to levels of segregation and so on because most of the data that we use for international and home comparisons is generated by the state-funded sector, so if you are slicing out seven and one per cent it does make a difference. It is interesting that the fashion ten years ago in international comparisons was for the home countries of the UK to look at the Pacific Rim countries as being the star achievers, the ones which we wished to try and emulate. Almost immediately at the same time these countries were concerned about the lack of creativity and individualism and personalised learning in their system and they were looking to us as exemplars of how to perfect their education system. Very similar things appear to be happening with more recent PISA data where we have looked at Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway as being exemplars of low segregation and relatively high attainment, but the Swedish model is partly predicated on some of the things that are going on here. They are now looking to us for ways to increase parental choice and improve parental satisfaction in the system. Q622 Chairman: Who are looking towards us? Professor Gorard: I think the Swedes are and the Finns to some extent. Q623 Chairman: They are rather different, small countries with small urban concentrations compared to this country, are they not, Professor Gorard? Professor Gorard: Yes. Q624 Mr Chaytor: Can I pursue the question of the impact of different types of schools. Professor Gorard, you said you challenged the argument that academies had delivered higher performance because the nature of the intake had changed (and you welcomed the changed intake) but surely in terms of GSCE results the intake will be the same because none of the academies have been going for seven years. It is not the same cohort at 16? Professor Gorard: We are currently negotiating to get the individualised data to follow this through but, yes, there were changes to GCSE cohorts because of the nature of the schools. They were relatively high turnover schools so the turnover patterns have changed and of course there have also been queries about the extent to which particular children have been permanently excluded sometimes quite close to the terminal examinations because the patterns for exclusion appear to be different between them. That was not the point I wanted to make. I suppose statisticians do disagree about how you measure school performance. We have tried to use value added to iron out discrepancies between the intakes to say this is the amount of progress a school makes. One of the papers you have had in front of you refers to the fact that even once you have taken that into account basically high-attaining schools have high value added scores and low-attaining schools have low value added scores. There is an imperfection in the method and I do not think the proposal to add context data such as free school meals to the system will improve it. I think it will make it even harder for the average person to follow what is going on in these tables and what they mean. To some extent what we will be looking for schools to do is to overcome the differences between the backgrounds of the children so by feeding into the schools you are ending up disguising what the purpose of the schools is. I think it is quite clear from the data I have looked at, which is all the secondary schools in England over a number of years, there are no types of schools or groups of schools or areas that disproportionately counteract the background of the students that go into them. Q625 Mr Chaytor: Not even the city technology colleges? Professor Gorard: I have not looked at those for a long time but the last time I looked the same thing would apply. You are going to get individual variations and you will get volatility between the areas and you will get high and low residuals perhaps for an individual school in a particular year, but given the level of measurement error there is going to be in any system and regression, that is going to happen. The question is whether they are consistent enough, and of course they are not. Q626 Mr Chaytor: So you are sceptical of all value added methodologies or is there one waiting to be devised that might satisfy your scepticism? Professor Gorard: There might be. I suppose what I am sceptical of is their use for consumer information. I think they are an interesting thing for academics to work on and for people to devise and for policy makers to look at, but I am concerned that the information out there is both not understandable to most people (it could be made more easily understandable but is not) and also insufficiently robust at the moment to base any kind of practice on what should we do with this individual child or should we reward or close this particular school? We are looking for a grand sweep of things. Are particular types of schools doing better than others or are particular regions doing better than others, would be more appropriate questions for a value added analysis. Mr Chaytor: Could I just come back to the question of transport and the relationship with better schools or more popular schools. Both Professor Gorard and Professor Burgess, you are strong supporters of the new policy of free transport for children for up to six miles, but the issue is if you agree that there is no significant difference between types of schools in counteracting the effect of social background, and that the performance of schools reflects the intake, does it not follow that the better schools to which poorer children will now be entitled to go will very quickly become less better schools with the change of the intake? Q627 Chairman: You are frowning, Professor Gorard. Professor Gorard: It is difficult to describe, it is the "less better" I am frowning at. My support for the transport was predicated on an "if" and the "if" is if we are going to offer people choice we cannot offer choice just to people who have transport, so, as we talked about at the very beginning, you could have a welfare system which would be different but if we are going to have a market system, they do not really coalesce very well. If you have a market system and you allow people choice you have to allow choice across the whole social range, the whole social spectrum. At one level, as a personal opinion, I think that segregation between social, ethnic language and other groups is an affront to society. For me that is a sufficient reason not to have social and economic segregation. I have lost track of the point. If we allow popular schools, not better schools, to expand because we cannot as a society allow choice only for people living in particular regions or with particular characteristics then, yes, the nature of those schools might change. That might be really helpful to us because it might help commentators and parents to see that these schools are not necessarily differentially affected. Q628 Mr Chaytor: Is not the problem that we use the concepts of popularity and equality interchangeably so a better school is by definition more popular because it is more oversubscribed? Professor Gorard: We try not to. Q629 Mr Chaytor: That is the way it works in the public mind and in the government mind. Is not the inevitable consequence of the new transport policy that some quality schools that nevertheless happen to be less popular for whatever reason - for example the nature of the geography - will then close, so you are prepared to sacrifice quality in favour of popularity, and will it not be that the schools in the poorest areas, the most difficult geographical locations, will be the ones that will close because the more mobile parents will take advantage of the transport policy which will inevitably leave those schools empty? Professor Gorard: There are so many things I could say. First of all, anything that is going to be done like that should be trialled and people who are independent of those who are proposing or advocating it - sceptics, and I would count myself among those - should be asked to evaluate trials of these things to see what happen. We have already talked about the possibility of size being a deterrent, but on the other hand size might be an attraction for the reason that John suggested, that you are then going to get better concentrations of resources, you are more likely to get particular specialist teachers, you are more likely to get a range of courses that will be appropriate for a larger range of students. Going back the original thing that drives this whole process, if we are concerned that there is a proportion of students who are not well served by the current system then offering them opportunities that are appropriate to how they see their lives is important. For that you need quite large concentrations because of the range of possibilities it could have. The other reason that it may not happen as you envisage is of course you have got aerial policies like the academies programme that are attempting to overcome that. My concern with the academies programme, even in its own success terms, would be that by definition if it is successful it should cease to be because effectively extra taxpayers' money is being given to areas of disadvantage to overcome those problems, and quite rightly, but they are based on an institution and not an individual, so that if the institution starts changing the nature of its intake so it better reflects its population and you reduce the flight to perhaps the suburban areas, then almost by definition that extra funding cease and it should cease to have that privileged status. I would rather see, which seems to me to be a more rational policy, the extra funding attached to the individuals so that it goes with them wherever they can, so the disadvantaged students are getting something extra. I know to some extent they are but you could change that and then trial different ways of doing it. Then those would perhaps become very attractive students to schools in the inner cities and the facilities there could be better and so on. Q630 Mr Chaytor: The assumption in the White Paper is that choice is exercised differentially by different social groups but your research suggests that there is hardly any difference between the proportion of children on free school meals or not on free school meals who attend their local school, so it is 44 per cent of free school meal children attend the nearest school and 46 per cent of no free school meal pupils. Does that not completely undermine the assumption of the White Paper about the extent of the problem? Professor Burgess: No, I think the point is that you have to understand that number in the context of the fact that people have chosen where to live. If you compare kids from free school meal families and non-free school meal families who live near good schools or who live near less good schools, you do see quite a substantial difference there in terms of if we are looking at kids whose nearest school is a school with a high GCSE score then pupils from the more affluent families are more likely to go there and pupils from families with free school meals are less likely to go there. At the other end of the scale pupils whose families are eligible for free school meals are quite likely to go to their local school even if it is rather poor whereas non-free school meal kids are very unlikely to go to their local school if it is not very good. That is the difference. You cannot interpret straightforwardly the proportion of kids going to the local school or not. Q631 Jeff Ennis: Very quickly, Chairman, because I am conscious of the time, in response to earlier questions, both Professor Gorard and Professor Burgess supported the principle of expanding popular schools and I can understand that. If that is the case, is there any evidence to show why community schools ought to be restricted from actually partaking in that particular expansion programme? Is there any research evidence to support their exclusion? Professor Burgess: I am sorry, I do not understand the question. Q632 Jeff Ennis: In the White Paper all schools will be allowed to expand their numbers apart from community schools. Is there any evidence to show that they ought to be excluded from the possible expansion programme? Professor Burgess: Again, I do not know of any evidence but my feeling would be that there is no reason why they ought to be excluded from that. There is no presumption they are not going to be a good and no presumption that they are not going to be popular. Professor Gorard: It is a leading question but yes I agree, I cannot see any reason for distinguishing them at all. Q633 Jeff Ennis: Will that not just skew the market away from community schools in terms of choice? Professor Gorard: Yes. What I was suggesting is if we want to keep a handle on segregation then to a greater extent you want to have the same rules applying so if even for some reason people want diversity (and I am not convinced that they do, I think diversity is often imposed from above, it is not largely community driven) but if people want different kinds of opportunities in schools I think the same rules about admissions and so on and the ability to expand and travel should apply to all schools. That is a basic principle. Could I very quickly comment on one other thing. One of the problems you have with the travel to school policy is you have to think about a typical British town or city. If you draw it as a caricature, you have got a circle, and the high free school meal population tends to be in the centre and the lower free school meal population tend to be on the outside. The population on the outside would be less so the catchment areas are staggered. If this city is an authority, the people on the outside will be travelling inwards and tend to be working inwards to the inner city schools. The catchment areas will be bigger on the outside than on the inside so it is not necessarily anything to do with popularity of schools or school choice it is just the nature of urban geography that people on the outside will tend to travel further to school even if it is their nearest school. Q634 Chairman: I am sorry, we have got to wrap up. Our advisers particularly want us to clarify one quote. We are not sure whether it is important to our inquiry, Professor Gorard, but on the last page of your submission there is a sentence where you say: "There is a clear pattern of low attaining schools having low VA (value added) and high attaining schools having low value added. Value added scores are no more independent of raw score levels attained than the outcomes are independent of intakes." Professor Gorard: Is that a misprint there? Q635 Chairman: You think there is a misprint? Professor Gorard: Yes, the high-attaining schools have higher value added scores in general and the low-attaining schools have low value added. In the same way that Fahrenheit and Centigrade are measuring the same thing but in different numbers, value added and raw scores are measuring the same thing. Q636 Chairman: A very brief final question. Okay, you are in this business presumably of not just doing research for research's sake; you actually want it to make change in our society for the better. Which bits of your research would you like to see reflected in the bill that comes out of this White Paper? What would be your priorities? John Micklewhite? Professor Micklewright: I would put that in a different way. My advice to you is to keep your eye on specialist schools. If specialist schools can be defined in ways such that "we are going to specialise in university admission" then that is going to lead to a more segregated system than a system where specialist schools means specialism in a particular type of subject, so I think in the definition of specialist school, if we are moving to a system where most schools are specialist schools, we have to be careful what specialist means. Q637 Chairman: Thank you for that. Professor Gorard? Professor Gorard: I would like to say the same rules and the same opportunities for everyone in so far as it is possible - and we are pragmatists - so that greater attention is paid to making sure we are not disadvantaging any particular sector or areas of the country. This is not particularly a London-based phenomenon or a regional phenomenon. I would like to see people not arguing for diversity per se and to see where the demand really arises from the ground for different types of schools rather than this imposition of diversity. I really would like to see any of these ideas rigorously trialled before they go nationwide. Q638 Chairman: Can I just pick you up on this. Schools have been able to become foundation schools for some time and some of the evidence that has been given to us is that a lot of this will be ignored because people will have choice, they will not want trusts, they will not go down this route. Professor Gorard: I think that is probably right. What you will end up with is what happened to grant-maintained schools where many of the schools that took the status were the ones that were going to be closed by the local authority so you get the less popular schools going for trust status. An interesting phenomenon. Q639 Chairman: Professor Burgess? Professor Burgess: I would like to make two points just to finish. One is to think about the situation we are in at the moment. A lot of the comment has been that we are in a situation of neighbourhood schooling and this bill is moving us to choice. My view is that is not the case at all. We are in a situation with school choice at the moment but it is only available to some. The White Paper ought to be trying to make that choice available to everybody. The second point is how is that going to succeed or not. There are two key elements. One is supporting choice through transport and possibly information and counselling. The second is there has to be flexibility of supply of places at popular schools and that can come about in a variety of ways, but the key thing is to avoid large-scale rationing of those places because however that is done, other than through a lottery, the rationing is almost bound to relate to people's income or their ability to negotiate and so on, and that is going to reproduce the segregation we have now. Chairman: Can I thank all of you, Professors Micklewright, Gorard and Burgess, it has been a most informative session. We would have liked to have gone on longer but Prime Minister's questions are calling. Thank you very much. |