Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS
28 FEBRUARY 2005
Q20 Mr Steinberg: Were you on expenses?
Sir David Normington: I was not.
Q21 Mr Steinberg: I was; my son was paying.
I think this Report is a very good Report, but really it is airy-fairy,
is it not? Frankly it is possible that we are actually pouring
good resources down the drain trying to solve the problem. Do
you think that your department is spending money wisely, effectively,
value for money, the whole lot?
Sir David Normington: We can show
that these targeted amounts of money which we spent within that
£885 million, which is, by the way, on average £125
million a year, because this is a seven-year spend, have produced.
However, what they have not done is affect the whole system. Where
we have targeted resources it has produced improvements.
Q22 Mr Steinberg: On unauthorised absences?
Sir David Normington: As yet,
we have not seen unauthorised absence coming down overall.
Q23 Mr Steinberg: This is the point.
If you look at page 14, Figure 6, you have just reiterated and
validated exactly what I have said. You have had no success whatsoever
with unauthorised absences. I do not blame you at all, but I blame
the system. Look at Figure 6. I know graphs cannot be 100% accurate,
but I took a piece of paper with a straight edge and tried to
work out unauthorised absences since 1994 to 2003-04 and there
is virtually no difference at all. So unauthorised absence has
not changed since this graph started in 1994-95 up to 2003-04;
no difference whatsoever. What was it 20 years before that? Can
the National Audit Office tell me? Can you tell me?
Sir David Normington: I do not
think we collected these figures before this.
Q24 Mr Steinberg: It would have been
important to do so.
Sir David Normington: They only
go back 10 years.
Q25 Mr Steinberg: I can tell you as a
former head teacher that I would suspect you could go back 20
years and those figures would be no different; there would be
absolutely no difference whatsoever. In other words, the money
you have been putting in to try to solve unauthorised absence
is an absolute waste of resources which could have been spent
in the education system on something better.
Sir David Normington: We have
not been spending most of that money on tackling unauthorised
absence: we have been spending it on reducing permanent exclusions,
which are down 25%; we have been spending it on trying to tackle
behaviour in schools, in other words trying to tackle the problem
upstream rather than downstream. Relatively small amounts of money
have gone directly into unauthorised absence.
Q26 Mr Steinberg: And truancy.
Sir David Normington: Unauthorised
absence. Truancy is part of unauthorised absence, you cannot equate
them exactly.
Q27 Mr Steinberg: I am sorry, I thought
you meant authorised absence.
Sir David Normington: No; unauthorised.
Your general point is right, you can see it, it is there in the
graph.
Q28 Mr Steinberg: It was the same when
I was a head teacher 20 years ago. You had targets and you failed
to reach those targets and you spent a lot of money and nothing
has changed in 30 years. In other words, the system does not work.
What you are trying to do cannot work, because there is a hard
core of truants who will not go to school, for one reason or another,
and it does not matter what you do, you will never get that hard
core of truants back to school. You might say this is a very pessimistic
outlook, but it is true; it is actually true. You have to look
to see why they do not want to go to school. If you look at paragraph
1.12 on page 16, it tells you why they do not want to go to school.
It says "It is self-evident that pupils who regularly fail
to attend school reduce their chances of fulfilling their academic
potential" that is obvious "and research has demonstrated
that high rates of absence are associated with low academic achievement".
Again, that is absolutely obvious. I know one should not say "slow
learners" or "educationally subnormal", it is not
particularly politically correct to say that now though in my
day it was, but the fact of the matter was that those kids would
not go to school because they could not fit into the school. It
did not matter what the school did for them, they could not fit
in because they were frustrated, because they were picked on or
they had other interests. They would not go to school. Has anybody
ever thought of actually taking those kids out of the school and
putting them into special schools?
Sir David Normington: That is
indeed what happens.
Q29 Mr Steinberg: No, it is not.
Sir David Normington: With some
of them.
Q30 Mr Steinberg: Some of them, but I
am not talking about some of them. I am talking about Figure 6
and the number at the bottom which has not changed for 20 years.
Sir David Normington: The behaviour
improvement programme which we talked about a moment ago has bucked
that trend. In those 1,500 schools unauthorised absence has begun
to fall and that is the result of very, very targeted effort on
the very children you are talking about.
Q31 Mr Steinberg: What we have done is
we have opened up specialist schools, which we could express an
opinion about later but not at this particular time, and we have
closed special schools and tried to integrate and it has not worked,
it has made the system worse. I had experience of children being
taken out of comprehensive schools because they could not cope
and sent to my school. They were truants but they did not truant
when they came to me and I did not thump them or beat them; well,
sometimes, not regularly. They did not truant because they were
in a school where they were all the same, they all had exactly
the same abilities, they were not left to become frustrated and
they attended school. What we have done is completely the opposite
policy: we have kicked them out of these schools and put them
into comprehensive schools with 2,000 kids and they are lost.
Sir David Normington: We still
have a lot of special schools. It is not the policy to force children
who are unsuitable into the ordinary secondary schools. Secondly,
we have increased the number of places in pupil referral units
and ensured that in the majority of those—and the aim is
to have it in every one—the pupils get a full timetable,
which they never used to get before.
Q32 Mr Steinberg: It is a waste. Let
me give you an example. I had a secondary school kid who was sent
to me, who never attended school at all, he was a truant, he thieved
when he was playing truant and he was at a comprehensive school.
He was sent to me, as a special school, with a reading age of
6 and an IQ below 70; I do not even know whether it is politically
correct to say that these days. He could not even read The
Sun and if you cannot read The Sun it is pretty bad,
is it not? When I read his Report, do you know what it said? It
said "This boy does not try in French and I had to remove
him from the lesson". He could not even speak English and
they were trying to teach him French. What was he doing in the
comprehensive school? You talk about giving them curricula which
are relevant to them, but you are giving them curricula which
are based on the standard curriculum and based on the school to
which they are ashamed to go because of their ability.
Sir David Normington: We are trying
to ensure that every pupil gets the support they need, whether
it is in a special school, in a pupil referral unit or in an ordinary
state secondary school and trying to provide them with the extra
support, whether they are in school or in a special unit. I would
not want to equate all these problems with special needs, because
truants come in all shapes and sizes. We know that quite a lot
of truants, that is people who are not in school, who are unauthorised
absentees, are with their parents and it is condoned by their
parents. Some are looking after their younger siblings, for instance.
Truants come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Q33 Mr Steinberg: Of course they do.
Sir David Normington: What I accept
though is that there are some children with special needs who
find it very, very difficult to fit into their schools and the
curriculum.
Q34 Mr Steinberg: So what do we do with
them? We either exclude them because they are a problem, or we
do not bother with them at all and they play truant.
Sir David Normington: I should
prefer, and this is the aim, either that they were in a special
school where they were getting the special treatment you are talking
about or they were in the mainstream school and getting a personalised
curriculum supported by a specialist worker. That is also what
happens more and more. Either of those is a possible solution,
but we are dealing with some really tough cases.
Q35 Mr Steinberg: This Report says that
it was not sure, if I remember correctly, whether truancy bred
crime or the crime bred the truancy. Well I can tell you: truants
have nothing to do and they gather in their twos and threes from
the same school and they plan crime or they get into mischief.
It is as simple as that. If they were at school, they probably
would not. The solution to the problem is to provide them with
places where they feel comfortable, where they are not ashamed
to go and where it is made interesting for them. That can be done
in a special school, it cannot be done in the comprehensive school.
Sir David Normington: Sometimes
it can be done in the comprehensive school.
Q36 Mr Steinberg: Tell me one. Which
schools has it been done in? Look, there is not a hap'orth of
difference in 10 years and I would argue that there is not a hap'orth
of difference in 20 years on that ever since we started to close
special schools. Baroness Warnock said it was a mistake, once
when she was in front of the Education and Skills Select Committee.
She said she had changed her mind.
Sir David Normington: We have
a lot of special schools still; every local authority is expected
to have special school provision which deals with some of the
children you are talking about. The aim is to give every child
the support they need wherever they are in the education system.
I just repeat this one fact. Within that unauthorised absence
figure, what is happening is that the average length of time that
people are off school is coming down; the total number of pupils
taking small amounts of unauthorised absence is going up. It is
a static figure in that chart, but within those figures something
very interesting is happening, which is heads being very tough
in not allowing people to be off school and not authorising it
and also there are some signs that we are getting people back
to school and keeping them there more than we have ever done before.
I agree with you that the overall figure remains static and there
are some real hard cases in those figures.
Q37 Mr Steinberg: The final point I would
make is that I do not believe either that it is a good idea necessarily
to involve or blame the parents—authorised absence is totally
different—in terms of unauthorised absence. They tend to
come from an environment which has bred that anyway, whether through
their genes or through the environment in which they live. I had
a case which I can remember clearly. I brought the parents in
because he was not coming to school. The excuse was, as the father
stood in front of me chewing chewing gum, that he did not care
that his kid was away from school because education had done nothing
for him. I can tell you that I had not done very much for him.
When the parent has that attitude, there is no chance for the
kid at all and that is why punishing those sorts of parents is
a waste of time. It is different with unauthorised absence. I
could go on about unauthorised absences, which is a different
kettle of fish altogether.
Sir David Normington: Neither
you nor I would want us to give up on any of those children. We
should never give up on them.
Q38 Mr Steinberg: No, I am not saying
give up. What I am saying is that the approach is totally wrong.
The approach should be to remove them from the mainstream altogether
and place them into special schools.
Sir David Normington: Sometimes
that happens.
Q39 Mr Steinberg: It should happen the
majority of the time and not the minority of the time.
Sir David Normington: I do not
always equate truancy with sending them to a special school. I
cannot agree with you that that is always the solution.
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