Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS
28 FEBRUARY 2005
Q40 Mr Steinberg: If you do not know
why they are playing truant in the first place, that is the important
factor. I would say that the vast majority are playing truant
for the reasons I have given.
Sir David Normington: Certainly
parents not caring whether they are at school or not is one factor.
Another factor is the fact that they are not getting the sort
of education they need at school. I accept that. Sometimes it
is pressure from older brothers particularly who are encouraging
them to bunk off school. It is all those things.
Q41 Mr Steinberg: Can I take it that
tomorrow you will be opening some new special schools?
Sir David Normington: Some new
special schools are being opened, but generally the pattern is—
Mr Steinberg: I do not know where. I
will tell you what to do. Go back and open two or three new specialist
schools for drama and dance. That is the best thing to do. Let
us have everybody poncing around doing drama and dance.
Q42 Chairman: Thank you Billy Elliot
for that. You talk about these figures and how you find it very
difficult to deal with them. One of the problems of dealing with
unauthorised absence is that although you are putting a lot of
pressure on head teachers to deal with unauthorised absence, you
are also putting pressure on them to be much less lenient with
parents who ask to take their children away during school time.
The parent then says he is going to take the child away anyway
and the school then says it is an unauthorised absence, does it
not?
Sir David Normington: Yes, that
is what happens.
Q43 Chairman: It may also be that you
are going to move away from unauthorised absence because there
is so little. Are you going to move now towards total absence?
Sir David Normington: That is
what we are trying to do. We are monitoring and our targets relate
to, overall absence. We are going to continue, nevertheless, to
measure the underlying trend in unauthorised absence. The reason
we have moved to overall absence is precisely as you say: it is
very susceptible to whether a head teacher in an individual school
authorises absence or not. Quite a few have very tough attitudes
to authorising holidays in the school term. That is quite true.
Q44 Chairman: I know for instance from
personal experience that the headmaster of the London Oratory,
with which I have had a lot of personal experience, does not give
any authorisation whatsoever for taking kids away on holiday,
even to posh villas in Tuscany.
Sir David Normington: There are
plenty of school holidays in which to take holidays.
Chairman: I apologise for that last remark;
I should not have made it.
Q45 Mr Bacon: Sir David, congratulations
on your knighthood.
Sir David Normington: Thank you.
Q46 Mr Bacon: What did you get it for?
Sir David Normington: For 32 years
in the public service.
Mr Bacon: Excellent, well done. I take
it that it was nothing to do with Individual Learning Accounts.
Chairman: I think you also should withdraw
that last remark, as I withdrew my remark.
Mr Bacon: I withdraw it unreservedly.
Chairman: Sir David is a fine public
servant, who always helps us.
Q47 Mr Bacon: I would not dream of saying
anything else. Surviving 32 years in the public service is something
for which anyone deserves a knighthood. Chairman, I hope you get
one as well soon. Sir David, you said unauthorised absences were
not the whole £885 million by any stretch of the imagination.
How much have you spent on unauthorised absences?
Sir David Normington: I just cannot
break that down. I can break it down into what we have spent on
each category, but I cannot break it down into authorised and
unauthorised absence. In truth, we have focused on behaviour and
attendance, not just on unauthorised absence, but I just cannot
give you that breakdown.
Q48 Mr Bacon: There is a quote somewhere
in the Report which says the whole difference between authorised
and unauthorised is basically a con. Did you see that? Page 42,
column two, just below paragraph 4.8. The principal education
welfare officer from a local authority said "The figures
[authorised and unauthorised absence] are false, the figures are
unreliable . . . They can be manipulated. Principal education
welfare officer". Presumably so he can keep his job his name
has not been put in there. Is that the case that these are basically
open to manipulation?
Sir David Normington: I do not
know about "open to manipulation" but certainly susceptible
to what the head decides to do in any particular case; whether
authorised or not. We have just been talking about holidays and
practice varies very greatly between schools. In that sense, they
are very susceptible to local decision making and that is why
we have focused more recently on the overall absence figure and
have been accused, of course, of taking our eye of unauthorised
absence. It is true that heads are being much tougher on unauthorised
absence.
Q49 Mr Bacon: It is certainly true that
the head teacher of the London Oratory does not mind rapping anybody
on the knuckles, however high in the land they are. It is also
true that the London Oratory has extremely high academic standards.
Would you take it that there is a relationship between the fact
that the head does not allow any absences during term time and
the fact that there are high academic standards? This is obviously
only one of a number of factors.
Sir David Normington: It is one
of a number of factors and it is almost certainly the case that
the way that school is run—
Q50 Mr Bacon: There is a positive correlation,
is there not?
Sir David Normington: Yes, there
is a correlation.
Q51 Mr Bacon: Apart from paragraph 4.6,
which I just found shocking, about head teachers thinking they
could leave it to others and I want to come onto that in a minute,
the two things which struck me most in this Report were paragraph
17 on page 7 and paragraph 20 on page 9. Paragraph 17 on page
7 basically says "The main common factor we identified in
the schools with the highest attendance was that the schools had
adopted all or virtually all the practices" that is the practices
referred to in Figure 5 on the following page, page 8 "some
time ago and had followed them consistently over several years".
In other words, if you had a well-managed school with the right
range of practices which were being implemented, you got results.
Sir David Normington: Yes.
Q52 Mr Bacon: Second, again pretty unsurprising
" . . . negative parental attitudes to education are the
external factor that is most closely associated with high rates
of absence"; startlingly unsurprising in a way and intuitively
obvious. If parents tell their children not to bother to attend
because it never did anything for them, they are not going to
attend. Equally, if you have head teachers who do a very good
job of managing the problem, you get a solution. That brings me
on to paragraph 4.6, the most shocking bit and the Chairman referred
to it earlier. I quote from page 42 " . . . some schools
see attendance as an issue that they do not need to deal with,
but as something that the local authority will sort out for them".
Surely, employing a head teacher who runs a school who has that
sort of attitude is simply a waste of taxpayers' money, is it
not?
Sir David Normington: If there
are such heads, yes.
Q53 Mr Bacon: The Report says that there
are.
Sir David Normington: The Report
says that the principal education welfare officers say that; I
am not doubting that.
Q54 Mr Bacon: Are you saying that there
is a difference between the education service in England and Wales?
Sir David Normington: Of course
not. I should not say that.
Q55 Mr Bacon: Do you wish to withdraw
it unreservedly?
Sir David Normington: I will do
that. I believe that there are some head teachers who are not
consistently applying all these practices and do not see the need
to focus on this as opposed to other things. I believe that. I
do not actually believe there are all that many these days who
are doing that, but there are some, otherwise we would be seeing
greater improvements.
Q56 Mr Bacon: When you say "other
things", do you mean other things vis-a"-vis
attendance or other things full stop.
Sir David Normington: Different
things.
Q57 Mr Bacon: Surely it is axiomatic,
is it not, that if the children are not there, they cannot learn?
This is absolutely essential and every head teacher must focus
on that and most do.
Sir David Normington: Yes and
most do and good schools have that as an integral part of how
they run the school.
Q58 Mr Bacon: What is the Department
doing to root out and get rid of, sack, head teachers who are
not doing that? Even if they are a minority, they need to go.
Sir David Normington: We do not
sack head teachers ourselves, because we do not employ them.
Q59 Mr Bacon: No, I know you do not,
the local authorities do. What are you doing to encourage local
authorities to get rid of such people?
Sir David Normington: Usually
this action follows an Ofsted inspection of the school, where
Ofsted do pick up this issue along with others and usually, when
schools are failing, one of the failures is that their attendance
record is very poor and that is usually when action is taken against
the head teacher.
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