Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)

DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION AND SKILLS AND OFSTED

27 FEBRUARY 2006

  Q120  Mr Davidson: So 90% is not there?

  Mr Bell: The majority of funding is related to pupil numbers and that is what you would expect. You would expect schools to be funded by the number of pupils on the roll.

  Q121  Mr Davidson: No, I would not, actually. I would expect money to be allocated according to need, of which pupil numbers would be one factor, but background and so on and the school meals argument would be others. I am quite surprised to find that it is only 10%.

  Mr Bell: But, of course, individual schools are free to allocate that funding according to the needs that they have. Those schools in those circumstances would also receive some of the additional funding support identified in the early pages of this Report, Excellence in Cities and the like, so there is a variety of means of supporting schools that will have particular social and economic problems to deal with. On your point about teachers and so on, schools do have flexibility to pay more. For example, we know that in attracting headship applicants in schools serving deprived communities that will often be used as a mechanism to try to attract the best.

  Q122  Mr Davidson: Is it still the case that teacher and headteacher salary scales are tied mainly to the school numbers?

  Mr Bell: Largely to school size, but they are not an absolute barrier to the school governors if they chose to pay more than that to attract someone.

  Q123  Mr Davidson: Is it still the case that there tends to be a pattern of progression of headteachers and senior staff where they work for a time in small schools in areas of deprivation and they aspire to move outwards to better schools with better-off pupils in the leafy suburbs?

  Mr Bell: I do not have evidence on that, Mr Davidson, so I could not comment. My sense would be, from what I know, that rather than that happening you do tend to get people who work in a smaller school and then move to a larger school. I am not sure about the patterns of travel that you have described, but certainly people travel to smaller schools and then move to bigger schools.

  Q124  Mr Williams: I will start where Mr Davidson did, back in primary schools, and table 10. We see in table 10 that 375 of them are under Special Measures, have serious weaknesses or are under-achieving, and another 349 are low attaining. You have not been able to calculate the number that are under-performing. Why not?

  Mr Bell: That is also related to the issue of having the appropriate data to decide—

  Q125  Mr Williams: Well, of course, it is.

  Mr Bell: The focus on providing the data that will tell you whether they are under-performing has largely been secondary-related up till now and that is why we have been able to give you the data in relation to secondary schools.

  Q126  Mr Williams: But why has it been primarily in secondary schools? That seems to stand commonsense on its head, does it not?

  Mr Bell: I should say that we are talking there about the data. There has been a very strong focus on improvement programmes in primary schools, so we have known where there are absolute levels of under-achievement. For example, taking the benchmark that 65% of students in a primary school will achieve less than level 4, the expected level for an 11-year old, there has been a range of programmes there from the Primary National Strategy to the intervention programmes and so on. The data generally has been better in secondary schools because we have had data from the achievement of pupils at the age of 11, then they do their test at the age of 14, and then they do their GCSEs at the age of 16, so we have been able to get that data more robustly in place in secondary schools than in primary schools.

  Q127  Mr Williams: I am surprised you find it so hard. I was talking to a teacher the other day in a very good comprehensive school in south London and he was saying that he does not need to look at the records to know if certain of the children come from a particular primary school because consistently, persistently, the children come there utterly unprepared for secondary education. If you have not got the primary sector right you are never going to get the secondary sector right, are you?

  Mr Bell: I absolutely agree with you and I think that is why there is and continues to be such a focus on improving standards in primary schools.

  Q128  Mr Williams: But how soon is it going to be before you get that gap in your information filled?

  Mr Bell: In terms of the information that is now provided to schools in advance of inspection, which essentially is the data that is available, we hope to have that secured by next September so that all schools will have at their disposal the sort of data that they require. If I could just develop the point—

  Q129  Mr Williams: I will not go on too long because we are time limited. I will come back to it if I need to because I want to ask Mr Smith something. When you are now assessing the secondary school, Mr Smith, do you have available to you the quality of input that they are getting from the primary school? In other words, are the secondary schools carrying the can for inadequate primary schools?

  Mr Smith: If I understand your question correctly, the data—

  Q130  Mr Williams: If you get poorly prepared youngsters, which is different from youngsters who do not have the ability; if you get youngsters who have the ability coming from the same schools year in, year out who are behind those coming from other primary schools, would you take that into account in assessing the school in its early stage of performance?

  Mr Smith: The answer is yes.

  Q131  Mr Williams: You do?

  Mr Smith: Yes.

  Q132  Mr Williams: If you can identify them because you have that information, why do you not pass it on to Mr Bell and save him a lot of worry and grief?

  Mr Smith: We have the same information. It is just that we cannot have it until this summer in order to analyse a primary school's performance. What we can analyse is those children at age 11 through their secondary school with something called contextually value-added data.

  Q133  Mr Williams: What can you do where the problem in a school is not with the head but with bad teachers? What can you do about bad teachers?

  Mr Smith: We can do a great deal. As an inspection regime we can identify them and, as in my answer to Mr Clark, leadership and management is a band of inspection judgment with a grade and so is quality of teaching. It always has been in Ofsted inspections. We can identify poor quality teaching and we either can make recommendations for that to improve or, if it is part of a wider picture of poor quality within a school, then the school will fall into one of the categories of concern we have just described. If that were the case, obviously, measures would then be put in place to improve the quality of teaching.

  Q134  Mr Williams: If I can come back to you, Mr Bell, going to the comprehensive level, there is a philosophy that a good school should be allowed to expand. Do you believe there is such a thing as a managerial optimum in a school, or do you think expansion can be infinite?

  Mr Bell: I think that is for schools to decide because I do not think it is for the Department to say a school has got to a particular size, and I think if you are going to give schools the opportunity to expand.[5]

  Q135 Mr Williams: But it will not be for schools to decide because the parents will have the choice. The schools cannot decide at all. They have to take who decides to come to them.

  Mr Bell: Schools obviously have the opportunity to expand should they wish. They are not required to expand to meet demand.

  Q136  Mr Williams: But under choice they are. Under choice it is implicit. In the discussion we had with the Prime Minister in the Liaison Committee we were made to understand this very well. It is implicit that in some magical way expansion can go on and on as long as parents want it to.

  Mr Bell: Some schools have chosen to expand because they have decided that they are able to do so and they can meet parental demand and it is absolutely right that they should do so.

  Q137  Mr Williams: Excuse me a second: I do not quite understand. How can the school decide to expand? Where would the local authority be in this? Who makes the decision? A school can only expand once it has reached a certain distal limit if someone makes financial decisions to cope with that, so it is not the school that decides, is it?

  Mr Bell: There is capacity for schools to apply to the Department for additional funding to help to support expansion.

  Q138  Mr Williams: So it is the Department that would decide whether they could expand or not?

  Mr Bell: No. The decision is—

  Q139  Mr Williams: So it is not you either?

  Mr Bell: The decision is made locally by the schools which put forward proposals to expand their numbers, which would be determined locally, currently by the school organisation committee.


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