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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