Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-319)
MR ROB
SHED, MR
BARRY WHITE,
MR MIKE
BLACKBURN, MR
MARCUS ORLOVSKY
AND MR
NICK KALISPERAS
5 JULY 2006
Q300 Chairman: Hold that for a minute,
I know Nick has got to leave now but one of the things that is
coming through is that you are more institutional than I thought
you would be because what interests the Committee very often is
the out-of-school learning that is probably the most revolutionary
thing in this period of educational development that we have ever
seen. Here we have a society in which little kids have to instruct
their parents how to understand most of the IT in their homes,
kids as young as four and five know how to handle the sophisticated
television and all that sort of stuff. There is an educational
revolution going on amongst very young children that is nothing
to do with what they learn in school, so what is happening there,
Marcus, and how do we cope with that?
Mr Orlovsky: We take people to
Halifax and we go to—
Q301 Chairman: You could build a
school right next door in Huddersfield.
Mr Orlovsky: I have to tell you,
I do not understand why—if we were building a supermarket,
if we were constructing a new supermarket which was a fairly inconsequential
shed, although I know the supermarket operators will say it has
got a huge amount of technology in it, we would probably mock
one up inside a big shed somehow, a big warehouse, and we would
try it out with some test customers. For the life of me I do not
understand why we do not do that with schools. We look at little
components, and the classroom of the future is great, but it is
just a classroom of the future, not a school of the future, so
one has to go Djanogly in Nottingham and see what those guys are
doing with regards to the ICT, one needs to go off to see what
Mike Davies is doing with Bishop's Park in Clacton, to see what
he is doing with school agendas, one needs to go to the Natural
History Museum and see how they are trying to change themselves
from being a collection into something else, go off to Montessori
in Amsterdam and try and see how that group of people are dealing
with the bottom 25% of attainment, the guys with 75% asylum seekers,
and pick certain components. The difficulty with it is in picking
those components and opening one's eyes we still do not obviously
have a model. There is a question about what should we be doing
with ICT, should we be having a national ICT framework, a national
model, and imposing it? We are a little too timid to do that,
so in a lot of authorities we are a little bit nervous of the
power of the heads, at the same time we want to put a framework
in place which is replicable around the place, we have LEPs trying
to do their bit and all of it is in a bit of a rush. I am not
suggesting that we cannot get innovation there, but I am suggesting
that what is going to happen is that some of the early schemes—and
I know we are talking about Bristol, but it is not open yet, it
is not built and we do not know if it works. Sometimes you see
a great idea which then gets built and you find that because of
the cracked marble and because the window has a flaw in it, it
is not quite as nice as it should have been. A lot of designs
which you see in PFI schools may have been okay, but a couple
of marginal decisions got taken which ruined it. That is where
we are; I am not trying to be institutional, I am trying to work
out where the issues are, or trying to help you understand where
the issues are.
Chairman: We are very grateful to all
of you. Not only has Douglas been neglected, but you mentioned
Clacton and I think he must respond.
Q302 Mr Carswell: I am just curious,
you mentioned Mike Davies's Bishop's Park College in Clacton,
what would you regard as successful about that?
Mr Orlovsky: What Mike has tried
to do is just look back and to some extent he has almost—it
is not quite what Steiner are trying to do because Steiner are
trying to make education much more tangible at the individual
level, but Mike has the work of having a secondary school divided
effectively into three smaller schools where a group of teachers
are responsible for a smaller group of students. Joining that
school, therefore, you will join one of the three schools within
it. There is a shared resource and the other thing he has done
is to change his school week in that on Fridays there is a master
class, which is a one-day class on an in-depth subject. That does
not sound like very much, but it makes a heck of a difference.
Q303 Mr Carswell: What would you
regard as successful about it, bearing in mind its first set of
results are due to come out any week now?
Mr Orlovsky: That is a loaded
question, is it not?
Q304 Mr Carswell: On a very serious
point though, does this not illustrate that we perhaps are losing
sight of what it is all about, which is learning and education?
It is all very well having these faddish ideas about this, that
and the other, but despite millions and millions of pounds of
investment, literally millions of pounds in this case, if you
are only able to produce a set of results that is simply not good
enough are we not basically losing sight of what education is
still thought to be about?
Mr Orlovsky: We have a set of
results which we are using at the moment, and this is another
debate, is it not? There is a set of results which we are using
which is attainment at a point in time, effectively GCSE results,
and we are saying it is A*-C and we are measuring everybody on
that. I do not know if we have done the work on how much correlation
there is between A*-C successes at a point in time—we are
not measuring the curve, we are not measuring somebody who is
on their way up, whether they are static or on their way down,
we are measuring that point of attainment at that point in time.
I do not know whether that measurement necessarily projects whether
somebody will be a great contributor in our society; I suspect
we may find that we do not have a perfect correlation, and I suspect
we will find that some people who are wonderful contributors in
society may discover their abilities at an earlier or a later
stage and it may not be reflected in that particular measurement
which we are using. You will find that an awful lot of the teaching
profession is saying I cannot measure and I cannot tell you whether
this student is on the way up and I cannot tell you that this
student is a very creative individual because we do not have a
course on creativity, but what we have is a set of measures. If
we choose to put everything on those measures then we will drive
different behaviours and we will drive teachers and schools to
teach to pass the exam. I do not know—and that is a wider
debate—whether that is what we want or whether we want teachers
and educators to educate people to be great contributors. We might
say it is the same, except I spend an awful lot of time talking
to teachers and I spend an awful lot of time talking to students.
We are just three-quarters of the way through a programme for
10,000 students from challenging areas to help them get into university
and I must talk to maybe 700 heads a year. In some places in the
country there are heads who know that some of their departmental
heads may be teaching parts of a subject in order that their students
will do well in that exam, and there is a debate going on within
the teaching profession at the moment about what is it that we
are trying to achieve. I do not want to sound negative, I am trying
to be really positive because the 10,000 kids that I met are just
outstandingly brilliant and we are achieving some fantastic results.
We are achieving fantastic results from people who, on paper,
do not necessarily look that good, so I am a little bit concerned
and I am trying to defend Mike because I do not know where Mike
Davies's results will come out, but if you walk around that school
and you see what those students are achieving and if you see the
commitment they have, it is very strong; I would like to hope
that that is a great blueprint. In the same way, if you go around
the Natural History Museum, and see what some of those students
are achieving, it is really good, and some of the kids walk out
and say "Good grief, I really want to do some stuff now."
If you measured at that moment you might not measure very high
attainment, so it might take six months or nine months before
something comes through, and that is the debate, it is a debate
about what we are trying to build.
Q305 Mr Carswell: We shall see when
those results come out.
Mr Orlovsky: I know.
Chairman: You missed Marcus's
opening remarks when he expressed what he thought schools were
about in terms of the sort of student he wanted between going
into a secondary school at 11 and coming out at 16 or 18, so he
had described that vision in some part. Anyway, carry on with
your questions, Douglas, if you wish to.
Mr Carswell: That is all I need
to know.
Q306 Paul Holmes: Could I just ask
a very quick question. I agree with everything that Marcus has
just said, however when any one of the five people giving evidence
is recruiting somebody to work in their firm, do you look at their
GCSE and A level qualifications, or do you assess something totally
different and ignore their exam results?
Mr Orlovsky: I am lucky because
I am in a smaller firm. I used to be in charge of graduate recruitment
at Ernst & Young and that is what we did, we looked at results,
and then we said that that actually can stuff somebody up at quite
at an early age, so we started putting in assessment tests, just
to see actually how good people were at the sort of tasks we wanted,
and that became a bit more mature. I am running a very small organisation
and we recruit people who have got a passion and commitment, that
is what we are interested in, whether people have got great results
or not. I am not really so interested in what people have done
in the past, I am more interested in what people are going to
do if they join us and what change are they going to make in the
future. I have not yet worked out how to measure what somebody
can do in the future necessarily based upon what they may have
done in the past at school. I might look at what their previous
background has been, but I am much more inclined to go with someone
who has got extracurricular activities and has done some wonderful
stuff, which is the application of skills, because that is a demonstration
of what a person is worth, more than necessarily what the academic
results are which is the hope that they can go on to achieve great
things.
Mr Shed: Inevitably we do look
at qualifications, particularly for graduates, but it is not just
about qualifications, it is about the person. You are recruiting
the person, not just the person with qualifications, so as a first
screening process the qualification is important, but in the end
when you are talking to somebody it is how you react to that person
and his enthusiasm. As Marcus has said, there is more to life
than just what GCSE or what qualification a kid got at school.
Q307 Chairman: I want to get back
to more of the nitty-gritty of how these things work now, and
I am going to ask the team to look at the section we have described
as "Cost to bidders and affordability", and that is
about this whole area where it is argued that the tender process
is cumbersome, long and expensive. I am certainly familiar with
that, wearing my environmental hat, in that there are enormous
costs, for example, for an organisation to supply an energy-from-waste
plant. I always put it into perspective—I think the Belvedere
has just been given planning permission after 16 years, so I do
not know how much that cost to prepare, but you take my point.
Part of the evidence we have already had and some of the stuff
that you have given us points out this real problem of the tendering
process. Is there a level at which the tendering process is a
barrier—we do not have to muck about with this, the fact
is that you big building companies must add that to your cost,
if it costs you whatever for the tendering process it goes into
the price eventually, does it not? We know that, so is that inevitable?
Is the tendering process also going to cut out the smaller and
particularly the medium-sized operator; is it all going to be
the big people, the big architectural practices, the big contractors
that are going to get these contracts because the system squeezes
out those people that are not in that league? Can we start on
that and then I will call Douglas to nail it down?
Mr White: First of all you are
actually right, that at the end of the day, to an extent, people
do have to recover their bid costs through bids that they are
successful in, and not everyone in the public sector necessarily
admits that or understands it, but it is absolutely right that
that is the case. Is it expensive; the early projects under Building
Schools for the Future probably are reasonably expensive to bid
because people are learning a new process and therefore there
is an initial cost in that; we are finding that on subsequent
projects that cost is less because we have learned lessons from
the first projects, which is a positive. Does it mean that only
big players can be there? I do not think that is the case; there
is a very varied range of bidders in the market between bigger
and medium-sized companies and certainly within Skanska we use
different sized architectural practices as well and we are working
with very small architectural practices because we believe that
they can bring a new vision and a new type of innovation to what
we are trying to do, as well as working with some of the more
established ones. There is very much a mixed offering within the
market.
Q308 Chairman: John Sorrell from
CABE said he was really worried about the smaller and medium-sized
practices being squeezed out of the process; is that a genuine
worry? He is a very knowledgeable chap as chairman of CABE.
Mr Shed: There has been a discussion
for some time that PFI/PPP does squeeze out the smaller players
and I do not know if that is the case. Certainly, as Barry has
said, we make a point of using the medium-sized and smaller architects
because that is where the expertise is. If you think about where
the knowledge of building schools, for example, rests, it rests
in a number of regional architects that have traditionally worked
in the education sector, so the bigger named architects are often
not the place to go for the best architecture in education. We
use a selection of architects and we try to build relationships
with a few so that we can try to use them around a number of projects.
Q309 Chairman: Why are people so
cagey about telling us who is good and who is bad? Has CABE done
an assessment of the five years of building new schools? I am
a great addict of the Good Food Guide; it does not have
any sponsorship, it has independent inspectors and when I go to
a town I know in terms of the score out of 10 that the cooking
is good and so on; it is a bible for me, it saves me from being
poisoned in places. Why can we not have a star rating for people
who actually have done these contracts in these past, so we know
that this is only a two-star performer, treat with great caution
because they have built a school with no natural daylight or corridors
that nobody can walk down comfortably. Why can we not have a rating
so that someone who is your client knows who to choose from?
Mr Shed: I guess the answer is
that it is all about the person procuring the building looking
at more evidence as to what the person in front of him is actually
going to deliver. We were talking earlier on about taking people
to your projects that you are proud of, and that is something
that we are happily prepared to do, so I guess that is probably
the answer. We can all wax lyrical about what makes a good design;
good design is often in the eyes of the beholder.
Q310 Chairman: That is an extreme,
is it not? It is not rocket science that a room with no windows
is not a good learning environment, come on.
Mr Shed: That is quite right.
Q311 Chairman: There are certain
things that you know are awful. The group here went to a school
in the Republic of Ireland and we all came out saying we had found
the builder that Basil Fawlty used to use, he was alive and well
and building things. It had a corrugated roof, it was dark, it
was awful; surely the consumer should be protected against that?
Mr Shed: I agree. I would need
to come and see that school and I would love to see that school
and find out what actually caused that to happen, because that
is exactly what gets our industry a bad name. The fact that you
can recount that example, the fact that CABE can recount examples
of bad architecture does our industry more harm and it ignores
the fact that there are people out there trying damned hard to
actually do something much better, and the longer that CABE keep
on coming out with those sorts of statements the more it does
the industry down. I can take you to CABE ratings for some of
the hospitals we have built where they have given us five stars,
where they have said it sets new standards. That never gets publicised,
all that gets publicised is the negative and that is always what
is disappointing. CABE have seen our schools in Bristol and CABE
have given our schools in Bristol a very good rating; that never
gets publicised.
Q312 Paul Holmes: If CABE are saying
that 50% of all the new schools in the last five years are poor,
that is a fairly headline figure.
Mr Shed: I would not seek to protect
some of those that built some of those schools and I can understand
some of the circumstances behind them, but you need to look at
the circumstances that made them poor. Was it poor because it
did not look nice, or was it poor because they were dark classrooms?
I have seen some reports that say something is poor architecture
simply because it does not look very nice; it may perform great
inside, it may allow the kids to get a good education but it is
not necessarily poor. One man's poor is not necessarily the same—
Q313 Chairman: We knew that Nick
could not stay the whole course, but he wants to say a word before
he leaves.
Mr Kalisperas: It is just to make
an offer to the Committee that we are not-for-profit as an organisation
and we are also technology neutral, so we would be more than happy
to facilitate a visit to a couple of schools that we consider
best practice. I can be in touch with the Clerk to the Committee
if you would like.
Chairman: That is a very good offer,
thank you, Nick. Sorry, Paul.
Q314 Paul Holmes: The specific examples
they gave us on Monday afternoon were not to do with visual design,
they were to do with a hall at the centre of a school so that
every time the classrooms emptied out, all the kids doing exams
in the hall were disrupted—there was no way around that
because that was the way it was built—the one-way system
because the corridors were too narrow and the library with no
external windows and being able to share classrooms. All the examples
they gave were just ludicrous for any building that people were
supposed to work in, let alone teach kids in.
Mr Shed: I agree, you cannot condone
those standards, those standards are valid criticisms, but I can
take you to other very famous buildings where some of the same
issues occur. I guess you can take someone inside this building
and there are elements of this building that do not work, but
CABE would still see this building as a great building.
Q315 Paul Holmes: They said that
only 19% were excellent or good, so one in five of the new buildings
in the last five years were excellent or good and 50% were poor.
That is a pretty appalling record and if the next £45 billion
goes the same way, that is a disaster for the taxpayer and it
is a disaster for our kids who are going to be in those schools
for the next 40 years.
Mr Orlovsky: If we were building
our own house we would be very concerned about what it was going
to look like at all times and we would be involved in that process.
When you ask a management team from the school to get involved
in that, we know that they sign off drawings but they may not
necessarily know exactly what they are signing off. We have already
said we do not know the reasons why some of those buildings are
bad, but that I think is the clearest case and if CABE want to
make a difference then we should have a CABE enabler who is not
just looking at the architecture but looking at the functionality
at all times through the process, just to hold the hand of the
uninformed users. That may be something which, at the moment,
does not necessarily have a huge amount of resource behind it,
and I cannot imagine really anybody necessarily wanting to do
that, to build a classroom with no windows, it is a mistake and
it has just got built. Those are things that can happen because
builders want to build and architects want to design, one might
have lost momentum and off it goes. Somewhere one wants to try
and put in the checks and the double checks; it is almost like
doing an absolute design audit. It might be a peer review, it
might be a good idea, before anything gets built, just in order
to check it from the users' side rather than from the deliverer's
side, because if you work on something for too long you cannot
see the mistake; it is there everyday but you cannot see it because
you have got too close. That might be an opportunity to make that
change happen. We have talked to CABE about trying to do that
and CABE have their own issues over what is the role of the enabler
and where does the enabler continue to be in the process and,
actually, how much veto or sanction have they got. At the moment
I think they have a consultative role as opposed to an absolute
arbiter role, and that might be quite a good thing to have.
Q316 Mr Carswell: I want to look
further at a point you have already touched upon. You have a huge
amount of public money, public procurement contract money through
PFI, swirling around. Is it not the case that the BSF bidding
process is a very effective barrier to entry to keep the ability
to tender and receive that money in the hands of a few big corporations?
Mr Orlovsky: Yes. The number of
smaller contractors and small architects who cannot enter this
is very high, and I am afraid that is because at the procurement
level we want to pass risk. I am a taxpayer, so it is all our
own money, is it not, and if we want to pass the risk so that
if something goes wrong during a period of time we have an ability
to go back, then it is not surprising that if I have a local builder
who may have a not inconsequential turnover of £150 million
or £200 million, they could not bid for a contract of £50
or £60 million, it would just be too great a risk for them;
likewise, we would not want to choose them because we would say
if they had one major claim they would go bust. If you like it
is cause and effect, it is not, so of course we are asking larger
and larger organisations to bid because we would have more comfort
that if something goes wrong we have redress. If the risk profile
changed we would have smaller organisations joining and I know
that the likes of very large building organisations do sub-contract
so ultimately some work comes down, it is just that they may not
be as visible. It is similar with smaller architects, the vast
majority of architectural practices are five or six people, so
although we are talking about a lot of large and medium-sized
practices, you probably would not want to get a secondary school
designed by a practice of four or five people, all of whom are
working on it 100% of the time, because the perception of risk
would be too great. That is what we have ended up with and as
projects get bigger and bigger, so we are requiring the respondees
to be like that. It is cause and effect and maybe if we reduced
the risk transfer we would have more people entering, or maybe
if we were not doing such major big projects we would have more
people entering, but then we have another element of procurement
in that we will have so many smaller contracts out there.
Q317 Mr Carswell: Do you think there
is a set bureaucratic cost involved in setting up an LEP regardless
of the number of schools involved?
Mr Orlovsky: We get back to the
debate about is it a thick LEP or a thin LEP and is it a LEP which
is actually trying to do something, which is staffed up, or is
it a LEP which is simply a poste restante for a series
of contracts which get administered? An awful lot of authorities
want to have the LEP structure but actually want to have a very
thin LEP, so it is really a poste restante and it is a
series of future purchase PFI contracts—I am trying to be
non-institutional now. There is a reality on the ground about
this and it is quite hard for an authority just to say okay, there
is another £300,000 or £400,000 which is going to disappear
in management costs to the LEP when I think I can do those things
perfectly well myself, and I think that is what we are ending
up with. If we have a thick LEP then, yes, there probably is a
fixed price and you would not want people just kicking around
because there is no project coming through at this moment.
Q318 Mr Carswell: Before I move on
to the next question, did anyone else want to comment?
Mr White: Our experience of the
market is that at the moment there are about 25 different bidding
organisations bidding in BSF so there is very much a variety of
size within those different bidding consortia, so for a programme
that is going to actually bring to market 10 projects per year
there is a very wide range of people competing in that market.
Q319 Chairman: Have we got the capacity
in this country to deliver on BSF?
Mr White: Yes, I believe the capacity
is there and we very much rely on smaller, local firms for that
capacity, so in terms of actually delivering the work, we rely
on local groundworks, mechanical and electrical contractors to
actually work with us to deliver the actual work. In terms of
the question of smaller architectural practices, we were asked
by DfES to speak at a conference about using smaller architectural
practices because we are one of the first people to really embrace
that, and we are using a practice of five or six people to design
a secondary school because we believe they can actually make a
difference. In terms of the cost of the Local Education Partnership
there are two important things: one is if the Local Education
Partnership ends up duplicating activity with the local authority
then that would be a failure and we very much set out our stall
to say it must be substitution rather than duplication in nature,
and as part of actually being chosen as a Local Education Partnership
you have to guarantee future savings and the guaranteed savings
that we have pledged on Bristol, for instance, are more than three
times the total cost of the Local Education Partnership. In terms
of the value for money balance, therefore, that has to be there
from the public sector point of view, if the Local Education Partnership
is simply an additional cost then you would be right, there would
be no point in it, but if it is actually delivering better value
for money and producing the savings, then actually it is well
worth having.
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