Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620-639)
MS SALLY
BROOKS, MR
MARTIN LIPSON
AND MR
TIM BYLES
6 DECEMBER 2006
Q620 Chairman: I wanted to get my
head round that. Sally, can I ask you: this all sounds very exciting
and interesting, but your Department and Government in general
tend to make mistakes when doing new things. This Committee has
looked at new things that the Department has done, much smaller
than this, and mistakes can be made. If there is a major project
in the private sector, a massive project, it is a feeling that
I sometimes get, listening to you and others describing the challenge,
that you are learning as you are going along, and there is a bit
of me that thinks that, if this was a commercial organisation,
you would get all the ducks in a row first and then say: we have
got our team together, we have got a programme and now we start
moving it forward, rather than this perception I am getting from
what you, Tim and Martin have said that you get started and hope
it will all turn out right on the night.
Ms Brooks: Yes, that is a fair
point. There is a temptation to sit for two years in a department
trying to work out how it is going to work and get it all right,
then start and then discover all the problems, but until you start
you do not really know what some of those problems are going to
be. I think the Department, before I arrived, set this up and
did recruit people externally, like me, who have got a construction
and school development background, and we set up Partnerships
for Schools to be the real experts in delivering the programme
because we acknowledged that central government departments do
not have a terribly good record with delivering major capital
projects. So, I think we did a lot of the work but we did not
do everything because you will only learn by doing. You will understand
the basics about cost control, programming, capacity and project
management but you will not understand all the issues around local
authority funding processes. We have had seven, eight, nine big
issues around VAT, around supported borrowing funding, around
levels of investment which would not have been spotted until you
started. It was a very ambitious timescale, and we have slipped
from that and we need to acknowledge that, but I think we got
as much as we could do ready, and we did set up PfS, which was
crucial in terms of giving a very hard-nosed delivery focus to
the programme that was not swayed by ministerial decisions every
five minutes. I think we have done okay. I think there were things
we could have spotted before we started that we did not, but I
do not think there were many. I think most of what we have learnt
since we started are things we would only have learnt by doing.
Q621 Chairman: This whole programme
has come for the Department as a great shock. Basically, the Treasury
said: "Look, this is a very ambitious programme and it has
got to be delivered through the Department for Education and Skills."
Ms Brooks: I was not there.
Q622 Chairman: You were not there?
Ms Brooks: No.
Q623 Chairman: How do people work
with the Treasury? Surely the Treasury are peering over your shoulder
all the time?
Ms Brooks: We have worked very
well with the Treasury. I think they are keeping a close eye on
it. We talk to them regularly about all the funding issues. They
are aware of our slippage. In fact, the Prime Minister's Delivery
Unit is, as we speak, doing an assessment of where we have got
to on delivery of BSF so that we can take those lessons learned
forward, but I think the Treasury generally have accepted that
it was an incredibly ambitious programme. I think we are all agreed
that targeting it on the most deprived and low-achieving areas
of the country was always going to be a very, very big task, because
those local authorities are under extraordinary pressure, and
the decision was made that that was the right place to start because
of raising standards. Within that come extra challenges. I think,
generally speaking, the Treasury has acknowledged those extra
challenges were there, and we are working together on making sure
that we learn the lessons going forward.
Q624 Chairman: What bit of the Treasury
are you talking to most of the time?
Ms Brooks: The education spending
team we talk to a lot, and the PFI team. Those are the two main
bits we talk to.
Q625 Chairman: You talk to them more
than you talk to Number Ten and the delivery unit?
Ms Brooks: Yes, we talk to them
as well, but the delivery unit is a one-off, intense two-month
evaluation programme which we are going through at the moment.
Q626 Chairman: In terms of the way
that you told us the history, that was interesting, because if
you take an authority like mine, Kirklees, where Huddersfield
sits, of course, being an early PFI authority, we have rebuilt
a lot of our school estate. You sort of left that out as though
all you have been doing is mending the roofs and building a few
laboratories over a period of time. Actually a big PFI programme
has been going on in the country. Why did you leave that out?
Ms Brooks: I forgot it. I think
the PFI programme was the next step, if you like, from the early
repair and maintenance, but I think what we have done with BSF
is on the strength of PFI, because all of our PFI is now in BSF.
We have taken it all and put it into BSF—half of the funding
in BSF is PFI the other half is convention—but we have built
on the strengths of PFI. Also there are some weaknesses to PFI,
there are some things that could be improved. One of the things
that BSF does is, because it sets up a long-term Local Education
Partnership, which is to deliver wave after wave after wave of
Building Schools for the Future in one local authority, we have
looked at how we could improve PFI, and one of the criticisms
of PFI is that it is fairly computational and that there are huge
bidding costs for one-off projects. We now have a one-off bidding
round at the end of which we now have a long-term programme which
can be up to half a billion pounds, if not more in some big local
authorities, with partners within a Local Education Partnership
who are incentivised to deliver improvements year on year and
to work with the local authority and, importantly, to work with
the local authority and the schools around educational transformation,
around integration of ITC and personalised learning as well as
buildings and maintenance. We have moved on from a situation where
the PFI contractors were, I think, talking about looking at, "We
are there to build a building and then maintain it, clean it",
and so on, to a situation where most of our BSF bidders are coming
in with educational advisers, with ICT people, with a kind of
hopefully integrated team prepared to address more than just the
building, prepared to understand they are in a long-term relationship
with the local authority and the schools to deliver buildings
and educational transformation. So we had the PFI; we have moved
on from that now.
Q627 Chairman: When you talk to people
on the ground, and we have been visiting schools, as you know,
there does not seem to be that amount of expertise available to
some schools in terms of the rush that they have in order to meet
a BSF deadline. I wondered who brings in the expertise. I can
understand where the construction expertise comes from—it
is well established—you expect a major construction company
to know about buildings and running them and maintaining them.
When we listen to ministers they talk about personalisation of
learning. If you say, "What is going to be in this 21st century
school that is different than 30 children with a teacher, throw
in a couple of white boards and computers?", and they say,
"Oh, it is all going to be personalisation", where is
the expertise around what is going to be in there? What is this
personalisation in a sustainable school?
Ms Brooks: Where is the expertise?
It is a challenge, because what we have at the moment is schools
that are getting on with their day job who are not necessarily
understanding how you can get involved in a major transformational
design, and the support is not necessarily there at the moment.
We are working on that with the National College for School Leadership
and others to work with the end users to help make a bridge between
the educational thinking that is happening at the moment and how
they are going to have their new building designed. So, when you
talk about things like personalised learning and you talk about
access for pupils from anywhere so they can access from home,
they can access from libraries, they can access from their own
schools, they can work at their own pace—
Q628 Chairman: It is all about IT,
is it?
Ms Brooks: A lot of it is about
IT.
Q629 Chairman: Personalisation is
IT really?
Ms Brooks: No. I think personalisation,
in as far as it affects Building Schools for the Future, a lot
of that is about making sure, not just that the ICT allows pupils
to have access wherever and whenever but that the spaces that
you are designing into a school allow small, quiet work spaces
that individual pupils can access, that they allow group spaces
where a group of people can sit together and work around a single
white board on a project, that they allow places where 60, 90
people can sit together in a lecture hall and see what is happening
and where, in fact, schools can link with other schools so that
you can have experts coming into one school to give what would
be a very valuable lecture at secondary level and schools in the
area can link in through their IT and appreciate it.
Q630 Chairman: That is interesting,
but who has got the expertise on this personalisation in the Department?
Ms Brooks: We talk to our curriculum
people. The curriculum people tend to have the expertise.
Q631 Chairman: So the curriculum
people, if they came in here, would be able to tell us what personalised
learning is all about?
Ms Brooks: They would probably
be able to tell you better than me.
Q632 Chairman: But you do have a
regular dialogue with them?
Ms Brooks: Yes, we talk to all
our curriculum people. We talk to our Extended Schools people,
we talk to the curriculum people, we talk to specialist schools,
we talk to almost every single bit of the Department.
Q633 Chairman: So a whole group of
you get together in the Department and say: "This is a school
for the future, this is the way it will be built." You have
got experts coming in saying: "This is how you make it sustainable
environmentally", do you?
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q634 Chairman: Then you have another
group saying: "This is what the school of the future will
be like in terms of IT and personalisation", and all that?
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q635 Chairman: So the full set is
there?
Ms Brooks: The full set is there,
but also the full set is in PfS because the PfS education team
are the ones that work with the local authorities and the schools
on their early education provision, which comes into their BSF
strategy for change. So, if you like, the Department sets the
overall policies and the overall expectations around personalised
learning, around Extended Schools around workforce reform, around
almost every area, and we then work with PfS and their education
team are the ones that work with the local authorities to help
them.
Q636 Chairman: Let us ask Tim what
he thinks.
Mr Byles: I think that is a key
point. The linking between what we know best at the moment at
a national level in terms of all the areas you have just been
discussing—sustainability, personalisation and so on—does
need to be translated into the real world in which teachers are
delivering in local communities and expressed in terms, starting
from where they are, that can allow that process to develop through
time. One of the key things that I think Building Schools for
the Future delivers is flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances,
to build on the best of what we know already and for that to have
resonance with what local people want and the way in which people
delivering these services locally can see it benefiting them.
Q637 Chairman: How does that work
out for someone in a school in Bristol? When we went down there
they said, "Look, we are in this wave. We have got to do
it in a hurry." Where do they get the support? They did not
seem to be thinking they had all this expertise coming from you
or anyone else?
Mr Byles: I certainly would not
want to say that everything is perfect now. I do not pretend that.
It is a process. If I can comment on the point you made earlier
on: does the private sector get all their ducks in a row before
they start something? I can tell you, that is absolutely not the
case. What we are seeing with the public and the private sector
in relation to this programme is doing our very best to set this
in the best practice of what we know and what we see coming but
recognising that this procurement process, the nature of the partnership
between central, local government and the private sector, is something
which we are all learning from, public and private, and I make
no apology, in fact I celebrate that learning in moving the process
forward and delivering efficiencies and effective investment through
time.
Q638 Chairman: Before you got involved
in this and worked out how many schools and how many ways over
how much time (and, as Sally has said, it is not just simple building,
this is a very complex delivery of the building: the delivery,
the maintenance, what goes in it is a multi-faceted skill-set)
did you do an evaluation of whether there was the capacity in
the system to do this?
Mr Byles: If I can, with my recent
history and look forward more than back, what I can say is that,
in terms of the wave which is just about to be announced, each
local authority has gone through a readiness-to-deliver assessment.
So we have looked at the capacity of the authorities and the scale
of their ambition and tried to reach a sensible judgment about
the ability to move forward in it.
Q639 Chairman: But some of the most
deprived local authorities are least able to—
Mr Byles: Absolutely correct.
That is why the support needs to vary according to their capability.
The project support from Partnership for Schools, for example,
or, indeed, from 4ps, which is very important in boosting capacity
in local government, needs to be tuned to a sensible assessment
of what their local authority capacity is and what the capacity
of the local partnership is to deliver this. That process has
developed through time and it has got to the point I have just
described to you. The very early projects, I am quite sure, did
not have that degree of preparation. That is part of the learning
which we have all found very helpful and I expect to get better
for the future, and, as Sally mentioned earlier on, this programme
did begin with some of the most challenged authorities in the
most challenging areas.
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