Examination of Witnesses (Questions 720-739)
MS SALLY
BROOKS, MR
MARTIN LIPSON
AND MR
TIM BYLES
6 DECEMBER 2006
Q720 Mr Marsden: Will there be any
penalties on local education plans that do not achieve key performance
indicators? We are told all the time about PFI contractors who
promise various things and then do not deliver and they are fined.
Will you be able to penalise an LEP if it does not work, in practice?
Mr Lipson: Perhaps I could help
here. The contract between the local authority and the LEP when
it is set up does include key performance indicators of that kind.
The LEP is paid by performance. If it fails to deliver some of
these KPIs, like educational transformation and sustainability
indicators, it will get paid less. There is a serious incentive
in there for the LEP to recognise these important issues and to
deliver them.
Q721 Chairman: We must move on. I
would like to talk a little bit about user participation. On one
of our school visits they said they had heard they were in the
next wave of Building Schools for the Future and they were not
able to have the time to consult with the users. This Committee
has a lot of experience of visiting schools and it is our belief—it
may be prejudicial but it may be based on visiting an awful lot
of schools—that where you build a new school and you consult
the students, the staff, the dinner ladies, everyone involved
in that school, it ends up as a better school than a non-consulted
school. Why is it that the school we visited said, "We don't
have time for that"?
Ms Brooks: I do not know the answer
to that. A local authority will have 12 months, whilst it is drawing
up all its plans and proposals, where it is required, as part
of its strategy for change, to consult schools. Once it knows
where it is and the wave it is in and it is moving forward, it
has every opportunity—there is plenty of time—to consult
the schools and their users. I cannot say—not knowing the
individual situation—why that happened. I can say that we
are working with organisations like the Sorrell Foundation to
set up a centre where every school in BSF can bring its pupils
in to talk through how they want to design their school. We are
supporting a lot of organisations that work with the users and
we are offering all that to local authorities and to individual
schools and we are funding the NCSL to work with head teachers
and school leadership teams. Part of what they will be saying
very clearly is that, in order to get the best possible school,
you must consult your users. We have all the right processes in
place, the right time scales.
Q722 Chairman: There is a worry,
is there not? The research shows that a head will be involved
in probably only one new school development in their professional
career.
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q723 Chairman: Although there is
no BSF school you can visit yet, there are Academies you can visit
to get some experience of a new-build school that is attempting
to be more sustainable. What facilities are offered to allow people
to go to schools where there seems to have been a sustainability
element?
Mr Lipson: In working with the
local authorities that are procuring these projects, we always
encourage them, at officer and member level, and school governors
and head teachers to organise visits to recently completed schools,
both good and bad, so they can see for themselves how this works.
There are lots of visits that are going on and there are many
schools that are running tours for this reason, because they are
very popular venues for showing off ideas.
Q724 Chairman: Is there a cross-fertilisation?
BSF is being informed.
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Mr Lipson: There is a great deal
of it. We have just established the regional network groups for
the local authorities in the Building Schools for the Future programme,
where they are now going to start sharing lots of best practice.
That will help the programme a great deal.
Q725 Chairman: Let us try to nail
one thing that does worry me. I have always had a great prejudice
when someone says "This is an off-the-shelf design."
I am not sure about that any longer. The more we have listened
to evidence, I would rather have a package that made sense environmentally
in terms of sustainability than have a jumble of buildings all
individually. Actually, I would like a synthesis of the two. Where
are you in terms of how the Department sees it? Do you see each
individual school having Richard Rogers or someone designing it
or do you see it off-the-shelf?
Ms Brooks: We are at pretty much
the same place as you. I will tell you one thing: if we knew beyond
any shadow of a doubt that we had a design that was right, then
we might be tempted to roll that out, but I think that is what
they thought in the 1960s and they were wrong. I do not think
any of us would be arrogant enough to say, "We've got a way
of building and designing that is right."
Q726 Mr Marsden: It did not bother
the Victorians.
Ms Brooks: No, and funnily enough
they probably got the nearest to being right.
Q727 Chairman: We have the Victorians
over here but we have Tesco over here. I hope you are not having
any discussion with Tesco's architects.
Ms Brooks: We are certainly not,
no. In practical terms, if you went to a head teacher, who had
a one and only chance to design their school, and said "You
cannot design it, we've got an off-the-shelf design"... One
of the early issues when I arrived, when we had exemplar designs,
was that at every conference I went to and in every conversation
I had with local government in schools they were saying, "We
do not want you imposing designs on us." We were never proposing
to impose designs. They were, as we said, exemplars. I do not
think you would ever, even if you wanted to, get through an individual
head teacher's passion about how they wanted their school to be.
We are not proposing to do that. There are two areas where we
are looking for some movement and one is around basic principles.
For example, if you are designing public spaces to be used by
the community, they should be accessible by the community easily.
We want some fairly basic principles which say, "Put your
ICT areas, your drama, your sports facilities where the community
can get in and use them easily". So on simple basic principles
I think we are looking for standardisation, but I think it is
about components really. Every head teacher will want to design
their classrooms and their social spaces but they will not necessarily
want to design their toilets and they certainly will not want
to design their door handles and their components.
Q728 Chairman: Who will not want
to design their toilets?
Ms Brooks: Head teachers do not
necessarily want to design their own toilets. They just want good
toilets, that work, that do not get broken, where people do not
get bullied.
Q729 Chairman: Our experience is
that the toilets are almost the most important thing in the school.
Ms Brooks: They are the most important
thing in the school. I know you know about joinedupdesignforschools,
but we have been talking to joinedupdesignforschools in terms
of: if you could get a toilet block that was designed to work,
that we knew—because we had done a lot of them—did
work, did not get trashed, was very robust, yet at the same time
did not feel like it was a high security area but was one where
people did not get bullied, head teachers would love it and would
not want to design their own. They would say, "Thank you
very much. Let's bolt it onto the building." It is about
what works and what does not. Components work—and PfS and
our design people are doing some work on that. Elements work—but
I do not think we would be looking for the whole thing to work
in that way.
Mr Lipson: There is a connection
between your previous question and this one in my mind. To get
a really successful school, you have to have ownership at the
most local level by the governors and the head and the school
community. Their involvement in the design is very critical. If
they were handed a standard school, they would not be involved.
They would not feel they needed to own it; it would not be their
project. So there is something about individualising schools at
the most local level that is very important for their success.
Q730 Mr Carswell: Going back to a
point I raised earlier, you say that, but then you have prescriptive
standards and an assumption that there are certain things that
head teachers are going to want to buy in. What are you leaving
local people to decide? The colour of the classroom paints?
Mr Lipson: No, these things are
not at odds at all. The standards they have to meet, as Sally
said earlier, have built within them a great deal of flexibility
as to how designers respond.
Q731 Mr Carswell: Top-down prescribed
flexibility.
Mr Lipson: No, I think it ought
to be bottom-up, bearing in mind a whole set of standards.
Q732 Mr Marsden: This Committee is
just completing an inquiry on citizenship education and it occurs
to me that a good role for school children might be to be well
involved in their schools. But, given that you are looking at
extended schools, the broader use of schools and that, what are
you doing to involve the broader local community—you know,
the area forums and maybe the FE college up the road—in
that process of designing that school? Because that school is
not just going to be used by the teachers and the children, is
it?
Ms Brooks: No. When we look at
a local authority's strategy for change, we expect, as part of
that, for them to tell us what they have done to consult the wider
community: the local people, the users out of hours, the FE community.
It is an expectation that, unless they have done that, their strategy
for change will not be passed.
Q733 Mr Marsden: You will be able
to monitor that, will you?
Ms Brooks: Yes.
Q734 Mr Marsden: Fine. We have been
told that there is no funding made available to subsidise the
efforts which are required to plan, develop and manage the delivery
of the capital programme. Is that correct?
Mr Lipson: Are you referring to
the procurement costs that the authority incurs in getting the
project?
Q735 Mr Marsden: That is my understanding,
yes.
Mr Lipson: There is a small amount
of support that Tim's organisation makes available to local authorities
to help with the cost of employing a project manager.
Q736 Mr Marsden: Is it enough?
Mr Lipson: It is not the whole
of the cost of that one individual, and the rest of the cost of
the large team does fall to the authority.
Q737 Mr Marsden: What percentage
of it would be covered in a typical local authority?
Mr Lipson: By the PfS grant? Less
than 10%, I should think.
Q738 Mr Marsden: It is a token rather
than a solution. If that is the case, Sally, given that we have
already talked about the problems with the lack of expertise,
would it not make sense for the Department to be looking to up
that proportion slightly?
Ms Brooks: We would expect an
average procurement cost on a £200 million project to be
1 to 1.5 to 2% and we would expect the local authority to fund
that. The local authority do have access to other funds.
Q739 Mr Marsden: We all know that
if you do not prescribe something, the local authorities, given
the other pressures on them, tend to drop out by the back door.
Are we not going to run the risk that we are going to have these
major procurement policies taken forward with a very small amount
of input into planning and development?
Ms Brooks: I do not know. I am
sure Tim would like to answer this, but evidence suggests it is
not a lack of willingness on the part of the local authority to
appoint people; it is lack of capacity. There are just not enough
good people around. Local authorities are very prepared now to
pay quite a lot of money but they just cannot get the people.
It is not that they are not prepared to pay.
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