Examination of Witnesses (Questions 800-819)
JIM KNIGHT
MP AND PARMJIT
DHANDA MP
24 JANUARY 2007
Q800 Chairman: What about learning
from the ones that have not been so successful?
Jim Knight: We need to do that
too.
Q801 Chairman: Do you?
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q802 Chairman: There is a system
in the Department that says, "Look, something has gone wrong
with that Academy in that part of the country". How many
Academies have now been established roughly?
Jim Knight: I do not do the Academies
Programme in detail. It is 38 [...][2]
Q803 Chairman: We saw that when we visited
Academies because we see them as a laboratory to learn from. You
say Academies are not your programme, that sets alarm bells off
in this Committee. Is there a process saying, "Here is new
build, here is supposed to be a very high standard, are we learning
from them, day-on-day and week-on-week"?
Jim Knight: One of the important
integrations to smooth this whole process has been to bring the
Academies Programme into BSF and through that mechanism we are
able to learn from the experience of those who have been working
on the Academies Programme within the BSF programme. That also
means that Lord Adonis and myself are working more closely. In
his case, he is working more closely with the capital side; in
my case, I am working more closely with the Academy side.
Q804 Mr Carswell: Minister, there
have been these delays in delivery and one may or may not blame
local authorities. I want to ask is there not a danger that when
you have got a project of this scale and a project that is top
down and centralist, it is going to run into this sort of problem.
Are these problems, delays and bottlenecks almost inevitable when
you have got this huge level of public expenditure being allocated
prescriptively, you have got this huge degree of what is, in effect,
state planning?
Jim Knight: I would disagree with
your premise completely that it is top down and centralist.
Chairman: Localism is the problem, is
it?
Q805 Mr Carswell: It is local authorities
who have made a mess of it, is it?
Jim Knight: I hesitate because
the buzzword "partnership" becomes a little bit tired.
That is what we are seeking to do between ourselves and obviously
we are accountable for a huge sum of money and the local authority
and the strategic commissioner needs to ensure that we produce
something that is sensitive and works for them. When you look
through the procurement process the local authority needs to come
forward with a strategy for change and that works with them setting
out in principle how they want it to work, the number of schools,
the number of secondary schools that they would have, some indication
of how the educational vision would work, how they will deliver
on diversity and choice, how they will integrate it with 14-19.
All those local decisions that they will be making—
Q806 Mr Carswell: They are dancing
to a different tune.
Jim Knight: Obviously they fit,
and they need to fit, with government policy that we were elected
on a manifesto to do. It is a perfectly reasonable principle that
we set standards and requirements essentially, but ask local authorities
to work out on the ground how they are going to deliver on those,
who their delivery bodies will be, how many schools will be delivering
education, for example, how they will configure them geographically
and how they will configure them in terms of their decision around
three or two tier. You have been to Knowsley, you have seen them
looking for quite a radical change in the way that they want to
deliver things. All of that is up to them locally to decide what
they want to do and put the case to us to release the funds. It
is not us sitting in Whitehall saying, "Right, we are going
to have a single contract, make all of those savings, we are going
to have three designs of schools that we will use nationally and
that will be it, you just choose one of them". There is no
kind of Stalinist centralised construction programme, this is
something that we agree locally and we continue to give the local
authority ownership of through the educational vision and then
delivery of that vision through the whole process.
Chairman: I am sure that gladdens your
heart, Douglas.
Q807 Mr Pelling: I apologise for
not having been here at the beginning. Chairman, I wanted to ask
in the context of this ambitious programme about the risks to
do with best value. The taxation system is about redistribution
of wealth. Quite reasonably, I was a little bit worried that if
best value is not secured that we will see a redistribution of
wealth from the hard-pressed taxpayers to shareholders. I know
that one provider has had a very tough time as a result of getting
involved in schools' programmes, amongst others, but what is it
in the work that the Department does at national level to ensure
that we are getting best value for money because if you do not
it could be potentially a huge transfer of resource from taxpayer
to shareholder.
Jim Knight: First of all, we have
got a balance between conventional funding and PFI and there have
been those who argue that we should do the whole thing as PFI
for all the reasons that we have discussed with David around whole-life
cost, for example. We ensure that there is a balance and then
within that balance that there is a market and my guess is you
probably would agree with me that if you can get competition within
a market then you get a certain amount of confidence around getting
a good price as well as competition on the basis of quality and
we seek to balance all of that up so that local authorities can
then decide from a number of different high quality options the
solution that is going to work best for them.
Q808 Mr Pelling: So there is a spike
in terms of expenditure at a time when the economy is already
very strong. Do you feel that in terms of scheduling of work there
is a danger that you might be paying too much by having such an
ambitious programme?
Jim Knight: To some extent that
is why we have spread it as we have. Obviously there may be one
or two Treasury implications if we decide to build them all in
a five-year period, but the construction price inflation and the
lack of value for money we would get as a result would not make
that worth thinking about. You do have to spread it because of
the scale of the projects and the ambition of the project. That
is tough for some areas. There are one or two members of the House
who come to me on a fairly regular basis arguing about the dilapidation
of schools in their area and can I not accelerate them in the
BSF programme.
Q809 Mr Pelling: I am sure I will
try and catch you as you walk down the corridor afterwards.
Jim Knight: That is a tough one.
Q810 Chairman: We are going to move
on, but not before I ask you whether these post-occupancy evaluations
that are considered by most of the experts we have talked to,
to be extremely valuable, are you going to use those and will
they be used in order to evaluate the quality of the finished
product and to inform other builders?
Jim Knight: It is a mechanism
that we are using and we are using it not just within BSF but
the Children's Centre programme in the Department uses the post-occupancy
notion. As I have said, it is very important that we should continue
to learn lessons and disseminate best practice and the use of
that kind of mechanism is an important part of that.
Q811 Chairman: Minister, you reeled
off a lot of organisations that were spreading good practice,
you mentioned the Sorrell Foundation and all sorts of people,
why is it then in Knowsley where we were very impressed by the
team, Professor Stephen Hepburn and Professor Tom Cannon and some
extremely good people, they are the senior management in Knowsley
Council, they thought that they were not part of an organisation
and there was not an organisation spreading good practice, not
just good practice but how you get started and who do you consult
and how do you get the visioning right and who pays for that visioning.
They still feel that there is room for more sharing, if you like.
Jim Knight: There may be room
for more and, again, I am not complacent. I am meeting Knowsley
tomorrow and I will discuss with them their experience along with
everything else we have got to discuss to see whether or not there
is more that we can do. Obviously for those that were in the very
first waves, as Knowsley were, it is more difficult to learn from
best practice.
Q812 Chairman: You would be open
to it?
Jim Knight: I am certainly open
to it and the conference that we had last week brought together
all of the wave 4 authorities, those that we have already assessed
are the most ready to deliver from waves 4, 5 and 6, but deliberately
bringing them together so that they have a chance to compare notes
and to talk to people who have experience of going through this
process. We are very conscious of the need to continue that but
we are not complacent.
Q813 Chairman: We would very much
have liked to have been invited to that conference because we
would have liked to share best practice as we conduct a new inquiry.
Jim Knight: I will bear in mind
the need to invite you in future.
Chairman: We like to be in the loop,
Minister. Let us move on to transforming education.
Helen Jones: Minister, to get this kind
of project right requires an awful lot of preparatory work, we
have seen some very good practice and some bad practice in this
inquiry. What support is being given to authorities through that
visioning process on how to conduct it? Given the fact that we
are spending so much money on this re-build, why is there no money
to support that visioning process to make sure that we get it
right?
Q814 Chairman: I will call both Ministers
on this one.
Jim Knight: Within the Department
we have a series of officials who work directly with local authorities
through the process but obviously have a particularly strong role
through the visioning process and they might have four or five
authorities that they are working with at any given time and there
is a bit of fluidity around that according to those that finish
and those that start in broad terms. We would also have the Partnership
for Schools project directors who equally will be working with
the authorities on their educational visioning as well as the
very real educational expertise and experience that the local
authorities have in-house. We may not be applying financial resource
for them to go out and hire consultants but they do have the support
of both ourselves from the Department and PfS in that. One of
the changes that we have made by merging the strategic business
case and the educational vision stage as part of the streamlining
of the process has been to bring together all of those people
who working are on the educational vision side with the people
who are more traditionally the construction side to make sure
that what previously were two separate conversations going on
become a single conversation and that will strengthen things considerably.
Later on as the LEP will be constructed, for example, at that
point you may well be bringing in consultants as part of the bidding
process who in turn will add further resource in working through
the application of the educational vision that has been agreed.
Q815 Helen Jones: Can I make it clear
I was not necessarily talking about consultants. To do this properly
a local authority has to have a real vision for the future of
its schools. It also has to carry out an awful lot of local consultation
with the community and with the schools. Knowsley, with whom we
were very impressed, estimated that cost them between £3
million and £5 million over three years. That is a lot of
money but we are spending a lot of money on capital. Why is there
not some money at the beginning of the process to ensure that
local authorities get this right because it is fair to say that
we have seen some who we think are not getting this right and
who are building schools for the 20th century rather than the
21st? They are new schools but they do not fit the vision of education
for the 21st century. Would it not be wise for the Department
to have allowed some money upfront to make sure that we are not
wasting money further down the line?
Jim Knight: I am sure you can
always put an argument for more money. We are confident about
the way that the challenge and the support that we offer from
the Department and from PfS works. I have not had any feedback
from authorities or others that the consultation process is burdensome
and that it needs—
Q816 Helen Jones: That is because
they do not always do it.
Jim Knight: Possibly, but, as
I say, people have not made representations to me on that point
and so I have been focused on making sure that we give them the
support that we can and that we continue to challenge them until
they get their educational vision right rather than thinking about
the need to resource them in order to carry out a consultation.
Q817 Helen Jones: What is the Department's
view of how the future teaching in schools and how the development
of personalised learning should be integrated with the new design?
We have seen some schools, for instance, that do this very well.
We have also seen some that are very green but ones that we believe
will not be fit for purpose even when they have got their full
complement of pupils inside let alone in a few years time when
education is changing rapidly. What are you doing in the Department
to make sure that these two strands of the programme are integrated?
Jim Knight: I think we need to
ensure that the designs—I have talked about involving CABE
more strategically in the whole process to ensure that we get
the best quality design, but, obviously, we are also developing
better expertise amongst the architects that are out there bidding
for this work. As they get more experienced in doing it, they
will understand the educational vision and the transformational
end of this better, but we need to make sure that we have got
more flexible buildings, that we are understanding the way that
personalisation needs to work, that we are understanding the way
that technology will transform some of the way that we teach and
we learn, that there is a proper understanding of the changes
in teaching and learning that were brought about by the introduction
of the diplomas for those that choose those. In my own mind that
needs more flexible spaces. I visited a school yesterday in Basingstoke
and some of the classrooms there, that were 15-years-old, were
built on the premise that you would only get A level classes of
a dozen or so, and they are much too small and they have not got
the flexibility to move walls. A lot of the new schools that we
are seeing being built now have got much more flexibility to change
the classroom setting and expand or contract it, there are one
or two slightly more avant-garde who are doing away with walls
altogether, and it will be interesting to see how that works,
but I think that flexibility is absolutely key, and then basic
things like making sure we do not concrete in cabling and that
we have created the infrastructure for ICT, and so on.
Q818 Helen Jones: To do that a lot
of work needs to be done with, not only school leaders, but school
staff, so that they have a vision of how education will develop
before they get too far down the road of the design process.
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q819 Helen Jones: In some of the
experience I have had, that has been a difficulty. When you ask
heads, "What do your staff say about how education will develop?",
it is very hard for staff to get the time out to think through
that process. What is being done to aid that?
Jim Knight: It is a big challenge.
It is a challenge attached to the transformation of technology
that we have generally. When I hosted 62 education ministers from
around the world at the beginning of this month here in London
for the Moving Minds seminar attached to the BETT Exhibition at
Olympia, whether you are in Afghanistan spending $25 a year on
average per pupil or here in this country spending four and a
half thousand pounds a year per pupil, the challenge remains the
same: getting the workforce to appreciate the cultural change
and the change in their pedagogy, for example, that the new forms
of technology and the new ideas around personalisation will bring
is quite a battle, and that is something that we address through
TDA and it is also something that, on an individual basis, we
will be able to address more easily with the introduction of performance
management from September.
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