UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 140-ii
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS
Wednesday 24 January 2007
RT HON JIM KNIGHT MP and RT HON PARMJIT DHANDA MP
Evidence heard in Public Questions 750 - 846
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Wednesday 24 January 2007
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr Douglas Carswell
Mr David Chaytor
Jeff Ennis
Helen Jones
Fiona Mactaggart
Mr Gordon Marsden
Mr Andrew Pelling
Stephen Williams
________________
Witnesses: Rt Hon Jim Knight, a Member of the
House, Minister of State for Schools, and
Rt Hon Parmjit Dhanda, a Member of
the House, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and
Skills, gave evidence.
Q750 Chairman:
Ministers, could I welcome you to this session of the Select
Committee and say that it is a pleasure to have both of you here because you
share responsibility for these particular issues on sustainability and
bullying. We are well aware, and you
will be aware, that they are both very important inquiries for us, but the one
on sustainability involves an enormous investment of taxpayers' money into
schools for the future, and to get those right is of paramount importance. I am going to give the chance to you,
Minister Jim Knight, to say something to open up if you wish.
Jim Knight: Thank you very much, Chairman. I am delighted that we have got the opportunity
to come and discuss, as you say, what is a really important programme. I have not prepared an opening statement; I
know you have got a lot of ground that you want to cover and I am happy to
maximise the time rather than going on at some length with something, having
already submitted written evidence which I am sure you have enjoyed
reading.
Q751 Chairman:
What a refreshing change that is!
Let us get straight into questions.
Could you tell us, Minister, first of all, how many new schools has this
Government built or totally refurbished since 1997?
Jim Knight: The estimate that we make which we
can be confident about is a figure of around 800. I would confess to you I have a degree of frustration about being
able to pin that down more accurately but, where, for example, local
authorities use a targeted capital fund to rebuild schools or fully refurbish
them, as they have in my constituency - I have got a number of different
examples of new schools that are opening at the moment - we do not collect that
information from local authorities, such is the spirit of delegation. That is something which I am looking to
address with officials so that we can give a more accurate figure, but the
figure which we can be absolutely confident about is the 800 one that we are
using at the moment.
Q752 Chairman:
That is a lot of new
schools.
Jim Knight: That is a lot of new schools,
yes.
Q753 Chairman: If you can give us an estimate
of how many schools were built in the ten years running up to 1997 and how many
since 1997 that would be quite good to get on the record.
Jim Knight: What I said last week in a speech in
north London was that we have built more schools in the last five years than
the preceding 25 years.
Q754 Chairman: Those schools that were built
at that time, were they just new versions of the old?
Jim Knight: You mean in the last ten years?
Q755 Chairman: Yes.
Jim Knight: There is a range of different
circumstances, but principally you would have circumstances where schools were
crumbling and just needed replacing for their own sake; you would also have a
number of other circumstances where for organisational reasons, for example
there would be a number that would be a merging of infant and junior schools
which would form a single primary, then a new school results. In my own constituency, the first BSF to
open using the quick win process was in Birmingham. I opened that in June, which was two new special schools moving
on to a mainstream site, so there are good educational reasons as well as
organisational reasons to make that change.
Q756 Chairman:
How many BSF schools have
been built already?
Jim Knight: In terms of the quick wins, literally
just a handful. The first full BSF that
has gone through the whole process will open in the middle of this year.
Q757 Chairman:
Where will that be?
Jim Knight: In Bristol.
Q758 Chairman:
Could you tell us, looking back over the last ten years, when was it
that the Department became aware that there was more of a challenge than just
building new schools, that there was a challenge around the sustainability of
that design and build?
Jim Knight: I think when David Miliband had my
job as Schools Minister, when a lot of the detailed work was done around
putting together BSF, that would be the moment when agreement was forged across
Whitehall that we needed to do more than just the substantial increases we were
making in the schools capital fund, that we needed a much bolder statement of
purpose and a commitment that moves beyond CSR processes across Government. It is quite a remarkable commitment that we
have been able to make to refurbish or rebuild every secondary school by 2020
because it cuts right the way through the CSR processes for years to come.
Q759 Chairman:
Help us forensically, who first committed us, the Labour Government,
to do that, to set that challenge of rebuilding every school? There is some debate about who first said
that in public, was it the Prime Minister, was it David Miliband? When did it come about?
Jim Knight: To be honest, Chairman, I cannot give
you a categorical answer. I have been
somewhat focused on the slightly scary prospect of how to ensure that this
money is well spent and spent on time rather than thinking about who first
thought of it, because it seemed such a good idea, why would I question whose idea
it was in the first place? I will just
get on with the job.
Q760 Chairman:
It is quite important, is it not, to know when this all started? What you have just described is 800 new
schools being built, so we were well on to building schools and suddenly this
vision of Building Schools for the Future, it was a watershed, was it not? Whoever said it, it is different.
Jim Knight: There was a realisation when the
Labour Party was in opposition that we had a big problem in terms of our school
estate. We would make some estimation
around the state of the school estate which says that currently schools are
spending about £1.5 billion of revenue per year on building, grounds
maintenance and cleaning when in order to just maintain a steady state on
schools you would need around £2 billion a year to be spent on the school
estate. That is current figures, but
back ten years ago the overall schools capital budget was only £700 million, so
we were woefully underspending and allowing the school estate to deteriorate
when we came into power and that is why there has been that steady increase in
funding which has been coming in. I
have got the figures year on year in front of me and we are now up to a budget
of £6.4 billion. In terms of
significant leaps, which perhaps would be the implication as to exactly when
there was a crushing realisation we had to do more, I would say it has been a
steady improvement over time.
Q761 Chairman:
Minister, you did mark out David Miliband. As a Committee, it is important to ask and forensically to know
where this came from and, of course, he was a very significant policy person in
Number 10 before he was elected as a Member of Parliament. In a sense, that is what we are tracking,
but we also want to track when was this decision made that Building Schools for
the Future was not going to be like the schools for the future that had been
built already, that they were going to be different. You were the Sustainability Minister in your previous job, were
you not?
Jim Knight: Elliot Morley was really leading on
sustainability in Defra when I was on the Defra team.
Q762 Chairman:
I do not want to flatter you, but you were known to have a real and
genuine interest in sustainability.
Jim Knight: Absolutely. I think that the conceptual change to properly integrate
education, design, ICT, as well as building into the schools capital project,
which is the hallmark of BSF and the way it is designed to include
sustainability as well, would have come with David Miliband in 2003-04 when he
looked at some of the experience of NHS LIFT and the way you could design
procurement in that way but also looked at how you integrate all of the outputs
that we are after to transform education through a capital investment.
Q763 Chairman:
This is what was fascinating when we visited Merseyside in this
respect only last week, that word you just mentioned, "transform", and this is
why forensically I am trying to get you to go back with this. When did the transformation of quality of this
process creep in because, as we see it, from the evidence we have taken and the
visits we have paid, there was some stage at which something in the Department
happened. We were not building schools
just to replace the old schools because modern schools are nicer than old
crumbling schools, but suddenly there was this change that they should not only
be sustainable in terms of being greener, better designed and having less of a
carbon footprint, but that they should also transform two things, the quality
and nature of teaching and learning in the future to a different kind of
teaching and learning, so it would be appropriate, and they should be at the
heart of the transformation process in communities in terms of
regeneration. That is why we are
interested, that is the evidence. What
I am trying to get out of you is, when do you think that happened and who was
responsible? You think it was Miliband.
Jim Knight: And Charles Clarke, Secretary of
State at the time. He would have
informed some of the sustainable development end of it, in particular, and that
element, I think, has been building steadily as we have gone on, so in 2005 the
BREEAM "very good" standard was applied to schools.
Q764 Chairman:
What date was that?
Jim Knight: I have got 2005, but I do not know
what date in 2005 but I can let you know.
Q765 Chairman:
It was not until 2005 we got a BREEAM standard?
Jim Knight: That was when the "very good"
standard applied, as I recall, but equally we continue to work on this area to
see whether we can go further and do better.
March 2005, some brief reviewing me tells me.
Q766 Chairman:
That is comparatively recent.
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q767 Chairman:
So when Miliband, or whoever it was, changed the nature of the
discussion around that policy ---- You are getting bits of paper passed to you,
I have had one passed to me which points out that the original prospectus for
Building Schools for the Future did not have the mention of energy, carbon or
sustainability in it. Why do you think
that was?
Jim Knight: I think when you listen to the Prime
Minister, when you listen to a number of ministers, talk about the environment,
carbon neutrality, carbon emissions and climate change, the way those issues
have risen up the political agenda has been marked over the last few
years. The Prime Minister says that
when he was elected in 1997 the environment was not a doorstep issue, it was
not a priority issue with the electorate.
It is now and we reflect that along with everybody else.
Q768 Chairman: I see.
That is the history of the programme.
I think most of us in questioning you this morning will not be hung up
too much about the lag in the programme of BSF, let us clear that out of the
way. I think all members of this
Committee would rather see a good programme of Building Schools for the Future
rather than a deficient one that was delivered on time. Why do you think there has been this lag in
building schools?
Jim Knight: I think there are a number of reasons that
can be summarised around that, that we underestimated the complexity and the
ambition. It would be easy for my
comments to be interpreted as a criticism of local authorities for not having
the capacity, and that has been at the heart of a lot of the difficulty, but I
do not think that they should be blamed for that because there will be very few
people in local authorities who have got experience of procuring this size of
project and something as transformational as this. I think it would make a lot of people quite nervous, the
responsibility of having to do so, because it will be the biggest thing they
will do in their working lives and to get them to be in turn imaginative and to
take some risks in order to achieve the transformation that we talked about
earlier has proved quite a challenge.
We use people like the LGA's 4Ps to try and build that capacity and
there is more we need to do there. We
are now asking the National College of School Leadership to build capacity
amongst school leaders themselves, to understand how to go through the design
process and to achieve the maximum for their own school. We are looking to involve CABE, the sign
advisers for us, at earlier stages and more thoroughly and strategically in the
process so that we can get around some of those problems of capacity, ensuring
that all of our policies are aligned properly.
That is where we have to take some responsibility in the department so
our policies around structures are properly aligned with BSF, that is something
we are trying to sort out now, and making sure that best practice is properly
being spread and we have certainly started.
The nature of the prioritisation of the waves of BSF was those areas
that needed it most, both in terms of the state of their school buildings but
also in terms of the level of deprivation and educational need, because this is
a transformational project in educational terms so it makes sense in my mind to
have started in those areas where educational performance has been struggling
the most and where they can gain quickly from that transformation, but those
are simultaneously some of the most challenging areas to do that work.
Q769 Chairman: You chose those not because they were Labour
seats but because of deprivation.
Jim Knight: That really is a nonsense story. We have had quite a few nonsense stories
recently about BSF but that probably takes the prize. It is done fairly and squarely on the basis of need. What we did not do and what we have now done
with Wave 4 and the announcements of the Wave 4 authorities that we made at the
end of last year was also adding to that their deliverability and their ability
to deliver on time and on budget and those later in that block of three will be
those that need more work on capacity and all the reasons why we have the delay
at the moment.
Q770 Chairman: Was there a design fault in the sense that
if the Department was choosing areas of highest deprivation and schools in the
worst state, in a strange sense whereas most people would applaud that, and I
certainly would, is there a bit of the Department's policy that would lead to
some local authorities with the most problems struggling with quite a demanding
set of tasks? We had the NUT in
evidence, so many schools are struggling with a number of high priority, quite
significant changes, particularly in deprived areas with local authorities that
have a great deal on their plates. In a
sense you have got all the deprived local authorities working on these schemes,
perhaps if you had a spread of different kinds of areas you would have got some
more interesting good practice early on.
Jim Knight: I am sure we would but I think it was the
right decision. As a Dorset MP, I would
have loved Dorset to be in one of the first waves but ten years ago, the
performance, let us say, at GCSE of five A-stars to C in Dorset was 50 per cent
and in Manchester it was 30 per cent.
They have got closer now as a result of the improvement we have seen
across the board, but particularly in those inner city areas. It would have been much easier to build in
places like Dorset, we would have got the quick wins, we would have made everyone
feel happy and confident about it, but we would not have been making the right
decision for young people who really need it.
The young people of Manchester, as an example, need that transformation
and it was perfectly right that would be in Wave 1, even though just in terms
of the construction side working in more cramped and difficult sites, you do
not have the space to decant as
easily onto sites and then re-develop the sites that they are leaving
behind. There are all sorts of
constraints that make it much more difficult.
Q771 Chairman: If the people in Dorset or Yorkshire were
given a choice of this vast public expenditure going on a new build or an
amazing number of new teachers and support staff, do you think they would have
all gone for the option of taxpayers' money flowing into one rather than the
other, or more into one rather than the other?
Jim Knight: I think they are quite happy that we are
trying to do both. They are very happy
to see 36,000 more teachers in this country, they are very happy to see 150,000
more teaching assistants in this country.
We have addressed the issue of class sizes for five, six and seven year
olds as we promised in 1997 but, alongside that, we have seen that six-fold increase
in real terms in investment in schools' capital and they are very pleased to
see the end of outside toilets, they are very pleased to see a huge reduction
in the number of temporary classrooms and all the other results of that extra
investment in capital.
Q772 Chairman: Thank you very much for that, Minister. Parmjit, you have been listening to all
this, is there anything that you would like to bring to the party in terms of
questions I have asked Jim Knight?
Mr Dhanda: Good morning, Chairman. It is nice to be before the Committee. I have only ever sat on the other side as a
member of a select committee so this is a new experience for me. Just to add to what Jim has already said
around the BREEAM "very good" standard coming into place from March 2005. It is a minimum standard and we are also
doing work with three pilot schools where we are trying to achieve BREEAM
"excellent" as well. I agree entirely
with what Jim says around BSF, we have not actually targeted Labour seats
because you have got two Labour MPs sat here and I do not get BSF for some time
in my patch either, for understandable reasons, but the fact that we will get
it before 2020, we are delighted about that.
Q773 Mr Chaytor: Accepting that you are not blaming local
authorities' lack of capacity for the delays, does it not imply a lack of
capacity within the Department for not being aware of the state of readiness of
local authorities?
Jim Knight: I guess you could say the fact that I have
acknowledged, and when my officials gave oral evidence, and I think Tim Barns
from Partnership for Schools said, that we underestimated the scale of the
challenge initially but now we are learning the lessons and rolling them out,
we are confident about the timetable from now on in, that implicitly we are
saying, as a Department, we underestimated.
You could take that as a criticism of officials. I do not think any individual official
should be to blame for that. For us as
well a £45 billion programme is kind of unusual and to seek to integrate
things, to transform things and to get things right rather than knock up
buildings and hope for the best has just been more work than we thought.
Q774 Mr
Chaytor: You are clear that you are not passing the buck to the
local authorities?
Jim Knight: No, not at all.
Q775 Mr
Chaytor: There have been delays in establishing the timescale. Have you now established new timescales and
target dates with Partnerships for Schools?
Jim Knight: Yes, we have been making some
adjustments. When Tim, the new Chief
Executive of PfS, had a chance to have a look at things, we made some
adjustments with local authorities according to their ability to deliver. I was very conscious when I first had a look
at this that we had within the early wave authorities a whole number of
authorities within the traffic light scheme on red with no real ability of
getting them back to amber or green and then all of the motivations around
performance management become very difficult if you are just saying, "Well,
sorry, you are too late and you are not going to get back on track". We have had some adjustment of the timing to
something that we all agree is realistic, but also we have had some improvement
as a result of some of the streamlining of the process that has gone alongside
it. There has been a genuine
improvement in terms of the speed with which we can get schools open.
Q776 Mr
Chaytor: Is there now a document that spells out the timescales for
each wave and which authorities are in each wave?
Jim Knight: Internally, we have our documents
around that and they are very much live documents, so when I have my monthly
meetings with PfS, with Tim and some of his team, we run through how each of
the authorities in the early waves are doing and we pay particular attention to
those authorities where the trend is in the wrong direction and what intervention
I should be making, as a minister, and what intervention the Department and PfS
in turn should be making. We have had
examples of one or two authorities where I have had to get involved and others
where things have turned around thanks to maybe better engagement between PfS
and the authority.
Q777 Mr
Chaytor: But this is not public information?
Jim Knight: It is not public information. I can discuss with the various parties to
that information whether or not we can let you have more information than we
have already sent you in terms of what the timetable is now looking like.
Q778 Mr
Chaytor: Is the Number 10 Delivery Unit involved in this, and what
is the nature of the dialogue between the Department and the Number 10 Delivery
Unit?
Jim Knight: The Prime Minister's Delivery Unit
has done a piece of work, which I will be receiving very soon, on Building
Schools for the Future and the slippage which they have been doing alongside
the Treasury, which obviously takes a close interest in this as well. That will be advice to ministers and,
therefore, will not be published, but what I will do is look at whether or not
we can publish the recommendations that come out of that so that you and the
rest of the public who is interested can see what they are suggesting. I would anticipate that it will be some
discussion and recommendations around how we streamline elements of the
process, which we have been doing, for example, with the new Strategy for
Change stage which merges to previous stages in the procurement process; it
will be around the sharing of best practice and what more we can do through the
various agencies that we use to achieve that; and whether there is more we can
do in terms of capacity-building and ensuring readiness to deliver before we
make a commitment.
Q779 Mr
Chaytor: Finally, in respect of the 800 schools that have been
re-built or refurbished through PFI, what would you say are the most important
lessons that could be applied to the BSF programme?
Jim Knight: I think in terms of PFI, you have got
the fundamental, which is the management of risk and being able to place risk
in the private sector which motivates them to build on time and to budget,
which is a feature of most of the PFIs.
Not all of them, but most of the PFIs have been able to do that. They are also able to look more easily at
the whole-life cost of a building. I
think one of the other lessons that we might want to look at is ensuring that
we have sufficient flexibility in the contracting because we have seen changes
in policy around extending schools, for example looking at more community use
of buildings and multi-agency approaches and having to locate practitioners
from other services in school buildings.
If the initial contracting has not allowed for that, then that has to be
re-negotiated and we have got to make sure that we have got some flexibility to
do that. I am confident on that, but
that is something we need to ensure we have got.
Q780 Mr
Chaytor: The 25-year contract is a dual-edged sword because it locks
you into a set of rigid terms and conditions, which is a problem, but, on the
other hand, it allows whole-life costing to be built in which is an advantage.
Jim Knight: Absolutely, and so on conventional
procurement, and most of our procurement is still conventional, the more we can
learn on the whole-life costing the better.
It is quite difficult because we are delegating the revenue funding to
schools, so they make the savings if we have put more capital investment in,
and obviously we have a modest level of delegated capital funding, but in terms
of these big construction-type projects that money is not delegated to schools
so the motivations are separated through conventional procurement. It is not the same with PFI, the more we can
work that one through with conventional procurement the better, but, as you
say, where we look to develop and extend the service that is being offered by
schools, however it is managed, be it PFI or conventionally, you still have to
find extra costs and you still have to negotiate with someone to provide that
extra service. If you have got a
25-year facilities management contract, you have got to make sure that you can
do that successfully with your contractor, the partnership is strong enough and
you are working closely enough together.
Q781 Fiona
Mactaggart: Minister, in that rather telling phrase, you said: "We
must be smarter about sharing experience".
How are you being smarter about sharing experience with the future
waves, or onwards, of Building Schools for the Future?
Jim Knight: That works on a number of different
levels. We have our own officials
working from the Department, we have the Partnership for Schools staff working
with the local authorities as well and then we have got the use of other
agencies, like the 4Ps and, as I have mentioned, NCSL and CABE. All of those have a role to play in building
on their experience working in local authorities that have been through this
process or are going through this process to then apply as we hold the hand of
the local authorities going through the later waves. Equally, for example, agreeing the first LEP - Local Education
Partnership - the procurement model, in Bristol was quite a major milestone for
us to get over last year, because you got the first legal agreement there and
there are not that many solicitors working in this field. People will look at what has already been
done and already been agreed and then will be able to apply that practice
elsewhere, so, as we build experience there are all sorts of people, both in
the commercial sector and in the public sector, who will be able to learn from
each other.
Q782 Fiona
Mactaggart: That is an interesting model where you talk about your
central resources going out to the frontline.
One of the things that I am struck by is there is not enough
across-sharing at the frontline from the teacher in the home economics
classroom who felt that the way the ovens had been put in would have been done
differently if someone had cast themselves into her position, to Knowsley who
said that there should be a kind of forum to interchange ideas. What are you doing to help people who have
been through it at the frontline to make sure other people do not make the
mistakes they have made?
Jim Knight: That is where I think the NCSL work
is really important in bringing head teachers together who are going through
this process, so at the individual school leadership level we have that
mechanism, the use of that agency. For
young people who are going to use the building, we have got some really
interesting and strong work being done by the Sorrell Foundation. I was at an event this week over at Somerset
House, and from April they will be opening at Somerset House to work with young
people to help them with the design brief and to develop practice.
Q783 Chairman: We are very fond of the Sorrell Foundation
on this Committee.
Jim Knight: Good, I am glad that I have touched the
right button, Chairman.
Mr Chaytor: Chairman, I should declare an interest, I am
a member of the Sorrell Foundation.
Q784 Chairman: That is why we are even more fond of it.
Jim Knight: Obviously the 4Ps have an absolutely
critical role, they are an arm of Local Government Association so they are
working with the local authorities, they are an offshoot of the local
authorities themselves and we pay them in order to do exactly this work of
spreading best practice of local authorities.
At local authority level the 4Ps, at the school leadership level the
NCSL, and that is not just head teachers but that would be senior management
teams as a whole, and then for the pupils themselves people like the Sorrell
Foundation.
Q785 Fiona MacTaggart: That is an account of you thinking you are
being smart. Are you telling me that
you do not think that people in future waves will be able to fall through the
net of this knowledge?
Jim Knight: I am not saying that we complacently sit
back and think we have got everything right and it is all perfect. I will continue to look at how we can spread
best practice more thoroughly and the use of the 4Ps and there are a number
around Ty Goddard`s organisation - the name of which temporarily escapes me -
which is another and we need to use all those various forums to ensure that we
are offering to anyone who is going through this process the opportunity to
learn from each other without forcing them to go to all sorts of expensive
conferences when they could be spending their time better in school.
Q786 Fiona MacTaggart: You referred earlier to the LEP model for
delivery and that is how authorities are expected to enact their BSF
plans. Is it proving effective? Is it going to be the usual way you deliver
these?
Jim Knight: Yes.
It is very early days, so I think it would be difficult for me to say
that it is absolutely brilliant already because we only signed up the first one
in September last year in Bristol, but we are optimistic about our progress in
the early part of this year in signing up the rest. We had discussions with one or two authorities who were resistant
to the LEP model and wanted to use their existing procurement partnerships that
they had already set up, but they simply were not at a scale for the markets to
have confidence that they had the experience necessary to do this through their
existing frameworks. That is really
where I have every confidence in the LEP as a model, that it is bringing in the
educational vision, it is bringing in the ICT high quality design and the
constructors with confidence from the market because the management of the
construction market is quite of big aspect of this because it is such a big
building project in national terms.
Q787 Fiona MacTaggart: Do you think that the people at the
frontline, the local educational authorities and the schools are effective
contractors in such a big project?
Jim Knight: Our job is to make sure that they are and
that is where some of the slippage lies in terms of the capacity. Again, I do not want to pin blame on the
local authorities themselves, it is everyone coming to bear on local
authorities to ensure that we have built up their capacity. Partnership for Schools was explicitly set
up by ourselves and the Treasury through the Office of Government Commerce to
ensure that we had a vehicle that could broker things properly and ensure that
this whole project went through smoothly achieving good value for money.
Q788 Chairman: This is a bonanza for the service sector,
they do not call themselves the construction industry anymore, but the people
who provide the buildings and the service.
These contractors see it as a unique opportunity because they see a
pipeline of money rather than contracting.
If they are good at this, if they place themselves in a range of
contracts, they have got at the end of the pipeline £45 billion or more for a
very long time. Are you asking for high
enough standards from them? As it is
such a bonanza, should we not be imposing very, very high standards on
them?
Jim Knight: I am confident that we are. I am confident that the way the procurement
has been designed has created a market within which those various organisations
operate and that level of competition within the market, and there is good
competition, is not just about price, it is also about quality. We have a responsibility to ensure that
quality is right up there at best value for money and I am very happy that the
procurement model set up does just that.
Q789 Chairman: It sounds wonderful, except when you know a
bit about the construction industry and know the people who built the new
Wembley Stadium littered half of the building waste all over the South of England,
dumping it illegally. If you understand
that, you then think what is happening in real construction on the ground
because that was a prestige project and in terms of sustainability that one
element was a disaster and one wonders how many other things were covered up at
that time.
Jim Knight: I better not comment on Wembley Stadium
because that would lead me inevitably to talk about how wonderful the Emirates
Stadium is and then I would have to declare an interest as an Arsenal fan, so I
will steer off that, particularly as I am sitting next to a Liverpool fan and
we beat them 6-3 the other week. More
importantly, we can also learn from our experience in building academies and we
have some really good examples of some fantastic buildings, one of which won
the construction industry award.
Q790 Chairman: What about learning from the ones that have
not been so successful?
Jim Knight: We need to do that too.
Q791 Chairman: Do you?
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q792 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 thirty-eight..
Q793 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 PfS and
through that mechanism we are able to learn from the experience of those who
have been working on the academies programme within the PfS 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.
Q794 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?
Q795 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 ----
Q796 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.
Q797 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.
Q798 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.
Q799 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.
Q800 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.
Q801 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 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.
Q802 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.
Q803 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?
Q804 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.
Q805 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 we 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---
Q806 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.
Q807 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.
Q808 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.
Q809 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.
Q810 Helen Jones: What
is the department's view of what educational transformation means? Is it about teaching and learning, or is it
about having lots of different types of schools: faith schools, Trusts,
Academies, or whatever. What is it?
Jim Knight: It is
fundamentally about teaching and learning and a focus on standards. There is a role for diversity and choice in
terms of accountability and ensuring that we do not have complacency in the
system, but fundamentally it is about the development of teaching and learning,
the personalisation. We are working
through our response to Christine Gilbert's review on teaching and learning for
2020, but one of the interesting aspects to that is the notion of learners
learning from each other more, of teachers facilitating learning and teaching
people how to learn, the skills to learn, as much as teaching the knowledge
itself. That sort of development is, I
think, at the core of it alongside giving learners choice over curriculum,
choice over qualifications, which is part of the 14-19 changes, for example.
Helen Jones: I am very pleased to hear you say that, but
does that then mean if there is local consultation---. For instance, Knowsley, who we were very
impressed with, have a very clear vision of where they want to go, they have
carried out a lot of consultation locally, but they told us they were then
pressurised by the department to have an academy in their plans, which did not
fit the structure that they wanted and that they had consulted on locally. Are you saying to this Committee that that
should not happen, or are local authorities going to be pressed to have an
academy as they go through a BSF programme whether the local people want one or
not?
Q811 Chairman: That rather takes us back to the centralism
and localism point, does it not?
Jim Knight: Part
of the strategy for change discussion will include what the structures will
look like, what diversity of choices there will be. If you are in an authority like Knowsley that has historic low
levels of performance and low levels of standards and still remains one of the
poorest performing authorities in terms of both value added and result---
Q812 Helen Jones: It is fascinating.
Jim Knight: Again,
I am looking forward to meeting Knowsley and having a discussion with them
tomorrow about continuing that improvement in standards, which they should be
proud of but they should not be complacent about. We believe that structures can play a role in forming
standards. It was fundamental to the
Act that was passed last year and the debate that we were all a part of around
that, and I do not know that we need to re-rehearse that debate.
Q813 Helen Jones: But
there were also assurances given that these would not be forced on local
authorities?
Jim Knight: Yes. In Knowsley's case, they were going to have an
academy. They are now not going to have
an academy. They are proposing moving
from 11 to seven. The previous
agreement was eight, which included an academy. We will be discussing tomorrow their proposals for seven and
whether or not we exempt them from competition, but I am not going to prejudge
that discussion now.
Q814 Helen Jones: I am
still not sure what the answer is, Minister.
Was it that authorities must have an academy or they need not have one
if they have other plans and there is no local pressure for one?
Jim Knight: By
implication, what I am saying in respect of Knowsley is that I am not saying
that you got have to have an academy or you have got to have a trust school or
you have got to have whatever else.
What I am saying is that you have got to demonstrate that you will see a
radical improvement of standards.
Q815 Chairman: Helen is asking you also the general
principle. Is it the general principle
that under the BSF programme, when you are dealing with the local authority,
you use that opportunity to press them to have an academy?
Jim Knight: No,
we would not dogmatically press them to have an academy. We would say, "Have you looked properly at
the standards that your school is producing?
Have you looked properly at how you are going to configure schools post
BSF to ensure that standards continue to rise, and have you looked at all of
the options to achieve that? If you
have an historic record of underperformance by managing and delivering your own
schools as an authority's community schools, then we would probably challenge
them to use some of the other forms that we know are working. Academies will be one of them which we know
are producing excellent improvements in results, trust schools, equally, maybe
others, but it is not a question of saying every authority must have an
academy, it is a question of saying every authority must be driving forward
standards for their young people.
Q816 Helen Jones: If an
authority like mine, where over 97 per cent of parents get their first choice
of secondary school, submitted a BSF plan that did not have academies in
it - I am not particularly referring to my own, there are lots of
them - where the schools, even those in challenging circumstances, are
improving schools, would your officials still go to them and say, "Have you
thought of having an academy?", because what we are getting from local
authorities is that there is lots of pressure from your department to have an
academy as part of BSF even when the authority has carefully consulted and
worked out a plan to tackle the problems it faces?
Jim Knight: We
would look at the authority, be it Warrington or elsewhere, look at the trend
in standards for the schools and ensure that the vision is going to improve
standards, is going to continue to challenge schools to do better, and if an
academy was going to be part of the solution, if we thought that the local
authority was complacent about that or dogmatic in the opposite direction, then
we may well challenge them.
Q817 Helen Jones: My
question is a bit more specific. Are
you going to say that to local authorities even when there is no demand locally
for that?
Jim Knight: We
may do if the standards still were not good enough. Just because there is no demand for an academy, there might even
be no demand in improvement, that does not necessarily mean that improvement
should not happen. It might mean that
there is a lack of ambition in that community or a lack of aspiration in that
community, but that still might be something that the authority should address.
Q818 Chairman: Parmjit,
you are not catching my eye very well.
Mr Dhanda: I was
going to give my colleague an opportunity to have a sip of water actually. Obviously, Jim leads on capital and BSF and
that has been the broad remit of the questions so far, but, Helen, you did
mention at the very outset a vision process of schools and I think vision
process and sustainability very much go hand in hand in terms of the work that
we are trying to do in the department at the moment. I thought I would mention within that context some of the work
that obviously I am involved in around the classroom and sustainability. We launched the Sustainable Schools
Consultation Process last May. I
believe it was actually the first government carbon neutral consultation document
that we had had, and within that context - I think you mentioned
build - big capital projects and obviously BSF are very important, but
amongst the eight doorways within that consultation process buildings and
grounds, certainly at a local level, are a very important element. I thought it would be worth mentioning,
something that the department has produced is a self-evaluation tool for
schools in terms of how they ensure that sustainability as a key part of that. You also mentioned, Helen, staff training
and the learning process. I think
sustainability is important there as well in terms of the context of what we
have been doing in terms of this consultation, and we will be producing an
action plan in the coming weeks which will refer again to the TDA and the
National College of School Leadership and will discuss just how we can do that
within a sustainability context and those doorways which are very important in
the classroom. That is slightly
separate to what we have been talking about in terms of new-build, BSF and
capital build, I just thought we ought to get that on the record and allow Jim
to have a glass of water.
Q819 Mr Marsden: Minister,
just to pursue these issues of flexibility, you have already referred to the
fact that you think the planning process needs to have flexibility. You referred specifically to 14-19 diplomas
as having an impact on that and you also mentioned the 2020 Vision Report. I wonder how you think specifically the 2020
Vision Report is going to affect what your department changes about its
recommendations and thoughts on design?
Jim Knight: I
think, principally, it would be around ensuring that we have flexible learning
spaces and ensuring that we are---. It
is already clear, and has always been clear, that ICT should be properly
integrated into the programme, but I am currently discussing with Becta and
looking to bring them into the process more completely so that we can ensure
that we are properly anticipating the future technology need and building that
into the design at a stronger level. I
have one or two concerns. They are not
major concerns, and it is very difficult with technology to anticipate where it
is going to go, but there are issues around ICT and sustainability, there are
issues also around ICT and future proofing and we have got to make sure that we
get that right.
Q820 Mr Marsden: I am
very pleased to hear that. Presumably
implicit in that is the suggestion that the department has not been doing
enough of it already?
Jim Knight: It is
just the nature of technology and the way it changes and the various directions
in which that industry goes. I have
been having quite a few discussions over the last couple of months, and I will
also, next month, be going to visit a number of the leading technology companies
in the United States to try and properly anticipate where we are going. It is actually more about that side of
things, about making sure that we can properly understand where things might go
and predict those and offer some vision of that to schools than it is about
criticism of where we have been today.
Mr Dhanda: I
think it is a very personal question, because as we see a greater roll-out of
technology and more computers, we do have the difficulty of dealing with
emissions and issues around technology.
It is very natural, but I think it is quite heartening, some of the
advances and changes, and you will have seen it on your journeys around
schools, the more sustainable ones in particular, where we are doing work
around intelligent buildings where the lights switch-off as you walk out of a
room, but also specifically in this area around ICT computers and thin client
devices, where there is a great deal of work that can be done. We can ensure that battery lives for these
machines last a whole day without a need for charging. I think Jim is probably more of a technical
expert on this than I am, but there are ways of ensuring that with these thin
client devices that power is used up not by a terminal but by the server. I think we need to look into this, and I
think there are some very exciting opportunities out there around that.
Q821 Mr Marsden: The
technical things, as you refer to them, Parmjit, are something that will always
challenge all of us, some of us perhaps more than others, but the challenge
that faces us in terms of transformation is also the challenge of usage, is it
not, Minister?
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q822 Mr Marsden: One
of the things that we are concerned about, and I hate to keep going back to
Knowsley, but Knowsley seemed to have a very clear idea of how their future
buildings would serve the whole community?
Jim Knight: Yes.
Q823 Mr Marsden: We do
not see that, I think, in all of the BSF bids so far. How are you going to ensure, without being Stalinist, state'ist
or top-down, as my colleague Douglas Carswell might put it, that that sort of
broader community vision is communicated to local authorities and is taken on
board by your own officials in assessing these bids?
Jim Knight: We
quoted and held up Knowsley as an example of best practice in the White Paper,
I think, and I regularly refer people to Knowsley as an authority that has been
particularly imaginative, particularly creative and how much we welcome that
level of creativity, and so, at a personal level, I am trying to do my bit and
as a department we are not shy in using that example; but, again, it is the
same sort of issue that we have been talking about again and again in terms of
best practice and how we spread that and the various agencies that are involved
in BSF and making sure that they are involved.
In particular, I am keen to get Becta more firmly integrated into this
as part of the sharing of best practice in terms of technology.
Q824 Mr Marsden: Minister,
I understand that, and the examples that you gave earlier of the NCSL involvement,
and you mentioned the Seoul Foundation, and all the rest of it, those are
things that we would share and agree with but the reality is that good or
innovative local authorities and schools will take those things forward anyway. What I am concerned about is what template
you have in the department for encouraging the spread of that best
practice. Can I raise one very specific
issue with you? My colleague, Helen
Jones, has already talked about the way in which academies fit into BSF, but I
want to ask you about how you see BSF affecting sixth-form colleges and the FE
sector. I have been talking to a number
of FE principles who are concerned, not, incidentally, in the Knowsley case,
but who are concerned that BSF may go ahead in their areas and these great
plans for community involvement across the age ranges and all the of rest of
it, and yet there is not a structural way of involving them, or they do not
think so, in the local authority's plans.
Is that a concern that you share?
Jim Knight: It is
a concern that I have had, because it stands to reason that we have an
ambitious 14-19 programme that I believe we will be talking about next week and
yet we have structures that begin and end at 16. Clearly it must be a concern to ensure that that runs smoothly
together. That is why I am pleased
that, as part of the changes that we have made in the process, with the
introduction of the Strategy for Change, we have a requirement that we look at
very closely, that the local authority is properly consulted with the Learning
and Skills Council locally to ensure that there is proper alignment between
their educational vision for schools and the post-16 offer and the delivery of
the 14-19 agenda. Similarly, the LSC
have a requirement that, when they put capital projects up to their board, they
show what consultation they have had with the local authority to ensure that at
their end it is properly integrated; and when we look at the gateways and the
use of the 40 million capital fund for the delivery of the diploma
gateways, certainly we will be looking to ensure that there is proper
integration with BSF.
Q825 Mr Marsden: In
terms of your own department, what are you doing to make sure that people who
cover the FE sector are liaising closely and properly with the officials who
are overseeing BSF?
Jim Knight: The
14-19 reforms and agenda are critical to that and bring the two directorates
together. John Coles, the official who
is responsible for the 14-19 curriculum changes and the diplomas and so on,
sits within the FE directorate, Steven Marsden's directorate, but he is working
very closely with the schools directorate, and I am the lead minister on 14-19,
I spend most of my time working with officials in schools, so I think we have
got a reasonable structural set-up which says that the lead official is coming
from the FE, HE directorate, the lead minister is coming from the schools
directorate, and that will, I hope, ensure that we have got good integration
across the department.
Q826 Mr Marsden: A
final point. You have talked, Minister,
about the problems of tightness in inner city areas. One of the problems at the moment within your own frameworks of
costing is that there is very little allowance made for increased costs of rebuilding
on inner city or inner town sites and, as we generate more and more towns and
cities, ironically land value goes up and that is going to be a problem. Is that something you can look at in the
context of BSF?
Jim Knight: It is
something that we have been looking at with the academies that are also in
those sorts of areas.
Q827 Mr Marsden: I
mention it, in particular, for obvious reasons, because I have had two examples
in my own constituency.
Jim Knight: Yes,
that is something we can look at. It is
something that I will reflect on and discuss with officials and, if it is
useful for me to send you a note on the outcome of that discussion, then I can
hopefully do so.
Chairman: Perhaps you ought to be talking to Tesco;
they seem to own half of England!
Q828 Fiona Mactaggart: Minister,
do you remain committed to the approach of integrating the ICT funding on
contracts within the LEP? We have heard
from some ICT providers that this approach ties them into the wider
construction process and consortium and therefore limits innovation?
Jim Knight: Yes,
when I was at the BETT fair there were some ICT companies who made similar
points to me about their worries around how they are being integrated. To some extent we will improve that through
practice and through building up trust between the various partners, but I
think there is gain in letting the ICT contracts as long-term managed services,
because, as always with these long-term contracts, what you are dealing with is
risk and you are placing risk, quite deliberately, outside the public sector. Again, by having long-term ICT contracts you
are placing the risk around technological change elsewhere, which is a gain but
in some ways it is the most difficult aspect of the integration just because
predicting where technology will be in 25 years time is kind of a
challenge.
Q829 Fiona Mactaggart: You
have a fantastic record on that. I also
wanted to ask you about regeneration. I
was struck in the evidence from the department that, in the part of the
evidence about the school being at the heart of the community, there was a
vision of schools offering stuff to the community rather than engaging the
wider community in creating it. In
fact, it was only in the Early Years section and Every Child Matters
section that there was a reference to the kind of participation of other forces
within the community in developing things.
I am concerned that BSF, which is a fantastic investment in some of the
most deprived communities in the country, is not being conceived as part of a
regeneration process which in the process involves the whole community. Why is it not and what are you doing about
it?
Jim Knight: What
we would want to achieve, by announcing well in advance which authorities are
in which waves, by having quite significant design periods as part of the process,
is the ability for local authorities, who, as we have discussed with Douglas,
have the key role locally in ensuring that this strategically works, that they
are using their local strategic partnerships to ensure that we have got any
gains that we can make by linking through with other services, and at a school
level obviously we have got the development of extended schools with every
school being an extended school by 2010, which is very much about them engaging
externally with their community and ensuring that the gains we make with BSF,
alongside everything else we are doing schools, is something that the community
can have access to, particularly parents but also the wider community as
well. Again, in terms, we have got the
development of the 14-19 curriculum and the engagement with employers locally
that we will need to see as part of that, and the development of trust schools
which, by definition, are looking for external partners in a locality to make
the whole culture of the school much more outward looking and less inwardly
focused.
Chairman: Can ask everyone to be very fast, because we
are going to squeeze bullying out of today's session if we are not very
careful.
Q830 Fiona Mactaggart: Can I
ask my supplementary and point it at you, Parmjit, partly so you can respond to
them both. I still think that your
response is a vision of schools making an offer to the community as part of
regeneration, and one of the things we have learned about regeneration is that
it works when it is from the bottom up on its own out there. I thought that that was clearer in the Every
Child Matters part of the evidence than the rest of it rather than an offer
from the centre to the community, and I wondered if Parmjit, as the minister
responsible for Every Child Matters, thinks there is a tension in the
department and whether other bits of the department can learn from some of the
stuff you are doing?
Mr Dhanda: I do
not disagree with what you are saying.
I do not feel that there is a tension from some of the visits that I
have made myself recently. I entirely
agree with you that this has to be about schools getting out of the old culture
of 9.00 to 3.30 and actually being hubs of their local communities, the
communities being part of the school rather than the other way around, just as
you say. Part of what we are trying to
do with the sustainable schools Strategy, but also with eco-schools as well, is
trying to help change that culture, and I am seeing more and more people, and I
am sure, Fiona, you are in your own constituency as well, for whom English is
not their first language coming in and learning and working, often outside of
school hours in extended schools, with pupils in schools. I think this is a model we are seeing more
and more of but it is something that we need to change over a period of time
because we are looking at a real culture change and within the whole
sustainable schools framework we really do want to ensure that schools are a
hub for those local communities.
Fiona Mactaggart: At the same time we have guidelines
determining capital funding allocated against pupil places which significantly
limit the funding available for building spaces that can be used by the
community. So can we really say that Building
Schools for the Future is committed to supporting regeneration when there
is a funding limit? It is a bit on
top. It is not actually at the heart of
it.
Q831 Chairman: Minister, this is a fair point, is it
not? We still pick up, everywhere we
go, that you still have not resolved with the Treasury the problems with VAT if
the community goes over 15 per cent, and we also pick up that one of the down
sides of PFI is that they do not let you in the school until eight o'clock and
they throw you out at five. There are
some pressures here, are there not?
Mr Dhanda: There
are. The discussions with the Treasury
are going reasonably well, they going apace, but I had better not dwell too
much on those. As we were discussing
earlier, I think with David, on PFIs, it is very important that we have the capacity
to renegotiate the extended use of those facilities, and, in terms of the
specification that we recommend, there is still considerable room within
that. A note here tells me, which is
very helpful because it gives me the figure, that there is an allocation of 500
square metres to each school for flexible community use. That is quite a considerable lump of
space. It is up to them as to how they
choose to use it, but the allocation is certainly there to ensure that we have
got community facilities in these new schools as well as the community being
able to use facilities that are built for educational reasons but are still
very valid for them to use otherwise.
Q832 Mr Carswell: When
we talk about sustainable schools, there is an idea that we have a twenty-first
century vision of what education should be like and what schools should be
like. How can we trust national
politicians to be able to know the shape of education in two, three decades to
come? If, for example, the Minister for
telecommunications of either party had sat before a parliamentary committee
several decades ago, they could not possibly have understood the innovations
that were about to happen in telecoms.
Mr Dhanda: Yes.
Q833 Mr Carswell: How
can we be sure that today officials in your department know what is best, and
what is going to be best, and what the shape of education is going to be in
decades to come?
Mr Dhanda: I
guess I would say to you that the public sector is not going to be the first to
anticipate where things might go, that it is probably going to be in the
commercial sector where that lies where they are spending huge amounts of money
on R&D internationally to project forward, and that is why we have pretty
active conversations with those companies.
That is why I am taking the Director General for Schools with me to
California and Seattle next month to discuss with the likes of Apple,
Microsoft, Google, not only to see what is good practice in terms of the use of
technology in schools, but also to have direct discussion with the commercial
sector to understand what they think the future might be like and where they
are spending their R&D. Are they,
in terms of devices, spending it on smart-phone technology or are they spending
it on PDA technology? We see excellent
use of the handheld devices in Wolverhampton in their "Learning to go" scheme,
for example, which is the use of PDAs, but if there is not any R&D being
spent in that sort of device, should we be promoting that device universally,
which we can see at the moment is working well, or should we look at something
that is less device specific and based more on platforms having understood
where the commercial industry is going.
Q834 Chairman: Let us hear a quick word from Jim.
Jim Knight: Very
briefly, as I said, we are preparing the State Schools Action Plan as a
consequence of the consultation that we have had over the past year, and young
people have actually played a very big role in that. You are quite right, in 20 years' time when we are older and
greyer it really does have to reflect the views and the needs of another
generation; so we shall send you a copy of it and the proof of the pudding.
Q835 Chairman: I am sure you will learn a lot on the West
Coast of the United States, but perhaps to talk to people like Professor Stephen
Hepple here and the Futures Laboratory here, as we have, might also be
useful.
Jim Knight: Stephen
is a fantastic guru who we use a lot, but we need to make sure we have
diversity in gurus along with everything else.
Q836 Stephen Williams: In
the Minister of State's answer to your initial questions you said that 800
schools have been built since 1997 by the Government. Have you made any assessment as to how important environmental
sustainability was in those schools before we got to BSF?
Jim Knight: I
guess I have not seen any detailed assessment of the impact. What I have seen is some examples, and we
have got some pathfinders at the moment, some modern schools. There are three in the One School
Pathfinders of BSF that are being developed at the moment, there is one in
Devon and one in Dorset as examples that we are looking at that are going to
the BREEAM excellent standard or beyond; I think a couple of them are looking
at carbon neutrality. I can confirm
this in writing to the Committee, but if we have not made a thorough assessment
of the environmental impact in the past it is certainly something we are
conscious of the need to do now, particularly as we develop these pathfinders
and see how much further we can go in respect of carbon emissions.
Q837 Stephen Williams: It
would be fair to say that prior to the current BSF programme the department did
not press upon schools or local authorities that were rebuilding schools the
need to have environmental sustainability as part of the building plan.
Jim Knight: I am
not aware of it, but I can make sure that I give a proper answer to the
Committee in writing.
Q838 Stephen Williams: Under
BSF itself how important is environmental sustainability? How much emphasis is given to it by your
department?
Jim Knight: It is
a very important element, that is why we have set the BREEAM standard, but that
is also why we are looking at whether or not we should be going further than
that standard, whether, for example, we should be looking at what the LSC have
been doing with their Sustainability Fund where they have been able to add some
extra funding in order to improve sustainability. That is something that is in an option that I am looking at, at
the moment, to see whether we can go further in respect of reducing carbon
emissions from schools. Bearing in mind
that two per cent of the UK's carbon emissions come from schools, we clearly
have an important responsibility of our own.
Mr Dhanda: Also,
taking on board what the Committee has said in its own discussions around
BREEAM and whether it effectively takes into consideration carbon
emissions. Obviously there are several
different criteria within BREEAM and whether we need to look specifically at
energy and emissions separately or whether we need to actually look at the
structure of BREEAM within that, as has been discussed within this Committee.
Q839 Stephen Williams: Chairman,
we have been given a different figure for carbon emissions and an estimate from
the public sector is 15 per cent. Given
that carbon emissions obviously do come from schools, how confident are you
that by the time we get to the end of this BSF programme the carbon footprint
for state education will be reduced?
Jim Knight: I am
very confident that through the use of Building Regulation L and the changes
that are still being implemented in some of the retrospective change to
regulation we are securing a 40 per cent reduction in emissions through the use
of the new regulation which came in last year.
So, that is applying not only to new but there is also some regulation
on existing buildings. As I say, I am
ambitious for us to go further but that is subject to negotiation within the
department and then within government as to how we resource that: because whilst
over the long-term we might find that money stacks up, as a responsible
government you cannot make promises willy-nilly, we have got to make sure that
we have costed out whatever proposals we make to go further.
Q840 Mr Chaytor: The
Carbon Trust estimates that the cost of improving the rating from "BREEAM very
good" to "BREEAM excellent" would be ten per cent over the existing
allocation. Your department's research
estimates that that would be between three and 12 per cent, and there is going
to be further examination. If there is
a definitive figure somewhere between five and ten, would you increase the
capital allocation to individual schools to enable that higher BREEAM rating to
be achieved?
Mr Dhanda: For
example, secondary schools, we think it is around 400 to 5,000 and I think, you
are right, it does fall within that three to 12 per cent. Around four per cent, I think we are
saying. Through part of the work that
we are doing with the three pilots and trying to find ways and effective means
of doing this through studies that are on-going, I hope that we can find an
efficient and effective way to enhance the standards. We say "BREEAM very good", but at the moment "BREEAM very good"
is a minimum standard rather than the height of our hopes and expectations.
Jim Knight: What
Parmjit said earlier about looking very carefully at what is the best use of
any extra resource we might be able to find to throw at sustainability, is it
excellence in BREEAM terms or is it doing more specifically on emissions? Because, as Parmjit has explained, BREEAM
covers a whole number of different outlets, not just emissions.
Q841 Mr Chaytor: Would
doing more on the emissions be setting targets for emissions for individual
schools?
Jim Knight: It
might be. It might be that we are able
to allocate a specific sum per secondary school that we would want to see in
exchange - a reduction in the energy usage, an increase in energy efficiency, a
certain proportion produced by renewables and, possibly, the use of
offset. Those are the three tools for
carbon neutrality. It may be that, if
we were to be able to allocate more resource, we would set targets on all three
of those.
Q842 Mr Chaytor: In
terms of the process for formulating the department's guidelines, Parmjit
referred to the Sustainable Schools Consultation in May 2006. How long was the consultation and when was
the deadline for a response?
Mr Dhanda: It
ended in September of last year and we have produced a response document and an
action plan. A detailed action plan
will be ready very soon indeed, in the coming weeks. Another thing that I think is worth mentioning on this in terms
of finance and support, David, is the
£375 million advanced capital investment that we are providing for
2007/2008 for sustainable initiatives that were encouraging local authorities
to actually consider, whether it is microgeneration or ways and means to save
energy and water and the like.
Q843 Mr Chaytor: But
the action plan will have been produced before publication of the Stern Report
into the economics of climate change, which really has shifted the whole debate
up a gear or at least a gear. Are you
considering revising your action plan in the light of the information and the
economic costs proposed or suggested?
Mr Dhanda: The
action plan is not quite complete. We
are in the process of completing it at the moment. The consultation, as I say, ended in September, and we have done
a response to the consultation, but we are now in the process of finishing off
that action plan. I will not go into
the details of the draft of what is in it.
Q844 Mr Chaytor: When
can we expect the publication of the action plan?
Mr Dhanda: Within
the coming weeks.
Q845 Chairman: One thing that has not been touched on today,
something which we are picking up and we should have asked you questions on,
and perhaps you will respond to us in writing, is skills. We are picking up, with the Olympics in
parallel with this building programme and other public sector building
programmes, that the availability of skills to build the schools for the future
are going to be very tight.
Jim Knight: It is
an active part of what we are doing on the Olympics legacy as well, so I will
drop you a line.
Q846 Chairman: The other one is that most of us who have
been to a lot of schools recently know that if you have not got the skills in
there, the students, the staff and the management of the building, you can have
all the wonderful gimmicks in the world in terms of sustainability, but they
will not be working properly.
Jim Knight: I
would agree. We have work to do to
ensure that buildings are managed properly.
You can design sustainable schools, but if they still leave the lights
on---
Chairman: We saw a dramatic energy reduction when the
students were energised! Let us move
on to bullying.
