Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS
AND FAMILIES
5 MARCH 2008
Q60 Chairman: Sorry, you are refusing
to make that information available?
Mr Bell: No, I am not refusing
to make it available to the Committee, Chairman.
Chairman: We do like transparency and
you agreed earlier that transparency is important.
Q61 Mr Mitchell: Also I would like
to know where North East Lincolnshire is.
Mr Bell: I am happy to supply
a list to Members of the Committee of where we are against the
146. I am just making the point that what we are trying to do
is to work with those areas.
Chairman: Fine, you are happy, you agree,
great. Mr Mitchell, carry on.
Q62 Mr Mitchell: I do not know where
North East Lincolnshire is and I do not know whether you can tell
us now off-the-cuff.
Mr Coles: I am sorry, I do not
know off the top of my head where North East Lincolnshire is.
Q63 Mr Mitchell: Paragraph 91, I
would have thought on the basis of those differences between areas
that the case is for supplying extra help and support for those
areas which are backward. I represent an area which I think is
backward in the sense that we have a much lower proportion of
people going to university and training for skills and gaining
qualifications. Should not help be concentrated on those areas
and what can you do to boost their performance and their involvement
in the scheme?
Mr Bell: There are perhaps two
ways of answering the question. First of all, it is really important
that all areas across the country are participating in this programme
because there will be a statutory requirement by 2013 for all
youngsters to have access. In terms of particular areas of the
country that might be struggling to get a partnership and I am
not suggesting your area is because we do not know off the top
of our heads quite where North East Lincolnshire is amongst the
146, we are providing additional support to those areas at the
moment, so we are offering some of our advisory support. Areas
that are very strong at the moment are supporting areas that are
not quite so strong. If an area is struggling to get itself ready
to roll for September we are providing that kind of additional
support now.
Q64 Mr Mitchell: Help but will they
get extra money as well?
Mr Coles: Yes, unsuccessful Gateway
consortia from Gateway 1 received some extra money. We are committed
that unsuccessful consortia in Gateway 2 will get at least some
help in kind in the form of direct support from people with experience
and skills in that area to progress.
Q65 Mr Mitchell: I see from paragraph
108 that some partnerships were beginning to feel overwhelmed
with information and there was some confusion as to who it was
going to, in other words, a lot of information went to one particular
institution in a local authority rather than to all the partner
institutions. Why is this?
Mr Coles: I think the Report rightly
identifies a problem here with our communication with consortia.
We have a number of partners working closely with us, national
partners and national organisations, and I think between us we
did overwhelm some partnerships with the volume of information.
Partly as a result of the fieldwork for this report and partly
as a result of other fieldwork, we at the start of this year agreed
amongst all of the national partners a moratorium on sending information
to those areas and then agreed a gateway process between us through
which we would send one single communication together from all
of us to consortia to make that much more rational. I think this
was a genuine problem at the time of the Report which we have
addressed at the start of this year.
Q66 Mr Mitchell: I was attracted
to the proposal in paragraph 68 which is campus-style groups as
seem to have been used in the Netherlands and which are proposed
in Cornwall by Plymouth University. What can you do to encourage
that, because that seems to me from the point of view of my constituency,
my area, North East Lincolnshire a desirable and attractive proposal?
Mr Bell: Going back to the theme
from earlier, we are not mandating from the centre a particular
organisational style. The Plymouth example that you cite is very
good but I can think of examples elsewhere, for example the Sheffield
one I cited, where you do not necessarily have an absolute proximity
of institutions but you have got the university, the further education
colleges and the secondary schools working together. I think the
concern should be less about geographical proximity, good though
that might be, and more about ensuring that all institutions that
have a contribution to make are making it. To come back to an
earlier question, collaboration underpins the whole programme.
Q67 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but you had
to bang heads together and, courtesy of the support supposedly
forthcoming from you, eventually there might be a university college
which is on the site of the institute which is on a site very
near—it is a big site—Hereford Technology College
and the Franklin Sixth Form College. All this merged together
with extra buildings would provide a suitable campus. Is that
the kind of thing you want to encourage and how will you encourage
it?
Mr Bell: I should just say for
the record, Mr Mitchell, that the funding for higher education
of course now comes from the other Ministry, DIUS, so I would
not want to take credit for the developments in your area. I do
not think we can or should mandate a particular style of buildings
in particular proximity. The key issue is that the Diploma partnership
in a local area should decide what works best. What you have described
in many ways is very fortunate if you are doing new build, but
most areas that are putting together Diploma partnerships have
existing buildings and institutions and have to work together
properly.
Q68 Mr Mitchell: I see from paragraph
20 that there is a problem with motivation. I think that is one
of the problems that has bedeviled things right from the start;
you are trying to motivate people who are not motivated already.
The Leitch Report and other research has all pointed to the value
of applied education in motivating many young people to continue
to learn and improve their skills. "However, applied education
has, historically, been less esteemed compared with general education."
All true. "This is in contrast to other countries we researched
as part of this study, where attitudes towards applied and general
education are less polarised..." You are trying to produce
a motivation in people who are not motivated because of the present
structure. How are you going to do that?
Mr Bell: You do not do it just
by this programme. There is a whole set of reforms that you have
to have in place. For example, we know that one of the great demotivators,
one of the reasons youngsters do not continue is if they have
got poor basic skills so getting those right in primary school
and early secondary education is really important. I do think
however that having a range of qualifications that does not necessarily
make such a sharp distinction between the academic and the vocational
and, dare I say it, in the eyes of many, a distinction between
success and failure, will help young people to see there are various
routes into learning. For some, an Apprenticeship—and of
course the expansion of Apprenticeships is a very important part
of 14-19—will be the answer. For others, a better developed
A level programme will be better. We hope for many, many young
people in the future the Diploma will help to address what I think
is an absolutely correct analysis in paragraph 20 that it has
generally been not as highly esteemed as the traditional modes
of learning.
Q69 Dr Pugh: I find this whole development
business fairly difficult to grasp sometimes and I come from an
educational background but, as I understand the prospectus, a
Diploma is driven primarily by the needs of students with flexibility
and they work within consortia and there may be multi-providers
and they move between them according to the needs of vocational
development. Am I right in thinking that is the general idea?
Mr Coles: We have tried to design
the qualifications, as we have discussed, to combine the best
of the general, the theoretical and the practical, so to motivate
through having a different style of learning. That is the first
key thing.
Q70 Dr Pugh: In order for that to
happen you might need to move from one educational provider to
another, from a workplace to a school and so on, and a whole series
of different people are involved; it is not just the straightforward
classroom business that education has hitherto been?
Mr Coles: Exactly. We know from
experience of this over recent years that it can have a very,
very powerful motivating effect for some young people to have
a more practical experience in a more work-related environment,
whether that is with an employer or in a simulated working environment
in a college. There is a big difference for those young people
between the sort of experience you might get doing cookery in
a classroom with domestic-type ovens and so on and doing catering
in a college with professional-standard facilities and with a
professional chef, and that motivational aspect for young people
is a very important part as well.
Q71 Dr Pugh: In many cases given
the variety of educational experiences that people are exposed
to, would it not be the case that they would actually have to
move between one institution and another and the institutions
would have to provide the education as a partnership? That word
has been used quite a lot.
Mr Coles: Yes.
Q72 Dr Pugh: Having got that far
are there not institutional pressures working against that that
need to be identified in the system? For example, pupils generally
provide funding for educational institutions, and might there
not be a temptation for educational institutions to hang on to
pupils if funding comes with them and not to send them off to
somewhere else to complete their Diploma?
Mr Bell: Perhaps if I can pick
that up. That takes you into the independence of advice that you
give students, and there will be a new strengthening of that duty
on schools and colleges in the current Education and Skills Bill
that is going forward to require that impartial advice.
Q73 Dr Pugh: The schools will give
that impartial advice?
Mr Bell: Obviously if a student
is in a school or college they are having to give that advice,
often supported by the Connexions Service, but the statutory duty
is to ensure that that advice is impartial and independent. I
do not deny your point that the pressures can be subtle rather
than overt about staying in a particular institution, but one
of the reasons why of course that is damaging to some students
is because it can be the wrong advice and it might be inappropriate
to stay at school when they might be better off going off into
a further education college.
Q74 Dr Pugh: If the school has to
fund the teacher's salary or wishes to keep the teacher in employment,
recommending that they go and complete their education or an element
of their education elsewhere is not going to necessarily be in
the school's best interest, is it, as an institution?
Mr Coles: We think that in practice
there are extra costs to delivering Diplomas and this is part
of the reason for that, that some students moving, let us say
from one day a week to study at a college, does have a cost, clearly,
and there will not necessarily be a matching saving to the home
institution because the home institution may not be able to have
a smaller staff as a result.
Q75 Dr Pugh: So there is some pressure
working against the scheme as designed. In terms also of the results
profile and things like that, that is also going to be a factor
and you might wish to advise people to do a course that is not
necessarily that good for them, but if you can guarantee good
results for the school rather than going somewhere else and doing
something, that might be wholly beneficial in the long run but
it might not reflect so well on the school's final league table
position.
Mr Coles: We think that here the
league table position should not be a barrier to this because
if a young person is going to do better and achieve better by
staying in the home institution, that probably is the right thing
for them to do.
Q76 Dr Pugh: The institution might
do better.
Mr Coles: If the young person
does better by going somewhere else, in other words if they achieve
more highly by going outside the institution, then the school's
league table results will be improved by that because the school
will still have the ownership.
Q77 Dr Pugh: The point I want to
make is the school's pursuit of league tables does not necessarily
coincide with the whole design of this scheme. I am just saying
there is an institutional pressure as to why it might not work
out so well. Can I just persist on that point because I think
you are broadly agreeing with that. What about those institutions
like academies which relish their independence and are not necessarily
such good team players?
Mr Bell: If I can just reassure
you on that, we have got 20 academies involved in the first round
of Diploma offer from this September. People have also extended
that argument and said but what about the really high performing
schools, will they really want to be involved, and again we know
the percentage of the highest-performing schools that is involved
in the programme matches the profile nationally, so I think widespread
acknowledgement that this is for the benefit of all students is
a key point because even if you are perceived under the current
measures to be very high-performing, it is very unlikely that
you are necessarily going to be meeting the needs of all students.
I think the vast majority of secondary schools see that this offers
a chance for students who might not be doing as well (despite
what the majority are doing) to get a different offer. All the
evidence suggests the high-performing institutions are part of
this.
Q78 Dr Pugh: I am reassured by that
but clearly there are pressures working against this wonderful
partnership consortia model. Some consortia and partnerships will
work out better than others and the Report says that there ought
to be some sort of penalty where partnership working does not
work as well as it could for the benefit of pupils. When that
does not happen who do you actually penalise? You have a partnership
which is supposed to work and it is clearly not working as well
as it might, it is not delivering as well for the students; whose
knuckles get rapped?
Mr Coles: We think that depends
very much on what the issue is. There will be a whole set of ways
of picking up what the issues are, inspection being one very important
one, where Ofsted will look at how effectively schools are working
with one another.
Q79 Dr Pugh: The component institutions
will be marked down quite badly if they do not show evidence of
readiness to form partnerships?
Mr Coles: If Ofsted concludes
that a school is not participating in a partnership in a way which
is damaging its pupils, then that would certainly be a very significant
factor in an inspection.
Mr Bell: Can I just add one additional
point if I might, Dr Pugh. We really do think that despite this
partnership approach that every student must have a home institution.
It is really important that there is somewhere that is ultimately
responsible for you as a student. I think that is an important
way of maintaining the accountability of the institution because
if a group of students are not doing very well then that individual
institution will be held to account as well as the partnership
in the way that John describes.
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