Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS
AND FAMILIES
5 MARCH 2008
Q100 Mr Bacon: You have taken an
existing pot and told them they have to do a second thing with
it?
Mr Coles: No. We allocated this
pot during the process of the work being done on this report,
so this was a new pot of money which we said had to be used for
one of these two purposes.
Mr Bell: It is working out at
around £8 million per local authority area that will not
be party to the BSF arrangements in advance of 2013 to address
those points.
Q101 Mr Bacon: You said earlier that
one wants the diploma to be able to subsume a wide range of qualifications.
My fear, especially in light of the paragraph I referred to earlier
about more academically successful schools, is that what it says
in paragraph 33 will prove to be true: there is a common concern
that too much may be expected of diplomas. "They are expected
to provide progression into higher education for those who want
it. At the same time they are intended to help improve disaffected
young people's engagement in education. Depending on who we spoke
to, Diplomas were perceived to be either too general or too applied."
Is that not one of the central risks that you run? What do you
intend to do about it?
Mr Coles: There are three chunks
to the diploma: the generic, which is common to all diplomas.
It is the basic English, maths and science extended project, personal
learning and thinking skills. Principal learning is the thing
that gives the diploma its name, which might be engineering or
an inherent new thing and then there is an optional area that
is called additional, specialist learning. That gives students
the option either to choose something which may be quite occupationally
specific, so the young person you were suggesting might be interested
in going into hairdressing might choose something really quite
occupational in that optional area; or the young person taking
engineering and wanting to go on to a Russell Group university
might do a maths or engineering unit within that additional specialist
learning element. It is the fact that there is flexibility within
the qualification which makes it possible for it to serve those
two different purposes. The key thing that we are doing—
Q102 Mr Bacon: You talk a good talk
but surely somebody who is about to apply to a Russell Group university
will be advised, "Go and get a good maths and physics A level
and then a good Russell Group university will give you a place
to do engineering." That is the advice they will be given,
is it not?
Mr Coles: Geoff Parkes, the director
of admissions for Cambridge University, recently addressed that
very point. He looked at the engineering diploma and the maths
for engineering unit and he said that, in his view, the new maths
for engineering unit in the diploma at level three would be a
better preparation for Cambridge University than doing maths A
level, so we do have that level of—
Chairman: I was talking to somebody from
Cambridge University last night who said that the A level is becoming
increasingly so devalued that they are looking at the International
Baccalaureate and I would need a lot of convincing that they are
going to want to go from the International Baccalaureate to a
diploma.
Q103 Mr Williams: What sort of timescale
are we looking at to deliver this programme?
Mr Bell: The full 14 lines will
be available by 2013.
Q104 Mr Williams: You do not even
know that you can afford it, do you?
Mr Bell: We have made the commitment
in the spending review period to enable the lines to be introduced
between now and 2011. Obviously it will be a matter for the Chancellor
and Secretaries of State regarding what happens beyond that.
Q105 Mr Williams: You cannot tell
them what you need.
Mr Bell: We have made a good assumption
within the—
Q106 Mr Williams: You cannot have
done because as Richard Bacon just said you have only recently
decided to survey local authorities to establish what facilities
and capital requirements arise.
Mr Bell: We know that the money
for the Building Schools for the Future programme is available
and, as we said earlier in response, part of that has to include—
Q107 Mr Williams: You do not know
whether that is an adequate programme.
Mr Bell: It is a very substantial
programme.
Q108 Mr Williams: That is not the
point.
Mr Bell: We believe that that
is going to make a huge difference. For those areas that do not
have access to Building Schools for the Future, after 2013, they
will have access to an additional £8 million each to do the
capital work that they might think necessary to deliver the diplomas.
Q109 Mr Williams: I was talking to
a teacher the other day who was teaching in a school that is going
in for major refurbishment but the senior staff in that school
are traditional academics understandably and they are not thinking
in terms of developing workshops and kitchens and things of that
sort. They are still thinking of traditional, old style, school
buildings. I know you have an organisation that is supposed to
be monitoring this but there are so many programmes to monitor.
Mr Coles: Because Partnerships
for Schools is working with every area going through the Building
Schools for the Future programme, doing that very intensively
and signing off business cases area by area, we do have confidence
that even if a particular school is not building facilities across
the area there will be sufficient facilities. That may be because
they are using the colleges' facilities which—
Q110 Mr Williams: Are you going to
allow people to use money to build out of date schools? Are you
not going to say, "Hold on, before you go any further, you
do not have any money until you toe the line"?
Mr Coles: What we need is that
across the whole area there are the right facilities to deliver
this full entitlement to all young people.
Q111 Mr Williams: You still have
no answer to my question and Dr Pugh's question. Are you seriously
suggesting that some of that would be spent on old concept schools
when with a little bit of better monitoring it could be spent
on a new future for schools?
Mr Coles: Clearly it should not
be the case that capital is being spent on old concept schools
which are out of date, but it may be that the best solution for
an area and the most cost effective and efficient solution in
an area is that everybody who is doing catering, for example,
makes use of world class catering facilities which already exist
in a college, rather than trying to replicate that on every school
site. I absolutely agree that we must not allow out of date, poorly
designed schools to be built but it may be that not every school
needs vocational facilities on their premises.
Q112 Mr Williams: This is all hypothetical.
I can understand your predicament. I want the system to work but
you do not really know what resources are needed. You say it is
stated quite clearly in the Report but you are a long way from
finding out.
Mr Bell: One of the other ways
in which we have reassurance on that is that, when partnerships
are applying to offer the diplomas—the 146 that are going
to go ahead in this September and those that will go ahead the
following September—they have to be able as part of that
plan to demonstrate that not only the workforce is ready or the
institutions involved but that they have the capacity and the
facilities to offer what they are going to do. As Jon said, the
question is not about what any single institution will have but
what does the area as a whole have. No single school or college—possibly
some colleges given their size, but certainly no single school—will
be able to have on its own premises all the specialist facilities
you would require to deliver every line.
Q113 Mr Williams: What is going to
happen in the areas of limited industrial infrastructure? How
will it work there, in the rural areas the Chairman was referring
to? How can you provide what you want to provide and what we want
you to provide—we are not against you on this—when
we see the scale of the problems you have?
Mr Coles: We have a range of quite
good examples of people doing really quite innovative things in
rural areas, to take that example. Sometimes they do it by using
existing college facilities. Sometimes they have built skills
centres which will be shared between institutions on a strategic
basis so that—
Q114 Mr Williams: If the skills are
not in the area, where are you getting them from?
Mr Coles: We certainly will need
highly skilled staff in the institutions.
Q115 Mr Williams: And where they
are training.
Mr Coles: And where they are training,
absolutely. What we have said in the design of the diplomas is
not that 50% of the principal learning must be delivered in an
employer's premises but that it could be delivered in a simulated
work environment of the sort that almost every college has across
a whole range of areas. That would be a very important part of
the solution.
Q116 Mr Williams: I have a horrible
feeling that, in so far as it does succeed, it is going to be
a very patchy operation and areas that are currently deprived
of an industrial background are being further condemned to being
without an industrial background.
Mr Coles: It is certainly the
case—and this is obviously the reality that we have to deal
with—that some areas of the country are much stronger in
some sectors of the economy than others. That is the reality.
What we are committed to doing with the capital programme is making
sure that there are the right facilities, even if that is within
an educational institution, to make sure that everybody can have
access to all 14 diploma lines. Yes, of course the model for doing
it will be different from area to area, but that basic entitlement
must exist for every young person, wherever they are.
Q117 Mr Williams: A lot of questions
need asking on the finance and industrial superstructure side
of it, but what about the logistics? This is a major nightmare.
I came from an academic background before I came into Parliament
and the one job no one wanted was the timetabling job. It was
a nightmare job in the department. Here you will have that multiple
integration of timetables between multiple institutions. How?
You look as if you do not know either.
Mr Bell: I am acquainted with
timetabling. Nobody really could guarantee a timetable would work
until the end of the first week of term.
Q118 Mr Williams: That was in one
school so imagine if there were half a dozen schools.
Mr Coles: Our best examples of
this is in places like Wolverhampton and Kingswood in South Gloucestershire
where they have very well designed timetables across a whole area—in
the case of Wolverhampton, right across the city. All of the schools
and the college are involved in that partnership, where they have
a single framework for their timetabling in which they agree how
they will timetable and in which now, in the case of Wolverhampton,
the best timetablers in the area effectively are doing this piece
of work for all of the institutions across the area. The effect
of that on learning in the area has been very, very marked. It
means that, because they have the common infrastructure, they
can move between institutions to the place where the learning
will be better.
Q119 Mr Williams: Because they have
it does not mean they can move; they have to have something to
move them. You have to lose part of a school day travelling between
institutions and in some cases that can be considerable. In many
cases, it will mean places where there is very limited public
transport. Who is going to meet those costs?
Mr Coles: There has been a lot
of learning about this as well. One of the features of these timetables
is that young people, particularly in key stage four, move just
once a day. They go somewhere at the start of the day and they
stay in that location until the end of the day. Instead of people
trying to move around in the middle of the day, they are in one
place for a whole day. If they are going to be in college for
a day a week, it is a whole day. Therefore, the children do not
have to be moved around any more than they did anyway.
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