Policy and delivery: the National Curriculum tests delivery failure in 2008 - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300-310)

LORD SUTHERLAND OF HOUNDWOOD KT

26 JANUARY 2009

  Q300 Mr Stuart: So you think it is a meeting of equals? It all depends on the culture, does it not? The Ministry might want something to happen and an individual might think that it will cause difficulties and say, "I don't think we should do this, Minister," and the Minister might say, "Well, I've thought about it and I think you should." Are you saying that they really are in a position to say "No, I'm not doing it"?

  Lord Sutherland: You can make a public statement. The evident one is to say "Well in that case, I'm not going to continue in this job." When I was head of the inspectorate, that was always an option open to me. If there had been pressure on me from Ministers that was unacceptable and unsustainable, that was an option. The similar one I made this time was that if there was any pressure I would go to the press, and I would.

  Q301 Mr Stuart: That comes back to the heart of this responsibility issue which we started with. If we rely on the fact that people will resign their job every time they are pushed by Ministers to do something that they should not do, we will not have many people left in public service. The last thing I would do is suggest that people involved in public service are anything other than people of great integrity and genuine commitment. The reality is that people do not routinely resign. Again, to suggest that it is their fault for agreeing to it is to get it completely the wrong way round. Did the Ministry push this hard? Short of Ken Boston saying, "I resign," which looks prima donna-ish over such a thing—well, I do not know. I am just trying to tease out whether you got it the wrong way round.

  Lord Sutherland: I hear what you say. There is no doubt that that would be the nuclear option that we should never rely on—but it is there. There are ways in which you can make a clear and straightforward point about this. Ken made his claims about the organisation before and how well it would operate and how well it would not, but I did not even see a letter back from QCA saying, "You have asked us to do all of this; it is too much."

  Q302 Mr Stuart: Fair enough. You have said that you welcome Ofqual being put on a statutory footing, yet you also say in your report that it was reactive rather than proactive in its scrutiny. Do you think that Ofqual was created too hastily and without proper thought to the consequences?

  Lord Sutherland: It is always a problem that if you are going to do something new, you will do it in the middle of something else. If it had not done it last April, it would be doing it now when it was waiting for the outcome of your response to my report or whatever. That is always a difficulty. I have seen some legislation going through in other areas where I have wondered about setting up shadow organisations and appointing chief executives and so on. All that has been done elsewhere. It is not as if it is unique. The sooner it got on with it the better.

  Q303 Mr Stuart: Do you thing that being on a statutory footing will make it a better organisation?

  Lord Sutherland: Yes, it will give it powers and if it does not use them it will rightly be excoriated.

  Q304 Mr Stuart: One more question, if I may. An issue that I do not think we have touched on directly is that your report is comprehensive in setting out what was done, what was not done, by whom and when, but it is less consistent in setting out why something happened or was not done. Can you explain why your report is not more consistent about explaining the reasons behind the failures?

  Lord Sutherland: The reasons why people do things are many and various. I remember how once in a senate meeting when I was a junior lecturer my professor of philosophy tried to explain to the vice-chancellor the difference between a reason and a motive, a matter on which there is extensive literature in philosophy. He failed. The mistake he made was to assume that everything is done on rational grounds. It is not. People have motives and emotions that move them. They are sometimes in entrenched positions. Sometimes they feel threatened. There are all sorts of reasons. You would need a better amateur psychologist than I am to chance putting that sort of judgment in a report of this kind.

  Q305 Chairman: As a former chief inspector—

  Lord Sutherland: I knew I should not have mentioned that.

  Chairman: That was between 1992 and 1994. This pertains particularly to this inquiry. We now have the power to interview the applicant for the job of chief inspector, the head of Ofqual and so on. How do you react to that power of a parliamentary committee?

  Lord Sutherland: We are in the Wilson room, and this is a Harold Wilson-like comment. I remember back in 1979, when Norman St John-Stevas proposed that there should be select committees with real powers, I said to somebody, "That is going to change the way in which the House of Commons works." I am glad to say that it has. I think it is very important that this Committee has a range of powers. This is a pattern that seems to work very well in the USA. I do not see why it should not work well here.

  Q306 Chairman: So you would have applied for the job if you had known that you would have to face us?

  Lord Sutherland: That is a different question.

  Chairman: The present chief inspector says she would not have applied for the job if she had known that she was going to be interviewed by this Committee, so that was a slightly mischievous question.

  Lord Sutherland: I was interviewed for the principalship at King's College many years ago; there was a student on the committee. I was interviewed for University of London; there was a student on the committee. Having a student on the committee often means that it is like holding it in public, which is the issue here. I had no objections to that.

  Chairman: Let us look at the future of national testing. David.

  Q307 Mr Chaytor: Looking forward to 2010, there is a question mark over the shape of the tests. There will be no Key Stage 3 tests in 2009 or 2010. Do you think it wise for the Government to proceed with a testing system at a higher level of intensity than the current one? If the pilots for the single level tests are given the go-ahead we will have tests twice a year and every 10 and 11-year-old will be sitting them. Is that a sensible way to proceed?

  Lord Sutherland: That is outside the report.

  Q308 Mr Chaytor: Are there any lessons to be learned from your inquiry that might inform future policy about the way Key Stage 2 is assessed?

  Chairman: We are trying to get value for our money, you see; with all your experience we thought we would throw a few other questions at you.

  Lord Sutherland: Complexity is always an issue. First, if you make the system more complex there are additional risks of things slipping up to guard against. Secondly, there is a group of able people looking at this at the moment. One will read, with fascination, what they have to say. Thirdly, I believe it is important to have some sort of national testing system. One of the difficulties of the current one, apart from its intensity, is that it tries to satisfy too many different things. What is the point of national testing? One is that it lets parents know whether or not their children are meeting a certain standard that is regarded as, at least, acceptable throughout the nation. Having that in place is important, whatever form it takes. Another is that it ensures that if there is a failure in reaching national standards, it is not because of the particular way a school or a local authority carries out its procedures. That has to be checked as well. Also, people do not make enough of the point that national testing is a way of deciding whether Government policies and expenditure are delivering the goods. They pin their policies and expenditure to meeting certain targets which are not just for the teachers but for the system that they are planning and funding. I would want any system that develops to take account of those three very important tests—or checks—on what our national testing system should do.

  Q309 Mr Chaytor: Do you think, though, given your support for the principle of a national testing system, that each of the functions you described can be adequately represented by a single form of test? Or is the logic of your remarks that there should be different forms of test to fulfil the requirements of each function?

  Lord Sutherland: I am not in a position to go as far as that yet, because I am still thinking about it. I am reassured, however, to know that people who are more expert on this than I am are considering it. I will test what they say against those principles, but yes, that is a possibility. All teachers assess the children in front of them, if they are good teachers, so assessment goes on. The issue is that if it is pedagogically important, is it important in relation to these national criteria?

  Q310 Chairman: Did you have the moment, when you were in the middle of this inquiry, that I did when I looked at all this? There were 9.5 million scripts whizzing around the country—an environmental disaster, let alone anything about education. There was a vast contract worth tens of millions and people coming from all over the country to be trained in centres. You can have a national testing system delivered locally. It seems to me that you can have a system, where the testing and questions are done by a perfectly respectable group of people, which is administered and marked locally. Is that not a possibility?

  Lord Sutherland: I think there are a lot of options. I was reassured by various decisions taken this year that the magnitude of the task has been reduced. There is no Key Stage 3 for a start. That will be very significant considering the timescale we have for this year. In reducing the magnitude of what is going on, I think this is a trend in the right direction. There are different ways of doing it. This is not really all that relevant but I will say it anyway. I chair the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. A primary core function that they carry out worldwide is to set standards for musical performance. Now, if you can do it for that, across the world, it must be possible to check across the country whether our children can read, count, spell and write. However, the current system has had such difficulties that I would be surprised if there were not significant changes.

  Chairman: In the words of quite a well-known 20th-century philosopher, I think we shall pursue that intimation, with interest. That was a good session. Thank you, Lord Sutherland.





 
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