Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
DR STEVE
GIBBONS, DR
TOM BENTON
AND SIMON
RUTT
30 JANUARY 2008
Q40 Mr Slaughter: Two points come
out of that. I think we all know that what you have said is a
truism. Is it more true in densely populated areas such as in
London where there is a smaller geographical catchment area, and
there is not a local comprehensive serving a smaller community?
More significantly, should not the types of schools we are talking
about be less prone to that? In other words, if voluntary aided
schools are selecting on the basis of religion and taking from
a wider catchment area, should not they be less prone to the house
price lottery? If academies are being targeted on deprived communities,
should not they be less prone to social selection in that way?
Neither seems to be the case.
Dr Gibbons: Thinking about the
voluntary aided sector, and the Church schools in particular,
you are right. You would expect the impact on house prices to
be less for those. The simple reason why they pick from larger
areas is because distance is not usually a criterion that is used
when rationing places. Usually there is a list of oversubscription
criteria so that when the school has too many applicants for its
number of places all those over-subscription criteria come in.
For community schools, living near is a key one but it is not
the dominant criterion for faith schools. Clearly the house price
effect there will not kick in for the faith schools. But there
are still differences in the preferences for those types of schools
among different types of families, even if there is no house price
linkage. I was using the house price linkage as evidence that
that takes place in the community school sector. If you step aside
from that and just think of the voluntary aided schools, clearly
different people have different preferences. This might be what
is driving the parent side selection into those kind of schools.
Some people just do not want to go to those schools and some people
do. There are differences between those types of people in terms
of their background and achievement.
Q41 Mr Slaughter: Is the answer on
the academies that it is too early to tell whether there is a
trend towards taking a more exclusive social intake or not? If
there is a trend, how would you explain it?
Dr Gibbons: I have not looked
at academies at all so I could not comment on them.
Dr Benton: With the numbers of
academies it would be hard to summarise that finding. In the last
report there were 27 Academies. Within those there are some where
the percentage taking free school meals is going up and others
where it is going down. We cannot generalise from that to say
that academies mean more selection. There are simply not enough
of them at this stage to be able to make that statement.
Chairman: We will drill down on that
in a different way. Douglas, on school diversity and collaboration.
Oh, Annette, do you want to come in here?
Q42 Annette Brooke: I am sure that
Douglas will take these questions further, but I would like to
start by looking at the choice model and competition. My first
questions will be directed towards you, Steve. If we have choice
and the competitive model, is it just a matter of sorting out
all the imperfections in the market to address the problems that
we are talking about this morning?
Dr Gibbons: The problems in terms
of the differences between schools, or are you thinking of overall
levels of achievement?
Q43 Annette Brooke: If we had a perfectly
competitive model, would we not end up with a set of schools that
were all of equal performance?
Dr Gibbons: There is a diversity
of opinion on that, and there are two views. First, if you have
a school system that admits purely on the basis of where people
live and takes only people from their local community, the make-up
of the school and the achievement of pupils in that school are
dependent on the kind of kids who live in that community. There
are differences between communities for reasons other than schooling,
such as the quality of housing and the environment. In turn, if
people start paying for a good school—through house prices—it
will drive sorting of a different kind in a neighbourhood, and
you will wind up with a very unequal system in that scenario.
If you opened up the competition and allowed people to choose
any school, it would break down that linkage and you could wind
up with a more even distribution of achievement across schools.
The other view is that if you open schools up to competition and
allow parents to choose more widely, the most motivated parents—those
with the willingness and ability to pay to travel across the borough
by car to drop their kids off—will make the effective choices,
which could exacerbate the inequalities. It could go either way,
so the jury is still out on this one.
Q44 Annette Brooke: Do we not just
need to identify all those imperfections and tackle them one by
one? Is that possible? If we were to address transport costs,
it could truly facilitate choice. To a certain extent, that is
in the new legislation. Choice advisers might fill the gaps in
terms of parents not perceiving the best choice for their child.
Can we just keep drilling into all the imperfections and remove
them? Would we end up with the perfect competitive model, which
I do not actually follow, under which a poor school that is not
performing will just wither away and something will come in its
place?
Dr Gibbons: There are two objectives:
one is to raise the level of achievement; and the other is to
equalise achievement across different schools. To start with,
let us think about equalisation. You are right that if you designed
a system of choice very carefully, and subsidised transport and
provided information, you could come up with a system that would
make everyone equally likely to make the right choices and wind
up with a very even distribution of people across schools. There
would be a lot of unintended consequences—there would be
a lot more travelling, so you would create a whole set of new
problems—but if the objective was to level the playing field,
it would probably work with a lottery system coupled with transport
facilities. Whether that would do anything to push up achievement
levels generally, and whether competition is an incentive on schools
and actually raises achievement, are slightly different questions.
It could work in two ways: through people finding schools that
better suit their needs; and because—as in the example that
you just gave—the schools that do not succeed will just
wither away and die. However, an inevitable feature of that model
is that there must be inequality of achievement because otherwise
those schools will not die out. I presume there is a transition
that involves a lot of inequality of achievement in that kind
of model. Perhaps, in the end, you wind up with better performance
that is equally spread out, but it is very hard to say. The transitional
consequences could be quite extreme.
Q45 Annette Brooke: So, the period
of transition might be too painful. You said in a paper to which
you contributed that although the competitive model might even
out ability, it would have downsides. Am I right?
Dr Gibbons: We were looking at
primary schools in that series of papers and considered two matters:
first, whether the performance effect of competition between schools,
and parents having a lot of schools to choose from, raises achievement;
and, secondly, the inequality aspects. Our conclusion was that
there was generally no evidence that competition and choice made
any real difference to performance. There was some evidence that
that worked in the voluntary aided sector, where the incentives
might be more correctly aligned for that model to work, but the
impacts were quite small. Where the costs came in, the downside
that we referred to was that we had some evidence that that tended
to increase inequality. In areas in which there is a lot of choice
among schools and a lot of closely-located schools so that people
can choose among them, there is actually more stratification and
more sorting—and more segregation, if you like—across
schools. The downside is the inequality.
Q46 Annette Brooke: Do you mean in
terms of socio-economic background? I was not quite sure which
inequality you were talking about.
Dr Gibbons: Yes. It is inequality
in terms of achievement, but as we have been discussing, achievement
is closely linked to the prior achievement and background of the
children, so the two are virtually synonymous.
Q47 Annette Brooke: So, is your conclusion
that we do not raise standards for the very children for whom
we want to?
Dr Gibbons: The evidence suggests
that the effects are marginal. The international evidence is not
exactly convincing on the idea that more competition increases
the performance of schools.
Q48 Annette Brooke: May I address
some questions to Tom and Simon? Is there any available evidence
on collaboration in any areas, or is it that any collaboration
that might exist is rather cosmetic? If we are going to have choice
and not go the whole way with the model, in order to support other
objectives such as equality, collaboration must be an important
part of the model.
Dr Benton: You are asking about
general measures of collaboration.
Annette Brooke: Yes.
Dr Benton: I do not know any general
ways of doing that. Within particular evaluations or programmes
there could be a purpose to collaborate. For example, I have done
an evaluation looking at delivering vocational qualifications
at Key Stage 4, and we can look at evidence there of schools helping
each other. If one school cannot deliver an NVQ in a particular
subject, they could get together with another school and send
pupils backwards and forwards. We have some data from particular
programmes, but nothing global about how much collaboration schools
are involved in as a whole.
Q49 Annette Brooke: And whether it
makes a difference, I suppose. When the Schools Commissioner visited
our Committee he gave examples from Kent, where the implication
was that through the Building Schools for the Future programme,
there was encouragement for grammar schools and secondary moderns
to work together. Do you see that that might have a positive outcome,
or will it just be cosmetic—sending a few pupils here and
there?
Dr Benton: It is certainly possible
that it would have a positive outcome, but I do not have any evidence
on that.
Simon Rutt: On added evidence
for that, part of the evaluation of Excellence in Cities looked
at partnership-level information where local authorities worked
to develop these sorts of collaborations and partnerships between
schools. We had lots of information about different levels—leadership,
management and so on. There were a number of different indicators
to inform partnership-level collaboration. When they were introduced
into the model, they had no effect over and above the pupil-level
effects that we have discussed. There was no added benefit of
having a good partnership score or a low partnership score. Over
and the above the pupil-level and other school effects that were
already there, we did not see anything else. It was not the greatest
possible measure in the world, but that is the only thing that
I have seen and been involved with that used this sort of collaboration.
There was no effect over and above lots of the other pupil-level
and school information that we have.
Annette Brooke: Thank you. That is rather
gloomy really.
Q50 Mr Carswell: I am interested
in the idea that competition does not necessarily raise standards.
If that is the case, this must be about the only sector in socio-economic
activity where more competition does not enhance outcome. I was
at a recent lecture given by someone from the Milton Friedman
Foundation who produced a lot of evidence to the contrary. I want
to explore the idea of spreading good practice. To spread best
practice, one basically does the good things that other people
do. To do that, you create an incentive to do what others do.
Surely competition, rather than collaboration, is the best way
of spreading best practice? For example, in the business world,
the practice of putting airbags in cars was spread by companies
competing with one another, rather than collaborating. Is it not
the case that if you really want to spread practice, competition
is a better way of doing that than collaboration? If you disagree
with that, I would be interested in why you think that education
is different from virtually anything else.
Dr Gibbons: I do not have any
evidence on the effectiveness of collaboration. The only evidence
that I have is on the effectiveness of having a range of schools
to choose from in the London area, so I could not really say.
Without knowing whether collaboration works or not, I cannot comment
on that. I think that schools are different from commercial activity
and the market sector—there is a difference here. There
are a lot of reasons why you might expect competition not to work
especially well. It might be better if kids are brought up in
environments in which teachers are not put under those kinds of
pressures. I am not arguing for that, I am just saying that there
are a lot of—
Q51 Mr Carswell: Why would it be
better for teachers not to have competition?
Dr Gibbons: That argument is put
forward. I do not know the way that teachers operate, but I would
imagine that if you have a classroom of kids, there are a lot
of things that you have to deal with that are not just to do with
thinking about raising their standards. There is a lot of classroom
management and other educational activities that go on, so if
you have this tunnel vision on raising standards to try to beat
the nearest school up the road, that is perhaps not very productive.
Mr Carswell: Could not MPs say the same?
If, as a politician, I did not have competition in terms of having
to stand for election, I could spend my time doing other things.
Surely you need competition to get the best out of teachers?
Dr Gibbons: I am not really arguing
against that; I am just saying what the evidence is, generally
speaking. There is evidence that you could find, particularly
from Caroline Hoxby in the United States, that would support the
idea that competition works, but the bulk of the other international
evidence suggests that it does not. I am just stating the evidence.
Q52 Mr Carswell: Do any of the other
witnesses wish to comment?
Dr Benton: On the issue of sharing
best practice between schools, one of the things about education
that is different from making cars, for example, is that identifying
best practice within schools involves a lot more debate. It is
a lot harder to say clearly, "This is the way such and such
should be taught and all other ways are wrong." It is difficult
to identify those things, so you might not expect that to work
in the same way as in other sectors.
Q53 Mr Carswell: The word "collaboration"
itself is interesting. If I learned that Ryanair and British Airways
were collaborating, I would assume that they were ripping off
the customer. Is there not a case for saying that collaboration
is another way of describing a "non-compete" agreement
between schools, and that that is a convergence of the producer
interest and that, by definition, the consumer interest will suffer?
Dr Gibbons: It is not collusion
on price or anything, is it? It is just about sharing practice
and techniques. I do not have any evidence on this, apart from
the fact that I have worked as a school governor and I know that
the school's teachers and head teacher seemed to value their visits
to other schools and the contact that they had with other schools,
and that they learned things from those experiences. However,
I could not give you any evidence on whether that is effective
or not, and I do not see that it is equivalent to collusion in
the way that you imply.
Dr Benton: Also, the collaboration
in some of the evaluations that I was talking about, again with
vocational degrees, is not collusion. It is particular expertise
in one area, or, indeed, facilities for the teaching of a particular
subject that are not present at another school.
Q54 Mr Carswell: Does it mean less
diversity?
Dr Benton: In terms of the school
types?
Mr Carswell: Yes.
Dr Benton: Not necessarily. It
could mean more diversity because you do not need every school
to be able to teach every subject. You can work together. There
might be two people who want to do an NVQ in engineering or motor
care or something, but you would not need every school to have
the facilities for that. There could be collaboration with schools
and further education colleges to ensure that the necessary expertise
was shared.
Q55 Mr Carswell: The question I have
written down is: "How can collaboration between schools be
encouraged?" I want to change that slightly. If collaboration
is such a good idea, why does it need any encouragement at all
from the state?
Dr Gibbons: I have not said that
collaboration is a very good idea. I do not know whether it is.
I cannot see that it would be harmful, but I have presented no
research that indicates that collaboration has any positive outcomes.
Simon Rutt: I have no evidence,
apart from a little from Excellence in Cities partnership working,
which showed no major effects over individual pupil-level factors.
I have no great evidence that it works, but one would think that
it ought to be encouraged, with practice shared between schools.
What they are working with—the pupils—is different,
and the environments are different. One would have thought that
shared practice ought to be encouraged, but I have no real evidence
of it having a major impact.
Q56 Chairman: This is not a reflection
on your evidence, but I am feeling a bit depressed after this
session. If diversity and competition do not make any difference,
what does your research lead us to say about policy? In a sense,
you are saying that this love affair we have had with competition
and choice, going across all parties, of course, is not getting
across.
Paul Holmes: Leaders, not "we".
Chairman: Not we, no.
Mr Carswell: I do not accept that.
Chairman: No, we are hypothesising here.
If this is a dead end in terms of policy, what does your research
say can make a difference? I read you as saying that nothing makes
a difference and that there is nothing we can do about this: poor
kids from poor homes will not attain very well, so what can we
do about it? Am I misinterpreting you?
Dr Benton: I think our research
is about overall school management and school structures, and
whether that has an effect on achievement. It is very difficult
to find things in that area. Certainly, there is research on classroom
practice and things on the ground, with enormous amounts of evidence
showing that there are things that make a difference to pupils'
achievement at that level. I am not very involved in that research,
but at conferences, a lot of people present teaching methods that
are effective and good for pupils along those lines. All we are
talking about is the big structural things and whether there are
any big structural things you can do that affect pupils. It is
harder to find things at that level.
Q57 Chairman: Okay. Let me bounce
something through that. I have an idealistic view: when the chief
master of King Edward's School in Birmingham or the high master
of St Paul's School in London tells me that comprehensive education
is not very good, and I look at their schools—high competition,
all sifted kids from middle-class backgrounds—I would be
really upset if I were a parent and my kids at one of those schools
did not achieve very high standards indeed. On the other hand,
my view has always been that, if a school reflects the community
in which it sits and it is a balanced community, you have a much
fairer chance of getting good results for all the children in
that community. Is there any evidence that this view of mine is
correct? Would that lead on to, say, a banding system, where there
is a duty on schools to take a fair proportion of children with
special educational needs, looked-after children and children
on free school meals? Would that improve educational outcomes
overall?
Simon Rutt: There is no evidence
to suggest that would happen. It would be interesting to do some
work on that. I believe that a local authority in East Sussex—perhaps
it is somewhere else—has started a lottery for admissions
to schools, with a random selection of pupils. It will be interesting
to look at the pupils in those schools and see what the effect
is: whether low-ability pupils have been dragged up, because of
mixed ability and mixed characteristics, with medium, high and
low-ability pupils, and whether low-ability pupils are moving
up the scale, rather than just having a few of them in a high-ability
school or a school with an awful lot of them. It will be interesting
to look at local authorities that do that to see whether it has
had an effect on all pupils, particularly pupils at the lower
end of the ability scale.
Q58 Chairman: But researchers have
loads of examples of schools with a balanced intake—we were
given some by Andy Slaughter—as opposed to some schools
that only have certain kids. Some of us visited a school in Maidstone,
where 100% of the pupils received free school meals and 65% were
SEN. Are you telling me that the opportunities for a decent education
for kids who go to a school where 100% of children have free school
meals are no different from what they are for children who go
to a school with, say, 35% free school meals?
Dr Benton: No. Certainly, all
the research shows that going to a school with a low percentage
of free school meals is beneficial. Having pupils around who are
clever or from middle-class families has an impact on the whole
school.
Q59 Chairman: I was not saying that;
I was talking about a balanced intake.
Dr Benton: Sure, that is right.
You were asking whether being in a school with 100% free school
meals is just as good for you as being in a school with 0% free
school meals. It is not. I was just answering that question first.
In terms of having a balanced intake, that would be somewhere
in the middle. If you did that to all schools, and gave every
one a balanced intake, you would find that some pupils who were
previously in a school with 100% free school meals would be better
off. But, equally, the evidence appears to show that pupils who
were initially in a school with 0% free school meals would be
a bit worse off. So it would not appear to make an overall improvement
to the system. There is no evidence to show that that would immediately
improve things.
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