Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DR STEVE
GIBBONS, DR
TOM BENTON
AND SIMON
RUTT
30 JANUARY 2008
Q60 Chairman: What about other evidence?
Research has been carried out in Kent showing that the children
who go to the grammar schools get a much better education, but
if you take all the children in Kent together they get a worse
education in terms of the totality of children in that area.
Dr Benton: That is right.
Q61 Chairman: Does that contradict
your view that the ones who gain are balanced by the ones who
lose?
Dr Benton: That is only one local
authority. When you look at it as a whole, it comes back to the
point I made earlier about relating the percentage of pupils who
are selected to their achievements. The relationship is slight.
When you look at that nationally across the country, and ask,
"Is there a relationship between the percentage of pupils
in a local authority who are selected and the results?" you
see that there is not much of a relationship. Although there might
be one situation in Kent, as a whole, looking at the situation
across the country, that does not seem to make too much difference
overall.
Dr Gibbons: To come back to your
point about the balanced intake issue, one point of confusion
is that when you are talking about a balanced intake relative
to a school at which all pupils get free school meals, that is
an improvement in intake. But if you compared your balanced intake
with a school with no free school meals, that would be a worsening
of the intake. So we are saying that perhaps the shifting-up of
the average characteristics of the pupils when they come in has
an impact on achievement, although that is a bit unclear. There
is some evidence that it does, and some evidence that it does
not. In terms of balancing or having a mix, I do not think that
there is any evidence that that matters in itself. Having a mix
is better than having all free school meals, but it is worse than
having no free school meals.
Q62 Chairman: So parents are absolutely
logical in seeking a school with the fewest poor and SEN children.
Dr Gibbons: I can talk a bit about
that. There are probably different views to a certain extent,
and there are different views in the literature. But it is a question
of the impact of peer groups; it is a peer group effect story.
Whether being among high-achieving classmates impacts on someone's
own achievement is a very hard thing to measure, because of the
problem that high-ability kids are sorted into schools with other
high-ability kids. Separating out whether there is any causal
linkage is difficult.
I have written a paper that investigates
the issue and looks at secondary schools. We concluded that the
link is in fact very small. Given a child's age 11 achievements,
if they go to a secondary school with other kids who are high
age 11 achievers, they do only marginally better by the time they
reach Key Stage 3 at age 14. There is a tiny difference. In fact,
we have extended that research and have tried to measure that
difference by considering a primary school and a secondary school.
In any year, there is a flow of kids from one school to the other,
and year after year we can follow what that flow looks like and
explore how kids who make the same primary to secondary school
transition differ in relation to the composition of the secondary
school to which they go. Changes over time can be used to see
whether the kids who make the same primary to secondary school
transition do better in years when the secondary school has a
high average intake from the local primary schools. You get nothing
from such research. People come in and are sorted into schools
with people of a certain age 11 ability, and they come out at
age 14 at the same point in the distribution. According to our
research, it does not seem to have any impact whatsoever. That
prompts the question: why do parents want to choose schools that
have low free school meal intakes and high-achieving kids? That
question is not easy to answer. It is clear that a lot of things
that go along with education and being in school are not to do
with achievement. Parents value the safety of their kids and the
child's well-being, and there are many other considerations that
come into play. The pure search for value added is not a big issue
for most parents, most of whom probably accept that their kids
have certain skills and abilities and they will either do well
or will not do well, whatever school they go to. Many other issues
that inform school choice are probably not about pure value added
in test skills.
Q63 Chairman: Tom's research shows
that the kids who just get into a selective school did better.
Doesn't that contradict what Steve just said about it not making
much difference?
Dr Benton: That was to do with
selective schools. I think what Steve was saying was not particularly
focused on selective schools; it was about general school composition
within any school. Selective schools are only a very small number
of schools. They are separate pieces of research. In terms of
what Steve has said about whether the composition of the class
has an effect, I would agree with him. There is a lot of debate
in the literature about the effect that that has and there certainly
are differing views.
Chairman: As policy makers, that does
not give us much of a steer.
Q64 Mr Slaughter: The point was made
about value added, and the fact that it might not be much of an
issue for parents. Should it be an issue for us? You are saying
that instead of having some schools moving towards 100% free school
meals and some towards 0% if all schools moved towards 50%, or
at least a mixed intake, that would make no difference to overall
performance and would not result in some children doing better.
You are admitting the correlation between social stratification
and results, but not admitting that readjusting it would produce
any overall increase in performance. You are the experts—my
evidence is all anecdotal—but I am quite surprised, because
the trend is that the schools with a low percentage of free school
meals often have good exam results and tend to coast along. A
high percentage of free school meals can often reflect a great
deal of mobility in the school population, with a lot of quite
challenged children and many children coming in for whom English
is a second language. That makes it very difficult for the school
to sustain improvements. You often get schools that have false
take-offs and then go down. If there was a greater social mix,
it would be easier to hold together the grist in those schools.
My observation is that that does happen and you get better results
by doing that. There is a trade-off to be made, and individual
families will not necessarily like it, but I am slightly surprised
to hear you giving that view.
Dr Benton: I understand what you
are saying about the perception of teachers within a school. However,
our research looks at the thousands of schools across the country.
We can see whether a pupil at a certain level in one school does
a lot worse than a pupil of that level in a different school.
We can see what the difference is for children who go to schools
with high free school meal intakes. You can compare any two children
you like out of the half a million or so from the national data,
and you will see that, on the whole, there is not much difference.
As that is based on a lot of data, that is where our conclusions
come from. On the changes in results that you are talking about,
one of the problems of looking at raw results is that, in schools
that are doing very badly in terms of the percentage of pupils
achieving five GCSEs at grades A to C, there tend to be more fluctuations
in results. Such results may be more down to a statistical phenomenon
than to the issues that you have raised.
Q65 Mr Slaughter: Have I understood
this correctly? You are saying that, if you take two similar children
from similar ability levels who go to very different schools in
terms of ethos, performance and social intake, they will do similarly.
Dr Benton: That is the way that
the evidence seems to point.
Q66 Paul Holmes: The Chairman said
that he is very depressed at the evidence that we have received,
but I am quite pleased with it, if we believe in evidence-based
policy making, which supposedly we do. You are saying that your
evidence and most of the British and international research says
that what matters in school attainment is not who the head is,
whether it is a faith school or an academy, but the intake of
kids, their background and so forth. If we have identified that
the problem is not diversity, but the family background and prior
attainment of the kids, does that not mean that we should be focusing
all the extra effort, initiative, input and money into the problem
areas, not into rewarding successful schools, which are already
successful because they have good intakes of kids?
Dr Gibbons: The conclusion that
I would come to from the evidence is that we need to tackle the
disadvantages of the kids at the point that they enter the school.
Schools provide some kind of vehicle for delivering whatever policies
you want to put in place to reach those children. It is not the
school-level differences that are important, but using schools
as a way to get to the disadvantaged kids within them.
I come back to the point that I made at the
beginning: the variation within schools is enormous compared with
the variation between schools. Therefore, if you are worried about
low achievement, you need to tackle low achievers within every
school. There are some schools with very few low achievers, but
95% of schools have someone from the bottom 5% of the distribution
of achievement. You need to tackle these problems in every school.
Extended schools ideas seem to be sensible; they are vehicles
for delivering services to families via the school.
Q67 Chairman: What you are saying
points to our investment in pre-school, to early years and to
Sure Start, because you are saying that it is too late once the
child is in school.
Dr Gibbons: Yes, it comes back
to basic differences in family background. Obviously, differences
in innate ability must play a role here as well. The initial conditions
that kids come into schools with are driving the extremes in terms
of achievement. It is not a question of the failures of schools
to do things.
Chairman: Everyone now wants a question.
Paul Holmes: No, I have made my point.
Q68 Fiona Mactaggart: I have three
quick-fire questions. I will ask them all at once, but I do not
expect them all to be answered, because they are factual, I hope.
First, is the pattern of achievement being so directly connected
to family income an international pattern or is it worse in Britain?
Secondly, are there any long-term figures? We have talked about
results within a school and within an age range, but I am interested
in what happens to those children when they are 21 and 25—do
you know? Does anybody know? Thirdly, when we were discussing
differences between schools and school admissions, we focused
on the difference between community schools and voluntary aided
schools. Is the pattern the same for foundation schools as for
voluntary aided ones? I do not feel that we teased that out.
Dr Gibbons: I think that the fact
that background is linked to achievement is generally an international
phenomenon; it is universal.
Q69 Fiona Mactaggart: Is it worse
in Britain than elsewhere?
Dr Gibbons: I do not know the
magnitude off the top of my head, but it is of a similar order.
Literature produced by some of my colleagues at the LSE on inter-generational
ability suggests that perhaps there is a stronger link in Britain
than elsewhere. It is very difficult to get evidence on this,
because the number of surveys that cover the issue is rather limited.
Q70 Chairman: Your colleagues told
us quite strong things about social mobility in the UK when they
were here last week.
Dr Gibbons: Yes, that it is worse.
Chairman: And do you think that the two
are related?
Dr Gibbons: Yes. Clearly, the
links between background and achievement are directly linked to
the social mobility question.
Q71 Chairman: So a greater percentage
of our population is poor, low-achieving and non-aspirational
regarding its children's education than other countries, to put
it crudely?
Dr Gibbons: No, the evidence is
that, in the long run, kids seem to progress up the income distribution
scale from lower levels less well in this country than in other
countries. Off the top of my head, I do not know how to compare
background and achievement internationally, but there is a strong
link everywhere. That is well known. You can see that in PISA—the
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment.
Q72 Fiona Mactaggart: The second
question was about long-term results. Do we know about these children
when they are older? Do they end up going to prison; do they end
up going to university? I am interested in whether we know that
these things have results in adult life and in terms of success
in the world, or whether some of the results that we are talking
about are short-term.
Simon Rutt: I have no direct evidence
of research that has been carried out, but we are just undertaking
some research where we are tracking pupils through their secondary
education and then looking at what has happened in further and
higher education, to see whether there is any relationship between
the schools pupils are in, academic attainment at 16 and what
happens in further and higher education. This is through the Aimhigher
initiative, which was recently introduced. We have a lot of pupil
attitudinal data as well, looking at aspirations in terms of higher
education and aspirations and attitudes regarding school and education
in general. It will interesting to be able to plot that through
and look at pupils to see who ends up in further and higher education,
and how what happens in statutory education affects what happens
in post-16 education.
Q73 Fiona Mactaggart: So you are
saying, "Watch this space."?
Simon Rutt: It is due to happen
very shortly.
Dr Benton: There are certain bits
of research about post-16 and onwards. For example, we are looking
at some stuff on the youth cohort study at the moment, which shows
the links between achievement at school and the chances of being
in education and training later in life. So there are sources
of data, but as people get older, it gets harder and harder to
track them.
Q74 Fiona Mactaggart: The people
who drop out are the people who succeed least in my experience.
Dr Benton: That is right.
Q75 Fiona Mactaggart: Samples are
so selective that they are inaccurate. And the point I made about
foundation schools?
Simon Rutt: Foundation schools—looking
at the tables again—seem to be very similar to voluntary
aided in their admissions and the type of pupils they take, as
in the communities they serve, the communities where they sit,
the proportions of characteristics within those communities and
who ends up going to foundation schools. They seem to be more
similar with voluntary aided than with community.
Q76 Chairman: What is interesting
for us is the joined-upness of this research. We have had a session
on social mobility, and we are trying to link that to the stuff
you are telling us and to relate that to policy direction and
policy decisions. We are also trying to research back down the
chain. When you go to schools now they will tell you—and
local education experts will tell you—that they are now
able to predict as a child comes into the school whether they
are going to end up as a failure, a NEET or whatever. They know
extremely early. Have you done research on how early you can tell
a child's level of achievement?
Dr Benton: We can predict it fairly
early, but it is not that accurate. We were talking about the
very large variation between pupils within schools. So you would
not be able to predict all that accurately when a pupil arrives
at secondary school what is going to happen to them by the time
that they leave. Although, as we have talked about, we can predict
90% of the differences between schools, within schools knowing
which children are going to succeed and which are not is much
more tricky. To predict on the individual level, who you are makes
quite a big difference.
Q77 Annette Brooke: Two things. Can
I come back to Steve on whether this competition makes any difference?
In your article, you cover secondary schools that are close together
in an urban area. You suggest that strong competition in an urban
setting can deliver better results. Can you comment on that?
Dr Gibbons: There are two strands
to the research. One paper looked at primary schools, where we
looked very carefully at the potential effects of choice and competition.
From that, we found little evidence that it made any difference.
In general, we found some evidence that it worked for voluntary
aided schools. A separate paper, looking at secondary schools,
does something a bit more general, looking at whether schools
in dense settings in urban areas perform better or worse than
schools elsewhere. We were trying to get at the question of whether
city schools are failing schools, or whether they are not doing
well because they have a low-quality intake, if you like.
Q78 Annette Brooke: Could I just
say that that is not true competition, because we have not got
a rural situation where there are not very many choices?
Dr Gibbons: It is not true competition.
No, that is right. That paper was really about the effects of
density on performance. We found that schools in high-density
settings perform better, marginally so, in terms of the value
added between the age of 11 and GCSEs. We cannot pin down what
that is to do with. It is closely linked to the number of neighbouring
schools, rather than more general things, such as population density
or proportion of built-up environment. It seems to be something
to do with the schools, but we can only conject what it is. It
could be collaboration; it could be competition. One candidate
explanation is that it is a competition-generated effect. That
is a bit of positive evidence, but we could not pin it down to
be specifically due to competition.
Q79 Chairman: This has been a very
interesting session. We have about a minute remaining. We have
really appreciated your expertise. You seem to be giving a strong
message today. If you were in a fantasy land where Fiona Mactaggart
or Douglas Carswell was Secretary of State and you were the Permanent
Secretary, and you did not think that the diversity and choice
policy direction would raise the standards for most students in
our country, which policy areas would you look at? About what
would you say, "Minister, this is where I would be looking,
based on my research."?
Dr Gibbons: I could not really
say much more than I have already about focusing on the differences
in kids within schools, rather than trying to focus on between-school
differences. The diversity, the schools targeted to try to raise
performance in one school relative to another, is a red herring.
We should focus within schools.
Dr Benton: I would suggest looking
at things at classroom level that can improve learning and borrowing
from ideas in medical research, such as proper randomised control
trials, to work out the most appropriate methods of teaching,
and sharing that.
Simon Rutt: I reiterate what both
my colleagues have said, but there are also some questions about
the information available on admissions policies to look at the
choice that parents have and who goes where and the impact that
that has on schools.
Chairman: It has been a good and very
thought-provoking session. Sometimes, it felt like a seminar,
and it was all the better for that. Thank you very much.
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