Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DAVID BELL
AND JON
THOMPSON
25 JUNE 2008
Q60 Fiona Mactaggart: What would
you think about a school that moved in four years from one in
20 pupils getting five A to Cs, to half of the pupils getting
five A to Cs, although not all of them getting English and maths?
Would you think that that school was doing well?
David Bell: I would think that
that was a school that was on a positive upwards trajectory. I
would, however, ask the question about English and maths. A school
can be making that kind of progress but all the students may still
not be achieving—even at that threshold of 30%—English
and maths. I would deduce, in the hypothetical circumstance that
you describe, that that was a school that would be well placed
to move through the threshold and onwards. That is why we have
been quite careful in how we described the National Challenge
schools. We said that they will be in different categories. Some
will be on that upward movement and are expected to be through
and out of the National Challenge threshold, but others will require
more significant support and help.
Q61 Fiona Mactaggart: The school
that I just described was on the National Challenge list and,
like every school in Slough, has a large number of children for
whom English is a second language and who therefore have additional
challenges in satisfying the English requirement, compared with
those in other local authorities. The head teacher e-mailed me
in the last two days to say that parents who had put in to join
the school next year—and in many ways it is truly improving—have
pulled out, and are looking for other schools, because of the
way the school has been categorised by being putting in the National
Challenge. How carefully do you think about that at the point
of publicising it? We are, of course, a selective local authority.
David Bell: We thought carefully
about the impact, but we also thought carefully about the need
to ensure that all schools achieve the 30% minimum on the five-plus
A to C grades. Frankly, from our point of view, that had to be
the driving motivation. I happened to visit a school recently
in a London borough which had also been in the National Challenge
list, where they were telling a very positive story about the
improvements they were making. It sounded similar to the one that
you described. They were quite close to the threshold of the five-plus
A to Cs and just saw this as the next step in the progress that
they are making. Speaking to that head teacher, his view was,
"How can we argue against setting a minimum threshold of
30% of the youngsters achieving five-plus A to C grades, with
maths? That is what they need."
Q62 Fiona Mactaggart: That was not
a school in a place with grammar schools where 30% of the children
are selected out.
David Bell: It was a selective
London authority and this was one of the secondary modern schools.
Q63 Fiona Mactaggart: Is there a
London authority which is 100% selective?
David Bell: Not 100% selective,
but this was a selective school in a selective authority.
Chairman: I am minded to call Paul on
this second section of questions, but do you want to ask a quick
question, Andy, on something that has transpired?
Q64 Mr Slaughter: Further to what
Fiona was saying, and to see whether I have understood the deprivation
issue, a substantial proportion—quite a noticeable percentage—of
the schools grant is specifically dedicated to tackling deprivation.
Are you saying that once that is allocated, whatever formula you
use, you have very limited controls for determining either at
LA (local authority) level or at the school level whether it is
being properly applied? That is the first part of my question.
Secondly, the main target outcome is presumably to improve educational
performance, whatever the route to that is. Even if you are not
able to control how the money is spent, are you able to assess
whether it achieves the results you would expect? If it does not,
what do you do then?
Jon Thompson: I will say something
about funding before we deal with achievement. The national system
allocates the funds. It has various safeguards. Those safeguards
do not specifically relate to deprivation. The safeguards relate,
for example, to the fact that at the local level, 85% of the local
formula must be driven by the number of pupils in the school.
At one end there are some safeguards for children with particular
special educational needs, or statements, which may attract funding,
but that may well depend on the local formula. Some have thresholds
at 10 hours and some have higher thresholds, so there is additional
funding. We come back to the principle that the policy of the
double formula system is that those are issues for local decision
and local discretion to decide, to give maximum flexibility to
local communities and to local schools about how to use the funding
to achieve for local people. That is the principle of the system.
We try to provide maximum flexibility to schools to use the funding
in the way in which the local leadership, governors and head teacher
wish to apply it.
David Bell: If I follow the logic
of the argument, it is for individual schools with their delegated
budgets to decide how best to spend them, and our accountability
mechanisms, principally through performance tables and the Ofsted
system, will enable us to know how well they are doing. So that
we are clear about it, the schools do not get into the kind of
detail that you may have been hinting at, where you would ask,
"What is the absolute connection between the amount of money
spent and the outcomes achieved?". They tend to focus largely
on the outcomes. We have measures of both the absolute outcomes—in
other words, the percentage of children who are achieving 5 or
more A to C grades—and the progress that the students have
made. That is how the system works, from national Government right
down to the level of the local school's accountability.
Q65 Mr Slaughter: So you are trusting
LAs to comply with Government targets, although LAs may have a
completely different philosophy for using a substantial proportion—10%
or so—of a school's grant. If they decide to use it in other
ways, which clearly they sometimes do, there is not much that
you can do about it. Is any frustration showing, for example,
in the recent decision to give extra money to secondary modern
schools? If you are going to give extra money to those schools,
presumably on the basis that they are disadvantaged compared with
grammar schools in their area, you could look at other areas that
do not have that formal spilt, but where there clearly is a two-tier
education system, perhaps between voluntary aided and community
schools or simply due to the way that the LA has decided to organise
itself, and you could do the same thing.
David Bell: I have two quick comments,
Mr Chairman. We are not trusting in a naive sense. We are trusting
in the best sense. We are saying that those are the decisions
that have to be made at local level, and that the various interests
represented in the schools forum will get us to a position, we
hope, where the funding is allocated according to the local priorities.
At an individual school level, it has to be right, with our principles
of delegation, that decisions about the allocation of funding
are left to governors and senior staff. We would fund particular
kinds of schools in particular circumstances through the National
Challenge grant. The more general review of schools' funding arrangements
is ongoing and, as I suggested to the Chairman earlier, that may
be a subject for further discussion, once some ideas begin to
emerge.
Q66 Paul Holmes: To return briefly
to what Fiona started asking you, the Institute for Fiscal Studies
says that half the money that you allocate for children in poverty
does not get to them in their schools, and your figure is a third.
Either way, a significant chunk of money, which you think needs
to be spent on children in poverty, is not getting to them. Both
of you defend that by saying that it is important to have local
flexibility in allocating funds, yet you go over the heads of
those local authorities by providing all this extra money for
the National Challenge and saying that those poor schools need
lots of extra money.
David Bell: We are saying in the
National Challenge that we want all the local authorities working
with the schools concerned to bring back their plans and ideas
about how those schools would best be supported through the threshold
and beyond. I think, as I said in response to Ms Mactaggart, that
some schools will probably be very close to the threshold and
will probably need very little additional support or other kind
of intervention, while others will need substantially more intervention.
I do not think that that is inconsistent with what we have done
with previous programmes to support schools. We accept that there
is a mechanism for funding the base level of every school in the
way that we have described, but sometimes, in different circumstances,
there will be a requirement for support over and above that. The
two are not incompatible.
Q67 Paul Holmes: But as a Department
you say that you want lots of schools in every local authority
area to come out of the local system altogether and be Academies
or trust schools, totally independent and managing their own finances
and all the rest. On the one hand you think it is important that
local authorities and local schools work together and allocate
the money, and on the other you say that you want as many school
as possible to get out of that system.
David Bell: I have two or three
comments to make on that. First, those are going to be local decisions
that schools will make. For example, we know that in a number
of trusts and Academies there is an interest in partnership, with
the local authority looking at its strategic role and saying,
"What kinds of schools do we need in our area?", alongside
the needs of particular institutions. I do not think, again, that
it is an either/or. It is entirely consistent with our view that
local authorities should not be principally concerned with direct
provision. The leadership, management, day to day accountability
and responsibilities lie at school level. What the local authority
should be thinking about is how best to secure its basic responsibility,
historically, to provide a sufficient number of places, and the
much more modern responsibility that it now has to secure the
best kind of education. I think that that is compatible. What
we have done at the national level is to give local authorities,
schools and others in local areas the choice of a variety of ways
to organise themselves to achieve the best results for the youngsters
in that area.
Q68 Paul Holmes: I still do not see
how that answers the point that I was making. You say that it
is important for the local family of schools to divvy up the money
according to local decisions, but you want hundreds of schools
across the country, and many within each local authority area,
to opt out and become self-managing financial trusts or Academies
with no role to play within the local divvying up of money, because
they have taken their cash and gone.
David Bell: It is important to
say—the National Audit Office confirms this—that we
do not provide any significant advantage to schools in any particular
category. Trust schools within the maintained system will obviously
still be in the Schools Forum discussions and so on, but the budget
shares relevant to Academies have to be tied to the decisions
made locally. They cannot skew all that funding because of the
choices that they have made. Some of them have not made such choices.
Becoming an academy, obviously, is less of a choice than a self-governing
school or a trust school would have, but nobody gets an added
advantage by being in a particular category.
Q69 Paul Holmes: Some of the figures
on funding for Academies do not agree with that. Academies certainly
get more per pupil in the first five years, when funding is protected.
However, we will leave that for the moment. If, for example, a
grammar school becomes a trust—if it now takes its own cash
out of the pot and does what it likes—how will you ensure
that it works in partnership with local secondary moderns? It
is a trust. It is there to manage itself. Its only interest is
looking after itself.
David Bell: A number of schools,
grammar schools included, already work with other schools. We
have been quite clear that the trust arrangements are a mechanism
by which schools in one area—perhaps stronger schools, but
sometimes not—will work with each other to provide the best
kind of education. A number of grammar schools that were historically
grant-maintained schools have now become foundation schools. They
get their funding fair share, but as we said, under National Challenge—as
we said in a number of our recent programmes, we want to move
increasingly to a system where schools feel a responsibility to
work with other schools in what they do. There are many hundreds
of examples of schools working together, whether they are grammar
schools working with other schools in the area, comprehensive
schools working together, Academies or whatever. There are many
examples of schools working together, whatever the circumstances.
Q70 Paul Holmes: But there is no
way that you can require that. Once the trust or the academy is
up and running, you cannot require it to do anything.
David Bell: Certainly, in terms
of the approval of trust arrangements and the funding agreements
for Academies, we are clear about the responsibilities to others,
but the same would be true of maintained community schools. In
the end, we cannot sit in central Government and say, "If
you're a community school in a particular area, you are required
to do the following." Again, it goes back to the principle
of local choice. The vast majority of head teachers have their
first responsibility towards the pupils in their own school, but
they want to look outwards. They want not just to assist the students
in their own school but, as part of their local leadership role,
to support other students in what they are doing.
Chairman: David has been very noble in
holding back on his question about National Challenge, because
we want to look at efficiency savings and productivity. Because
of time constraints, I now call Graham on that.
Q71 Mr Stuart: I am trying to square
your opening remarks to the Committee with the facts in front
of us. Since 2000, there has been a massive increase in expenditure
on education, yet the Chief Inspector of schools tells us that
standards have pretty much stalled since then. I do not see how
we can square those facts with your opening remarks, which seemed
to suggest that significant and satisfactory progress was being
made.
David Bell: The Chief Inspector,
of course, is right that we have not seen the rate of progress
that we saw in the earliest period. However, it is worth pointing
out that last year we saw the best ever achievement by youngsters
at 16 in their GCSEs, and we saw the highest ever level of attainment
among 11-year-olds. The Chief Inspector rightly pointed out that
the rate of progress has been slower, and it is easy to try to
explain that away, although I would not. Some would say, "Of
course, it gets more difficult if you set higher and higher targets.
You move into circumstances under which more children might find
it harder to achieve." We set those ambitious targets partly
because if all schools achieved even what the top half achieve,
we would be close to, or exceeding, our targets. We have not plucked
them out of the air. We recognise that in recent years we have
not made the progress that we should have made, or at the same
pace, which is why a number of programmes are in place to keep
pushing the pace. But let us not undermine the significant efforts
and continuing improvements of recent years.
Q72 Mr Stuart: Nobody would want
to undermine the significant efforts, but let us combine the chief
inspector telling us that standards have stalled with the progress
in international reading literacy study and programme for international
student assessment showing that we appear to have fallen down,
at a time of an astonishing explosion in expenditure on education
stewarded by your Department. I still struggle to understand how
you work out that overall the Department's performance has been
good. Undeniably there has been great political will on the part
of the Government to put in place the resources and to see outcomes,
but I and the Committee, I think, struggle to see how the Department
has delivered a real return on the vast increase in expenditure
put in place by Ministers.
David Bell: I could demonstrate
that in a number of ways. For example, about a decade ago, the
percentage of 11-year-olds achieving the required level was in
the high 50s, but last year it was in the high 70s. The number
of schools failing was well into four figures, but we are now
well below that—in the low 100s. The attainment of 19-year-olds,
at Level 2—the five-plus A to C equivalent—has improved
substantially.
Q73 Mr Stuart: There are questions
about whether you are measuring the same things. We have just
written a report on testing and assessment suggesting that the
narrowing of the curriculum and the teaching to tests has led
to an apparent improvement, but that is not the same as a real
improvement, although no one, least of all this Committee, would
deny that there have been improvements in a number of areas. Owing
to the high stakes and pressures on institutions, they have had
to deliver and have learned how to work the system so that statistically
their schools and institutions meet the supposed higher standards,
without necessarily improving the learning experience
David Bell: I obviously read with
great care your report on Testing and Assessment, and we
shall respond in due course, although I hope not at 7.20 pm on
the day before a sitting. The issue about testing is slightly
separate, and I would challenge the argument that we might have
achieved those improvements by narrowing the curriculum. The vast
majority of schools use the greater curriculum flexibility now
available to organise the curriculum to meet the needs of students.
Furthermore, we should not apologise for students being better
prepared for achieving more, whether at aged 11 or 16. The argument
goes that youngsters are being taught to the test at age 11. Clearly,
if that resulted in a complete narrowing of the curriculum, it
would be worrying, but we know that if a child achieves Level
4 at age 11—the expected level for an 11-year-old—they
have a far greater chance of achieving the five A to C grades
later on. It is important, therefore, to maintain that focus on
student attainment. On the statistics, the measures on English
and mathematics were introduced partly in recognition of the fact
that, despite the undoubted achievements and qualifications that
youngsters were acquiring in other areas, English and maths form
an important bedrock of future success. We have tried to adapt
and change our requirements. Some people call that raising the
bar, but perhaps for the reason you just cited in relation to
international comparisons, we have to keep raising the bar, we
have to keep demanding more if we are to ensure that our youngsters
are well educated.
Q74 Mr Stuart: Yet at a time of massive
increase in expenditure—education, education, education,
as the Chairman of the Committee said, is the leading light of
the Government—we have fallen down the league tables, our
performance standards have stalled and huge revenues have been
spent. I find it impossible to square those facts with your opening
remarks. Has there been a fall in productivity from 2000 to 2007?
David Bell: According to the ONS
survey, there was a 0.7% fall in productivity.
Q75 Mr Stuart: Each year from 2000
to 2007?
Jon Thompson: As the Chairman
said earlier, between 2000 and 2006, the ONS conclusion was that
productivity fell by 0.7%
Q76 Mr Stuart: I think it was 2007,
so it was a long time. There was a year on year productivity fall
at exactly the time that massively increased resources were put
in. In the private sector, you would expect the exact opposite.
You would expect, when you get a major investment opportunity,
to deliver accelerated productivity improvement. How is it that
your Department and its predecessor so significantly failed to
deliver on what we would naturally expect?
Jon Thompson: As I understand
the maths of the national statistics survey, it says that for
the significant increase in inputs, there has been an almost matching
significant increase in outcomes—as David said, significant
rises in GCSE results and at age 11 and so on. The two are very
closely linked, but when you do the exact maths, what you find
is that productivity falls, but the graph essentially shows both
increasing at a substantial rate. The productivity, therefore,
remains pretty flat.
Q77 Mr Stuart: A fall of 0.7% each
year for seven years is a significant fall. When we look at the
bigger issue outcomes, picking up on Fiona's remarks earlier,
many of us are interested in those who, because of deprivation
or for other reasons, have historically been failed by the system.
We want to see opportunity genuinely delivered to all. Looking
at outcomes, we would look at NEETs, for instance. We want to
get around possibly manipulable or alterable examination results.
Maybe standards have been diluted, or maybe they have not. It
is hard to tell. Let us look at real outcomes, at those at the
bottom who end up not in education, employment or training. At
a time of a strong economy and vast expenditure on education,
how is it acceptable and how is it compatible with your opening
remarks, to see that, if anything, the number of people in that
position between 16 and 18 has increased, and certainly not dropped,
in the 12th year of this Government?
David Bell: You are absolutely
right to comment on the data in the report, but recently published
statistics have shown a recent fall. That is not encompassed by
the report.
Mr Stuart: In one quarter.
David Bell: There is no denying
the fact that youngsters who are not in employment, education
or training present a very substantial demand. One reason we have
tried to enhance what we have done, for example in the September
period, the so-called September guarantee, is to give them the
best opportunity possible. It is interesting to do the analysis.
When you look at the breakdown between 16 and 18, not surprisingly
there are more 18-year-old NEETs than there are 16 and a half
or 17-year-olds. That gives us grounds for optimism, because it
suggests that the majority of youngsters in that category are
not choosing to opt out of any kind of education or training immediately
after they leave school. What is happening is that the right kinds
of opportunities may not be sustained for them. I cannot pretend
that this is a straightforward, simple issue at a time when the
economy is tightening and when there are all sorts of labour market
pressures, but we are seeing some fall in the number of youngsters
in that category, not reported, as you point out, in the Departmental
Report. There is very vigorous activity on our part, in local
government, in the Connexions service and others to find the best
opportunities, so we do not end up with those young people as
NEETs.
Q78 Mr Stuart: I suppose that what
I am trying to get at is that, regardless of the percentage of
people getting GCSEs, the major effort and focus has been to try
to deliver for those at the bottom and tackle deprivation, because
they were not getting a fair crack in life. If you look at whether
young people have been given the skills and confidence to succeed,
that bottom group has not moved a whit at the end of this sustained
period and vast amount of expenditure. If you wanted to look at
one measure of the results for your Department, particularly for
those from deprived backgrounds, would NEETs not be a pretty good
one to look at?
David Bell: That is a good measure
to look at. It is moving in the right direction, but it is moving
slowly. I do not think that anyone—
Q79 Mr Stuart: It is not moving in
the right direction overall, is it? It might have done in the
last quarter, but it went up in 2006 and down slightly in 2007.
That is the general picture, at a time of high employment and
before the credit crunch and all the rest of it bites. Do you
have an estimate of where we could go if we have a tough time
for the next two years? I feel for those who are Labour Ministers
if, at the next general election, after spending all that money
for the people whom they most wanted to help—those at the
bottom, on the basis that the bright kids from the best family
backgrounds generally get on okay anyway—for the people
for whom they really wanted to deliver a change, they end up with
much worse statistics. That has got to be at least possible if
there is a downturn at the bottom. If that were the case, would
it not be a devastating indictment of the performance of your
Department?
David Bell: If it were the case
that the figures continued to go upwards, you would be right in
your conclusion. We are trying to ensure that for those youngsters
who are in the most difficult circumstances, having left school
not ready to progress into something else, we are doing all that
we can to provide the right kinds of opportunities for them at
the age of 16, through a range of projects and programmes. It
is interesting that one of the consequences of more youngsters
doing well in the system is that for those who do not do well,
it almost becomes sharper and more extreme. If you look back over
the last decade or so, what can be described as the entry-level
requirements for almost any occupation have increased. We know
that that situation is going to get better—or worse, depending
on how you look at it. It gets better the more youngsters acquire
more qualifications, but worse for those who do not have them.
Trying to capture those youngsters in the September, before they
fall out and get into the habit of falling out and staying out,
is therefore important. This is not an issue that can move quickly
or easily. That is why it is very important that the commitment
to raise the participation age is there, to enable all the youngsters
to benefit from further education and training.
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