Public Expenditure - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)

RT HON. ED BALLS MP, DAVID BELL AND JON THOMPSON

16 JULY 2008

  Q160  Mr Chaytor: Do you expect that the presumption to open a new sixth form will depend absolutely on the approval of the local authority?

  Ed Balls: As I said, there is an appeal.

  Q161  Mr Chaytor: To whom?

  Ed Balls: To Ministers.[1]


  Q162 Mr Chaytor: And would a school's desire to convert to an Academy be subject to the approval of the local authority?

  Ed Balls: Raising Expectations makes it clear that the collaborative arrangements for 14-19 education are for all state-funded schools in the area. In terms of a school converting to an Academy, that already requires a local authority sign-off.

  Q163  Chairman: You must have been pleased this morning, Secretary of State, by the leader in The Times stating clearly that it believes that Academies are a success story.

  Ed Balls: I am.

  Q164  Chairman: What did you think about the rider?

  Ed Balls: I was a leader writer for four years at the Financial Times, and was taught that the headline of a leader and the first paragraph are by far the most important, because most people do not get halfway through, let alone to the end.

  Q165  Chairman: Even Financial Times readers?

  Ed Balls: The key to a good leader was therefore to say why it was important, why it mattered and what should be done in the first paragraph. I thought the headline and first paragraph of the leader in The Times were excellent. Like most other people, I guess, I did not get to the end. Actually, that is not true—I did read the whole thing.

  Q166  Chairman: But what did you think of the end? It said that how you were rolling it out was not as good as it could be.

  Ed Balls: As I said, I thought that it was a fine first paragraph. There were aspects of the leader in The Times that I did not agree with. I think that it is really good that we have so many more universities coming forward as a result of the reforms that we introduced. It is right that Academies are co-operating with other schools on exclusions policy—they all are—and that they are teaching the core national curriculum, as they already were. When I started this job last June, local authorities were already signing off Academy plans and many were coming forward with Academy plans. Therefore, I do not think that the idea that involving the local authority in Academies is a new fettering of discretion is right at all. The great thing that Academies do—this is why I like the first paragraph—is to deliver rising results, disproportionately in disadvantaged communities. So for me this is a progressive education policy, and that is why I have been keen to strengthen that progressive dimension of Academies in the last year. That is what we are doing through the National Challenge, and that is why I thought that the leader became less focused as it went on.

  Q167  Chairman: None of our four Conservative members are still present, but if they had been here they would, of course, have asked, "But what about this dead hand of local government?" Do you not regard it as a dead hand?

  Ed Balls: A couple of weeks ago I was at a meeting organised by the LGA, at which the local authority role in education, school improvement, National Challenge and wider children's policy was discussed. Around the table were local government leaders—Labour, Conservative and even Liberal Democrat—who were all enthusiastic about their role in school improvement and in co-ordinating children's policy through the Children's Plan. They find the anti-local government, centralist rhetoric of the Conservative party very odd indeed. I think that that view is shared in local government—Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat. I do not think the Conservative party is in the real world when it comes to children's policy. It does not understand it.

  Chairman: Let us switch to a Liberal Democrat.

  Q168  Paul Holmes: I was not going to ask about Academies, but you have provoked me.

  Ed Balls: I was trying to provoke you to talk about Conservative education policy.

  Q169  Paul Holmes: Academies have reduced numbers of children on free school meals and reduced numbers of children with special educational needs, and they expel four times as many children as other schools. Do you recommend this improvement programme to all schools, or just to Academies?

  Ed Balls: Academies disproportionately are being set up in disadvantaged communities. They take more free school meal pupils than their catchment area would require—I know that you do not like this—and are delivering faster rising results. That is great. Of course you want Academies to become popular and to bring in children from across the area, because that is what makes them comprehensive schools. In my view, Academies are closer to that excellent comprehensive ideal than the schools that they replaced, in many cases. When it comes to exclusions policy, these are often schools that previously had been expelling or excluding a much smaller number of pupils and have become the schools where pupils who have been excluded end up. That is why we have seen that establishing effective discipline means a rise in exclusions in the beginning, although there has been some misreporting in recent weeks. There are more exclusions from Academies because there are more Academies, not because each Academy is excluding more pupils. The important thing is that Academies co-operate with other schools. Following Alan Steer's recommendation, all new Academies in the funding agreements, and all existing ones, are working in behaviour partnerships with other schools, because when it comes to exclusion, truancy and the provision of pupil referral units, you cannot have individual schools going it alone. My experience is that Academies do not want to do that.

  Q170  Paul Holmes: My experience is that they do. Again, per head of school population, Academies expel four times as many pupils as other schools. Do you recommend to all schools that they should quadruple their expulsions?

  Ed Balls: Academies are turning around what is often a difficult situation. The difficulty has often been ineffective discipline and exclusion in the past. We give them more flexibility in the first couple of years precisely because that is an important part of the start, and I think that most other schools and heads in the area appreciate that. What they cannot do, however, is persistently over a number of years carry on doing that in a way which undermines other schools. It is important that Academies co-operate in exclusion partnerships and behaviour partnerships, and that is what is happening. The other thing is, looking at the figures, the average for free school meal pupils at maintained secondary schools is 13.1% and at Academies it is 33.8%—three times as likely.

  Q171  Paul Holmes: At the risk of prolonging this issue—I was not going to ask you about it, but you have provoked me—you know that it is misleading to compare with national averages, because Academies are being set up deliberately in inner-city areas. The point is that they massively reduce the proportion that they take and the experience of the longer established Academies, although there are not that many longer established ones, is that they do not just go to the average for the area, they go below the average for the area.

  Ed Balls: These are the latest figures. Academies have, on average, 29.5% of pupils with special educational needs, compared to an average of 19.2%.

  Q172  Paul Holmes: But you are comparing the average for inner-city areas with the national average, which is an utterly different figure.

  Ed Balls: You have to be careful. Without wanting to return to a technical analysis of today's editorial in The Times, I was really annoyed to see it refer to 638 failing schools, because that is not language that I recognise and I disagree with it. Many of those 638 schools are high achieving schools and I have said that consistently. Secondly, equating disadvantage, lower performance or Academies with inner-city areas is not right. The striking thing about National Challenge is how many schools in shire counties are in that category. You have to be careful when saying that they are happening only in inner-city areas. I made two points. First of all, Academies are disproportionately establishing in areas of greater deprivation. Secondly, they take a greater degree of free school meal pupils than their catchment area would suggest, so they are actually taking more disadvantaged pupils, given their area. It is quite hard to say that they are, by the back door, selecting affluence.

  Paul Holmes: No, it is not.

  Chairman: I am intervening between you two.

  Paul Holmes: We will agree to totally disagree on the semantics of the answer, and perhaps we will come back to it at another time.

  Ed Balls: I want to persuade you that this is a progressive policy. I have a quite different vision from the Conservatives, but I hope the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party, on some of these issues, can agree that, given that we share a progressive aim for education, we ought to be able to discuss how we can ensure that the means deliver those ends. I think that in Academies policy, that is what we are delivering.

  Chairman: Paul, I am bringing you back to funding.

  Q173  Paul Holmes: I have two questions on funding. First of all, the current review on funding is the second one running back to back. When do you actually expect to implement any changes as a result of it, or is this just a way of putting everything off until after the next election?

  Jon Thompson: We expect that if we implement anything, it will be in 2011-12, which is the answer that we gave to the Chairman.

  Q174  Paul Holmes: But would you then just make recommendations to consult on further, so that in effect it would not be until 2013-14?

  Ed Balls: No—I apologise. What I said earlier, which I think is right, is that we are taking evidence now, there will be a further development phase and we will go out for consultation in 2010 for proposals to be implemented from the 2011-12 financial year. That is the intention: after the spending review, we then implement.

  Q175  Paul Holmes: A different question on funding: 11 years ago, new Labour came to power and a whole wave of children aged five were starting infant school. They are now 16, they have just taken their GCSEs and are awaiting their results—they are a product of new Labour education policies. Over those 11 years, you have quite rightly put more money into schools and exhorted schools, parents, teachers, pupils to do better, to get better exam results, to stay on, and for half of them to go to university. Would you expect that of those 16-year-olds who have just sat their GCSEs, more of them will want to stay on to do A-levels in September?

  Ed Balls: The good thing is that 68,000 more of them will be getting five GCSEs including English and maths, than in 1997, so many more of them will have the qualifications to do well and carry on in education. The reason why we are raising the participation age to 18, and why every 11-year-old arriving in year 7 this September will stay on in education, training or an apprenticeship until 18 is that, despite the improvements in school results over the past 10 years and the fact that schools are doing better, it has been stubbornly difficult to raise participation after 16. There has been a rise, but from my point of view, it has not been big enough.

  Q176  Paul Holmes: I am not asking specifically about the NEET group and those whom it is hard to get to stay on, but about those who are doing very well, partly as a result of you putting more money into schools in the past seven years, and all the rest of it. Yes or no: do you expect more of these 16-year-olds, who will get their results in the next few weeks, to want to stay on to do A-levels?

  Ed Balls: Compared with 1997?

  Paul Holmes: Yes.

  Ed Balls: Yes.

  Q177  Paul Holmes: And compared with last year?

  Ed Balls: I don't know what the figures are going to be for this year, compared with last year.

  Q178  Paul Holmes: Would you hope that more would want to stay on to do A-levels and go to university?

  Ed Balls: I would expect them to want to stay on to do A-levels or to take some other form of work with education. I think that there are 100,000 to 150,000 more apprentices now than in 1997.

  Q179  Paul Holmes: Let's stick to A-levels.

  Ed Balls: I do not think that we should be too prescriptive.



1   Note by Witness: The appeal would be to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. Back


 
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