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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