UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 232-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE

 

WORK OF THE DEPARTMENT FOR CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES

WEDNESDAY 4 FEBRUARY 2009

ED BALLS and JIM KNIGHT

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 1 - 63

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee

on Wednesday 4 February 2009

Members present:

Mr. Barry Sheerman (Chairman)

Annette Brooke

Mr. Douglas Carswell

Mr. David Chaytor

Mr. John Heppell

Fiona Mactaggart

Mr. Andy Slaughter

Mr. Graham Stuart

Derek Twigg

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rt hon. Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State, and Rt hon. Jim Knight MP, Minister of State for Schools and Learners, Department for Children, Schools and Families, gave evidence.

 

Q1 Chairman: Secretary of State, I welcome you and the Schools Minister to our deliberations. It seems a long time since we last saw you, although we have seen the Schools Minister many times. It is always a pleasure to see Jim, and it is nice to have you here today as well. I understand that you do not want to make an opening statement, Secretary of State, so I shall ask you some questions. You came to office in June 2007.

Ed Balls: I think it was the first week of July.

 

Q2 Chairman: It seems to have been a rather frenetic period since you became Secretary of State. What have you achieved that you are most proud of to date?

Ed Balls: It is an honour to be back. It seems like only a few hours since we last debated some of the issues that we shall talk about today. You are right, it has been a few months since I appeared before the Committee, but, as you said, there are so many issues to discuss that we thought that, rather than deliver opening statements, we should get straight down to it. The Schools Minister enjoys coming here so much that he asked whether he could attend today. I said that he would be very welcome to come along-I knew that we would be discussing Lord Sutherland.

The permanent secretary was unable to come this morning because he is at the morning meeting of permanent secretaries, but he would have liked to be here. The biggest changes caused by setting up the new Department have been "The Children's Plan" and "The Children's Plan: One Year On", and all the different policies that they have brought with them. Such issues are not in any sense an achievement of mine because they reflect what has been happening over a long time since the Every Child Matters reforms and before that at the time of Sure Start.

The old idea that schools focus either on standards in the classroom or the well-being of children is dead and buried. I do not hear head teachers in schools throughout the country suggesting that there is a trade-off between those two things. Those whom I speak to say that children who are safe, fit, healthy and happy are children who learn well, but, if we are really to drive up standards for all children, we must focus on the barriers to children's learning not only in the classroom and during the school day, but in and out of school. They say that we cannot do that without close co-operation with parents and sometimes with children's health experts, sometimes people from housing and people from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

Rather than schools acting as atomised institutions on their own and simply trying to raise standards for some children, they are working together as part of the wider community to drive up standards and promote the well-being of every child in the schools. That is encapsulated in "The Children's Plan" and will be at the centre of the legislation that we shall take through Parliament in the next couple of months, which will extend the duty to co-operate as part of the children's trusts to all schools. Also, "21st Century Schools" is promoting the well-being of every child and tackling all barriers to their progress. That is a big change compared with 10 years ago, and "The Children's Plan" has been an important part of cementing that change, although I would not say that it should take all the credit, and nor should I.

 

Q3 Chairman: Thank you for that, Secretary of State. You seem to be hanging a lot on children's trusts and their development. Why is that?

Ed Balls: When you speak to parents and, sometimes, to directors of children's services about issues such as behaviour, truancy and the health and well-being of children, they often say that they know that some schools in their area really work with them and with other schools to make sure that every child succeeds, but not every school does. Bringing all schools into that discussion is important, as is accountability for outcomes for children.

When I speak to head teachers, they sometimes say that they have a great relationship with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, so if a child has problems with behaviour that they do not understand, they can get specialist help. Sometimes they say the same thing about housing, where they are worried about whether a child will have a place to go to at the end of the day.

Too often, however, head teachers say that, when they need those other services to support their work, they are not always there. Sometimes, they do not know who to call or how to get the support they need. I see children's trusts as both ensuring that each child's needs are being thought of across an area and that schools have a proper voice whereby they can say that they need support from other services locally, as well as a place where, if something goes wrong that falls between the school, the GP or another local service, people can use the children's trust as the place to investigate why it happened. If a parent feels, for example, that their child's special educational need or particular needs caused by the disability of their child are not being listened to, they know that the children's trust is the one place to contact children's experts, the health service, schools and, sometimes, the police.

We know that the Every Child Matters agenda or broad outcomes for children cannot be delivered without proper co-operation between services and parents. The children's trust is the place to ensure that that happens, and we shall legislate to put that into a statutory framework and to make sure that everyone turns up at the meetings and that the children and young people's plan properly incorporates the views of all, including schools. The biggest lesson that I have learned in the past year and a half is that I can travel around the country for the next 10 years visiting examples of best practice-sometimes, our Department wants Jim and me to visit only examples of best practice-but the public policy challenge is to take the best practice in one or in some areas and make it the universal and common practice and expectation for every child in every locality. The children's trust is our best way to take best practice and embed it as common practice in every area.

 

Q4 Chairman: It would be unfair to say to you, Secretary of State, that the children's trust is your latest enthusiasm and that it has replaced academies.

Ed Balls: It would be unfair.

 

Q5 Chairman: Academies are now your second favourite.

Ed Balls: No, I would not say that. Children's trusts have been in existence since 2004. We thought that the Audit Commission report last autumn was a little unfair, but the truth was that it reflected the state of children's trusts a year to two years ago. That is when the fieldwork was done. These were nascent and innovative, but different in different areas, as sometimes happens in good policy making.

We stated in "The Children's Plan" a year and a half ago that we saw it as the basis for ensuring outcomes for every child and proper accountability. We stated that we intended to legislate. We consulted on how to do that and the legislation is to be published this week. That strengthening, making things statutory and requiring all to be there have been the real train of our thinking, certainly over the last year and a half.

Within that, we are saying that the current players from the local children's community must play their part properly, but we are also extending the membership of what will become statutory children's trusts. We will extend the duty to co-operate as part of the children's trust to promote the well-being of children to all schools. That will include all academies and further education colleges, and it will be in the Bill in statute, because all our schools have a duty to work together to promote children's well-being. That includes academies. I am keen to include academies partly because they are part of the community of schools, but also because they can do a lot to help us to teach other schools, as they have really succeeded in raising standards, often for the more disadvantaged children in our communities. I am keen to have academies as fully players in children's trusts.

Jim Knight: If I may say so, in the last 18 months we have seen a rapid expansion of academies; we now have 130 open. We might not talk about them so much because we are not developing new policy on them. That does not mean that, in implementation terms, we are not spending an awful lot of time and energy in driving forward their expansion in those areas that need it.

 

Q6 Chairman: Okay. I am ticking off a couple of things. In terms of your enthusiasm, Secretary of State, I have always thought that you were a great pragmatist. You like to delve into an issue and evaluate it against the best research evidence you can find. Are you going to consider doing that in relation to something that has always been a taboo for Secretaries of State on the Labour side-that is, considering a system of vouchers?

Ed Balls: School vouchers?

Chairman: Yes.

Ed Balls: We have a funding review, which is doing its work and will do over the summer. One of its issues is to ensure that we have the right balance of funding across the country, and a balance of funding for deprivation within that, to make sure that we focus funding on areas of need and on pupils who need more support.

As you know, we have also encouraged a choice of local schools for parents. We have wanted to make sure that through, for example, choice advisers, parents have the information to make informed choices. Through national challenge, we have intervened to make sure that every school can be a good school.

At the last election, the Conservative party proposed a pupil's passport-an education voucher that would allow pupils to take their voucher with them. While this is sometimes represented as being a policy to tackle disadvantage, the truth is-as we also saw with the patient's passport-that the underlying motivation was to encourage a top-up fee on top of the voucher. Very quickly, going down that road, you would find that it entrenched disadvantage rather than advantage. So, I have always been very sceptical indeed that that kind of market-based voucher would tackle disadvantage. I think it would have the opposite effect.

 

Q7Chairman: When was the last time the Department evaluated that kind of proposal?

Ed Balls: The Government's policy consistently has been to be sceptical of education vouchers as a way of trying to drive performance. We think that they would entrench disadvantage and make it harder for parents from poor families to get the school of their choice. I am not sure whether there has been a formal evaluation of education vouchers; there certainly has not been in my time as Secretary of State.

Jim Knight: There was the whole nursery vouchers system in the late '90s that created a massive paper chase-the Department has learned lessons from that. Naturally, as part of the funding review, we look at ideas such as pupil premium to see whether there is any merit in them. They are full of inherent dangers because if we went with, as some people might argue, a flat rate for everybody and then a premium top-up, compared with the current system where we have quite significant weighting of deprivation in terms of area-based funding, the danger would be, in the end, having a huge redistribution of funding to the shire counties and away from those areas that most need it.

As ever with funding, when we make change-we are taking a lot of time over this review to allow us to make change-there are winners and losers. We have to look at those things extremely carefully. Naturally, we are not ruling anything out at this stage and we are looking at all the options, but we have to approach these things with a degree of caution and scepticism.

 

Q8Chairman: Would it be helpful if the Committee took evidence on voucher systems here and in other countries? We have discussed that possibility.

Ed Balls: We would be happy to participate, as always.

Chairman: I want to bring Douglas in on this one, quickly please.

 

Q9Mr. Carswell: I shall be brief. I am fascinated, Mr. Balls. Is there any difference between your position, as you have outlined it now, and that of Alan Milburn, who was quoted in an interview in The Times recently as saying that he is very much in favour of education credits or vouchers? He was quoted in that same interview as saying that his only criticism of the Conservative proposals is that they "haven't gone far enough." Is there any difference between what he believes, with his support for empowering education vouchers, and your position?

Ed Balls: I do not think that there is any difference in our commitment to tackling disadvantage and breaking the link between poverty and lack of attainment. The Conservative party fought the last election campaign on a pupil's passport policy, which I believe, for the moment, has been dropped by David Cameron-I do not know how long for. At that time, Alan Milburn was the election co-ordinator of the Labour party campaign and therefore was central to our decision to oppose the pupil's and patient's passports.

We are a broad church and people are entitled to float ideas in any way that they choose. I am confident, on the basis of the conversations I have had with Alan over many years, that his focus is on tackling disadvantage. That is why he opposed the pupil's passport, which would have entrenched disadvantage.

Chairman: Okay, we will have a chance to come back to that.

Ed Balls: I hope so.

Chairman: We would like to warm you up, Secretary of State, on a range of issues. We are now going to start looking at responses to the economic downturn. John, you will open.

 

Q10 Mr. Heppell: I think that the Minister for Schools and Learners was here a fortnight ago. Before him, we saw Graham Watts, chief executive of the Construction Industry Council, who told us that investment was drying up and that it was getting more and more difficult to get investors. An hour later, the Minister rather brilliantly said, "No, it is not drying up. We have new investors coming forward now." But on, I think, 26 January, The Times reported that Birmingham city council had stopped its Building Schools for the Future programme. On the FE colleges rebuilding programme, Sir Andrew Foster, former chief executive of the Audit Commission, is examining the programme so far. I know that in my own area, where colleges have had quite a bit of investment, they now find their programmes effectively suspended. With the benefit of two weeks' hindsight, does the Minister think he was wrong to say that investment had not dried up?

Jim Knight: No, I do not. In the intervening two weeks, we have done a deal in Tower Hamlets, so deals are continuing to be signed because there is still funding around. As I said two weeks ago, we are not yet out of the woods-it is not the easiest of environments-but we are finding new ways of attracting the funding and of making sure that the development continues with BSF. As I said then, we have six new lenders coming into the programme and European Investment Bank agreement around bringing £300 million into the scheme as well. So far as BSF goes, mostly due to the leadership of Partnerships for Schools, we are negotiating our way through this.

The issues in respect of the Learning and Skills Council and FE capital funding are different from those issues around sources of lending. We have seen the dramatic increase in the amount of money being spent on FE capital investment from a budget that did not exist 12 years ago to more than £2 billion now. The work that Sir Andrew Foster is doing is just reviewing the level of commitment.

There is a complicated interplay here. There was, perhaps, a little bit of over-commitment on behalf of some aspects of the LSC that needs to be reviewed to make sure that what has been planned is affordable, and we need Sir Andrew's work to happen swiftly so that we can carry on with those projects that are well advanced. We need to be able to get on with it.

Additionally, these are independent educational institutions and they make a significant contribution themselves. We need to be able to look at some of those deals that separate institutions make, institution by institution, and ensure that they stack up. Some of them have been asking for a larger contribution from the LSC than they would have asked for previously. That may be related to the economic conditions and their ability to generate revenues from land sales, but given the level of commitment and of finance-the amount coming through from the LSC has been increased-the plans need to be reviewed, and reviewed quickly, so that we can continue.

Ed Balls: As Jim said when he appeared before the Committee before Christmas, capital markets are going through a very severe period, and, given the changed market conditions, all lenders are reassessing the kind of activity that they can take on. As you know, in the case of FE, some of the problems have risen partly because co-financing from other private sector institutions and issues around the expected return from land sales have changed the financial package.

In the case of the private capital markets as well, some of our school partners in the private finance initiative are thinking about the kind of finance they are willing to offer in a different way. As Jim said, there are more financiers coming to us at the moment than there were. If we do this sensibly-we are discussing with the Treasury how to ensure that this happens-we believe that we can continue to keep expanding the BSF programme. We are confident that, if we get this right, we can keep the flow of capital investment coming through. It is vital for our economy that we are spending money on capital investment at the moment. To propose substantial cuts in current or capital expenditure now would be, in my view, economically illiterate.

 

Q11 Mr. Heppell: To follow on from that, why were BSF and the FE colleges not brought forward? I recognise all the difficulties, but they were not part of the £3 billion fiscal package, were they?

Ed Balls: We have an £800 million opportunity to bring forward capital spending from 2010-11 to 2009-10. We need to use the kind of project that can be brought forward quickly and that is easy to procure in a more accelerated way. So, we focused on the small to medium-scale capital projects that local authorities will typically procure in relation to primary and secondary schools.

On the BSF side, Jim's judgment was that, given the complexity of school reorganisation, an attempt to bring that forward, although it could be done in part from a capital spending point of view, would come at a substantial loss in terms of the kind of educational outcomes that we want to achieve.

We all know, from our own constituencies, that the BSF discussion is complicated. If you try to go too quickly and do not consult properly, you can end up taking longer than you intended because you have to start again. That has been an issue in a number of areas. We were keen on BSF, which was about system-wide reform, rather than simply about building schools.

Jim Knight: The same applies in FE. The time it takes to assemble very large projects of that sort, involving tens of millions rather than a few million pounds, means that, in fiscal stimulus terms, they are not as effective as giving money to local authorities and schools in smaller amounts, where they can procure locally more easily. And, importantly, much more quickly-getting the stimulus now rather than allocating money when it still takes two or three years for it to be spent.

 

Q12 Mr. Heppell: I think I understand that, but I hope you understand as well the feeling among some people out there. It almost feels as though the Government are now not signing up to BSF and it has been examined under the public value programme. What does that mean? On the FE sector, there are rumours about whether there will be rationing in the future and the tap will be turned off. Again, I refer to my own authority. It feels that it has projects ready to go. It has planning permission, but they are not given the go-ahead.

Jim Knight: John, I would anticipate that we will be able to make announcements before Easter about the reprioritisation of BSF for the wave 7 to 15 authorities. That ought to give people comfort that our commitment remains as strong as it ever was. Yes, this is something that the Prime Minister talked about in his conference speech last year. The commitment remains extremely strong from this Government. Obviously, there are others in the House who want to cut BSF, but we remain as committed to it as ever.

 

Q13 Mr. Chaytor: Secretary of the State, of the 35,000 new apprenticeships that you have announced, how many do you anticipate being taken up by the private sector?

Ed Balls: We are using the drive for 35,000 more apprenticeships in 2009-10 and the £140 million we announced a few weeks ago to demand that the public sector raise its game. The truth is that public sector take-up of apprenticeships, with the notable exception of the Ministry of Defence, has been poor. The statistics show that public sector organisations across the country are half as likely as those in the private sector to take on apprenticeships.

Within that 35,000, while we will wait to see the proposals that come forward, we would expect a mix involving the public and private sectors. Our ambition is that 20,000 would be public sector apprenticeships and the further 15,000 private sector. Partly, that reflects the nature of the economy in 2009-10, but, as I said, it also reflects our desire that the public sector raise its game.

We have a process at Cabinet level, discussing how we can increase the number of apprenticeships through public sector organisations for which we are responsible-that means in schools, FE colleges and the health service, as well as in our central Departments. That is not something that we can mandate, but we are ambitious to see more apprenticeships.

I particularly would like to see more apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds. If the Ministry of Defence can take on apprentices, I see no reason why there should not be opportunities for young people to become apprentice teaching assistants or for the health system to have apprentices. I am not sure what the modern health service term would be in this case, but I want to say orderly nurses-people who might not have gone through to degree-level qualification, but who want to do that kind of nursing service in hospitals. We think there is a real opportunity here, across the public sector, but obviously if we could overachieve on the 35,000 and get extra, that would be great.

Jim Knight: It is worth adding that we are today introducing the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, which will, among other things, introduce the apprenticeship guarantee to legislation. That is quite a key driver for us in, again, galvanising the system to provide the apprenticeship places that we need, particularly in the public sector.

 

Q14 Chairman: You have not responded to our report on apprenticeships yet, have you?

Jim Knight: No, but we thought that it was, as ever, a very helpful report and we will respond shortly.

Chairman: I should think so, because it is due tomorrow.

Jim Knight: Yes, so very shortly.

Chairman: Do you know that it is due tomorrow?

Ed Balls: I think I am probably the first person to say this: we hope that you find the ASCL Bill a helpful response to your apprenticeship report.

 

Q15 Mr. Chaytor: If the private sector falls short of the 15,000, given the pressures on companies at the moment, is there a case for revising the rules of apprenticeships and making the arrangements more flexible, or reviewing the roles of colleges in leading on apprenticeships? The old programme-led apprenticeships have been run down, but there may be a halfway house between a full-blown apprenticeship led by a private company and the old programme-led apprenticeship, led by a college.

Ed Balls: On the broader point first, these are critical months for our economy. In past downturns, we have seen the public and private sectors both retrench on capital investment and on investment in training. That was absolutely the experience of the early 1980s. Some think that it would be a good idea to repeat such cuts-I think it would be a terrible mistake. Actually, apprenticeships are one way that we can help the private sector to keep investing through the downturn. That is why we launched our national advertising campaign on Monday, with Alan Sugar. We are doing a series of events around the country to encourage more employers to take up apprenticeships, particularly for 16 to 18-year-olds. The National Apprenticeship Vacancy Matching Service started at the beginning of January. The National Apprenticeship Service is now up and running and will be cemented in legislation with the Bill. There are a number of things happening already, and if there are further changes that we can make so that, for the long term, it is easier to take on apprentices, we should. If there are ways in which, during a more difficult period for the private sector, we can help to share the burden to keep people in apprenticeships, we are open to doing that. This is very much an open book.

Jim Knight: In the last few days I saw-

Chairman: Minister, may I warn you that I am watching you, in the sense that you are tending to come in before the Secretary of State and after him? You will not get away with that again-you get one shot.

Jim Knight: I will remain disciplined.

Chairman: You can quickly come in.

Jim Knight: I am most grateful. Just to say that, in the past few days, I saw something that came over from the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills-the other education department-about private sector apprenticeships and the scheme that we have for private sector companies to bid in for some funding around new apprenticeship places. That was over-subscribed. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the private sector for it from a whole range of businesses-from small to large-and enthusiasm for group training associations. We are also working on a regional basis with those that were not able to qualify and go through. So we have some good signs that the focus that the Government now have on apprenticeships and the message that is going out are having a good response from the private sector.

 

Q16 Mr. Chaytor: The apprenticeship guarantees are due to be in place by 2013, which is the year in which the participation age will be raised to 17. Is there an argument to bring that date forward?

Jim Knight: In terms of the date for the raising of participation age-and probably in terms of the apprenticeship guarantee-we have to be realistic about what is achievable. We have to get the ASCL Bill through Parliament, for example, to complete the delegation to local authorities on post-16 learning, to configure the break up of the Learning and Skills Council and to have a national apprenticeship service within the Skills Funding Agency that has a much stronger focus, with a chief executive to drive forward the roll-out and take-up of apprenticeships. If we accelerated that, I do not think that we would have the same confidence that we could achieve the ambition that we set out in the Education and Skills Act 2008 and are furthering with the ASCL Bill.

Chairman: I want to move on quite quickly-so quick and sharp.

 

Q17 Annette Brooke: I am going to ask Jim a quick, local question. I had long discussions at Bournemouth and Poole college on Friday and-making it a more general point-the principal did not seem to have been given any information about why the projects had been halted. Part of that, one could guess, was that there was a capital receipt, but half of the £150 million was totally independent of any sale of assets. Is any communication now flowing from the Learning and Skills Council, explaining what is happening and giving a timeline for when we might hear something?

Chairman: I know that you are a local Member of Parliament as well, Jim, so a quick answer to this, please.

Jim Knight: I have some constituents who go to Bournemouth and Poole college, but it is certainly not in my constituency. My understanding is that DIUS and the Learning and Skills Council have communicated with FE colleges about what is going on and the nature of the Foster review. Obviously, I cannot give the specifics about what might have been communicated to Bournemouth and Poole college by the LSC locally. If I can be of any help in getting more information, I am very happy to do that.

Chairman: We welcome Derek to the Committee today; this is his first question.

 

Q18 Derek Twigg: On the issue of apprenticeships, clearly, I welcome the funding and the initiative, but always with these initiatives and projects, the point is making them work on the ground. By coincidence, I was talking to my local college this week. A constituent who works there said that six apprentice mechanics had all lost their jobs this week. She had heard about this apprenticeship scheme, but could not find out any information about whether she could access the money fairly quickly to keep those people in work. I wondered whether you could say a bit more about time scales for getting money to the coal face quickly. Is there an issue not just about creating new apprentice positions, but about keeping apprentices in jobs now, because their employers are in difficulties?

Ed Balls: The extra allocation of money and the extra 35,000 places are for next year-2009-10-starting this April. There is a separate issue about how we can insure that young people who have already started apprenticeships can continue in them if, for whatever reason, the private sector employer gets into difficulty and cannot continue. Obviously, we want private sector employers to continue to offer apprenticeships-that is our first expectation-and to simply announce that the Government will take over the burden would make it easier for people, who would otherwise carry on, to transfer that burden. In my conversations with employers, they have said that they want to carry on with apprenticeships if they possibly can, but we are actively looking at what we can do now-

 

Q19 Derek Twigg: In this financial year?

Ed Balls: In this financial year, to provide some kind of financial cushion-the cost of learning could be transferred to the college system. The crunch issue for the individual arises where they were previously on a guaranteed apprenticeship minimum and that was being paid by the employer. So we are actively looking now at what we can do to fill that gap and therefore keep apprenticeships going, even if the employer drops out. That is something which I am talking to John Denham and James Purnell about at the moment, and we will move on that as quickly as we can.

 

Q20 Mr. Slaughter: Do you know how the 15,000 private sector apprentices break down between large firms and small and medium-sized enterprises? Is there any particular incentive for SMEs, which might find it more challenging at the moment? I am thinking particularly-if I am right-of the wage of about £100 a week that is supposed to be paid. Do not get me wrong: I am not saying that it is a bad idea-it would be if MPs pay their interns that-but small firms may find that a problem. Are you doing anything to address that?

Jim Knight: One of the aspects of the work that we are doing on apprenticeships is looking at wage compensation schemes for small firms, alongside helping them through group training associations. I do not have the details on the breakdown between different sizes of companies, but I know from a note that I saw this week that we are getting good interest across the piece. Clearly, it is more challenging for small businesses. It is something that we are looking at piloting in respect of wage compensation, but, obviously, we have to make sure that money is well spent and that there is not a large dead-weight of cost attached to wage compensation, where the wage would have been paid anyway, preventing us from expanding apprenticeships, because we are paying money that would have been found in another form. We are working on that with Lord Young, the Apprenticeship Minister.

 

Q21 Mr. Slaughter: I take the point that the money should be used sensibly, but I hope that we will be looking for SMEs to take quite a lot of apprentices. What would you advise a college that was saying that they could not make those links, because they were finding that resistance?

Jim Knight: That is exactly why the National Apprenticeship Vacancy Matching Service has been set up. It is now live. It is a way for employers of whatever size to register their vacancies and interests, and then for colleges and learners to match themselves up to that. As a core part of its business, the new National Apprenticeship Service is brokering this and ensuring that colleges are able to broker those relationships with employers of whatever size. It is a big challenge, as we all know from our own areas, particularly at the moment. That is why it is important that we also develop public sector apprenticeships. That is something for which we will be holding the new head of the National Apprenticeship Service to account.

Ed Balls: The Alan Sugar regional conferences that I am doing with John Denham and Alan himself are particularly targeted at SME audiences, rather than the largest companies, because they are the companies for which we are making it easier to navigate the bureaucracy and see the benefits. It is the area where we think that there is the greatest opportunity to expand between now and 2013.

 

Q22 Chairman: Are you associated with the campaign to cut down on swearing?

Ed Balls: No.

Chairman: I am just thinking of Alan Sugar and the campaign to cut down on swearing. I wondered whether that sat easily with the Department, but it is nothing to do with you.

Ed Balls: My guess is that probably-

Jim Knight: I have always found him sweet-tongued myself.

Ed Balls: He has sworn at me, though-but only about making sure we deliver this in the best possible way for small and medium-sized employers. Do you think 16 to 18-year-old apprentices are disproportionately likely to swear?

 

Q23 Chairman: Encouraged by Alan Sugar, yes. I asked you, Secretary of State, at one stage, to have a commission of senior people to look at what the offering would be, as David Chaytor said, for when the participation age rises to 17 and then 18. I believe that the quality of the offering for those 17 and 18-year-olds is going to be what crucially decides on the success of that transition. You have not responded about that, although the Edge Foundation has given money and we now have a young people's commission looking at that. The shadow commission is already working, how about the other commission?

Ed Balls: I am happy to look at it. A core part of the way in which this Select Committee in particular contributes to the policy making process is to tell us not just to have a commission, but what the commission should conclude. We have tended to want to start our policy work in some areas after you have reached your conclusions. With the ASCL Bill, though, the reforms we shall need to information, advice and guidance on the ground-as well as what we are doing in the curriculum with the introduction of diplomas-are all vital to getting an effective offer.

The point I made about taking best practice and making it common practice is going to be key to getting this offer right. If a commission can achieve quality, bridge some of the political divides and forge a consensus that all young people should have the chance to be in education, that would be a good thing.

Chairman: So you are saying you should have been playing the Australian Open? You batted that straight back into my court. Thank you.

We are moving on: Sutherland.

 

Q24 Mr. Stuart: Looking at the Sutherland report, it is hard not to arrive at the conclusion that the system that was set up-the alphabet soup of organisations who were made responsible-had created a situation that was an accident waiting to happen. Do you accept that the structure, with QCA, DCSF, NAA, ETS, SMRG-I could carry on, there must be another 10 acronyms involved in the process-meant that no one seemed to be in overall charge, and the risks were ignored again and again until it turned into a complete catastrophe? Do you accept that there were some systemic organisational problems for which your Department was the root?

Ed Balls: We commissioned Lord Sutherland to carry out an independent inquiry and have accepted his findings and recommendations in full, and we responded at the beginning of the week in more detail. In some areas he was clear that the proliferation of seeming organisations was unhelpful. He has been critical of the appearance that there was a separate organisation within the QCA called the NAA, which was in fact part of the QCA. He recommended that that was an artificial and unhelpful distinction and it was immediately abolished by the QCA.

Lord Sutherland has also welcomed the establishment of Ofqual as an independent regulator separated from the QCA, where before the regulatory function happened within one institution. In that case he agrees with us that to have an institution setting, managing and regulating tests is the wrong way to do it. Separating improves accountability and it is, as the report states, something we have done and are legislating for. It is a little simplistic, then, to say that more institutions are always bad. That is not the view that Lord Sutherland has taken.

 

Q25 Mr. Stuart: I am just asking if you feel responsible for setting up the situation. Did the Department get it wrong? You quoted through Lord Sutherland; you are the Secretary of State. Although you have made it clear that you do not think that having additional organisations is always wrong, it is pretty clear that leading up to 2008, the plethora of them did not help-and you were the authors of them.

Ed Balls: I am sorry but I have just contradicted that point because I said that Lord Sutherland welcomed the establishment of Ofqual as a separate institution rather than subsumed within the QCA. As I said, we have accepted his inquiry and its findings in full.

Lord Sutherland said that the primary responsibility was the delivery failure of ETS Europe, but there was also a failure on the part of the QCA to deliver its remit. Both those findings are correct. Obviously, it is important for us to ensure that those failures are not repeated. That is why there have been changes at the QCA. We have established Ofqual and we have responded to all Lord Sutherland's recommendations. I am not complacent. Managing these processes is a difficult task. But clearly, in the case of ETS Europe and the QCA, there was significant management and delivery failure, and that has to be sorted out.

Mr. Stuart: Sure. Lord Sutherland also said that ultimately, your Department was responsible.

Ed Balls: No, I said that.

Mr. Stuart: Lord Sutherland said that.

Ed Balls: No, he actually quoted me saying that to him. Of course that is the case. As Secretary of State, I am responsible for everything that my Department does, including what non-departmental public bodies do. It is our responsibility to ensure that the tests are properly managed and delivered. As is common in Government, we set the remit to deliver those tests on our behalf to the QCA. As Lord Sutherland says, the QCA failed to deliver on that remit. Therefore, it is our responsibility to make sure that does not happen again.

Mr. Stuart: But you had observed-

Chairman: I think that the Schools Minister wanted to come in as well. Could you give him a moment? Then I will come back to you.

Jim Knight: In terms of your belief that there is a plethora, pages 12 and 13 of the inquiry report are perfectly clear, where Lord Sutherland sets out the roles and responsibilities. He talks about five, if you go over the page to page 14. We all agree that there was one too many in respect of the NAA, but I think that the Department having an NDPB in the form of the QCA that has a contract to ETS is perfectly reasonable and is not a plethora.

Mr. Stuart: Anyone outside listening to that would think exactly the same, I am sure.

Chairman: I think that he means that there were lots of acronyms.

Jim Knight: Well, I am very happy to use their names.

Mr. Stuart: You are so immersed in it that you do not even notice when you are not speaking English, but perhaps that is understandable.

Ed Balls: If you would like, Chair, we are happy to spell out any acronyms at all times. We will never again refer to the ASCL Bill, which will please John Dunford; instead, we will always call it the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill, if you like.

 

Q26 Mr. Stuart: Going back to the issue of oversight, there were observers from the Department throughout the process. Some of them said, "The Minister of State asked good and pertinent questions-eventually." Some of the challenging could have been done by the DCSF before it reached that level. I just wanted to tease out, if we are not to have that sort of catastrophe again, that Ministers expect more searching questions to be asked.

Going back to the alphabet soup, Lord Sutherland said that given how far from the action Ministers sat, through all those organisations, it was challenging for you to find out what was really going on, but you asked pertinent and good questions at too late a stage. Do you accept that?

Ed Balls: As I said, we have accepted the recommendations in full. One of the recommendations that Lord Sutherland makes is about the importance of clarifying the role of DCSF observers. He says at one point that "officials may not have challenged QCA sufficiently on its project and risk management" of the tests, and we take that on board, but what he finds overall is that it was a failure of ETS Europe and QCA.

He says, "In practice what happened in 2008 was that DCSF observers escalated their own assessment of risks to the DCSF ministers on a number of occasions. On this basis, ministers usually pressed QCA's Chief Executive for answers. At this point, because information was not being escalated within QCA effectively, ministers were given strong reassurances, by QCA that all was on track. As late as 17 June when the Schools Minister," Mr. Jim Knight, "met QCA's Chief Executive and NAA's Managing Director, they provided reassurances...In practice, the first time QCA notified Ministers that ETS would not deliver test results on time was 30 June 2008."

It is on that basis that Lord Sutherland reaches his conclusions. You might not like those conclusions, but they are the conclusions that Lord Sutherland reached. Our job, having given full, on the record evidence to Lord Sutherland and received his independent report, is to act on it. That is what we are doing. I am confident that we can ensure that that kind of debacle does not happen again. I said in the House how sorry I was that pupils, teachers and markers went through that experience that summer.

Jim Knight: This is about risk escalation. It is talked about extensively in Lord Sutherland's report. He quotes the then chairman of QCA, Anthony Greener: "I think it is fair to say that given the fact that these were new people, and a whole new approach to the tests, they [the QCA Executive] did not escalate the problems early enough and particularly high enough." In his analysis and findings, I will just read out the headings: "ETS failed to identify and assess risks accurately and failed to report risk to NAA transparently". "QCA had project and risk management systems in place, but did not use these effectively to support and challenge ETS and inform decision making". "DCSF had good project and risk management processes, but officials may not have challenged QCA sufficiently on its project and risk management".

That is about risk escalation. The only other thing I would say in passing is that when you have ministerial oversight responsibility for these things-there are some very complicated delivery chains; we could have discussions about whether they are too complicated-you have to be cautious about interfering too much in the delivery of the contract. That can throw delivery of the contract and can cause some serious contract compliance problems, which then mean that if there is a problem with the delivery of the contract, you cannot enforce the contract's measures, which we did against ETS and secured millions of pounds back to the taxpayer.

 

Q27 Mr. Stuart: I do not want to overdo it, Chairman; it was just on the "eventually". They said, "eventually" the Minister of State asked good and pertinent questions.

Jim Knight: That is a function of when we finally were told in a meeting at the end of June, or beginning of July, that there was a problem and we were not going to meet the set deadlines. Up until that point, I had been given every reassurance by David Gee and Ken Boston that everything was going to be okay. I was told in a very memorable meeting, in which I had to go through each individual test and what date they thought it would be done by; only under detailed scrutiny and questioning was it revealed to me that they believed we were not going to hit those deadlines and at that point, I was scaled up and was intimately involved on a day to day basis in what was going on.

Ed Balls: As the report makes clear, prior to that-at the end of May and beginning of June-I in terms asked for a meeting with the QCA chief executive to ask him whether there were problems with the testing regime and whether it was on track. He told me and the Schools Minister that there were not-that there had been some teething troubles, which had been sorted out, but things were on track. That turned out to be wrong. I think we have every reason to believe that it was his best judgment.

What we know is that at the same time, prior to that, the NAA was already recruiting substantial numbers of extra markers to deal with a crisis which they were not escalating up to QCA at board level. That is really where the problem lay.

 

Q28 Mr. Carswell: Looking ahead, I have a slightly broader question. Having been on this Committee at the time of the SATs fiasco, I feel that accountability to Parliament is a bit of a fiction-it does not really work, although in SW1 people might pretend that it does. The reality is that you blame the quangos, the quangos blame the ETS, and Lord somebody-or-other produces a report that sounds like the voice of the establishment.

I do not want to be too critical of you personally, Secretary of State, because I know that your predecessor, Estelle Morris, had not dissimilar problems and I suspect that no matter what colour rosette the Minister wears on election day, under the current system we would have similar problems without structural change. Looking at what we could do to enhance accountability, should the chiefs of quangos such as the QCA, perhaps only be appointed after a formal confirmation hearing in front of this Committee, with a formal vote to ratify the appointment? Perhaps we could go even further and make sure that the quangos have to present their annual budget for approval to this Committee. That would ensure you had real, true, meaningful parliamentary accountability. It would not be a question of convoluted lines of accountability between the legislature and the Executive. The legislature could do its job of holding the quango to account.

Ed Balls: That depends who you think is ultimately accountable to Parliament. I said in my answer to Lord Sutherland that accountability for the actions of the Executive in this matter lay with me, the Secretary of State, and with Ministers. If you want to move to delivery organisations being independently accountable to Parliament and not Ministers, sometimes that is the right thing to do. That is what we have with, for example, Ofsted in delivering the inspection regime within legislation, which we set, but in this case, this is a non-departmental body, although it was accountable to Parliament through us. That is why we regularly reported to Parliament and why we made statements to Parliament. That is why we commissioned and then responded to the Sutherland inquiry. It is fully consistent with that to say that there should be hearings.

As you know, I am in favour of pre-confirmation hearings, but I would be worried, and I think that you should be worried, if accountability was sucked away from Ministers within this system. I do not think that that would be right thing to do.

What I do think we should be very clear about is how we organise things and what we are accountable for. We are accountable for the delivery of the test. We had very highly-paid people within executive organisations who were unable to deliver on their remit and unable to report to us effectively, as Lord Sutherland makes clear, but the accountability is of them to us, and then from us to Parliament-that is the system we operate. I am not sure whether you, as a Select Committee, want to change that.

Mr. Carswell: My other two questions are about Building Schools for the Future, so perhaps I can come in afterwards.

Chairman: David, you wanted to come in quickly.

 

Q29 Mr. Chaytor: Given the changes to the timetable that were made, are you confident that you can now move to a system of single-level tests that will take place twice a year over multiple levels and still operate the system in the old way? It just seems that the experience of the last few years over delivery of key stages 2 and 3 should be a big warning sign about the risks of introducing more tests to the system.

Ed Balls: For 2009, we are doing a one-year procurement with a tried-and-tested deliverer, Edexcel, which is returning to previous systems-pre-ETS for this year-and, as the exchange of letters between me and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority shows, this was a quick procurement and, therefore, it is of course not without risks, but we have asked Lord Sutherland's advice and we are monitoring it closely. We are as confident as we can be that in 2009 we can procure the Key Stage 2 tests.

We have also said that, for the future, the system is not set in stone. The expert group, which, as you know, I announced when we abolished Key Stage 3 tests, will report in the spring. The complicated set of issues-

Mr. Chaytor: The spring of 2009?

Ed Balls: The spring of this year.

The reform of testing is intimately bound up with the accountability of schools to Government, governing bodies and the public. So, we see the reform of testing and the new school report card as very much part of the same set of reforms. Important contributors to that are the Making Good Progress pilots and the single-level tests. We have already concluded that, at Key Stage 3, it will not work, so that part of the project is ended.

We are still looking at the Key Stage 2 single-level tests. We have always said that a testing system that really delivers not just information, but incentive for the school to focus on the progress of every child, rather than just the average child, has great attractions. That is also what we are trying to achieve through the school report card. That is why the single-level test in principle has great attractions.

As you say, there are also issues around both the assessment and the bureaucracy, which we need to think about. I think I am right in saying that the second set of tests was done before Christmas and we await the results. The evaluation, which is being done, will feed into the expert group. It is too early say whether single-level tests, for the long term, are the right way to go in primary schools, so we would not want to jump either way.

Jim Knight: The QCA is doing a technical evaluation, which I think will be published in March.

 

Q30 Mr. Chaytor: Is the evaluation on the educational aspect of the test or the logistical aspects of the capacity to deal with it?

Jim Knight: From memory, I think that there are three technical evaluations and I would expect to get evaluation of all of those things. In terms of the effect of the single-level test pilots on the overall deliverability of the testing contract with Edexcel, with all the problems that we had over the summer, the single-level test marking-that side of the operation-obviously had to take second place to get the standard assessment tests done. The same would remain, but we do not anticipate that the presence of the single-level test will cause problems. The December tests went pretty well. There were, I think, one or two issues with level 5 writing, but, apart from that, the feedback we got about how it went was pretty good.

 

Q31 Mr. Chaytor: To clarify the time scale, will the full evaluation of the Making Good Progress pilots be available to the expert group when it reports in spring?

Jim Knight: That is my understanding.

 

Q32 Mr. Chaytor: What would then be the Government's time scale for deciding on the future of Key Stage 2 tests?

Ed Balls: Our plan is to receive and study the expert group report and to produce the 21st century schools White Paper, which we intend will prefigure fifth Session legislation. That document will look at issues around school improvements, intervention and how we encourage greater collaboration between schools. It will also consider how we expand upon our agenda to personalise learning and drive progress for every child, and how we can improve accountability of the school system through the school report card to show how schools are delivering on progress for every child, rather than simply on the average child, which is the reality with school league tables at the moment. We want to make this more comprehensible than value-added measures, which, as we all know, are hard for all of us to understand and communicate publicly.

The question for the expert group on reform of testing is how the testing regime at Key Stage 2 supports the progress of individual children and enables effective accountability, including in a system where schools are working more closely together. We do not know exactly how we will sequence this, but our intention is to receive the expert group's findings, reflect on them and set out our views on testing as part of the White Paper. Key Stage 2 tests are not an end in themselves; they are important only because of how they contribute to the progress of children and the accountability of schools.

Jim Knight: As well as the technical information from the QCA, the expert group will get an interim report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on its evaluation of the Making Good Progress pilot. That report will be published in full in the autumn.

 

Q33 Mr. Chaytor: Have the single-level tests been entirely paper and pencil tests, or has the evaluation considered online testing as an alternative?

Jim Knight: The papers I saw last year were pencil and paper tests, but we have been doing some work with the QCA on on-screen marking. That has proved to be quite effective and popular, both with markers and the schools involved. There are some good signs in respect of that, but obviously we have to be absolutely confident that such a system will work well throughout the delivery chain to avoid problems of the sort that Lord Sutherland set out so clearly in his report.

Ed Balls: Although that is one of the things that Lord Sutherland says we should be aiming to do in future years. There were difficulties this year, but he would be critical of us if we went backwards on some of the reforms that ETS tried but failed to deliver last year.

Chairman: To be fair, Graham, I think that you felt that you were one question short in the previous section, so I will let you go back to it. Is that what you want?

 

Q34 Mr. Stuart: Thank you very much, Chairman. You are right.

We have talked about single-level tests in relation to last year, but we have not talked about this year. There is a severely compressed timetable for procurement, which is obviously critically important. Can you tell us your assessment of that and, with the Chairman's indulgence, just touch on ministerial accountability, because I think that is an issue? If it is to mean anything, when there is a serious catastrophe you would normally expect a Minister to say, "It's my fault." Everyone knows that Ministers do not run these things personally, but they are responsible for ensuring that they are run right. If things go catastrophically wrong, we should be looking for ministerial resignations, but when we do not get them, we tend to feel that accountability is not in place.

Ed Balls: So, is it your judgment that we should have resigned in this case?

Mr. Stuart: My judgment is that Ministers were responsible for this and if they are to be accountable to Parliament, given the scale of the fiasco, there was a serious case for ministerial resignations to be considered, rather than purely to use Lord Sutherland's report to talk about it all. We do not normally expose public servants for their failings when Ministers are responsible for the architecture, the holding to account and ensuring that things work. I think that that is a bit of an issue.

Ed Balls: With respect, that is a fully comprehensible but opposite view to the one taken by your colleague in the previous question. The right thing to do is to have Ministers responsible for the overall system. Within that, they should be responsible for the delivery of services and for education for children and parents. The right thing for us to do is not to pretend that we can run every aspect of the whole public service-whether that is individual schools, the testing system or, in the health service, every individual hospital-because that would be ridiculous.

That is why, within that overall system, we have heads and governing bodies. It is why we have arm's length bodies rightly to deliver tests that are independent of day-to-day ministerial interference. Your accusation is that we have "used" Lord Sutherland, but I do not really recognise that language. As I understand it, Lord Sutherland is a highly respected individual. I had never met him before he started to do this work. I have had two meetings with him-at the beginning and the end of the process, as I recall-plus my formal evidence session.

Lord Sutherland is absolutely unimpeachable in his independence. He reached a series of conclusions in which he specified where he believed the delivery failure was. On that basis, the ETS contract was ended and the public servants, who were at arm's length from Ministers and were responsible for delivering these tests but failed to do so, resigned from their jobs.

As I said to you the last time you asked me that question, I have looked hard at this issue. The Schools Minister has, too, and our consciences are clear. At every stage, we took the actions that we thought were the right ones to deliver the tests. It was only very late in the process that the advice to us from arm's length experts changed very substantially. At that point, we worked very hard to sort out the situation. We quite rightly ignored the political calls for immediate sacking of ETS Europe, which would, as the legal advice made clear to me, have cost the taxpayer very many millions of pounds. That is the difference between Opposition and Government.

As for 2009, we are working hard to ensure that the tests are delivered effectively. We have gone through a proper procurement process. Lord Sutherland has looked carefully at how that has been done. It has been monitored very closely by the new QCA leadership and also by Ministers.

The honest answer to you today is that we believe that things are on track. It is our intention to deliver the tests properly this summer and not have a repeat of last year's fiasco. We have just come out of January, so I cannot say anything more than that. If you had asked me this question last January, I would have said the same thing on the basis of the information that we had before us.

Mr. Stuart: That is the point.

Ed Balls: Since then, there have been very substantial changes in the contractor and in the management of the QCA. An independent regulator has been introduced and we have had Lord Sutherland's inquiry. I am considerably more confident today than I would have been a year ago.

Chairman: We are not even halfway through the agenda, so let us move on to child health.

Ed Balls: The Schools Minister is monitoring the situation very closely.

Jim Knight: I have a weekly assessment update here, so I could give you some more information if you like.

Chairman: Thank you, Jim.

 

Q35 Fiona Mactaggart: Since yesterday's debate, I have detected a tension between universality and focus on need. For example, in computerised child data systems, we have a universal proposed system. In health visiting, we have a proposal that we should arguably focus on need. You have said to the Committee that you want to ensure that best practice is common practice, which I think is an expression of starting with focus and turning it into universality. When it comes to child health and health visiting, do you have a strategy that will make that happen?

Ed Balls: Our intention is for there to be a children's centre in every community and for there to be midwives and health visitors based in and working closely with the children's centre, so that there is support for parents from before and at the beginning of a child's life from health services, closely linked with parenting support and then the early years education of children. That is our plan. That is why we are investing in a massive expansion of Sure Start centres around the country. When the child health strategy is published in the next week, we will make clear how we are strengthening the relationship between children's health providers and children's centres.

This is one example of what we are doing. The best children's centres around the country approach outreach in a very disciplined and deliberative way. They work with the health visitors, but also often with parent advisers. They go out and knock on doors to ensure that the parents who most need those services are coming into the children's centre. That is the best practice. I cannot legislate that that practice must happen in every Sure Start children's centre, because that is a question of local leadership, but what I can say is that the children's trust will have on it the Sure Start children's centre leadership and the council's director of children's services, but also, for the first time in the legislation, a local GP child expert to represent the GP's view, plus all schools. It will be their job to say, "Are we sure we are taking this brilliant system of children's centres and ensuring that the best practice of outreach is happening in our area?"

We will be able to say to every children's trust, "Are you sure all your Sure Start children's centres are delivering best practice?" Part of the new inspection involving Ofsted and local area agreements will be whether that is happening at children's trust level-whether change is being driven to deliver best practice.

The alternatives are to try to catch that in law, which is just impossible, or-this may be the way others think it should happen-for us to sit in the centre with a bank of phones round our desk and call Sure Start centres every day, saying, "Are you doing the right thing?" Of course we cannot do that. We can set the legislation and the expectation, and we can provide the resource, but what the children's trust must do for the first time-statutorily, with everybody in the children's world there-is ask itself, "Are we doing things in the best way to deliver outcomes for children?" If you or I think that in our area they are not doing it in the best way, we as Ministers, local MPs or parents can say to the children's trust, "What's going on?"

I think that that is a huge step forward. To have individual accountability for the GP, the school, the Sure Start centre, the council or the police officer at basic command unit level is not good enough when you are talking about the degree of co-ordination and complexity you need to promote individual child well-being either in simple cases, such as ensuring that Sure Start works, or in the very complex cases that we deal with around child safety. If you can get the accountability right-with the people who should be there present, proper reporting and proper inspection-that is the best way to ensure that the leaders on the ground do the right thing. In the end, it comes back to whether individual leaders in schools, children's centres, the police and the council work together and have that best practice culture in relation to the people they are responsible for.

 

Q36 Fiona Mactaggart: There is much truth in that. The problem is that we know that, when it comes to child welfare, we do not have, historically, as good a record as we would want in terms of getting the accountability right. One might need to have mechanisms that can deliver the right result even if the accountability is a bit flaky. That was previously provided by universality of health visitors. If a young woman presents in a formal way, for antenatal care and so on, she will be fed into the system. But I know that among many communities in my constituency, that is not how her first encounter with the system will exist and she may disappear from the system thereafter in a highly mobile community.

The GP might, for example, do her pregnancy test and ask her whether she plans to continue with the pregnancy. Do we have the engineering that gives the GP a tool which produces some support for her into the system that you have just described, which seems like a great system?

Chairman: Can I ask everyone to ask shorter questions and provide shorter answers please?

Ed Balls: My last answer was long, but it was a difficult question. I will make my answers shorter from now on.

This is partly about getting the framework right. If you take the Haringey case, for example, and Lord Laming has already said this, it is not acceptable to have the same person being responsible for children's services and chairing the local safeguarding board and the individual serious case review. There were other issues there about the structures and accountability which failed and need to be sorted out-and they will be.

It was clear in the inspector's report that there was also a lack of effective challenge in the children's trust and the safeguarding board at the senior level-children's services, policy and the health service. They were not demanding of each other that, collectively, they were ensuring that the right thing was being done, case by case. That is hard to legislate for, because it is about local leadership culture.

Then there is the case that you raise. If an individual GP picks up the phone because they are worried about a girl who is in the situation that you described, and the response from social services or the school is, "That is an important phone call; it is not your responsibility to deal with this, but you are often the first early-warning indicator; we will now take this up," and a week later the GP gets a letter saying, "We thought you would like to know that in this case we have seen this happen," that is incredibly empowering for that GP. My guess is that, in future, that is a call worth making.

If, when a GP makes a call, the school says, "That is the parents' fault, what are we supposed to do?" and the social services say, "We are quite busy at the moment, we will try to get back to you," the GP will never make that call again. We cannot legislate for that; that is about local leadership and culture. If the GP then thinks, "That is a really awful service, I wasn't taken seriously," what do they do? I want them to be able to ring the lead GP for children's services in the area, and for that lead GP to then say around the table at a children's trust meeting, "We have some real problems in the way in which we are responding to GPs; they won't pull their weight if they don't feel that when they do, others respond; what are we going to do about that?" I would like for that then to affect the way in which the children's trust and individual leaders of public services engage with GPs in future. I want to make sure that the messages get sent down, through the organisations-through schools, social services-so that if they get a call from a GP, they know that it is a serious call and they know what to do. That could only be delivered by leadership in local areas. But the culture which develops from inter-agency working is vital.

That has got to be the responsibility of the children's trust. The reason we had schools in there, and the reason we need GPs, inspection and accountability is so that we can encourage and cajole that kind of local leadership. But it is not possible to do that through a target or mechanism; it is about leadership.

Chairman: So, are we going to be-

Ed Balls: Sorry, that was too long again.

Chairman: I shall show what a generous Chair I am by accommodating Douglas. I believe that he has a question about academies.

 

Q37 Mr. Carswell: I do-I have questions about Building Schools for the Future and academies. I think that the Building Schools for the Future programme is great and I am very much behind it. I am not trying to trip you up, I am genuinely trying to get some information, but I fear that if we focus exclusively on the shiny, attractive buildings, we will lose sight of other important things we need.

I would like to refer in particular to Bishops Park College in my constituency, which was not part of Building Schools for the Future but was, in a sense, a prototype for the programme. It cost £60 million and was opened with much fanfare a few years ago, but last year, shockingly, it was the third worst school in the country, with only 8% of pupils getting five or more GCSEs. In fact, there is a local group of mums and dads who refuse to send their children to the school and are paying to educate them at home, and I fully support them in doing so. There is an attempt to turn the school around, and I totally accept the idea of turning it into an academy, which I know you are behind.

It is also very impressive that the voodoo thematic curriculum that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority had been promoting there has quietly been abandoned and the kooky idea of having a thematic curriculum has been ditched. As a result, fewer pupils are now voting with their feet and they are beginning to turn up to school. Is there not a danger that we focus too much on the shiny new buildings and lose sight of what we really need to do to make schools great, which is to focus on what is actually taught? In that rather long-winded way, I would be interested in your thoughts on that.

Ed Balls: There is no doubt that what happens in the classroom, the leadership of the school and the quality of the teachers make the most significant contribution to school improvement. There is also no doubt that having good, modern, flexible and light buildings, rather than horrible places with leaking roofs, makes a difference to the morale and commitment of the young people and teachers, and the surveys show that. That is why great leaders want good buildings and why an important part of our academy and national challenge programmes has centred around ensuring that we focus on new buildings in the early waves of Building Schools for the Future, and through national challenge we can now also use a new school building to support leadership to raise standards. It sounds like that is what is happening in your area.

Your support for Building Schools for the Future is very welcome. I think that I am right in saying that Essex has 66 schools in wave 7 and later in Building Schools for the Future, so yours is probably one of the authorities that would be most at risk if you went ahead with the £4.5 billion programme of cuts. Having your support is really helpful, and it would be helpful if you injected that message into other places.

The great advantage of the national challenge programme is that it builds on what we know works now, which is changing schools into academies where that is the right thing to do, and also collaboration through national challenge trusts. It is systematically saying that we will ensure that we raise standards area by area by working with local authorities and through Building Schools for the Future, and that includes changing leadership, buildings and ethos where necessary to ensure that every school, and not just some, gets above the threshold. That is an important task in Essex, and Jim has been quite involved in the Essex discussions on the national challenge programme.

Jim Knight: Yes, I have been. I think that we can make good progress and I am pleased that you support the move to academy status. The substance of your question is right: just because it is called an academy and based in a shiny new building does not mean that it will be successful. Importantly, academies exhibit double the average rate of improvement on GCSE attainment because, with one or two exceptions that we are sorting out, such as Carlisle, by and large we have really strong governance and leadership supporting strong teaching and learning with a good curriculum, and ultimately, that is happening in great buildings. If you go to an academy such as North Liverpool, which I visited in the autumn, you will see that it is still in its old buildings and in the most deprived ward in the country, but it is doing a fantastic job in raising standards in that area and creating confident young people who will be successful in later life, so that is not about buildings, but about great sponsorship and leadership creating an ethos that works.

Chairman: We have to move on.

 

Q38 Mr. Chaytor: Has not the definition of an academy changed significantly? It is now almost an all-embracing term that covers everything from rescuing a school that falls under the 30% threshold, to bailing out a private school. Do we not need a new Government statement about what an academy really is and what possibilities they open up?

Ed Balls: Academies are not about bailing out failing private schools.

 

Q39 Mr. Chaytor: How many of the private schools that have been bailed out were under the 30 % threshold?

Ed Balls: As the Schools Minister said to The Guardian in a letter on Monday, there is a certain irony in the way that we are regularly accused by that paper of using academies to privatise state schools. The idea that we are simultaneously using academies to nationalise private schools suggests a contradiction at the heart of that argument.

That is not what it is about. This is about free state schools-part of the local family of schools-being given new investment, extra flexibility and freedom to innovate on the basis that they bring in great leadership and partners and drive up results-and they do. I am very pleased that we now have local authorities around the country that ask for academy status. We have gone from having a handful to over half of our universities sponsoring academies, and that is a huge step forward. However, we do not want to lose the flexibility and innovation that is at the heart of academies and an important part of what they do.

 

Q40 Mr. Chaytor: But you would accept that academies have evolved into something quite different from the definition of academies that was originally proposed?

Ed Balls: When I arrived in the Department I asked Andrew Adonis, "What do you see academies achieving?" He said that they would show, in the toughest areas, where school performance had been least effective, that with an injection of new leadership and external challenge, things could be turned round. Historically-and this is something that I have mentioned over the last few weeks-there have been times when people have talked about the link between poverty and attainment as if it was a given. Academies show that with the right kind of aspiration and injection of leadership and resources, we can break that link and raise results much faster in schools that have disproportionately more children from low-income families.

I have always seen academies-and I think Andrew Adonis always saw them-as being our battering ram to break the assumption that certain communities would always have low aspirations and low results, as if that was pre-ordained because of deprivation. The reason that there is consistency in the academies programme is that, as we expand it, we deliver that original impetus.

 

Q41 Mr. Chaytor: Did William Hulme's grammar school in Manchester have a high proportion of children from low-income families?

Jim Knight: Look at Bristol, for example, where Colston Girls' School and the cathedral school have come into the academies programme. Historically, the performance of schools in Bristol has been one of the lowest in the country, but I am happy to say that it is now improving. After four years, Heather Tomlinson, the director of children's services, has moved on, but what she has turned around with the authorities has been remarkable in the secondary area. Bringing in those two independent schools has meant that we have been able to extend the number of high-quality places to people from all backgrounds, at no charge to them. That is a good thing in turning around an education system that was not working well enough in that city, and extending high-quality education to people who need it. That is what the academies programmes is fundamentally about.

 

Q42 Mr. Chaytor: On the wider question of diversity, when are we going to get a new schools commissioner?

Ed Balls: There was a change in the autumn because the previous schools commissioner is moving on. I spoke with the Chairman of the Select Committee at his farewell drinks a few weeks ago. The view of our permanent secretary, and the acting director of schools, Jon Coles, was that we should think very hard about how we internally organise school improvement work for the future. We are announcing in the legislation published on Thursday that responsibility for managing existing open academies on our behalf will go to the new Young People's Learning Agency, the new 16 to 19 funding organisation. We also now have a very strong national challenge team in our Department, working very closely with local authorities and schools. Picking up the recommendation of Cyril Taylor, the former chair of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, who was writing about these matters on Sunday, we are very much focusing our work in the academies division on national challenge schools, in the next period as we expand.

The view of Jon Coles and David Bell was that they did not want simply to replace the existing schools commissioner: we should think hard about the way in which we organised our Department around national challenge and school improvement for the future. I was happy to agree with them. The answer is that we have not made a decision on that.

 

Q43 Mr. Chaytor: You have not?

Jim Knight: No.

 

Q44 Mr. Chaytor: Can I just ask about the commissioner's report; will the former schools commissioner's report be published? It was intended it should be used as the annual report.

Ed Balls: We did publish his annual report before Christmas, did not we? We definitely published a report quite recently. If he has another report-

 

Q45 Mr. Chaytor: Was that the school commissioner's annual report?

Ed Balls: My memory is that we published it, and if there is another report to publish before he leaves we will do that. I think many of the things that you want published are things that our Department should definitely publish. Whether we publish them in the report of the schools commissioner, or through another route, is something we would be very happy to discuss with you. I think actually there is a set of issues that you are concerned about-not just the academies programme, and schools commissioning, but also around admissions-which go broader than the role the previous schools commissioner played; so that is something we would be very happy to discuss.

 

Q46 Mr. Chaytor: Finally, the schools commissioner, I understand, has gone, or is going, to work for Edutrust. The Department is carrying out an investigation into Edutrust's sponsorship of academies. Could you give us a progress report on the investigation?

Ed Balls: Yes. There were allegations made by the ex-chief executive. When those kind of allegations are made it is obviously very important that they are taken seriously, so there is an initial investigation happening within our Department, which will report to our permanent secretary. The report, I believe, will arrive with him in a matter of days. He will then consider its implications and report to me, and we will then decide what the proper next steps are. We will obviously make public any conclusions or steps we reach, but in the appropriate way.

 

Q47 Mr. Slaughter: This discussion we were just having on academies makes me think you do need to restate the purpose of them. What you just said, Secretary of State, a moment ago, is what I understood was the original purpose: they were to address, principally, failing schools, principally in low-income areas of social deprivation, and the controversy around them was that part of that was removing the LEA, which is clearly seen as a problem, and putting in the private sector, or, we would now say, the external partner. That is what has happened.

What now seems to be the case is that there is the opportunity at least for them to be colonised by the middle classes, so that what you thought was a humorous contradiction may actually be quite near the truth; because if they are actually sitting somewhere between the independent sector and the voluntary-aided sector in the hierarchy of schools, so that they are a secular alternative, perhaps, for parents who cannot get their kids into voluntary-aided schools, or a cheaper alternative, for parents who cannot pay or will not pay, their ethos, which was supposed to be the positive thing about them, may actually be taking them out of the ambit that they should have been in. Do you see what I am saying?

Ed Balls: I do. There have been, as Jim referred to, particular private schools, often with an educational ethos from their foundation about the promotion of education for disadvantaged children, which they did not feel could be properly pursued as a private and fee-charging school, who actually wanted to move into the state system so that they could substantially widen their catchments and focus on extending educational opportunity. We have only, and will only, allow private schools to become academies if there is, first, a need for places, and second, a desire on their part to change their intake to become more comprehensive and tackle disadvantage. These have been very much the exception, but where it makes sense-as Jim said, in Bristol and Liverpool-we are happy to do that. There is no ideological opposition to private schools wanting to become state schools. These are schools that have a particular legal form-very similar in substance to voluntary-aided schools, but not exactly the same. They have more flexibility to innovate, increasingly with private, public and university sponsors.

Since before I arrived, academies were proposed and supported by local authorities, who sign off the funding agreement at the key stage to move forward. The change that has happened is that local authorities are banging on our doors saying, "We would like to have academies," rather than the other way around. Their focus now, and from the beginning, is to ensure that lower-performing schools-which are often schools with greater disadvantage, and which need that sort of aspirational change involving new leadership and investment-get that opportunity. There will be, from time to time, exceptions at the margins for particular reasons, but that is absolutely the focus of the programme. Did that answer your question?

 

Q48 Mr. Slaughter: Obviously, one of the objectives is, if there are schools that have become sink schools over the years-to use that pejorative term-to widen the social mix, as well as all the other improvements. Are you going to monitor not just the academic outcome, but also the social mix in academies?

Ed Balls: Look, part of the reason why some academies with a disproportionate number of free-school-meal pupils, have seen a fall in the percentage of those pupils, is because other children and parents in the local area suddenly decide that that is a school they would like to go to. That is a good thing, not a bad thing-and fully consistent with those schools delivering better education for more disadvantaged children and young people.

We will absolutely monitor it, and we expect local authorities, with us and as part of the national challenge, to be looking at this closely. I have already said to Mr. Chaytor that we would be happy to discuss with you the kind of annual reporting you would like, across a slightly broader set of issues than the schools commissioner addressed in the past, if monitoring these kinds of things is something you would benefit from. We would be happy to make that part of the report, because it is absolutely central to our thinking about the purpose of this programme.

Jim Knight: The middle classes deserve a good education as well. The snow prevented me from visiting the academy in Midhurst that is being developed. Midhurst has pockets of disadvantage and need, but that academy will serve the whole community of Midhurst, and that is the result of turning around a failing school that was serving a slightly less deprived community than some of the ones in other parts of the country such as north Liverpool, which I referred to-

 

Q49 Chairman: Let me tell you why this causes me some concern about the demise of the schools commissioner, or whether or not it is going to exist as an office. The previous Education and Skills Committee provided a critique of the original White Paper that the Schools Commissioner came out of.

Jim Knight: A very influential document it was, too.

Chairman: It was. What we said was that, on the one side, we would like the schools adjudicator to have his job back with much more power, with an admissions code that really had teeth-

Jim Knight: Which has happened.

Chairman: It has happened; we are fine with that. And balanced by a schools commissioner. We wanted added to the schools commissioner role of helping trusts and partnerships to form-all that stuff with trusts and academies-the making of a regular report on the social composition of schools. That speaks directly to Andy Slaughter's point.

Ed Balls: It does.

 

Q50 Chairman: If the schools commissioner is to disappear, we would like to know who will fulfil that role.

Ed Balls: That was at a time when there was some concern about what role a schools commissioner would play.

Chairman: Absolutely.

Ed Balls: I think the change that has happened-we will set this out in the White Paper in the spring-is that the promotion of academies, and I would say the promotion of trusts in collaboration, has moved from being part of what the Department did to being at the core of what we do in schools improvement. The promotion of academies or national challenge trusts is not being done by one office separate from the rest of the Department, but is central to the national challenge programme.

The question we are asking ourselves as part of the 21st century schools White Paper is, would this be best done by a separate office or is it integral to what the whole Department is about and what is happening on the ground through our delivery chain and through local authorities? That is purely an organisational question about the best way to pursue the expansion of academies and trusts in a system where, rather than standing back in a passive way and seeing what requests you get, you actively go out and say, "Area by area, we need to know what your plan is for every school in your area, which is underperforming."

As Jim says, when we look at academies-Jim and I look at every academy proposal that comes forward-we look to see whether the school has been persistently below 30%. We look at whether there is the support for the community and whether the sponsor is strong. We never look at the degree of disadvantage in that school because schools that are underperforming are disadvantaging all children, whatever their degree of deprivation.

However, we also note, across the piece, that in respect of disadvantaged communities academies are taking a disproportionately disadvantaged intake. Academies are about making sure that underperforming schools are turned round, which has a disproportionate impact on disadvantage, although not exclusively so.

The White Paper is about improving school accountability for the well-being of all children, not just some, but in particular making sure that we do not allow disadvantage to be a barrier. If also, as part of that White Paper, you are asking us, "What is the best way in which we as a Department should be accountable for those objectives?" we are very happy to have that discussion.

I am very happy to discuss with you what information we should regularly produce for you so that we are accountable for how our school system and school improvement deliver.

I do not think that it helps me for that to be only a report of the schools commissioner and only the responsibility of one team. I want those objectives around fair admissions, tackling disadvantage and school improvement to be integral to the work of every part of my Department, here and round the country. I would probably rather that the report we produced were the report not of the commissioner, but of Ministers in the Department. That is necessarily separate from the school adjudicator's report, because he must act independently of Ministers. The schools commissioner does not and should not act independently of Ministers, but works for us. So will his successors.

 

Q51 Chairman: The Committee is more interested in the roles that are performed than the names. At the crucial time when the schools commissioner concept was highly unpopular in some quarters, the Committee-or rather, its predecessor Committee-was, I thought, very helpful in suggesting that the commissioner have an expanded role, which many people have approved of.

Jim Knight: I will make an extremely brief but helpful point. I am sure the Committee will agree that the office of the schools commissioner is a really important part of the director general for schools directorate. It is right to wait until the permanent appointment of the director general is made so that that person can influence the decision around how that function is headed up within the Department. That, in part, is why there is a delay, which some people might find frustrating.

Chairman: Minister, that makes sense. We must move on to children's social care. Annette was very kind to allow Douglas to ask his question.

 

Q52 Annette Brooke: There are quite a few questions, so if we could work through them fairly crisply that would be to the benefit of us all. The Unison report published last week described the situation in child protection services as a ticking time bomb. It covered 369 responses from social workers. How did you react to that report? Is the situation a ticking time bomb? Is that description false or is the report sending us some strong warning messages?

Ed Balls: I did not agree with the language-a ticking time bomb-at all. I place more weight as an assessment of the whole system on the views of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children or of Lord Laming, who said, as we discussed in last night's debate, that the system has improved substantially. Every Child Matters is the right framework. The idea of local accountability for safeguarding across agencies is the right approach and putting the interests of the child first, which is at the heart of Every Child Matters, is the right system. However, there is still a long way to go to make sure that the system is working effectively in every part of the country. That is why we have asked Lord Laming for a progress report, and I do not want to reach a conclusion until I have seen that report.

Having said that, when I look at the details of the Unison report and survey, much strikes a chord with my understanding of some of the challenges that we face in the system. It is no accident that the senior Unison officer-an acknowledged expert in those matters-is also a member of the Social Work Taskforce.

Many issues have been raised around inadequacy of training. A statistic that is shocking to me-I am not sure whether it is in the Unison report, although it reflects it-was in work done by the Children's Workforce Development Council. It shows that more than one third of social workers do not believe that their training prepares them in any way for the job that they do. Compared with other services, too many social workers in the early stages of their career do front-line work without proper support and challenge from middle management. Often, case loads put those individuals under pressure, and the case load has risen substantially during the past two months or so during which the survey was compiled.

Furthermore, universally, there is no proper engagement from other public services in case conferences. We saw that clearly in the Haringey example. In some parts of the country, social workers do not have the training and the understanding-and sometimes the IT systems-to make the integrated children's system work in the way that it does in other countries. So, individual elements of the Unison report encourage me to believe that what we are doing through Lord Laming and the Social Work Taskforce is urgent and important, but I do not accept the ticking time bomb description.

Chairman: This Committee will be looking at the training of social workers very soon.

Ed Balls: That is very important.

 

Q53 Annette Brooke: I wish to pick up on the integrated children's system. The Committee has received a letter from Professor Sue White who does not accept the Department's analysis that it is just a matter of social workers not being trained well enough in IT, but thinks that there was not enough engagement with social workers in the design of the project. I understand that the issue is to be looked at by the Social Work Taskforce, but not by the Laming review. Would it not be rather useful for it to be examined in both contexts?

Ed Balls: Lord Laming can look at anything he wants to look at, and he will. My view is that he will range widely, and in some cases he will set down what he thinks needs to be done by others. The Social Work Taskforce is centrally looking at the training of social workers, but Lord Laming will, I think, have some pretty strong views about what the taskforce should do. My guess is that he will have views on the ICS as well, although I have already asked the taskforce to take a hard look at how the ICS works in practice. I hope that Lord Laming will take the same view.

As for the letter from Professor Sue White at Lancaster University, I have also read the summary of her paper, "Error, Blame and Responsibility in Child Welfare". She is a member of the Social Work Taskforce, so we shall ensure that her expertise is absolutely central to this.

My sense on the ICS, although I am not an expert in the detail, is that there is a procurement issue here, because individual authorities around the country have individually procured the computer systems to deliver the social work casework manager ICS. Sometimes that procurement has not worked as well as it should. We have some experience in Government that individual, local procurement for such things may not be the best way to go, so there is a procurement issue to look at.

Secondly, it is difficult to have change. Some social workers have probably worked in a culture where there was considerably less systematic recording than there should have been. For them, there will be an issue about being brought up to best practice. Some experts worry that, in some areas, how ICS is being run, or management are expecting it to be run, requires too much recording, but that is something we need to look at.

However, as I said in the debate last night, what if you jump to the conclusion that the ICS is a flawed system and that we should return to the position pre-ICS? Make that your headline and you may get the support of some social workers who preferred things as they were, but that is a very unwise presumption to jump to if what you care about is the safety of children.

 

Q54 Annette Brooke: Can I be assured that the question raised about basic design failings will be properly addressed? Will you, in turn, be responding formally to all the recommendations of the Social Work Taskforce?

Chairman: This Committee is not in the business of a headline, Secretary of State. Sue White is a respected professor-at Huddersfield University in a previous incarnation-and we are putting her point.

Ed Balls: And she is on the taskforce.

Chairman: She is.

Ed Balls: We will respond in detail to everything that Lord Laming and the taskforce say. I want them to tell us how we can make sure that the practice of those councils that say that ICS is transforming our social work practice positively can be the common practice in every area of the country, rather than just in some. If there were design issues, around time scales or the amount of time being taken in some areas, we absolutely should address that. All I am saying is-I know you are not saying this, nor will Professor White-some people say that we should rip it up and go back to how things were, as if there were some halcyon bygone age where no one wrote anything down, because they were too busy looking after children.

Chairman: Let us talk about diplomas.

 

Q55 Mr. Heppell: We have more than 12,000 children taking diplomas, in the first five lines of learning. There are 12 more lines of learning coming in over the next few years, which is going to increase the number dramatically. However, there still seems to be a little confusion about what diplomas are. When we had the chief executive of UK Skills in, he described them as academic qualifications that teach subjects in an applied manner. Your own definition, Jim, I thought was quite good-neither academic nor vocational but a rich mix of the two. The DCSF website emphasises the flexibility of diplomas-that you can move on to an apprenticeship, university or other qualifications.

Last week a Sutton Trust survey, which interviewed just under 13,000 teachers, showed that only a quarter of them thought that diplomas were for the academically able, and only one in five that they were suitable for those going on to university; 83% thought that diplomas were suitable for people who want to assume a vocational role, and three quarters of them said that they were suitable for schools in poorer areas. If that is the perception of teachers, are you satisfied that young people, people from universities and employers have a proper understanding of what diplomas actually are? It seems that teachers are still seeing them as vocational qualifications and probably as a second-tier qualification.

Chairman: Can I have a quick response?

Jim Knight: I will be as quick as I can. The reality of diplomas for those who are teaching them and learning through them is as described in the various quotations that you cited at the beginning, but clearly we have more work to do with the perception of those who are not involved. I have encouraged some members of the Committee to visit diploma learning to see it in action. My first experience of it was at a school in Macclesfield that had creative and media learning. There was an art teacher who was taking some of the styles of teaching she has developed for the diploma to use at A-level because she sees that the relationship between the real world of work and academic learning can be extremely positive in bringing out the academic best in young people. That is the reality. We have more work to do on the message.

 

Q56Derek Twigg: The proposed operation of the Learning and Skills Council is seen by some to be more administrative than improving skills and training. How would the Skills Funding Agency prove to be better at ensuring a demand-driven improvement in skills and training?

Ed Balls: The Learning and Skills Council was playing two separate but overlapping functions, a bit like the previous Department for Education and Skills. One was to manage funding for 16-to-19 education, the input of colleges plus sixth forms but also, separately from that, adult skills. The Government decided that we would have a better focus on 14-to-19 reforms and 16-to-19 funding on the one hand and adult skills on the other and could manage the interface between the two if we did that through two different departments. The logical next step is for the Learning and Skills Council to be split into two separate functions: one, the Young People's Learning Agency, which takes on a wider set of responsibilities but is locally based to manage the funding of school, college and wider education up to the age of 19; the other, the Skills Funding Agency which will be organised differently from the LSC but takes on the management of adult skills. I think that is a much better way to achieve proper integration of 16-to-19 funding in a managed way, and separately, to make sure that adult skills get the priority they need in the way FE colleges, companies and private organisations think about delivering and funding training. We need to manage the interface between the two because there is an overlap-FE colleges will be providing both. The LSC has always managed the interface internally and we think two agencies will give us a better focus on the crossover.

 

Q57 Derek Twigg: It is interesting. You made the point that FE colleges will still be doing both, the 16-to-19 and the post-19. You recognised obviously that local authorities have a much bigger part to play post-19. There are of course local strategic partnerships in place in every local authority area, which are often chaired by business people and have a great involvement with business people. The argument is: why not go the whole hog and give responsibility for commissioning and funding of those services to the local authority? Basically, that is how it used to be before incorporation, obviously excluding higher education, so why not do that? It might not be the most intellectual comparison, but if you take the example of primary care trusts in the health service, you will see that they commission across a whole variety of areas and services for health, so what is the difference?

Ed Balls: You will know from your experience on the skills side that it was always a struggle to get the education system to give the right priority to post-19 skills and education training. We think that the SFA, with that absolutely as its remit and delivered from a different Department, will give a greater profile and share of the funding.

On the 16-to-19 side, local authorities are absolutely the key to commissioning, because they are the centre of the delivery partnerships for diplomas and for ensuring that schools and colleges are working together closely to get the integration that we want and need to be able to deliver the kind of reforms to the curriculum that Mr. Heppell referred to a moment ago. But a lot of colleges serve more than one local authority area and sometimes will serve a multiple number of local authority areas.

There is a lot more cross-border travel by young people using the college system than by those using the school system, so the legislation hands over responsibility for commissioning to local authorities, but it hands it over to consortia of local authorities, which have to come together to plan commissioning and delivery across the area, rather than to individual local authorities.

The YPLA's job, we hope, is to be light touch and to ensure that, where there are difficulties, they can be sorted out and that there is quality and proper monitoring, but there will be times when local authorities cannot agree, and in those times, it is important that we have powers to step in and sort out problems.

There is also an issue where you have cross-border flows. The FE colleges were very anxious that we should not have a much more complicated system and, as far as you can, to have a common tariff that could apply across areas, so we are trying to strike a balance between devolution and simplicity, where you have cross-border local authority moves, and that is what the Bill tries to achieve.

 

Q58 Derek Twigg: I understand the point you are making, and that is why I used the PCT analogy, because they go cross-border considerably in terms of commissioning services from different hospitals and local authority areas. Intellectually, it might not be the best comparison, but, administratively, that is a road we have gone down. I was involved in local authorities for many years, so I accept that that was not a priority in some of them, but has the world not really moved on since then, following the experience of the '80s? The local strategic partnerships now have a much closer relationship with local authorities, businesses and FE colleges. Are we not really planning that based on what used to happen and failing to take account of what is happening today on the ground-the fact that residents will give local authorities a bit more responsibility?

Ed Balls: There are players in the education world who worry that the legislation will give local authorities too much responsibility for commissioning and would actually prefer a rather more centralised system, and we think that that is not right. The legislation allows for a very substantial local authority commissioning role, and the large bulk of the under-19 staff on the Learning and Skills Council will be transferring not to the YPLA, but to individual local authorities.

We are trying to find a way in which you can expect, encourage and require effective local authority collaboration, and when you do not have accountability-we do not have regional government or sub-regional political structures-it is not always easy to achieve that. On the basis that that is what local authorities are able to agree together, the Bill enables substantial devolution to the local authority, but it holds back its powers so that, if that is failing, there are powers through the YPLA for us to step in.

Jim Knight: I want local authorities to focus and build their capacity to deliver on raising the participation age and ensure that there is a quality set of choices for every single young person in their areas. If they can focus on nought to 19, we will get the FSA dealing with the adult world. The Bill also extends responsibilities for the education of young offenders below the age of 19 to local authorities. We are instilling a huge responsibility on councils and giving them the tools to do it by raising the participation age, and we need to do one thing at a time.

 

Q59 Chairman: Is there the capacity to do it, Minister? Some of us who visit lots of local authorities worry because we see them struggling with the responsibilities that come from right across the children's services-the social services remit and the schools remit. You can physically see them struggling. In some high-profile cases, you can see that the management task is too much for them, especially if you have a person with a background in social services who does not understand the schools sector, or vice versa. I have seen real problems there. I look at the capacity of many local authorities and wonder where they will find the capacity and the quality of management to undertake these new tasks.

Jim Knight: There are two aspects to capacity. We have to ensure that we do not lose the expertise of the staff within the LSC and that the staff want to migrate to local authorities to perform the functions that will be moved over to those authorities. I am meeting Ruth Serwotka from the Public and Commercial Services Union today to discuss some of those issues. That is a really important aspect of capacity.

At the same time, in terms of leadership capacity, one of the important things that the Secretary of State has taken forward has been the link between the Association of Directors of Children's Services and the National College for School Leadership in order to develop stronger leadership training for not just directors of children's services, but those in management positions just below DCSs, so that we can address the problem that you are talking about.

Ed Balls: But there is a broader issue here, Chairman. In some ways, this is where the most acute political debates are at the present time. If you do not believe in the proper role of the local authority and the local tier of government in delivering school improvement, child safety or effective economic development, you either have a very centralised system or you end up with something of a lottery, where you see who rises and who falls. There will be some areas in which schools will succeed. Some individual schools will succeed and some will fail. Pupils in the failing school will sit back and suffer failure for years before something changes. Personally, I do not think that the lottery is fair. But, in the end, if you start down that decentralised and market-based model in education, you quickly see the need systematically to tackle underperformance. Without a proper local authority tier, you end up with massive centralisation. I do not think that it is possible for Whitehall to run school improvements systematically in every part of the country and to give that guarantee to parents. Without the guarantee, you entrench disadvantage. That is why the local authority tier is vital and why it is vital that we should think about leadership and capacity, which takes me back to the conversation that we had earlier about children's trusts.

Q60 Chairman: A very senior member of the Institute of Education described the current education policy in respect of schools as a franchise system-franchised directly out of the Department and directly to schools, largely bypassing local authorities.

Ed Balls: I think that that is a little out of date, to be honest.

Chairman: It was published in November.

Ed Balls: Heads and governing bodies-increasingly in collaboration-are responsible for their schools. In the case of the national challenge, we have challenged every local authority to show us what they are doing to turn round leadership and standards.

Chairman: You mentioned that 90% of funding goes straight to schools.

Ed Balls: The 2006 Act substantially increased the responsibility of local authorities for commissioning and for school improvements. In the past 18 months, we have been saying that we will deliver the 2006 Act in practice by requiring local authorities to use those powers to drive school improvement. It does not require them necessarily to have the budget of the school, but if the school is failing to deliver, the local authorities have the powers. One question that I have been asking repeatedly in the past year is why they do not use those powers when there are schools that persistently underperform.

Chairman: I am going to get shot by my colleagues if I pursue this, but I am of the generation who remember "All the President's Men", and I remember the line, "Follow the money."

 

Q61 Mr. Slaughter: London has a particular problem with small local authorities and big colleges. Can you give an assurance that students will still be able to go to the college of their choice and be funded? Can you also give an assurance that children who get into their 19th year will also continue to be funded? That does happen if they are on the second year of a course or are pursuing a level 1, 2 or 3 course.

Jim Knight: We have encouraged the local authorities to go into regional groupings, and they decided who they wanted to get together with. London has come together as a single sub-regional group, precisely to address the issues that you mentioned, such as the issue around the large colleges in the London area and being able to have sensible commissioning arrangements for them. People travel across borough boundaries all the time. The arrangements for those who continue beyond their 19th birthday are set out in the ASCL Bill, which we are introducing today and publishing tomorrow. The guarantees around level 2 and level 3 funding will, by and large, deal with that issue.

Chairman: We are nearly out of time.

 

Q62 Fiona Mactaggart: I have two questions. I am sad that we are looking at child poverty in the last three minutes of this session. I shall put my questions to both of you, so perhaps your two answers to two different things can be merged together. First, the paper put out earlier this week about ending child poverty does not mention the target to reduce the number of children in poverty by half by 2010-11. I assume that is because you do not expect us to hit it. When do we expect to hit that target? Secondly, you were very supportive when we had what I thought was a very positive session speaking to you and colleagues across Departments about child poverty. Could we do something similar for the "New opportunities" White Paper, which includes responsibilities of different Departments that have not been interrogated in that way? Would you help us in being able to do that as a Committee, please?

Ed Balls: It is for the House to decide how to conduct its inquiries and to allocate responsibilities, rather than for Ministers. If this Committee were to have a hearing on the "New opportunities" White Paper, I would be delighted to come. I am very happy to encourage other colleagues to attend as well. The issue will arise as to whether you will be looking at the nought to 19 part of social mobility and across the piece; but, whatever, there is a substantial contribution-from the activities of John Denham's responsibilities, as well as of the Cabinet Office Minister Liam Byrne and others-to life chances for nought to 19-year-olds. If you could imperialistically expand your reach across the piece, that would be great.

Chairman: Our family responsibility goes to 90.

Ed Balls: In that case, this is absolutely the right Committee to do this inquiry, and I look forward to giving evidence alongside what will be a range of colleagues. On the former point, the critical decisions on where we will be in 2010 have already been made or will be made in the coming weeks and months. The decisions made in last year's Budget-the allocation of more than £1 billion-will very importantly affect child poverty this year. What happens to child poverty up to 2010 will be very importantly determined by what happens to incomes and employment in the coming 12 months, plus decisions made in the Budget.

The child poverty consultation is separately and explicitly about 2020. It was never intended to be about 2010, because the consultation is about what kind of Bills we should introduce in this Session to become law during this year and then to start affecting decisions and monitoring over the next decade. So the Bill will establish 2020 targets on the percentage of children in relatively low income families-combining low income and material deprivation-and the percentage of children in persistent poverty.

We will consult on how to frame those objectives in primary and secondary legislation correctly and on the monitoring. We are now starting the consultation that will lead to the legislation and then to the law. By the time that we have the law in place, all the decisions, pretty much, will have been made for 2010. So, the right focus for 2010 is not this document and legislation; it is actions now. We are committed to meeting our 2010 and 2020 objectives, and I hope that there will be cross-party support for the details of the Bill.

Chairman: Fiona.

Fiona Mactaggart: I said that I would ask both questions at once.

Chairman: Okay, you have done that. One very last thing is that we have had a letter from Ofsted that puts a rather different light on the original figures on child deaths that the chief inspector of schools gave to the Committee. Graham, I will give you one quick question on that.

 

Q63 Mr. Stuart: I spoke to the Secretary of State about this last night. Can we finally settle the number of children who die as a result of abuse? Ofsted gave evidence to the Committee and sent a letter to the ADCS in December. Can we come up with a set of figures on such an important matter that Ofsted, the Government and everyone else can agree on?

Ed Balls: There is always a difference between being clear and being misleading, and between being comprehensible and being incomprehensible, and our challenge is to be clear and comprehensible. Perhaps the right thing, having read the letter to the ADCS, would be for me to write to the Chair to set out exactly what the position is.

Just for the record now, the figures are all entirely reconcilable. The letter from Ofsted is very helpful. As I explained in the House before Christmas and again last night, while Ofsted quotes 282 child deaths notified in the 17-month period from 1 April to 31 August, 210 were deaths in which abuse or neglect was suspected to be a factor and the other 72 were cases in which abuse was not suspected. That would come down to four deaths a year.

The question being asked is how do you reconcile 210 cases with the 140 serious case reviews and therefore the two deaths a week figure that we quote. The answer is that the figure of 210 is based on a 17-month period, rather than an annual figure, and our data are based on serious case reviews that are identified. When Ofsted's data are broken down, we find that, over the 16-month period where an SCR has been commissioned, the figure is 125, which is entirely consistent with departmental expectations.

The difference is that there were a number of cases where it had not been decided at that time-or, in 44 cases, it was subsequently decided-that there should not be a serious case review, because it was not, in fact, a case where abuse or neglect would require such a review. That is how the figures reconcile. They are all fully reconcilable, and the big difference, as I have said many times, is that the Ofsted figures-and the 280 figure-include deaths in house fires, deaths by suicide and deaths by substance misuse, where we would not say that abuse or neglect was a direct contributor to the death of the child.

I will set out to you clearly how we reconcile those numbers, which I think will show that, while there are differences between the figure that Ofsted used and the ones that we use as standard, they are fully explained and there is no intention to mislead anybody.

Chairman: This has been a long session and a good session. Thank you, Secretary of State and Minister. As I said before, it is the Department's range that takes up the time.