Mr.
Laws: Like the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and
Littlehampton, I am convinced of the need at least to touch on the
issue of home education, even though we clearly have not been given
enough time for the scrutiny of the Bill. Before we get to home
education, however, we have to deal with a couple of incredibly
important clauses, which could have a major impact, for better or for
worse, on the schools system. One of those issues is the licence to
practise, which we will come to in a moment, and the other one is the
provision of information about schools. In shorthand terms, that is
known as the school report card.
Given the
time constraints, you probably want to avoid a stand part debate, Mrs
Anderson, so I hope that you do not mind if I set out some of our views
at the beginning and then link in the
amendments. 1.15
pm We
are sympathetic to the idea that the existing school accountability
framework needs fundamental review. All sorts of different elements of
school accountability have grown up over time. John Dunford, the widely
respected head of the Association of School and College Leaders
professional group, often presents to me—and, I suspect, to
those in the other two major parties—a diagram with schools in
the middle surrounded by the vast array of different organisations and
mechanisms that are supposed to hold them to account. When he first
showed me the diagram a couple of years ago, I did not even know what
all the bodies were, because there were so
many. School
accountability is clearly incredibly important, but so is
accountability not being excessively expensive, not replicating itself,
and being useful to parents and those responsible for holding schools
to account—from the head teacher and the governing body to local
authorities and others. At the moment, there is concern that the
accountability system replicates a lot that need not be replicated, and
does not often provide information that is useful to parents when
making decisions. Teaching organisations are often critical of the
league tables, although my response is that once information is
available about school matters and school performance, keeping such
information secret is impossible, as we have discovered in this
place. A
legitimate concern is that existing league tables reflect to a large
extent the social catchments of the schools in which they sit, and do
not always give us an idea of whether schools in tough areas are
performing
particularly well or badly set against their challenges. Sometimes the
tables do not give us an idea of whether schools in leafier areas, or
in middle-ranking areas for social deprivation, are doing a good
job. If
we are not simply to end up with an unreasonable focus on the bottom
10, 20 or 30 per cent. of schools, but are to hold them all to account,
we need to find a better mechanism. That has been offered to us in the
school report card, a version of which I have obtained from the
Minister, who kindly circulated a draft the other day—I assume
that the size had been blown up to help those with defective eyesight.
It was useful to have a copy before the debate so that we could reflect
on how useful it will be and on whether the process will get rid of
information that we do not
need. My
first comment is that I was expecting the Government’s idea to
be a rather big one—something rather radical—that would,
for example, help me, as a local MP, to make judgments about the
schools in my area. I expected to see more refined information about
how schools were performing set against their catchments so that we
could compare performance to the degree of challenge. However, when we
look at the report card and, even more so, the impact
assessment—I commend its precision, detail and helpfulness to
the Committee—we discover that we have not a mountain of a
policy but a bit of a
molehill. Instead
of the report card delivering a better, more refined judgment about
individual schools, the impact assessment says that all it will do is
consolidate existing available school information on, essentially, one
piece of paper, and deal with what is described as the market failure
of imperfect information by combining information sources, therefore
presenting economies of scale. Another clue comes from the annual cost
of the proposal: a total annual cost for the entire thing, in net
present value terms, of £1.269 million. The costs all appear to
be one-off, up-front transitional ones, because some information is
already collected by the Department, while other information is held by
Ofsted and other bodies. The assessment says that “significant
additional running costs” are not expected, so there will be a
tiny set-up cost and, apparently, no average running costs at all, as
well as no collection of additional information or any processing of
data—that is why there is a low
cost. I
wonder whether the report card will deliver the real improvement in
school accountability that I hoped we might see. As I have said, I do
not think that the existing mechanisms of school accountability are
good. The way in which the Home Office now compares the basic command
units of different police forces is an example of better practice,
although not necessarily of best practice. If I want to compare the
east Somerset BCU with other forces, I compare it not with a tough part
of Bristol that will always have more crime, and so always flatter east
Somerset, but with BCUs with a similar level of
challenge. The
Government will probably say that the pupil progress element
demonstrates an element of value added, but I think that this is a
missed opportunity. We should find an accessible way—pupil
progress is not accessible for most people—in which to compare
schools depending on their catchments so that people have a clear idea
of whether a school is performing well or badly compared with other
schools with a similar level of challenge. No doubt other hon. Members
will have better suggestions on how we could compare schools.
We
need to get away from the problem that much of what is in the league
tables—although not all of it, before the hon. Member for Bognor
Regis and Littlehampton says anything—is determined by social
catchment. That is not to say that we should have low expectations of
schools in tough areas. We should have high expectations of
all schools. There are schools with all kinds of social catchments that
perform incredibly. A comparison using a simplistic league table of a
school in the richest community in the country with a school
in the most chaotic community will deliver meaningless
information. My concern is that this is a missed opportunity to deliver
more meaningful
information. I
am sceptical about whether much of the information on the report card
will prove useful. I might sound a little Gibbish or Bognorish saying
these things, but I baulk at the bits about pupil perception, parent
perception, pupil well-being and partnership working. I fear not only
that it is all rather vague and meaningless and does not come to the
crunch of whether a school is doing a good job, but that those things
will be put into the computer somewhere in the Department for Children,
Schools and Families—I will come back to that later—to
produce the overall grade in the corner of the school report card,
which is the only new element. I assume that the six measures from
pupil progress down to narrowing gaps will be turned into one grade
that sums up the quality of the
school. At
first, I was sympathetic to the idea of straightforward and blunt
accountability and thought that delivering one grade would give
clarity. I say that with reservations because if hon. Members were
asked whether our performance should be measured by one grade, we would
quickly come up with 20 or 30 good reasons why doing so would be
meaningless. One of those reasons might relate to the experience of
school report cards in New York. I understand that when they were first
introduced, the grade was regarded as giving a clear signal of where
improvement needed to be made. There was a fairly predictable
distribution of grades among the schools, with about 20 per cent. of
schools getting As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es. Although I do not have
the figures at my fingertips, I read recently that over the
past few years, the number of schools graded A had rocketed and that
the overwhelming majority now have
As. Precisely
the same thing would happen if MPs were graded on five or six things,
such as making interventions in Committee or signing early-day motions.
We would all sign every daft EDM without any scrutiny because we would
want to move up the league table. We would also do all the other things
and all suddenly get As. Everyone would realise that it was a waste of
time because all the MPs would have As, whereas people would know that
they were not all
As. I
therefore think that the A, B, C, D grading might be
counter-productive. It will certainly anger schools and it will lead to
the inevitable inclusion of all sorts of other things. Schools do not
want to be compared only on the basis of attainment and results; they
want a wide range of other issues to be taken into account, but the
measure would start watering that down. The only new thing in the
school report card will probably not be valuable, and needs to be
dumped. Martin
Linton (Battersea) (Lab): The reason why report cards for
MPs are not necessary is because we are on maximum five-year contracts.
I am sure that the
hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that schools should be put on a
five-year contract. Will he concede that, in the absence of anything
else, it will be helpful to
parents?
Mr.
Laws: I am not sure whether teachers would share that
view. I think that they would say, “Look, we are accountable day
to day and term to term in all sorts of ways.” If parents do not
like a school, they can take their children away, and there is
immediate accountability. As a Member of Parliament, we have
accountability every five years, which is not very much. If
someone was in an area that has always had a Conservative
or Labour MP with a 20,000 majority, or even a
Liberal Democrat MP these days—with a
large majority, anyway—the amount of
accountability, if they are unhappy, is quite limited. I think that
when the hon. Gentleman meets his local teachers, they might not be
quite as attracted by his argument. There are also all the other things
that do not give us a clear idea, such as partnership working, to which
I suspect the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton will
object in a
moment. It
therefore seems likely that the measure will be—I say this with
great disappointment, and without a determination to resist it for its
own sake—a bit of a waste of time and a big missed opportunity,
which is something that I care about. This mechanism could be valuable,
and we could end up with two or three—please not four, five, six
or seven—meaningful comparators. It would not initially be
perfect, and schools would complain about it, as would be the case with
comparators of MPs, but it would be fairer than existing
league tables. It would shed light on why some schools do
better than others and enable us to be fair to
the people who teach in and govern schools when we make
comparisons about their
jobs. The
amendments that we have tabled, to which I will speak briefly, try to
address some of the problems. Amendment 200 and the Conservative
amendment 69 address the question of whether it is worth the candle to
collect all the information to put into a school report card that is
not delivering anything new from schools, but no doubt imposing some
burdens on them. Amendment 201 suggests that as part of the
school report card, there should be a better attempt to assist people
to make informed judgments by facilitating comparisons of schools and
colleges that have similar people characteristics, in the same way in
which the Home Office compares
BCUs. Amendment
202, which I have not touched on so far, questions whether it is
sensible for the Department for Children, Schools and Families to be
the guardian of the school report card. One of the things that has been
corrosive to education over the past 10 years is that because the
Government are so determined to improve schools, for all the right
reasons, we have ended up with incentives for the Government to
conspire in a situation in which results are seen to be
rising—where we put all the attention into the continuing
development borderline—instead of one of trying to deliver for
all young people. If we are to have a school accountability system and
the As and Bs are published annually, the Minister will get it in the
neck if the number of As go down, as the system will also hold the
Government to account. What is the point of the Government being held
to account in such a way when they themselves are the guardians of the
new system? If the new system is to be effective, it should be run
either by local authorities, who should, in our view, be the first tier
of accountability, or, if we do
not trust local authorities because they are compromised by their job of
school improvement, by Ofsted. The last people who should be running
the system are the
DCSF. Finally,
amendment 225 would require the information collected on schools in
this way to be subject to an annual report to Parliament.
I hope that
the Minister will comfort us on those issues. However, at the moment, I
fear that this is a good idea badly delivered, and not worth
implementing in its existing form.
Mr.
Gibb: I listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman. I share
many of his observations regarding the school report card. He is right
that there are many things in here that, as he described, are
“Gibbish”, although I am not sure when I became an
adjective— [Interruption.] Perhaps the hon.
Gentleman meant “gibberish” rather than
“Gibbish”. Parents’
perceptions are an important factor when judging a school. Leaving that
aside, I share many of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about the
card. Clause 20 amends the Education Act 1996 to enable the
information to be gathered for the Government’s policy of a
school report card. The consultation paper said that the report card
was necessary because league tables contain so much information
that “they
can be difficult for parents to use, do not signal clearly the relative
importance of different academic outcomes and, with the exception of
the pupils’ attendance rate, do not contain information about
outcomes relating to other aspects of pupils’
wellbeing.” That
is the view of the consultation document. The answer, according to the
Government, is to have a school report card with an overall
score. We
take the view that we should publish all the data currently held on
schools, whether that is the proportion gaining five or more GCSEs, the
proportion gaining eight or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, or the
proportion gaining an A or B in physics GCSE. Different parents have
different priorities about what they want from a school for their
children, and we do not believe that it is possible to provide an
overall score, which will inevitably involve a very subjective
judgement. 1.30
pm When
I looked at the example of the report card that the Minister circulated
last week, I was concerned that the GCSE figures seemed to have been
transformed into a bar chart setting out whether the pupil progress, or
pupil attainment, was A, B, C or D. There was no mention of five GCSEs
at A* to C, including English and maths, so there is a reduction in the
amount of information available, not a consolidation of the
data. The
school report card is not an original idea, as the hon. Member for
Yeovil said. It was introduced in New York in 2007, and last
year’s scores showed that 84 per cent. of the 1,058 elementary
and middle schools were awarded an A rating, and 13 per cent. received
a B grade. The New York Daily News said at the time—that
sounds like a song from Barbra
Streisand—that: “The
report card system makes a mockery of accountability. No one can be
held accountable when almost everyone gets an A or B. No one can tell
which schools are getting better or worse. Nor do parents get enough
information to make good choices.”
We share the concerns
expressed by the people of New York about the report card system as
introduced in that
city. Amendment
69 would add a new source of information about a school’s
performance, in addition to the views of prescribed persons, which is
already provided for by clause 20. We would add details of the
proportion of pupils who go on to further and higher education and the
ultimate employment and training that such pupils undertake. If we want
a more rounded set of data to describe the outcomes of a school, this
would be far more pertinent information in so far as parents are
concerned than some of the nebulous, “Gibbish” and
subjective criteria set out in the White Paper and consultation
document. I
wanted to keep my remarks brief so that we could get on to the home
education provisions as quickly as possible, so with those few words, I
await the Minister’s response.
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