Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
60-79)
RT HON
ED BALLS
MP AND JON
COLES
10 MARCH 2010
Q60 Chair: The evidence that the
Committee has been given is that Ofsted gets bigger and bigger.
Ed Balls: It's a bit like your
Committee, with respect, Mr Chairman. Your remit has broadened
and so has the remit of Ofsted.
Chair: That is because we reflect your
Department. That is the reason we have got bigger.
Ed Balls: But my Department reflected
what was happening to Ofsted as well, which reflected what was
happening in the wider—
Q61 Chair: What we worry about
is that Ofsted—we are currently looking at its fitness for
purpose, particularly looking at children's services and child
protection—has got bigger and bigger; it has gone into further
and higher education and down into early years. Now it is going
to go into children's centres. It is a massive organisation, and
while it may be fit for purpose in some parts of its remit, it
may not be in others. You talked about the risk-based procedures.
It may be perfectly good for schools, but not as good as it could
be for children's services.
Ed Balls: Clearly, a school inspection
and the expertise needed to do it are different from a child protection
inspection. They are done by different people. Some came from
old Ofsted and some came from CSCI. The question is whether you
try to have coherence across the whole piece or whether you do
them in different silos. Again, reading the evidence, there are
some people who would be very critical of Ofsted, my Department
and Every Child Matters because they think that schools should
just be about education in a narrow curriculum sense and that
these wider issues are a diversion. I disagree with that. There
is a rather old-fashioned view that says, "Is it standards,
or is it the well-being of every child?" and that if you
are focusing on these wider issues around the well-being of children
it is a diversion from standards. I don't think that is the reality
of leadership in schools.
Chair: This Committee has never been
in that camp at all.
Ed Balls: Exactly. So I think
there is a real issue for schools. Do they get the kind of support
they need from the CAMHS service in a responsive way? Do they
have ways in which they can manage behaviour across groups of
schools with expert support? The ways in which they deal with,
for example, family support, family intervention projects or housing
issues are very important for schools. Looking across the piece,
which is really Ofsted's job, and asking whether the area has
the capacity to manage children's services in a way that delivers
for children and schools, is important. It would be a step backwards
for the inspection regime to look only at classroom practice,
because that would be disempowering for schools.
Q62 Chair: We were worried when
we took evidence. Most of us in the education sector agree that
the quality of teaching is absolutely paramount to the quality
of learning in the classroom, and we became worried about the
specific quality and training for inspectors in the inspectorate
for particular purposes. The evidence to the Committee was that
very few people inspecting children's services and child protection
had training in that area. That was the sort of thing that worried
us.
Ed Balls: I saw your recommendation,
and you saw our response. It is a matter for Ofsted and it must
make sure that its inspectors meet the highest professional standards.
We don't see evidence that HMIs and other inspectors have a different
level of professional standard or that the organisations used
by Ofsted are second class, but it is something that we need to
be efficient about. Do you want to say something, Jon?
Jon Coles: If you don't mind my
jumping back a bit, I wanted to say something on the much earlier
question of a tick-box approach.
Chair: We are back to Annette, that's
good.
Jon Coles: I want to say two things—from
a historical perspective, if that is the perspective that the
Committee is taking. The current inspection framework is less
tick box than what has gone before in two important respects,
if you want to use that way of analysing it. First, the last two
inspection frameworks have been based rather heavily on the school's
self-evaluation. That is a good thing. The inspectors are looking
at the school's evaluation of its own strength and weaknesses;
they are looking at the quality of its evaluation and at the conclusions
that it has come to. That helps the inspectors to have the broad
view of what is going on. Secondly, the inspection framework means
that the HMI actually looks at more of the practice in the classroom
and in the school generally than was the case in the previous
inspection framework. In other words, the inspection team gets
a better view of what is going on in the classroom than would
have been the case under the previous inspection regime. It is
also true that, under the last two versions of the framework,
each inspection team has been led by an HMI—the most professional
inspector in the system—which was not the case in the previous
version of the framework in 2005 and earlier. In a number of important
ways, as the framework has evolved, it has become stronger and
more robust, and a better professional way of understanding what
is going in the school as a whole. Of course, that has come alongside
some toughening and broadening of some of the criteria, which
has obviously led to concern and the issues that you are raising.
It is not fair to say that it is a tick-box approach to inspection.
It is, of course, true that how well children do and the data
and evidence of that are important parts of the framework. That
is as it should be, but it is not the only thing. There must be
a professional look across the school and its process.
Q63 Annette Brooke: I want to
develop that point to cover Ofsted's wider remit. Jon, you talked
about how things are improving all the time, but our Committee
was concerned when we heard from Dame Denise Platt that very few
of the senior people from CSCI had actually transferred to Ofsted.
Should more base work have been carried out before the function
was passed over to Ofsted, because it is probably true to say
that Ofsted is clearly having to run to catch up with how to inspect
children's services and child protection? It didn't appear to
be ready to take on the functions that it was given. As you said,
Jon, things are developing all the time, but surely we should
take the greatest care, particularly with the inspection of child
protection services.
Ed Balls: Of course, the answer
is yes, we must take the greatest care, but it would not be appropriate
for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to come along to the Committee
and comment on whether the Bank of England had the right balance
between economists with expertise in monetary policy or financial
stability. The same thing applies here. Those are really matters
for Ofsted; it operates independently of us and reports to Parliament.
It has to get the balance of training and professionalism right,
and be accountable for it. I don't think it is right for us to
give a running commentary on the way in which Ofsted goes about
those things.
Q64 Chair: But it's you, the Government,
who have kept expanding its role. We are talking about the suitability
of the expanded role that you as a Government—
Ed Balls: Which I am accountable
for and absolutely defend to the hilt. The issue about how many
people from CSCI do or don't play a senior management role—
Annette Brooke: That was just to illustrate
my point.
Ed Balls: I understand that. I
am just explaining why it is quite hard for us to get into that
level of micro detail. The thing I care about is: are we addressing
all barriers to the progress of children? And do you have, across
an area, proper engagement of schools, children's services, early
years and, critically, health professionals? That might also apply
to youth offending teams and police. It is very important that
inspection looks across the capacity of everybody who needs to
work together to provide services for children. It is really important
for schools that that broad look is being taken. If you only had
inspectors looking at particular elements within it, rather than
across the piece, that would be unsatisfactory. I pushed Ofsted
very hard to look at the capacity of children's trusts and the
ability of individual services to work together, but that does
not take away from the fact that we also need to have the particular
expertise to be concerned about maths teaching in the classroom
or social work practice at the front door when referrals for child
protection cases are received. What you need to have is the expertise
to look not only at the micro issue, but across the piece. If
you don't have both of those things, I don't think you are really
doing a good job. Ofsted needs both, but I think that silo-based
inspection would be wrong. I don't think that really worked for
us.
Chair: We have a lot of territory to
cover. I am going to move on to Paul, who is going to talk about
school improvement and academies.
Q65 Paul Holmes: Before I do that,
may I ask one more question about accountability, but from a different
angle? How many countries publish league tables of exam results
in the way we do?
Ed Balls: I don't know.
Jon Coles: I wouldn't like to
put a number on it. We are not the only ones. There are plenty
of other jurisdictions. US states do, and I believe that Australian
states do as well.
Q66 Paul Holmes: So some individual
states do, but all the US states do not?
Jon Coles: I am sure it is true
that not all US states do.
Q67 Paul Holmes: The reality is
that we are constantly told—I am thinking of the four former
Secretaries of State who gave evidence on Monday as well as you
today—that league tables are the only way, or the key way,
to monitor and drive school improvement. In fact, however, most
western European-style countries do not publish league tables.
Scotland does not and Wales has stopped doing it.
Ed Balls: We have better results
now on the international surveys than any of those European countries.
Q68 Paul Holmes: Better than Finland,
which does not publish league tables and tops the PISA league
tables every single time?
Ed Balls: If you look across the
bulk of western European countries, we have been better than them.
Jon Coles: A very interesting
study by Eurydice shows that the level of school-based testing,
and the use of that for accountability purposes, is much more
widespread than you might suspect.
Q69 Paul Holmes: But isn't that
the key difference—in my exasperation, I tried to get this
across to the four former Secretaries of State on Monday—that
testing within schools and school departments is as old as the
hills? I was tested as a child, and I tested my kids as a teacher
and as head of department, as did every school I ever worked at,
but never on this national scale where it is all high-stakes testing,
following which the school and the teacher will either be pilloried
or praised.
Jon Coles: But it is also true,
as one of the Secretaries of State said on Monday, that there
are US states where there are annual state-wide tests for every
child. One of the Secretaries of State said "termly."
I don't know about a termly case, but I know about annual cases.
Paul Holmes: And there are many where
there are not.
Q70 Chair: Paul is pushing on
testing for assessment, and testing for accountability. He is
in favour of assessment, not accountability.
Ed Balls: I am in favour of both,
but they have to be done in the right way. We have come quite
a long way since the original Baker conception of National Curriculum
tests, which I think was to have a test in every one of the National
Curriculum subjects. We have removed the Key Stage 3 tests, following
your Select Committee report, and we have made substantial changes
at Key Stage 2. Of course, teachers need to test to track progress
much more regularly than you need testing for accountability purposes.
I've been very clear about my views about league tables, but I
still think you need testing for accountability purposes.
Q71 Paul Holmes: We went to Ontario,
and one of the things we looked at was exactly this. Ontario,
as a province of Canada, if you took it out of Canada as a whole,
would come very high up in the PISA league tables. They don't
publish their league tables, deliberately. They do have all this
accountability testing within schools, and they have highly proactive
local authorities that go into the schools that are not doing
as well as they should and do something about it, like replacing
the head teacher and all sorts of other things, but they deliberately
will not publish a nationwide or province-wide league table, because
they think it is far too counterproductive.
Ed Balls: Of course, we don't
publish them, but we have a culture in our country of freedom
of information now, and also of scrutiny, which means that it
is not possible to say to parents or newspapers or websites, "You
shouldn't have the information. You can't make these comparisons,"
and think that's going to happen. The issue is whether you can
do this in a way which is fair rather than unfair and whether
it is used properly in the accountability process rather than
overemphasis being placed on particular measures. That's a challenge
for us all.
Q72 Paul Holmes: In terms of whether
you can claw back from here, Wales has stopped doing that, deliberately.
We can move back from it. Scotland never did it. I just note,
on the statement about "We're doing better than all these
other western European countries," that in PISA 2006 we were
24th for maths and 13th in science. That doesn't exactly show
us doing better than other countries. Moving on to academies,
would you say that academies have been a success? Doubtless you
will, in which case, why?
Ed Balls: On PISA for a second:
from 1995 to 2007—this is TIMSS, actually—we have
gone from 17th to seventh for primary maths, with Scotland 22nd
and Sweden 18th; from eighth to seventh for primary science, with
Scotland 23rd and Sweden 16th; from 25th to seventh for secondary
maths, with Scotland 17th and Sweden 15th; and from eighth to
fifth for secondary science, with Scotland 15th and Sweden 14th.
So I think we can make the case.
Q73 Paul Holmes: So you're looking
at TIMSS and not PISA?
Ed Balls: Well, TIMSS is probably
a better survey than PISA, isn't it? Why I chose Sweden, I have
no idea. Draw no conclusions from the use of Sweden in those comparisons,
unless you want to.
Jon Coles: It is really worth
looking at trajectories of improvement for England as against
Scotland and Wales in relation to this policy issue. That is all
I would add to that. TIMSS is a very good example. Scotland was
ahead of us in 1995.
Q74 Paul Holmes: Are academies
a success, and if so, why?
Ed Balls: I think academies are
a success, because they have raised results faster in disproportionately
disadvantaged areas, taking a catchment which is more disproportionately
disadvantaged than the catchment area would suggest they needed
to take. They show that with the right kind of investment and
leadership, you can deliver faster rising results for students
from the poorest backgrounds. That is what we're all about, I
would have thought: raising standards and breaking those historic
links. I was talking about this on Friday to the head teachers'
conference. I'll say the same thing to you that I said to them.
There is one view of academies which says that the reason why
they succeed is because they are independent of other state schools,
and that that is the key to their success: their independence.
The trouble is that if that were the case, it would mean by definition
that any state school that was not an academy must be an unsuccessful
school. That is clearly not true. The reason, I think, why academies
succeed is that they have a set of ingredients which we know are
what work more generally in our best maintained schools, which
is strong leadership—sometimes, in the case of academies,
new leadership—external support and impetus to improve,
a culture of high aspirations and sometimes an injection of investment
and a new building, but not always. Also, at the time of turnaround,
there is the use of extra curriculum freedoms when you need to
have that new start. We know that that is what our best maintained
schools are doing all the time, so it's not about independence.
It's actually fundamentally about leadership. When we accredited
our first group of schools, which we think should be playing a
wider role across the school system, we had Harris, a multi-academy
chain, Barnfield, a sixth-form college, and two state schools
that had just become academies—Greenwood Dale and Outwood
Grange—but we also had well over 10 high-performing maintained
schools. Those schools are distinguished and need to play that
wider school improvement role, and although they are not academies
they have all the ingredients that we know work for academies.
That is my answer.
Q75 Paul Holmes: On the general
picture, a piece of research some time ago looked at the old Excellence
in Cities programme and compared it with the early academies.
It showed that improvement in the Excellence in Cities areas was
as fast as in the best academies, but cost a lot less financially.
Other research has argued that about a third of academies do less
well than the schools that were taken over, and about a third
do the same and a third do better. The statistical research does
not just universally say that academies do better.
Ed Balls: That goes back to my
previous point. If, as a matter of principle, simply being an
academy and being independent of other state schools was enough,
every academy would succeed and every school that wasn't an academy
wouldn't. It would be silly to say that; it's not true. That is
not really what makes for academies. At the time of turnaround,
when you have to break out of underperformance, the responsibility
that is placed on the school to turn things around, which an academy
in particular takes on for the new start, plus some of the curricular
freedoms at that time, are important, so I am not trying to deny
the importance of some of the things that are particular about
academies. Having said that, the things that make for academies
succeeding are also those that make good maintained schools succeed.
An academy that does not have those ingredients in place won't
succeed, and we've had some academies that haven't succeeded.
Q76 Paul Holmes: Looking at the
individual points that have come out of what you've said, one
argument that people make about why academies might be improving
is that their intake alters, that the numbers of children who
qualify for free school meals and have special educational needs
start to fall rapidly when a school becomes an academy. On Monday,
Kenneth Baker was constantly extolling the advantage of the city
technology colleges that he set up—academies are basically
the same thing under another name. But when you analyse the intake
of CTCs, which have been running for more than 20 years, it bears
no resemblance whatsoever to the social make-up of the catchment
area they were set up to serve. They were set up like academies
were supposed to be, to serve poor inner-city areas, by and large,
but their intake does not represent in the slightest that area.
They have become selective, in whatever process.
Ed Balls: Which is why the premise
of your question, that CTCs and academies are the same thing,
is wrong. Academies operate in an entirely different environment,
which is essentially framed by the admissions code, and there
is an obligation on them within that code to have fair admissions.
Of course, you want a local academy to take the cross-section
of children who live in that area. If they are taking over from
a school that was disproportionately made up of children from
a certain income group or whatever, you would want to let there
be some shift towards a more comprehensive intake, but unlike
CTCs, academies are all doing—must be doing—fair admissions
because of the admissions code, and they can't be doing parental
interviews or the kind of things that used to go on. I go back
to my starting point, which is that it is not simply that academies
set up in disadvantaged communities, but the evidence that I have
seen is that the pupils going to the academies are more disadvantaged
on a free-school-meals basis than the catchment area would suggest,
and therefore they achieve these rising results while taking pupils
from a disproportionately disadvantaged background, which is why
I think we should be pleased about it. They are completely different
from the CTCs—that is a completely different world.
Q77 Paul Holmes: I gave the CTC
example because they have been around for more than 20 years and
most academies are too young to be judged properly. The evidence
so far—
Ed Balls: I support academies,
but I wouldn't support CTCs.
Paul Holmes: Their intake is changing
away from what their catchment area is, but obviously the jury's
out on that—we'll have to see.
Ed Balls: But in part, that is
what you would want if they were succeeding.
Paul Holmes: As long as they stopped
when they got to the balance, rather than going past the balance.
Ed Balls: Exactly. But the key
anchor there—this goes back to the work of this Committee—is
the admissions code. People who say that CTCs were the model and
grant-maintained schools were the key—their independence
wasn't really the issue—also tend to be people who don't
like the admissions code. They tend to be people who think that
schools should decide their own admissions, and what they are
really saying is that schools should be able to select the kind
of parents they would like to come along. Parents would like their
children to go to the kind of school that selects parents. The
trouble is that that is totally unfair and takes us right away
from what we are trying to do in terms of social justice. The
key anchor is the admissions code and its legal basis.
Q78 Paul Holmes: I quite accept
the direction you have been trying to move that in. I visit academies
that say, "Of course, we don't select. We can't. We don't
interview. We are not allowed to any more." But children
have to attend two or three Saturday sessions with their parents
before they can apply and put their names down. There are ways
round the admissions code.
Ed Balls: If that is being used
as a sift, it is totally contrary to the admissions code and they
can't do that.
Paul Holmes: It is being done.
Ed Balls: In that case, you should
tell me and we'll deal with it.
Q79 Paul Holmes: Another point
might be the question of funding. Do they lead to improvements
because they get more cash? Kenneth Baker on Monday said that
CTCs introduced breakfast clubs and after-school activities. They
were given more money and therefore could afford to pay for that.
A National Audit Office report on academies said on the front
page that academies only get the same funding as schools but on
the second or third page it gave all the statistics that showed
that they actually got a lot more money than other schools. Some
people would argue that a lot of the things that we hear academies
can deliver are predicated on having all that extra money. Just
recently we learned that the Government are now going to withdraw
the £100 million start-up fund for after-school activities
in mainstream schools. How can you deliver all those enhancements
to the curriculum that academies are supposed to be so good at,
if you don't have the extra cash to do it?
Ed Balls: I think in your questioning
you slightly slip into the academies exceptionalism argument.
I am saying that academies are doing well and, from a low base,
turning round under-performing schools, because that is where
we have focused the programme, and they have been achieving faster
results. As I said, most of the schools that we have accredited
as top-performing schools aren't academies; they are maintained
schools. One good statistic concerns schools with more than 70%
of their children getting five good GCSEs. In 1997, that was one
in 20 schools; now that is one in three. That is a massive change
and almost all of that is due to improvement in maintained schools.
Academies aren't driving that. If I were to read out the list
to you of accredited school providers of secondary schools, almost
all are maintained schools. The divide of academies as good, advantaged,
better-funded schools, and other maintained schools as less good
and less well-funded is a completely ideological view.
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