Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
80-99)
RT HON
ED BALLS
MP AND JON
COLES
10 MARCH 2010
Q80 Paul Holmes: I am interested
that you are playing down that divide in all the answers you are
giving.
Ed Balls: Because I think that
is the right way to do it.
Q81 Paul Holmes: So is that why
the Government seem to be moving away from what they said was
going to be policy of having a big expansion of academies among
primary schools?
Ed Balls: In terms of expansion
of academies, I am proud to say that I have expanded academies
faster than any previous Secretary of State. To be honest, if
the Independent Academies Association has a criticism of me it
would be that I am going too fast. It quite likes being a small
group. Because of National Challenge and our determination to
address under-performance wherever it was, we have really pushed
the academies programme. We have gone from five universities sponsoring
academies to more than 50—a big change—because it
works. I think that academies have reciprocal responsibilities.
They are part of the family of schools but they have also gained
from their curriculum flexibility and I think it works. We have
been absolutely clear that the academies model would not work
in primary schools and we will not extend academies into primary
schools. The teaching of the National Curriculum in primary schools
across the piece is very important. The expense and cost of stand-alone
primary schools would be very poor value for money. We are keen
to see our new accredited providers taking on primary schools
individually or groups of primaries, but they would be as maintained
schools. Mr Stuart's party is in favour of primary academies,
we are not. With regard to all-through schools, as previous Secretaries
of State said on Monday it is very important to have room in the
schools world for some innovations and experimentation. We have
a small number of all-through schools and I support them. I am
also keen to have academies sponsoring or federating with primary
schools in their group. But making them stand-alone primaries
is expensive, unnecessary and a real diversion.
Jon Coles: Could I just say on
the funding and on the admissions point that I have a team of
people in the Department whose job is to replicate the local funding
formula and make sure that the academies are funded on the same
basis as other schools locally? If anybody has any concerns about
whether that has been done properly, I would be grateful if that
could be brought to my attention. On the issue of admissions,
if anybody has any examples of concerns about whether academies
are following the admissions code, again, I would be really grateful
if people would bring that to my attention, because they are in
breach of their funding agreement if they are breaching the admissions
code.
Ed Balls: If you go back to the
survey we did almost two years ago, the one group of schools that
was unequivocally following the admissions code was academies,
because all of their admissions policies had been checked. If
you remember the dispute we had at the time, it wasn't academies
who were causing the difficulty.
Chair: We're very keen on admissions.
Karen.
Q82 Ms Buck: Can I just pick up
on a couple of points on academies before we finish? As an interest,
I think I am the only MP who has a child in an academy, and I
believe that academies utterly transformed the landscape of education
for the good. I confess to being completely baffled as to why
anybody would argue that, if a school is replacing a failing school
in one of the most deprived communities, they shouldn't actually
be better resourced and we shouldn't aim to have a more mixed
intake. That seems to me to completely miss the point. Just a
couple of specific points. One thing worries me, and you have
already implied the possibility of this. Academies are seen as
a solution for failing schools in deprived communities in many
cases. Not all academies succeed, we know that. We know that some
individual academies do not succeed. Some groups of academies
are not doing as well as they should. Are you confident that within
the Department you have the knowledge and capacity to effectively
duplicate the role of the education authority to support and change
those academies that are not working?
Ed Balls: First, in National Challenge,
we had the fastest improvement in schools coming through the floor
last year than we have ever had in the past 10 years. That is
because we have really focused on doing what it takes to get schools
that are below that floor on the right track if they needed change.
That has sometimes—often—been done through an academy,
but we have also used a different model called National Challenge
Trust, which is a federated partnership between a stronger local
school and that school. Sometimes it has just needed some extra
resource and support for the leadership, so it is not one-size
fits all. Academies are not the only way we have done it, but
they have been an important part of the turnaround. Secondly,
you are right; they don't always work. We have had some issues
that are in the public domain with individual schools. We clearly
had problems a year or two ago with the Richard Rose Academy in
Carlisle. We have also had documented issues with some of our
multi-sponsors—just before Christmas with the United Learning
Trust. In terms of individual schools, first of all, I did not
feel as though we were in the right place when the problems happened
with Richard Rose. What became clear was that nobody else really
thought it was their responsibility to understand what was actually
happening. Carlisle is quite a long way from London. The anecdotal
feedback coming through was that there were some difficulties.
It ended up with me saying to the then Schools Minister Jim Knight,
"You need to go to Carlisle on the train". He went up
when the Ofsted report had come across our desk. He then made
a phone call. We got Mike Gibbons in. I was just opening their
buildings virtually two weeks ago and there has been a huge turnaround,
but we cannot micro-manage school improvement, or school turnaround,
from the centre in that way. That is why we have delegated authority
for that monitoring and support to the new Young People's Learning
Agency, the 16-18 funding organisation, which has a regional presence
concerned about 16-18 funding, but also the academies programme.
So we will have a group in every region of the country supporting
and working with local academies, and also supporting on start-up,
who will be the first port of call if things are getting difficult.
While the powers come back to the Secretary of State, I would
expect them to know at a much earlier stage what is going on.
I will say just one other thing. The thinking behind the accredited
providers and groups is to make sure that schools or organisations
who want to take on that school leadership role are coming through.
We need to make sure that they have got that educational capacity,
track record and experience. Harris is excellent and was accredited
in the first wave, but it is our intention to make sure that that
is how we keep a grip on that.
Q83 Ms Buck: The reality is that
the Department culture with the academies couldn't fail because
academies were the last stop. You still have a problem there,
and there is a necessity for micro-management. One of the things
that was worrying me about your solution, which may work with
individual schools, is exactly as you say: when you get into a
sponsor of multiple schools spread in different parts of the country,
the regional response is going to be problematic.
Ed Balls: I hear what you are
saying. When I arrived at the Department, we only had 40 to 45
academies open. It was a little like this famous phrase. Ronald
Reagan was walking into the US Department of Agriculture and was
going past someone's desk. A man was sitting there crying. Ronald
Reagan asked him why. The man said that his farmer had died. There
was a slight sense where we could always man-for-man mark every
academy with a team. That was possible when we only had 40. But
you can't do that when you've got 130 and another 100 coming through—we
are aiming for more than that. You just can't have that capacity
at the centre. Therefore, we need eyes and ears out there in the
regions. The other thing is that what National Challenge has done
is uncompromising for all schools. We've said that, if you are
a school that has become an academy, we will give you a couple
of years to turn things round, but three years is enough. If after
three years, you aren't on track in going through the threshold,
the rule for academies will not be different from that for other
schools. That is one check. Clearly, more generally, in the accountability
system and the accreditation process, we aren't having a different
rule for academies. To be fair, while I understand what you're
saying, I think probably the Department has genuinely been a bit
tougher on academies than on other schools. However, it was easier
to do that when we had a smaller number.
Jon Coles: May I add one small
thing on that? A number of the schools we're talking about—I
remember North Westminster Community School in 2003-04—had
been in difficulty for some considerable period. Local authorities
faced with that situation, particularly with quite large secondary
schools and serious difficulty, tended not to have the capacity
or people to deal with the sorts of problems that they were facing,
particularly in small metropolitan authorities. What the academies
programme and other programmes such as National Challenge have
done for us is to make sure that there is a system nationally
to ensure that for each of the schools in very difficult circumstances
or failing, there is a solution in place. That doesn't mean that
we have to provide it from the centre. As the Secretary of State
was saying, often it will be provided by having another, strong
school either to take over or come alongside the school that is
struggling to transform standards. That is the model that we've
used successfully in a number of cases. I don't think it requires
us to have a sort of very large advisory service, because that
is not the most effective way of doing things.
Q84 Ms Buck: I am just saying
that it worries me.
Ed Balls: In recent months we
have been pretty tough, and rightly so.
Q85 Ms Buck: Do you still see
a role for education authorities?
Ed Balls: What I have done is
implemented the 2006 Act as shaped by this Committee. The Act
has a very clear role for the local authority as the commissioner
of education and as the second line of intervention, after the
governing body and the SIP, in school improvement. When I started
out this job, I said I thought that we had sent mixed messages
in the recent past, because we had both talked about the 2006
Act and underplayed the local authorities' role as if they didn't
exist.
Q86 Ms Buck: Do you share my concern
that my education authority will effectively be abolished to save
£2 million in Westminster? It is going to get rid of the
education authority completely.
Ed Balls: As far as I am concerned,
the local authority has a responsibility to ensure that all schools
are succeeding for our children. The first line of intervention
is the head teacher and the governing body, and there is a local
authority responsibility before it comes to the Secretary of State.
We have been pretty tough. We have been very tough on Leicester,
Milton Keynes, Gloucestershire and Kent. Sometimes, the comeback
is, "Why are you talking to us about this? On average, our
children do well." The answer is that that is great for the
average child, but if you have tens of schools below the 30% threshold,
the local authority has a responsibility in terms of its commissioning
and its resourcing. The same is true of primary schools. We wrote
to 12 primary schools earlier in the year to say that we needed
to know why they had a disproportionately poor progression. As
far as I am concerned, a local authority, including Westminster,
has a statutory responsibility in secondary and in primary education,
and it has to fulfil those functions. If it does not, that is
something that I will take very seriously indeed. It is not good
enough to say, "On average, our schools are all right."
The culture that we have shifted to, which requires a local authority
to play its role—it can't be done from the centre—is
that we care about every child succeeding in every school. It
was really hard in 1997, because we had 1,600 schools below the
threshold. I now expect the Schools Minister to be able to tell
me exactly what we are doing about the fewer than 40 schools that
we still have concerns about. You can do that when it's 40, but
you can't when it's 1,600. It was beyond our ability. I need to
talk about after-school clubs at some point, because I was asked
about them.
Q87 Ms Buck: I was about to go
on to that. Sadly, I could not attend the evidence session with
the former Secretaries of State, but one of the regrets expressed
by Lord Baker—I think that David Blunkett made the same
point—was that the school day is now shorter than it used
to be. Lord Baker said he regretted that he had not extended the
school day. First, is that something that we should do? Secondly,
I think that extended services work in fulfilling two or three
different functions that we have never quite got entirely clear.
Is the extended school service intended to replicate or to extend
the learning experience? Is it intended to provide child care
to allow parents to work? There has always been a lack of clarity
at the heart of the extended school system. Can you provide clarification?
Ed Balls: Having read the record
of Monday's session, I thought I had better check the facts. The
position on the length of the school day and the school week is
that we do not determine the length of the school day. We set
out a suggested minimum number of hours in a school week for children
of different ages, but schools decide that. There isn't a statutory
minimum on the length of the school day. There are certain procedures
that any maintained school has to follow in regulation if it wants
to change its hours. In terms of the year, we have regulations
specifying that schools should be open to pupils for a minimum
of 380 half-day sessions in a school year, but we don't say how
long those sessions should be. Teachers work 195 days in a school
year under the contract, with five non-contact days for teacher
training. That is the sort of framework within which schools then
make their own decisions. We do not mandate a shorter or a longer
day. My experience of academies, which have more curriculum flexibility,
is that some of them have used that flexibility to have a different
configuration of hours during the week and a different configuration
of terms. An academy in Leeds that I know very well starts its
year 7 in July and does not have the school holiday until later
on. Children come straight from primary into secondary school
and then have the summer holiday later on, after they have started
secondary school. I have not heard anybody advocating a longer
school day or a longer school week in terms of hours.
Q88 Ms Buck: Lord Baker said that
his biggest regret was that he had not extended the teaching day
by one period.
Chair: As did David Blunkett.
Ed Balls: I was talking about
people who are currently involved in schools.
Chair: An unkind cut!
Ed Balls: I didn't hear David
Blunkett advocate that during his evidence. Maybe I missed that.
Q89 Chair: Yes, he said that he
notices kids going home really early in the afternoon and that
in his day he didn't leave until 4 o'clock. He said that.
Ed Balls: I have known no harder-working
Secretary of State than David Blunkett. His work ethic is renowned.
Q90 Chair: The Committee saw some
really innovative programmes in New York. They run nine-to-five
schools. Some of our academies are copying that, aren't they?
They see that as a protection.
Ed Balls: You are now moving us
on to a different issue, which is about extended schools. The
thing that I was talking about there was the school day in terms
of hours of teaching in the normal day. There was then the issue
about what you do before and after. I have seen lots of academies
and maintained schools that essentially operate a seven-to-seven
school, with before and after-school clubs. Just to clarify where
we are on funding, I have to find, as you know, £500 million-worth
of savings in 2013 from my non-protected budgets and 75% of our
budgets are ring-fenced and rising in real terms. Then there are
teachers' pensions and so I have to find £500 million from
about 10% of my budget. That is quite a difficult thing to do
because there are lots of very important programmes within that.
Within the ring-fenced part of our settlement we have £300
million a year, which is ring-fenced and rising in real terms,
for before and after-school clubs for extended schools. That is
about sustainability and making sure that the schools can keep
them going; they get £155 million a year and then also subsidise
children from low-income families to participate in after-school
clubs—the figure is £167 million a year. That approximately
£300 million is protected in real terms in the settlement.
Outside that protected settlement we also had £100 million
a year, which we were using to subsidise start-up. So how would
a school that did not have after-school clubs get the capacity
in to do that? Some 95% of schools have got them already and as
we expect all schools to have them by the end of this year I judged
that I could take that £100 million of start-up money out
of the budget. But the ongoing support for after-school clubs—£300
million a year—is there and protected. So there is no excuse
at all for anybody to withdraw from the provision of before and
after-school clubs or extended services because of this change.
The answer to your question is that it is both, but there are
three dimensions in my experience. Dimension one is, "I work
Mondays and Wednesdays and need to drop my children off at school
at 8 o'clock and they go to the breakfast club because that makes
it possible for me to balance work and family life." That
is an important part of before and after-school clubs and is not
to be discounted at all, but it is not the only thing that they
are for. The second thing is to participate in activities that
are about broader learning after school which, to be honest, we
know from the evidence is the kind of thing that children from
low-income backgrounds may not get a chance to do. They are fun,
but are also in some sense about their wider development, which
is really important and that is why we subsidise them. Thirdly,
if I ask head teachers who are tracking the progress of individual
children and are making sure that every child succeeds, "What's
your breakfast club for?", they will always say that in every
year there will be, depending on the school, five or 10 children
who, if they can get into breakfast club between 8 am and 9 am,
it will impact on their learning and their behaviour over the
course of the day to such an extent that the school will pay for
it because that is what they need to succeed. If they don't get
to the breakfast club, they may not have eaten since the day before
and sometimes they may not have gone home. The chances of them
calming down enough to learn anything before lunch are zero. I
think this is about convenience for parents, about fun for kids
and about getting those fun and enriching activities to children
who might not otherwise have the chance. However, it is also a
targeted intervention that heads and heads of year will use for
children for whom this actually makes a massive difference to
their day. All those things are vital.
Q91 Ms Buck: I would love to ask
more questions about that, but I know that we haven't got time,
unfortunately. My last question goes back to the admissions debate.
There is unpublished evidence from the Sutton Trust about the
continuing extent to which admissions to the highest-performing
comprehensives are heavily skewed against children from lower-income
backgrounds. Looking at my own authority and the data on everything
from free school dinners entitlement to ethnicity, I find that,
if anything, a polarisation is occurring. It is not something
that has happened in the last year or two; this is a long-term
polarisation. You'll look at schools that vary from having 70%
free school dinner intake to 10%. What do you think would be the
next step to reverse that polarisation and deal with the extent
to which the highest-performing schools, both faith schools and
maintained comprehensives, clearly do not have the mixed intake
that they should have?
Ed Balls: The first things to
say is that the admissions code is a very important safeguard
against people using certain techniques to skew the intake, of
which parental interview and asking about parental occupation
are some of the old practices. We don't have evidence that that
is now widespread in the schools system. We have been pretty tough
about that and that is right. In general, what you are talking
about reflects the nature of the communities that the schools
are serving, rather than the particular admissions policies of
the schools. That leads into a wider debate about what kind of
schools and what kind of admissions arrangements you want to have,
rather than about the admissions code itself. Some people advocate
a wholesale move to lotteries. Personally, I have always been
sceptical about that. We asked the schools adjudicator to look
at lotteries. He said that almost all the time, lotteries were
essentially used as a tie-breaker when you had two children from
equal distance away who were the last two children. Other than
in the Brighton experience, which I understand and was particular
to Brighton's circumstances, there is not a widespread use of
lotteries. I am cautious about lotteries—maybe this is from
personal experience, but it is also more general—because
the transition from primary to secondary school is difficult.
It's good that children move with their peers and friends from
primary to secondary school. Having a complete lottery on who
moves where is destabilising to children and bad for their welfare.
People being able to go to their local school is a good thing.
At the same time, if going to your local school becomes entirely
driven by house prices and whether you can afford to move, that
is not very fair. So the direction that we have been moving in,
which local areas have been moving in—this is not something
that we mandate—is towards banded admissions. Banded admissions
allow you to have the combination of proximity and a more comprehensive
intake. It does mean that within the primary school class, some
children who live further away have less chance of getting into
the school, but, at the same time, the intake will be more comprehensive.
If a school is within a wider local authority that has more high-income
housing around it, the chances are that the lowest ability band
will take from a wider catchment than the highest ability band
and vice versa for other schools. For example, Mossbourne
has always had a much wider catchment for its highest 20 or 25%
ability band than for the lowest because that is how it brings
them in. This is something that you grapple with all the time
in my job. You also probably feel thankful that these are local
decisions. We have had conversations and have thought about this
internally. Andrew Adonis and I sat and talked about it a couple
of years ago when we were thinking about the admissions code.
My view is that banded admissions are the best way to have local
schools, to be fair to children and to get to a more comprehensive
intake. I think they are better than a free-for-all or having
no admissions code or having lotteries.
Chair: I hate to remember how long ago
it was that this Committee recommended banded admissions. It was
a very long time ago.
Mr Pelling: I appreciate that time is
running out so I will try to be reasonably clipped, but I probably
won't be.
Ed Balls: I apologise. These are
big questions you are raising so we are trying to answer them.
Chair: Good.
Q92 Mr Pelling: I think that the
admissions thing is a very emotive thing and potentially a powerful
tool of social progress. What do you see as the right balance
between parents, Government, local government and school governing
bodies? The Liberal Whip is trying to put through a private Member's
Bill on dropping the Greenwich judgment. That is a big controversy
in Croydon and Sutton because we like the grammar schools and
we export lots of pupils to Sutton. One of the issues that is
upsetting parents in London is that because of the unexpected
rise in the number of pupils attending primary schools, one-form
entry schools are being transformed into two-form entry schools,
and that is not the type of school that they wanted to send their
children to. It is not an easy issue. We are pursuing a holy grail.
Is it possible to give more power to parents?
Ed Balls: Yes, definitely, and
we are. You describe particular London issues where you have relatively
small geographical authorities with parents who are more used
to their children travelling larger distances and where you have
individual authorities choosing different admissions arrangements,
so it is a very complex mix which you do not see in most other
parts of the country. In my constituency, 94% of parents got their
first-choice schools last year; there would be very few children
crossing a local authority boundary to go to secondary school.
That is probably more similar to the pattern across the country
than in London. It is good to have a London-wide admissions system,
but it is very complex to try to navigate your way through different
admissions arrangements in different schools. Secondly, you always
want successful schools to expand. As you said, that sounds like
a good idea until you are the parent of a child going into year
1 and you suddenly find out that the classes are bigger. The approach
that we have taken to school improvement, chains and accreditation
is to try to allow the best school leaders to be running more
than one school—running schools that may have increasingly
close links with each other—rather than simply saying that
the individual school should just get bigger and bigger; that
is potentially quite difficult to manage. Thirdly, you need all
the different pressures. We have said that we will introduce the
right of parents to say, "We as parents would like to look
at whether the whole leadership of our school should change."
You can imagine parents saying, "Well, actually down the
road we now see that Kemnal Trust state school is running two
other schools in our area and that is really good and we would
quite like to be part of the Kemnal Trust group." If that
is what a critical mass of parents say, then it is right that
the local authority and governing body should respond to that
demand. I know that some of my teaching union colleagues are a
bit worried about that, but it is right that parents should have
that voice, and have it in a very direct way. Increasingly, as
you have multi-chains, that parental voice might be quite powerful.
On the other hand, let's think about why the academy movement
has been so successful. Often parents in some communities have
been willing to tolerate low results and underperformance, without
a voice for generations; sometimes, the parental voice has been
the opposite of powerful when it comes to asking for change. You
cannot, therefore, rely only on parental voices. I will not be
critical today, but I think that parental voice is really good.
The idea that you have to walk down the road to go to another
school, or set up your own school and try and pay for that is
deeply flawed. I shall put that to one side.
Chair: And now—
Ed Balls: No, hang on a second.
There is a parental voice, but at the same time there is a role
for the governing body to hold a school to account as well as
to defend it. It is really hard to be a chair of governors, because
you ought to be holding your head teacher to account as well as
being the defender of the head teacher to the wider world. There
is also a role for the local authority, which is to challenge
and to use powers if there is underperformance. In the end, I
have powers as the Secretary of State. I personally think that
central intervention power should be used very much in the last
resort. At the same time, we need to have that power in order
to breathe down the neck of the local authority or the governing
body and say, "If you don't face up to your responsibilities,
we can require you to do so."
Q93 Mr Pelling: I very much appreciate
that answer. I just want to pick up on a point that Karen Buck
made earlier. In some ways that reprise that we enjoyed on Monday
was very interesting. All the former Secretaries of State seem
to have a sort of lament: they said that they had been too interventionist,
and then they felt it was all about pulling back. Do you think
that it's right to have that kind of scepticism about the ability
of government to change things?
Ed Balls: The most honest answer
was David Blunkett's when he said, "Yeah, I probably was
too interventionist, but there was so much to do and I really
wanted to get on with it." There is a tension. I'm the longest-serving
education Secretary of State since the '80s, other than David
Blunkett. There was always a slight element of thinking, "I've
got to take my chance while I can." Therefore you need to
try to hold back. Don't forget that initiatives are often the
Secretary of State's. If you think of the changes we're currently
making around accountability, this is responding to the demands
of schools themselves to have a fairer way of schools being accountable
than current league tables. The pressure for change isn't always
or often from the centre. When reading those discussions, I felt
that we had succeeded. I'm quite happy to say that, since the
late '80s, both Conservative and Labour Governments have succeeded
over 20 years in getting ourselves to a much better place than
where we were at the start. When we started out, there were so
many schools not doing as well as they should have done; we were
doing it in a piecemeal way, one by one, school by school. That
sort of made sense. When you get to the position we're in now,
and especially if you care about social justice, you think to
yourself, "It's great that there are good schools, but I
want every school to be a good school. How can I do that?"
I've learned that there are two things. One is that not being
satisfied with best practice, but trying to make that common practice,
requires you to be tough from the centre. But at the same time,
if you think you can make best practice good practice by mandating
from the centre, it fails, because you know that the key to great
schools is local leadership. National Challenge is really interesting.
It's been one of the most successful things we've done. It's very
tough, and is both centralist and localist. It's centralist and
we say, "No excuses. If you're not sorted out, in the end
we'll step in." But the solutions have all been local. The
solutions have all been a local school supporting another school
or the local community changing the school leadership, or the
local school community saying, "Okay, we do want an academy."
It's not about mandated outcomes; it's locally led outcomes. Trying
to get that balance between universal and locally led is really
hard. It's more a dilemma for me than it was for the other Secretaries
of State, because to be honest it wasn't possible for them 10
to 15 years ago.
Q94 Mr Pelling: It's interesting
that you talk about—after all the strife that you've had—the
balanced and effective way forward. In his speech in Hackney last
month, the Prime Minister had a very ambitious target in terms
of science and maths. It was a very relevant speech as we try
to move the economy away from its over-reliance on financial services.
I suppose in some way that speech could have been made by Jim
Callaghan—it probably was, in a way. How do you think that
the Government can go about delivering on what is a very important
ambition in terms of delivery on science and maths?
Ed Balls: The interesting thing
is that while there are differences at the margin, there was a
consistency of view from Jim Callaghan through to Kenneth Baker,
David Blunkett and my predecessors. I feel at the moment, though,
that that consensus is in danger of being ripped up. That consensus
was based on the National Curriculum, on accountability for all,
on allowing innovation within that system of National Curriculum
accountability and on focusing on improving the schools that we
have. The political debate in this general election is much more
pulled apart. I feel as though I am continuing the tradition.
The argument that I'm having is with a much more market-based
approach—not schools collaborating and driving up standards
but using competitive pressures to drive up standards. As I said,
the reason why I think that it is flawed is that the Swedish example
shows that it leads to lower standards and more social inequality.
It might be quite good for some people in some schools, where
they get some more money. That is the flawed view of academies,
which I think we have moved away from. The best way to do this
is to keep focusing on great teaching in good schools with locally
empowered leadership, but not making the whole thing a competition
for "my pupils versus your pupils". Continuity would
be the right way to do it.
Q95 Mr Pelling: Coming specifically
to the ambitions on science and maths, how are they going to be
delivered by you or your Labour successor in the next five years?
Ed Balls: We looked at those ambitions
and at the progress we've made in both the OECD PISA survey and
the TIMSS survey, and concluded that those were ambitions that
were deliverable if we maintained and accelerated progress. The
speech that the Prime Minister made was a speech in which we essentially
set out the accredited groups—the first set. I think that
that is the key ingredient. The key thing now is that we have
great teaching in general, the National Curriculum working in
a more decentralised way and an accountability system that will
be fairer in the future, but you can't get those standards consistently
across the whole country with 18,000 individual and separate leadership
teams—one in every primary school—and 3,500 separate
and individual leadership teams in every secondary school. I don't
think that it is sensible to think that every leader will be an
outstanding leader. The right thing for us to do is to take experience
and track record and put it to work. The thing that is very exciting
when you look at accredited providers and how they operate, if
they are running four or five schools, is that they have really
deep leadership teams, where people are moving into leadership
roles at an early stage in their career and spending time in other
schools working as heads of maths, getting experience and developing
that strength of leadership. Karen Buck is right to counsel that
being a multi-chain does not by definition make you good, but
it certainly makes sense for our best leaders to be playing a
wider role across the system and using that to bring on the next
generation of leaders. I think that that is probably the biggest
change. We can use our best leaders to work more widely across
the system.
Q96 Chair: We're running out of
time. I want to ask you two questions to finish up; one is about
child well-being. Evidence suggests that there is great room for
improvement on that. I found that Monday's evidence session was
very upbeat and positive about the achievements made over the
past number of years by all parties and Governments. The indices
on child well-being in our country are not good, however. Why
is that?
Ed Balls: I think that the scars
of past decades are very deep and take a long time to turn round.
When I think of underperformance in education or high unemployment,
I can be thinking about the 1970s as well as the 1980s, so I don't
need to make this a party political point.
Chair: No, no.
Ed Balls: Turning that round is
deep and takes a very long time. We had a spat a couple of days
ago about young people from low-income backgrounds in schools
going to Oxbridge, but of course quite a lot of those children
had no opportunity to go through a Sure Start children's centre
or nursery education aged three and four, because of the age they
are at. It is true that we now have a generation of young people
coming out of our schools who started primary school in 1997,
but we don't have anybody who has been through a Sure Start children's
centre coming out of our secondary schools.
Q97 Chair: So you are upbeat about
the future?
Ed Balls: I am really upbeat about
the future, and the more the polls narrow, the more upbeat I get.
Q98 Chair: I am taking over the
questions because we have run out of time. I have one last question
on 14-19s. Former Secretaries of State said quite extraordinary
things on Monday, one of which was that the big failure was not
accepting the Tomlinson report. There was a radical proposal from
Baroness Estelle Morris about the whole change in GCSEs at 14
level, and about 14-19 being a separate phase of education entirely.
What did you think?
Ed Balls: The reason why we got
rid of Key Stage 3 tests was that we didn't think that a staging
post National Curriculum assessment at 14 made sense when you
also have GCSEs at 16. That is also why we kept Key Stage 2 tests
at 11. The schools Minister and I have today written to primary
school heads about the way in which we are reforming accountability
for primary schools in the future, and urging them to continue
to work with us. We are producing a guide that responds partly
to the expert group and your report on how the best schools avoid
teaching to the test as part of the preparation for Key Stage
2 tests. That was a slight digression, but our thinking is increasingly
around 14-19, and the Key Stage 4 curriculum into post-16. We
have clearly changed the funding arrangements, and we also have
education to 18 becoming the law. If you are thinking about those
young people who are going through school to university, there
may be a case for an accountability measure at 14 and then when
they come out of the school system at 18 or 19. Within our education
to 18 policy, a lot of young people leave school at 16 and go
into an apprenticeship or into work with training. For them, it
would not make sense for the accountability test to be at 14 rather
than at 16. It is right for us to think about 14 to 19 holistically
in terms of how we fund and provide, but I am not sure that that
necessarily means that it is the wrong point to allow all young
people of 16 to make a change. I have an open mind on that. An
opportunity to implement Tomlinson was not taken at the time.
Charles Clarke made clear his views about that to your Committee.
We have subsequently implemented 90% of Tomlinson. Mr Stuart talked
about inconsistencies. One of the striking inconsistencies that
I have to deal with on a weekly basis is those people who berate
me for the fact that A-levels fail to provide young people with,
in their view, the skills and qualifications to succeed in university,
business or professional life but say, simultaneously—often
the same people—"Whatever you do, you must keep the
gold standard of A-levels at all costs rather than have it replaced
by a new qualification." I have to navigate my way through
that by saying that we will make A-levels better. We shall introduce
diplomas, which will be a better qualification in the end and
which are very close to Tomlinson thinking. We will not centrally
mandate, but we will allow schools, universities, parents and
employers to see what works best for them, and that can evolve.
Q99 Chair: You have been the second
longest-serving Secretary of State since Ken Baker. Do you have
any regrets about things that you have left undone or that you
have not yet been able to achieve?
Ed Balls: Things take time. There
is always a frustration that you cannot see things you believe
can make a real difference come to fruition more quickly. You
don't always know how things are going to develop. Our agenda
for the next few years is very rich. I hope that we can get a
consensus for taking it forward rather than ripping it up, and
in a sense shifting away from the Baker-Balls view.
Chair: Secretary of State, it has been
a pleasure. Thank you very much.
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