Public Bill Committees, 10 March 2009
Joan Humble (Blackpool North & Fleetwood, Labour)
I welcome the Ministers and members of the Committee to our final evidence session. There is much detail to be discussed and many questions that hon. Members might wish to put to Ministers. For my convenience, and that of those who will read the report, it might be useful to adopt a thematic approach so that Members can come in on those, rather than trying to hop, skip and jump around the Bill’s many provisions. I am, of course, in the hands of Members.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
I welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble, and we look forward to your firm but fair leadership—that mix of sagacity and benevolence for which you are famous.
In contrast, I will now turn to the Ministers. The Bill was described in one of our evidence sessions last week as a “bureaucratic muddle” and a “mixed bag” by employer representatives, and I am sure that those words are still ringing in the ears of Ministers. Professor Alan Tuckett from the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education described it as “a missed opportunity.” At a time when employers and education providers must be deregulated in order to respond effectively to the economic crisis, does not the Bill simply tie their hands? When people are coming out with such robust and clear criticisms, do Ministers ignore them or take stock of them and respond? Does replacing the Learning and Skills Council with three bodies really improve the capacity of employers and employees to survive the economic downturn?
Jim Knight: I would like to take the opportunity to welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble, and look forward to serving under your chairmanship over the next few weeks.
In response to John’s question, what is ringing in my ears is the endorsement of the vast majority of witnesses for the measures we are taking in the Bill. It is possible to pick out one or two isolated quotes about specific elements of the Bill that people might not agree with, but that would be an unfair reflection of the substance of what witnesses told us last week about this set of measures, and there are many of them.
On the question of whether we should be doing this at this point in the economic cycle and with the recession, I am sure that Siôn will want to comment on the aspects relating to skills. As far as the 14-to-19 phase is concerned, we passed the Education and Skills Act 2008 in order to raise the participation age, and if we are to make that a reality for 17-year-olds by 2013, as the legislation sets out, we have to act now to build the capacity of local authorities to do so. Therefore, those who oppose the Bill on the grounds that the timing is wrong essentially oppose the change that was agreed by Parliament last year.
With regard to the timetable for doing this, the Committee will know that there are currently shadow arrangements between local authorities and learning and skills council staff, that the academic year starting this September is a transition year and that in April 2010 the legal responsibility will go over to local authorities. They will then be able to commission the services at the same time as running Connexions, which will be transferred by the Bill, as John knows. They will then have the tools at their disposal to commission the sort of learning that will engage every young person in their area so that that policy is a success. Having moved from the break in education from 16 to 19, it makes sense to have an infrastructure that reflects that. You need something that brokers the arrangements for local authorities so that further education colleges in particular are not having multiple conversations because the vast majority of them are commissioned from several local authority areas. That is why the Young People’s Learning Agency is necessary, as well as for the transfer of academy functions. In order to drive the growth in apprenticeship places forward, and to have a discrete agency focusing on adult skills, there is great merit in setting up the Skills Funding Agency.
Mr. Simon: It is a great pleasure it is to serve under you, Mrs Humble; I echo the comments about your sagacity and all your other qualities.
Is now the right time to move towards a more flexible, responsive and employer-responsive skill system? The answer is yes, obviously. A lot of what we and the Learning and Skills Council have managed to do in the last six months or so in response to the recession is precisely the kind of thing that the Skills Funding Agency will do more and more of, and be better and better at. It will be slimmer, more streamlined, faster and more responsive to things such as introducing £350 million-worth of flexibilities into Train to Gain, the integration of employment and skills, and the discrete work that we have been doing with, for example, car manufacturers in the north-east.
Far from being against the grain of the reforms, all of those are entirely in line with the direction of travel of the SFA. The Learning and Skills Council has done an outstandingly good job, but a different job is needed next. The job of the LSC was to drive up participation and success in a skills system which was sadly lacking. It has achieved that with a great increase in success rates and at levels 2 and 3 in respect of the skills system.
What we need to do next is to make the skills system more specifically and directly responsive to employers and learners. The SFA will do that through its customer-facing outward-looking gateways: Train to Gain, the National Apprenticeship Service, the adult advancement and careers service, skills accounts and the National Employer Service. It is about making the system respond more directly and quickly to the needs of individual learners and businesses. I commend it to everybody.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
I want to be helpful to Ministers, because that is the right thing to do. Perhaps I can give them a bit of guidance on why people feel that this is a bureaucratic muddle. The relationship between the NAS and the SFA is unclear. The NAS cannot specify standards. As you know, that is the job of the SFA; clauses 21 to 30 detail that, despite the fact that the NAS will be dealing with everything else on apprenticeships. The NAS reports to both Government Departments and must develop apprenticeships, as the Minister suggested, in conjunction with local education authorities, which will decide the type and amount. There is very little on an explicit role for employers or providers, and the entitlement to apprenticeships is not matched by any major plans for implementation.
It is not surprising that in the Committee evidence sessions, the transition from the LSC was described as being likely to be “messy and complicated”. While I acknowledge that Ministers have had discussions with countless employers, I wonder whether they appreciate that the CBI was, at best, lukewarm and the British Chambers of Commerce was hostile. Does that not cause immense concerns? What about those relationships and lines of accountability? They are all over the place and so immensely unclear. We can barely understand them; what chance has anybody else got?
Mr. Simon: To start with the relationship between the SFA and the NAS, it may be the case that it has not yet been widely understood. It was only relatively recently promulgated in any detail, and that is perhaps one of the reasons for that, but it is not complicated or ambiguous.
Let me explain. The chief executive of Skills Funding is the accounting officer and is, in statutory terms, responsible for apprenticeships and the NAS. In practice, the chief executive of Skills Funding will delegate all practical functions relating to apprentices to the chief executive of the NAS, who will have a statutory accounting reporting responsibility to the chief executive of Skills Funding, but will also have management reporting responsibilities to the two Secretaries of State of the two Departments. I do not think that that is terribly complicated or at all ambiguous.
What was the next thing that you asked?
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
I talked about a series of bureaucratic elements, but let us deal with the one that you raise, Siôn. Perhaps I can ask my third question on sector skills councils on the back of that, because you make much mention of them in the Bill’s explanatory notes.
The real issue is that by, in your words, having a line of accountability to two Departments, there is an implicit lack of clarity. What if the Departments have different perspectives or take different policy positions? That is immensely confused, is it not? I find it very hard to be tough on the Minister as he is such a charming chap, but Keith Marshall from the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils—the Minister was here and heard his evidence just as clearly as I did—complained that there is not enough detail in the Bill on the role of sector skills councils in statutory terms. There is very little legislative mention of their role. Indeed, Keith Marshall argued that the involvement of LEAs actually weakens the role of sector skills councils—the voice of employers—in the system. It seems to me that, contrary to the Government’s intentions, which I am prepared to accept are noble and virtuous, the Bill will result in confusion, lack of clarity, potentially conflicting reporting lines and a diminished role for sector skills councils.
Mr. Simon: If I can just respond to those two points, and I think that Jim would then like to answer some of John’s points in his opening question. I do not think that the dual reporting of the NAS chief executive to the two Secretaries of State is inherently impossible or dreadfully convoluted. The apprenticeship system comprises two components, one of which falls under the remit of, and is funded by, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, while the other component falls under the remit of, and is funded by, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. The components are obviously split by age and have separate concerns, which is why they are covered by separate Departments. Apprenticeships are extremely important and form a central plank of what both Departments are trying to achieve. As such, we think the dual reporting function to be right and perfectly coherent.
On sector skills councils, it is true that they are not writ large on the face of the Bill, but that should not leave anybody in any doubt that they remain at the heart of the system. Part of the Bill refers to the specification of apprenticeship standards for England, to which sector skills councils are central. The councils will be responsible for producing apprenticeship frameworks. That is not in any doubt. It is, and will remain, the case. As I say, they may not be writ large on the face of the Bill, because we did not feel that they needed to be, but nobody should be in any doubt that they are central to the system.
Jim Knight: To follow on from that last point, I refer the Committee to paragraphs 48 and 49 of the explanatory notes, which explain how the frameworks will work. The Bill sets out the frameworks and, in describing how they will operate, paragraph 48 says:
“These clauses set out the procedures for the issue of apprenticeship frameworks, which will be developed by employers, Standard Setting Bodies and Sector Skills Councils according to the specification of apprenticeship standards in England and Wales.”
Paragraph 49 says:
“Subsection (2)provides that there is to be only one person authorised to issue frameworks for a particular apprenticeship sector. The intention is that, in England, frameworks will be issued by Sector Skills Councils working in partnership with Standard Setting Bodies.”
We could not be any clearer about the pivotal role that sector skills councils will play in England without unnecessarily fettering them with legislation. I do not think that they would welcome it hugely if we started to legislate about how they should be.
I will make two other points. On there being lines of reporting to two Secretaries of State, that is simply a function of the 16-to-19 apprenticeships and the adult apprenticeships. The slight majority of the NAS budget will come from the DCSF. It is right that the chief executive of the NAS should report to the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in exchange for that money.
Finally, the reason why it is right for the NAS to be nested inside the Skills Funding Agency is that they are both employer-facing bodies. It is critical that they develop relationships with employers across that function. They must be able to broker apprenticeship places with employers at national, regional and local levels. They must also respond to the skills needs of employers.
It is entirely coherent to me that there should be an employer-focused body in the form of the SFA, working under DIUS, that responds to skills needs and the demands of adult learners, with that discrete adult focus, and an apprenticeship body that straddles the two Departments.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
So you contest that our expert witness, who represented the sector skills councils, was wrong about two things: first, when he complained that the involvement of LEAs would complicate the process as far as sector skills councils were concerned, and secondly, when he explicitly said that one of the advantages of the LSC was that he dealt with a single body. Sector skills councils will now have to deal with more bodies, which will confuse and complicate their role and make it more bureaucratic. We want to be clear about this. We have already gathered that the Ministers think that the British Chambers of Commerce was wrong when it represented business. Was the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils wrong too?
Jim Knight: Sector skills councils currently deal with the Learning and Skills Council, but they also deal with my Department in diploma development. They have several types of relationships in terms of qualification development. As Siôn and I have set out, it is clear that the LSC will have a discrete and clear relationship with the NAS, alongside the sector bodies, in delivering apprenticeship frameworks in England.
Mr. Simon: I think that they were a bit miffed and a bit worried that they were not put more clearly in the Bill. That is why I am happy to make it clear now that although we did not feel the need to put sector skills councils in large letters on the face of the Bill, they are central to the system not just now, but in the future.
Joan Humble (Blackpool North & Fleetwood, Labour)
For the convenience of the Committee, I will say which hon. Members have indicated that they wish to be called: Stephen Williams, Nick Gibb, David Laws, Alison Seabeck and Graham Stuart. I shall call them in that order. If other hon. Members wish to ask questions, they should indicate that to me.
Stephen Williams (Bristol West, Liberal Democrat)
I have served under your chairmanship on the all-party universities group, Mrs. Humble, and I look forward to serving under you in this more formal setting.
I will pursue the point of structures, which John Hayes began with. The Bill will abolish the LSC, but create the YPLA, the SFA and the NAS. What simpler structures did you consider and why did you rule them out?
Jim Knight: The only other option given serious consideration—Siôn will forgive me for responding to this, because I was around when these debates were taking place—was whether we had a discrete NAS outside the Skills Funding Agency. There is merit in having sharply focused separate bodies, but you do not want them to proliferate out of control. Where you can see synergy between the functions that could be performed by what would otherwise be separate bodies, it makes sense to bring them together. Undoubtedly, in presentational terms, it might have been easier to have a separate NAS with dual accountability to the Secretaries of State, and we could all have explained that clearly. However, in practice, given the relationship with employers that would be common across the SFA and the NAS, potentially creating more of a single conversation with employers meant that it was worth trying to bring them together to create that coherence, rather than just making it easier for us to design the infrastructure.
Stephen Williams (Bristol West, Liberal Democrat)
I can see that there is some logic in a separation at 19, partly because of the change in the machinery of government—the two Secretaries of State—and the creation of the 14-to-19 stage and diplomas. The role of further education colleges is changing; they help to deliver apprenticeships and other adult learning courses, and will increasingly be the vehicle for the expansion of higher education, foundation degrees, part-time learning and so on. Did you not consider an all-embracing adult education service or quango to oversee that area?
Jim Knight: Again, we are back to the same discussions about to what extent bringing them together adds value and to what extent keeping them separate adds value. The break-up of the LSC into its three functions, plus the formation of the separate NAS, is quite a significant shift. Through the Bill, we also split the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority into the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and Ofqual. If, at the same time, we had taken the higher education funding agency and merged it with the SFA, that would have created a lot of churn all at once. There is merit in proceeding in the orderly way that we are at the moment.
Stephen Williams (Bristol West, Liberal Democrat)
There seems to have been a lot of churn in the past eight years anyway, so a lot of people would not see that as a break in procedure. Is this an undertaking that if you remain in office, there will be no more churn? Do you think that this structure is sustainable?
Mr. Simon: Can I just say that there is another argument, which I am not equipped to go into in detail, which says that further and higher education centres have different roles, to some extent, and are structured and governed very differently? Therefore, although there are precedents for putting them together, there is a coherent and cogent argument for keeping them apart.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Can I ask a couple of quick questions about academies and the YPLA, and then move on to Ofqual? The letter from Mike Butler of the Independent Academies Association says in its opening paragraph:
“It appears with every consultation, each missive and even new legislation from the DCSF, there comes further erosion of the independent status of Academies.”
Will you comment on that? Why was the YPLA chosen to administer the growing number of academies, given that the YPLA was set up to deal with 16-to-19 funding, yet academies go from 11 to 16 or 18, or even from 3 to 18? It seems an odd body to choose to administer academies. Was it just an afterthought—it had to be put somewhere so let us put it in the YPLA?
Jim Knight: No. Let me deal with the two. In respect of the charge in the letter that we are watering things down and reducing independence, I disagree strongly and I think that the vast majority of sponsors and principals of academies would also disagree. That was reflected in the evidence we received from Dan Moynihan and Liz Reid. I know that unfortunately you had to join a Westminster Hall debate and were not able to attend that session. I am sure that in the assiduous way you work, you will have read Hansard and been frustrated at the lack of quotes you can knock back at me. We have good support for the moves that we are taking in legislation around behaviour partnerships, children’s trusts and the YPLA functions.
I was surprised by the letter from Mike Butler because his predecessor as chair of the IAA had also written to me saying:
“The IAA...welcome the plans to establish the YPLA and its proposed role in the administration and support of open academies”.
Dan Moynihan said:
“With the growth in the number of academies it seems reasonable to consider a dedicated support agency for open academies in order to provide first line support.”
When asked whether she was happy that academies would be administered by the YPLA, Liz Reid said:
“It makes absolute sense and, as the academies programme continues to grow, it would be anomalous and unusual for a Department of State to take direct responsibility for a very large number of schools.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 44, Q109.]
I agree with all of those comments. By the time the YPLA is properly up and running, there will be at least 300 academies on our current projections. I do not think it right that they should be run directly from my office. It would make us by far the largest education authority in the country. I already have to deal with a lot of issues in respect of open academies, and I do not think that is the best strategic use of a Minister’s and senior officials’ time.
Moving on to whether the YPLA is the right body to which to make that transfer, if you want to manage so many schools at arm’s length, we currently have somewhere around 20 officials in the Department who are working just on the funding of open academies—the funding agreements and so on. The YPLA is principally a funding agency. On the work that we would transfer over, transfer is probably the wrong word to use in legal terms because the YPLA would be acting as an agent of the Secretary of State. So I use the word “transfer” not in the legal sense of the word but for clarity’s sake. The majority of officials working on the functions that will move over deal with funding. The YPLA is principally a funding agency and, therefore, it seemed to make sense.
In terms of other work in respect of open academies, the YPLA by definition will have a strong presence regionally, and we want those who are doing that work and providing intelligence on how academies are performing back to the Secretary of State also to have a strong regional presence. So there seemed to be a really good fit, and a much better fit than anything else on the landscape.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
We can pursue that as we reach those clauses. Before we move on to Ofqual, I want to ask about the concern academies have over discrimination—the funding of the system now, with the LSC funding coming back to the local authorities. Learning and skills councils are worried that there will be discrimination against academies in terms of establishing sixth forms or establishing academies with sixth forms. Can you comment on that fear and assure them that there will not be that discrimination?
Jim Knight: I can assure you, the Committee and the academies movement that that discrimination will not exist. The Department will retain the functions for starting new academies. As we reported in oral questions, since the DCSF was formed we have opened just over 100 new academies. Those functions will be retained, as will the functions for closing academies, were that ever to be necessary. The decisions about whether there is post-16 provision are made on the basis of feasibility, and the funding agreement is then signed. Those functions will be retained by the Secretary of State and not transferred to the YPLA.
In terms of the relationship with local authorities, what we do at the moment will not change. We have discussions with local authorities about the academies that we agree with will be opened in their areas, and discuss there and then post-16 provision and how it fits with current provision on the ground. That would continue.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Moving on to Ofqual, I did find a good quote on something else in the evidence session. In response to a question from my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, Kathleen Tattersall said that
“several studies that have been conducted over the years involving international experts looking at our system have concluded that there is grade inflation. We need to bring in that sort of expertise.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 81, Q214.]
One of the people she had in mind was Professor Timms from Durham university, who has shown, for example, that students who achieved an E in A-level maths in 1998 would have achieved a B in 2004. My first question is, do you think that there was grade inflation in that period? Secondly, given that the QCA was divided into two parts, a QCA part and a regulatory part on different floors of the building—with a Chinese wall—why did the regulatory part fail to maintain standards over that period? Was it because you and your ministerial colleagues were interfering the whole time?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
She said that others had said that there was and that we therefore had to look at what those experts were saying.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: That is fine, and I am sure that that would be Ofqual’s role. Qualifications change over time because the context changes over time. I do not think that anyone would agree that an exam that somebody took in the 1950s would be relevant in the context of today’s curriculum. That certainly is the role that we see for Ofqual, and we believe that the powers we have given it are sufficient for it to monitor that.
Your second question was about the regulatory part of the QCA.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Yes. A lot of experts have said that there has been grade inflation and you have almost admitted that in your response to me by saying that exams change over a period and are more accessible now than 10, 15, 20 or 30 years ago. Therefore, you are saying almost by definition that there has been grade inflation or an easing of the rigour of those exams in order to bring in a wider—[Interruption.] You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say that there has been wider access to GCSEs and A-levels and at the same time say that the rigour has been maintained.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
It is not if you look at the exam scripts. You can examine how general standards have fallen. A lot of experts, such as Professor Timms, have said that an E in 1998 is worth a B today. Why has the QCA allowed that to happen?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Because the examinations are different, which was the point I was making. It is not a tick-box exercise; you cannot take one exam from one period and one from another, tick a box and then say that that applies, because there are so many aspects to it. Ofqual’s role will be to look at that, and it will use experts from different countries to come to those conclusions. It is not as simplistic as—
Jim Knight: Can I come in on that? Having been a Minister a little longer, the accusation of interfering with them might be levelled at me. That is certainly not the case. I am sure that the Committee would agree that there is a role for Ministers in agreeing the content of programmes of study so that, for example, we can ensure that the holocaust, the slave trade and the world wars are covered in the history curriculum. I was party to some of the discussions on the new programmes of study that are being introduced in the GCSE to make sure that the content reflects our culture, our society and the things we hold dear.
Beyond that, we leave it up to the experts to develop those programmes of study, the awarding bodies to develop the general qualifications and the regulator to regulate them. The QCA’s regulatory role has been done pretty well by and large, but there is merit in having independence from Government. The QCA is just a non-departmental public body and Ofqual would be a non-ministerial department. The public can see that the regulator is completely separate from Government. There is no question that there has been any kind of interference through the NDPB route.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Was there interference before?
Jim Knight: No. There was none that I am aware of, in terms of the regulatory function that was carried out, but we have to satisfy the public debate and try to move on from the nonsense about dumbing down which plagues young people every summer. They are proud of their achievements at GCSE and A-level, which are undermined by a public debate that struggles to get away from saying that standards have fallen. Thanks to the best learning environments and more of the best teachers we have ever seen in this country, standards have risen.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
The trouble is that we are hearing from both of you that there was no ministerial interference before. [Interruption.] Okay, I accept that—that is my view. I do not believe you are interfering in the regulatory side of the QCA. It would not allow it. We have had discussions with the regulatory side of the QCA and they made it very clear what Ministers could and could not do, but what will change in terms of methodology when Ofqual is established? Will this be just a PR exercise to assure the public of something, because if the methodology is not changed the same thing will happen with a 1998 E grade becoming a B? Why will that not continue for the next 10 years if nothing is going to change in terms of the methodology? That is my concern.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
It was up to Ofqual before.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry:It has some additional powers in the Bill. It now has the power to direct awarding bodies. It has the power to set conditions. It can direct awarding bodies to do things to set standards—a power which the previous QCA did not have. It has additional powers and it will be up to it to ensure that it uses those powers. It is no accident that the first objective we put in was its qualifications standards objective.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
But what happens if they accept your argument that exams change over a period? There is a quote from Kathleen Tattersall saying that with all the modernisation and these other changes, it is almost impossible to compare one type of exam with another. Given her comment and your comments about why it is perfectly acceptable for an E grade in 1998 to be a B grade in 2004, why will that process not continue, even though Ofqual has these new powers to order the exam boards around?
Jim Knight: We have strongly to rebut any notion that it is acceptable for a B and an E to be equivalent. The clue is in the name. The “general” in the general certificate of secondary education is there because these are qualifications which, unlike the O-levels I took when I was at school, are there to assess the academic performance of the full range of ability. You will get some easy questions, which are easy to quote at the Dispatch Box and make everybody laugh, but they are there to assess whether someone is at an E or an F. There are also questions that are really tough, which are there to assess whether someone is at an A or an A*. That is the dishonesty in this debate, and the suggestion that easy questions are plucked out of thin air. That is to misunderstand completely the general nature of general qualifications.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Okay, we had better move on, but Peter Timms is not dishonest when he says, in a very comprehensive report, that a student who would have achieved an E in A-level maths in 1998 would now achieve a B.
As I said, I want to move on, and I have a final couple of questions. What are you doing to ensure that the board members of Ofqual are independent, not just of ministerial interference and Government but, more importantly, of people who might benefit from a downgrading of the exams, for example professors of education who train teachers, as well as teachers, head teachers and former head teachers, who want to demonstrate that standards have not fallen, and whose career might benefit from that? How will you ensure that board members do not have that conflict of interest, while retaining expertise?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: It would not be in anybody’s interests for Ofqual to have board members who were not independent or who were not seen to be independent. The normal rules for public sector appointments apply, and the process of appointment will be regulated by the Office of the Public Sector Standards Commissioner. It will be key to Ofqual’s credibility to ensure that, as I say, those board members are not just independent but are seen to be independent.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
That is a very reassuring answer; I am grateful to the Minister.
I want to put one final question to either Minister. The international general certificate of secondary education is interested, as the Minister for Schools and Learners was just saying, in all-ability exams. As he knows, of course, the IGCSE is a GCSE; it is an all-ability exam. However, he refuses to fund it in state schools. Surely, if he wants to decrease the apartheid between the independent and state sectors he will allow this all-ability exam to be taught in schools in the state sector that want to use it.
Jim Knight: I am not going to start to regulate what independent schools can and cannot do in respect of the awards that they put their pupils in for. Unless I were to do that, the inference of the approach that you are setting out is that we will always be led by independent schools: if I am not going to tell them what to do, they will go off in a particular direction and go for the pre-U, the IGCSE, the AQA Bac, or whatever latest wheeze comes out of the awarding bodies. Then, to prevent an “apartheid”, I have to follow, regarding the exams that the vast majority of pupils in this country take in maintained schools.
If you have an assumption that everything that the independent school sector does is always, by definition, going to be right, you might want to do that. There are great strengths in the independent sector—and I am very keen on strong partnerships between state-maintained schools and the independent sector—but that does not mean that independent schools have a veto on wisdom.
Our job is to ensure that the general qualifications that are taken at 16 and 18 are fit for purpose. We continue to look carefully at that, across the range of subjects. Occasionally, there is a need to challenge the people who work with us on developing the exams, in the QCA, or there is a need for regulators to challenge how well they are working at the other end, in respect of individual subjects. However, that does not mean that we rush off to do something else.
We have set up a process for qualifications. If the IGCSE, as an international qualification, wants to go through the process of, first, conforming to the national curriculum and, secondly, satisfying the process in respect of whether or not it is funded, then it will be funded. That is a transparent process. However, I reject the notion that we should always be led by a sector over which we have no regulatory control.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble.
Picking up Jim’s last answer, I must say that I thought it was probably his least convincing one. Surely the issue with IGCSEs is not whether the Government are going to oblige the maintained sector to use them but whether they will enable it to use those qualifications if it chooses to do so, which is a very different thing.
Jim Knight: In terms of the process that it has gone through, is the IGCSE as an international qualification, subject by subject, conforming to the national curriculum? As I understand it, the IGCSE that is most popular with independent schools is maths, which does not have a non-calculator paper, so all the assessment is done using a calculator. We have decided that to test mental arithmetic and get people to really understand the processes they go through in maths, it is appropriate to have a non-calculator paper so that there is not conformity. Obviously, if the two awarding bodies that do IGCSEs want to make some changes—I think that the Cambridge board is developing something called the CIE—and come up with something that conforms, they can go through that process. That is up to those awarding bodies.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Let me take you on to clause 138—this question might be for you, Sarah, as I think that you leading in this area—and the power of the Secretary of State to determine minimum requirements. Under what circumstances would you use clause 138?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Minimum requirements in terms of qualifications. Why have you taken that power?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
It is in the Ofqual part. The explanatory notes for the clause state:
“The Government intends that this power would be used only in exceptional circumstances.”
It gives the Secretary of State the ability to intervene and essentially dictate minimum standards in qualifications. Why should a Secretary of State meddle in that area?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; Portsmouth North, Labour)
I think that the Government have a role, if they felt that Ofqual was not meeting its requirement to maintain a certain minimum in the qualification.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
But you have QCDA and Ofqual, so why on earth should a “here today, gone tomorrow” politician dictate what is taught and what is part of a qualification in that way?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Surely that is what those independent bodies are for. Jim said only a moment ago that there is merit in independence from the Government in relation to all those areas. Now you are giving yourself a sweeping power that you or some other future Government might use, and the only example in the explanatory notes is one in which the Secretary of State might choose to specify
“which authors’ works needed to be studied for someone to gain a GCSE in English.”
Is it really appropriate to give a Minister the power to dictate what books are studied at GCSE?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I certainly agree that Shakespeare is an important part of our history, and I would be deeply concerned if his works were not part of our general qualifications. That is one example. To give you some comfort, the Secretary of State has said publicly that he will put a memorandum of understanding in place with Ofqual setting out a clear process to ensure that we do not compromise the independence of the regulator, which might be a safeguard.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Do the Government have any favoured authors whose works they will insist on, and what is to stop a future Government, whether Conservative, Liberal Democrat or Labour, choosing their favourite book and sticking it in?
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
I am saving Proust for later.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Okay, I register the point but I will not press it any further. Moving to another point about Ofqual, in paragraph 50 of the Government’s response to the Select Committee report, you state that Ofqual’s role is not to monitor education standards as a whole. Why have you come to that judgment, and what credibility will the body have if it cannot monitor standards as a whole?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Not across the system. Ofsted does not make judgments about whether standards in English education as a whole are going up or down, and it does not compare them internationally.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
But why not allow it to be the true standards regulator, as the Government have at times presented it? The other day in the House, Ed Balls said that Ministers will not have to get bothered to intervene in the national debate that we have every August and September, because Ofqual will be able to make definitive judgments about what has happened to standards. Yet you are stopping it from being a body that can monitor education standards as a whole. That seems unbelievable.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
What it does not do is make any definitive judgments on what has happened to educational standards over long periods in a way that would allow it to participate in the annual debate about dumbing down.
Jim Knight: When you look at the chief inspector’s annual report and some of the thematic studies, you will see that it makes some of those judgments. The dumbing down nonsense that we get every summer is about whether or not qualifications have become easier. That is what Ofqual was set up explicitly to address.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
If that is true, why does paragraph 250 of the Select Committee report state that the Government have failed through these changes to address the issue of standards? It says:
“In the context of the current testing system, with its ever-changing curriculum and endless test reforms, no regulator, however independent, can assure assessment standards as they are not capable of accurate measurement using the data available.”
It goes on to recommend that the Government allow for standardised sample testing for monitoring purposes, for example by Ofqual. First, do you accept the criticism that simply looking at qualifications gives rise to that problem? Secondly, is there any reason why Ofqual, as you have established it, should not do that sample testing?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Look at the latter bit of it. It makes a serious point about people’s inability to be sure that the results from qualifications tell us something about standards. We carry on having this debate because the majority of people in this country believe the concerns that are reflected in the report.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
But then you are back to political entanglements, are you not?
Jim Knight: Let me just finish making the point. I do not know whether it does, but in its independence, Ofqual might want to do that to satisfy its functions. However, you must bear in mind the burden that that would place on schools. We participate in the programme for international student assessment, the progress in international reading literacy study and the trends in international mathematics and science study, which are international comparison studies. Those studies perform a similar function in benchmarking how we are doing in the subjects that they assess. I am not sure whether a sufficient amount would be gained by doing the standard sampling tests that the Select Committee advocates.
Jim Knight: They are done every few years. Alongside those, we have SATs at the end of key stage 2, teacher assessments at the end of key stages 1 and 3, GCSEs at the end of key stage 4 and advanced-level qualifications at the end of key stage 5. There is a debate on whether there is too much or not enough testing, and I think that we have got the balance about right.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
So if Ofqual concluded over time that that was a useful way of addressing the standards debate, Ministers would be happy for it to do so?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Hang on a second; you said that there was nothing to stop Ofqual doing it.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
But if Ofqual decides that it wants to do it itself, does it have to ask for your permission?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
That is great. May I turn to two other brief points? Under clause 229, are you going to expand the powers to search to cover illegal drugs, alcohol and stolen property, but not hard pornography?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
So you think that head teachers and schoolteachers should not have the power to search for hard pornography?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Do you not think that many parents will be shocked and disturbed? I understand the problem that you are trying to deal with, but by prescribing those particular areas you are effectively being explicit about something that most parents would think was intolerable and that teachers should be able to search for—hard pornography—and preventing that area from being looked at.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: We have data suggesting that drugs, alcohol and stolen goods are in schools, but we do not at this stage have evidence that there is a significant problem with hard pornography being taken into schools. We can extend powers further if a justifiable need occurs, but at this stage we do not believe that that is required. We are following the recommendations from Sir Alan Steer’s report, and we believe that additional powers to search drugs, alcohol and stolen goods are sufficient at present. That does not rule out searching for other items in the future.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Last question. The one area that the unions are united in their concern about the Bill—or one of the many areas of concern, I should say, before the Minister looks too happy—is that of powers in relation to complaints. The unions are worried that the powers could lead to a big increase in complaints and that they could be very bureaucratic. In taking the complaints power away from the Secretary of State, which seems quite sensible, did you consider any other options? Did you consider leaving the power with local government, for example, rather than following the necessarily more onerous ombudsman process, or were there any other options that you considered that would not lead to the level of concern expressed by the union heads?
Jim Knight: The consultation included the local authority option. As Clem Henricson told us during her evidence—I have read other consultation responses, too—there seems to be a general endorsement of the local government ombudsman as an appropriate and sufficiently independent body. It is certainly preferable to the local authority doing it. I completely agree with Clem Henricson’s assessment, and as parliamentarians we all have some experience of dealing with ombudsmen and referring constituents’ complaints to them. I am sure we would all agree that they are set up to do a good job.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
They do a very good job, but are you not concerned that schools, anticipating that the ombudsman service may be used greatly in future, may have to take on a great deal more reporting to anticipate problems that may arise? That applies not only when an event occurs and schools have to take action or exclude someone, but also to cases when in which they see a problem with a pupil building up and they know that it could end up in a referral to an ombudsman. Is there not a danger that, in having a meticulous and bureaucratic process, we are going to place the type of burden on schools that you heard the teaching unions are very concerned about?
Jim Knight: No, I do not believe that it will add a huge layer of bureaucracy. I hope that it ensures that schools, governing bodies and leadership teams have their minds focused on the importance of the home-school relationship. That is a positive, very good thing, very much in the spirit of the public service reform paper published by the Prime Minister today. It needs to be done in such a way. We will issue guidance to schools about how they should set out a complaints process and, as long as that process has been properly followed by the school—in terms of handling a complaint—then they have nothing to worry about from the local government ombudsman. The ombudsman is already very experienced in dealing with vexatious complaints and dismissing them very quickly. The point at which the LGO becomes exercised and reports against a body, is when schools have not followed the process that they have agreed they will follow.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Humble. It is a pleasure to see you presiding today.
On the issue of employers and their engagement, I was concerned about the evidence given. We touched on it already, but John Lucas from the British Chambers of Commerce said,
“We believe the changes are too bureaucratic and do not address the underlying issues and problems of the education system.”
He also said that
“it will be very difficult for businesses and employer bodies to engage with the system set out in the Bill.”
Richard Wainer of the CBI said that
“the Bill is silent on local authorities and the YPLA consulting employers.”
Keith Marshall, to complete a group from the sector skills councils, on the subject of apprenticeships, spoke of
“our real fear that, to hit the targets, quality will be lowered.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 5-7, Q1-7.]
It is worrying is it not, that, in addition to the questions from Mr. Hayes earlier, those representatives of employers and sector skills councils view the changes in that way?
Mr. Simon: Obviously, there is bound to be a bit of it, but I hope that we are not going to get into just trading quotes. As you said, John Lucas, on behalf of the BCC, thought that the system would be too bureaucratic, but under repeated questioning from me, he was absolutely unable to give a single piece of evidence to show that it would, in any way, be more bureaucratic.
Mr. Simon: He said that he would write. If he has written, I have not seen anything yet, although to be fair to him it would be a big ask for him to have written by now. He and the BCC are wrong about this. On the other hand, the CBI said that, regarding the transition, there was no evidence at the moment of a disruption to service. On the rest of that aspect of the Bill, although I am not going to pretend that it was a head-over-heels cheerleader for the measures, it was—and is—not demonstrably opposed to any of the substantive measures that we are taking. What it has expressed are some reservations that it might be too bureaucratic. It is not opposed to any of the things that we are doing.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
No one, probably, is opposed to the aims. One of the fears of the Bill is the picture it paints of employer engagement, apprenticeships for all, and many other aspects. Those are aims that everyone can buy into. It is when you go into the mechanics of the Bill that some people worry that there is a mismatch between the two.
The subject of employers takes us neatly on to the subject of apprenticeships. Why did you decide to give this statutory right to apprenticeships? It sends out a promise of the offer, of two places within a reasonable travel to work distance, when all previous efforts—and I am sure that they have been genuine—but every previous Government announcement about targets has been missed. Therefore, is there not a danger that you are sending out—cynics would say that you are trying to capture a headline—a promise that you cannot deliver, as you do not have the mechanics in place to deliver it. I suppose that links to the employers’ evidence. They believe that the system will be too bureaucratic. Would you not be wiser to work hard at establishing the mechanics of delivering more apprenticeships rather than going for a headline promise that you cannot be sure of delivering?
Mr. Simon: Jim will talk about the entitlement. However, as far as employers are concerned, the Bill sets up a much clearer and simpler system, with two employer gateways—although I do not like that term—in Train to Gain and the NAS. In the NAS, there is a newly dedicated group of people whose job is solely to make it easier for employers to set up and run apprenticeships, and in the new structure for the apprenticeship system, including the statutory basis that we are putting it on in the first part of the Bill, we are very conscious throughout that everything that we are doing will be smoother, easier and more responsive to employers. When we get into the detail in the line-by-line consideration of the Bill, I genuinely think that that is what will emerge and I hope that, as we go through the Bill, his view might soften.
Let me just say, in response to the point about what he perceives as a gap between the ambition and the high-level structure on the one hand and the likely delivery on the other hand, there is a danger that it appears that way when talking about this Bill, because much of the detail of the delivery mechanisms is not in the Bill. Indeed, strictly speaking it does not require primary legislation; we are legislating because we think that it is so important and because it is such a major part of the economy, and therefore the very broad structure should be in the Bill. However, it is a broad structure and much of the detail will emerge when—Jim wanted to talk about the entitlement, I think.
Jim Knight: Let me come in on that part of the question, Graham. First, I want to talk in respect of missing targets and that aspect of the question. We are on course to meet our target of 130,000 completions by 2010-11. Completions have more than trebled from 39,000 in 2001-02 to more than 113,000 last year. We have rescued and expanded apprenticeships since 1997, when only 65,000 people started an apprenticeship, and 225,000 people started an apprenticeship in 2007-08, which is a record number and an increase of 22 per cent. on the year before.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
You have missed the headline targets, have you not?
Jim Knight: What the apprenticeship entitlement and the guarantee that is set out in the Bill will do is so—to describe it as just trying to grab headlines is very disparaging about the effect of legislation. To put this duty on the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency to deliver through the NAS means that he must ensure that the huge expansion in funding that we are putting into apprenticeships, to more than £1 billion during this financial year, is deployed in such a way that when young people who are suitably qualified choose two sectors that they want an apprenticeship in within a reasonable travel time—that will be different according to which sectors they choose, because if you are in Northamptonshire, for example, and you want to work in the marine sector, then a reasonable travel time is different to the reasonable travel time involved if you wanted to work in the hair and beauty sector—the provision is there.
The use of schemes such as the national apprenticeship vacancy matching service, which is being established and began operating in January, and the level of engagement with employers that the chief executive will have to ensure exists, will provide the supply of places. In particular, the drive that we now have regarding public sector apprenticeships, which have lagged behind the private sector historically for some time, will be critical in delivering that. The fact that we, as a Government, are legislating for ourselves to deliver something is some guarantee to the system that we will do so.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
I suppose that is the problem. I think you are slightly disingenuous in your answer because the Prime Minister has spoken at various times of 200,000, 300,000 or 400,000 people having apprenticeships. The headline figures that he said have not been met. That is not to disregard the efforts that have been made. No one would complain about what you are talking of, in terms of trying to drive new systems with additional funding in order to get more people into apprenticeships. However, you are talking about a national apprenticeship service and a Skills Funding Agency that do not yet exist. These are new institutions that have yet to be established, while we have a track record of lagging behind the aspiration the Government have rightly had. I come back to my question. Why lay down the statutory right when you do not have proven organisations—in fact, they are all being set up—to deliver it? Is there not a danger of making a false promise and would that not be a great shame?
Jim Knight: I know that you were not on the Education and Skills Bill Committee last year to vote against the raising of the participation age. But that, in a similar way, set out in legislation that we were going to do this. There were consequences that we are legislating on in this Bill, that are required in order to enable us to achieve that. It is well established that we would set out a duty, such as the one we are setting out to deliver the apprenticeship guarantee in order to reconfigure the system and make people want to do it. We have already appointed the chief executive of the NAS. We have already got the national vacancy matching service up and running. We are on target to deliver 35,000 extra apprenticeship places in the next year, in large part because of what we are doing in the public sector and the spending of an extra £140 million. That is using the existing structures we have in place and anticipating, subject to parliamentary approval, what will happen in this Bill.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
If I may move on to the subject of Ofqual and its independence. The Ministers were here last week when I questioned an organisation whose board is appointed by the Secretary of State, whose chairman is appointed by the Crown and thus effectively the Secretary of State, who can only be removed by the Secretary of State and who receives a budget set by the Secretary of State. It is hard to see how the public are going to view that as entirely independent. While answering that, would he follow up on earlier questions from my colleagues about the character of the people on it? It is not about the process by which they are appointed being relatively independent; it is about making sure that the educational establishment and spokespeople for it do not entirely dominate an independent standards body that is supposed to be there on behalf of the whole country.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Of course it is. It is very similar in its structure to Ofsted, and we consider Ofsted to be independent. We cite Ofsted and use it as an independent inspector. It is very similar in the way it has been set up. We will demonstrate that it will be independent. As in many of these cases, the proof will be when we see it in action.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
Can I move on neatly to the subject of accountability to Parliament? As you will have seen, a number of witnesses expressed concern about the way that Ofqual will be held accountable by Parliament. I recognise the need not to legislate, to give duties to Select Committees and so on, but would you spell out what confidence you can give to those with doubts, about how you feel it can be made accountable to Parliament and thus bolster its perceived independence?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: As Ofqual will be reporting to Parliament it will be for Parliament to decide the process of how that reporting mechanism works. I imagine it would be similar to Ofsted, in that I would expect the Select Committee to play a large part in similar ways but that will be for Parliament not Ministers to decide.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
May I ask one last question? On the topic of children’s trusts, the Audit Commission report last October said that
“there is little evidence that children’s trusts, as required by the government, have improved outcomes for children and young people or delivered better value for money”.
So, it is peculiar, having had that independent assessment, that Ministers are now deciding to put them on a statutory footing, without addressing in the Bill any of the points made in the report, including the fact that representatives are turning up for the meetings but do not bring authority or budget with them and that the joint commissioning that might have been hoped for from children’s trusts is not being delivered. Will you put our minds at rest and tell us why we should believe that putting them on a statutory footing will address the problems that the Audit Commission so clearly identified?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: The Audit Commission did that work between November 2007 and January 2008, so by the time the work was published a lot of it was out of date. There was a rapidly developing policy field and a lot of the changes were made in response to consultation with local authorities on what they wanted to do. The Audit Commission report also had many very good examples of good practice around the country—where the mechanism has delivered—and a statutory footing will enable us to have consistency across the country. One thing we will put in guidance is exactly the point that you are making about the accountability of the representations on the board, and how we gauge that.
Jim Knight: I refer you, Graham, to the evidence given by Clem Henricson from the Family and Parenting Institute. She was asked a very similar question about the relationship with the Audit Commission report and said:
“I would say that a significant contribution to them not working is that they have not been implemented in some areas. That was because they were not put on a statutory footing in the first place.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 5 March 2009; c. 130, Q52.]
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
I think that that was a misunderstanding on her behalf. A statutory footing does not address the problems in the Audit Commission report. To trade quotes—this is useful for the record—the National Union of Teachers has expressed some reservations about making children’s trust boards statutory. It has reservations about
“giving more power to...unaccountable local quangos”.
So, notwithstanding the guidance, the NUT has not been convinced.
Jim Knight: I will remember your response that there has clearly been a misunderstanding if further quotes come forward. I always treat with a certain amount of suspicion certain parties in the House quoting the NUT, with which they would not otherwise agree about anything. I disagree. It is really important that we have that co-operation between schools and children’s trust arrangements if we genuinely are going to join up services for children and intervene earlier to secure better outcomes for those children.
Graham Stuart (Beverley & Holderness, Conservative)
I am trying to tease out, as Clem Henricson does in that quote, in what way a statutory footing will ensure that the issues raised by the Audit Commission are tackled. That is the key question. If all the problems could be removed by putting them on a statutory footing that would be great, and we could have widespread support for it. But I cannot see the connection between making the boards statutory and the problems being tackled.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I think that it is also their statutory responsibilities for the children and young people’s plan. They will have to produce an annual report and their activities can be inspected under sections 20 to 22 of the Children Act 2004. By putting these regulations in place, the children’s trust boards will become accountable because they will be on a statutory footing.
Joan Humble (Blackpool North & Fleetwood, Labour)
I will next call Annette Brooke, followed by Jeff Ennis, Charles Walker, John Hayes, Maria Miller and Nick Gibb, if time allows.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs. Humble. I will start with a question about the powers of restraint. Two out of three of the union representatives told us that such powers were unnecessary, that there is professionalism and good practice. I have looked at the non-statutory guidance and must admit that it is quite comprehensive. So why do you need to make this a statutory requirement and put pressure on people, who will worry that there will be extra bureaucracy?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: We are not changing the powers of restraint. We are putting in the Bill the requirement to record the use of force in schools. That is just an extension of our partnership with parents and the wider community. That will not put a huge additional burden on schools; many schools do it anyway. It is recognition of best practice, and recognition that school is not separate from parents. We all have a duty to look after children. I would be unhappy if I thought that schools were not recording that and not reporting back to parents.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
Do you have evidence that there are schools that are not recording that? I have checked with a few local teachers and they all assure me that they do it.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
I would like to refer to something that Sir Alan Steer said on Thursday. Did he recommend to you that there should be a more general power of search?
Jim Knight: I probably was around at the time but I was not the Minister responsible for behaviour. My colleague is advising me that Sir Alan did give us that advice. Certainly the impression that I got from the evidence that he gave was that he thought that there might have been some merit in it. He was given legal advice that there might be some difficulties with human rights legislation.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
I question that because the impression that I had on Thursday was that Sir Alan had been advised by the Department that it was not appropriate, which is not quite in line with your earlier answer on why there was not a more general search. It would be useful for the Committee to have the details of why the decision on the more general search was made before we reach that part of the Bill. Would it be possible to have the details?
Jim Knight: As the Committee knows, a statement on compliance has to be made under section 19(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998 with every piece of legislation. In this regard, it is about whether it is justifiable and proportionate to have a general search power. In respect of David’s question about pornography, we would all have concerns about young people bringing pornography into a school. They may bring it in on a computer—a laptop, for example—so do we extend the powers to schools so that they can search a computer for material? Could we do so in a way that would be justifiable and proportionate? There are difficult questions around how you draw the line and make those judgments about proportionality in respect of complying with the European convention on human rights.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
I thought that the purpose was to get greater understanding before we reached consideration of the Bill—this does not necessarily reflect personal opinions. May I refer again to clause 138? Sarah, does the power already exist for the Secretary of State to determine minimum requirements? I think that it must.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
If it does exist, I would be interested to know where it is and why we need something in this legislation.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Sorry, was the answer from Ministers that it does exist or that it does not exist?
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
On children’s trust boards, you have answered some of my questions already on accountability. I have a further concern. I am not convinced that Councillor Les Lawrence really satisfied the questions I asked him.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
Well, at the moment the Children Act 2004 gives a clear line of responsibility to the director of children’s services and the lead member. I do not see that single point of accountability with the children and young people’s plan. I would like to push you a bit more. It appears that the responsibility goes to different people for each section of it. But when the chips are down, will it not be easier for someone to say, “Oh, that’s not me, that’s health”?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: All the partners are accountable for agreeing and implementing their plan. The individual partners are responsible and accountable for delivering their part of the plan. That is why they have to produce an annual report. That annual report will have to set out how the implementation of the plan has been delivered. As I said in answer to a previous question, their activities can be inspected under sections 20 to 22 of the Children Act. If there are any concerns, there is the eventual power of the Secretary of State to intervene on a local authority if the plan either does not exist or is not being implemented properly.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
My concern is that one of the strongest points of the Children Act was knowing the person who held the position who was accountable. I am concerned that we might lose that clarity.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset & North Poole, Liberal Democrat)
Do you expect to table any amendments following Lord Laming’s report on Thursday?
Jim Knight: Obviously, we will also have to bear in mind Parliament’s ability to scrutinise the Bill properly. This Committee has to have proper notice of amendments, so that it can scrutinise them properly. We do not want to bog the Bill down. Clearly, if there were things that needed urgent legislation, we would have to look at that.
Jeff Ennis (Barnsley East & Mexborough, Labour)
I suppose I should welcome you to the Chair, Mrs Humble, seeing as everybody else has. My first question has been answered. It related to the accountability of Ofqual, through Parliament. I certainly support the model that Sarah mentioned of having a similar situation for Ofqual as we have for Ofsted through the Select Committee. Moving on to an area that we have not considered yet, the evidence from my old trade union, the NASUWT, was very negative about the establishment of the Young People’s Learning Agency. It seemed to say that this is a wasteful tier of bureaucracy and that the functions of the YPLA could be subsumed into the responsibilities of the local authority. Presumably that particular model was looked at before the decision was taken?
Jim Knight: Yes. Obviously, you do not set up a new agency without ensuring that it is justified. If you did not have an agency there and you established sub-regional groupings of local authorities for post-16 commissioning, and that sub-regional grouping could not reach agreement about an aspect of commissioning, you would still need an external person or body to intervene—
Jim Knight: It could be done at a departmental level, but that would mean expanding Government office functions much further so that there is knowledge of what is happening on the ground. There are also funding functions. It could be done in-house, but there would have to be a large number of people in-house. Should it be done in-house or at arm’s length? Given the administrative nature of this, it is desirable to have it at arm’s length and to achieve efficiencies through that separation. There could be a board that drives efficiencies in that aspect of the organisation.
There is disagreement between us and the NASUWT over whether academies should be independent of local authorities. We would have given in to the charge of watering down the independence of academies if we had handed over their performance management and funding to local authorities. We did not want to do that.
Jeff Ennis (Barnsley East & Mexborough, Labour)
That to some extent answers my supplementary question. It appears that the existence of academies has been a complicating factor in terms of taking the decision away from local authorities.
Jim Knight: I have given separate reasons why I feel that the YPLA is justified. Only one of those relates to academies. When replying to Nick I set out why I think that it is appropriate to have 300—growing to 400—academies in an organisation that is at arm’s length from Ministers and Government. I have also said why the YPLA is the right organisation to do that. Those reasons are separate from why it is right to set up an agency for the post-16 funding role.
Jeff Ennis (Barnsley East & Mexborough, Labour)
In an earlier answer, you mentioned that you would support greater collaboration between the independent sector and the state education sector. I have no problems with that. Presumably, that principle applies to academies being part of clusters of schools within LEAs.
Jim Knight: We are saying exactly that in respect of behaviour partnerships. We think it is equally important that all academies co-operate with children’s trust arrangements. We see the importance of partnership. Indeed, in the witness sessions, when asked how many academies are in behaviour partnerships, Liz Reid said:
“It is the vast majority—94 per cent. is normally quoted. That tells you a good deal about academies’ desire to be part of those local arrangements...Academies have a large proportion of vulnerable and disadvantaged children on their rolls. It is in their interests as well as everybody else’s to be part of those partnerships.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 45, Q115.]
Charles Walker (Broxbourne, Conservative)
I believe that successful head teachers should be respected and slightly feared. Surely, if a head teacher feels that something is being brought into his or her school that threatens its equilibrium, they should be allowed to initiate a search. I am still not sure why the Bill is so prescriptive over what items a head teacher may search for.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I think that we are going over old ground here. We want to get a sense of proportion. We certainly do not think that there should be a general power to search. Who will decide what is being searched for? We have to avoid making our schools places in which any child can be searched for anything. You have to have a proportionate response to concerns. We have evidence to suggest that drugs, alcohol and stolen goods are in schools and we have included the recommendation in the Bill. We are not ruling out extending the things that can be searched for if the circumstances arise. From the advice we have been given, I do not think that we would be compliant if we gave a general power to schools to search any child for anything.
Jim Knight: With regard to some of the other issues that have been raised perfectly legitimately, we would expect schools to use their other powers and their home-school relationships to address concerns, because no one wants to see pornography, for example, in schools. If a school believed that someone was bringing in pornography, we would expect it to act and not to ignore it, but we would expect it to tackle it in other ways.
Charles Walker (Broxbourne, Conservative)
I am sorry if we are going over old ground, but this is the first chance I have had to go over it. Head teachers should be allowed to use their professional judgment. They are responsible for running a school and looking after the youngsters who go to it. I feel very sympathetic with you as Ministers getting caught up in the Human Rights Act 1998, but I firmly believe that if a head teacher feels that a child needs to be searched we should support that head teacher once that search is initiated and after it has happened. Surely head teachers are there to run schools, and I am really concerned that your lawyers at the Ministry have advised you that that might somehow breach children’s human rights. Perhaps you could explore that a little more closely with the Committee.
Charles Walker (Broxbourne, Conservative)
Children do not have human rights as much as adults do. I tell my children where they are going to school, what time they are going to bed, when they will do their homework and what they are having for supper. You just cannot argue that children have the same human rights as adults do, because their lives tend to be governed by adults for their own safety and well-being. I am concerned that you have received advice from your lawyers stating that it is all right to search for guns, knives or whatever, but that we suddenly get into a whole area of difficulty with other things, and I cannot understand why that distinction is being made.
Jim Knight: There is a balance to be struck. The reason why the human rights legislation is there in the first place is to ask us as parliamentarians and Ministers to pause and check that it is justifiable to interfere with a student’s rights, such as the rights of the privacy of the person. If we deem it justifiable, necessary and proportionate to do so, we will bring forward legislation, but I share Sarah’s concern about the general stop and search power. The question of whether the police should have the power to stop and search on our streets has been much debated in this House over many years. If you were to extend stop and search into our schools, you would do so very deliberately on the basis of real concerns that have been expressed. Those concerns have not been expressed, so we do not have the justification to interfere with those rights. If the justification were made, we would legislate to do that.
Charles Walker (Broxbourne, Conservative)
Children are naughty and like to get away with things, which is good and shows character and spirit. I always assumed, perhaps wrongly, that if a head teacher thought some mischief was going on they had the right to intervene and say, “Right, turn out your pockets and show me what is in your locker.” We have of course gone beyond that with computers, but if the head teacher believed that there was some mischief going on with a laptop, for example, surely they should be allowed to check that out. It does not have to be pornography; it could be cyberbullying or all sorts of things that are computer generated. I just feel that we are constraining teachers from getting to the bottom of things very quickly.
Charles Walker (Broxbourne, Conservative)
But we have heard evidence from members of trade unions suggesting that if they break up a fight between two children who are beating each other up, nine times out of 10 they will get a complaint from a parent because their poor child has been discriminated against by teachers. You are saying parents will act responsibly, but people have given us evidence suggesting that parents are all too willing to take their child’s side, regardless of the evidence that their child had been misbehaving.
Jim Knight: I think that it is possible completely to exaggerate parents’ willingness to co-operate with schools. Head teachers can, of course, search with consent. If we try to separate schools off from home too much, we are going down a very dangerous path. Children are only in school for 15 per cent. of the time, so we need a better relationship between home and school. We need schools to be properly engaged with parents, not only so that children achieve their full potential—we know that the biggest single determinant of a child’s success in education is the support that they get at home—but in respect of behaviour. We are systematically trying to work through how to engage parents more in those issues, from the expansion of children’s centres in early years, through into school with the development of extended services—as I set out in an oral answer yesterday in the Commons—and then with things like personal tutors, real-time reporting and the roll-out of home access.
Therefore, the answer is yes to being proportionate in school and giving head teachers the powers that they are asking for, but also to having schools work more closely with home. What was apparent when I went to Alan Steer’s school, when he was head teacher at Seven Kings in Ilford, was the absolute mutual respect that was shared between pupils and staff and the really strong relationship that he had with parents.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
Returning to apprenticeships, most of us want to be clear about the record. I appreciate that Ministers do not like us using average numbers of apprenticeships as a measure of whether the numbers are increasing or falling, even though that is how such judgments have historically been made. The latest Learning and Skills Council figures show that there is a problem with the number of apprenticeship starts. According to those figures, fewer people are starting apprenticeships than in 2003-04, and there is certainly a problem with the number of level 3 apprenticeships. We know that there has been a continuing issue about getting the number of level 3 apprenticeships up to scratch. Is it not basically confusing to have the Skills Funding Agency as both a curriculum body that creates apprenticeship standards, and a funding body? Would it not have been better to leave the responsibility for establishing the frameworks with the National Apprenticeship Service, given that it has responsibility for modelling apprenticeship?
I do not understand how this system will work, and nor do employers. You heard what the employers said about it. There is scepticism about an entitlement that will not be realised. There is no use in telling me that I have an entitlement to milk and honey if the honey has run out and the milk has gone sour. This is creating a false promise—it cannot be delivered. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, the Prime Minister has talked on various occasions, first as Chancellor and now as Prime Minister, about extraordinary numbers of apprenticeships—300,000, 400,000 and 500,000 are on record. We will not reach those targets, so what is the entitlement really about and why is the management of apprenticeships as set out in the Bill so convoluted?
Mr. Simon: First, I hope that we are not going to go over and over the numbers issue. The short answer is no, we have not missed any headline targets and we are on track to hit or exceed all of our future targets. John said that we do not like to talk about average numbers, although that is how numbers were historically recorded. The truth is that under previous Administrations numbers were barely recorded or measured at all; indeed they barely existed. Measuring them using an average is meaningless. Measuring starts is good. Completion rates have trebled in the past few years—that is where the massive success has been. Last year, starts were 225,000, which was a massive increase on the year before, and the balance between level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships is determined and driven by employers, as he knows. The Government do not have a policy on the proportion of level 3 apprenticeships in relation to level 2 apprenticeships. That is for employers to determine.
Employer determination is also the answer to why apprenticeship frameworks will continue to be determined by sector skills councils rather than the National Apprenticeship Service. Sector skills councils represent business and employers. They are coalitions of employer bodies and direct employers in each sector. They run the apprenticeships, they know what employers want and need and they set the frameworks.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
With respect, it will be the Skills Funding Agency that releases specifications for apprenticeships. I am very happy for sector skills councils to be at the pivot of that process. However, as I said earlier, the Bill does not mention sector skills councils, except in a cursory fashion. I acknowledge that the explanatory notes refer to them. The real point is that the National Apprenticeship Service will be responsible specifically and explicitly for modelling the developing apprenticeships and the apprenticeship frameworks specified by the SFA. It would be entirely possible to have a National Apprenticeship Service with that competence working with sector skills councils, would it not?
Mr. Simon: It would have been possible. However, my point remains that under the structure in the Bill, it will be statutory for the specification of standards to be set by the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency. That will give the broadest definition of what an apprenticeship is and should be. That will be done through wide consultation with everybody in the sector from businesses to users.
It is absolutely right that the frameworks should continue to be set by the business employers who use them. There are currently 180 frameworks among the sectors. It would be wrong to bring that function into the NAS. It is much better for the NAS to focus on delivering apprenticeships and driving up the number and quality of them. It should be involved in the high-level business of setting the overall standards and in saying what an apprenticeship is. Determining who needs to do what should be left to employers in the sector skills councils. As I have said repeatedly, although the councils may not be writ large in the Bill, they are writ large at the centre of the skills system.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
But there is no definition of apprenticeships or advanced apprenticeships in clauses 1 to 38. Clauses 20 to 25 provide an outline of content specification for apprenticeships, but there is no example and no draft specification.
As the Minister knows, clause 15 allows existing vocational standards to be upgraded to apprenticeships. As we have heard from witnesses and from elsewhere, that is a worry because the standard of apprenticeships and the quality of the brand are critical. If we call anything an apprenticeship to meet the targets and fulfil the entitlement, it will be extremely damaging to the real apprenticeships that he and I admire and wish to grow.
Why is there no specification? Can we expect to see it at least in draft form in Committee so that we can have a real debate about the quality and content of apprenticeships?
Mr. Simon: I am very surprised that the hon. Gentleman says that there is no definition or specification of an apprenticeship in the Bill. If you were to summarise clauses 1 to 34, one of the fundamental things that they do is to define and explain exactly what an apprenticeship is, how it is to be delivered, who is to deliver it and in what circumstances it is to be delivered. Obviously, it would be wrong to put in the Bill the line-by-line detail and substantive content of what that means.
The Bill sets up the processes by which employers will work under the three structures of the specification. At the highest level, they will work under the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency. The frameworks will be made by the sector skills councils and the agreements will be made between learners and employers. The Bills sets out clearly how those different parts of the apprenticeship system work. An apprenticeship is a relationship between an employer, a learner and a provider. The Bill sets out how those parts feed in to the process and at what levels. The process will be different in hundreds if not thousands of cases.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
To grow the number of apprenticeships, we need good, independent advice and we need more young people to hear about them. So was the Minister surprised when the CBI complained that the Bill
“did not go far enough”,
in terms of the advice that could be offered and that it specifically complained that providers were not going to be obliged to let people know about apprenticeships? The CBI said that it was very much left to their discretion. The suitability of the advice that they gave was very much in their advisers’ hands, rather than there being the open, free and independent advice that might come from an independent careers service, of the kind advocated by Conservatives and others.
I asked careers advisers about that specifically. You will remember that I asked Kieran Gordon, the expert witness:
“Has the Bill gone far enough on strengthening the mechanism by which quality independent advice can be offered to young people?”
He replied:
“I do not think it has.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 57, Q155.]
He went on to say that the Bill did not have sufficient “teeth” in that regard. Why are the Government so resistant to independent, free, quality advice being given to young people so that they can consider apprenticeships?
Jim Knight: Sorry, a call of nature intervened. In respect of clause 35, the important thing for the Committee to consider—obviously, we will debate it at more length later in our proceedings—is how this sits alongside the statutory guidance that will be issued in respect of the duty to give impartial advice, which was in the Education and Skills Act 2008. We will be consulting on that statutory guidance fairly soon. It will ensure that every young person in school is given advice about what an apprenticeship is and about the merits of an apprenticeship. In respect of delivering what we have set out in clause 35, that ensures that those for whom an apprenticeship is suitable receive more detailed advice about that apprenticeship, beyond the advice that is set out in the statutory guidance as regards the 2008 Act.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
May I ask just one final question? It is a very straightforward one, and the Ministers will have the answer to hand. They will remember—indeed, it will be writ large on their memory—Andrew Foster’s advice about freeing up further education colleges from what he described as the “galaxy of oversight” bodies that regulate, monitor and advise them. We heard scepticism from the Association of Colleges and particularly from Graham Moore of the 157 Group about the Bill’s effect in respect of local education authorities. As a result of the Bill, will that “galaxy of oversight” be bigger or smaller? Will the 17 bodies that are currently involved, which Andrew Foster mentioned in his report, be fewer or greater in number as a result of the legislation?
Mr. Simon: I can only assume that there was some kind of a misunderstanding. Privately, they have been very enthusiastic and supportive. I am perfectly confident that, under the new arrangements, life in a FE college will be simpler, more straightforward and less complex than now. On the 16-to-19 side, colleges will have one funding relationship with the lead local authority. On the adult side, they will have a single account relationship with the SFA, which is novel; they now have multiple funding conversations with many different parts of the Learning and Skills Council. Another novel aspect is that they will have a single accreditation facility with the SFA; currently, there is a cumbersome, 100-page bureaucratic process that they are compelled to repeat with the LSC every time a new tranche of funding becomes available. They will have a single performance framework in the framework for excellence arrangements. They will have a single data relationship with all the various agencies that require data from them; there will be just one relationship. I am in no doubt that, under our plans, life in an FE college will be—
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
And will the number of bodies involved in oversight, as identified by the Foster model, be fewer? What is the number to be: four, three, two, one?
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
We argue that all this new structure will be convoluted and complex—we agree with the witnesses; the Ministers do not—but how much will the change cost or save? I guess that the ambition is that it will save a lot of money.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
Okay, but will the new structure be cheaper? Will it deliver a better service more cost-effectively?
Jim Knight: Yes it will, and most importantly, it will be responsive to the needs of both learners and employers. The other strength for FE colleges, beyond what Siôn has set out so clearly, is that the planned side of their business for 16 to 19-year-olds will give them a certain amount of stability, while the demand-led side will allow them to innovate in relation to adults. That will appeal to a sector that has been remarkably successful at innovating and responding to the changing economic needs of its areas.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
I appreciate the difficulty of answering these questions on spec, but will the Ministers set out the cost savings in relation to the change from LSC to all the successor bodies? We would like to be able to explore that in detail in Committee.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
May I point out that I thought that the LSC’s view was that the change will not save any money at all and that it will be cost-neutral?
Jim Knight: For clarity’s sake, the administrative cost of the new system, including staffing and on-costs, will be met, as Siôn has said, by the LSC’s current staffing budget. We expect that to be revenue-neutral, but there will be some additional transitional costs. Savings will be made by operating from a smaller estate of office premises. For example, by operating at national and regional level, the SFA will require fewer premises. Furthermore, we expect to make administrative savings through a centralisation of functions, including shared support services, the greater use of technology and perhaps some shared procurement. Sharing will be facilitated by the fact that the SFA and YPLA head offices will be located together in Coventry. We also think that there will be efficiency savings at local authority level, by joining the commissioning of 16-to-19 education and training with the commissioning of wider youth services, such as learner support.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
What is the transitional cost?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I am sorry to butt in on John Hayes again, but is it not the case, Minister, that some of the cost savings that you mention are already embedded in the LSC’s plans for estate reorganisation, so we are not really comparing the reorganisation per se with the old situation?
Jim Knight: Even if the whole thing is cost-neutral, it is still right to move the break from 16 to 19, to have a dedicated adult skills agency, to return 16-to-19 commissioning to local authorities and to have an agency that will ensure that everything is coherent for FE colleges, which is what the YPLA will do.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
There are a number of important early years provisions in the Bill, and we have not had much time to talk about them in the earlier evidence sessions, so perhaps I could turn the Committee’s attention to those provisions now. I do not think that there has been any conversation about clause 190 and the early years budgetary framework. When that is in place, do you expect there to be a level playing field for the cost of delivering early years’ free entitlement for both the maintained sector and the private, voluntary and independent sector? Do you think that that budgetary framework should have been in place when the free entitlement was introduced?
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
In saying that you want to get a consistency of funding, are you acknowledging that there has not been consistency to date?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: The Bill aims to ensure that there is. I would not like to say that there has or has not been consistency, but by putting it in one setting and having it in one place, our aim is to make sure that, even if other providers feel that they have not been as well serviced—whether or not that is true—we will be able to demonstrate it under these proposals.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
The Library’s research paper, which it very helpfully published alongside the Bill, would tend to suggest that it is more than just a feeling that certain sectors have not had the same funding. The Department’s own benchmarking analysis for 2007-08 and 2008-09 clearly pointed out that maintained nurseries have been receiving £3,800 per pupil per year, whereas the PVI sector has been receiving around £1,800 per pupil per year. When will the new legislation and the single funding formula, which is being developed by local authorities, be in place so that all local authorities will be able to even out the imbalance of funding that we appear to have seen to date?
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Will the Minister look favourably on those local authorities that try to ensure that the PVI sector, which is already undergoing quite a lot of difficulty in this economic recession, is not unfairly penalised in the meantime?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: A local authority’s responsibility is to ensure that there is quality provision of early years settings for the children for whom they are responsible. I would not expect a local authority to discriminate against, or for, any particular sector, but to ensure quality of provision.
Jim Knight: Important changes were made in either the last Act or the one before—I think it was in the Education and Skills Act 2008—to the membership of the schools forum, so that the PVI sector was represented on the schools forum and its voice could be heard in making some of those funding decisions.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Staying with funding for a final question to Sarah, according to the Department’s impact assessment, funding could be transferred away from maintained nurseries. Given the current economic uncertainty that all early years providers face, will she seek to safeguard the surpluses that, at present, are potentially under threat from her colleague? Some 71 per cent. of maintained nurseries have what I think her colleague described as “excessive surpluses”. Unfortunately, in response to my question yesterday, Jim implied that those surpluses are by no means safe. Should maintained nurseries be feeling a little nervous given that they might see money clawed back at a time when the amount of money that they receive will drop as well?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Maintained settings that are full will not see any change in funding, but I do not think that that is quite the point that the hon. Lady is making. We are trying to make sure that the funding is transparent across settings. I come back to the point that I made before that we are looking for real quality across the settings. For the first time, we will ask local authorities to base funding in the maintained sector on participation, rather than on places, but we are not being prescriptive about where our early years settings should be. We want quality and transparency in the funding, so that all participants in that sector feel that there is equity in the process.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Do you, like me, want to see a level playing field, as soon as possible from today?
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Quickly moving on perhaps to progress the discussions on children’s trust boards, there is a lot of emphasis in the Bill on structural changes at a time when perhaps Ofsted and the National Audit Office might have been expecting more emphasis on the nature of the workings of children’s services, rather than seeing yet more change. Do you share my concern that, when the sector has seen so much change over the past 10 years, further change in the form of making children’s trust boards statutory, introducing children’s centre advisory boards and putting Sure Start children’s centres on to a statutory footing, may take those organisations’ eyes off the ball, when they should be focused on improving the quality of the services provided and particularly on getting those services to vulnerable families?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: This is exactly about improving services to vulnerable families and all families. A lot of what we are putting into legislation happens in practice anyway, but it is not happening across the country. The point of putting it on a statutory footing is to ensure consistency, so that we are able to deliver the services that the majority of children, but not all, are getting on a consistent basis across the whole country. That is why we are doing it.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Okay. So if you are really focused on structural changes, how will you ensure that the new structures know how to work together and how to organise local services in a constructive way? You have not only the organisations that I talked about, but the local strategic partnerships and local safeguarding boards. We have a lot of organisations at the moment. When will the Minister make it clear how all those organisations work together? The evidence that we have had so far suggests that many of those organisations are not as clear as they need to be.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: The requirement for the children’s trust boards to prepare and implement the children and young people’s plan will mean that those organisations will have to work together. The accountability of having to produce the annual report that I spoke about earlier will focus the mind, and we will issue guidance that includes best practice around the country to help those children’s trusts that have not been operating as well as they might to see what is happening in other parts of the country.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
So, to use a colloquial expression, the pecking order will be determined locally?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I hope that there is not a pecking order. The point is for those organisations and agencies to work in partnership and to share information and work together. They are all accountable for agreeing and implementing the plan; each one of them is separately accountable for the delivery of its part of it.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Of course, you run the risk of people not knowing who is responsible if you do not have a pecking order in place.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Moving on, children’s centres were set up in a way that could respond to local needs. Every community that we represent differs in family and local children’s needs, but two provisions in the Bill could limit the ability to be responsive to local needs in the future. I am thinking of the duty to consider supplying services through a children’s centre by local partners and the very tight definition of early years services. Are you happy that the duty to consider providing services through children’s centres will not lead to those partners dictating what the community needs, rather than the community being in control of that important decision-making process?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: That is why we want to put the advisory boards on to a statutory footing. Many Sure Start centres do have advisory boards. This is about ensuring that the advisory board represents parents in the wider community, so that we can ensure that the children’s centre provides the services that are particularly needed in that local community.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
But if the duty is on the local partners, such as the local primary care trust, to consider providing services through Sure Start in the first instance, surely that will override any thoughts from an advisory board. That seems to be taking away from the important local nature of children’s centres.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
That is not the point that I am making. Children’s centres, not the primary care trust, should determine which services are provided.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: But the primary care trust is a partner—we come back to the children’s trust board and the children and young people’s plan, which says that those involved must have regard to the number of children’s centres that they need to meet the statutory requirement. The whole purpose of what we are doing with Sure Start children’s centres, children’s trust boards and the children and young people’s plan is to join up services to ensure that we achieve locally what you are referring to.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Moving on to my other point on the tight definition of early years, do you share the concern I felt on hearing that 4Children and Action for Children were worried that the Bill could limit service delivery in some of their communities? Certainly the Sure Start children’s centres I have visited that have extended support for families are very effective. I am sure that the Minister would not want that to change.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I do not think that the legislation changes that. I am sure that when we consider the clauses in detail, we will enjoy exploring it further. The intention is not to restrict what happens in children’s centres; the point is to put them on a statutory footing to ensure that all children have access to the very good services, which we have both spoken about, that children’s centres provide.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
On inspection and the provisions in the Bill for inspecting children’s centres, I was somewhat surprised that neither of the third sector organisations that came to give evidence seems to have been involved in any discussions about inspection. Given that both organisations run children’s centres, and given the very limited number of third sector organisations that provide Sure Start centres in our communities, I would have thought that such wide-ranging changes to how the centres are inspected would have been discussed with them. Why was that not the case?
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
Will the Minister paint a picture of how she expects the new inspection service to work? As I am sure she is aware, there are already two different routes through which Ofsted can go into children’s centres to inspect them: through the child care facilities or through the early years learning facilities. How does she expect the new inspection service to work? Obviously, I do not expect details. Presumably it is in the Bill because a change is needed, but I am not sure what that change is.
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: We are still working with Ofsted on how that is going to work. We certainly want to involve parents in how it works. We will undertake a pilot of children’s centre inspections so we that do not duplicate and do not go into two different areas and conduct multiple inspections. That is the sort of thing that we will be working with Ofsted on and, hopefully, the answer will come out of the pilots.
Maria Miller (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Basingstoke, Conservative)
So we are legislating for something, but we are not yet clear about how it is going to work.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
May I ask about the recording of the use of force in clause 233? I do not know which Minister will answer this question. The current guidance on use of force requires detailed records to be kept for 10 years. Why 10 years? Is that not excessive? Does it not make this very burdensome and bureaucratic for teachers?
Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I suppose that the question is, if not 10 years, for how long should we say records should be kept? We have to find a point at which we say, “This is how long we think these records should be kept in this school.” There are two issues here. It is a matter of the school keeping records to monitor trends over time and of getting the balance right on what that length of time should be.