16 JUNE 2004

MR DAVID NORMINGTON AND MR STEPHEN KERSHAW

  Q40 Chairman: There is still the feeling, even with new arrangements, even in terms of your longer term objectives, that you would really like to cut the LEAs, the local authorities, out of the whole thing and directly fund it. Is that not your real ambition?

  Mr Normington: That is something that the Government will no doubt decide in due course. I do not think I ought to say yes or no to that question. There is a debate going on about the future role of local authorities and the future funding system, but no decisions have been taken yet.

  Q41 Chairman: You will be giving advice to your Minister on that, will you not?

  Mr Normington: Of course.

  Q42 Chairman: Would you like to cut out the local authorities? Would it be much more convenient in your trimmed down department if you took all that responsibility yourself?

  Mr Normington: I am not . . . I think it would be wrong of me to give my personal view to this Committee. I will be discussing that with the Secretary of State. All I would say is that we have lots of models around. We have a model where we had a funding agency for schools which did fund about a thousand schools by 1997 directly. There are those models around, but, as I said to this Committee before, you do need to have some local moderation of a national system, and these are big decisions which are for the Government to take, not for me.

  Q43 Chairman: But you know how the media works in these things, Permanent Secretary. You know that in a year's time what happens at A level and GCSE time will happen. You know, the BBC and all the media, all those people, the education correspondents, all are brought back from their holidays—they are not allowed to go on holiday at that time—and you know they will be back to this time because they will find a story on the next wave of how you fund schools. Yes? That is exactly what happens at A level and GCSE. They all come back because they all know there are going to be stories—you do not bring back all those highly qualified journalists for nothing—and they will be there like locusts waiting to see if you have got the answer that year?

  Mr Normington: They will. They are very interested in this, yes. We exist in that world and, first of all, we have to try to minimise the individual cases which provide the story and often are the things that then cause the story to run away, but, secondly, we need to provide some long-term stability on these big policy issues.

  Q44 Mr Turner: Do you really think that long-term stability can be the Government?

  Mr Normington: I think it is very difficult in a system which is . . . You must not read anything into this comment—it is neither a plus nor a minus—but in a system where it is a combination of national funding and local funding, both of which depend on national and local government's willingness to fund, to put resources in so at local level it will depend on whether local authorities are able to put up the council tax in order to fund their share of this, it is very difficult in that kind of system to provide stability. On the other hand, if you are a school you do not really understand that. What you really want, you are trying to run your school and you have a longer time horizon than a one-year horizon. So I think we must all try to provide that stability even though I think it would be very difficult.

  Q45 Chairman: The reason I ask is because it sounded to me as though you were accepting the sticking plaster because you could see long-term stability being achieved, but now you are telling us it would be difficult to achieve?

  Mr Normington: Yes, but the Prime Minister has said publicly that he would like to see a move to three-year budgets—that is what he said to the National Association of Head Teachers a few weeks ago—and I am saying that will be very difficult to achieve but that is what we are working towards.

  Chairman: We would like to move now to schools funding, particularly focusing on teaching numbers. Jeff Ennis.

  Q46 Jeff Ennis: If I could, prior to coming on to that, ask a question supplementary to the point we have just been pursuing about the billion pounds that is consumed in school budgets at the present time. David, you have already acknowledged that a fair chunk of that is being kept by head teachers for future capital projects, but there is also a fair chunk that is being kept for a rainy day by certain schools. Do you foresee the fact that we are going, hopefully, to a three-year budgetary span will that reduce the amount of that billion pounds that has been put away for a rainy day, and should that be ruled out in the amount that continues at the present time? Do you foresee that happening?

  Mr Normington: If we can get to three-year budgets or something that provides that kind of stability, then I would expect it to be possible for schools to be more confident about using their surpluses. That is what our aim would be. I think we need to encourage them to do that, because that is money that is sitting there unused and it is public money for education. Equally, I think we have to give them some discretion to decide what to do over a period.

  Q47 Jeff Ennis: But we are conveying that message to head teachers?

  Mr Normington: We are conveying that message very strongly. Of course, in last year's problem we encouraged local authorities to try to use some of those surpluses to help the problems.

  Q48 Jeff Ennis: Focusing on last year's problem, first of all, in terms of the problems it created for personnel issues with schools, we have been given a variety of figures just exactly how many teachers were lost within the system. The University of Liverpool said that although we had a net loss of just over 4,500 jobs in the private sector we had a small gain of 20 jobs in the secondary schools sector. Are those figures accurate?

  Mr Normington: The figures I have, which are based on a January account of the number of teachers in schools, is that in January, 2004, compared with January 2003 there were just over 4,000 extra teachers in schools and 16,000, just over 16,000, extra teaching assistants in schools compared with the previous year. There are some differences between different parts of the country. Generally there were increases everywhere, but it was largely flat in the North East and the West Midlands. We are doing further analysis of that to see what the local authority position is: because if it is true that we had problems last year, and we seemed to have, it may be that in particular places it shows up as a fall. Can I say one other thing? We have this issue underlined—this is why it is so difficult to get to—we have this issue of falling primary school rolls, and indeed from next year, falling secondary schools rolls, and that is causing some reduction in primary teacher numbers potentially, although it is not showing up in the figures very much yet.

  Q49 Jeff Ennis: So at some point in the future we will have the figures?

  Mr Normington: We will have a better figure, but the figure that we have is that schools in this last year have employed 20,000 extra staff.

  Q50 Jeff Ennis: Do we have a figure on the number of compulsory redundancies that were made last year?

  Mr Normington: No, we have tried to get that answer and I am afraid we just do not have it. We do not collect that as a matter of course and I do not have it.

  Q51 Jeff Ennis: Do you think we ought to collect it in future?

  Mr Normington: I would have liked in the last year to have had a better handle on what was happening. We tried to get a better handle on what was happening using local authorities and they were never sure what was happening right up until the moment. In fact what was happening in the summer last year was that some notices were being given which were then not implemented. So it is very difficult to get an accurate figure here, and compulsory redundancies are very rare indeed.

  Q52 Jeff Ennis: Absolutely. So that is why it should not be too difficult to get the figure?

  Mr Normington: I should think the answer would be almost none, but that does not tell you whether there was a shake out of people, does it, because some people go every year for various reasons, some voluntarily?

  Q53 Jeff Ennis: What about compulsory?

  Mr Normington: There would be none, almost none.

  Q54 Jeff Ennis: What information do we have about the distribution of new teaching posts? Are they evenly distributed across the country, or does it depend on the circumstances of individual schools or LEAs?

  Mr Normington: I would have to come back to you on that.[1] It is certainly the case that setting aside the one-year funding problem that there are some places where there is significant growth in rolls and some places where there are significant falls. The most extreme cases are the North East, where school rolls are falling quite sharply, and London and the South East where they are growing quite fast. These aggregate figures, of course, do mask this problem that we have, that there are quite a lot of jobs in some places and the market is static in others. We do have that picture, but I would have to come back with the details if you wanted it.

  Mr Kershaw: One way of answering that question is through vacancy rates. We do know from last year's figures that vacancy rates fell pretty much across the board and fell more sharply in places like London, where, as the Permanent Secretary says, the demand for new teachers is biggest because the population is still growing, but actually the gap between the number of teachers—

  Q55 Jeff Ennis: The reduction in vacancy rates, would that be across all areas?

  Mr Kershaw: It will vary between subjects. I think we all recognise there are particular challenges, for example, in maths and science teachers, but broadly, and it is an average in that sense, numbers are falling, vacancy rates are falling, across the piece and most sharply in the areas where the demand is greatest. We thought that was rather encouraging.

  Q56 Jeff Ennis: Going back to the hypothetical example that Jonathan quoted where you have got a school with a similar social mix and a similar pupil numbers, has the operation of the funding mechanism meant that a school in one area can recruit more staff while a similar school in another area has had to reduce?

  Mr Normington: Do you mean in one area?

  Q57 Jeff Ennis: From one LEA to another with a similar social mix, similar pupil numbers?

  Mr Normington: If I say, no, you will almost certainly give me an example of a case where this is happening. I cannot be sure that will not be happening. Overall the allocation mechanism was designed to move resources out of the south-east in broad terms, but there are quite significant historic disparities between the funding of education in neighbouring local authorities, which means that the resources that local authorities have from place to place do differ quite a bit and you get schools on either side of the local authority boundary which can be funded quite differently. So it is possible, though if you are putting a floor in in terms of the increase each school is to get, every school should be getting that increase. So in terms of the increase this year, every school should be getting it, but it is from a different base in each case.

  Q58 Jeff Ennis: Is the funding of individual schools fairer now since 1997 and is it as fair as it should be?

  Mr Normington: We try. In the reallocation, in the new formula that was introduced, the one that was the basis of all the problems, that did attempt to provide a fairer system for allocating resources in terms of pupil numbers and need, and I believe that was a fairer formula. What has happened is that by putting in floors and ceiling, as you well know, we have slowed down the impact of that. So the impact of that is going to be introduced over a much longer period. It will happen, but putting in floors and ceiling means that you do not have the sharp shifts immediately. So it is fairer but it is going to take time.

  Q59 Paul Holmes: One quick question on teacher numbers. Last year there were these big arguments, which Jeff has already referred to, with some surveys suggesting there were big losses of teachers, but the Government has come out with figures saying that in fact there was a net increase of 4,200 teachers. Part of that 4,200, nearly half of them, 1,800 people are trainee teachers, they are trained for qualified teacher status through an employment route. Is that not fiddling the figures when we do not include those who do PGCEs as teachers, we do not include people doing BA and task teachers, why include trainees through a third route as teachers?

  Mr Normington: I do not think it is fiddling because those figures are on the record. We announce them. So you can see it. If you want to take 1,800 and 4,200, fine. They are real people and they are in schools and the graduate training groups, the graduate teachers programme, does involve them being in the classroom teaching, albeit with support and supervision. So they are real people and they are teaching, but, yes, they are trainees.