MR PETER WILKINSON AND MR DAVID BELL

22 MAY 2007

  Q500  Chairman: Let us try and relate this, so we can start on a broad front, to David and education. I have been reading about personalised learning as a way of getting a user focus to the process of education, and I sometimes think I understand it and then at other times I think I do not. If I go to learn to play tennis, I want someone who knows how to play tennis to teach me how to play tennis. I do not want someone to discuss with me my needs and all that, do I? Have we been doing depersonalised learning up to now? What has been going on?

  Mr Bell: I hope not, but to take up your example of being taught how to play tennis, you do require, on the part of the teacher, a degree of knowledge and skill, but if it was the case that they had a very fixed view on how they were going to teach you and, however badly you responded to that, they carried on teaching the way that they had always been taught to teach, actually you would not learn very much. I think that is quite a neat example of what we are trying to get at with personalised learning. It is not in any sense to say that children or young people should drive everything that they are taught or should take a pick and mix view of the curriculum or anything like that; it is trying to shape how they learn to best suit their needs, talents and aptitudes. The other thing to mention on personalised learning is to involve parents more in the shaping of what is taught and how children learn. I think that leads very neatly to a connection with what Peter said, that that involvement and engagement is more likely to lead to a successful outcome. We know, do we not, from years of research that parental engagement, enthusiasm and support for how pupils learn is more likely to mean that the child or a student learns successfully.

  Q501  Chairman: We have all had bad teachers and we have all had good teachers, and we know the difference. You are describing how bad bad teachers are, whether it is at tennis or anything else, and how good good teachers are, so I do not see why we are not just talking about good teaching.

  Mr Bell: I think to a large extent the characteristics of personalised learning do involve good teaching, but the focus is not just on how the teacher teaches, it is the focus on the learner. Maybe one of the issues that we have become much better about in recent years is thinking about more successful techniques of teaching, through different strategies and the like, but now thinking how do you relate how the teacher teaches and becomes more effective in their teaching with the way in which the child or the student learns. I think you can apply technology to that. You can enable the students to make choices about how they learn, when they learn, you can make decisions about the kinds of choices that they make, the information they get, and so on. It is getting the balance between the quality of the teaching right and the engagement of the student and the learner, because without that engagement, the pupil or the student is not going to make the kind of steps that they need to make in our education system.

  Q502  Chairman: Let me ask one more question before I move to colleagues. This is something the Audit Commission has done work on and should know about and something that has engaged this Committee over recent times and now in this inquiry, which is the question of choice. If someone says to the Audit Commission, "We know all the arguments about choice, whether it is a good thing, whether it is a bad thing, but, Audit Commission, you tell us, on the basis of the work that you have done: does choice have a good effect in public services in terms of improving how those services operate?"

  Mr Wilkinson: We published a report last year called Choosing Well which tried to look in some detail at three elements of choice, but I only refer to two: one is on choice-based lettings and the other is on direct payments for social care. That was against some research that we published back in 2004 that actually the public generally is in favour of choice, and those who are most in favour of choice are those who depend on public services the most. That is because they, we think, are the people that feel that choice would give them back some degree of control over public services and, therefore, give them an opportunity to influence them. It is not the top priority. I think there is much written about the fact that people would prefer to have good public services available to them on their door step, but in the circumstances in which people find themselves, they recognise that choice can be of assistance to them. So, we tried to look at specifically two forms of choice, choice-based lettings and direct payments of social care, and, in the right circumstances, there is no doubt that the people who had those choices approved of having them and benefited from doing so. In the case of the choice-based lettings not only did people end up more likely living in an area where they were comfortable to live, but there were also some substantial benefits from the point of view of the providers in reduction in length of voids and in terms of the speed at which you can re-let houses once they have become vacant. In the case of direct payments, the concept of direct payments, I understand, was first mooted by disabled people who were themselves able to carry out the administration that comes with being responsible for direct payments but who also wanted to have the chance to personalise their services more and viewed this as a scheme to give them more scope to do so. Again, the point of that report was to try to analyse the circumstances in which choice could lead to better public services and better experiences for individuals.

  Q503  Chairman: The proposition is not just that people may like having more choice—although in fact it may be that they are actually experiencing more control over the service rather than choice between services—but the proposition amongst the apostles of choice is that it has the effect of driving up standards overall and that it ups people's gain and that it brings in new suppliers and extends the menu of choice. Is all this true?

  Mr Wilkinson: You have been talking about choice of provider, and I cannot give you clear evidence that choice of provider leads to what you have just described, though I think there is other research that might suggest it would. I was specifically looking there at the ability for individuals to personalise services to meet their needs, and there is no doubt in my mind that, in the right circumstances, that does bring benefits. Whether that then puts pressures on the providers to improve what they do, that is not something that we—

  Q504  Chairman: This is where the terms get confused, because we think we are talking about choice and it turns out we are talking about personalisation, which is something different. Choice, in a hard sense, is increasing the availability of suppliers amongst which people can choose and claim benefits. David, I am looking at you. The Committee went to America some time ago and explored all this in relation to the school system in charter schools, and so on, and we were asking questions about: "What is the effect of having charter schools, both on the schools themselves and on the rest of the school system?", and we are still, as it were, arguing about the evidence. I think it is in the school area that we find the choice argument most difficult, do not we?

  Mr Bell: Yes. It is not the only mechanism to drive improvement, to reply to your question, but I think it is an important fillip to improvement. For example, if parents are making a choice not to send their children to a particular school and that accelerates, then there is a question about the nature of that school, what is offered, whether it is the right kind of education; and it is not an absolute perfect market, is it, because we cannot select by price. We do not say, "Here is a set of citizens that we are just going to exclude from the market altogether", but I think it has been an important factor in helping to identify where schools are not performing the way they should be and that then leads to other mechanisms for intervention and improvement. I think it is important and I think in the education system, probably after 20-odd years of parents exercising a degree of choice over school placement, most parents would now just assume that that is part of the system and that is their right to have a degree of control over where their child is educated.

  Q505  Chairman: People still cannot go into a school that they cannot go to, can they?

  Mr Bell: That is correct, and that is a situation where, even if you had all sorts of schools that were considered by any objective measure to be of a very high standard, it is very likely that some would be more popular than others. Then the question becomes: "Are different groups of people more or less likely to be able to exercise some choice in the selection of schools?", and some of the evidence has suggested that some people from less advantaged backgrounds are not as able to work the mechanisms of choice through school admissions and, therefore, one of the changes that has come out of last year's Education and Inspections Act is the introduction of Choice Advisers in local authority areas to assist parents when they are coming to make a choice. I do not deny the point that, even if you have a more informed group of customers in this context, not everyone will necessarily have their choice satisfied, and certainly not necessarily their first choice. Again, I think that leads you to have to ask about different kinds of interventions, and one intervention, of course, is that you do put different suppliers onto the market, you do say there are different kinds of schools that parents may wish to choose from.

  Q506  Paul Rowen: Picking up on what you said about choice, is it real? You mentioned choice by selecting. Is it not the fact that for the majority of people on the waiting list in this country they do not have a choice because there are not enough houses available? I met some GPs yesterday and we were talking about the Choose and Book system, and what they were saying to me was that in the past they could select the most appropriate consultant who they knew, they had a relationship with and who they felt could deal with their patients. Now on the Choose and Book system, they can choose the hospital but there is nowhere on the system that allows them or their patient to actually choose the consultant, and the system does not want them to do that. They were saying they have now got far less choice, because for most of their patients it is not a choice of the hospital as to where they go, they want to go to a local hospital, but there is no choice because of the system in terms of which consultant they can choose.

  Mr Wilkinson: I think that illustrates the difficulty with using words like choice to mean quite a range of different options. In the case of choice-based lettings, that is really a method for allocating the resources that are available in a system which is generally perceived to be fairer and more satisfactory from the perspective of the people that then get the homes. That is clearly a different question from whether or not there are sufficient resources to go around. I cannot comment on the Choose and Book system.

  Q507  Paul Rowen: With this so-called public involvement, if at the end of the day people have no choice because it is predetermined by the system, whether it is the school that you go to because there are only a limited number of places or the hospital or the house that you want, should we not stop wasting all this money on these so-called consultation mechanisms if, at the end of the day, you are going to get what you are given?

  Mr Bell: I am the wrong Permanent Secretary to ask about the Choose and Book system in health, but I think education is quite an interesting example of a movement from a system pre the 1980s where you did not have any choice at all because the decision was made elsewhere about an allocation of you to a particular school, to a system now where, yes, the majority of parents will want to have their child in a local school but they do have other options that did not exist previously. That is not a perfect system, because not every parent will get the choice of school that they want, but, in my view, it is a far preferable system to give parents and children a sense of going to a place that they have some control over choosing than a system where somebody else remote from them determines where they are going to go to school, and I think that is one of the more significant changes. I think public services cannot be immune from the general pressure that is felt across the population for people to shape what it is they want, to choose, to make choices, and so on, and I think public services have got to be up there at the same time as other services that people now just expect to be able to choose in different ways.

  Mr Wilkinson: In respect of the choice-based letting system to which you referred, I think there is evidence to show that people feel that the system is fairer, in particular, for example, between new applicants and people who want to transfer, but also that there is a greater degree of ownership of the locality because people have had some element of choice over where they go and live and they take a little bit more interest over the circumstances. So, recognising the limitations which you are describing I do not think undermines the benefits that you can get.

  Q508  Paul Rowen: I have two points about choice-based letting, and this brings up some of the issues about access. First of all, to get on to that system, with the majority of councils you have to use the Internet. Many older or poorer people, or whatever, do not have access to that. Then, if they are going to go through the traditional method on the phone or visit the thing, they are spending hours trying to get through on the phone on a daily basis. You mentioned the point about these Choice Advisers. Is it not the case that it is the well-off, the well-heeled parents who are able to move house to get into the school that they want and for everybody else you get what you are given?

  Mr Bell: I think you have to choose your mechanism accordingly. If you take, for example, the changes that we are going to be making on the student loan side, that has been driven by consumers who want to apply online. They want to be able to apply for a university place in a new system. At the same time as they apply for their university place, they will be able to identify the kind of financial support they get. That is not surprising, because in the main it is young people that apply much more frequently, so you choose your mechanism appropriately. Contrast that with some of the work we have done recently with young people, particularly the most socially excluded young people. We had a Green Paper a couple of years ago. We deliberately did not assume that every young person must have access to the Internet. That is actually not the case. We actually organised a different set of ways of getting at young people's views. I think you have to be very careful and you must not just fall into the trap of saying, "It is the modern world; everybody is on the Internet and therefore we will use it". I think that is a danger. I think maybe some public services have gone just a bit too quickly in assuming that everyone is going to use a web-based approach, when for some different groups that is not the case, and the elderly is a good example, although increasingly that is changing, if you look at the research, as well in terms of access to IT.

  Q509  Paul Rowen: Public services are driven by targets, whether it is targets for schools. The Audit Commission spends a lot of time measuring outcomes for local authorities, how well you have performed. How reflective is that methodology of what people want when you are setting the targets in the DfES? They are not being set by the young people.

  Mr Bell: I think that is an interesting question. I think government, in terms of national priorities for education, it seems to me, is entitled to say: we have a certain set of expectations, say, for a number of children or a percentage of children who should reach a particular level at English or maths by a particular stage. I doubt that that is an issue of lack of choice that people would perceive that way. I think the question then becomes: to what extent is the individual school able to choose the way it structures the curriculum and the teaching, or whatever, to meet the needs of the children to meet that particular target? I do not think it is the case that if you have national targets you somehow preclude or exclude choice. There are consequences sometimes of having targets that we could debate, but I do not think it somehow precludes choice by having a national target.

  Mr Wilkinson: The last time I came to this Committee was to talk on the subject of targets, and although we believe that you do need to have targets in a variety of different ways, we are strong believers that they need to be applied intelligently and sensibly. If I may paraphrase, I think your report, we would concur, is that you cannot manage by targets alone, and if you look at the key lines of inquiry that are within our Comprehensive Performance Assessment, they are very strong on the extent to which local authorities understand and engage with their citizens and their users so that the way in which they then provide services are appropriate for their ability to access them and their particular needs. You describe a choice-based letting system where a section of the community who needed access to it could not do so. I would raise some serious questions about whether or not that particular service had been tailored appropriately for the whole community.

  Q510  Paul Rowen: The thing about that is that that is government policy and if you do not do it that way, you are in trouble. Perhaps I could give an example, a story I was told today about a former head teacher. She used to keep two records for the primary school for this class six of the work that they were doing: a public record for the local authority so that if they actually came in they were meeting all the targets and then the actual record. The school had a number of pupils sitting entrance exams of various local schools and most of the time they were actually focused on that. Does that not illustrate that, once you set these targets, you are actually becoming like the proverbial monkeys or hamsters: you are performing or going through the hoops or making sure you are providing information to meet those targets and actually sometimes you might be doing other things to deliver what your customers want?

  Mr Bell: Absolutely right. If you look at targets and children taking national tests, I do not think anyone would argue that that should be the sum total of their education. But, equally, it really does matter if you have got an appropriate standard in English or maths, particularly when you make that transition from primary to secondary school and when you make the transition from end of school to work. My sense is that schools do recognise the need to focus on those basic subjects, but schools also offer a huge range of other issues. I do not think it is necessarily a secret record they keep. I think good schools will always say you can have a rounded education that focuses on those basics, perhaps, arguably, focused by national targets, at the same time as offering a very diverse range of other activities for young people which can be tailored to suit the needs and aspirations of users in the school or the college.

  Mr Wilkinson: There is currently a bill before the House which looks at the balance between the nationally specified targets and the scope for local flexibility for local public bodies to apply their local priorities, and, certainly from our perspective, we think there is a real danger in over-specifying at the national level and driving out the opportunity for local tailoring of services to meet particular local needs because our country is a very diverse one and local public bodies need the scope to do that. Assuming the legislation is passed, then there will be a more limited set of national targets specified and the local strategic partnerships will have enhanced scope to set their own priorities. We will, of course, have to see what the evidence is for how that works out in practice, but philosophically that sounds, from our perspective, to be a sensible way forward to try to get an appropriate balance between what is specified at a national level and what is left to local flexibility.

  Q511  Mr Walker: What age does personalised learning kick in in the classroom?

  Mr Bell: You would hope that the earliest opportunity a child has in school is going to be meeting their particular needs, so I would say as soon as a child enters school or even pre-school they should try to offer a range of alternatives and options to meet needs.

  Q512  Mr Walker: How many children are in the average primary school classroom?

  Mr Bell: It will be about 26, 27.

  Q513  Mr Walker: How can a teacher provide personalised education to 27 children?

  Mr Bell: I think there is a distinction to be drawn between individualised education, which I think would be impossible for a teacher to provide, and a personalised approach, which does not mean necessarily that every child has to be doing something completely different. There are things that children will do in common, there are different options that can be available, there are groups of children who can be working on different areas, there are children that could be using IT to support their learning and I think we know in the best classroom the best teachers actually do meet the needs, the very different and diverse needs, of children in a classroom.

  Q514  Mr Walker: You do not believe in whole class teaching then?

  Mr Bell: I do believe in whole class teaching as part of a repertoire of skills that teachers will use. No teacher, particularly if we are talking about young children, can have a diet of whole class teaching, but there are lots of occasions on which the teacher will draw children together and teach as a whole class, absolutely.

  Q515  Mr Walker: I send my children to a state primary school in Broxbourne and I want that school to do three things: I want that school to teach them to read, to write and to add up. That is what I want the school to do. I do not want my children to get a personalised learning service that sounds very trendy. I want to know when they leave that school at 11 and go to secondary school that they are equipped with the skills to succeed at secondary school, because I understand we have far too many children, tens of thousands of children, leaving primary schools who cannot read or write. So, why do not we get the fundamentals right before going on about abstract theories, such as personalised learning, which I think most people around this table would think is impossible for hard-pressed teachers to deliver when they are filling out forms for the other four hours of the day?

  Mr Bell: I am at one with you in wanting to ensure that children get to the end of primary school with the attributes that you describe. The reality is that, as you have described, not all children do that, and what we are trying to describe and what we are trying to find out are the best and most appropriate ways for all children to succeed. If you take what has happened over the last few years with the introduction of National Strategies, which has been across governments in literacy and numeracy, I think they have had a very powerful impact in helping to raise the level of attainment. We know that more children are achieving better at the end of primary school, but the reality is that we still have a number of children who do not get that appropriate level by the end of primary school, which is a crucial time, and therefore trying to tailor what we are doing to ensure that those children do get the right opportunity and get the right kind of teaching and learning is in everyone's interests. We are not disagreeing, Mr Walker, at all in the priority given to ensuring that children leave primary school with the basic skills that you have outlined.

  Q516  Mr Walker: There was something you said that worried me greatly. It probably did not worry other people, but it worried me. You said providing children with the choice of school that they go to, involving them in choosing the school. They are children. My children will go school, in essence, where I tell them to go to school. They are children; they do not have choice in these matters. Their parents make the decisions, and the idea that we all sit around with 11-year olds and discuss where they would like to go to school seems completely nonsensical?

  Mr Bell: I know, from what we pick up and what we find out, that children do express their opinions about where they go to school, some children express it quite vociferously, but, you are absolutely right, the ultimate responsibility is with the parent on behalf of the child to make that decision, and I am not suggesting there should somehow be some great democratic debate in every household in the country but I think the reality is that children, particularly as they get older, do express a view about where they might want to go to school. That is all I was reflecting. I was not suggesting that somehow children should have the final say when it comes to the choice of school. Parents have a very significant influence on where children go to school, but children sometimes express strong views. Particularly if you have got a range of schools that are actually accessible to the child, then that might become a much more pertinent conversation about where the child goes to school, particularly when they move from primary to secondary school.

  Chairman: I think we have got the flavour of the Walker household!

  Q517  David Heyes: I would like you to tell us about your dedicated consultation unit: why you have one, what the purpose is?

  Mr Bell: I think the Department for Education and Skills carries out quite a lot of consultations. Last year we reckoned there were just over 45 consultations carried out. I think our view was that, if we just left it rather haphazardly, we might end up in a situation where different parts of the department were carrying out very different approaches to consultation without actually learning as we were going. So what our consultation unit does is advise teams within the department that are about to carry out a consultation what the most appropriate mechanism is for consultation. To give you an example, the old style "send in your written comments" kind of consultation, I think we have to seriously ask ourselves whether that has had its day.

  Q518  David Heyes: That is usually asked for in July with a response date by September from schools.

  Mr Bell: In the worst possible example; I am sure that is the case. I remember as an ex-Headteacher having those sorts of gripes as well. We know that a lot of consultations, the old style written consultations, do not even generate three figures in response; so what we have been trying to do is to test out different ways. I mentioned some work we have done on the back of a Green Paper on youth matters. We have been doing quite a lot of work recently on children in care and going out and talking, not just saying to the professionals, "What do you think is most appropriate for children in care?", but actually talking to these young people, whose experiences of education are not always very positive, and trying to use that kind of learning and expertise and passing it around. We think it is better; we also think it is cheaper to do it that way. Rather than every time you do a consultation inventing it from scratch, just having some focus within the department and spreading that across department and, hopefully, across government.

  Q519  David Heyes: This is unique, I think, with DfES. I am not aware other departments do this.

  Mr Bell: As far as we know, this is the only dedicated consultation unit across government, and it is not perfect (we do not get all the consultations right, of course we do not) but I think we have been trying out and testing out different ways of consulting. Another example, I think we have often in the past assumed that in any consultation everyone will think exactly the same way, or everyone that you target is some sort of homogenous whole. Going back to the example that I gave you of consulting on the future student finance arrangements, I was quite careful to use the jargon "segmentation". A parent or a person who is sponsoring a student: what is their view of the financial system? What is the view of a student who is about to apply? What is the view of a student who is already in the system? Under the new system of loans, what is the situation of a student who has got repayments? I think that is another example of trying different ways of consulting, making sure that you segment your consultation to give you a more informed response. I think central government generally has got to think really carefully about how we go about consulting; sending out a document and asking for written comments, I think those days are gone.