Ask Education Secretary Charles Clarke

Ask Education Secretary Charles Clarke

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Charles Clarke was appointed Education Secretary in October 2002 after the surprise resignation of Estelle Morris.

He took over a department rocked by the A-level grading fiasco and preparing to make politically difficult decisions on changes to the way students are funded at university.

But since taking on his new role, Mr Clarke has already announced his plans for a wide-ranging and long-awaited shake-up of higher education in England.

They include allowing universities to charge top-up fees and a pledge to increase the number of specialist schools to encourage higher standards in secondary education.

The A-levels system is also under consideration and could be replaced by an "English baccalaureate".

On Tuesday Mr Clarke - who has a reputation for political toughness - issued a deliberate snub to the biggest teachers' union, the NUT, by saying no ministers would attend its annual conference this Easter.

Charles Clarke answered your questions in a LIVE interactive forum.

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Transcript

Mike Baker:
Welcome to this interactive forum. I'm Mike Baker. My guest today is Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education and Skills. And this is a timely appearance - just yesterday Mr Clarke was making the news with his announcement of a ministerial boycott of the NUT's annual conference. And as you might expect we have some questions on that. Mr Clarke has certainly been busy in the three months since he took up his job. In that time he's delivered a major package of reforms for higher education, specifically introducing top up fees. He's also set out his vision for secondary schools. So welcome Mr Clarke and let's go straight on to the questions.

The first one's, as you might expect, on the NUT and this is from Daniel Coysh from London who says: "Why are you snubbing the NUT annual conference? I thought you were meant to be some kind of tough cabinet bruiser."

Charles Clarke:
Well other people call me tough cabinet bruiser, not myself, it's my self description. But the reason's quite simple - you look at the conduct of the NUT conference, the delegates at the conference over the last few years, when dealing with politicians of all kinds actually and a lack of willingness to discuss the issues properly and I don't think that Easter event has brought any good news for the teaching profession as a whole, certainly not for the NUT, but not for teaching in general - it hasn't encouraged people into teaching, it's looked like a rabble. And in my opinion I don't want to encourage that or move it forward. That's the reason why I'm not going to the conference. I also think that the NUT should think again about its decision not to participate in our agreement on workforce reform, which all the other teaching unions and also the non-teaching unions have agreed to, because I think that's the way of the future - partnership in schools - but that's another matter, that's a policy matter which I'm happy to discuss with the NUT any time but it has to be on the basis of genuine forums.

Mike Baker:
There's a number of others on a similar vein but let me sum them up really, along the lines of what Mark Johnson is saying, Mark Johnson from Nottingham, he says: "How can you explain to teachers, if you're not going to attend the conference of the largest union, how can you explain that you actually do want to listen to the concerns of teachers?"

Charles Clarke:
Well we've had conferences running over the last autumn for every secondary headteacher in Britain, we're now doing it for primary heads and we are talking very widely to teachers and I and my colleagues are going to all the other teacher union conferences. But the whole essence - the whole essence - of going to conferences, having events, is to exchange views and have a dialogue. The NUT asked me to go up to Blackpool for 10 minutes in an environment where everybody who's in teaching knows the NUT conference has been a bear garden with no substantive debate and discussion over many years now. I hope the NUT will decide to conduct itself differently and I'm absolutely ready to discuss with them in any time and place how we address this question of the future of education and workforce reform and so on. But as I say the key issue for me politically for the NUT is do they want to be a serious partner in debate? And they should want that, they've got a great history of doing that, they've been a progressive forward looking union in the past and I hope they decide to return to that tradition.

Mike Baker:
And if they do you would then be happy to go to their conference again?

Charles Clarke:
Of course and it's a perfectly reasonable thing but you know Mike, you've reported these conferences in recent years, and you know the way it's been and the kind of approach that's been taken and I don't think that's an intelligent way to debate things - it's been more like an unruly class than a serious group of professionals.

Mike Baker:
Now, as I say, we have a lot on that issue but we've had far more on the issue of university fees, which won't surprise you after your big White Paper announcement just last month. Let me start with this one from Julia Goldsworthy from London, she says: "How much extra funding will the differential fees bring in to universities and will it be enough to fill the current funding gap?"

Charles Clarke:
Well we put from the Government six per cent a year increase in real terms over this comprehensive spending review period, which is the biggest settlement for decades and is very substantial itself. The question of how much extra funding comes in through differential fees will obviously depend on which universities and how many decide to raise fees to what level. At the moment about 7.5 billion altogether is spent on universities, of which about 400 million comes in, in student fees, so the lion's share is paid by the state and that will continue. But depending on what assumptions you make that 400 million might go up to 700, 800, 900 million altogether - that would be the kind of order of it. Does it meet the funding gap? Not completely no. The fact is we've been at a position where funding's been at a low level for many decades, I think one of the reasons for that is education's had to compete - universities had to compete against other parts of education for money from the taxpayer which is why we think bringing in more money from fees was a good idea.

Mike Baker:
Now I've just had an e-mail that's just come in, it's from Ian Griggs Spore, from the United Kingdom, who says: "Why are you opposed to funding university education out of general taxation, wouldn't that be simpler than all this complicated arrangement of top up fees and bursaries and all the rest of it?" Simply out of general taxation as we pay for other things?

Charles Clarke:
Well we do fund, as I said a second ago, the overwhelming bulk of university education does come exactly from that, from general taxation. But there's a big argument, which let me describe in my position - I'm faced with competing demands within the overall education budget from nursery education, primary schools, skills, universities and so on, in that competition most secretaries of state for education tend to prioritise primary and secondary schools, for good reason because the future of the country depends on that. We, as a government, have decided to put more resources, I think quite rightly, into nursery education - three and four year olds with our Sure Start programme and so on - again for the reason that all the evidence is that if you get a good start then in that way life works out better. So you have universities competing in a very competitive field - and I'm now not talking about other issues like health as well, which we're trying to fund - and if you just have the universities coming from general taxation they're always going to be scrabbling around for money and that is the reason - that is actually what's happened over the two or three decades, that's why universities have got settlements which have just about managed but the pressures on basic resources, on academic salaries, on books and libraries and so on, have been so great. So I think having an extra source of income needs to be considered. I also argue Mike, and I think it's an important point, that it's not unreasonable for students who are going to have the ability to earn significantly more throughout their lives, as a result of their university education, to pay a little bit themselves more towards the university education which has benefited them.

Mike Baker:
Now we've got some very specific points here, this one from Mark Curry. He wants to know: "In view of your determination to broaden access, to get a wider range of people going to university, why not exempt the poorer students from the full £3,000 - if the university chooses to charge that - rather than simply the first £1100?"

Charles Clarke:
Well we are considering that actually. As you say we're exempting the poorest 40 per cent from the 1100 as now and we're bringing in a grant system from next year of a £1,000 a year to help with maintenance, which is costing us about £280 - 300 million, and about a third of all students will be able to get that £1,000 grant. But we are considering - we've flagged it up in the White Paper - that as we look at the way in which we implement things after the university fees can be raised, after 2006, whether that money might not be better spent in dealing with the total refund of the total fee going up to 3,000 if that's what happened - we're discussing that with universities and so we don't rule it out. But at the moment we think the grant is the best way to approach the position of those and the poorest together with the remission of fees for 40 per cent of the population but we're not closed to looking at the idea that Mark suggests.

Mike Baker:
That is very interesting, I don't think many people would pick that up from the White Paper that you were considering that. If you were to consider it, how soon might you do it - would that be after the introduction of the fees, after you've seen how it works or could it be from the beginning?

Charles Clarke:
It'll be sooner, it'll be one of the things we look at going into the next comprehensive spending review period, i.e. over the next year and a half or so we'll be sorting out what we bid for from government for the next three years of spending after this current three year ends and we'll be looking at it in this context. We'll be talking about it with universities because many universities acknowledge that like American universities they should put money in, in the form of bursaries and so on to help students from the poorest backgrounds and we'll just come to a view after some discussion about what's the best way to proceed in that area.

Mike Baker:
Now we've had another one just come in from Emma Roberts in Oxford and I think this is a wide concern too about the current student loan that's available - there's a higher rate at the moment available if you live in London - but Emma's point is really this should be increased to cover the entire South East to reflect the high cost of living in Oxford but also in many other places, what do you think of that? Charles Clarke:
Well I think she has a point. The fact is that the last time which the level of maintenance loan was reviewed was 1998/9, we've now implemented, and again I announced this in the White Paper, a review of current living costs which will look at the situation right across the country and so that Emma's point about London and the South East can be considered in that context, to see what the real costs of being a student are now. And on the basis of that analysis, which will be completed - I can't remember the exact time - of the order of nine months to a year from now - we'll then make a view about what the appropriate level of loan would be, both across the country and in particular parts of the country. And it may well be necessary to reflect different living costs. The problem is that housing is the key issue for London and it is for the rest of the South East and the question of the place of student housing within that is very different in different parts of the country. Some universities in the South East do have substantial student accommodation that's available, others don't. So those are the issues we'll be looking at in that survey and then we'll take a view on meeting in this point.

Mike Baker:
So ??? some reassurance there, he's certainly looking at it and it is a possibility that that London allowance could be extended wider than that and you may even have other bands throughout the country possibly?

Charles Clarke:
That's right, I mean what we want to know are what the real living costs of students and that's the analysis that we're doing, together with the National Union of Students with whom we work with on these things to come to a rational real world assessment of today.

Mike Baker:
Now I have a question here on the access regulator. This is from Patrick Watson in London and he's concerned that if you have the access regulator coming up, in place from 2005 he believes and the top up fees starting from 2006, is that really long enough for the access regulator to be able to say which universities have done enough in order to justify putting up - using the top up fees?

Charles Clarke:
Well we're working to get the access regulator in as fast as possible and we are prepared to consider doing that before the actual - having a kind of shadow regulator before the legislation is passed to establish it. So I think the timescales will be enough to make at least initial judgements. But the broader long term judgements will only take place over a period of years and universities will have to demonstrate, and in my opinion rightly so, that they're not only committed to a system that actually does encourage people from all backgrounds to go but also actually achieves results and outcomes against which they'll be monitored. So the time factor is a factor, I understand why Patrick's raising it in the way he is, but I think we've got enough time to put the regime in place.

Mike Baker:
Now there's one issue which has been raised by several people, I won't be able to name them all, but they're very concerned that under these changes that you're proposing and that universities are now beginning to realise that if they're going to meet the requirements of the access regulator they need to take more students from poorer homes and particularly from state schools and we had news from Edinburgh yesterday - Edinburgh University changing its ... now several of these people, many of them with children in independent schools, are concerned that it'll be unfair - it'll no longer be a level playing field. What do you think specifically of Edinburgh's proposals and in general are independent school students going to be discriminated against?

Charles Clarke:
Well no they're not. The fundamental fact is we're looking at ability and attainment but also at potential. And there's a lot of evidence that people, not just people from different kinds of schools but people who go to university later in life for example, do better at university than people who go straight from school. So there's a lot of issues which universities are taking into account. Now each university has to establish its own approach and I'm not going to comment on Edinburgh's in particular or anybody else's in particular but I think Edinburgh's right to focus on how it can achieve the ambition of finding the students who really have got potential to deliver. But I don't want to be rude to anybody who buys places at independent school, I went to private school myself, but the fact if anybody thinks they can buy a place into university simply by sending their child to private school they can't. What they can do is get a good quality education, which most independent schools do provide, and if they get a good education, get the good results, they'll get the university place.

Mike Baker:
Okay, there are lots more, as I say, on these but we've got also several other subjects still. I'm going to move on to the next issue. It won't surprise you that there's a question here about grammar schools. This is from David Pollard. He says: "Is it true that you wish to see the abolition of all grammar schools and if so, is it not purely for flawed ideological reasons?" Now I want to couple that with another question from Chris James in Cheltenham who says: "What do you think should be done to get all schools to add as much value as the grammar schools?" So you're being attacked there from both sides I think.

Charles Clarke:
On the first point, first of all, it's not true that I want to get rid of all grammar schools. What I do want is a proper debate about the impact upon education standards of a particular system of selection. There are very many good grammar schools in this country, there are very many good secondary modern schools and a large number of excellent comprehensive schools. So the issue isn't about the quality of the schools, the issue is about the impact of the system, in particular the impact on large numbers of children who don't get into grammar school and are essentially rebuffed by the 11-plus and told they're failures at that point, which I think is wrong, that's why I personally don't like the idea of selection at that point. But it's not coming from an ideological point of view still less from a flawed ideological point of view. It's coming from trying to have a proper assessment of educational standards for everybody and that's what I'm encouraging - the debate on that basis.

Now on the point about value added the key thing there is to improve the quality of schools - whether they're grammar schools or any other types of schools. And if you look at the recent value added tables schools of all types did very well within that system. In the top performing schools there were comprehensive schools, there were specialist schools as part of the comprehensive system, there were grammar schools and so on - they were all there. And that's as it should be and we have a whole set of measures, which I won't go through now Mike, unless you'd like me to, where we're seeing how we want to try and improve the quality of education in all schools. But that's not a question of selection or not.

Mike Baker:
Well just to finish on the grammar schools then - in your priorities where does it lie on a scale of one to ten where does doing something about grammar schools lie in your priorities?

Charles Clarke:
Oh quite low. I mean seven, eight, something like that, if you use one as the top. My priority is one, I see my responsibility to get good quality schools throughout the country, that has to be my number one priority. My biggest political issue at the moment is how education has to deal with the issues which some of your correspondents raised earlier and I think my biggest opportunity is training and skills and the Learning and Skills Council where we need to do a great deal more in making things happen. But they're all well up the list compared to the grammar issue - delivering proper Sure Start early years programme is very important as well. So I've got a lot of priorities. And I just think that grammar school supporters should be ready to debate, like everybody else in the country has to, what is the quality of education and what's really going on.

Mike Baker:
Now judging by the volume of e-mails we've had another important issue, certainly for teachers, is the issue of teachers' pay and their conditions. I'm going to pick just one from several here - Dan Wise from Kent says: "Why is it that the latest deal struck by the unions and the Government to improve working conditions for teachers is having to be paid for by the teachers?" I think he's referring to the fact, as he puts it, that their pay has gone up just at the level of inflation in order to find the money to bring in the extra classroom assistants and so on to make the deal work.

Charles Clarke:
Oh well there's two or three different things to say about that. The first is the overall pay increase across the country recommended by the Independent Review Body is 2.9 per cent which is slightly above inflation. But I think it's worth emphasising Mike that if you look at the increase in teachers' pay since we were elected in 1997 it's been very significant in real terms and rightly so because teachers deserve the money.

The second thing to say is that the figures I've given generally across the country doesn't apply in London because the Review Body specifically recognised the major issues of recruitment and retention of teachers in London and recommended very significantly higher increases in London and I've accepted those recommendations.

The third thing to say on the point that Dan's specifically raised is that the main or a main complaint we get from teachers is the overall workload, the fact that they're doing jobs which are not real teaching jobs but organisation and administrative jobs, the bureaucracy issues and so on and very many teachers said to us they want to get to a position of being better supported in schools. Now that's exactly what our workforce agreement does and I think in doing that addresses a concern amongst teachers which sometimes leads them to leave teaching, at least as great as the pay issues. So I think that any government has to say what are the various issues, how do we address them? And pretty high on our list was the problem of needing to get teachers proper support in classrooms and that's why we've got the workforce agreement and that's what I hope we'll be able to achieve.

Mike Baker:
Your comments are prompting a response, we've just had a live e-mail in from Stuart McKinnon in Glasgow who says: "What incentives are going to be introduced for new teachers as there are still major deficits in certain subjects?"

Charles Clarke:
Well I don't know the Scottish position, Stuart's calling from Glasgow and I was up there on Saturday talking to - on Friday and Saturday - talking to Cathy Jamieson, the education minister, but they have a different set of issues in Scotland so I can't speak - and different pay arrangements and so on. But generally teacher recruitment is improving very significantly, in fact figures just yesterday released of significantly more people wanting to come into teaching. And we do have particular packages for the shortage subjects like maths and languages where we offer particular incentives but we keep that under constant review, as does the Review Body, to see where we need to put more in. And what the Review Body concluded in its announcement this time was that our biggest problem on recruitment and retention was actually teachers in London and teachers that had been teaching in London for five or six years, i.e. not at the immediate recruitment point but after they'd been already working for a few years in London. And the Review Body recommendations acknowledged that, which is why I supported them and accepted them and that's where our real shortage issue is.

Mike Baker:
Okay we can't let you go without a question about A Levels, I know you came into the job really after the worst of that sort of crisis was over but obviously there are going to be issues to look at ahead. This one's come in from Ginette Cox in Bracknell and she says: "Is it really such a good idea before the new A Level system is well established for people to be talking about diving off into a new area that of the baccalaureate?"

Charles Clarke:
Well Ginette's on a very powerful point and we've been very worried about this because I have two real priorities in this area. First it's to make sure there's absolute confidence in the integrity and strength of the existing system and secondly is to look to what might be an appropriate system for the future. And obviously there's a danger if we get the balance between those two things wrong that we can fall into the hole that Ginette's just described. I hope we haven't done that, I don't think we've done that. What we are saying is for a considerable period of time we will stick with the existing system and any new system that we brought in would need to be very well considered, which is why I asked Mike Tomlinson to set up a committee to report in a year or so's time, and then to be introduced on a basis of consensus across the education system about what ought to be done maybe in four or five years time from now. So I don't think we can just say no we're not going to talk about any of these things in the future but I do think Ginette's right to say that we've got to focus on making the existing system robust and I think that's what we're trying to do. But I don't think, as I say, that can exclude any discussion of any changes sometime in the future.

Mike Baker:
And are you reasonably confident things will go smoothly this year - there have already been some warnings about there being a shortage of markers?

Charles Clarke:
I am confident about that. I talk to the QCA - the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority who have responsibility for this - on a regular basis and I've offered them whatever support they need and they've accepted that and they've also said that if they need more support they'll come back to me and I said if they ask me then I'll give it to them. So I'm confident this will operate effectively but as Ken Boston, the secretary of the QCA, said the other day there can never be absolute certainty in life and that we're doing our best, things could go wrong but I don't believe that will happen.

Mike Baker:
Another live e-mail that's just come in from Tom Hadfield in Brighton, I think this might come into the category in parliamentary terms of a helpful question: "In the Education Secretary's opinion is the education budget high enough?"

Charles Clarke:
No. I can't imagine any circumstances in which the education budget would be high enough. The whole future of the country depends on education and we're going to compete in the world on the basis of the talents and skills of our population not on the basis of low pay and so on, I hope. And we therefore continue to need more and to drive forward more and get more lifelong learning and better education throughout life, so it can never be high enough. But it very much depends what the society's prepared to pay in terms of tax and so on and that's something we just have to look at but I will always campaign for more resources to go into education. I'm not dogmatic about it, I don't say it has to be through tax, that's why we mention the fees in the university context, but we need more resources and more commitment to our future which is what education is.

Mike Baker:
Now further education, you did actually announce some more money for them, it was one of the first things you did when you came in but we have an e-mail here from Glenn Holmes in Romford who says he's recently concerned to read that further education teachers get paid 12 per cent less than school teachers and wants to know what you're going to do to rectify the situation.

Charles Clarke:
To try and close the gap is the answer to that question. We've committed ourselves in our manifesto to doing that. The announcements that I made, as you say, shortly after I started at the Association of Colleges Conference indicated how that could be done. I think if you talk to the trade unions concerned, as I have done very recently, they will acknowledge that we are taking some steps in that direction and narrowing the gap and that's a perfectly worthy aspiration and we'll go down that path.

Mike Baker:
We've just had a text message in from Rico de Marco in Staffordshire, I think it's not so much a question but more a comment. He says: "I think the education system, as it stands today, is a shambles and the UK has the worst system in the EU." Is that true - are we the worst system in the EU?

Charles Clarke:
No we're a long way off it. If you look at a recent survey conducted not by the EU actually but by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most of the EU countries but also countries like America, Australia, New Zealand and so on, so called Pisa tests which assess ability and attainment, we're doing very, very well indeed, better than most other European countries. If you look at other European countries, as I do, they feel that many of the things we're doing are very positive indeed. I don't know which country Rico comes from and where he's comparing it with but I don't think it's unfair to say that most countries in Europe would be proud to have the kind of education system that we have. Now that's not to say there are not massive problems in our education system, there are, and that's what we're trying to address but to go round talking ourselves down I don't think is the right way to proceed.

Mike Baker:
Okay, one more just to finish off now, this one's from Daniel in Bath, similar issue really, comparing us with other systems. Daniel says an American recently joined his course at Bath University for the year and she was surprised that Bath was considered one of the top institutions in the country, she commented on the quality of teaching and the facilities. What do you propose that universities do to become top class, if not world class? I suppose that's bringing us back to where we began.

Charles Clarke:
Well it is but I mean one of the things I tried to do in that White Paper was to say we had to focus much more on teaching. I think one of the results of the American system where students pay more is that consumer demand is heard more and people are less tolerant of the kinds of low quality teaching that do exist in some parts of the university system - I'm not saying that to Bath in particular of course - but they do exist in various areas and we have to be intolerant of it. And I think the proposals that I've put in place with the annual assessment to the quality of teaching, the extra resources to deal with basic resources, will make a difference in all of those areas.

Mike Baker:
Well my thanks very much to you Charles Clarke for joining us and I'm afraid that's all we have time for. Thank you for your questions, there's been a great number, I'm sorry to those of you that we weren't able to ask more of them but from me Mike Baker and from the rest of the news interactive team thanks for watching and goodbye.