RDC(3) RRSWA6

Rural Development Sub-Committee

Inquiry into Reorganisation of Schools in Rural Wales

Response from National Association for Small Schools

The Case for Small Schools as presented to representative bodies and organisations.  Submission to Welsh Assembly Rural Development Enquiry
June 2008

The National Association submits this paper on behalf of its members in Wales and in support of the contributions being made by organisations within Wales equally appreciative of the worth of small schools. Small schools tend largely to be rural in character. NASS, however, argues that rural small schools represent a model of educational quality so wholesome and effective it is needed in our towns and cities as much.

In submitting this paper NASS contributes to a rural debate within Wales. We recognise and value the role of schools at the heart of their communities as a feature sustaining rural life. We argue that the dynamic young families they represent lie at the heart of all other major rural issues such as housing, transport, employment, shops and post-offices and other services as well as the environment. However, in advocating positive approaches to rural schools, we are also defending one of the most effective models of education yet evolved from eradication, Flawed, often unsubstantiated statements shaping administrative policy threaten to close or compromise the individual identities of some 400 village schools.

NASS has observed, and of course resisted, three decades of consistent efforts to close small schools on grounds of:

• Educational viability

• Financial viability.

Educational Viability

Small schools at various times have been accused of being unable to deliver a curriculum appropriate for the time and national expectations within which they live. The evidence from research has consistently refuted this.  Nash in 1980, working in Wales, compared the performance in mathematics and English of ten two-teacher small schools with ten large schools and found no significant difference. ("Schooling in Rural Societies” Methuen 1980” )  The consistent evidence of research in the years before national test and inspection data became available confirms that no adverse findings exist in terms of results or factors such as breadth of curriculum and teaching quality.

There are several key studies but we cite that by Graham Vulliamy and Rosemary Webb from York University which found that, compared with medium and large schools, "there were relatively more innovative examples of experimentation with specialist teaching within the small schools.” They noted particularly the use of part-time staff. ("The National Curriculum in Small Primary Schools, 'Educational Review’ Vol. 47 No.1) NASS refutes the unsubstantiated claim by David Hawker, the new Assembly Education Department Director, that small schools need six subject specialists. The 44 pupils of a two-class primary school in rural Cumbria, not so different from Wales, have access to six specialist teachers by planned use of part-time teaching and still adds significant local  community specialist skills to the curriculum planned.

OFSTED in England has consistently found small schools as strongly represented at the top of national test performance as any others. In three House of Commons small school seminars (2002, 2004, 2006) OFSTED spokespersons confirmed this finding which first appeared in their comparative study, "Small Schools: How well are they doing? March 1999.” OFSTED confirmed the fact revealed by NASS analysis of DfES test evidence for 1996-1997 and 1997-1998 that schools too small for individual results to be published in fact scored more highly than the rest, larger schools, that were published. OFSTED applied socio-economic analysis to these raw scores and as a result, in terms of attainment alone, reduced this performance to parity with the best of the rest, at which they have remained, including 2007 test data.

Moreover in a Parliamentary answer to a question about overall success in test subjects Stephen Byers, then Minister of State for Schools, reported that almost three times as many schools with less than 70 on roll obtained 100% pass rates in all three required subjects than other schools. The 2007 figures show this is now as high as six times the case. Of 45 Scottish primary schools achieving 100% pass rates in 2006 in all required subjects 42 had less than 100 pupils.

The 2005 "State of the Countryside” report to Parliament by the Commission for Rural Communities studied DfES test data and reported that the best primary school results came from schools under 100 on roll and that just living in a rural ward brought better performance across the age range including secondary. This, too, sustains our wish that children in urban areas had access to such provision. We deplore the current efforts in England to make small, rural schools into bigger entities through amalgamations of one form or another, especially since this leaves such schools vulnerable to ultimate closure by their governing bodies outside the provisions of statutory guidance placed upon local authorities. This has already happened in Dorset and Warwickshire. Furthermore such amalgamations compromise the identity and autonomy of local communities.

The Scottish Executive in August 2006, following profound analysis of both performance data and socio-economic data, reported that the smaller the school the better were the outcomes. They looked not only at annual test performance but at the longer-term impact of the positive picture that emerged. They reported that the children in their smallest schools had a 25% higher chance of reaching university. Moreover children in those schools from impoverished, disadvantaged families actually made progress where their counterparts educated elsewhere, usually large, urban schools, had remained a sorry and often expensive cadre of under-achieving, disaffected pupils.

It is little surprise to NASS that so pragmatic a nation as Scotland now seeks positively through new guidance backed by strong legislation to protect small schools from unwarranted closure and will institute a "presumption against closure” similar to that obtaining in England since the OFSTED study….but in the Scottish case with more effective protection.

R.S. Johnston in Scotland produced a study in which he found that pupils from remote highland island, sparsely-populated small primary schools obtained the best results at 'Highers’, the 18+ leaving examinations which were, as now, the gateway to that same higher education the 2006 report reflects. ( 'The Survival of the Small School’  - Address to OECD/CERI Perth Conference 1979.) Again NASS argues the enduring quality of the evidence, enduring as evidence in itself but also arguing the quality of the education given when children are starting school also endures over time.

A consistently very effective Welsh local authority in terms of 18+ performance using 'A’ level results has been Ceredigion, the county with the most small and very small schools. NASS is not surprised by and welcomes Ceredigion’s reluctance, so far, to endorse the closure and amalgamation concept.  

A very rural school in Derbyshire’s Peak District in evidence arguing it should not be closed had compared the 16+ examination success rates of its former pupils with the particular secondary school’s average and the national average. These were 85%, 72% and 54% respectively. The Adjudicator ruled in favour of the school. A few years earlier Derbyshire had spoken of its utter commitment to its smaller schools and had long acted accordingly. Under the ethos of new government demands for bigger schools and new building projects even so positive a local authority has begun to unpick its convictions. The same pressure has changed the formerly positive and appreciative LEA goals and values in Somerset, Kent, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire and currently Cumbria, Oxfordshire and Suffolk.

Beyond Tests

We are aware that Wales has abolished SATs, in our view wisely as there have always been more accurate ways to analyse and report national school performance. The OFSTED comparative study went much further than comparisons of test scores. They reported that quality of teaching was higher in small schools and that there were proportionately more good teachers in smaller schools. They commended the breadth and balance of curriculum offered and noted how much the staff of small schools exploited parent and community support in achieving this. They welcomed the teaching role of the headteacher as strengthening the planning within close, small teams and offering ready access to levels and standards being attained in pupils’ work.

This finding in effect confirms that what the York researchers reported has endured. NASS argues that small school qualities in modern decades endure over time. At those House of Commons small schools seminars other speakers cited similar research. Moreover, in 2002 the Chief Education Officer of Worcestershire reported that his small schools did better than the larger ones. In 2004 his Derbyshire counterpart reported the same. The evidence is compelling.

Parents and Local Communities

We can provide similar evidence of performance from the United States and Australia. Studies of children in Tasmania living too far from the  nearest school and educated by their parents and the education authorities in tandem using radio and correspondence materials shows no adverse effects on such children in their adult lives. Their quality of language was reported as richer because their education is far more mediated though adult speech than for children in classrooms of twenty or more.

The parent role was observed by OFSTED as noted above. The majority of Gaelic-medium schools in Scotland are small, less than 100 on roll, and yet the 2006 study found such schools obtained the best results of all, even in English, taught as the second language. This is the one school subject which is certain of automatic parental application at home and that partnership between home and school in the smaller community is profoundly significant. We believe small-scale and close partnership between home and school will be a factor in Welsh-medium schools eliciting similar overall, school success, notwithstanding David Hawker’s insistence that all circumstances in Wales are unique and beyond comparison with other evidence as a result.

The mid-70s Haringey reading project testing the hypothesis that classroom learning supported at home in the same mode as experienced at school, using parents or other family members, was superior to extra teaching at school and the normal levels of teaching. The result showed over three times faster development in reading skills in this group in which children saw their family taking them in the same direction as their teachers. The Haringey project stopped when the funding stopped. NASS argues such significant and necessary partnership between home and school in educational effectiveness is more difficult as schools become larger. Small schools know their parents and can engage them in any important messages about values and standards be it reading or obesity and diet. We pick up this point in the financial section of this paper.

Research consistently shows that up to 50% of educational outcomes still reflect home background. The other 50%, not surprisingly, reflect quality of teaching. OFSTED inspectors know this and thus their emphasis in the original series of full inspections on that factor and the leadership that generates it.  Though OFSTED no longer inspects in those modes their reports consistently praise the life and work of small schools and NASS naturally wants the same glowing experiences to be available for all children.  Another 2007 outstanding school, Clutton in Cheshire, was praised for the way it used its small size to such good effect. Inspectors have begun to praise small-scale for its particular merits. Local and national government is properly concerned with provision but recently a priority has arisen for investment in resources not so established in research findings as equally effective, buildings, systems and initiatives, compared to those two fundamental resources to do with people. Education remains first a social process.

Small schools are people-rich places high on social process. Children feel safe and secure in the knowledge they are known and themselves know everyone. They see home and school sharing values and standards and taking them in the same directions. They feel that effort is worthwhile and achievement possible. The data cited above affirms that quality of achievement and personal development.  In an age when the character of childhood is changing ever more rapidly in some very disturbing ways NASS argues the small school, in town and countryside, to be a wholesome, effective and very viable form of education.  

We see no evidence of school performance in Wales such as that available in England and Scotland, but random sampling of ESTYN’s small school reports suggests a very similar quality. We cannot imagine that, if otherwise, it reflects small size as such unless Welsh teachers, pupils and schools are really so different from elsewhere.  Were ESTYN to have negative evidence about small schools one imagines LEAs pursuing closures or federations would have welcomed publication.  David Reynolds would surely have included it in his IWA Report which was distinctly lacking evidence of the impact of federation on standards.

There is little that is claimed for such 'hard’ federations, amalgamations or new schools under unitary governance and leadership, that cannot be achieved by systematic, planned local collaboration, itself externally validated, between neighbouring primary schools as well as between primary and partner secondary schools. Informal collaboration offers greater diversity than the artificial welding together of disparate communities into one new school.

Financial viability

The educational quality of small schools has been down-played by official commentators as well as some within the profession. The socio-economic context within which small schools operate is said to be more favourable than the areas with whose results small school performance is compared. OFSTED discounted superior raw test scores as a result. Nevertheless after decades in which the David Hawker fundamentally sceptical view of small school potential has dominated much official analysis, OFSTED still reported small schools so effective they recommended a place for them in national provision as a whole - because of their academic achievements and their contribution to their communities. The new Scottish Government guidance argues the same significance to the community of good local schools.

OFSTED’s socio-economic data was confined to the free school meals entitlement factor. The Scottish 2006 findings reflect more sophisticated economic analysis such as entitlement to free clothing allowances. Scotland’s smallest schools are its most successful ones and, as in Johnston’s earlier study, such schools are unlikely to be the havens of privilege openly assumed in the IWA report of David Reynolds’ study of the impact of federation on small communities in Powys and Pembrokeshire. Reynolds in his opening remarks claims campaigners for small schools in England come from counties like Surrey, Middlesex, Sussex, clearly areas with higher socio-economic context, an unfortunate pre-determining ideological standpoint. Do we liken rural families in those Welsh counties to their London commuter belt counterparts?

NASS accepts that close to major Metropolitan conurbations there are rural areas reflecting such. We argue only that the OFSTED evidence only brings small school high performance back to parity with the best of the rest. More importantly we argue that the Scottish evidence, and that from 'State of the Countryside’ cited above, show superior performance across rural areas as a whole and we submit that very many of these areas are far from havens of privilege. Average incomes are low in many rural counties such as Cornwall, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire, Durham, Northumberland, all with significant pockets of sparsity and deprivation. It is different from that found in urban communities but as distinctive in its disadvantaging impact. In a 1981 survey to establish where educational priority areas might exist Oxfordshire found that two small village schools were in the top 25 of its most disadvantaged communities using standard social services indices.

The same US and Australian evidence shows conclusively that as schools become larger the gap between rich and poor in society widens. The tired, old argument that somehow high unit costs are draining resources from the urban poor is seriously flawed. The urban poor need the same access to small schools as they start out on the big journey called education. The is also the clear implication of the Scottish evidence that in the smallest schools the impoverished and disadvantaged children can make progress.

The principal financial argument has been unit cost. These can vary considerably but at their extremes look very expensive in the case of small schools.  NASS argues that reliance on this data alone has been unfair and unwise. The debate has as a result been seriously skewed. Even those sympathetic to a fundamental small-scale philosophy will assume finance forbids it.  We offer more rational economic perspectives.

A closure proposal can cite a unit cost, say £6000 or more, and a county average of £3500 or so. That average will reflect a wide range of pupil costs, some not so far away from the particular £6000. Like is not compared with like. The county average should be compared to the average of schools within the roll levels deemed unacceptable, for example the figure used to commission review. That these roll thresholds can vary from 25 to 80 with several intermediate levels, conveniently expanded to 110 to suit current "extended services” thinking, another "big” strategy irrelevant to people in small communities, bespeaks only the wholly uncertain science sustaining closure claims of unviability.

At a West Sussex small schools conference in 1998 the Deputy CEO reported that if every two and three teacher school closed all other schools would have a one-off payment of £50. There never has been a vast pot of jam draining resources from the rest of the system and the urban poor. In even the most rural authorities little more than 6 to 8% of teachers (the dominant small school cost) work in such schools. At least half the teachers would be required elsewhere. Those unit costs may look daunting but small schools represent fragmentary portions of overall budgets.

An academic study in France of 50 schools, 22 of which had closed under rationalisation, revealed that by 1999 the overall transport costs to the surviving 28 had almost overtaken the cost of keeping the fifty open and as fifty they had achieved better results. By 2008 the cost in the UK of bussing pupils to alternative schools, using firm commercial calculations, demands £1000 to £1500 per pupil per year per five mile journey, and rising rapidly. Scottish campaigners have shown that the cost of heating, lighting, cleaning and maintaining small village schools is now significantly less than would be the cost of closing them and bussing pupils to alternative schools.

It is cheaper in most cases to keep schools open; a few years ago Somerset and Devon considered using small schools for secondary and higher education pupils who needed only a desk and a PC for particular work in order to economise on transport costs.  We need to return to such creative analysis of educational finance. As an educational measure in itself it would have been potentially useful for those pupils to return to their former village school in that way. Developments since then in mobile telephony mean contact with their own tutors has become far more manageable. Meanwhile the cost of transporting pupils has risen dramatically. Moreover research published in 2007 showed that the old Victorian/Edwardian school buildings found in rural areas have carbon footprints almost as good as anything now being purpose-designed.

The 1970s/80s US "Headstart” project spent billions of dollars in big urban inner-city elementary schools to bring parents and teachers together in shared effort where hitherto had been only mutual tension, suspicion and blame, consistent symptoms still today. They found after five years that behaviour and attitude improved, truancy reduced and attainment in the next five years was better as a result. There were parallel reductions in the cost of vandalism, drugs, street crime and other very expensive outcomes from previous failure and disaffection. Improved attainment led to more staying on, higher qualifications and better jobs, generating higher tax revenues. Overall economic analysis showed that every dollar spent earned between four and fifteen back in profit to the Exchequer, long-term. Politics has to be more sensitive to strategies that are longer-term than the next electoral cycle.

Small schools do exactly what that project did, but far more cheaply. Their OFSTED reports, indeed the Scottish evidence itself, mirrors the ethos generated in the schools and is almost certainly achieving the same long-term financial returns on the investment represented by small-scale provision, especially when children are young. Small schools are a virtuous economic investment long-term. By sharing values, effort and goals with parents so effectively they are capable of both reducing levels of educational failure, distressed families and broken communities, very expensive on other public service budgets, and enhancing tax revenues through the kind of higher achievement brought in Scotland and Ceredigion.

The Audit Commission reported in the early 1980s that even in the most rural shire counties far less was spent on people living in the villages than the towns.  A community currently defending its schools has calculated that it pays in local taxes ten times more than it receives in service benefits. The school is often the only remaining return local residents get for moneys otherwise largely providing services in towns. Ian Gilder’s study in 1979 for West Suffolk District Council of where to build urban overspill housing showed it was cheaper to provide four major public services, including education, in smaller villages than larger villages and smaller towns. This so overturned conventional thought that two academic institutions replicated the study for education and confirmed the findings. It is the other side of the same Audit Commission coin. It costs less where service provision is more meagre. It is a valid alternative economic perspective. Financial arguments well integrate with educational evidence to argue the small school model of education has overwhelming validity.

Secondary Education

Just across the border in Herefordshire are two very small secondary schools glowing with tributes and testimonials. The Specialist Schools Trust has 2500 members. They rank schools in three categories, most improved, most value-added and most highly performing. These two schools are among just 56 schools that feature in all three rankings. Fairfield School in Peterchurch, just 366 pupils, in open, fairly sparse countryside, is second best performing secondary school in the country this year. OFSTED reported it was outstanding in everything it did. Its previous report was as good, when roll was just 276 - .impossibly small by most professional administrative standpoints.  Its life and work were presented to the latest Commons Seminar on June 10^th. this year. As a small secondary school it is as people-rich as the best small primary schools. This sheer humanity of scale drives its great success and is born of smallness. 25% of its pupils have special educational needs which means its SEN value-added score, off the top of the normal scale, lends distinctive weight to the Scottish finding about disadvantaged children doing better in smaller schools.

Joined-up Thinking

NASS argues education has to be integrated across other public service provision and costs. Proposals that would centre provision in rural communities on the communities themselves, with proper access for schooling, pre-schooling and lifelong learning, would better guarantee not only longer-term security, since communities so empowered would manage such provision and work even better together to maintain and develop it, but would strengthen and enrich even further the already positive links between communities, parents and schools in the education provided to the children. It is a vision within the joined-up thinking notion. In its Select Committee Report on rural education DEFRA argued for more joined-up thinking between themselves, the former DfES and the Deputy Prime Minister’s department. Little happens though.

In terms of rural sustainability young, dynamic families and a lively school are central to all other rural concerns, housing, jobs, transport, facilities and the environment. Moreover birth-rate is now back to levels where it began to fall and the empty places arguments still being touted by those anxious to close small schools or bundle them into "big” federations are almost redundant. DEFRA and other rural agencies confidently predict migration from town to country in the next two decades which we already detect in places as far apart as Cornwall, Somerset and Cumbria.

The predicted nation-wide migration from urban to rural living is already occurring but birth-rate is equally rising and back to levels where it began to fall, so creating the high levels of unfilled places, mainly urban, that have proved so difficult and embarrassing. To concentrate provision in smaller urban new-build will avoid similar problems in future as birth-rate falls once more. Meanwhile the rural school places will be the more needed.

We believe the argument for provision in public services of "small-scale” strategy is needed beyond schools. It applies to hospitals, GP surgeries, community policing, all of which have clear benefits by being closer to those using them. There needs to be a balance between such local provision and provision that has to be central because of its distinctive and more expensive nature. This balance is not right in any of our services and is compromised by financial pressures that induce local authorities and even professional organisations to feel they must endorse one OR the other. The commitment to "big” organisation per se is not at all sophisticated enough to match need and the demands of what proves effective.

Effective small schools offer the chance to transform society through a new approach to families and communities within which education is far better located and enduringly natural. They offer safe and secure models that better reflect what is effective in teaching and learning. We have demonstrated that conventional doubts on educational and financial grounds are mistaken and even at times seriously flawed. There is scope and need for radical change in this aspect, size of schools, of the way we provide education.

The Conservative Party is already talking of a need for smaller secondary schools. Human Scale Education is pursuing a project to introduce and develop small scale operation within 50 large secondary schools, supported by significant funding from Gulbenkian, Esmée Fairbairn and Paul Hamlyn foundations. Channel 4 recently presented a programme proposing urban village concepts of secondary provision in Bristol, based on small secondary schools worked under unitary management.

Whilst endorsing such ideas NASS argues that too often when attempting to treat perceived educational and related problems we focus where the blood shows, usually in secondary years. Education is a slow-burner and the damage is almost certainly occurring far earlier. NASS has argued the urban village concept for several years but based on small primary schools or units serving streets rather than entire estates, and perhaps managed under federated leadership and governance.

The concept of the small school in the city was first advanced back in 1967 at a time of rising birth-rate and a need to bundle growing numbers of bodies into buildings in the same way that falling birth-rate has created similar demands to bundle fewer bodies into fewer buildings. Had we taken up that suggestion by Leonard Marsh, then a college lecturer and eventually an innovative College Principal, we should have avoided the later half-empty schools that arose only because we built "big.”  With radical and significant changes ahead from technology alone in the way we organise teaching and learning we are foolish again to be contemplating ever bigger schools and organisation.

Conclusion

We make no apology that in this paper we have been arguing for a model of education rather than the distinctive needs of rural communities. We argue that our thinking and the abundant evidence sustaining it indeed have significance at a time when serious problems of provision of service to rural areas have arisen.

Similarly we make no apology for reference to evidence from across national and international boundaries. We do not accept David Hawker’s hypothesis that Wales is so unique that the performance of children in small schools in rural communities in Scotland, England, even France is irrelevant. We do not accept that the evidence of just how heavy is the impact of parental effort and ambition on outcomes applies anywhere but Wales. We do not accept that Welsh teachers do not share the same influences, experience and capacities that teachers in England and Scotland apply.

We do not believe that Welsh children are immune to the evidence from valid research as to how children best learn and that clearly influences the teaching and learning in Scotland, England and elsewhere.

We do not believe the rising cost of diesel fuel has no similar impact to that already being found in Scotland, England and France nor that evidence about the impact on performance of the quality of school buildings and their carbon footprint has no meaning for Wales.

We would argue that, as elsewhere, rural Wales has distinctive need for appropriate financial recognition of sparsity and deprivation that are in no way deference to rural populations but balancing the heavy resource allocations conventionally favouring provision of services in towns. Schools and the community life they can generate represent a proper financial return on moneys paid by Welsh rural taxpayers largely providing benefits in urban areas.

We recognise that any country has distinctive characteristics, history and needs and these merit proper reflection in priorities and provision.  Wales has a rich and important heritage. Much of its character has arisen in rural community life and circumstance, notwithstanding the changes brought by the industrial age which have added their influence. We do not believe the model of education we advocate for rural and urban areas would impair proper respect for such heritage but indeed, by emphasising and better enabling partnership between home and school, deepen it.

Bill Goodhand, Chairman
Barbara Taylor, Secretary

National Association for Small Schools
'Quarrenden,’ Upper Red Cross Road, Goring  RG8 9BD, Tel: 01491 873548
Tel: 01400  272623 Information Officer:  Mervyn Benford  Tel:  01295 780225