Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q 6 Dr Homden, I think you were about to answer the question before we went to vote.

Carol Homden: In establishing regional entities, which Coram has already done, local authorities have taken a range of different views in what will best meet their needs, and have used a procurement and contract process in order to align those needs. Different local authorities will apply different modules and commission different services.

We have in process the formation of such an entity with a set of five local authorities, which will see those different approaches taken, but all of them will benefit from a centre of expertise with resilience in practice leadership and social work retention and, therefore, offering added benefits to children and adopters locally on a hub-and-spokes model. You are quite correct, Mr McCabe, that this is about taking a power, but I am sure that good sense would prevail: if excellence in practice is being delivered and something is not broken, then it does not need to be mended, irrespective of questions of scale.

Annie Crombie: What we want is a local authority to look as widely and swiftly as possible for the best possible match for a child, and not to be constrained in doing that by looking only, or for a long time, introducing delay, within their own local authority area. We need to ensure that in moving towards regional adoption agencies we do not introduce a disincentive for local authorities to look outside a regional adoption agency if the right placement is outside rather than inside. It is that kind of issue that is again around that sequential decision making, which we need to ensure we address as the policy on this develops.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Q 7 The relevant clause in the Bill talks only about adoption, but there other forms of permanence. In fact, for most children in care, the other forms of permanence are where they end up. Do you have concerns that the measure will exacerbate an existing gap in the quality—or perceived quality, at least—of adoption and fostering, residential care and kinship care?

Sir Martin Narey: I do not take that view. I think the Government, certainly encouraged by me in my role of the past few years, are encouraging adoption because adoption happens to be the disposal that has been in such long-term decline. I am puzzled when people talk about the emphasis being given to adoption, as opposed to other disposals. The number of special guardianships, from a zero start in 2006, has now caught up with adoption. There were 5,000 adoptions last year and 75,000 fostering placements.

Adoption has been in long-term decline, despite some spirited attempts to revive it by the Labour Government, who inherited figures of about 2,000 adoptions and got them up to about 3,700. The figures then immediately fell away again. This Government have brought great leadership to it and have got the numbers up to about 5,000. In 1975, there were 24,000 adoptions a year in England. Adoption has been in long-term decline, despite the evidence that it offers quite extraordinary advantages in terms of permanence and outcomes for children.

Despite all the difficulties that adoption can present, it offers quite extraordinary options for changing the lives of neglected children. Even after the recent slowdown in placement orders, we still have children waiting for adoption who need it as soon as possible. We are right to try to make sure that we have a system that is more fit for purpose and can fill that gap.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 8 Before I come to Dr Homden and Annie Crombie, is there anything in the Bill that will help children who are placed through other forms of permanence?

Sir Martin Narey: There is nothing in the Bill that will do that. I believe, however, that the emphasis on adoption has had significant advantages for other forms of placement. The emphasis on responding to neglect means that the Government have done other things to make long-term fostering easier—the development of and financial investment in special guardianship. A lot more has happened in dealing with neglect and adoption, but adoption is still not meeting the role it could play in responding to neglect.

Carol Homden: I agree with that. Adoption is not in conflict with other forms of permanence. It is an exemplar of when the care system works correctly for children for whom the risks are so great that the decision has been taken, by due process, that they need to be placed in a new, loving family. We need to guard against putting up different forms of solution for children as if they are somehow in conflict with one another. We need to aspire to ensure that the appropriate decision making is in the timescale of the child, and that children’s need for continuity of relationships and attachments is foregrounded in all those decisions and in the actuality of practice.

All too often, children from the care system report repeated changes in social worker and in placement. That is where our attention should sit, but the Bill focuses on seeking to accelerate and accentuate a direction of travel to ensure the maximum benefit for children for whom adoption is the right plan. I commend to you a further focus and emphasis on the benefits of concurrent planning and foster-to-adopt approaches—particularly concurrent planning, which offers a fully fair, appropriate and transparent way to foreground children’s need for attachment, while allowing all proper support and opportunities for birth parents to demonstrate their capability to change.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 9 As far as you are concerned, will the Bill’s provisions help with the challenges you have outlined?

Carol Homden: It certainly will. It is not possible for very small agencies, however noble their intent, to provide sufficient opportunities for concurrent planning, which is a specialist form—for example, within a very small social work team. Having a larger base of resilient social work will allow that kind of opportunity to become normalised for more children.

For example, in the establishment of Coram Cambridgeshire Adoption—the first voluntary adoption agency into which Cambridgeshire County Council has delegated its adoption functions—we simultaneously introduced concurrent planning. Twenty-five per cent. of adoption placements in Cambridgeshire were made through concurrent planning last year, with significant benefits for the timeliness and for those children’s attachments.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 10 Will the Bill help with children who are sometimes regarded as hard to place—sibling groups or children with disabilities, for example?

Carol Homden: In my view, absolutely; definitely. Those are the circumstances in which the principle that Annie indicated—the principle of having the widest possible range of adopters and specialist services available to provide the necessary ongoing, reliable and consistent post-adoption support—is more likely to be resiliently achieved within a larger grouping of agencies that have a common purpose.

Annie Crombie: I agree with much of that. The point about scale and the specialism of adoption services is important. If regional adoption agencies work well, it could allow agencies that really specialise, or develop specialist expertise—such as some that I represent—to offer their services in a much more structured way across a wider number of local authorities, rather than it being a question of an individual relationship or a happy coming-together in the margins of a conference with a local authority making an arrangement with a particular voluntary adoption agency that has a specialism in a particular type of work. We could see those sorts of services being made available in a more systematised and structured way, which would benefit more children.

To come to the earlier point that you made, I welcome the way that the Government document published to support this opens the door to arrangements that go wider than adoption. Many of the voluntary organisations that work in this area provide services across more than just adoption; some do not, some are very adoption-focused, but many do. It may well make sense to think more broadly than just adoption, but there is something about specialism here that is important, and which I think we all want to see developed in relation to some aspects of adoption.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

Q 11 Good afternoon. My question is to everyone in turn. The Bill states that an authority’s functions may be taken on by either another local authority or another adoption agency but there is nothing to say which criteria the Secretary of State will choose for the preferred option. I was wondering whether the panel could help out the Secretary of State and suggest what kind of criteria she might use.

Annie Crombie: I do not imagine that the Secretary of State would disagree that it is really important that quality should be at the heart of any regional adoption agency and that we need to think about expertise in the different elements of what is needed to be able to provide a good adoption service. If a group of local adoption authorities without any particular strength in low incidence adoption support—without any specialism in particular provision of therapeutic services—were to come together, it would not provide a strong service for children in the area. If they include someone with a specialism or real, and proven, expertise in adoption support, then that would be much better. So it is about quality across all the different elements of what an adoption service needs to do.

Carol Homden: Quite clearly, excellence for children is what needs to drive us. That is our sole focus and concern. Therefore, in making any decisions on intervention, I think that the Government would wish to consider the criteria that it applies in other circumstances where there is a shortfall against national standards. In considering how we might take forward regional adoption agencies we, as an organisation that already provides regional adoption agencies, have given considerable thought to this and would recommend including six key criteria that should be taken into account—we would be prepared to give written evidence of those recommendations.

The first is that bringing weak things together does not in itself make a strong thing. Any hub should therefore include at least one agency, as the lead, that is rated either good or outstanding. The aim must be to replicate good practice, not to concentrate less good practice. Steps should be taken to ensure that not all the agencies forming the arrangement are characterised by a high turnover in social work staff, since relationship continuity is essential to the support of adopters and children and effective planning. Data collection and case-tracking systems are directly related to performance management and should be robust in at least one agency. There is considerable complexity in the different systems used by local authorities and the more of them that are involved in any regional agency, the more complexity and difficulty there is in managing risk and optimising outcomes. The definition of a cluster should relate to road transport and not to the other forms of consideration around what might constitute a region. The important factor here, as it is for a special school, would be the travel distance involved for adopters and children to access the services that they need.

Any hub should explain how it will build upon the cross-regional system support that is already provided in our nation. This includes, for example, First4Adoption, which has demonstrated the benefits of consistent customer service and could do far more on a cross-national basis. Every hub should undertake a market risk assessment if it is excluding any voluntary adoption agency, since more than 90% of voluntary adoption agencies are good or outstanding. Any loss of that excellence in the system could only be a disbenefit to children.

Sir Martin Narey: I will not give you six criteria but just one. I have not given much thought to the criteria for how this will be used, because I genuinely believe that there will be a significant move towards regionalisation, which will occur of its own volition. This was poised to happen before the election. For me, the overwhelming criterion when we look at adoption—or indeed other forms of permanence—is how quickly we rescue a child from neglect and put them into a home in which permanence is achieved, and where the reparative work can begin.

We have made great strides with recruitment, but matching still takes far too long. The main criterion for me is how quickly we can improve the process of matching and achieve greater pragmatism in matching. Matching between adopters and children sometimes takes too long as we search for the mythical set of perfect parents, but the sooner we get children into permanent homes, the sooner and more complete will be their recovery from the desperately adverse consequences of being brought up in neglect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Trevelyan]

Q 23 You mentioned in your written submission that this may prove more difficult for children with complex needs, although it might be successful for children who are less needy. Could you expand on why you think that is the case?

Andy Leary-May: Yes, it is based on some anecdotal evidence, but also on the study that the DFE commissioned in 2010, which is referred to in the briefing paper on this. It points to the fact that, as the study found, some local authorities—some agencies—wait too long to look widely for a match for children. It is quite right that that causes harm. It also specifically pointed out that the larger local authorities were the worst at this. From talking to agencies in my role, I see that there is a tendency for the larger local authorities to feel so self-sufficient in their own supply of adopters that they feel there is less need to look outside for placements.

If you accept the fact that interagency placement is not working, and you do not try to address that problem, in some ways increasing the scale of the agencies would help, because there would be a larger pool. Our service has only been running for a year and we have only matched just over 250 children, but our experience is that half the placements that have been made—and these tend to be the harder-to-place children that we see—are between neighbouring regions. That indicates to me that there are children for whom it is necessary to go outside their region to find the right placement—the right family. I worry that if we increase the scale of agencies, and I think there could be many benefits to consolidating and increasing their size, unless we address the problems that exist—the barriers to inter-agency matching—the children with the most complex needs may wait longer to find a suitable placement.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 24 You said earlier that you wanted to clarify what the problems are that the Bill is addressing. You mentioned issues around children with complex needs; is that the primary one or are there others?

Andy Leary-May: Not defined by who it is trying to help, necessarily, but I think it would be helpful if, rather than looking at the number of adoptions, for example, there were measures looking at the outcomes for the children, if at all possible, and some measure of how agencies may already be collaborating together. We did a quick survey last week of the adoption social workers using our system, and by far the majority of them commented that they felt that they were already collaborating as well as they possibly could. That is not necessarily true in all cases, but I think the possibility that there may be a group of agencies doing everything that you would hope that they would be doing should be looked at. There should be something that would help local authorities and agencies to know if they are doing as well as expected.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 25 Okay. In the last session, I think we heard the suggestion that the Bill will help with other forms of permanence, so even though it concentrates just on adoption, it will help with fostering, residential care and kinship care. Do you both agree?

Andy Leary-May: For me, not to the extent that I think it could. There are still issues in adoption with children finding the most suitable placements, and they are barriers that will probably not be solved by increasing the scale of agencies. Whatever barriers and organisational issues there are within adoption, the same issues are within fostering, and to a much greater extent and affecting far more children. I do not think that we should look at one or the other. It should not be a competition between them as to which gets the focus; not to address the same kinds of issues that exist within fostering would miss a very large part of the picture.

Hugh Thornbery: The Bill itself does not tackle any issues beyond changing the infrastructure that delivers adoption. Very helpfully, and I think this has been a development in terms of Government thinking, the discussion paper, which is what we are hoping will initiate a bottom-up-led approach to this, talks about the potential to move beyond the narrow confines of adoption and think more broadly about permanence. If local areas, in thinking about taking a regional approach, were to exclude too early the broadening out to other forms of permanence, that would be a real mistake.

We have seen over the past 12 months or so, a significant decline in the number of children coming into the adoption system and a big increase in younger children going to special guardianship. That informs us that we are working in an environment where pathways towards permanence can be unpredictable. We have seen significant changes recently, and I think that if we had put a lot of effort into setting up regional arrangements just around adoption, we would be missing a trick. My view is that the opportunity is there at a local level to broaden this out. That would be the right thing to do. I also think that it is right to continue to improve the adoption system. As you heard from Sir Martin Narey, adoption can do things that other forms of permanence cannot in providing total long-term security and continuity for children. We know that the outcomes for those children are better than if they stay elsewhere.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 26 Do you think the Bill helps with or hinders other forms of permanence?

Hugh Thornbery: Looking at the legislation, I think it forces people to think about adoption, but it does not necessarily hinder the development of a broader approach to permanence. I say elsewhere that the Government are encouraging that in the paper they produced. It is quite difficult to think about how the same degree of direction as is contained within the clauses of the Bill could be applied to wider permanence. I think it is easier to focus that direction on a document. Whether that is the right thing or not is questionable.

Andy Leary-May: Could I add that local authorities that have decided to treat permanence holistically have already created permanence teams? For those local authorities, if they are required to form an adoption service jointly with others, that may create a separation.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

Q 27 How do you think the local authorities will work in this regional way? Will it mean that they work better with and have better relationships with voluntary organisations?

Hugh Thornbery: The opportunity is there for better relationships because we will change the way that things are done at the moment. As I said earlier, there are varying degrees of willingness to work with the voluntary sector in different parts of the country. Local authorities and regions have different cultural approaches. I would hope that every region would be carefully considering who the potential constituent parts of a regional or sub-regional approach could be and fully involving them from the beginning.

The other critical thing, which I have not heard discussed at all and is mostly missing from everything that I read, is what adopters think about this. Inevitably, I would say this, representing so many adopters through our membership: what really struck me during Adoption UK, having had previous experience with adoption, is just how often I heard complaints about being ignored, not listened to or done unto. There is a risk of missing the opportunity of involving adoptive families, who are the ones who can tell us, from the best possible position, what is required, what good would look like, what does not work well at the moment and what would improve the quality in the future.

Andy Leary-May: On the point of what adopters think about it, which is very valid, we did a quick survey last week of the adopters using our system. About 600 responded. There was a lot more optimism for the changes that could be brought about through regional agencies among adopters than the social workers that responded to the survey. Due to the current issues within adoption, for adopters, a lot of whom have been waiting for a very long time and are desperate to find a family, there may be some sense of feeling that anything will create an improvement compared to where they are now.

I hark back to a point a little while ago about choice for adopters; that was a concern that I had and asked the people using our system about. It was interesting that 40% of the respondents said that, at some point, they had had cause to consider changing agency because of the experience that they were having. The ability to look to a different agency is important. If we lose that, we need to be careful that there is still some recourse for adopters at any point in their process if they feel that they are not being treated well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe]

Q 33 Thank you. You have all got different experience of the issues of placing children. Do you recognise the problem of the harder-to-place children? Who in your judgment are harder-to-place children, and how will these proposals specifically help them?

Andy Elvin: I am very wary of labelling children as harder to place. Generally, it is not that children are harder to place; it is that we as a state have failed them at some point. There are far too many children who undergo multiple placements, and there really is no excuse for that. Often first placements are made in an emergency; it can happen when you do not know the family or late on Thursday and you go with the carers that you can find.

When you are into the second and third placements, there is no excuse for not getting that placement right. It is children who are labelled harder to place who tend to be in their fifth, sixth, seventh placement. It is not their fault. They have given up on making relationships with adults, which makes them very difficult to care for, no matter how skilled the carers. My worry about this move and this legislation generally is that it ignores that permanence for the vast majority of children who are looked after is not adoption. It is long-term fostering, it is being looked after within the extended family and, for a certain number of children, it is residential care.

We cannot separate out permanence options, because providing long-term, stable, predictable families for children is what we should be doing. We should be getting permanence right earlier. If we start separating out and creating a hierarchy of permanence options, we are not going to serve the whole looked-after population well.

What we should really be legislating against is multiple placements. Real failure is failing to find good placements, and permanent placements, for children early. That does not just exist in adoption. The outcomes are just as good for children on SGOs—special guardianship orders—with extended family and for people in permanent, long-term foster care. We must not forget that. The hierarchy that seems to be being pushed for is dangerous, and is very, very clearly objected to by children, particularly children in foster care, who are often made to feel second rate because they are not going forward to adoption.

Alison O'Sullivan: We know from experience that older children—those over the age of five, six, seven—can be quite hard to find the right family for. If it is in the interests of children to be placed with siblings, placing sibling groups can be challenging. And children with particular needs, either because they are traumatised or have special needs or learning difficulties—that combination of things can make it harder to find the right family. But certainly from a local authority point of view, we do think it is important to persist in trying to find placements for those children. It can take longer.

If the emphasis on making early and speedy decisions, which is absolutely right for the vast majority of children, were to deny those children the opportunity of a permanent family, it would be an unintended consequence. We are making judgments in each individual case. For some children, we will try very hard for a longer period to find them a placement and that will be a great success. They will not necessarily be waiting in an unsatisfactory situation. They might already be with very caring foster-carers that they may have been with for some time, but their need is for permanence, and if it takes us 18 months to find them that permanent family—that forever family—that is what we will do.

Anna Sharkey: In terms of the experience that my family had, the fostering that was started in the late ’60s was for pre-adoption babies. We would have two or three at a time for six weeks, then they would move to their adoptive parents. As we moved into the ’70s, the children placed with my parents had more complex needs, and they are the types of children that we place for adoption. By “more complex” children, I mean older children, sibling groups, children who had experienced significant abuse and neglect, and children who were born drug withdrawing and with alcohol problems. Those were very different in terms of adoption outcomes, because the adopters that we had in the late ’60s and early ’70s were looking for those little babies who were going to be fairly straightforward, and the children became more complicated and more complex.

Our agency has always specialised in harder-to-place children, and that has been to do with the supply of children. Local authorities needing to place the relatively straightforward child do not need to come outside of their internal resource, so they will come to the voluntary sector to find their harder-to-place placements. The children that we place, predominantly, are over the age of four, are in sibling groups or have disabilities.

Of the placements that we have undertaken since we have been operating, we have had 68 single children, 45 sibling placements of two children, and five sibling groups of three. The youngest was six months old, but that was the youngest child in a sibling group. The oldest child we have placed was 10 years and two months. It is a wider range and they are children who bring with them many more complex needs than those very little people to start off with, which means that they have many more needs when it comes to the longer-term support for their adoptive families.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 34 May I pick up on the point you were just making? What needs to happen to get more people to come forward as either adopters or foster-carers? Are there issues around education, awareness and being much more honest with people, or is something else needed to increase the number of people available?

Anna Sharkey: It is interesting that we have had an increase. There is the recruitment activity, which was very definitely promoted. First4Adoption was very involved in that—the education and highlighting options for people. The fact that a very different cohort of people is coming forward as potential adopters and foster carers has been significant.

In terms of bringing more people forward, the education challenge is about which children actually need placements, in comparison with where someone’s starting point might be in terms of the type of family they thought they were going to be. That is the bigger challenge for adoption agencies and fostering agencies in managing the longer-term outcomes for those children. That stage becomes more of a challenge.

Alison O'Sullivan: It is important to help prospective adopters to have in view the kinds of support that are available. On the one hand, we should be being more direct about the sorts of needs that children requiring adoption may have. But in the same breath we need to be able to say, “And this is the kind of help that you could reasonably expect,” which will include financial support in some circumstances. It is important that we raise awareness but are also equipped to support those more complex children over a longer period of time.

Andy Elvin: I would echo that point about support. It is not just about recruiting carers; it is about keeping them. That is with foster-carers, doctors and those family members taking children on special guardianship. Far too often the support is not there—it is not there in a timely manner, it is not there in a non-judgmental manner—and that is what we need to get right. Our job is to support the placement. Sometimes the mistake is made of thinking that the child protection task is the main task. That is 10% of the work; 90% of the work is helping that child to recover from trauma and go on to have a successful adult life. Far too little support is given post the permanency placement order, whichever order that happens to be.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 35 You mention the trauma—would you comment on the state of mental health services and support from child and adolescent mental health services?

Andy Elvin: The biggest complaint that we get from our foster carers, the No. 1 complaint, is the lack of support from CAMHS and from other related physical health services—late assessments, long waiting lists, lack of support in an appropriate manner, lack of support in their postcode or their region—that is usually the No. 1 complaint. No. 2 is generally poor information given by the placing authority, which does not flag up some of the issues that they find they are dealing with in their home 24/7.

Anna Sharkey: I would say that it is varied. We place children all over the country and it is different depending on where they are. Some CAMH services are very good, some are very overstretched, but there are also other services that are available for children. The adoption support fund is a really important development and how that pans out over the next few months will be very significant, and how those assessments work. One of the things that the Bill talks about is the responsibility for undertaking those assessments of need for children. Those need to be done so that adopters feel that they are being listened to. Certainly one of the most important messages that came out of the recent research about violence by children against their adopters was that adopters felt at last that somebody believed them and that they were being listened to. If that is something that is coming through, then the adoption support fund is significant and the different sorts of services that are available through it are important. That is what we need to be supporting—including how it is assessed at an early stage.

Alison O'Sullivan: I think that it is important that universal services are tuned into the needs of adoptive children and adoptive families. Mention was made by previous witnesses of the importance of support in school; raising awareness in schools for all adoptive children is important. The virtual school headteacher may have a role, quite a complicated one, and some discussion will take place on how effective that might be, but mental health support for children and young people is critical. I am hopeful that the “Future in Mind” paper—

[The Chair]

Mrs O’Sullivan, can I ask you to raise your voice ever so slightly? It is not your fault; the acoustics are really bad in this room, as is well known to all the Members, and it would help us if you could speak up a little.

Alison O'Sullivan: I will speak up. The “Future in Mind” paper recently published about children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing services has a whole chapter devoted to recommendations to improve support to children with particular needs and it talks about adopted children. Arguably, some of the support that people might look to from the adoption support fund ought to be met through mainstream child and adolescent mental health services. If they are improved in the period to come then that will help.

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[Kevin Brennan]

Q 51 A final question. Could the whole issue of coasting schools be dealt with in the inspection regime? Is there a danger that there could be confusion about accountability if we have two separate regimes running side by side?

Russell Hobby: That danger does exist. We now have two separate systems with no read-across between the Ofsted categories of “requires improvement”, “good” and “inadequate” and the new definition of coasting. You will find schools in every Ofsted grade that will fit that definition—in fact, I think you will find slightly more “good” schools than schools in “requires improvement” meeting the definition.

There is a risk that schools will feel that they are working towards two distinct and different sets of criteria. We have always thought that schools should be accountable, but it is helpful if they are accountable in one direction and have one set of standards so that they can focus their efforts on that.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 52 If having a good headteacher is the best indicator of success in a school, what would you like to see in the legislation to increase the numbers of good headteachers?

Russell Hobby: We have taken the first step, which is to move away from vague generalisations of what a coasting school is to start to define what coasting schools are. One of the risks was that a lot of schools were looking over their shoulders, wondering whether they were coasting and, therefore, a lot of people were thinking, “That’s not the sort of school that I would want to go and work in” if there were extra pressures arising.

In favour of the legislation and the regulations being provided, although I have my concerns around the definition, we have now got a more graduated response to those schools that are judged as coasting. Rather than the default assumption being that you will sack the headteacher and academise the school, it is now proposed—at least as written—that you will look for a credible plan of improvement within the school and look to partner the school with other good local schools or national leaders of education. Only then will you move down into forced academisation. I am not sure that that message has reached many school leaders yet. If it does, that might reassure some of the people working in these coasting and challenging schools.

At the same time, some of the checks and balances have been removed or are proposed to be removed. The regional schools commissioners now have a great deal of discretion in determining whether the plan of improvement is credible and who the school should be paired up with. A school’s ability to represent and defend itself is not particularly enshrined within the regulations. School leaders will be wondering, “It’s all very well having the challenge, but do I have the chance to make my case or will I be rushed through a change?” I would look at strengthening those aspects, if possible.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)]

Q 53 A quick question: are you happy with the concept of using a progress measure and not just an attainment measure to define a coasting school?

Russell Hobby: Yes. It is essential that you use a progress measure. If I have understood it correctly, it is an either/or—a school can demonstrate either high attainment or high progress. If it reflects the approach to the current floor standards, that is good. It is possible for a school to exceed the floor on attainment alone, as currently proposed, which means that a school with a high-attaining intake could benefit from that. For example, I believe that a few grammar schools fall within the definition of coasting at the moment. The balance between those might need to be looked at. I understand that you switch entirely to progress as a measure at secondary level in three years’ time, when we have the new progress 8. In primary, it remains a balance.

I should emphasise that none of us are entirely sure what the progress measures will look like. They have not been used or tested. The level at which the bar is set remains to be defined and is, in fact, defined in retrospect for each of those years. The very structure of the primary progress measure and how it relates to either the reception baseline or key stage 1 has not yet been explored either. There is a lot of uncertainty on what progress looks like when used, but it is the right measure to use.