§ Mr. Ralph Howellasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science if he will state (a) the number of teachers, (b) the number of pupils and (c) the number of schools, in 1960, 1970 and 1985 in local education authorities throughout the United Kingdom.
§ Mr. DunnThe numbers of maintained schools, pupils and teachers in England in the years 1960, 1970 and 1984 are:
schools by Hertfordshire county council in each of the last five years in terms of (a) cash, (b) real terms and (c) real terms per pupil in school.
§ Mr. DunnThe information requested is given in the table:
what is its definition of a satisfactory level of resource provision; what test it applied to the information to establish its statistical significance; and what data were used by Her Majesty's Inspectorate to establish the order of importance of four factors, mentioned in the same paragraph, as influencing effective teaching.
§ Sir Keith JosephDuring the autumn term 1984 Her Majesty's Inspectorate gathered information about 13,880 165W classes which had been observed. It first assessed the quality of work in each class, both in terms of the quality of the provision made by the teacher, and of pupils' response.
Where provision was satisfactory, the resources were adequate and appropriate to support the material being taught. What is adequate and appropriate will vary not only with the work taught but with the age, ability and aptitude of the pupils.
Having judged the quality of the work, Her Majesty's Inspectorate then indicated those factors which, in the light of the evidence available, were considered to be influencing the quality of the work in each lesson. The aggregation of these responses from the 13,880 lessons, when analysed using a chi-squared test, revealed that work assessed as satisfactory or better was significantly more likely than chance alone would lead one to expect to be found where resource provision was judged satisfactory and helpful to the work. This does not imply a direct casual relationship between levels of resources and quality of education.
The four factors mentioned in paragraph 7—quality of teaching, identification of pupils' and students' needs, the level of resources available and their effective management and deployment—were among those whose contribution to effective learning Her Majesty's Inspectorate assessed in its observation of the classes. The identification of the four factors as important, and the order of their importance, was established by the frequency of their mention in reports of these observations.