Revised

Members present

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (Chairman)

Lord Brabazon of Tara

Baroness Gould of Potternewton

Baroness Kennedy of Cradley

Baroness Massey of Darwen

Baroness Morris of Bolton

Baroness Noakes

Lord Patel

Lord Sawyer

Baroness Shephard of Northwold

Baroness Tyler of Enfield

Baroness Walmsley

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Cathy Street, Research Director, National Children’s Bureau, and Joyce Connor, Director, Early Childhood Unit, National Children’s Bureau

Q113 The Chairman: Thank you very much for being available, and—through you—I thank the department for being willing to give us this oral evidence in advance of the publication of the material you have. We appreciate that very much indeed; it will be very helpful to us. Just to remind all of us about the rules, we are not being broadcast at the moment, but I think it will be in due course, after your evidence is formally published. In the same way, there is a written record being taken that will be published. This is not private evidence; it is just a closed session for this particular part of the witnessing.

We expect to have that evidence from you published in November, is that right?

Cathy Street About 17 November.

The Chairman: If you would like to introduce yourself to the microphone so it can pick up who is saying what, then we can move on with the session.

Cathy Street: I am Cathy Street and I am Director of the Research Centre at the National Children’s Bureau.

Joyce Connor: I am Joyce Connor, and I am Programme Director, Early Years, at the National Children’s Bureau.

The Chairman: Thanks. I think Baroness Tyler wants to declare an interest.

Baroness Tyler of Enfield: Yes. I declare an interest as President of the National Children’s Bureau.

The Chairman: Baroness Massey.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: I think it is an interest. It is that the National Children’s Bureau administers the all-party group I chair, which is the All-Party Group for Children in Parliament.

The Chairman: Which reported this week, we were delighted to see.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: Yes, indeed.

Q114 The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along. We will send you a copy of the transcript to just check for any errors or lack of clarity.

The first question I want to ask is about why the Government decided to undertake a demonstration project and, at the same time, could you say very clearly what a demonstration project is? Is it a series of policy options being examined? It is clearly not an experiment—we do not experiment on schools and children—but if you could say just what the constraints were and then tell us, if you can, why the Government decided to take this on board.

Cathy Street: I will try to answer that question. A demonstration project, in terms of what we have undertaken, involved a number of selected schools which agreed to share their practice and demonstrate the different ways that they were offering the provision for two year-olds. In this case they were selected from across the country, where there was awareness that we needed more funded places for two year-olds, and the schools selected were all rated by Ofsted as good and outstanding. The demonstration element of it is that these schools undertook not only to allow the NCB to evaluate them, but that they would also attend a number of events to share their practice and learn from one another. It is a learning experience of sharing good practice and of looking at the different ways that schools are developing this provision. This information may then provide models for other schools.

The Chairman: The working assumption would be that you may come out with a number of different models, in fact, from each of the schools.

Cathy Street: Indeed.

Q115 The Chairman: Can you tell us what kind of recommendation you think might come out of the evaluation and are they what the Government are looking for, to go back to that question?

Cathy Street: If I explain briefly what we then did to undertake this project. We worked with the department, and obviously with the schools that were selected, to look at the different models that they were demonstrating. What we understood from the brief that we were given was that what the department wanted to do was to build the evidence base about the different models to understand about schools’ experiences of developing what is a new area of provision for some, although it appears that quite a few schools have been offering provision for quite a bit longer. For example, some may have a standalone nursery on their premises. We quickly discovered that this is a field of quite experienced providers as well as some who are brand new.

They wanted to understand about the whole process of implementing this, because of course the context was that there is a wish to increase the number of places for two year-olds, so what does implementation mean in terms of resourcing, staffing, adaptations to the building? Some of those I know we are going to talk about a little bit, but also things about the way that schools work. Those were the things that we were asked to do, and the way that we have undertaken that evaluation has been through a number of different methods, but very much working very closely with the schools to learn from them as they have rolled out this provision over the academic year 2013-2014. We have looked at the schools through survey data. We have done in-depth case visits and then we have attended a number of events that the department put on to bring the schools together, for them to be able to share their experiences, look at what was working and what was not working and how schools could develop and network not only among schools. An important part of this—and one of the learning points—is that it is important that schools work with other providers in this area, not restricting themselves to just their school colleagues. We found that schools valued the learning and expertise from other providers of provision for two year-olds. That is one of our key recommendations to the success of this—schools need to work very closely and in partnership with other providers in the sector, so that we do not have a fragmented approach but we also learn from each other about what does work, because there are things to be avoided as well as things that clearly are more successful.

In terms of the recommendations, they include the importance of schools looking at their local area and understanding the local needs that they may be trying to address by offering this provision and that it is important to have a good working relationship with their local authority. That is very closely linked to some of the issues about funding, which I am sure we will talk about a little later. It is very important that they work with other schools that may have more experience in this area, and it is very important that they work with nurseries and other areas of provision for two year-olds to learn from them.

Secondly, it is key that they plan this provision carefully and allow adequate time. This is not a quick-fix solution to just providing more childcare. It requires very careful planning of the sort of facilities for example, appropriate toilet facilities through to outdoor space. It needs careful planning of the staffing, and that is one of the major issues here: getting the right staff with the right qualifications and expertise. I know Joyce is going to talk to you about some of that, because there are some issues here that I think we need to be very honest about how we staff this area of provision.

There is a whole issue to do with how schools work with parents, and form a partnership with parents, for what are essentially very small children coming into a setting, how that works and what strategies schools need to think about. Again, our recommendations allude to the fact that there is quite a culture change needed here, perhaps in terms of schools being more proactive in doing home visiting, actively involving the parents in how their two year-old makes that transition from home into a different setting, because this is the first major move out of the home setting for a number of them.

There is the issue particularly of children with special educational needs and disabilities: how do schools work with them at this very young age and what skills and training do they need? Then there are some recommendations about how this is funded and how schools develop models that are sustainable, affordable and which work in a way that can deal with some of the vagaries in terms of more flexible provision, perhaps having two year-olds who do not attend all the time because they are very young. How do you deal with those sorts of things and yet have a sustainable business model? We have some suggestions and ideas about what that might look like but, I have to be very clear, this is based on a small number of schools in a demonstration project. Therefore, we have to put the caveat around all our recommendations that more work will need to be done across the whole sector to understand how other schools, which may not be quite such pioneers, will need support to make this work. Because we are very aware that we have been working with schools which, as I say, are the go-getters, which grabbed this opportunity, and that may not be true for all.

The Chairman: That is very helpful and certainly whets my appetite for seeing the report when it does come out.

Cathy Street: Thank you.

The Chairman: One of the things I appreciate about it is it sounds as if the department are listening to what is going on out there rather than telling people, though there will be conclusions to be drawn. Baroness Massey.

Q116 Baroness Massey of Darwen: Thank you for coming. Could I ask: do your findings show whether schools are the best places for two year-olds to be to receive early education and care?

Joyce Connor: I think that when we looked at what we were asking schools to report on, we were obviously looking at some of those broad issues about quality that have already been reported on in terms of your other committee findings. I think it is just to emphasise that it is about not if something is in a school, but about what happens there, the quality of the staffing and the quality of that opportunity for those young children.

In some ways, what we were told was how the schools self-reported on some of those aspects, but we obviously did not find out what they were doing, for example, with some of the things around the nature of the qualifications and experience of the staff. We were told what staffing they had and what the qualifications were, but there was no way of finding out how those staff were interacting with the children, the level of the qualification of the staff spending most time with the children during the period and what they were doing, because it was all self-reported.

In some ways, what we have is some information on some of the aspects of quality that might be within what the schools were doing, and we could make some sort of observations about how that fits in with some of the findings that you have been given about the nature of quality provision with young children. But that is the only way that we were able to be informed about whether schools in particular would be a place for young children. It would only be if they were able to offer real quality provision for very young children. I think you have heard in great detail about what experts in the field feel that that entails.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: Could you remind me how many schools are involved in this?

Cathy Street: Forty-nine.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: Did your research find that there are lessons to be learnt for how home environments and schools might overlap and support each other?

Cathy Street: That is very much about the work schools do with parents and the strategies they employ to make that transition seamless. For example, that could include doing home visits, asking parents to be actively involved in planning the sorts of activities that their two year-old might be involved with, looking at parents themselves, their parenting styles, their particular cultural needs and how those might be developed in the school environment.

All the staff that we spoke to in the schools talked about an awareness, that they knew they needed to create an environment that was different and was specific to the needs of two year-olds, that it needed to be homely, it needed to be comfortable, it needed to be safe physically in a way that you might not need for a slightly older children. It needed a mixture of stimulating activities, play-based activities and individualised approaches to the needs and interests of two year-olds. I think a recurring message was, “Two year-olds are not small three year-olds”, that they are very distinctly young children with particular needs and developmental needs that schools need to recognise.

But I think what schools realised was that the parents’ role in this was very important. That is what I mean about a culture change: the relationship schools have with parents may need to change, because it has to be on a much more in-depth basis, in a way, to be able to support this to happen. The challenge is that, certainly with these schools, a lot of these children were attending on a part-time basis for the 15 hours a week, so how do you manage that flexibility of provision? How do you develop that in-depth relationship to work with parents ? Those are sorts of challenges we saw, but what we did see was that schools understood that message. What we cannot say with any certainty is how that translated into practice, because obviously they could tell us one thing butwe might think there may be something quite different going on. I think this will be where, when this becomes a more established area of provision, there will need to be very careful monitoring to look at this.

The other thing is of course this was not an impact evaluation, so although we received some feedback from schools about what they thought the benefits were for children, and we have some feedback from parents that information is very much self-report. That is not us being able to say to you, “Yes, and by being in this placement, the language of these two year-olds improved”. We cannot say that. We do not have the evidence for that. We can give you the self-report feedback that the early indications are that if the right things are in place, then there is no reason why this cannot be a very successful way of providing something for two year-olds.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: Thanks, that is very helpful.

Joyce Connor: Could I just add that we also have been running a project where we are looking at working with settings, including schools, in raising early achievement in literacy? We have had schools that are working with two year-olds, and that is very much a home-visit based approach. We have had an evaluation that has shown that the outcomes of those young children—through those home visits—have been improved as it has raised the levels of their early literacy. The schools that were involved, one in particular, reported that they had found it quite hard sometimes to take those home visits into account, in terms of funding and budgets and things, but when they stopped doing it, they found that they missed out and so they put it back into place straightaway. It was a really important part of the process.

Baroness Massey of Darwen: Can we get hold of that?

Joyce Connor: Yes, I can certainly do that.

The Chairman: That will be part of your published material or is that a separate report?

Joyce Connor: It is a separate evaluation that I can make available.

The Chairman: That would be very helpful. Thank you very much. Baroness Shephard.

Q117 Baroness Shephard of Northwold: I think I missed part of what you might have said about the home visits. Was that for all kinds of children, because my question is about disadvantaged two year-olds?

Cathy Street: In this project, there was quite a focus on disadvantaged two year-olds, because we were looking at the funded places, so it could have been that there was economic disadvantage in the family, it could have been that the children were looked after, or that they had special educational needs. We found that across the patch, schools recognised that home visits were an important strategy for engaging with parents who might not otherwise engage with the schools It was also a way of learning about what that child’s needs were, and at what stage they were, if they were going to come into this setting, so that it could be suitably individualised for that child when they came into school, because what schools found—which was not surprising—is that some two year-olds had much higher levels of need than others.

That leads into another of the issues that the schools have discovered about the funding, which is that the blanket level of funding that the local authority may pay them may well be inadequate if they have children who need a higher level of support Some schools talked about the fact that they needed to provide one-to-one support. All of them were working within the legal ratio of 1:4, but that was not enough for some of the two year-olds who were coming in.

It also goes back to my earlier point about the fact that what schools have learnt is they are going to need to work in a different way with a different range of professionals, including health professionals—such as speech and language therapists or health visitors—because, as I say, these children may well be coming to people’s notice for the first time with issues to do with developmental delay or speech or language issues. Again, these are challenges that are emerging as this field develops.

Q118 Baroness Walmsley: I should also declare an interest, because I am vice-chair of the all-party group of which Baroness Massey is the chair and the secretariat is the NCB. My question is: what adaptations were needed to accommodate care in early education for two year-olds, and were these adaptations different from those required for three and four year-olds?

Cathy Street: Perhaps if I start and then you can talk about the staffing. In answer to the question, simply said, yes, there was a whole range of adaptations that needed to be thought about, from the changes to the building, through to different types of staffing arrangements, through to this whole issue of how you work with parents and how you engage with your local community. What we found in quite a lot of the schools was that space was a major issue. The idea that perhaps schools have free classrooms or free space that they can easily adapt for taking in new two year-olds is very far from the truth. Most schools were finding it quite a struggle to accommodate this provision for two year-olds as they were already struggling with the space that they have. That is one important finding, because what it is doing is limiting the numbers of places for two year-olds that schools can offer. We had schools which were talking about the fact that they would have liked to be able to offer more places for two year-olds; the demand is definitely there. Certainly in all these schools, they had had no problem filling their funded places. They might have problems sustaining that, because people then discovered they did have quite such frequent attendance, but certainly in terms of demand it was there. But what schools were saying is, “We cannot take more children because we do not have the physical space, but we also have the issue about the costs”. That was certainly an issue.

In terms of adaptations, as I say, it is things like needing appropriate toileting facilities, separate areas possibly for two year-olds to have a sleep, those sorts of arrangements, which are quite different to slightly older children. I think the biggest adaptation is probably the staffing and the requirement that the department had put in as part of the demonstration project that the schools provided regular access to an early years professional as a part of their staffing group to work with the two year-olds, to make sure that their developmental needs and their social and emotional development were being appropriately supported. That is one of the biggest adaptations and it is one of the biggest costs. It is certainly the area that has caused the most concern in terms of sustainability, how they are going to deal with rising staff costs and possibly needing more staff, as I say, because they have discovered that they need to be able to offer one-to-one support in some situations. So that is a very major adaptation.

The other piece of it was about a different way of working, and that to make this successful it is very important that provision for two year-olds is not seen like a bolt-on, that it needs to be within the ethos of the whole school, so how do you make that work as well. There are implications for training your whole staff group, that two year-olds become three year-olds and how does that carry on through the school, so again there is the join-up. I think that was another quite major adaptation that schools were grappling with.

Then there were practical things like insurance, Ofsted registration—those sorts of costs are quite significant and take time. Then we have some schools which have completely built things. They had to knock things down to create space, while others just adapted on a slightly more minor level.

Baroness Walmsley: Did the department give any extra money for these new buildings? No.

Cathy Street: No.

Baroness Walmsley: The school managed to do it somehow?

Cathy Street: Schools were given a grant of £10,000 to be a part of the demonstration project, and that was meant to cover a variety of things. It could go towards some of these adaptations, it could go towards taking part in the evaluation, freeing up staff time to attend the learning events. There were a variety of things you could do, but the way schools had dealt with the funding was to use some of the funding that has come through the local authorities for this whole area of provision, and they may have put that towards their building costs. They may have drawn on some surplus; they may have gone for local grant funding and drawn on money from those different sources. Again, this was one of the reasons why some schools have had to probably scale back their plans a bit, because I think they had realised that to put this all together is quite a costly undertaking and it is quite difficult to secure funding.

Baroness Walmsley: Will that range of funding be appearing in the final report?

Cathy Street: Yes. I should say NCB undertook this piece of work with Frontier Economics, which did the finance survey and the economic analysis part, whereas NCB focused very much on the quality and the work with the schools themselves about exactly what the nature of the provision was and how schools were meeting children’s needs, so that was the split.

Q119 Baroness Gould of Potternewton: I think a lot of my questions have already been answered, because we have dealt with quite in detail the question of funding, but if I can ask two spin-off points from that. One is what you have explained that, obviously, there are quite serious implications for the schools in doing this. Is that going to be a deterrent in discouraging schools from going down this road and saying, “No, we cannot do it”? The second question is you said that this is not state funding, but it is being funded out of the school budget.

Cathy Street: Some of it.

Baroness Gould of Potternewton: For what you were doing, they received the special allowance, but basically if it was not for that, would it be out of school funding, and do you think that it should be state funding if it is going to be successful?

Cathy Street: In terms of the first question, there are some indications that some schools are wondering about the sustainability of this. Others have found they can make this work, they are breaking even, they have the capacity and they seem to be fine. They are some of the more established providers. It is probably a little early to see how some of the new ones find their feet in this; we had some schools start to offer places during the evaluation for the very first time, so there were inevitably unexpected costs and things that they had not thought about, so it is very early for them.

But there are some indications that some schools may find this very challenging. They are worried about rising staff costs and about where local authority funding may come from in the future or what level may they get. I think the honest answer is that, yes, some schools may be concerned about this and we certainly had some schools in our second survey indicating that they were not sure if this would be sustainable in the future, so I think we need to think about that.

In terms of your second question, yes, I think there is some suggestion that we need to look very hard at the whole funding infrastructure here. That goes down to things like transparency of local authority processes and procedures for applying for the money that is available. It is quite clear that in some areas local authorities were very proactive in supporting this and, for example, paid supplementary money to schools so that they could offer one-to-one support and so on, whereas other local authorities were perhaps not quite so clear in their communications with schools. Capital funding was generally sought, but not everybody seemed to be aware of it. The learning events with the DFE were very important in sharing those experiences so that schools could learn from one another the most effective way to fund this and where you go for these funding streams. There is some suggestion from the schools that they need clearer, more detailed information about where you might go for funding, how you apply for it, what the eligibility criteria are, but also what sort of things they need to be funding so that they do not waste time on perhaps very ambitious building projects if that is not what they need.

You need a business model that focuses on having high-quality, well qualified and enough staff. Going back to Joyce’s point, I think to some extent the building is important, but the key piece here is having the staffing and having enough staff to be able to offer the flexible, high-quality provision that will make this work.

Lord Sawyer: Just a very quick one. Did you find that there was the leadership capacity for this new initiative? I worry about pressure on leaders and the ability to take on more initiatives and more things. You would observe this, no doubt.

Cathy Street: My answer there would be of course that we were working with these selected schools.

Lord Sawyer: Yes, so the leadership was very high.

Cathy Street: So leadership, the very fact that they had put themselves forward, means that they were up for this. I am not sure that we could say whether that is true in other schools or not. What schools would also say, though, is that some of them certainly underestimated the amount of time it took to plan, the amount of time it took to get through planning processes, the amount of time it took to recruit staff. It is not just about schools wanting to recruit staff—it is quite challenging to find the right staff. Some areas of the country were finding this difficult and that has implications for the training of the workforce, because there is not a limitless pool of people that the schools can call on. We had a number of conversations at some of the learning events and schools were saying, “We are trying to recruit. We cannot find people in our area” and that led them into trying to offer temporary contracts to attract people, for example. All of this takes a lot of time and effort and some of these schools definitely found it was a lot more than they thought.

Joyce Connor: Even where there were not new builds but about looking at how the environment would be used, planning that use to specifically meet the needs of two year-olds was one aspect of quality. It is about the staffing, but it is also the wider needs of the two year-olds.

Lord Sawyer: Of course.

The Chairman: Are schools subject to significant planning permission constraints here? Suppose they want to put in an extra couple of loos because they are going to have very young children, is this a big planning permission issue or do you have the environment within your sights?

Cathy Street: I am not sure that I can answer that, other than schools were telling us that it had taken longer than expected and that getting through the Ofsted legal inspection requirements and the planning together was leading to some delays in being able to even offer places.

The Chairman: We will perhaps follow that up separately. It is a legal matter, I dare say.

Cathy Street: Exactly.

Q120 Baroness Kennedy of Cradley: I should probably declare an interest as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham, in case one of your 49 schools is in that authority.

Just going back to the issue of funding and sustainability, my question was: do the schools feel that the entitlement funding for two year-olds is sufficient to cover the ongoing costs of delivery? Obviously you spoke a little bit about that, but is there anything more that you would like to add? Also, Cathy, you seemed to say, in the reply to Baroness Gould, that some schools have less of an issue with sustaining the programmes than others, and what is the difference between the ones that think they can sustain it and the ones that think they cannot?

Cathy Street: One of the things that schools have talked about is that the entitlement funding covers the 15 hours of direct contact time, and that does not allow for all the planning and engagement work that goes around the edges, so I think that is one issue that needs to be thought about.

We have also discovered that some local authorities pay when children are enrolled, some only pay when they start to attend on a regular basis or only pay for numbers of sessions attended, which can cause problems if you end up with vacant places. There are some funny ways that the funding is working at the moment that probably need to be ironed out as we all get a little bit more experienced of what the patterns of attendance are like, but I do think it is about factoring in this work with parents and the other engagement work that needs to happen to make this successful. I think some schools feel that is not adequately reflected in the current funding arrangements, so that is certainly an issue that needs more work.

In terms of whether some schools’ provision was more sustainable than others, part of that was that we had more schools which were offering this sort of provision for quite a bit longer than others and they therefore were over that initial outlay of money for all the expenses and all the other things that came with setting the thing up in the first place. Therefore they were in a slightly better position and they may have built their capacity gradually, so they had a business model and it was working, whereas others were just at that early stage of thinking, “Is this for us or not?”

It also depends very much on the size of the school and its general reserves and what else it can pull on. Some schools seem to be already quite well embedded in terms of working with other providers and therefore sharing resources, whereas others seem to be much more going it alone, which may be one of the things about how schools look for opportunities to work in partnership and to look at economies of scale and how you manage that. But the other thing is that the financial climate is more challenging, so some schools probably had the luxury of setting this up a couple of years ago when possibly there was slightly more local authority funding available and things were a little bit easier on that front. But the schools that were trying to set this up last year in the period that we were evaluating— 2013/14—were trying to do that in a climate of austerity with much tighter funding available to them. Therefore it was much more difficult to meet some of those initial outlays unless they have something else to draw on. I think that will be a challenge for the future in terms of growing the sector: if the funding continues to be very restricted from the local authorities yet staff costs may be going up, and building costs certainly are going up, how do you match that imbalance?

The Chairman: May I push a little bit on that? If local authorities provide funds, obviously there is one kind of fund that is for capital expenditure and so on and one-off costs of applying for Ofsted recognition or what have you. Is there a similar figure that applies across the country per capita for running the system, because we hear—indeed, we heard it earlier this morning—that this varies a great deal for children in the upper age range across the country. Does that apply here?

Cathy Street: Same here.

The Chairman: Why is that? Presumably the department makes available a per capita rate for expansion in this area or does it not?

Cathy Street: As I say, it seems to come down to some quite complicated arrangements within the local authorities about how the calculations are based, which is on the numbers of estimated two year-olds in that area versus the numbers of hours and things. What we found across the schools was a quite marked variability about exactly what hourly rates the schools were receiving from the local authorities for funding provisions for two year-olds. We tried to understand a little bit about that, but again it was such an early stage of development for some of these schools that it is something that is going to need to be looked at in the future.

It goes back to my point about needing greater clarity about exactly what pots of money there are and what the procedures are that you apply for them and what you can expect, rather than it being left to this rather locally haphazard approach. No, “haphazard” is not fair, but it is—

The Chairman: I was going to pick you up on that and ask what evidence you had.

Cathy Street: Yes, the word is a varying approach to who gets what funding. I am not entirely sure we know what the reasons for that are, other than that that is what we found.

Q121 The Chairman: The examples you gave of how many two year-olds are there in the area, that would apply to the size of the pot. However, I wonder whether I am naive to think that there ought to be, or there is, a national funding formula so that, if you have 40, you get so much? I know as the money goes through local authorities, there is always the risk of the need for overheads to be taken off. Is that the difficulty?

Cathy Street: What seems to happen is somewhere between that money flowing from the centre to the local authority, it is very unclear how decisions are made on what is allocated at that point. For example, that is why we had some schools that had been able to negotiate enhanced rates and yet others which have a similar level of need had not been able to. It was very unclear quite how that had come about, other than it goes back to some schools obviously having much clearer, stronger working relationships with their local authorities than others and have managed to negotiate their way through the different pots. We identified about four or five different funding streams and I think it came down to whether schools had worked out which way round they were going to apply. That is why one of our recommendations is that there needs to be much greater transparency and some agreed way by which schools know what they can apply for and for what because, even down to capital funding, there was quite a lot of confusion certainly at the start of this project as to whether you were eligible for that or not.

The Chairman: I can understand the capital funding being a problem at a squeezed time but, if there is a national formula, there ought to at least be the transparency of a school being able to say, “I am only getting 80% of what they say”.

Cathy Street: Exactly. The department is aware of this. We did pass back to them that this was one of the things that we were finding so that they could take that on as an action for themselves to try to look at what that meant in taking this forward.

The Chairman: I look forward to your recommendations on that with great interest. I know that sometimes when one writes a public report of this kind and you float it out, you wonder, “Does anyone read it?” You have 14 potential eager readers around this table.

Cathy Street: Thank you.

The Chairman: What you have told us today I think is very helpful. If we have any further follow-up questions when the report is published, we will let you have them.

Cathy Street: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.