Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
MONDAY 24 MARCH 2003
MR BARNABY
SHAW, MISS
ANNABEL BURNS
AND MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
80. Yes.
(Mr McCully) I might start and then offer the floor
to others. I am responsible in the Department for taking forward
our work on the main national strategy for pupil achievement in
secondary schools. That is our Key Stage 3 strategy, which as
it becomes further embedded we are looking to be a driver for
the whole school improvement. Some of the early work that we have
in the Key Stage 3 strategy very much builds on the success of
our national literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools,
and some of that experience, I think, is also relevant to some
of the questions that I know this Committee has been looking at,
even though you are focusing on secondary school achievement.
So that is where, I think, our contribution is.
81. Barnaby?
(Mr Shaw) Our approach to policy making is to look
for general policies that impact on standards across all schools—that
is more or less Andrew's area of responsibility—and more
targeted policies, which look at particular problems and solutions
to those problems, and Annabel and I cover differently targeted
policies. I am responsible for the Excellence in Cities Programme,
which is a big programme targeted, first of all, on the inner
cities, but then latterly on the clusters of deprivation elsewhere.
I am responsible for Education Action Zones, which were an early
attempt at targeting by the Government. Also, I am responsible
for school improvement generally, but particularly problem schools,
schools that need special measures, schools that have serious
deficiencies, schools that are underperforming generally. I am
also responsible for what we call schools in challenging circumstances,
that tends to be schools of either phase primary and secondary,
where there are large numbers of children with barriers to learning
and particular problems for school management in those schools.
(Miss Burns) I head up a small project, which was
established last August, with a brief to develop strategies to
work across the Department to raise the achievement of minority
ethnic pupils. We have very recently produced a consultation document
Aiming High: Raising the Achievement of Minority Ethnic Pupils,
which I believe has been shared with the Committee, and that
document sets out some of the proposals. We are now in our consultation
phase. We are seeking views on how to develop those proposals
further with a view to issuing a strategic document in the autumn.
82. When we had our opening session with the
academics, in part some of us thought the message coming out strongly
was that what they were saying, in a sense, you can be led to
believe that this is all about different performance from different
ethnic minorities, ethnic communities and we went round that territory
in some detail. What kept coming back to us is it is poverty,
it is the relationship of people from poor backgrounds in deprived
circumstances that really is the key to underachievement. Would
you agree with that?
(Mr Shaw) I think poverty combined with low educational
aspirations is a very big chunk of the problem. Educational performance,
I think, is a big chunk of the problem, too. If one compares schools
with similar intakes of children, for instance, there is a very,
very big gap between the best performing and the lowest performing
schools. So it is not simply that children from some backgrounds
learn less, are harder to teach than others, it is also that some
schools are better than others, so in our view we need to tackle
both those issues. When you look at the achievement of ethnic
minority children—Annabel should say more on this than I—there
are groups of children who start school with a considerable disadvantage,
particularly if they do not speak English at home. There are other
ethnic minority children who start school at no disadvantage,
when they are assessed at the beginning of primary school, they
are on a level with their peers of any background, but they fall
behind as they progress through school. So there is a mix of issues
which have to do with poverty, with aspirations, with culture
and with schools.
83. How do you explain the much higher performance
of students from the Chinese and Indian backgrounds? Is that just
because they happen to be better off or they come from a culture
that values education more highly?
(Miss Burns) I think it is very difficult to explain
the causes. Looking at the factors, we can see that even where
Chinese and Indian pupils are on free school meals, an indicator
of poverty, they still perform much better than their peers from
other ethnic groups on free school meals. So it is not purely
a poverty issue, but clearly there is a broader issue which may
perhaps relate to aspirations around education and a strong culture
of learning.
84. There is nothing new about that, is there?
Certainly, when I spent a lot of time in Wales, the Welsh working
class and the Scots working class valued education much more highly
than the urban working class in England. Certainly there seemed
to be some evidence at that time that was reflected in much higher
performance by children from working class backgrounds in those
parts of our country.
(Mr McCully) I think effective teaching and effective
management in schools can go some way to overcome some of those
differences and aspirations. One of the well-documented successors
of the national literacy and numeracy strategies is the extent
to which setting demanding objectives and with a high degree of
challenge and support in the classroom can not only raise attainment
at all levels, but also raise the attainment of some of the lower
performing children disproportionately. Indeed, through the development
of the Key Stage 3 strategy, which in many ways follows some of
the principles to the national literacy and numeracy strategy,
I think where we would hope to see a similar sort of effect as
the Key Stage 3 strategy better embedded in schools. It is quite
early days yet, but that culture of high expectation, high support
and high challenge is something that can start to go some way
to address all those differences and aspirations.
85. This is a lot of tax payers' money that
is being spent on targeting particular students from deprived
backgrounds. How far is there in your evidence that this is a
good investment and this is a good spend? What I fail to see,
in most of the evidence that this Committee has received, is a
comparison between those people who have these resources in schools
that are targeted? In your evidence you said 75%, or certainly
in some evidence we had said 75% of the schools with a large percentage
of poor students are covered by various schemes. How do you compare
that with the performance of children who are not in those schemes,
but from that sort of background, because that would give you
a pretty good measure of what the difference is you are achieving?
(Mr Shaw) If I may answer in relation to Excellence
in Cities, which is probably our biggest and most expensive targeted
programme. We have compared the performance of children in those
schools with the performance of children in other schools. Naturally,
they start from a lower base, because this programme is targeted
at places with educational and forms of social deprivation, but
the improvement since we have started spending the money has been
substantially faster in the schools which have benefited than
in the schools which have not. Last year, for instance, the secondary
schools within Excellence in Cities improved their GCSE results
by 2.3 percentage points, whereas schools outside Excellence in
Cities improved their results by 1.3 percentage points. That is
a significant difference in improvement rates, and it is one which
has now been sustained for three years in the places where the
programme has been running for three years. So, for instance,
we can say, that in Inner London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and a
number of other places which have benefited from this programme,
the improvement has been significantly above the rest of the country
for three years. I suspect that is the first time that we have
seen a closing of that sort of gap for several decades, if not
in living memory. That is the first significant sign of a pay-off
from the tax payers' investment. Also, when we look in more detail
we see that the most deprived schools in the inner cities have
been improving fastest. If we take the schools that had below
25% of their pupils getting five good GCSEs, the improvement in
those schools was nearly three times faster than the rest of the
country. When we look in more detail at the individual children,
it is good to see that it is the children from the most deprived
backgrounds in those schools, which have been benefiting most.
So we feel reasonably comfortable that the heavy investment is
beginning to pay off and the problem for me, as a manager of this
policy, is to make sure that it continues to pay off over time.
Can I throw in an observation from a different angle, which is
the international comparisons.
86. Sure.
(Mr Shaw) The international comparisons tell us the
best comparisons are of 15-year olds, and the very latest comparisons
from the OECD tell us that England has a fairly fast improving
standard at that age. When we compare the international comparisons
with earlier ones, England has moved up the league tables, but
England has one of the biggest gaps between top-performing and
lower-performing children, and that is very closely associated
with class and poverty. Middle class more affluent families support
their children and their children succeed more in education. The
gap between best and lowest performing is strikingly big in England,
and bigger than in some other countries which you might have expected
to have a similar sort of education gap because they have got
a similar class gap, the US, for instance. It underlines the fact
that this is quite a priority for England to try and narrow that
gap, and it is an uphill struggle because it is quite endemic.
So my sense that we are beginning to see some closing of that
achievement gap is against the odds. It is something that we have
not seen for a long time and which seems pretty endemic in England.
87. We were very interested in that. We went
to Paris to meet our OECD and talked to them in some depth about
those findings. Indeed, when we went to New Zealand, and one of
the reasons we chose New Zealand was because they have similar
problems to us in that regard in terms of score and the gap. The
last thing I want to ask you for the moment, is I was not sure
before you went off to OECD when you were giving that two point
something and one point something, was that a comparison of schools
in similar circumstances in the Excellence in Cities area compared
with similar schools outside, not with all schools outside, similar
schools?
(Mr Shaw) No.
88. The same number of free school meals in
an Excellence in Cities and a school that had the same number
of free school meal percentage outside, what are the figures there?
(Mr Shaw) I do not know. That is mainly because Excellence
in Cities is targeted at almost all the country's high free school
meal schools. What I gave you was a comparison of those schools
with the rest irrespective of their poverty levels.
89. Do the stats exist? Can you get them?
(Mr Shaw) I could get them.[14]
Chairman: That would be most useful.
Thank you very much. We will move on now to Jonathan.
Jonathan Shaw
90. Yes. I want to continue with the same theme
as the Chairman. One of the issues that arose out of our visit
to Birmingham—talking about the concern about the underachievement
of black Afro-Caribbean males—was the lack of role models
in the schools; the lack of teachers, for example. When the Chairman
asked you: "do you join up" and you said, Mr Shaw, that
you try and join up as much as you can, I wonder when you are
looking at the Excellence in Cities, that is part of the equation.
Is part of the equation looking at individual schools and their
profile? As I say, this was something that was said to us quite
frequently during our week in Birmingham, the need to get black
teachers in front of black pupils to be a good role model. How
much do you join up with the recruitment wing of DfES and the
local education authority departments? You have got the investment,
it is all very well having the investment, wonderful buildings,
wonderful computers, but at the end of the day good educational
standards are down to excellent teachers.
(Mr Shaw) The Government sees itself
as having a fairly integrated strategy towards improving the experience
of ethnic minority pupils in schools, and Annabel can talk about
that. Certainly, it includes increasing the numbers of ethnic
minority teachers in school, but there are very, very few ethnic
minority teachers overall in English schools, so it is quite a
long haul to increase the numbers because you can only recruit
so many a year. So a shorter haul to increasing the number of
ethnic minority adults in school who can work with ethnic minority
pupils is what we are doing through Excellence in Cities where
we have recruited something like 4,000 learning mentors. Their
job is to work with children on their barriers to learning and
it is noticeable—I cannot give you the numbers—when
I talk to learning mentors or talk to conferences of learning
mentors, a large proportion of them are from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Also, a large proportion of them are male whereas the majority
of teachers are women. So for a black boy in school it is good
to have a learning mentor there who is likely to have a similar
view of the world, a similar experience of the world and is able
to talk his language to him.
91. They might have been successful within their
community or within business?
(Mr Shaw) They come from a lot of different backgrounds.
I can think of learning mentors who have been footballers, learning
mentors who have been actors, learning mentors who have been business
people and learning mentors who have been teachers. So they come
from a lot of backgrounds and are usually chosen by schools for
their ability to get on with teenagers.
92. In terms of the investment we put in, £3.6
billion, a lot of money, and you have told us about the GCSE improvements,
which are very welcome. There will be a cohort and within that
cohort there will be young people who will struggle to reach that
educational attainment. What about that group? What about the
group that we do not hear from? Are we seeing standards go up
across the board? What is exclusion like in Excellence in Cities?
Tell us a bit about that.
(Mr McCully) Can I say just a word about looking at
performance across the range. We have the key targets at Key Stage
3, which are in terms of the expected level of achievement at
level 5. Also, we have important targets at level 4 within Key
Stage 3, which are precisely to meet the needs that you have just
addressed, making sure that even those who leave primary schools
below the expected levels of achievement are receiving the right
amount of support and catch-up support within their first year
of secondary school. So it is not just the GCSE figures which
are a crucial indicator of school and school improvement, we look
at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 3 progress performance as well. We
have a range of indicators to address the progress of a range
of different pupils.
(Mr Shaw) Two observations, if I may. One is about
exclusions. Exclusions have fallen quite rapidly in Excellence
in Cities.
93. Across the board, in all of them?
(Mr Shaw) Pretty well in all of them.
94. Pretty well in all of them?
(Mr Shaw) It is largely in response to the presence
of learning mentors in schools. One of the other strands in this
multi-strand programme is the learning support units which are
quiet places with a very high teacher to pupil ratio for children
who are not coping in class, usually children who are disrupting
learning for other children; misrepresented by the press as "sinbins",
they are not that. They are usually places where there is some
intensive learning going on and usually where children, who may
have arrived at secondary school with very, very poor literacy,
catch up with their literacy. So that looks pretty effective to
us and the evidence we are getting back from Ofsted, the evidence
we are getting back from our evaluators, tells us that not only
are exclusions falling, but also pupil behaviour is improving
and pupil motivation is improving.
95. How do you measure that?
(Mr Shaw) Our evaluators, the National Foundation
for Educational Research—NFER—interview pupils and
ask them.
96. Okay.
(Mr Shaw) Can I make another observation about children
for whom GCSEs are quite a high hurdle.
97. Yes?
(Mr Shaw) The Government's aim is to extend the range
of qualifications that children can be offered and that will score
for the performance tables. The Government is extending the range
of GCSEs to include vocational GCSEs they want to introduce and
also, working with QCA to extend the number of vocational qualifications
outside GCSE which youngsters can take, which will score their
performance tables. That seems to me one of the really important
factors to motivate youngsters, who may find academic learning
a bit difficult, to stay in education and to be well motivated.
98. So what do you think you can say to the
Secretary of State when he says: "I have spent this £3.6
billion, has it made a difference? Should I continue to spend
money in these areas, and what are the key lessons that we have
learned from spending all this money?"
(Mr Shaw) I would say it has been a good investment,
we ought to go further with it. To give complete assurance that
it is a good investment, pound for pound, we are using the London
School of Economics to give us an economic assessment of Excellence
in Cities, as well as the NFER to give us an educational assessment
of it, and we will have that, I think, later this year. We should
go further with it, particularly because Excellence in Cities
has been targeted mainly at secondary schools. For most of the
children that it is targeting, their problems are visible right
at the start of primary school and ought to be tackled at that
end. Indeed, they are visible much earlier than primary school,
and a lot of what we are trying to do through Sure Start and essentially
nursery education will reach those sorts of children. I have failed
to answer your last question.
99. I am not sure what it was myself now. There
is a lot of money making going on, is there not? I simply heard
the figures. Basically, spend more money on education, get better
results, is that a summary of what you have just told us?
(Mr Shaw) A spin-off. You have reminded me now of
what your last question was, which was: what lessons have we learned
from public spending groups? The answer is not simply spend more
money. The answer is spend more money in ways that will be really
effective to improve the quality of teaching and the quality of
children's learning. What we have learned is that some forms of
expenditure are more effective than others, that things which
impact most on the classroom tend to be the best value. Also,
we have learned the importance of effective management and leadership.
Where Excellence in Cities is working best is because head teachers
and the team in school have really worked out how to integrate
it into the rest of what the school is doing. That is one reason
why the Government has just brought in—or is about to bring
in—a new grant aimed particularly at Excellence in Cities'
schools called the Leadership Incentive Grant to put more money
into the quality of leadership.
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