Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
MONDAY 24 MARCH 2003
MR BARNABY
SHAW, MISS
ANNABEL BURNS
AND MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
100. You have told us the good news: top of
the league table. Who are facing relegation? Which in the St.
James's tests are looking at facing relegation in your mind?
(Mr Shaw) We have thought very hard about the money
we have put into behaviour support in schools, and it is leading
us to think that a form of investment which may be slightly more
effective and cost effective than the investment we have made
direct to the schools would be to provide expert support outside
the schools that schools can draw on. We have looked at the reasons
why Excellence in Cities has worked stupendously well in some
places and not paid off in other places, and have thought that
one of the reasons why it is working really well is because schools
are working collaboratively. They are talking to each other about
the most effective ways of raising standards for their pupils.
101. So they do not just pass on—
(Mr Shaw) They do not stay struggling with low expectations,
with high teacher turnover, with poor behaviour; they actually
use the experience of schools that have been more effective and
have raised their standards to raise their own standards. It is
always a puzzle to me to go to an inner city school in London
or Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester, and observe how isolated it
is and how difficult it is for that leadership to work out how
to get out of this hole into a better place.
Chairman
102. This Committee would welcome the pragmatism
of the Department of the evidence-based policies that seem to
be what you are talking about. As Mr Shaw said, that means that
you pursue some policies and drop others if you think the money
could be best spent elsewhere. Given that people argue that 80%
of what makes a child thrive in education comes from the home
and outside the school, and 20% comes from within the school,
should there not be more programmes about reaching into the homes
from which the children come? If they do lack books, an educational
environment, or stimulus—we have it in Sure Start and we
saw it in Early Years, but what about in secondary education?
It does not seem to exist in the schools that I have visited in
the same way.
(Mr Shaw) It does not exist in the same
way. That is partly because parents are a little more distant
from their children at that age. They are not reading with their
children or telling stories to their children, or reading nursery
rhymes in the same way. They are more engaged in supervising homework,
if they are engaged at all. We insist that those activities within
Excellence in Cities that bear upon home life really do relate
to the home. For instance, a learning mentor, working with a child
who has problems turning up to school, or problems doing their
course work or homework, talks to parents and works out what a
family can do to support the child as far as what can be done
in school is concerned. We observe it as pretty good practice,
for instance, with learning support units, that the people who
are managing the learning support unit should be in pretty well
daily touch with the parents of the children who are there. That
is usually quite welcomed by the children, because it is a sign
that the whole team is pulling together in their interests. It
is a tough task for some families. In my book, one of the things
that we have yet to satisfactorily secure in education—and
it is a matter more for primary than secondary—is teachers
and parents working together on the early development of literacy
in children who may have experienced Sure Start but are now moving
to primary school and need that experience to continue. In fact,
Andrew and I this morning were talking together with David Hopkins,
the head of the Standards and Effectiveness Unit and the head
of the Sure Start unit about how we could extend Excellence in
Cities into that sort of territory.
103. An organisation called QED in West Yorkshire
recently did a survey on how pupils and students viewed their
education. One of the things that came out of the Muslim population
was that they felt that they were hampered from doing homework,
for example, because they are expected after school to go for
religious instruction in the local mosque. When someone said,
"well, that is only two hours a day", I added up the
school day and two hours, and it sounded like an awfully long
day. Could there not be better liaison there between institutions
like the local mosques in terms of how much importance should
be stressed on homework?
(Ms Burns) Certainly within the achievement strategy,
we are looking at five key factors which characterise effective
schools in raising ethnic minority achievement. They are the things
you would expect: leadership, teaching and learning, high expectations,
a positive ethos, and culturally relevant curriculum, and also
parental and community involvement. Many pupils do go to either
religious schools or supplementary or complementary schools in
their own time, which can have both a positive and a negative
impact on their learning within schools. Many schools are unaware
of the range of supplementary schools that their pupils go to.
We are working hard to try and encourage schools to learn a little
more about what their pupils do outside of school hours, which
can add to their development as people as well as students.
104. We will return to this later, but the fact
is that many schools groan that only the 5 A-Cs seem to score
in terms of achievement. We visit schools—and we are off
to visit more schools in Northern Ireland and the Republic next
week—but the fact of the matter is that when you visit a
school, they say: "It is a wonderful thing. Of course, we
are a very deprived area and we are not getting many A-Cs; but
why does nobody really ask us a question like, `how many pupils
leave your school with no qualifications at all?'" I have
met a head who said: "No child leaves this school with no
qualifications." Some people might argue that that is a better
sign of achievement than just the 5 A-Cs.
(Mr Shaw) We measure school achievement in an increasingly
rich variety of ways. The latest addition to the spectrum of measures
of school performance is value-added, which is potentially one
of the really sophisticated ways of looking at how a school is
doing. Value-added basically takes an individual child, looks
at their starting point and their finishing point in the school,
and asks what progress did they make relative to other children.
So a low ability child may yet make a lot of progress in an effective
school, and that school is adding a lot of value; whereas a high
ability child might be making little progress. His or her raw
score in GCSEs might be stupendous, but nevertheless they could
have made more progress had they been at a better school. I think
that part of the answer is to add to the sophistication of the
ways in which we measure schools. Part of the answer is to increase
the range of ways in which young people can secure qualifications,
so that it is not simply academic ability that is being tested,
but intelligence of other kinds is being tested. However, in my
territory, which is generally high poverty/low performance schools,
there is a very, very great temptation for schools to see themselves
primarily as care institutions, without very high expectations.
It is possible to have both. It is possible to be both a care
institution and a high performance/high achievement institution.
The temptation to say, "we will measure performance simply
by the number of children who leave with one GCSE" might
well lead you down the road towards low expectations overall.
Mr Pollard
105. Evidence has shown that for many years
some groups of ethnic minority students were high achieving, and
some groups have a history of low achievement. To what extent
do you consider that this is down to action within the individual
schools?
(Ms Burns) I do not think we have a full
set of research that shows us the impact of the different factors.
There clearly are a range of important factors: school policies,
procedures and practices are clearly some of those factors; poverty
is an issue too, and so is language; and other things like teacher
expectations. I do not think we yet have a full picture of the
balance of those different issues. Clearly, one can see from,
for example, the performance of black Caribbean pupils, which
starts off well at the age of four and five and tends to fall
relative to other pupils by the time they reach 16, that there
is something in the policies, practices and procedures within
the schools that do not reach that group.
106. Bangladeshi children are now overtaking
Pakistani children; that is welcomed by Bangladeshis of course,
and the Pakistanis are not best pleased about that. Bangladeshi
girls are doing miles better than Bangladeshi boys, and the gap
between those two is growing. Is this a worry to you, and what
can we do about that?
(Ms Burns) It is true across all ethnic groups that
girls out-perform boys. The difference varies between the different
groups, and in Chinese groups it is actually very small, but in
all the other groups there is a very substantial difference between
the performance of boys and the performance of girls. Girls are
out-performing boys at every level. We have so far been focusing
more closely on the differentials between the ethnic groups rather
than the differences within them. It may well be that we will
need to look more closely at gender as an issue as well.
107. Could we ever get the Bangladeshis to equal
what the Indian children achieve?
(Ms Burns) There is no reason why we should not aspire
to that.
Valerie Davey
108. You mentioned language. Can I be specific
about the Caribbean group. I was a bit dismayed, I have to say,
and I shall be sending some comment in on Aiming High.
There is one paragraph about African-Caribbean achievement, which
seemed to be very inclusive and did not differentiate between
African and Caribbean, when certainly in terms of language there
is a huge variety there, and I hope that that will be recognised.
Is research being done? Have we got background on African-Caribbean
or Caribbean-English, because in the schools that I visit and
in the work I have seen, there seems to be little understanding
that there is a difference between English-English, if you like,
and Caribbean-English. Is work being done there?
(Ms Burns) The data we have used is the
annual schools census data. The 2002 data breaks it down into
black-Caribbean, black other, and black African.
109. Good.
(Ms Burns) That, clearly, is not a rich enough category
but it does show us the differential achievement between those
groups. We have chosen to focus on African-Caribbean as a broader
group in the strategy so that we can take some of those issues
around school policies, practices and procedures together. From
2003 we shall have better data still, and that data will show
us much more about the outcomes of mixed heritage pupils, who
are of concern. There is some local data held by local authorities
at present, which suggests that mixed heritage pupils can fare
as badly as can black-Caribbean pupils in education. We are very
keen to look at what the data about mixed heritage pupils will
tell us so that we can compare black-Caribbean, black-British,
mixed heritage and black-African pupils across the board, to see
what the issues are and what the differential levels of attainment
are.
110. I was interested to note that you had started
only last autumn with a very small team, and I guess that that
is reflected in part in the book. The language issue is crucial
to a child's development, and we will be talking about bilingual
later on; but I hope that that whole area will be looked at.
(Mr Shaw) As well as doing passive research, we are
doing some actual research into what works for different groups
of ethnic minority pupils. Annabel and I have pooled some of our
budgets and set up some projects in fifteen authorities with very
high concentrations of ethnic minority pupils, to investigate
a whole variety of different approaches which might work, particularly
around language, mentoring and peer mentoring; and around links
to the community. We are hoping that in about a year's time we
will have some real lessons emerging from that.
Paul Holmes
111. Annabel, you were saying that African-Caribbean
pupils in school at the age of five score quite well, but then
their performance goes down going towards 16. You said that that
must be down to something that happens in the schools; but there
is another school of argument that says that 80% of a child's
time is spent outside the school, and therefore the influence
of family, parents and the area in which they live is far more
important. How far can we distinguish between the 20% for school
and 80% background, to say which is to account for the performance
of African-Caribbean children going down from the age of 5 to
16?
(Ms Burns) I do not think that research
gives us a full answer, but one factor that helps us to answer
that is the difference in achievement between those black Caribbean
pupils who are on free school meals and those who are not. For
most groups, the achievement is very different for pupils on free
school meals than those who are not, with pupils on free school
meals getting a much lower score on average. For black Caribbean
pupils, that gap is very small indeed, which suggests that there
is something more to do with the way other factors impact differentially
on pupils from different groups. It is very difficult to distinguish
the way in which teacher expectations might impact on pupils because
one cannot be sure whether those expectations are lower due to
poverty factors, or due to where that child lives—and more
ethnic minority pupils do live in areas that tend to be poorer—or
whether it is to do with the ethnicity of that child. The fact
that the gap is much narrower than you would expect for black
pupils suggests there is something to do with the schools' policies
and procedures.
112. How far are you able to look at the distinction
between black African-Caribbean children and black children whose
families come from Africa, from Nigeria for example? I was talking
to a young professional black woman recently who grew up in Lambeth,
and her family came from Nigeria. She said that all along they
stood out like a sore thumb, but she argued it was a middle-class
attitude from her family but she was in a working-class environment.
How far can you distinguish the black African pupil from the black
African-Caribbean and say what the difference is that is not just
down to the schools?
(Ms Burns) Our data does enable us to distinguish.
The data at the moment is split by black African, black other
and black Caribbean; and black African pupils tend to score much
more highly than black Caribbean pupils. For example, four in
10 black African pupils get five good GCSEs, whereas only three
in 10 black Caribbean pupils get five good GCSEs. That is very
much captured in—
113. Even in the same inner city schools, or
do the black African children tend to be going to all the schools
outside the inner cities?
(Ms Burns) That is a national picture. I do not know
off the top of my head whether that is true in every school.
114. Is that an area that you would pursue—comparisons
to see why that is the case?
(Ms Burns) We certainly want to look at comparisons
at local authority level. Given the relatively small numbers of
pupils that we are often talking about, it becomes much more difficult
to get comparisons at school level.
115. Certainly anecdotally, over the years the
black children I taught whose families were direct from places
like Nigeria had quite a different outlook on education to the
African-Caribbean children. When we went to New Zealand, we were
looking at schools that had a high proportion of Maori children,
for example, and one of the really impressive things was the way
the schools in New Zealand celebrate culture and ethnic difference
of the Maoris, which is fair enough because they were there before
the Europeans in New Zealand. That seemed to lead to a real self-confidence
and turn-around in attitude on their part. It struck me at the
time that it would be difficult to do that in England, where the
political end perhaps is that children from such cultures should
become English, rather than celebrating their differences. Have
you done any research or have you any observations on that?
(Ms Burns) I have visited schools which put great
emphasis on celebration of the cultures within their schools and
have done that very successfully, representing a whole range of
cultures, particularly in Inner London schools. There are a great
many cultures, and schools manage to celebrate those, to enable
children to feel proud of their cultures, even though it is a
very broad range. That is perhaps more difficult in other areas
of the country, where there is a rather different balance of ethnicity.
116. Is that a strategy that the DfES would
be recommending, though? As a history teacher, looking at the
National Curriculum for history, one of the arguments is that
it is very difficult to depart even from the National Curriculum
to celebrate that sort of difference.
(Ms Burns) I will go back to the points I made around
ethnic minority achievement: the ethos of behaviour and mutual
respect, and being clear on zero tolerance behaviour such as racism,
is clearly something which successful schools share—and
also an inclusive curriculum. There is flexibility within the
National Curriculum for teachers to bring in aspects of a range
of different cultures. Some of the schools and teachers are able
to use that flexibility more than others.
(Mr McCully) What the Key Stage 3 strategy aims to
do for teachers is to break down the National Curriculum into
guidance on the "what" and "how" through challenging
objectives, and a constant feature of the frameworks in the key
core subjects of English, maths, science and ICT is precisely
that they look at the differentiation across backgrounds and cultures,
and the specific expectation and celebration of different backgrounds
would be part of the approach to the classroom.
Mr Turner
117. Would you say that there is a difference
in performance, depending on the concentration or dispersal of
pupils in a particular ethnic group within schools?
(Ms Burns) Yes, there is. The performance
of minority ethnic pupils in those schools that have a much smaller
minority ethnic population tends to be higher, but those also
tend to be schools with fewer pupils on free school meals; so
it may well be that we are seeing a poverty factor there, not
an ethnicity factor.
Mr Chaytor
118. Can I follow that up, because I am interested
in how you separate out the different components of poverty, culture,
class and language. You have talked about differential achievement,
and the figures you used to justify differential achievement were
between different ethnic minority groups, which are all based
on raw GCSE scores. Is there not a need for a value-added methodology
specifically to get an accurate picture of differential achievement
within ethnic minority groups? What I do not understand is where
language features in all of this, and the extent to which a Bangladeshi
youngster, or an African-Caribbean youngster, is not scoring as
well at GCSE as his white neighbour, precisely because English
is his second language, or his command of English is not as strong
at an earlier age. I realise that this is a long, complicated
question, but what I am trying to get at is this: can we really
trust GCSE raw scores to get an accurate picture of differential
achievement between different ethnic minority groups; or
should we not be constructing a value-added methodology on the
basis of SATs scores at English levels 1 and 2?
(Mr Shaw) I am sure we should, and that
is the way we are going.
119. How many years before we get there?
(Mr Shaw) We are now in a position for the very first
time to measure value-added in every school for every pupil now.
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