Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 139)
MONDAY 24 MARCH 2003
MR BARNABY
SHAW, MISS
ANNABEL BURNS
AND MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
120. Once the data set that came out for the
first time this year is interpreted, it may turn out that African-Caribbean
boys are performing more strongly than other groups, given—
(Mr Shaw) It may. We have not done that.
121.—the language they started with.
(Mr Shaw) We have not yet done that analysis. The
analysis we have done so far on deprivation uncomfortably tells
us that high deprivation schools tend to add lower value. You
can imagine why that is: that is because in a high deprivation
school, they are coping with a lot of problems—children
who arrive with poorer attitudes towards learning; a high turnover
of pupils; a high turnover of staff. Everything is against effective
teaching in those schools. That is one reason for trying to invest
more in assessing those schools. We are definitely going in the
direction of using value-added as much as we can to give us that
more sophisticated look. Annabel can comment on the language issue,
but it seems to me that all the evidence we get about the progress
that children make tells us that command of English is really
critical, at every stage through their school; and, therefore,
helping children whose English is not very fluent, or who have
not been brought up speaking English at home, is really critical.
We are still exploring really effective ways of teaching English
as an additional language, and we have not quite got the answer
yet.
(Mr McCully) If you wanted an indicator of future
achievement at Key Stage 3, when you are looking at a primary
school, or pupil achievement at GCSE when you are looking at the
early years of secondary school, it is the achievement at English
at Key Stage 3 SATs which is the fundamental guide to future performance.
I think that underlines the point you are making about how important
it is that we get the support right at an early enough stage to
make a real difference.
(Ms Burns) Bilingual learners tend to have higher
value-added scores, and that may well be because their scores
at an earlier stage have been depressed by their lack of ability
to respond to questions because of their lack of English; so it
does not demonstrate their cognitive development at that stage.
The value-added methodology is already beginning to tell us something
around bilingual learners, and to reinforce the point you made
about the need for good-quality support, both at an early stage
and throughout their educational career.
Valerie Davey
122. Do we yet know at what age it is most effective
to teach English whose mother tongue is not English?
(Mr McCully) Very early indeed. There
has been a debate throughout the history of the National Literacy
Strategy about the intensity of early phonics teaching, which
is an approach that has been most successful in work with those
for whom English is not their first language. That debate over
recent years is almost no longer a debate, in the sense that the
National Literacy Strategy has increasingly emphasised the early
intervention with—
123. How early is early?
(Mr McCully) At reception class—the early literacy
support element of the National Literacy Strategy starts at reception,
and there are concentrated programmes. You will find a number
of very successful literacy schemes in some of our most deprived
education authorities, which have had considerable success at
a very early stage. Tower Hamlets, for instance, is one; and Leicester
is another area where the level of success has been very impressive.
124. The essential thing, as I understand it,
for all concept development, is that you absolutely embed—which
is the new word apparently—your mother tongue. So the mother
tongue has to be secure for most children—unless they have
bilingual parents, or coming from a purely bilingual situation.
You need to embed your mother tongue and get all the concepts
there before you start. I am not saying that reception is too
early at all, but do we know? What research has been done to say
how the brain functions for its mother tongue, and then how the
second language develops?
(Ms Burns) The foundation stage curriculum puts great
emphasis on using both mother tongue and English if that is different
from the mother tongue, precisely for those points. We will probably
have to go to our Early Years colleagues and talk in more detail,
but I know the foundation stage curriculum was developed in precisely
that way because of the need to embed the mother tongue and to
learn English as early as possible, to ensure that that child
is able to go on and access a good-quality education.
125. It depends on the individual. I was at
a school on Friday where a young girl from Pakistan had arrived
at the age, presumably, of eight, had taken her Key Stage 2 and
had got a score of 4, because she was just a very bright child.
Taking a second language on—she was as good as, in fact
better than, the majority of the English-speaking children in
her school.
Ms Munn
126. I am interested in the other end, the report
from Ofsted, which is very new on more advanced learning of English
as an additional language in secondary schools and colleges, which
points out that young people who have learnt English as a second
language still feel an ongoing need for support. What is the DfES's
view on that, and what is happening to support those pupils at
that stage?
(Ms Burns) It is one of the issues that
we are consulting on. We were able to talk to Ofsted about that
report shortly before it came out, and we have incorporated within
the bilingual learners strand of our document an emphasis on more
advanced bilingual learners—those at Key Stage 4 and beyond.
We are raising issues about the kind of support that should be
given to them. The Ofsted report gives some very helpful pointers
about the need to give ongoing support once social English has
been acquired.
127. It seems to me that there is some very
good stuff in there, particularly that which comes from the learners
themselves, who are indicating that it is not that they cannot
communicate in the language but that they have not got the depth
of the language in terms of descriptions or how they learn new
vocabulary. It seems to me that there could be ways without differentiating
pupils from their classmates, that they could be given this additional
support, whether it be writing new words, or putting vocabulary
on the board so that it is there, written in a way that might
not be necessary for a native speaker but would help somebody
for whom it was a second language.
(Ms Burns) Yes. I think some of those points have
been taken on through the Key Stage 3 strategy. There is a great
emphasis within that strategy about supporting bilingual learners.
That is a slightly younger age group than the ones that the report
focusses on, which are those at Key Stage 4 and beyond. There
is a great deal of good practice in the national strategies about
supporting bilingual learners through using those kinds of learning
cues you describe—sharing vocabulary within the lesson and
using gestures to enable pupils to understand concepts more readily.
(Mr McCully) Ofsted, within its own separate evaluation
of the early progress of the Key Stage 3 strategy picked up those
aspects as being particularly worthy of attention, so we have
made a good start. That is not to say that there is not a lot
more good practice in schools that we can capture and share.
128. Are you confident that that practice is
getting out to schools? I ask particularly because there are areas,
as you say, in London which have a long history of having quite
a mix of pupils, and there are lots of areas of the country, particularly
with the increase in asylum seekers, where schools are getting
more pupils for whom English is a second language; and some teachers
will not have had this experience before and are against a difficulty,
as they perceive it. Are they getting that information?
(Mr McCully) I think so. One of the effective elements
of the Key Stage 3 strategy, which again replicates our best practice
in primary schools, is the consultancy resource that we support
in local education authorities and contact with our own professional
force in the Department. Having that cascade of our professional
force talking to consultants means that we have a rich dialogue,
being able to share that best practice around. It is quite an
effective resource for getting messages and best practice from
the centre out into the local education authority and therefore
through the authorities direct to schools. There is always more
that we can do, but I am confident we have the strategies there
to do it.
129. Moving to the issue of a whole school approach
to achievement, you talked earlier about some of the important
issues to be addressed if pupil attainment is to be raised. How
much of that is different for raising the attainment of minority
ethnic pupils as generally raising attainment levels within schools?
(Ms Burns) All of those characteristics are characteristics
of successful schools. It is possible to be a school that is successful
for some pupils, but if a school is successful for its lowest
performing groups, it tends to be successful for all of its pupils.
Those characteristics are very similar to those that the Department
has put forward in a range of documents around leadership, teaching
and learning, pupil behaviour, community involvement—the
kind of characteristics that successful schools share. What is
important is to see whether an individual group, for example,
is being disadvantaged by any policy or procedure and to see whether
any individual group is under-performing. When one focuses in
on the lowest achieving groups, that tends to shine an X-ray into
the system and enable all groups to succeed well.
130. It sounds almost as though you are trying
to say both things. If the things that help schools achieve anywhere
are things that will help ethnic minority pupils achieve, why
do we need your bit of the Department? That brings us back to
the earlier question—if it is just poor schools or schools
in areas of deprivation; is it just about poverty, as opposed
to about anything else?
(Mr Shaw) I think it is possible to hold both positions
and be right. Ofsted did a really important report called Improving
City Schools about two years ago, which asked carefully what
are the characteristics of those city schools which had improved
tremendously, and what was different about them. The answer was
not that they are doing a different form of teaching or have a
different curriculum, a different timetable or different style
of leadership—they were just doing it better. So Annabel
is right, I think. Ofsted bears out my own observations of effective
schools. To teach a school that has a high number of ethnic minority
pupils, you need to run a good school. That is the first thing.
Ofsted also said—and this is important—that you need
to make sure that the diet of learning, the culture in which children
learn, is one that is congenial to the children. That is going
to be different, is it not, in an inner city school with large
numbers of Pakistani children than in a county school with a majority
of white children? It is not a fundamentally different approach
to teaching; it is fundamentally the same approach to running
a good school.
131. Do you think there are situations where
teachers are under-estimating the ability of pupils from minority
ethnic groups? We heard last week about an example of children
from Montserrat: when they first came to Britain they were doing
really well and they were very positive about education; but three
years later they were not doing so well and they were not positive.
The only explanation for that seems to be implicit views about
how well they were likely to do, and the attitudes of teachers.
Have you got any evidence on that?
(Mr Shaw) We have certainly got evidence about under-performance
generally. It is easy to spot schools which are under-performing.
They are not necessarily schools with large numbers of ethnic
minority pupils. It can just as easily be schools that are predominantly
white.
132. That might also be because we are concerned
about working-class white boys as well.
(Mr Shaw) Yes.
133. Again, is that an expectation that they
are never going to do well due to low expectations of teachers?
(Mr McCully) I think low expectations not just of
different minority ethnic groups, but of the standards of achievement
of many schools across the board has been a key issue in some
of the poor performance that we have seen over previous years.
One of the key drivers that Ofsted constantly reported on, in
terms of the development of standards in primary schools and national
strategies, and looking towards the development in Key Stage 3
has been that turn-around of differences in expectation—the
finding that you can, by setting high objectives, with that challenge
and support behind it, begin to counteract a number of the external
factors that affect individual performance, and to some extent
the parental and family background as well. Some of the evidence
published in the major evaluation we had of the primary strategy
by the University of Toronto again picked up on the degree of
progress that could be made purely in the classroom by that degree
of support and high challenge. I think you can overcome some of
the issues by high expectations.
(Mr Shaw) I wanted to come back to the
second part of your question, and talk about children from the
Caribbean for whom there were higher expectations. My observation
is that that is often a complaint by parents from the Caribbean
and from other parts of the country and other parts of the world;
that their children are being treated as if they were dimmer.
One of the things we have done in Excellence in Cities, which
we have not talked about this afternoon, which has real potential
to solve that problem, is what we are doing to extend the range
of opportunities for gifted and talented children. We are quite
careful to make sure that schools with large numbers of ethnic
minority pupils choose their gifted and talented children with
an eye to reflecting ethnicity of their pupils overall. It is
a major feature of the way in which we are going that we are now
able to offer a much richer diet to children who are abler or
talented—perhaps not in academic ways—to expose them
a bit more to the possibility of higher education, which may not
have been in their horizons before—to give them master classes
and summer schools and experience within the classroom which will
extend their aspirations, extend the expectations of their teachers,
and meet the aspirations of their parents.
134. Given the recognition within the DfES that
a lot of these schools are in challenging circumstances, with
high numbers of children getting free school meals, with a large
ethnic mix, is the DfES trying to attract more high-quality teachers
to those areas, to do something to reward them, given that school
leadership, teaching and learning are so important in that achievement
in all schools?
(Mr Shaw) Yes. We can describe three things. One is
that we have just changed the funding system so that it reflects
deprivation more. Second, we are constantly trying to loosen up
the way in which teachers are employed, so that the ability of
schools to set terms and conditions that will attract the right
people for their circumstances is greater. Thirdly, we are doing
a lot of work with schools in challenging circumstances, whether
in Inner London or in Grimsby, or wherever, to enable them to
be more adventurous in the way in which they manage the school,
less hidebound by what they thought were the old rules constraining
them, and more able to tailor what they are doing to the needs
of their children.
Paul Holmes
135. Going back to the point that it appears
to be the schools that are assuming that African-Caribbean children
are not very bright and that is why they under-achieve, why then
are the schools assuming that black African children are bright
and therefore are doing much better?
(Mr Shaw) I am not saying it is the schools'
fault. I think there is a whole mix of factors in under-performance.
I am not sure I can answer your question about the difference
between children from an African background and children from
a Caribbean background.
(Ms Burns) One of the factors which may have an influence
is the fact that historically many black African children come
from a relatively middle-class background, whereas more black
Caribbean children have come from more disadvantaged backgrounds,
which will have had an impact. Perhaps the point you are raising
is about the extent of the impact of the different factors. We
all recognise that there is a range of different factors which
impact on achievement. I do not think we have a precise answer
about the impact of teacher expectations versus poverty, versus
inner city, versus home background for example. I do not think
there is a simple breakdown of the proportions of those factors.
Clearly, they impact differently on different young people.
136. That is the point I have asked twice now
because it seems to me to be too simplistic to say that it is
the schools' or teachers' attitudes that are at fault, when you
can see clear differences between black African children and African-Caribbean
children's performance within the same areas or schools; just
as with the Asian community you can often see a difference between
Indian children, who tend to be more middle-class in our terms,
than Bangladeshi children, who tend to come from small rural villages.
There are clear differences that seem to be down to other factors
such as social background. You cannot just pin it on to the schools
or the teachers, saying it is their fault.
(Mr Shaw) I am sure you are right. It means that you
need to tackle the multiplicity of factors that may be at work
in a fairly multiple way. One of the things that seems to me most
likely to work for the good of children for whom there are too
low expectations has not been mentioned at all: it is the emphasis
that the Government and the teaching profession are now putting
on assessing the potential of individual children—not seeing
them as groups or as clumps of Pakistani girls or whatever, but
as individual children, each with a different potential and a
different learning style, for whom the teacher needs to be very
careful to pitch the learning in the way that he or she will get.
One of the most promising developments around is what the teaching
profession tends to call assessment for learning, and that is
a real inquiry into the potential of the child and how you make
sure the child understands its potential and the standard it can
reach.
(Mr McCully) In more successful primary schools—this
is not my observation as much as Ofsted's observation—a
key characteristic is the extent to which individual children
have their own individual objectives measured on a regular basis
and discussed between the child, the teacher and parents, and
their progress throughout the year. If there are issues that we
can build on in secondary schools, it is how we extend those practices
to start to make a real difference in primary schools across the
difficult period of transition from primary to secondary. We still
have a little way to go to map the assessment for learning experiences.
137. You talked about the problem of attracting
the most gifted and talented teachers into inner city schools
for precisely these sorts of reasons; but, of course, the inner
city schools tend to have to use temporary staff and unqualified
staff and so forth. Meg asked if you had proposals to encourage
staff into inner city schools. Some people perhaps think some
of the DfES policies are discouraging those people, bearing in
mind league tables, Ofsted, applying professional performance
pay every couple of years—being told, "it is your fault;
the kids are not doing very well and you will not get your pay"—and
that deters any graduates coming out of university from going
to inner city schools where they perceive that they are going
to get the blame through league tables and all the rest of it,
rather than going to a nice leafy suburb.
(Mr Shaw) I do not think that is right actually. I
think the chances of a bright young teacher progressing fast are
higher in a tough inner city school than elsewhere, precisely
because staff turnover is high in those schools. Probably the
bigger problem for some of the cities, certainly London, is the
cost of housing for teachers as well as for other key staff. The
Government has put a lot of money into enabling local authorities
to buy houses for teachers and similar staff. We are also doing
some work with schools in challenging circumstances to help them
attract really good managers, because it is noticeable that aspiring
head teachers are often aiming for schools other than those schools,
because they are easier to run. We have a deliberate programme
to develop what we call "training heads" and place them
with really experienced effective head teachers in tough circumstances,
so that more young promising aspiring heads will feel that that
is for them—"we can do it".
138. In terms of fast-track teachers, the idea
of spending two years in a school and working in another for two
years, then another one for two years, and then getting accelerated
promotion, to a lot of teachers—they will say that to teach
an exam course, GCSE, it is two years through, and then you can
do it properly because you have learnt what is going on; but with
other fast-track schemes, as soon as you have just about started
to get to grips with what is happening, you move on to do something
else somewhere else. Is that a sensible thing? Do you want teachers
to spend rather longer in one place rather than it being here
today, gone tomorrow?
(Mr Shaw) I do not think I can comment on that.
(Mr McCully) The correlation between teacher turnover
in the school and the levels of performance at the school are
well documented, so I find it difficult to see a strategy that
would look to increase that teacher turnover.
139. But the fast-track recruitment strategy
does precisely that; you have to spend two years in one school
and then move on to another and then to another; and then they
say, "we will make you a deputy head".
(Mr McCully) None of us here are experts on teacher
recruitment. We can only promise to go away and talk to our colleagues
in the Department who are responsible.
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