Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


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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