Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
MONDAY 24 MARCH 2003
MR BARNABY
SHAW, MISS
ANNABEL BURNS
AND MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
Mr Pollard
140. You have stressed throughout the piece
that competence in English is vital. The Chairman said earlier
that 80% of the impact on children's education was from the home.
In Bangladeshi homes, Bangla is spoken, and in Pakistani homes
it is Punjabi or Urdu; and in Indian homes it is generally English.
Is there any relationship across that?
(Ms Burns) One needs to make a distinction
between whether a child is fully bilingual and therefore could
be achieving very well in the English-speaking school system,
while speaking Urdu at home; or whether the child is struggling
in English in the school system, in which case there is an issue
about appropriate support being found for that child within the
school. Perhaps that has an important impact. I am not sure that
one could make a simple read across from the language spoken in
the home to attainment within the school. We do not have data
at a national level which would give us that read across, but
I am sure many local authorities do. Our data collection is improving
and it may be that in future we will have better data to help
us probe exactly that kind of issue.
Mr Turner
141. Mr Shaw, why did you say that the problem
is the cost of housing, rather than the poor pay of teachers?
(Mr Shaw) You would have to pay teachers
in Inner London so much in order for them to be able to own houses
in London. It would be astronomical.
Mr Pollard: You would have to pay nearly £100,000
a year—that is the truth of it. That would be ridiculous.
Chairman: We have not yet introduced
a chorus system. We will resist that tendency.
Mr Turner
142. It was a practical, rather than factual
basis.
(Mr Shaw) My answer was a practical one.
What is the effective quick strategy for attracting more teachers
into a high-cost city like London?
143. That was not my main question, but thank
you very much. There seems to be evidence that a good deal of
the reason for low achievement is related to family breakdown.
(Mr McCully) I have no evidence today. My own experience
of working with groups that have worked alongside schools bears
that out. That is anecdotal and as a result of their own professional
experience. I do not have any of the detailed research evidence
that could distinguish between the effect of family breakdown
or poverty or some of the other issues that we have talked about
today. It would not surprise me if that was the case, but I do
not have that evidence.
(Mr Shaw) I do not have any definitive evidence. I
have some sidelong evidence that might bear slightly on what you
are saying. There certainly is evidence that pupil mobility interferes
with their education. A child whose family breaks up, and he is
therefore obliged to move school—that is bound to have an
effect on his education. There is plenty of good evidence about
the impact both on individual children and on whole schools of
too much pupil mobility. Whether that is really linked to family
breakdown, I do not know.
(Mr McCully) Communities that Care has a number of
very well researched programmes out of the UK and also in the
United States, list a range of key risk factors for children's
development, not just in educational terms but in health and social
development. One of the key risk factors is family breakdown.
There is certainly a lot of evidence of the damage that that does
for a child's future development, but it is not specific to education.
144. I wonder why you focus so much attention,
as the Divisional Manager for School Improvement and Excellence
in Cities or, for that matter the Divisional Manager for Pupil
Standards, you focus so much attention, so it appears, on minority
ethnic pupils, without fixing so much attention on this question:
the anecdotes you have related and the research I have seen from
Patrician Morgan, among others, suggests that there is very significant
link.
(Mr Shaw) We have focused on ethnic minority children
because there are large numbers in the cities. Many of the things
we have been talking about this afternoon could be applied just
as easily to white children. Some of the most severe educational
gaps are those experienced by the poorest white children. We should
not be accused of having the wrong focus, simply because we talk
a lot about ethnic minority children. It is undoubtedly the case
that lower educational attainment is mixed up with a whole load
of social factors outside the school. When we are looking for
effective policies that will bear on educational attainment as
our priority, we tend to work most of all with those which are
under our direct hand, which are within the school. However, around
us are policy-makers at the DfES who are working hard to try to
link up educational policy with other social policies that are
important for the children we are talking about. The Government
is due to produce very soon a Green Paper on Young People at
Risk, which will be talking very much about those sorts of
policies. We try and design our policies in ways which will not
create barriers between the school as a social institution and
other social institutions that are working with children or their
families.
(Mr McCully) I would go beyond that and look positively
for those opportunities, to make sure that the services work hand-in-hand,
not just complementing but adding to each other's activities.
To take two examples of the work of the Department with other
departments at the moment, the BEST teams are working in schools
where there are mental health issues or issues to do with criminality
and family breakdown. These are examples of professionals with
a social services background, agencies working with youth offending
and wider family problems, working alongside teachers in the school
to bring that expertise that the teachers themselves cannot bring
to bear in children's needs. The Children's Trust, which the Department
of Health has been leading on, is another example of brigading
educational services, social services and health services within
a common structure at local authority level—another example
of how we need to bring education and educational focus alongside
health and social services.
Chairman
145. Andrew has a good point, does he not, in
terms of how you relate to the research? I know that the DfES
commissions an enormous amount of research. How does it work?
I was a bit concerned because in relation to Mr Pollard's question
you said, "we do not know how much difference it makes or
does not make, if English is spoken in the home." You said
to Mr Turner that you are not quite sure what effect the break-up
of marriages has. There seem to be a lot of areas where either
the research must be there because you have commissioned so much
of it, or there is research you should be doing because we need
to know the answers. What is your relationship between the research,
either commissioning it or feeding in ideas for new research?
(Mr McCully) Some of the answers that
we have given about being unable to answer on the research, it
is not our personal—
146. The Committee would be interested to know
what the relationship is.
(Mr McCully) The Department conducts
a regular exercise of looking at future research needs and matching
them against our own programmes. That sort of discussion goes
on throughout the year. All of our individual programmes, as Barnaby
Shaw said a little earlier, go through an evaluation process and
looking at its cost-effectiveness. We have a structure to ensure
that research constantly feeds into the policies.
147. Let me give you a clear example, the education
entry zones are being phased out, is that based on research evidence,
that they were not such a good spend, or was it for some other
reason?
(Mr Shaw) I am responsible for them, I am phasing
them out but blending them into Excellence in Cities, where there
is an EAZ, and there will continue to be activity in the future.
We are phasing them out because Parliament gave them a statutory
life of five years. The research evidence showed us a mixed story,
it said that they had a good effect on primary schools but not
a profound effect on secondary schools. At that stage of government
policy we felt we wanted to shift the focus, it did not seem the
perfect policy answer. That really was a mix of research evidence
and policy thinking that goes into shifting policy like that.
I think I would acknowledge that we relate more easily to natural
education researchers than social researchers beyond education
and that we maybe have not done enough in that area. The Government's
current focus in education is one where one of our priorities
is beyond the classroom, beyond the school and it is an attempt
to join up education policies more effectively with social policies
of various kinds outside. If you were to criticise us for not
having gone far enough down that road that would be a fair criticism,
but one which we are already active on.
(Mr McCully) We also have the benefit of the efforts
the Government have put in to try and fill in some of those gaps.
Two of the most notable advances in working on in this area are
in the work of the Social Exclusion Unit, to fill in some of those
gaps, and it has dealt with a number of key, educational issues
linked into social issues. To take one example, the work on truancy
and exclusion, and most recently work on children who are looked
after, looking at that divide between the educational and the
social aspects. The other structural change has been the Children
and Young People's Unit, again working across departments, especially
the key departments of Education, the Home Office, the Department
of Health and, to a lesser extent, the DCMS and the Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister, once again looking at those links,
especially for those children most at risk, who are key contributors
to the forthcoming Green Paper.
148. EAZs are going to have a five year life,
what if somebody said to you, "in three years your unit is
going to be wound up", how do you judge whether you have
been a good investment or not? What would the three of you like
to have achieved in the three years?
(Mr Shaw) We will have each achieved something different.
Apart from meeting government targets I have a whole load of government
floor targets.
149. Flawed or floor?
(Mr Shaw) Floor, F.L.O.O.R. My personal goal is to
narrow the achievement gap for whomever that is, for whatever
group that might be that is relatively under-performing.
(Mr McCully) It is the key objectives of the two major
strategies of which I am responsible, both for primary schools
and the literacy and numeracy strategy, to improve performance
in primary schools, and the Key Stage 3 strategy is about raising
attainment for all but also, as with Barnaby, of closing the achievement
gap. The targets that we have are very public and, as we know,
uncomfortable some times but I think the levels of progress so
far give me great confidence that we are making a real difference.
150. You are going to be judged on that.
(Mr McCully) We are judged on what feels like a weekly
basis
151. Is there a high turnover of civil servants
in the Department?
(Mr McCully) I do not think so.
152. We have seen a few permanent secretaries
come and go. When we did the Individual Learning Accounts inquiry
most of the team that had initiated the policy had disappeared
by the time we got our hands on it.
(Mr McCully) It is a tradition of the Civil Service
to move round and gain further experience.
(Miss Burns) My aim is about the narrowing of achievement
gaps between minority ethnic pupils and the other pupils, it is
a mirror of the aim Barnaby described, it is about narrowing that
gap.
153. That nicely leads us to lessons to be learned
from Excellence in Cities.
Mr Chaytor
154. I want to ask, first of all, what do you
think are the special ingredients of the Excellence in Cities
programme that have now contributed to this narrowing of the achievement
gap and can they be transferred to other contexts?
(Mr Shaw) This is a multi-strand programme
designed to counteract a whole load of deficits that we first
thought inner city schools particularly suffer from, deficits
like low expectations, poor behaviour getting in the way of effective
teaching, isolation and a relatively narrow range of opportunities
for children in the inner cities. The three most important strands
that it gives schools to work with are learning mentors, all of
the evidence suggests in both primary and secondary schools they
are an enormously effective addition to the school. Learning Support
Units, which we are confident have had a really big impact on
behaviour in schools and the learning of the children most likely
to be disaffected and who play up in class. As I said earlier,
I think there is a slight question about the balance between Learning
Support Units and out of school provision for similar children.
A lot of authorities and a lot of schools are playing round with
that balance at present. The Government wants to flex the programme
up so that they can play round with that. The third big element
has been the Gifted and Talented Programme, which we assess and
Ofsted assesses as still having a distance to go. We feel that
this is absolutely the right thing to do but there are a lot of
bright and talented children in the inner cities not getting as
rich a range of opportunities as they could and the programme
is right for them but it has not yet really made a difference
to classroom practice. It has mainly been activities outside of
the classroom, very successful and very well liked by pupils,
like master classes and revision classes and homework classes.
There are other elements which are less important and get a smaller
investment, one is City Learning Centres, which are shared ICT
facilities of a very high standard, much used for children who
might otherwise feel a bit marginalised or for children who have
a minority interest they want to pursue, like some form of music
which they cannot do within their school but when you share facilities
with another school and draw in children with similar interests
you can provide something. The verdict is still out on City Learning
Centres and about how much they have impacted on children's learning,
but they are certainly well liked by those who take advantage
of them. Other elements of this multi-strand programme are we
have deliberately increased the number of beacon schools, previously
the inner city were not getting any beacon schools. That programme
has now more or less done its job and it is time to move on to
different things. Another element was to increase the number of
specialist schools in inner cities. We are now vastly increasing
that element, as the Government decided it wants many more secondary
schools, virtually all secondary schools to have specialist units.
Chairman
155. Was that based on research?
(Mr Shaw) On a certain amount of research.
There is certainly good evidence that specialist schools offer
higher standards and higher improvement in standards than other
schools on average. The other element in Excellence in Cities
has been, as it were, free money, which we all see in action zones
in inner cities, it is money for a group of schools to use as
they wish on their priorities. That has been very useful for tackling
some of the issues particular to a particular locality, like the
problems of refugee families arriving in a locality, like the
transition from a group of primary schools into a secondary school,
anything that people locally want to use the money for. You asked,
what have we learned from that and where do we go in the future?
We are feeling pretty confident that as a whole the programme
has worked and we certainly feel we need to flex it up now, and
that some localities have really worked out how to use the money
effectively. Some cases have twisted the rules a bit to make sure
that it works with what they see as their priorities for school
improvement. That seems to be something that we should encourage
rather than discourage. The other big lesson we learned is the
importance of leadership in making it all happen effectively,
you cannot use learning mentors effectively unless you slot them
into the school and have them as part of the school's system for
teaching and support. We want to take the programme further. We
started off in the inner cities and the obvious big inner cities,
London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, and we have spread it
to all of the major conurbations in the country and then we have
looked around and said there are pockets of deprivation outside
the inner cities which we have to tackle. Latterly we have been
picking up Excellence Clusters, which are generally two or more
schools with high poverty and low performance and their feeder
primary schools give them the core of the programme and tell them
to get on with it. We are at a point where we think we have covered
the most obvious clusters but there are still some places that
could do with this sort of provision, so over the next couple
of years we are planning fifteen or twenty more excellence clusters
and we are thinking now about the criteria we should use for assessing
where a locality needs an excellence cluster and looking for criteria
that are good and transparent. The other thing we want to do,
and the Spending Review has given us the money to do, is to take
the programme into primary schools more. When we started the programme
we could only afford to do it in the first six major cities, we
could only afford to do it in their primary schools, so London,
Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield have primary
schools getting the benefits of Excellence in Cities. There are
a lot more cities that could do with it and we have the money
to extend the programme into their cities for their primary schools.
We are now thinking about what is the right blend, what are the
strands we ought to be offering primary schools and how in particular
do we do things that are effectively with families, with parents.
Mr Chaytor
156. The evaluation shows that in the Excellence
in Cities areas there is a 2.3 increase and the non Excellence
in Cities are progressing 1.3%.
(Mr Shaw) Overall the increase that we
have seen since the programme begun has been about one and a half
times the increase in results as well. We think that the pace
is hotting up as schools have got used to using the resources.
I would not be surprised if over the next three or four years
we see a continued improvement of a percentage point a year faster
than the rest of the country, and that is substantial.
157. How substantial is it? In a school with
a cohort of 200 if I were the head teacher I could identify five
people who are borderline, Cs/Ds, and give them virtually individual
tuition for the whole Year 11 to make sure they end up going from
a grade D to a grade C, and that would be a 2.5% increase.
(Mr Shaw) It would. A lot of schools have done that
already, they have picked off the easy, near misses, but they
are now thinking, how do we move the whole cohort of children
up a grade?
158. Does this issue of intensive targeting
on individual children worry you? When you said that they have
done it already surely it is a trick to be performed again year
after year after year as each cohort moves from Year 9 to Year
10.
(Mr Shaw) If you were to keep improving standards,
and you already have effective ways of picking up the children
who are nearly there, then next year you need to do the same and
something more. A lot of inner city schools are now thinking quite
radically about changes which will affect every child in the school.
There will be a much broader curriculum, a much better pastoral
system that will support children at all levels of ability, and
teaching and learning supported by the programme that Andrew McCully
runs, that is of a different league, of high expectations and
the quality of teaching and the use of work force teachers and
other staff that is radically different to the way in which schools
have used the work force in the past.
159. Can I ask about this differential rate
of progress between the inner city schools and those outside.
In the evidence you have submitted there is a rate of difference
according to free school meal bounds. This is the one that shows
in paragraph three the biggest increase in GCSE performance there
has been in schools with the highest proportion of free school
meals.[15]
Equally it shows the smaller increase, apart from the grammar
schools, and obviously it is within that middle band. All of the
other bands are more or less the same. There seems to be a direct
trade-off between the middle free school meals band, which has
progressed to a lesser extent, and the highest free school meals
band, which has progressed to a greater extent. Is there a trade-off
or is that coincidence?
(Mr Shaw) I would like to think the biggest
impact has been where the Government has invested most by putting
a lot of extra resources into the highest poverty schools. The
improvement in the high poverty schools is because of that investment.
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