Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


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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