Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2002
MR DAVID
TAYLOR, MISS
KATH CROSS,
MR TIM
KEY AND
MR MIKE
RALEIGH
140. Is that a public document yet or will it
be and, if not, why not?
(Miss Cross) It is not a public document yet but we
were waiting until we had sufficient evidence, but it also features
in the —
(Mr Taylor) It features in the annual report of this
year.
(Miss Cross) And last year as well.
(Mr Raleigh) In 2000, we produced a report called
Improving city schools which focused on the more effective
schools in disadvantaged circumstances and we are proposing to
update that report, which will include some but not all of the
schools that are in the schools facing challenging circumstances
group.
(Mr Taylor) We also report on the excellence in cities
programme.
(Mr Raleigh) There is one general thing that I wish
to say—and it is a rather dull thing to say as well—and
that is that the things that drive improvement when you look across
these different programmes are pretty common. So, if one is looking
for, how much value for money do you get out of this as opposed
to that, it is important to recognise that the mainsprings of
improvement come down to the few extremely important features
of good management in schools and that is always the answer to,
why is this not producing value for money: that it is not well
managed; that it is not well-integrated into the rest of the work
that the school needs to do; this management team is not well-informed
about what is actually going on; they are not making very good
use of assessment data and so on. So, that rather short list which
appears in different guises in our annual reports perhaps relentlessly:
good management, good teaching, good personal support, good relations,
good links with parents is the list that we find looking at the
effectiveness of improvement programmes.
141. Just going back to specifically excellence
in cities, is there a parallel report to the specialist schools
report on excellence in cities and is that a public document?
(Mr Raleigh) That will be coming out in the New Year.
It is a report on an exercise looking at excellence in cities
and other major schemes including education action zones over
a two-and-a-half year period covering primary and secondary schools.
We hope it will be informative.
142. Finally, I think your broad conclusions
are that the characteristics of all good and improving schools
are the same and can be clearly identified. Is there anything
in your inspection evidence that says that the education system
that has a large variety of different types of school in itself
is a higher standard of education or a more rapid rate of improvement,
again either in rural schools or in valued added?
(Mr Taylor) I think the answer is "no",
if I can put it as simply as that. I do not think that we would
have had the evidence to say that going for diversity in itself
necessarily drives up practice standards more than a single system,
but it does depend a little on what you mean by "system"
because we have analysed that data both in terms of the foundation
of the school, in terms of selection and in terms of designated
status and, in all of these ways, you get pockets of difference
which are interesting to pursue, but you do not get a 42 type
solution. You do not say that because we have looked at it like
this, we can say to the Government confidently, "Go for diversity
rather than uniformity." It does not look as clear-cut as
that.
Chairman
143. When you read all the literature that this
Committee has been reading, what is fascinating about the evidence
we had last Wednesday was the fact that this is not a new development
and this love affair with diversity started with the last Conservative
administration and has been almost seamless in terms of that attraction
and whether it is excellence in cities, education in action zones
and specialist schools, one gets a picture of governments flailing
around looking for some formula that will bring better achievement
in a hurry whereas a lot of the research shows that it is a relationship
between poverty and educational attainment all the time. Is that
not right?
(Mr Taylor) It is undoubtedly right that, whichever
system you have, some of the most intractable problems are those
relating to inherited disadvantage or really the kinds of very
hard indicators to shift. Alas, the free school meals indicator
continues to be very consistent in its effect on performance and
achievement, whichever kind of system of schooling you have. Therefore,
unhappy as I am with relying on free school meals data—and
I think this is why people level data will take us further—it
is undoubtedly the case that, when you look at the kinds of charts
we produced on free school meals, it is only relatively rare outriders
that buck the trend that links performance and free school meals
incidence. I do not know if any of my colleagues can make specific
comment on our data on free school meals.
(Mr Key) In chart 15—it is not particularly
clear because of the preponderance of red squares—two points
might be drawn from that chart: one would be, as Mr Turner said,
the general relationship between free school meals and GCSE average
point score; secondly, at any given level of free school meals,
the range within at any level of disadvantage, which is quite
considerable.
Mr Chaytor
144. Could you answer a specific technical point
on the use of free school meals as a proxy for deprivation. In
the debate about educational standard spending assessment, one
of the issues since the introduction of the working families tax
credit in April 2002 is that the use of free school meals as a
proxy for deprivation is less relevant as there are far fewer
families who are eligible for free school meals and that the more
accurate proxy would be eligibility for working families tax credit
because that is the real indicator of low incomes as a whole.
Has that every cropped up in your deliberations and do you have
a view on it?
(Mr Key) We recognise the shortcomings of using free
school meal data and they are frequently drawn to our attention
by head teachers. Nevertheless, infuriatingly, they do work as
a proxy for disadvantage. You are mentioning other indicators
and, yes, we are working pretty hard to see whether we can put
together a package of indicators including, for example, pupil
mobility which might feed into a more acceptable although not
necessarily more useable measure of disadvantage.
(Mr Taylor) Certainly the changes that Mr Chaytor
referred to have pushed us further along the road of looking for
alternative ways of measuring the effect of disadvantage.
Mr Turner
145. Allowing for the fact that we seem to be
using a number of different words—poverty, disadvantage,
deprivation and social segregation—and I am not clear whether
we are using it as meaning the same thing or as if we mean different
things, does social segregation affect positively or negatively
the standard achieved in a community in a locality?
(Mr Taylor) The terms are slippery ones, are they
not! I think I want to say that we probably intend to use the
first three of your quartet as being rather loosely interconnected,
but that social segregation is a horse of quite a different colour
and that, to some extent, was clearly one of the factors in some
of the early studies in grammar schools in how successful they
were or were not in providing a different kind of segregation
which was designed to overcome the disadvantage of economic and
social segregation. I think what we want to say is that social
segregation if seen to produce a kind of elite socially and in
terms of status is perhaps not what Government policy can be directed
at. It should be directed at overcoming disadvantage and poverty
and making sure that the entitlement to access to high quality
education is there for everyone and that the risks of some kind
of hierarchical system, which any diverse provision might create,
are minimised.
I do not know if that is an answer or not!
146. I do not feel it is an answer because the
question is, does it affect the standards achieved? Is there any
relationship?
(Mr Taylor) If we are talking specifically on specialist
schools and non-specialist schools . . .?
147. I am talking about social segregation.
(Mr Taylor) What would you see as an example of that
in order that we are sure what we are talking about?
148. Professor Gorard, for example, was talking
about the intake being not representative of the community on,
I assume, the basis of some kind of social measure—I cannot
remember what measure he was using but I do not think it was a
poverty measure.
(Mr Taylor) I know that the CTC, for example, has
made great store out of stressing that it is not in that way socially
divisive and that it is taking intakes fully representative of
the local community.
(Mr Raleigh) It is fiendishly difficult to get to
the bottom of this as Professor Gorard would have indicated. I
think he was using ward level data and the match between that
and the school that happens to sit in that ward is nowhere near
exact. I think that the point to come back to is the one that
Mr Taylor has made that, from our evidence including looking at
research, there is not a straightforward connection between the
extent of diversity and the quality of education and the outcomes
in an area, nor is there a straightforward relationship between
uniformity, relatively speaking, and outcomes and quality. We
are talking about a number of factors here. Age range of schools
is quite often regarded as significant by parents, 11 to 16 as
opposed to 11 to 18, single sex and so on. You can play in probably
a dozen factors in looking at the mix of the schools and there
are examples in not necessarily the whole LEA area but smaller
areas of systems which are, in one respect or another, highly
diverse which overall do not produce very good outcomes, certainly
within the maintained sector and vice-versa. Relatively, uniform
systems do not produce consistently high levels of outcome. My
feeling is that talking about it across the nation is actually
a rather abstract notion and that it only starts to have reality
when you are looking at a particular area and the question of,
is this the right mix of schools for this patch? Rightly or wrongly,
this is a matter for local decision and the Members here will
no doubt have experience of the difficulties with the decision-making
process when local authorities or others involved in our organisation
try to get that mix to be different. The final point is that it
is not just a matter of what the name on the gate subtitle is
of those individual schools but the relationships between them
and, when you look at those areas which have more consistent outcomes
across the piece, where there is a higher level of parental satisfaction,
certainly when you look at the parent preferences and the degree
to which they are met, the number of appeals and so on, the fact
that there is not friction of a particular sort between schools,
the fact that there is co-operation among them in the provision
of courses, in staff development and in management development,
and the fact that they are looking not always but a lot of the
time at how this system is providing for the most vulnerable,
those who under-achieve, and they are looking at that together
are very strong characteristics of a good mix which tends to correlate
with a high level of satisfaction and credibility with parents.
It is a system that carries conviction for them. So, it is not
just which schools in the mix but how those schools relate.
149. Is it a fair comment to say that, in a
sense, you are saying that a stable system, regardless of its
components, is more likely to provide satisfaction than an unstable
system?
(Mr Raleigh) Yes, except that the schools in that
local mix change over time. The designation "specialist schools"
has been one fairly new example but there are others with new
designation or involvement. Schools change; they get better; some
get worse. Parents' views of them change; they do not necessarily
relate to what Ofsted inspection might say about the quality of
the school, parents have other lines of inquiry. So, no the local
systems are really stable or really absolutely stable and there
are some good examples of re-organisation proposals which, over
time, have done exactly what the local council was hoping, that
it has improved the quality of the education and the outcomes.
(Mr Taylor) One thing we definitely cannot say is
that a stable system would work better or worse because we have
not had one!
150. Given that one of the key drives, it seems,
of social segregation and all other sorts of segregation is the
inability of parents to get into the school of their choice, do
you have any evidence on what happens when schools expand rapidly
or indeed new schools are set up in particular areas?
(Mr Taylor) Miss Cross has looked at some of the new
school setups, fresh start, which is one type of drastic change.
(Miss Cross) They have not normally changed in their
population, so we do not have that sort of evidence. We are looking
at schools that will become city academies and going to the predecessor
schools to look at those and then we can help to give information
to the city academies union in order that they can advise schools
to try to improve themselves. So, we will be monitoring those
in the future and getting that sorted. If I may just make a comment
in relation to schools that have been in special measures and
using the term "deprived areas". The key to those schools
changing as well as the list of things that Mr Raleigh gave you
about leadership, management and quality of teaching is that the
culture changes to one where the teachers and people in the school
believe that those pupils can achieve instead of saying, "What
do you expect pupils to achieve when they have these sort of difficulties
in their lives?" The most important thing for school improvement,
when you are looking at some of the weakest schools, is that there
is a focus on the pupils and it is a focus on the pupils' achievement
and that drives everything and then you need decent leadership
and management to pull that together and you have commitment from
everybody involved in the school including governors, parents
and pupils to work together to say, "We can do better than
we were doing before."
(Mr Taylor) On the rapidly expanding schools, I have
just checked with Mr Key and we do not have any specific evidence
though I think that if there is any, we should look at it. My
gut instinct, which is the thing I am supposed to leave behind
when I come in here, tells me that actually rapidly expanding
schools tend to do rather well because they have a kind of buoyancy
of confidence and the funding that goes with it and that it is
much better to be in the school that is doing that than one which
is losing numbers drastically as a result of other factors.
Chairman: Those of us who went
to the George Dixon School in Birmingham had that feeling of a
buzz, growth and so on.
Ms Munn
151. You have talked very helpfully about it
being an improvement programme for specialist schools. What we
heard last week was that specialist schools did not seem to be
showing great improvements in outcomes on the measures of exam
results. In your experience, how long does it actually take for
these specialist schools to have an effect because a number of
them are only just becoming specialist schools? With some of the
ones that we visited in Birmingham, we could tell that, as the
Chairman said, there was a buzz and that things were starting
to happen. In terms of children who were actually going through
that process, is it not going to be some four or five years before
we really know?
(Mr Taylor) In broad terms, you are right. It is wrong
to expect quick fixes albeit that some schools do actually achieve
remarkably quick improvements under the right ideal circumstances.
We would normally see improvement as something which should be
expected to take two years or so. Again, from Miss Cross's evidence,
schools in special measures often do make quite remarkable achievement
within that two year period but they are not improvements that
show themselves in dramatic transformations in test data, which
is again why what we are trying to do is pick up on schools which
we visited that have had that status for at least two years and
look at these broad range of indicators about the quality of behaviour,
quality of management and the quality of teaching and ask, how
is this group of schools doing under the kind of things which
we as inspectors, which are the same things that parents and pupils
will see when they are in schools, are judging alongside exam
data and are often not proxies for performance but the growth
points which will lead to that performance in a couple of years.
152. The other point I wanted to talk about
is these schools are taking on a specialism, and one of the schools
that I visited with the Committee in Birmingham was a specialist
school in technology and some of the stuff that the kids were
doing there was just absolutely phenomenal. Last night I was giving
out the awards to the children who had left from a school in my
constituency, Meadowhead, which has taken on a language status,
and I was giving out German and French dictionaries so it has
clearly encouraged a number of those children probably beyond
what was happening previously to take an interest in languages.
Has any data been available or anything been collected about improving
in these areas and in promoting excellence in particular subjects,
beyond what was happening before?
(Mr Taylor) Certainly the progress within the specialism
was one of the key factors, which Mike Raleigh said a little bit
about in our report, but again it is difficult to disentangle
features that were already there to a large extent and that were
what earned schools status in the first place from things which
are generally innovative as a result of the programme. What it
has normally done is given the spur to existing good practice
and taken it on that extra level. We certainly quoted in our report
some examples of very good specialist practices.
(Mr Raleigh) We did indeed, which did build on what
schools were doing otherwise they would not have had a basis for
the difference they made but it enabled them to do things faster
for greater numbers and in some cases different things. A fantastic
example I saw in a sports column was what they managed to do in
engaging a very large number of young people who would not necessarily
have seen themselves in leadership roles in school or in a community
context, and junior sports leaders and who worked their way up—
153. I thought you were going to say it was
going to enable England to win the World Cup next time round!
(Mr Raleigh) To be honest, some of the sports performances
we saw there were of such high quality you just wondered why we
were not on the map already.
154. So it could turn round Britain's sporting
fortunes, then?
(Mr Raleigh) I had better not attribute that to Ofsted!
(Mr Taylor) I think we are directly responsible for
the Rugby Union.
Chairman: What about the cricket?
Mr Pollard
155. We have various specialist schools—sports,
language, business, technology, etc. Is there a place for vocational
specialisms? I am thing about plumbers and bricklayers. We are
distinctly short of those, and the Chancellor will be mentioning
this in his speech this afternoon, I am sure.
(Mr Taylor) Obviously the COVEs, as they are called,
Centres of Vocational Excellence, which are now being placed on
the FE sector largely and joined with developments in the 14-19
curriculum, are designed to ensure that there is a broad basis
but only within the specialist college designation.
(Mr Raleigh) They are all firmly expected to develop
work-related learning to a high level within their specialism.
In the new specialisms we have science, business and enterprise,
mathematics and computing, and engineering.
(Mr Taylor) Not plumbing though?
Chairman
156. The experience of Huddersfield technical
college is they no longer teach these because they can no longer
get staff, because the staff would be on much higher earnings
doing the job outside further education.
(Mr Taylor) The same is true of maths teachers in
secondary schools and everything else.
Paul Holmes
157. Looking at one other aspect of diversity
within specialist schools and that is grammar schools, the PISA
study said categorically that, from their comparisons, selective
systems like the one in Britain did very well by their most able
pupils but much less when looked at in the context of countries
like Finland which has a comprehensive system. Professor Jesson
in 1999 did a study where he compared two authorities in Britain,
one which had grammars and one which had comprehensives. The grammar
authority had 48% of pupils getting 5 GCSEs across the whole county
and the comprehensive one had 52%, and he said that the Ofsted
average scores for those countries in the comprehensive area was
39 points per pupil for GCSEs and in the grammar was 37. So there
is evidence there that selective systems like the grammar systems
do less well for the whole school population. Have you any comments
from Ofsted research?
(Mr Taylor) Yes, we have, but prefaced by the obvious
observation that for every Jesson you will find an anti Jesson
there as well!
(Mr Key) I was going to look more widely and say,
as David Taylor just hinted, that it depends who you speak to
and it is interesting talking to people from the countries which
you mentioned, either with the selective system or with the non
selective system, both will defend their particular systems on
the basis of PISA results or higher attainment. Certainly in Scandinavia,
and maybe Canada and Australia as well, there will be a strongly
held feeling that streaming arrangements may disadvantage lower
attaining children and therefore those countries are pretty strong
in their desires to stick with the fully comprehensive systems
they have.
(Mr Taylor) If you ever get the chance to get to the
back of the pack of charts with which we inundated you, you will
find that there are three or so on teaching and selection by general
ability, and we like these scatter gun type ones with dots all
over the place, and once you start working out what it means,
which takes a bit of help from Tim—for me anyway—you
do find some extraordinarily interesting things but they never
lead to you the point of saying, "Well, that proves that
a selective system is better than a comprehensive one".
(Mr Key) I have chart 28 in front of me and if I thought
we would have been able to cope with another layer of dots and
different colours I would have added one which showed comprehensive
schools, of course. That is a fascinating range of dots to superimpose
on this which really stretches from just about the highest of
the blue diamonds for grammar schools down to way amongst the
red squares for the secondary moderns, and shows that there are
secondary modern schools which are doing better than some of the
comprehensive schools and there are comprehensive schools up with
the best of the grammar schools.
(Mr Taylor) But the top secondary moderns are doing
better than the worst grammar schools, which we found interesting
to look at.
158. How far would you then divide that down
further? If you have a secondary modern that is doing well, or
the average comprehensive or a low grammar, would you have to
look at the sort of area it is serving in terms of free school
meals, etc?
(Mr Key) I think that is absolutely right because
we have talked about schools that are located in a particular
place, and I think it is important to look at what is the choice
within the area that we are looking at. Have we got fully comprehensive?
Have we got comprehensive? Have we got selective secondary modern
and grammar? What is the mix? And how close are they to each other?
So it is a very difficult picture to generalise over.
159. But again there is the comment on socio
economic background—grammar schools on average have 2% of
their pupils with free school meals and comprehensives have on
average 18%, so we are back to what we were saying earlier about
schools in challenging circumstances that are in inner cities,
for example.
(Mr Taylor) All of that is right, precisely, and that
is why it is interesting that the red blobs at the left hand end,
which is the good end, are also in very low school meal areas,
so once again it is another index of how important this class
pupil level data is going to be to enable us to drill down to
those very specific factors which are affecting achievement. I
think once we get that tracking of individual pupil data fully
worked through the system, some of these great big questions which
have been teasing us about system-wide improvement will be easier
to answer.
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