Examination of Witnesses (Questions 223-239)
WEDNESDAY 15 JANUARY 2003
MRS MARGARET-ANNE
BARNETT, MR
RON JACOBS
AND MR
RAY SHOSTAK
Chairman
223. Can I welcome Margaret-Ann Barnett and
Ron Jacobs from the Department, the School Diversity Division,
and Ray Shostak who is from Hertfordshire LEA. We are grateful
that you have given us the time to help inform our inquiry into
secondary education, the first phase of which you will know for
most of this year, when we are not rushing off to do other things
like respond to White Papers or statutory documents for higher
education, we are looking at secondary education in four sections
but diversity is the first. We have taken quite a lot of evidence,
particularly from academics, on the diversity strategy and we
thought it was only appropriate that we talk to the people who
really know what is going on in the Department and in the project
areas to find out how you can help us. Can I begin—and I
do not know who wants to lead on this—by asking you to give
a little background of the history of the pathfinder project.
Mrs Barnett, I believe you are from New Zealand.
(Mrs Barnett) Yes, I am.
224. You will know that we recently visited
New Zealand and, if you want to make any comparisons with what
does or does not go on in New Zealand, that would be very welcome
because it will bring back very happy memories.
(Mrs Barnett) I am here on secondment. I joined the
Department in September of the year before last and was asked
to take on this Diversity Pathfinders Project, which had its beginning
during the Green Paper consultation Schools Achieving Success
and, in the course of those consultations, the Secretary of State,
Estelle Morris, visited a number of LEAs around the country and
head teachers. At that stage, you will recall that they were talking
about expanding the specialist schools programme and talking about
diversity being an important component of the secondary reform
and raising standards and, in her discussions with people, she
could see that there were a number of implications around expanding
diversity and a number of things that people were particularly
interested to explore. So, she decided at that time that she would
establish a very small project that would enable us to put some
of these things into practice and to look at how an expansion
of diversity and an expansion particularly of the specialist schools
programme would work in a rural area and in an urban environment
and that was really the beginnings of this project. We were interested
to see what the factors were going to be that would make this
successful and what we could learn from the work of the pathfinders.
That was really the beginnings of it.
(Mr Jacobs) I would only add, in the context of my
presence here, that, if the Committee has questions that it wants
to ask more broadly about specialist schools and diversity policy,
I will be very happy to answer those. Mrs Barnett is very much
the expert on the Diversity Pathfinder Project which is part of
the division that I am currently heading.
225. Mr Jacobs, you are one of the constants
in the Department.
(Mr Jacobs) Yes. We do not actually keep records on
this!
226. People say to me, "Thank God Ron Jacobs
is still there when everybody else seems to have moved elsewhere."
You know the history; I would suggest you would know in the Department
where some of the bodies are buried!
(Mr Jacobs) Well, I hope you are not going to ask
me about that!
227. Could you give us a little more of a context
to supplement what Mrs Barnett has said.
(Mr Jacobs) Yes, certainly. My involvement with specialist
schools goes back nearly seven years which is a very long time
in terms of a civil servant's stay with a programme. That comes
about because, at about the start of that time, the Department
abandoned its policy of moving everybody at least every three
years and it was a policy which I found extremely interesting
because, as you will know, it has evolved a great deal over those
seven years. It has developed enormously from something that was
originally, I think, perceived certainly and probably in practice
exclusive into something that we now recognise as being targeted
to go right across the secondary system.
228. Who was the Secretary of State when you
started?
(Mr Jacobs) The Secretary of State when I started
on this would have been John Patten, I suppose, or it might just
have changed to Gillian Shephard by the time I started on it.
The reason for my confusion there is that I was associated with
city technology colleges immediately before that and of course
dealt with both and was therefore already very close to the specialist
schools programme even though I was actually dealing with the
city technology colleges. As background to the pathfinder project,
by the time the events that Mrs Barnett was describing in relation
to Estelle Morris took place, we had already clearly established
that what we were looking for was a specialist school programme
to go across the board and therefore it did seem highly appropriate
to have some areas in which that might happen more quickly than
in others in order that we could see what lessons might be learnt.
Even from then we have moved on in the sense that, at that stage,
I think it would be fair to say that we were thinking in terms
of those authorities being somewhat in advance of others in possibly
reaching a stage at which all or nearly all their schools might
be specialist whereas now, since the 28 November announcement,
all authorities potentially are in the same position in relation
to how quickly they might achieve specialist school status across
the board.
229. In terms of the development of the specialist
school concept, it starts under the last Conservative administration?
(Mr Jacobs) Yes.
230. It moves, which we are aware of, and it
is much more of an elite system then; it is a small number of
schools. What is the trigger for it becoming a general programme?
Was that during David Blunkett's period of office or was it not
until Estelle Morris came?
(Mr Jacobs) I would say that it was still under David
Blunkett's term in office because of course, going back to 1997,
there were 181 specialist schools. The new Government decided
to keep the programme; they immediately decided it should be broader,
both in terms of expanding the planned numbers and in terms of
the community programme coming in. It was really in 2001, with
the Green Paper and the White Paper, that the clear shift from
a policy that was not necessarily directed at the whole system
became directed at the whole system. The Green Paper targeted
1,500 schools by 2006 and the White Paper revised that target
to 2005, and that was clearly the time at which we were saying,
"This is not about two-tier; this is not about setting up
divisions within the system; this is about a programme that we
want all schools to be able to take the benefit of."
231. If this programme were building, expanding
and developing, what was the earliest discussion about how you
evaluate it and monitor it?
(Mr Jacobs) The earliest discussions on that would
have been back in 1997, which is when we were first talking about
setting up the research projects that became the London School
of Economics and Leeds University research projects that were
carried out in 1998 and 1999 and published in 2000.
232. So, you were really getting outside consultants,
albeit universities, to evaluate?
(Mr Jacobs) To look at the impact of the programme,
yes.
233. What is different about pathfinder to that
sort of . . .?
(Mr Jacobs) The research that I was talking about
was to see how it affected individual schools and the pathfinder
project is very much about how best benefit can be gained from
a whole area or from subdivisions of areas within that area.
234. That is exactly what I wanted to get on
record. Mr Shostak, do you want to say anything to get us started?
(Mr Shostak) No.
Jonathan Shaw
235. Mrs Barnett, you said that when the Government
were looking at pathfinder bids, you were looking at how their
bids would work and how the diversity would work in urban and
rural areas. You have given us a précis of those pathfinders
which are now a year old and you have told us in the report that
you provided to the Committee what is happening in those areas.
You are telling us the good things that are happening. Tell us
what has not worked in rural areas. Tell us what has not worked
in urban areas. If the diversity were going to be spread out across
the board, then other local education authorities other than Hertfordshire
would want to know what the pitfalls are as well as things that
work.
(Mrs Barnett) First of all, one of the interesting
things about this project is that we are looking at, in particular,
diversity and collaboration and one of the really exciting outcomes
of the project to date has been that although it started on the
basis of expanding the specialist schools programme and expanding
diversity, it very quickly developed with head teachers very closely
involved into a project that was much more about joining up initiatives,
about working together and about collaboration in local areas
and of course that raises some particular challenges when you
are looking at an area such as Cornwall where your schools are
quite spread apart. So, they have looked at a number of strategies
and are looking and are using a number of strategies to get around
that isolation, such as in particular with Cornwall ICT. I think
that one of the interesting things—and I am sure that Mr
Shostak will have something to say about this as well—is
that, in some of our pathfinder areas, when head teachers first
started to get together, in some cases, some of those head teachers
had not really had very much to do with their other local secondary
schools up to that point. So we are very encouraged that, in the
course of the pathfinder project, we are seeing head teachers
working together and, perhaps more significantly, we are beginning
to see subject leaders working together. For example, in the Birmingham
Oaks Academy, in that urban area, every Wednesday afternoon, their
heads of departments from different subject areas come together
and they will get to the point of sharing their data with each
other and looking at poor performance and looking at good performance
and looking at how they can achieve best practice. They are the
really encouraging signs; they are the good things that are happening.
Some of the challenges are that, in some cases, there has been
quite a competitive environment. In some cases, there has been
a lot of change. In Middlesbrough, for example, there has been
a huge amount of change in the education system and that has not
always made it easy for head teachers to work closely together
and to work in an environment of trust, but the interesting thing
is that they have a determination to move on and to make it work/to
make it happen.
236. What were the problems in Middlesbrough?
(Mrs Barnett) There has been some pressure on numbers.
The rolls in Middlesbrough, as I understand it—and I would
need to check this—are dropping and that creates difficulties
in maintaining student numbers when your schools are all very
close together. There have been some changes; there have been
mergers and closures; there has been the establishment of two
city academies; and there have also been changes in the LEA. Their
CEO has just moved and our pathfinder co-ordinator moved. In an
environment where there is a great deal of change, it is harder
to make a project like this work effectively, particularly when
you are asking people to collaborate closely and share best practice
and so on.
237. The project has been going for a year in
Middlesbrough. You gave them the money from their pathfinder and,
during that year, there has been a great deal of upheaval within
Middlesbrough and some of that within local government we are
aware of. If you compare Middlesbrough to some of the other areas—you
mentioned Cornwall for example—have they all performed equally
as well? Has this been a good use of public money?
(Mrs Barnett) In many respects, it is hard to compare
them because each of the projects is very different. I think it
would be fair to say that, in some cases, it has been more difficult
for them, just as I have described. We knew when we established
this project that we were looking at very different areas, that
there would be different impacts and that there would be different
rates of progress and we felt that that was as much an important
thing for us to be evaluating as anything else that we were evaluating
about the project. In answer to your question, I think that, although
these are early days, this relatively small amount of funding—it
is £2.5 million over the period of the project—is a
relatively small amount of money to be spending and has been quite
a powerful catalyst for some very good work.
238. Mr Shostak, has £2.5 million been
enough? What have you managed to do with it in Hertfordshire?
What have been the pitfalls in Hertfordshire? Not enough money?
(Mr Shostak) Which of those would you like me to start
with?
Jonathan Shaw: All of them.
Chairman
239. Please use your own priorities, Mr Shostak.
(Mr Shostak) I suppose I ought to begin by saying
that although you have asked us to sit up here together, I really
am not equipped to comment on the diversity pathfinder as a whole
in terms of the overall project. My colleagues on the left will
need to do that. I am able to talk confidently about what we are
doing in Hertfordshire. In respect of the question as to whether
or not the money is being well spent in Hertfordshire, I have
no doubt that the money is being well spent and is actually beginning
to make a difference. What I would want to say, which I think
follows on from Mrs Barnett's and Mr Jacobs's contribution, is
that we do not regard the diversity pathfinder, the diversity
policy if you want to put it that way, as, as a "done deal".
It is not one of those policies/programmes that has been rolled
out like the Key Stage 3 strategy, the literacy or numeracy strategy.
Hertfordshire became involved with the diversity pathfinder—we
put ourselves forward—because it aligned with the direction
of travel that we within the authority were taking in terms of
raising standards. It enables us to actually test some of the
assumptions that were being made about diversity, in partnership
with the Department. As Mrs Barnett has said, these are reasonably
early days but it has been, without question within the county,
a further catalyst in terms of the work we are doing with schools
to focus on the individual child as opposed to getting caught
by the institutional boundaries that very often is the case and
has been the case for many years.
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