Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-460)
MONDAY 20 JANUARY 2003
DR JOHN
DUNFORD OBE AND
MRS KATE
GRIFFIN
440. When we went to Birmingham we went to a
particular girls school where some of the engineering stuff they
were doing was absolutely fantastic. I had never seen anything
quite like it. With the best will in the world, every school will
never deliver that, just as the school in my constituency which
is a language school, because it is a language specialism, is
now starting to forge links with Russia, with China, in a way
which not every school will be able to do. Clearly there may well
be children who are not in that school who later on might be able
to benefit from that in some way.
(Dr Dunford) But not all the good linguists are going
to get into that school.
441. No, of course not.
(Dr Dunford) Therefore we have to have the capacity
for all the other schools to develop good linguists.
442. Surely what the specialist school programme
is doing there is producing excellence in certain schools. Yes,
not every school—
(Dr Dunford) I am sorry to interrupt, I apologise,
but there are non-specialist schools which have that kind of languages
opportunity, that kind of programme of visits. My school had links
with Russia, Japan, France, Germany, America and it was not a
specialist school. You do not have to be a specialist school in
order to do these things. If you put these special resources in,
what you are saying is that it is some money to develop a particular
mission, a particular ethos at the school and that is something
which schools welcome.
443. Coming back to your whole point which I
am very supportive of, the idea of collaboration between schools
and some of the stuff we have seen, whether Birmingham or elsewhere,
teachers in different subjects all planning together and doing
those sorts of things, surely where you have a school, whether
it is the school we saw which was doing well in engineering or
a language school, because they have that focus, because they
are driving that forward, it is creating excellence which may
not, for all sorts of reasons, often resources, have existed before.
(Dr Dunford) Resources and well qualified teachers
as well.
Chairman
444. Take engineering, engineering is a very
expensive specialism.
(Dr Dunford) Yes, it is.
445. To get a good engineering specialism in
a school is a lot of kit and a lot of sophisticated tuition and
all the rest. In my own constituency you are not going to have
every comprehensive school able to deliver the same quality in
engineering. Surely it makes sense that some of those schools
have a real ability to cater for that specialism.
(Dr Dunford) In the case of engineering, which is
probably the most expensive of all of these things, what we actually
have to do is get people with good maths A levels and good physics
A levels and send them off to university to do the engineering.
I am not convinced by the need to produce eleven-year-old engineers.
446. That is for me a little elitist, too elitist.
In the description, one of the questions we did not ask and we
discussed in the pre-meeting, was the fact that engineering is
quite elitist. It is obviously gearing up people to go to university.
Engineering is multi-layered and indeed if you talk to Lord Sainsbury,
he will tell you that the big missing capacity is to deliver people,
perhaps on a very short course, not graduates, who are in fact—
(Dr Dunford) But we will not do that with a few engineering
colleges. What we will do it with is much better quality vocational
qualifications and that would be in all of these schools.
447. It is technicians. You really rather rejected
that.
(Dr Dunford) No, I am just rejecting the idea that
you solve the country's problems by having a few engineering .
. . What you want is good quality vocational qualifications through
which these people can develop.
(Mrs Griffin) And there are major problems with admissions
right across the board. One of the anxieties many of us as heads
have is that if you perpetuate just 10 per cent of a selection
process, you are going to do absolutely nothing to solve the problems
you already have, you just end up magnifying them enormously.
Admissions is a whole different agenda.
448. You are not convincing me here. We are
sitting here representing Sheffield and Bristol and Huddersfield
and Bury and as practising politicians with local constituencies
we are not convinced by the idea that every school will be able
to deliver all the subjects in the same quality. I do not know
that I would even want that. I want schools to give a sufficient
choice of good subjects across the range in that community not
just in every school.
(Dr Dunford) If you go to any community where there
are informed people about the education in the town, irrespective
of whether there is a specialist schools programme or not, you
will be told that such and such a school is better at science,
such and such a school is better at languages and so on. It is
inevitably the case. It is about the skills and expertise of the
teaching staff.
449. That is exactly what many of us would reject.
People in the know will know that, whereas people who are less
in the know will not know it. That has always dogged school choice.
At least what specialist schools flag up with a big sign outside
the school is that they are strong in this specialism. Everybody
can see that. It is not a nudge, nudge, wink, wink, send your
child down the road to such and such a school because everybody
knows that has a strong maths department.
(Dr Dunford) A mass of information is now available
about schools and about what is—
Chairman: I should like to believe that
all my constituents had equal access to information.
Valerie Davey
450. May I just back up the experience Meg and
I had of a school which was 11 to 16, not even 11 to 18? It was
doing computer designed technology of a level which as a former
teacher I would not have thought possible for a 15 to 16-year-old.
They were going into competition with 18-year-olds and winning.
It was a rover linked school and they had something which as a
former teacher I found humbling and which said these children
could do something which I never anticipated they could do. For
all of us as former teachers, when that happens we just have to
sit back and say, "That is great. That is brilliant".
(Dr Dunford) That is about the expertise of the teachers,
the additional resources and that spark.
451. Exactly.
(Dr Dunford) A lot of what we have been talking about
today is what has created that spark.
Valerie Davey: Yes, it has created dialogue
now. My phrase used to be "creative tension". Now let
us get onto creative dialogue and see where we go.
Ms Munn
452. The reality was that the teacher was there
and they were doing that level of stuff before. The difference
was that the specialism recognised that, it put in extra resources,
it reinforced and it helped. If it is a good thing and it is helping,
I do not see it as a problem.
(Mrs Griffin) No. We really must look very, very carefully
at when it is sensible to make these choices and look at the actual
maturation and the development of the children. When you look
at the way the youngsters develop between the age of seven and
14, before pushing more and more for selection or choice at 11
you really must look very, very carefully at when it is best to
specialise in various subjects.
(Dr Dunford) What you have seen there is a really,
really good school doing wonderful things. You can see that across
specialist schools, you can see it across non-specialist schools
throughout the land. What the specialist school funding has been
able to give to that programme is something which has really ignited
that spark.
Ms Munn: I am not arguing for greater
ability to select. All I am saying is that if there is a parent
there—and actually they would have to have a girl, because
it was a girls-only school—who has a girl who spent her
childhood from the age of five to 10 building models and the like,
that is where they should go. All I am saying is that if it is
obvious, what is wrong with that?
Chairman: This is turning into a seminar.
The effect you have had on us today is very unusual.
Mr Chaytor
453. Do either of you think that either aptitude
or ability can be determined and assessed accurately or is fixed
at the age of transfer from primary to secondary school?
(Dr Dunford) The answer to that is no and no.
454. Sir Cyril mentioned the question of the
high achiever in sport or music and you have suggested that maybe
the selection should continue in sports colleges and arts colleges.
What I cannot understand, if there is a distinction in sport and
arts between aptitude and ability, is that all the argument for
allowing selection to take place is because we might lose a potential
Olympic gold medal winner. Surely therefore we are really confusing
aptitude and ability? What is the point of a sports college taking
on a load of people like me, who are very keen on sport but actually
hopeless? What is the future of our railway industry, if our engineering
schools select people at 11 on the basis of aptitude, people who
just like making a few models but by the time they get to 16 or
18 cannot design a bridge? Is this not the critical issue?
(Dr Dunford) In the end this is why we need diversity
within. The great thing we have to produce, the great thing comprehensive
schools do, is to cater for 90-something per cent of the population.
In so doing we have to make those opportunities available to them.
Through collaboration, the kind of facilities and the kind of
things you are talking about there might be available on a Saturday
morning to the people who attend other schools. It is those kinds
of things which are now starting to develop, which make a much
more positive agenda than it was even two years ago.
Paul Holmes
455. A question in a totally different area
which could take the next hour but we have about two minutes,
a big part of the diversity programme was going to be a massive
expansion of faith schools, but that seems to have gone a bit
quiet now. In your submission you said, "Increasing the number
of faith schools will cause considerable dissent among secondary
school leaders . . . careful consideration should be given to
the effect on other schools in the area". What are the concerns
about an expansion of faith schools?
(Dr Dunford) Within our membership we have a number
of teachers in faith schools who strongly believe that the faith
school label and background enables them to develop a particular
ethos in their school. Equally there are other head teachers who
believe that to have a faith school within their area skews admissions
particularly and can make a situation more difficult in a multi-faith
community. Kate is head of a very multi-faith school and perhaps
might like to comment.
(Mrs Griffin) There would be great difficulty if more
faith schools, Anglican or Catholic schools, were to be opened
in our area. We would be much more likely to be opening a Moslem
or Sikh school in the area I serve. I feel very, very uncomfortable
about this programme because I do not have any sort of handle
on the research evidence which tells me what it is about the faith
schools which makes them successful. Is it that it is still "the
Anglican Church being the middle class at prayer"? Or is
it a much wider thing than that? We have the beginning of some
work on this. I have been talking to people who have looked at
schools which have improved dramatically, which have been faith
schools, compared with a control group of schools which were not
faith schools, trying to tease out what the difference is between
the approaches within the faith schools as opposed to the non-faith
schools. We need to do an awful lot more work on that before we
go battling on at great speed just saying that faith schools are
a good thing because they are getting good results. We do not
actually know whether those results are value-added results or
not.
456. Did you say that was a piece of research
which was being done now or one which ought to be?
(Mrs Griffin) A very small-scale piece of research
has been done already. That should be broadened and we have been
speaking to Bishop Peter Hullah from the Anglican Church about
the possibilities of broadening it out.
457. Has it been published and what lessons
does it draw?
(Mrs Griffin) It has not been published yet. The lessons
would appear to be very small scale, that the faith schools have
checked the results using the personnel they had in place at the
beginning, yet there seems to be much more likelihood that the
schools which had achieved the success, which were not faith based,
had had a massive changeover of personnel in order to change the
results. It is not statistically viable, so it needs to be done
on a much broader scale.
458. John talked about faith schools being seen
by some people as being selective, which is why they might be
seen as successful. Do you have any comments on that?
(Dr Dunford) You need to look at the situation of
the faith school in relation to the education of the area and
not simply in relation to the education of the children who happened
to be in it. You have also got to be very careful about the social
effects in some cities where you have faith schools. You would
have observed quite a lot of faith schools in Birmingham no doubt,
but there are faith school situations in some north-western cities
which are creating a difficulty between different people of different
faiths, if the people who can attend that faith school are only
of one faith because of their admissions policy only allowing
in people from one faith. That does cause difficulty.
459. There are two ways logically. One is that
you remove all faith schools, or you have to open up faith schools
to the "newer religions", otherwise they are discriminated
against under the current 100-year-old system.
(Dr Dunford) Yes. The difficulty of doing the second
of those is huge.
460. The difficulty of the first one is huge.
(Dr Dunford) There is difficulty doing the first one.
This is probably why things have gone quite quiet on faith schools.
After a certain amount of rhetoric there has not been very much
action and we are quite happy to keep it that way.
Chairman: We have had very good value
for our time today. Thank you very much for your attendance. No
doubt we shall be seeing each other here and elsewhere very shortly.
Thank you.
| 
