MONDAY 7 APRIL 2003

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Members present:

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Jeff Ennis
Paul Holmes
Ms Meg Munn
Jonathan Shaw

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PROFESSOR CAROL TAYLOR FITZ-GIBBON, University of Durham, examined.

Chairman

I should like to welcome Carol Fitz-Gibbon to our deliberations. We have come back, having paved the way for the Prime Minister and the President, because the Committee was in Northern Ireland last week looking at the Burns Report and the secondary education system in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. We come fresh from that experience and have learnt a great deal, we think. We are back now and thankful to you for coming in to give us some help and hopefully answer some questions. As you know, we are looking at secondary education this year. We are looking at diversity, and have gone through that report and are writing that up; and we are now looking at pupil achievement. We are trying to tease out the arguments about how one looks at and measures pupil achievement, and how one improves it. Professor Fitz-Gibbon, do you want to say anything to open up the discussion?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Has everybody had a chance to read?

Some people have only just received it, as they have been on their way to London. We have only just got this.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Basically, there were ten sections: gender differences, ethnic socio-economic status - the value-added tables are calculated incorrectly, and I think that needs attention. The impact on enrolment in maths and science is a national problem, I would suggest. Driving up standards has been.

Can you try and project your voice a little bit?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) We can go straight to questions, I think.

None of the material we received told us what the YELLIS acronym stood for. We presume it does stand for something.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Sorry. There is ALIS, A-Level Information System - and then following on from that we started YELLIS, which is the year 11 information system. The Ls are A 11".

I think there was one member of the Committee who actually understood that!

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Before that, there is Middle Years Information System (MIDYIS), and below that in primary there are Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (PIPS).

That is a whole new group of acronyms that the Committee will benefit from. Can you tell us what YELLIS does? The Committee has been to France to meet OECD and look at their PESA results; we know quite a lot about the testing systems in secondary schools in our country. We know about the qualification systems in our country. What benefit does YELLIS give your member schools?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) An independent baseline that they administer in year 10, at the beginning of year 10, which is when students have normally chosen their GCSE subjects. Against that baseline the GCSE results can be evaluated in terms of value-added.

At 14.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) 14 to 16. They could use Key Stage 3, but when YELLIS started there was no Key Stage 3 test; but in any case Key Stage 3 is one teacher= s output, or several teachers= output; so if the teachers at Key Stage 3 have boosted the results or their students have fallen back, that has an impact on your value-added in the next two years. It is quite beneficial for teachers to have one baseline that does not change from year to year, and which is not curriculum embedded. It is not related to what is taught. Inevitably, part of it is because maths is very sensitive to instruction, and yet you need to measure maths in an aptitude test. But the verbal part is largely vocabulary, and the non-verbal part is perceptual reasoning. It does provide a very good predictor in a very short period of time.

Predictor of what?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) GCSE results, subject by subject.

Could the criticisms not be that you already have the most over-examined and over-tested group of children in the world practically - certainly from the experience and evidence we have had? Now, not only that, but you introduce YELLIS tests to test for the tests.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, to give a steady baseline that does not change from year to year - all the other tests are new every year, so if we are going to know what is happening, whether standards have improved and so on, we need some steady baselines. That is why we can say with confidence what has been happening because we have had the same tests across the years - and YELLIS only takes 25 minutes.

Is it like a mini 11-Plus?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes, sort of. MIDYIS takes 45 minutes, and they are both very efficient because I designed them to pick up, very efficiently, lots and lots of answers every minute that predict subsequent achievement.

What are they predicting in the schools where you have applied these tests? One in three schools belong to your system, do they not?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) They do, yes.

What are they predicting?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) All the subsequent achievement at GCSE or Key Stage 3.

How long have these tests been going?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I started the ALIS project in 1982, but only introduced an independent baseline - because the average GCSE score was a very good predictor of each A-Level subject - and aptitude measure after three tries at different tests, in about 1986. So since then, they have had a baseline for post 16. Not everyone chooses to use it, but in YELLIS everyone uses the baseline and in MIDYIS everyone uses the baseline.

We then come to the crunch: what benefit do the schools get? What is the value-added of your tests?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) For each syllabus largely - at A-Level we analysed more than 100 syllabuses - the data is modelled correctly, taking account of that particular syllabus, so it has its own regression line. So they get a very fair comparison of the progress students - like their students - meaning who scored the same on the aptitude test in other schools; so the progress of similar students in other schools is provided as value-added tables. We also measure a lot more, and we also put that into software so that they can put in their own classroom groupings, or whatever questions they want to ask of the data, so that they can do some of their own analyses. We provide very, very clear diagrams that are quick and easy to read.

Each school that takes these can now tell how students of a like ability are performing against other children in other schools of a like ability.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes, indeed. That is the best comparison. There are no similar schools. Benchmarking, Pixis, Pandas - they are all extremely inaccurate and unfair because it is just not fair to compare two different institutions as a whole - but similar students in other schools.

You have been running these tests for quite some time. What do they tell us in terms of how our secondary educational system is working?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, the tests that we have added are not there to tell us how the system is working, but to give us - well, to give us a benchmark against which we can test the other things. We see that for the same ability the grades given are higher and higher, year on year, so we have grade inflation.

Could you develop that argument?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes. For example, at A-Level, if you look at A-Level mathematics, the grades have gone up and up. The enrolment has increased as well. But if you just look at those who got an A A@ in A-Level maths, if it was not grade inflation, then when they get to universities, the universities should be pleased that standards have risen. In fact, the universities are dismayed. The University of York has been testing for twenty years, and now they have had to give up the test because nobody can do any of it. So there is a maths test when you get to York to do a mathematically orientated subject, and I have heard that they cannot use it any more. I have seen a graph in a report from the Engineering Council that shows the scores going down and down. As I have put in one of these, there has been a steady decline in basic skills in mathematics. They are 6a and 6b.

You are saying that whereas the Government= s tests suggest there is an improvement of performance across the board, year by year, you are saying there has been a decline in performance year by year.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes, except in primary school numeracy.

Not even at primary school in literacy?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) No.

Jeff Ennis

What do you think is the reason for the fact that there is only numeracy at level 2 where standards are increasing? What is the trick that we need to do in the other areas, particularly the secondary sector, to achieve that same objective?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think probably achievement is quite good in the rest of the sector, but in primary schools a number of primary teachers may be concentrated on reading and enjoyment and other activities and did not spend an hour a day, every day, on numeracy. But when they were required to spend one hour a day on numeracy, and when they were given some very good materials produced by people who knew what they were talking about, like Anita Traker and Margaret Brown, it really helped because these were very useful materials, and I know that teachers were very happy with the numeracy materials.

It is effectively a reinforcement of what we call the A actual@ curriculum, as opposed to the intended curriculum at that level.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes. Maths was on the curriculum, but no specification as to the amount of time devoted to it was laid down. Given a lot of people= s dislike of arithmetic and so on, they probably did other things.

Given that improved level within numeracy skills at primary school, how come we have still got a decline at secondary school in examination results? Does that not only emphasise the fact that standards are getting worse in secondary schools, rather than them holding their own or perhaps even getting better?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Certainly, the measures show that - I am very grateful that the Engineering Council picked up some end point of measures. Of course, we have published an article, Timms & Fitz-Gibbon on standards. The explanation may be that they are already pretty good. Years ago, we were third only to a couple of east Asian countries in achievement at 18 in maths and science, which are very critical subjects; but we have seen a steady and quite substantial decline, and that is what the Engineering Council report said. You see it very dramatically in mathematics because mathematics is very sensitive to instructional effects. Kids= reading improves even during the summer holidays, but their maths does not improve; it is very dependent on instruction.

Jonathan Shaw

Do you expect those pupils who will spend all their time at primary school doing numeracy hour, to show some benefits when it comes to A-Level? You are saying it is very instructive, but will that provide them with the foundation stone?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think it remains to be seen. We must always be guided by data, and it would have been nice if the numeracy hour had been introduced into a random half; and then we could have compared like with like. That is a very major issue, that we do not know what interventions are effective because we do not introduce them in such a way that we can find out.

Have you piloted the numeracy hour?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think there was some small-scale piloting, but you still need to go on checking because the implementation can go awry when it is no longer a pilot, when it is just getting more distributive. At every stage we should design political interventions in a way that allows us to do cost-benefit analysis, by finding out the size of the benefit for the money invested. I do not see any other way to run a country.

Ms Munn

Returning to the information that you provided us with, there are some lovely coloured pictures here; could you take us through them and explain what they mean?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Shall we start with figure 1?

Yes, that would be very helpful.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Figure 1: the green dots are 100 randomly distributed boys, and the red dots are 100 randomly distributed girls. The natural distribution is called the A normal@ distribution because it arises normally from random events. The girls= distribution is a bit lower down, a bit more to the left than the boys= distribution . So to the right is high scores and to the left is low scores. Those vertical lines are the averages. It would be really nice if I had a Powerpoint display and could point! These vertical lines show the means, and the girls= mean is below the boys= mean.

From which test is this?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) This is a very general finding from the United States, England and anywhere.

According to this, then, girls are on average less able than boys.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) In quantitative work. But it is very small. Although it is a substantial effect size of 0.5, when you see the two distributions there is an enormous overlap, so you cannot tell by looking at someone - A oh, that= s a girl; they can= t be very good at maths@ . This is stereotyping, and we have had oodles of studies of gender differences, and where does it get us? Nowhere at all. Once you have a body of data, it is so easy to divide it by boys and girls and write a paper, put it in - it will help for the RAE, but does it do anybody any good? No.

From the written document that you have given us, when you talk about gender differences are you saying you do not think it is statistically significant, because what is happening at the moment is that people say girls are doing better than boys; there is a real issue, particularly perhaps about white working-class boys? Are you saying that the information there is not statistically significant?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Ah, well, statistically significant? You usually test for significance at the 0.5 level. Do you know why? It is because Fisher could not get the copyright for the other levels, so he published 0.5 and ever since then they have been tested at 0.5. With huge numbers, the most trivial difference is highly statistically significant, so it is not a matter of statistical significance. It is a matter of if there is a policy-relevant difference that you have to do something about. Should girls be taught separately? I would suggest not. They go to work together, and they should be taught together. Nobody has demonstrated huge or continuing effects from segregating them within a mixed school, for example. I think there is no evidence in favour of segregation. It would have to be very strong evidence, and we should just monitor. Every head-teacher can monitor with our data very easily. If you find a physics class where all the girls are at the back and the boys are at the front, and the teacher only talks to the boys - that is something a head-teacher would intervene about. You do not get that from statistics. If you find these differences in every country, do not blame the teaching profession for them. What we should worry about is that boys are doing less well than the girls; but they earn 12-15 per cent more than women later in the same jobs. Maybe that is something to worry about.

I am sure that is something to worry about. One of the issues that we have concerned ourselves a great deal with in this inquiry is issues around different achievement of pupils from different ethnic minority groups, and the overlap of that between issues of poverty. You have dealt with this in your paper under (2) and (3). Can you summarise whether these are important issues in terms of how children achieve?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) If we say what is predictable, and we think of poverty, and we think of free school meals as a measure of poverty, or parental occupation, or cultural capital - we measure cultural capital simply because our new sociologists would want us to measure cultural capital, so since 1982 we always have. If you look at the next diagram on the first page, 2a, if you have just got a measure of free school meals, you can only predict 9 per cent of the variation in exam results. So 91 per cent is unexplained. If you have a measure of prior achievement, you can predict about 50 per cent of the variation in exam results, and that is about as good as it gets. If you put them both in together, they do not add independently, and you have still got about 50 per cent explained. Why does everybody think the home background is so powerful? There are disadvantaged home backgrounds among the wealthy; it is not that all wealthy parents are ideal parents, or anything like that; so we can all think of situations where the home background might not be what we would want it to be, that is not necessarily associated with free school meals. The reason is something call the ecological fallacy, which is in the six diagrams on the next page. A strong correlation, such as you get from achievement prediction, would be a correlation of 0.8/0.7: 0.7 is predicting 50 per cent of the variation. If you have got a weak correlation, like 0.3, you can see the points are all over the place; and knowing somebody= s prior achievement on the horizontal axis does not allow you to make a very accurate prediction of subsequent achievement. However, the situation we have in schools is that schools are segregated, as in the third diagram on that page, with a blue - the blue is a well-chosen one for the upper class, and red for the lower class, and they are segregated. So if you take averages in these three schools, and you get the larger dots, the average for the red, the yellow and the blue - a straight line goes through it. It is almost a perfect correlation, and that has fooled everybody because they have done means on means analysis and said that home background is a strong predictor. But if the children were not in segregated schools, it would not be such a strong predictor.

Can you explain A means on means analysis@ ?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) You take the average for the school, and instead of analysing all the data pupil by pupil, you sum the pupils in one school up to an average and sum the pupils in another school up to an average, and then you play with those averages. That is what makes people think that home background is a very powerful predictor, when it is not. I know we have had decades of being told it is, but, I am sorry, it is not. Well, I am actually quite pleased that it is not.

I do not know if I am unusual in thinking this, but where we are struggling with that is that if we went to areas of my city in Sheffield which were socio-economically doing well, they would definitely be further down the league tables than schools that are in much better-off areas. If what you are saying is true, how does that happen?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) You may have a different distribution of ability/aptitude in the different social classes. It is less so now than in the past, when you had not a chance. My father was sent to a mill at the age of 12 because he was so good at maths, they said, A thou= st learnt enough, lad; off to t= mill@ . In that day and age, very high ability was never picked up because they were sent off to the mill at the age of 12. Nowadays they are in school to 16, and if they have the aptitude they will achieve. There may still be a correlation between home background and aptitude. I am saying that it is not an explanatory variable, that we can do anything about, and it does not explain much. I do not want an excuse; I do not want a child to be told, A well, you are from a poor home; you are reading well enough@ . If they have got the aptitude, they must learn to read. It is the aptitude that matters, not the home background. We do not want to judge children by which home they came from.

What is bothering me about this is that having been a school governor in Barnsley, where they use the PIPS, we were told that the children in Barnsley are no thicker than the kids anywhere else, and so they should be doing as well, but the reality is that they were not.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) What was their value-added, using PIPS?

I could not tell you now.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) If they had zero value-added, it means the keeping up with everybody else of the same aptitude. But you will never get everybody at zero value-added because there will be a range. There is a lot of error in all these measures, and in a value-added measure there is twice the error in a single measure, because you have a difference between two measures, and that increases the error. So you have to set the value-added. We put it into statistical process control charts to see if it is out of line with what you would expect. But on the whole, students - like the huge difference in raw scores shrinks to about half that difference if you look at value-added scores between schools.

We were being told that these kids in Barnsley, on their baseline, with the same distribution of intelligence as there was, say, in other areas of the country that were socio-economically better off, at the end of the day were not coming out with as many O-Levels or A-Levels as they were in other parts of the country.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Then we should look at the teaching and the teachers because the biggest difference is not from one school to another but from one classroom to another in the progress made; so maybe very good teachers are not moving to Barnsley. However, I would not like to generalise. The issue you raise is the only important issue, is it not, which is how we get reasonable achievement.

I suppose that is the issue we are fundamentally looking at. The Committee has been looking at children from certain groupings that do not appear overall to be doing as well.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) There is another possible explanation: maybe Barnsley is not cheating at Key Stage 2.

Chairman

Using your analysis, Professor Fitz-Gibbon, some evidence has been admitted to this Committee that some children are quite bright through primary school, but do not progress and actually deteriorate once they get into secondary school. They do less well. These are children from poorer backgrounds. As they get through primary, we were given particular examples of some African-Caribbean children. They progressively come through with high expectations up to the age of 11, and once they get into secondary they start to decline in achievement, whereas children from socio-economically better-off homes, who start lower down in primary, progressively get better in the same schools. How do you explain that?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I would want to examine that. If taken literally as you said it, I would find it very strange. I would have heard about it from Peter Timms. I am not an expert on primary progress, but I do know that the picture is more like this. If they start fairly close together when they enter school, the one that is ahead makes more rapid progress than the one that is lower down to begin with. It is a kind of funnel like that. So that may confuse people, depending what they are measuring achievement against.

Jonathan Shaw

You said all children can achieve if they have the aptitude.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) And all children have some aptitude.

Aptitude is something that ministers talk about when they do not want special schools to select viability and they say it is aptitude. What is your meaning of aptitude?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, one should say A aptitudes@ because the brain is a very complex, modularly organised kind of facility, and some people will be very strong on the language and others will be very strong on the perceptual, the visualisation, the putting things together, making things work. Others will be much stronger on the verbal. Spin doctors will be particularly strong on the verbal, but they are usually weak numerically. I think that is a big problem actually. I think we see in the evidence I have put forward that we have lacked numerical accuracy in running these systems. We have also lacked a scientific approach of trying to find out what works, and all this analysis by gender, ethnicity, social classes, is just a smokescreen. What we want to know is how to make things better, an our intuitions are not good enough. If just trying to make things better worked, they would have got better: everyone has been trying. Intuition is not enough of a guide when you are dealing with people. We are incompetent as social engineers, totally incompetent: we rush in to help and we make things worse.

Can you point to any examples around the world that you think people do not rush in and make things worse?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, the world is in a pretty bad mess, is it not? Social science is not recognised yet, although there is a lot of effort to get social science up to the standards of the proper medicine, for example, with randomised control trials. Let me give you an example from our YELLIS project. We match up the students= aspirations, based on their responses to six questions about staying on. If that aspirational level is out of line with their aptitude level, we put them on a list of under-aspiring pupils because we feel that schools should know this student has the aptitude but is intending to leave at 16, or something like that - because a lot of parents have not realised. Thirty per cent now go to universities and it used to be 2 per cent or 4 per cent. Generations change. But then I found that schools were putting a huge effort into this list of under-aspirers, so each member of staff took one or two under-aspirers, checked their homework, talked to them about careers, tried to encourage them - maybe called the parents in - anything up to 23 counselling sessions and mentoring in the lunch hour. I got a bit worried about this because I thought that if I was an under-aspirer, being mentored in my lunch hour would seem like harassment and make me more determined to leave school early. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the child. Being picked on by an adult is not necessarily a nice experience for children.

Do you think that special attention, focus, support and help - because that is how the schools would see it - would be seen as bullying and harassment? People who I speak to who have been given additional support would think that what you have just said is a bit odd.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I was putting myself in the shoes of the under-aspiring student, who was telling us they were planning to leave at 16, and then this happened to them. I am not saying that that is the pattern. What I will tell you is that we then went onto do a clinical trial, because we needed to know. Fifteen schools agreed that they would like to find out. So how do we find out? We must compare like with like. So we take the list of under-aspiring pupils and we match them up on their predicted GCSE scores and we toss a coin: half go on the list and half we keep back. So the school has half the normal work because they only had half the list. This costs nothing. In those fifteen schools, the ones on the list only made better progress in three out of the fifteen schools. In the other twelve schools, they made much worse progress, an effect size of -0.38, which is a large effect size. So we had rushed in with the best of intentions, and actually their progress was less good. It was highly statistically significant less good, in case you care about that - 122 pupils. Now we repeat the experiment, the 15 schools said, A no, it is all right, we will not bother with under-aspirers; we will do something else.@ Teachers were giving up their lunch hour. So 26 schools have now participated in a second round, and this time the results were just not significant either way. In this way, schools are probably designing their interventions to try to make them more effective. Twenty-three counselling sessions gave the worse results of all.

Can you give us a flavour of what worked? You have told us that 24 counselling sessions actually had a negative effect.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Was associated with less progress. But the randomly distributed thing, which is the only one we can interpret the cause and effect, was being on the list; and being on the list was apparently damaging, and the second time it apparently had no impact. We need to work closely with schools on what they can do to have an impact. I know what I would recommend, but schools have to also make their own decisions.

What would you recommend?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) That when students are not making progress, they teach a younger child one-on-one under closely supervised conditions and with preparation. The reason for that is that you can see on this diagram here, which is not actually labelled - it is the one on the page below figure 7. You can see there the effect sizes. This is a set of interventions that have been evaluated by the experimental method of randomised control trials, and Cohen, Kulik & Kulik found an average effect size of 0.6. That was based on 65 randomised control trials, done in various places all over the United States. That is having older children teach younger children, one-on-one. The major benefit accrues to the one who does the teaching. What is more, they love it and enjoy it. It is a little bit like: ask not what you can do for the under-aspirers, but ask what they can do for somebody else - and it has more impact. If you were ever asked to teach anything in schools, or if you have ever taught, you will know that you learn when you teach. So we should make much more use of this in schools. I did experiments in inner-city Los Angeles with teenage gang members, and for example taught fractions with great effort and enormous effectiveness because they were very able to communicate. Wang, Haertel and Walberg was not exactly randomised control trials, but they summarised lots and lots of effect sizes and came up with 0.4; Levin, Glass & Meister came up with an effect size of 0.81. These effect sizes vary but you would expect different samples to give you different effect sizes. On the whole, they are all positive and they are all large, much larger than you see for, for example, integrated learning systems, for which schools spend , 30,000 a time on things like Success-Maker or Global Justins maths, and an attempt to make the computer - I may get sued for mentioning this, but it was a study sponsored by BeCTa -----

Chairman

Not in Parliament; you are under privilege here.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Both the CEM Centre and the NFER had survey data. This was not a controlled experiment, but it was survey data. Students that used integrated learning systems for which schools were paying , 30,000 per year for a site licence, and all the company provided was CDs, which cost pence to print - so massive, massive profit. Both the NFER and ourselves found that students were making less progress if they used those systems, and schools that had those systems made less progress than schools that did not have those systems. However, when you use computers as tools, so you give them to teachers and students to use in the ways they want to use them, rather than trying to replace a teacher with a computer, then you find a modest positive effect. That is 0.22. If you reduce class size, in 1985 Levin, Glass & Meister found in a survey a number of evaluations and effect size of 0.12 that the Tennessee legislature implemented - and this is the important one - a huge randomised control trial in which hundreds of primary school teachers were randomly assigned to classes of different sizes - small, large, or large with a teaching assistant or a learning mentor. Thousands of students were randomly assigned into those classes, so you were really comparing like with like, not just doing a survey. They found a very positive effect - not as large as cross-age tutoring, but an overall effect of 0.2, and it was larger for students who were more dependent on the school and had less support in the home for academic work.

So small class sizes worked.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) They did. This was fewer than 20 in primary schools. The large classes with or without a learning mentor - it made no difference. Teaching assistant, they called it.

Jeff Ennis

A particular hobbyhorse of mine, Professor Fitz-Gibbon - and I think you are alluding to the fact that this is something we ought to focus on - I always believe that whatever the educational institution, you need to have a good social mix in that educational institution for it to be successful or for it to have the potential to be more successful. Would you agree with that?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I would want to see evidence, and I was very interested in reading the evidence presented by Sally Tomlinson who referred to an experiment done in Stockholm. I did not have time to go to the library this morning, and I want to get Torsten Husén= s biography and read about that, because I do not know why I had not heard about it before. That was a randomised control trial, as I understood it, of having schools that were segregated, or selective schools, versus comprehensive schools. They came to the conclusion in Stockholm that the comprehensive model worked best. I would believe it on those grounds, and I would like to read about it.

Going back to the chart, you seem to be advocating more vertical grouping in the secondary school setting. Obviously, it happens more in primary schools at the moment, where you get vertically grouped classes.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes.

Do you think that that would make a difference in terms of improving achievement at secondary level?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, I think we should find out. I think also that a very good reason for using cross-age tutoring is that children enjoy it. Students enjoy it. We do need joy in work: this is their childhood; this is not just a matter of meeting government targets. This is their childhood, and they should enjoy it. The fact that they like learning by teaching should encourage us to use it. Also, it makes them nice to each other and very helpful.

I guess that same philosophy supports the need to integrate more special educational needs pupils into that setting.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think inclusion is basically a good idea, but if we want to be experimental about it, then - for example, let us look at gifted students, at the other end. Is it justifiable to identify some students as gifted and give them a special programme. You might argue that it is cost-effective because they need to go fast and they need to be together. So let us draw a borderline; but within the error of measurement around that borderline, randomly, and some into the gifted programme and others not - this is totally ethical because it is all errors and measurement in the borderline - and then follow up the progress and see if actually some children hate being labelled A gifted@ . A No, I am not@ , they say; they do not want to be labelled A gifted@ . Others may relish it. We have to do thousands of experiments to find out what works. We cannot just argue the results. We need to find out with good evidence, and then have more experiments to design interventions that do work. But we need to measure a lot of outcomes, not just achievement. Childhood is not just about achievement. What do you remember when you leave school?

Chairman

One of the things that one remembers is actually the school not as an individual but as part of a social system in the school. Does your methodology not tend to pinpoint just the individual achievement rather than - one of the things we found when we looked at a range of schools, in a number of cities, was that it does matter that if you have a school which is a social system of kids coming from relatively low-income families, with a background of not just low achievement but something more complex - no tradition of educational achievement from their parents or the people they know who live in their street and in their community - there is a sense in which one never gets the lift in those educational aspirations and achievement. There is a social system. Are you not always looking at the individual, and you cannot actually evaluate the social system of the school?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Well, we need to look at a lot of aspects. We do evaluate social systems. We get measures of racism and of alienation - and those vary from school to school quite substantially.

Levels of alienation are not the same as saying that this is a school in an old mining community or an old ship-building community, where none of their parents have ever gone to higher education, where no-one ever had any aspirations for education at all; there are no books in the homes, or very few, and no parents reading to a child at an early age. Is that not a social system that your analysis is missing?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It is a question of what you can alter. As a teacher, the students come to you. You cannot go back into their homes and change their homes; it is what you do with them in the time they come to school. They should not be doing homework in primary schools, so it does not matter; it does not make any difference; it does not improve their achievement. It is what we do in school, and that must be aimed at making them happy, kind, nice individuals, and good parents subsequently by learning a lot of social skills as well as cognitive skills.

So the evidence we took when we did the Early Years inquiry about the importance of early years stimulation, reading to children and playing games, creative play - you think before they get to school that does not matter.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think a lot of these early childhood interventions need replicating. The one that has been most strongly promoted ...

SureStart?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) No, that is a new one, but the one from the States that SureStart was probably modelled on. The name escapes me just now.

HeadStart.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) HeadStart was one, yes, but that did not produce such strong evaluations. There was the C

Valerie Davey

HighScope.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) As someone said at one of our evidence-based conferences: A Why has that not been replicated?@ The initial data that was so well promoted - and the students were followed up - were 64 students. That was hardly a large sample. But at every stage of schooling, the schooling should be as good and as much fun as possible, not just pre-school - or we will lose them later.

Chairman: This is all very interesting, but we must move on. I will ask David to look at league tables.

Mr Chaytor

To return to YELLIS for a moment, your argument in favour of that is that it provides constancy because it is the same each year, unlike Key Stage 3; but why does anybody buy it if it is the same each year? Why do they not just photocopy it previously?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I suppose they could.

Is it exactly the same test year after year after year?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes, but it is a lot of work to mark tests and then they need to be nationally standardised, so you need the national standardisation. We have a fantastic team of very clever youngsters running computers. They do all the matching and they do the value-added calculations; so the teacher gets a huge amount of work for nothing, plus some free software, plus conferences, plus help on the telephone and so on. Uniquely in the world, schools are supporting 65 staff in Durham, the biggest research group in UK education.

But you said earlier that YELLIS was primarily for predicting GCSE scores; and now you have referred to its value as a measure of value-added. Does it work equally well as both?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) If it did not have good predictive validity, it would not be a good measure for value-added; so it has to predict well.

How is it different from the methodology that the DfES uses for its value-added calculation, which just draws the difference between Key Stage 3 point scores and GCSE point scores? What is your criticism of the methodology that has been used in the value-added scores that were published last year for the first time?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) If we can look at figures 3a distribution 3b: that refers to GCSE predicting A-Level, but could just as well refer to Key Stage 3 predicting GCSE. What we see is that each subject has a different line necessary, and there is no way any single line could represent those adequately. So where the DfES has gone wrong is in treating an A as an A as an A, no matter whether it is in physics or communication studies. It just is not true that the same challenge is in both subjects.

Your criticism is entirely based on the variability of the grading in each subject, because in your submission you make an issue of the contrast between physics and sociology for example.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) They are graded so they give a similar distribution . I have no problem with that. But you must not then evaluate the school, and if they put a lot of students in for an easier subject they should not go up the league tables as value-added.

Is it not conceivable that the value-added achieved in sociology is greater than the value-added achieved in physics? Is that not an equally valid conclusion that you could draw?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) On what?

As I understand it, your argument is that because the levels of difficulty of individual subjects vary - and you quote sociology whereby the cohort entering sociology, by and large, has a lower level of performance than that for taking physics - but could not the reason for broadly the same level of grade distribution be that there is more value-added generated by sociology teachers? Is that not an equally valid conclusion?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) No, I think it is most unlikely. You cannot compare the teaching of physics and sociology. We can only look at the data and ask how difficult it is to get a child through physics or through sociology. Most teachers would agree that one was harder than the other. We can then see the effect of calling them all the same. The maths has declined. It is not easy to get people through A-Level maths and so on. It is a matter of comparing like with like, and that is where the DfES is unfair to schools. When I did a re-analysis of the data of schools that were told that they were below average, they had put students in for the difficult subjects in the same way the others had, but the other schools that were told they were above average, when in fact they were not on our calculations, had put students in for a lot of easy subjects. That was having an impact. The capping may have reduced that effect a little bit, but it is still a very unfair system that does not compare like with like. The first principle of a statistical model is that it models the process that produces the data. The process that produces each of these regression lines is the examining in that particular syllabus; and that is what should be modelled statistically.

If there were absolute parity or absolute equivalence of grading between the subjects, would the method of calculating the point scores be acceptable? Do you think it is a sound method in itself?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I do not think what the DFES does is sound. The grading of the subjects is perfectly sound and I have no problem with the same distribution in sociology as in physics. It is just let= s not kid ourselves that it would be good for the country to move everybody out of physics and then they would do well in sociology.

That is not the point I am trying to get at. If the way in which the grading of physics and sociology, for the sake of argument, were done that satisfied to you that it accurately reflected the levels of difficulty, do you think the DFES's method of measuring the progress from key stage three to key stage four is adequate, simply averaging of the point scores?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It would be enormously difficult to constrain them to be exactly the same level of difficulty. The Scottish Office asked me this in 1990, they said, A What would happen if all the subjects were equated and given a distribution of grades that reflected aptitude?@ No-one would have got a fail in physics and nobody would have had an A in art. You should be able to use the full range in every subject. Everybody knows that they are different subjects and of course the distribution of aptitudes will vary from subject to subject, so some students in physics might be absolutely tongue-tied in sociology, however those who have A-level maths have higher verbal scores than those with A-level English on average so it is not a simple thing. Then the subject should be taught in a way that is appropriate for the group of students that take that subject, and it should be graded to give a reasonable distribution. The analysis must not penalise schools that put students in for tough subjects because the country needs people to do maths, sciences and foreign languages. Students who have A-level maths earn ten per cent more than students who have not taken A-level maths and are doing the same job. We must not reward schools for moving people out of those subjects.

On GCSEs you make the point about the five A-Cs and indicate that they are not being very helpful. What is the issue there? You do not think that accurately reflects the schools' achievement? How else could it be done? If it were five A-Gs at GCSE, would that be more accurate?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) No, the average points score.

The average points score would be the key, would it?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) The average points score means that every student counts so the behaviour implied by using the average points score is to look at the progress of every child and that is the kind of ethics that teachers want. It is unethical to care more about the D student than about anybody else.

But a school that only puts children in for easier subjects, even that system could be defeated?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) A C in anything as long as it is a C. This is not good because it is a very, very bad indicator. Let me give you a comment I heard a student saying to another student: A Do you want help? Tell her you are a C/D borderline@ , so even the children know if you are a C/D borderline you will get extra help. I mentioned this at a meeting of researchers with someone from the DFES and the man from the DFES was the only one not amused. He said that ministers would be very annoyed if they thought schools were concentrating on D students. I was taken aback and he said, A You are only giving us an anecdote@ , so I dredged up the meetings I had been at where they were giving money for D students. Over coffee the other researchers said to me, A What schools does he know about? Where does he live? Show me a school that is not concentrating on D students.@ However, let me say this: they did not say that to the man who worked with the Minister because universities are looking for contracts, so they do not speak up, they are not going to be difficult. I thank schools enormously for supporting the staff so I do not have to think will someone lose their job if we do not get the next contract and I can speak without fear or favour. Until universities are soundly founded they will keep their mouths shut, which is terrible.

Valerie Davey

What account does YELLIS take of youngsters for whom English is not their first language?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It is not meant to be a label on a student. It is not an IQ label. To get away from that we produced chances graphs that show from any score they can get any result, they just have different chances. The fact that English is their second language will depress their vocabulary score but it also makes it harder for the teacher to teach them, that is the point about the YELLIS baseline or the MIDGES baseline or the ALIS baseline. How hard is it going to be for the teacher to get the value-added progress? It does not matter that their score is depressed, but it does make it harder for them to get through the English and possibly through the mathematics if their English is really bad.

I happen to believe that children who have two languages are doubly able. I would hope that they would score very high.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think we should have nursery schools where you decide what you want your child to be bilingual in. Cantonese? Okay, there is a Cantonese nursery school there. Spanish? Okay, there is a Spanish nursery school there. They absorb languages, there is a module in the brain that learns languages with no effort at all. You cannot stop them learning so why try and teach it later? Put them in a nursery school and get a bilingual child.

What does YELLIS do in terms of children with at least two, in some cases three, languages? Do you know about that in that test or does the test overcome that or does it have no relevance to that?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) We collect the data and that is recorded. In the MIDGES test, which is the baseline for all the secondary schools, and is more complicated than the YELLIS test, we will report a whole profile of separate schools, so we are aware of that and we will point that out in the reports.

Valerie Davey: I still have not got an answer to - and let's stick with YELLIS which is the one we have concentrated on today - is the YELLIS test more difficult or less difficult or equally difficult for children with a background of two or more languages? In other words, is it language sensitive?

Chairman

Bangladeshi students, kids from a Bangladeshi background, from Pakistan?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It depends entirely how long they have been here and what their aptitude for picking up languages is.

Valerie Davey

But it is vocabulary based?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) There is a large vocabulary section for the very good reason that vocabulary and maths are the biggest predictors in success at GCSE. That is not to label the child. In fact in the early years of the test I would not give the results to the schools. I would say, A This is just for us to tell you the value-added later.@ It is a baseline against which we can measure how difficult it is for the school to get them through the next exam.

So you should not know from the outcome whether a child has one language or two? They take the test and it is irrelevant to you and irrelevant to the school?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It is not irrelevant but what do you suppose we should do?

I do not think you should know. I think there are some very bright children with two or three languages who will do supremely well in any test and there are others who will not. My hope was that you would say it is irrelevant but you are not saying it is irrelevant.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) We have a question about is English an additional language, if so, what else is spoken in the home? It varies from one project to another so the exact wording I do not have at my finger tips. That is so we can subsequently do research and answer questions that people will ask us on how do people with EAL perform under the YELLIS test.

How do they perform?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Their vocabulary of course will generally be lower but it depends on how recently they have come. All of these things are generalisations of completely overlapping distributions so you have to look at the individual child.

If you look at the individual child in that respect, why do you not look at the individual child in terms of their background, in terms of how many books they have got in the house, all the other things we have been talking about this afternoon?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) We ask exactly that question, it is one of our cultural capital questions. How many books in the home? Does anyone ask you about homework? How many times have your parents been in the school? A lot of questions like that. That is all there but the predictability of that does not come anywhere close to the predictability of YELLIS. It is a baseline value-added about that general aptitude that any teacher recognises is a good predictor of subsequent achievement and is the baseline that is fairest for teachers.

Who answers all those questions, the child?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) The child in the confidential questionnaire that they receive in a plastic envelope and it comes back to the university and a tape recording that says, A Do not raise your hand if you have a problem with the questionnaire because the teacher will not look at your answers.@ It is there on the tape recording. We go to the trouble of sending a tape recording so in every school the test is administered in the same way with same words.

I am sorry I am obviously so thick this afternoon but are these questions part of the 25-minute test or is this background information before they do the test?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) After they have done the test, it is the questionnaire.

There are three different things, sort of unrelated, but covering across the matters we were talking about, the first one is that you talked about the problem of the league tables and the five As-Cs, and so forth, distorting the way that children are advised to go in to maths or not go in to maths because it is hard. There are all sorts of complicating factors there as well. I used the YELLIS system for ten years as a head of sixth form, and extremely good it is, however even then counselling GCSE students after they got their results in the summer, and you would have a student who got seven grade Cs who would say, A I want to do maths, physics and chemistry at A- level@ . Using your chances graph from ALIS you would be advising them that they would be better doing other things. We were not doing it because we wanted to manipulate the school's scores, because we had a head who said we should not be doing that, quite rightly, we were doing it for the best career prospects of the student, but it would lead to the same distorting effect. By using your method you were arriving at the same distorting effects as the league table emphasis on five As-Cs. How can you get round that?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I think the school has to take into account the fact that maths, science and a foreign language A-level will lead to better employment prospects than sociology, and psychology even.

Not if the student is likely to struggle and fail.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) But they do not from a C, the chances graph do not show they will fail. In fact that is what made me start the chances graphs because I knew that some colleges would not let you do A-level maths if you only had a C. I thought, I wonder what the chances are, let us look at the other colleges and see what happens to those who go in with a C for A-level, and sure enough, it is like the 11 Plus, to have a sharp cut is absolutely wrong because people have different rates of development, they are on-line, they are off-line, so chances graphs have moved us away from a single predicted grade to show a spectrum of possibilities. I do think there is certainly an incentive to schools to keep people out of difficult A-levels because if the current method of value added calculation continues it is absolutely ridiculous, and they are going to lose out by putting people in for good subjects, except that a bright student is more secure doing A-level maths than A-level English because of the accuracy of the marking in maths compared with English.

The other point about league tables is the fear, the opinion that they lead to pressures on schools, they lead to unfair comparisons because with a league table you are comparing very different types of schools and say you should all be doing the same and achieving the same. What some heads would say is if they have a school with a low socioeconomic intake, like in an inner city school, the league tables are going to be unfair to them. You are saying on the one hand socioeconomic factors do not make a difference, although on the other hand concentrations of them in segregated schools do make a difference. Is that right?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Yes. If you are going to have value added tables it should be based on prior aptitude or prior achievement, or both. I share the concerns that a number of you expressed about reporting the aptitude back to the school in case it cuts off possibilities for students. As I said, in the first few years I would not give them the results but then I felt I must trust the professionalism in schools and let them decide how to use the data. We talk about distributed research, we are a research arm for schools and the power is in both corners, as it were. From the data we can discuss the way forward. When schools are under pressure, and I had not realised this, they will shift the entries, or the students will choose to get a higher grade and will not be counselled otherwise. Maybe you should have a go at maths if you want to have a go at it.

You say the problem with poverty is not that it causes low achievement, and you then say, because schools are often segregated by social class it does look as if poverty is a powerful factor. Are you making the distinction that individuals may well have the ability to achieve and their background will not matter from that point of view, but if they are all concentrated in an inner city ghetto school or a sink school then collectively the weight of the social background of the pupils will make a difference?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Actually that is called the compositional effect, does the average ability of a group in the classroom have an influence? You can imagine that it might, if everyone is doing their homework you perhaps would tend to do your homework and if nobody is you would feel a fool doing your homework, would you not. It may have an impact in secondary school in particular, when the peer group is so powerful, and far more powerful than parents. We do not know that for sure. We need to watch that very carefully. The reason not to segregate is that it is unfair, it is not a fair distribution so that everyone has a similar chance. The most important thing is none of those things but to have really good teachers. The teacher proportion is attributable to which classroom they are in. We have reported on a value added national project, 34 per cent in English, 40 per cent of the explained variance in mathematics, for which classroom they are in, and in the school it is only a matter of five per cent or ten per cent. It matters that we have happy teachers, and happy teachers should be in control of what they are doing and should not be subject to things that would be illegal in the United States, like Ofsted.

Chairman

I wondered when you were going to mention Ofsted!

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I did not mean to mention it, it just came up.

Chairman: I never mentioned Chris Woodhead. It is interesting both of us have this thought.

Paul Holmes

There was an article in the Educational Press a few weeks ago from a governor of the Riding School in Halifax, the one which notoriously hit the headlines some years ago, he had been a governor all of the way through before, during and after and he said, A It got a really bad reputation, it hit the headlines, it had the super heads brought in, the extra money, the wonderful teachers, all the attention@ , and eight, or however many, years later it is still not doing that much better in terms of GCSE scores than it was at the start, even though it had all the razmataz and the wonderful new teachers. He was very much making the case there that because there was a segregated system of schools selecting left, right and centre, and the Ridings was right at the bottom of the pecking order, that it therefore got a much higher level of socioeconomic deprivation amongst its pupils, and that critical mass meant that however good the teachers were they still were not going to overcome that problem.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Intuitively I feel that that is very likely the case. I remember when somebody on the road did not get through the 11 Plus, they put on a different uniform and went to the secondary modern school instead of the grammar school, it was a terrible thing for that child, we labelled them with uniforms, and they go to a so-called good school. We should stop all this nonsense about good schools and bad schools. Which year are you looking at? The value added goes up and down like the weather, so it is good one year, bad another. When they are at the bottom they are going to go up, regression to the mean. A super head may come in but regression to the mean more or less promises it will go up. It is not the school, although you know a malfunctioning school for some particular reason would be very rare, it is the teachers that matter, and if you get a school with a bad reputation so nobody wants to teach there you will not get the best teachers in the classroom. It is whole system where we need really good teachers because they are appreciated and they are dealt with fairly on objective data.

You say at the end of your submission that, yes, there is more money going into the education system with lots of ideas on how to improve it but it is not really based on evidence and you are very critical of the role of special advisers who are not experts, do you want to elaborate on that?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) No.

As the chairman pointed out, you can say anything you like, you have Parliamentary privilege.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) I just wonder why a system that I expected would function very well has been disastrous for the last decade or so. I just seek explanations. In a recent advertisement from DFES they advertised for spin doctors, a background in journalism and PR, , 46,000 a year to convince teachers their job is good. Who do they think they are conning teachers with PR and journalism? This is not the climate in which we want to live and it has been disastrous. So basically I would like to see a more effective country with a good education system and I see it declining, despite its leadership in the whole world in taking on at the school level ALIS, for example. Probably at first not everyone was in favour of all these numbers and then gradually the whole school takes it on and they say, A It is part of the background, of course we analyse the data.@ Then they move to another school and they say, A How can you know what is going on if you have not got your data?@ so the profession has led the way internationally. There is not a more rigorous system than our baseline measures and extensive questionnaires. Do look at the graph on racism because it is quite worrying and that is being taken on by a very fine profession but people are leaving. The Engineering Council says that we are in meltdown and we will soon have no maths specialists in schools. How are we going to prepare people and take them forward at the speed they need to go?

Chairman

Obviously any rational policy-maker would want to listen to good evidence-based research on which to base their policies. On the one hand why do you think that is effective? In your answers you do not think that is the case. On the other hand, could it be that the kind of evidence, and we have listened to professors in your field who say very different things to you about how you secure better pupil achievement and it is quite confusing, is it not, for government or any policy-maker if the evidence-based research is not as uniform or as coherent or as persuasive as it could be?

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) Let me say two things. The evidence base in medicine is based on randomised clinical trials and you do not see researchers citing that very much. Where you do have randomised trials there does tend to be assistance around so you can put in collaboration internationally to bring together the randomised trial. We have a conference co-sponsored by the Cabinet Office in July this year to which I would like to invite you and that is the invitation. I wanted to mention that last time you said to someone from the DFES how do you know Excellence in Cities has been successful? They have given it to everybody, the whole lowest stratum has been given Excellence in Cities and no doubt been told to do this, that and other. If you give money to some and money plus instructions to others then you would see which group did better and have an evaluation strategy. If you give everything to everyone you do not know what works, this belief that we can get it right first time without designing experiments to gradually improve how effective we are, so you were right to question that. They are going to compare the progress with the others and regression to the mean will mean that therefore there will be more progress in the lowest group.

What I am saying to you is you are a member of a profession that has been for government evidence-based research for a very long time, but you do not all speak with one voice, do you? Presumably the DFES under any administration does not want to make the wrong decision or choose the wrong policies and they very much consult with leading professors and your colleagues in other universities.

(Professor Fitz-Gibbon) It is a funny thing but when I was at the Assessment of Performance Unit, someone told me when they talked about randomised trials with students that only 30 per cent understood it, and that was after a day or two's instruction. They would go on teaching it for three weeks and still only about 30 per cent understood it. I think some people do not see what a powerful thing a randomised control trial is. Without it you cannot do a survey and get cause and effect. If you do a survey, large classes get better results than small classes, they have more value-added. So should we make all classes large? No. The large classes are in the leafy suburbs and the small classes are in the inner cities. The large classes are the top sets because they are well-behaved and the small classes are the bottom set which are kept small because of behaviour problems. Surveys are full of pitfalls like that. You cannot jump from correlation surveys which are vast areas of educational research to cause and effect and what works. We have to get down to work. We have students in our control for 15,000 hours of treatment. We could be doing thousands of experiments a year if LEAs were encouraged to develop evidence for what works, then have yearly conferences, present a randomised trial and gradually the profession will find out what works.

Chairman: Professor Fitz-Gibbon, we will remain in contact with you. Thank you for your evidence.

Memorandum submitted by White Hart Lane School

Examination of Witnesses

MRS ANNE COLE, Headteacher, Saltley School, Birmingham, and MR DAVID DANIELS, Headteacher, White Hart Lane School, examined.

Chairman

Can I welcome Anne Cole and David Daniels to our deliberations. We are very pleased they were able to take time off from a very busy professional life running two real schools, Anne Cole in Birmingham and David Daniels in London. I would apologise to Anne Cole. This Select Committee spent a week in Birmingham and did not visit her school but we did visit a lot of others. Of course, David will know we have not yet but as we are in close proximity we might well visit his school on a future occasion. Can I start off the questioning. What we really want to learn and the reason you have been invited to speak to us is the Committee has spent a lot of time with academics, and we have just had a very refreshing and challenging session with Professor Fitz-Gibbon, and we have heard a lot of people talking in terms of an academic perspective but we really wanted to talk to people who run schools, who have had experience of different types of schools, so some of the questions we ask might be reasonably fundamental but we are trying to unpack this pupil achievement question, the myth and the reality. We have heard what Professor Fitz-Gibbon said about the nature and quality of research on which you base your policies. How does it seem to you? Do you want to say anything to open up this discussion? How do you see this assessment of achievement? You have heard the Professor's views on this, what does that sound like to you as a practitioner?

(Mrs Cole) As a practitioner I followed Professor Fitz-Gibbons' research with interest and I hear all her comments about studies and pilots groups and the like, but the difficulty for us on the ground in practice is that year eight is there now and youngsters only get one chance, and so we would welcome pilots in anticipation of initiatives but, on the other hand, we do not do things in such a clinical way. We use our judgment and throw everything we have at our youngsters' achievement now rather than taking such a methodical researched approach. The other thing about pupil achievement is we can talk about data and research but often the thing that is missing (which is certainly central to my school) is the human dimension and all those other things that make schools tick, which I would like to talk about when the time is right.

(Mr Daniels) I would concur with most of that. As a researcher myself I am very aware of the broad sweep that research produces for us. In my case the information I gave you last week is wrong, it is not 65 nationalities, it is now 66 as of this week. I can take broad swathes of research but I have to unpack that into individual cases, ethnic groups and so on, to see how that can be applied. I welcome research but at the end of the day we are both saying pragmatism wins because we have to produce those results, we have to ensure every child wins through - and I do say every single child - and in the challenging circumstances which we both have, getting every single child through various stages is a mine field, and I have to suggest on occasions the research does not touch us greatly.

You both sent us interesting material about your individual schools, and the high number of languages interests me specifically, given the way in which both your schools are improving can you tell us, in the light of your experience, what are the major factors that have improved the pupils' achievements in your schools?

(Mr Daniels) If you had about ten hours I could probably go through that. In my case it is a situation of taking a school which was in serious weaknesses very rapidly to being an improving school. I did not need Ofsted to tell me that because the signs were there very, very clearly. I am going to go away from issues concerning research, and so on, and I am going to talk about leadership, because I think that is a very critical thing to the success of any school. As I have indicated in my paper here, one of the foundations of a good school is an active leadership, an overt leadership, a leadership that sets clear tones and expectations but also a leadership that is out on the corridors doing the job day in and day out, and I mean that. A simple example, I man the school gate every lunch time not because the children come in and go out but because I am symbolising to the staff somebody is out there all of the time. What are the net results of that? All of the paperwork I would normally be doing, especially during the lunch hour, which I never, ever take, gets taken home and there is, naturally, a cost. I have a leadership group that believes the same way, we speak as one when it comes to being out there. As I have said here, we are not talking rocket science when it comes to leading good schools, we are talking about being there for the children and actually making it work for the staff and the pupils.

Chairman

You call it A leadership@ , that is just good management, is it not? You are managing your school appropriately?

(Mr Daniels) I can lead the charge of the Light Brigade into the valley but can I get them out at the other end? That is an important point. That is really how I define the leadership/management issue. We can have all sorts of charismatic leaders, we can have people with wonderful ideas but actually initiating them, seeing them through, evaluating and making them stick is all about management.

The material you gave us is you built a management team, partly from those people you inherited, and those you brought in, you set objectives and had vision, that is classic good management, is it not?

(Mr Daniels) With the added extra, we have to communicate that vision to get the management working, and working successfully, and that is where the leadership comes in.

(Mrs Cole) I concur with that. I think the leadership is about setting the direction and the moral tone and the values of the school, which is fundamental to achievement. Some of the particular things that have contributed to school achievement in my school are very clear teaching and learning objectives, particular focus on literacy, which actually preceded the Key Stage 3 literacy strategy and flexible pathways across the curriculum, which allows all pupils to achieve. I am quite proud of the fact that in my school achievement levels at the lower ability end and the middle ability end were shifted upwards before the top ability, I think that is a sign of the health of the school. One of the important things to consider is the appropriate pupil groupings so that there is no cap on children who are entered for higher level examinations. One of the things is time- tabled, flexible curriculums for potentially disaffected students, actually being time tabled in. We found that that supports their achievement in GCSE subjects. I am talking about the Compact or Asdan type awards which have been quite important. We have used bilingualism positively in the classroom. We have relatively few beginners in English but one of the strategies that has been particularly successful is through drama developing children's formal use of speech, which applies actually equally to children of ethnic minorities and, for instance, those working class boys, because the idea being that children will write as they speak. It is the flexibility about communicating with an appropriate audience which is so crucial to accessing higher levels, particularly in examinations. I talked about the human dimension, I think in schools with ethnic minorities it is particularly important that there is real emersion in culture aspects, that these things are taken to the heart of the school and it is reflected, particularly say in the profile of the staff. We have a very high proportion of ethnic minorities, both Asian and black staff, which serve as a powerful role model and catalyst for the achievements of those youngsters. There are other examples I can cite, but those are some.

Valerie Davey

A general question, and then a very specific one, have the national programmes, such as the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant or Excellence in Cities been of help in the strong leadership which you are both giving?

(Mrs Cole) In the notes which I have here the first thing I have is that the school has hugely benefited both from Excellence in Cities funding and from the Ethnic Minorities Grant, which improves opportunities and extends opportunities in all directions. I think with Excellence in Cities funding the learning mentors and the gifted and talent strands they provide the support and enrichment which complement the teaching and learning provision. There are some questions over the basics of the teaching and learning provision and one has to say because of the difficulty in teacher recruitment we are dancing on our feet and trying all sorts of ways to secure teachers. Excellence in Cities has provided support mechanisms and enrichment mechanisms, which are particularly lacking in communities of disadvantaged pupils.

You did not need random testing of that to say that it was a good thing for your school?

(Mrs Cole) Not in that case, no.

(Mr Daniels) EIC in particular has been of demonstrable advantage to White Hart Lane, it has allowed us to be fairly creative in some of the different aspects that we provide. The notion of Learning Support Units, which is part of the EIC philosophy, we have some difficulty with that concept at base, that it must be a physical entity somewhere within the confines of the perimeters of the school because we have developed with another school, if you like, a virtual Learning Support Unit which takes place in and out of the school, and without that influx of cash from funding we would not have been able to do that. One of the things I do mention in here is if we take the gross total of the school's income versus the outgoings EIC support is not something that is, if you like, a luxury and the icing on the cake, but it is essential to maintain the level of input that we have to achieve and sustain the success that we have already. If I can just mention learning mentors in particular, we have, and I guess you probably have as well, some excellent mentors who work very effectively, covertly and overtly in ways that we never could, keeping on board some youngsters that we would lose for all sorts of reasons. They are highly dedicated and skilled people and if they were to ever depart from the school because of lack of funding I think our general results and ethos in the school would plummet.

Mr Daniels, you mentioned, and I was interested in it, your home language work, is that done within the school day or is that additional work that you do with families or with individual students?

(Mr Daniels) It is a range of things, both during the school day and also outside. The Turkish language science project - and as I have privilege I will mention that I was very upset the DFES could not support last year - under the excellent challenge is done as a regular curriculum activity, and that is within the timetable. Would it be that I could extend that I could certainly do that in at least four or five other languages and produce effects overnight in terms of motivation, achievement, and so on. I think that it is very clear if we regard children's heritage language as being important, and in my case a lot of Turkish children and Kurdish children arrive on a regular basic, if we take an example, a child might spend two to three years languishing - and I use that word fairly guardedly - waiting to acquire sufficient English to really access the national curriculum, especially in a subject specific area such as science. What we can do, and we would do it even better with more resourcing, is to passport those children straight into success and in some cases carry on the success in their own country (some of them have been doing extremely well within their own educational system) and bit by bit introduce them into the English structure. At the moment I can pinpoint very clearly the link between the inability to access the National Curriculum for a period of time and disadvantage and disaffection.

Jonathan Shaw

Mr Daniels, in your paper you talk about introducing school uniforms, pupils standing up when teachers, and I am sure yourself, walk into a classroom because that brings a more disciplined ethos to the school, and you also say that it is something that kids are used to from the schools from which they came in their various countries. That makes a difference, does it?

(Mr Daniels) Surprisingly, yes. I must point out the standing when I go into the room is not because I am a megalomaniac but simply it is an effective, pragmatic tool which actually works. I have very strong connections with the Gambia and I go there frequently. In fact, we are twinned with a school there. I have also been in schools in Turkey and in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe and it would be the normal thing for this to happen. All I am suggesting there is that we should not just expect children to arrive, adopt the English style automatically, and understand it. If that is their norm and we can somehow manage to wriggle within the skin and bring it to be part of our way of working, it continues their expectations of what they believe in and what they are used to. I can think of a Turkish child who recently arrived and could not understand how laissez faire his first English school appeared to be. He has now arrived in my school and feels more at home as though it is like the school back in Turkey. I am not saying that we are draconian, we do this with a smile on our face, but I think it is important to use what students know in the same way that we use the language they know best to accelerate their progress. Does it work? Yes. Do the parents like it? They love it. And actually a lot of the children like it too.

We will not pass that on to new Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

(Mr Daniels) Thank you, much obliged.

Earlier on we heard from Professor Fitz-Gibbon and she was challenging quite a number of the things that you are both now telling us work. Instead of spending all this money on mentors, get your old under-achievers into years seven and eight and that will have far more impact upon their achievement than anything that you are talking about, these people that you are so desperate to keep at the school. It is important that we have what is happening within our schools challenged. You mentioned the things that you did not perhaps agree with, you talked about the here and now for kids, was there anything in Professor Fitz-Gibbon's evidence you thought, A That is a point, I need to look at that again@ ? Was it a challenge for you today?

(Mrs Cole) I am listening to the whole notion of value added because clearly for schools such as ours value added is very important since the traditional measures of league tables, As-Cs, tend to make us towards the bottom of the table or at least below the average. I was interested in what she was saying about notionally easier subjects because my mind was then going to our understanding of different sorts of knowledge and children's differing abilities that she described earlier and the value we attach to those relative abilities and different aspects of learning.

Chairman

What about the older children teaching the younger children, what do you think of that?

(Mrs Cole) I think most schools have some experience of that. We certainly find that and we find it works particularly well with the lower ability groups. We do it with higher ability groups, we have children who are there at Early Birds eight o'clock in the morning teaching younger children to read. We have a reading centre which is not a library where they are learning activities at lunchtime. We have a new peer mentoring scheme headed up by the learning mentors. I think that many of us have experience in various aspects and that is what I was describing earlier, that we will trial most strategies that we think are relevant and appropriate to our circumstances.

(Mr Daniels) Can I maybe extend that very slightly. It is about learning, it is about cross-learning, but it is also about young people taking their place rightfully within the school society. If we are going back to traditionalism, and I may be perhaps faulted for that, one of the things that we again found that children like, especially from very varying backgrounds, is a sense of community and a sense of an importance in that community. One of the very first things I did was to introduce senior students. We have a blue uniform that is a sweat shirt. Our senior students wear a green sweat shirt and they are trained to be senior students. We would have perhaps called them in our school days junior prefects in year eleven. We have mentors who wear a maroon sweat shirt so they are easily identifiable. They assist us in all sorts of ways, some perhaps I do not want to know too much about, but they are part and parcel of the way we deal with our youngsters. In our sixth form we have principal students, whom you might call full-blown prefects, but the important thing here is that within that hierarchy - and they do move through a hierarchy - they sense it, they believe in what they are doing. To lose that status is absolutely appalling as far as they are concerned but it gives them that status within that learning context where they can take a pride and confidence in what they do.

How much influence do you think you have in your schools on student achievement if you take the totality of their life?

(Mrs Cole) This is not a time for modesty. This is about leadership, it is also about distributing leadership, so it is about the Chairman's initial remarks about the difference between leadership and management. I think the head is crucial in setting the tone for a school and in guiding and seeing that standards are set. I do not think there can be any question about that.

(Mr Daniels) No. If that is answering your question directly, if I can take it one stage further, until two years ago we had the police outside the school on a regular basis every day and indeed there were some quite serious incidents of bother. We were actually used as a school for Ofsted training for how inclusion does not work. People like myself and OFSTED inspectors had to undergo that training. When I did it I read the paper at the training session and I thought, A I recognise this school@ , and, low and behold, yes, it was White Hart Lane. Without any doubt being on the gates, being out there, being highly visible - and I mean being highly visible - to the parents and community is absolutely intrinsic and vital to the job. That is how we start making the difference, apart from all the initiatives, because unless you set the tone nothing is going to happen.

Jeff Ennis

Professor Fitz-Gibbon in the earlier evidence used a very strange turn of phrase which I have not heard before in this sort of committee. She said that it is important that teachers are happy. I have always thought the government were looking for effective teachers, ones who set targets and meet targets and all that sort of stuff and that it is important that pupils are happy in the school setting and settled. As I say, it is probably two decades since I heard the term A happy teachers@ . How important is it that teachers, particularly in challenging circumstances, apart from having to be effective in meeting targets, are happy? Are teachers happy in challenging school circumstances these days?

(Mrs Cole) I agree with Professor Fitz-Gibbon that teachers need to be happy. I think that teachers work incredibly hard in urban schools such as ours. They rise to meet amazing challenges daily and they work so hard it is quite unbelievable. Teachers are happy to be accountable. They would be happier if they felt trusted and left to make decisions for themselves and if their professionalism were allowed have more flexibility in more decision-making. I think that is the crucial thing that will make them happier.

Mr Daniels, do you have anything to add to that?

(Mr Daniels) Over the last few years inevitably the level of administration and paperwork has become colossal. If we think back to the late 80s and early 90s, when the GCSE was born, we were crippled at one stage, it is a bit less likely that is the case now. I think the sheer volume and the rate of change - and I am great advocate of change, because that is important to keep us moving - beleaguers some teachers in the sense of what do they do next. There is a genuine anxiety sometimes as to which master or mistress they should be satisfying at any moment in time. One thing that concerns me, and we are back to consultants again, Professor Fitz-Gibbon mentioned that, is the number of experienced teachers taken out of schools to fulfil consultancy roles. The Key Stage 3 strategy takes about six people in every authority to run, if not more, consultants in different subjects, and they have to come from somewhere. With about 140 LEAs that is roughly 600 very experienced teachers, and they are all probably ex heads of departments, who are out of the system within a year to 18 months. Where do we find the replacements? It is that sort of thing, on top of paperwork, on top of change, which on occasions makes teachers want to take breath. I do think there is a time when we should be saying on occasions, we have put this in in place let us take a rigorous look at what effect it is really having. It is a balance between the rate of change, but also keeping the change going.

Jeff Ennis: I serve on a governing body, which was previously one of the first wave of Education Action Zones, which achieved some quite remarkable result in terms of lifting the 5 A-C grades. We seem to have moved away from Education Action Zones to the Excellence in Cities model, what is the difference between the two models? Why have we gone from the Education Action Zones to Excellence in Cities?

Chairman

It could be a long answer.

(Mrs Cole) It is a fairly short answer because my school has not been in any Education Action Zone, so I do not have experience of that. The Excellence in Cities model has facilitated a great deal of sharing of good practice, which we may describe as a shortcut to raising pupil achievement.

(Mr Daniels) I have some experience of both of them in that I wrote the Enfield EIC bid about two and a half years ago now. I think the localisation of an EAZ is interesting in principle, I have yet to be convinced, looking at some of the research and outcomes of government departments, that it produces overall dramatic results. There is a big concern about sustainability, you can do something very, very quickly, and in a sense we are both in the business of sustainability, you can wreak havoc in terms of improving results in the year, but keeping up there is the next job. My feeling is that EIC will form a longer basis for achieving and sustaining, simply because of the wide range of collaboration across a number of partners.

(Mrs Cole) Can I add to that, head teachers and governing bodies do have concerns about the short-term nature of some of the funding and the associated bureaucracy with the multiple funding mechanisms.

Ms Munn

I just wanted to come back to the issue of accountability. Accountability, as I understand it, is at the heart of Ofsted, it is at the heart of league tables and it is about making the whole system transparent. I have certainly seen, again in my experience as a school governor, a difference between those issues, it did not make a great deal of difference to a good head but to a bad head or a not so good head it gave a much needed push in terms of beginning to raise children's aspirations and look at how pupils were achieving. What are your views about those mechanisms in terms of accountability and contributing to pupil achievement?

(Mrs Cole) In the first ten years, or so, of Ofsted the mechanisms and systems are much clearer and standards and processes are much more transparent. I think we need to re-examine accountancy mechanisms. There are some clear issues which absorb school time which would be better spent in other ways. I know that my association, the Secondary Heads Association, has suggested that the annual parents meeting, attended by one or two parents as an example of accountability, it would be much better for schools to have a different mechanism so they can spend that time in a different way.

Nobody is going to argue with that. Anybody who has been a school governor has been to many, many meetings like that, arguing about that. What I am trying to get at is Ofsted and school league tables are all about trying to make schools more open, transparent and accountable. We can all point to specific examples where accountability is not working and what I am asking is, how have they contributed to pupil achievement?

(Mrs Cole) I think what has improved hugely in schools is the mechanism of self-evaluation and for that reason schools are in a much more robust situation now. The accountability needs to be to do with those self evaluation methods.

(Mr Daniels) I can see this in a sense of poacher and gamekeeper, being a team inspector I have inspected schools that have done terrifically well and schools that have needed that kick from behind. I have no problem with accountability, we are spending vast sums of public money in education - I dare say one of the largest sums of money perhaps after defence, I am not entirely clear - and I think we have a duty to be open and accountable. I think the hard days of the original Ofsted have now gone. We go now as teams with not a happy face but certainly with a friendly face. The feedback and the interplay is of a different nature entirely, where one is allowed nowadays to make comment, to offer advice or whatever, and that was not the case originally. I think a profession which fears accountability has a problem in itself, it is not only the sums of money but we are also accountable for the thousands of children who go through our hands, and, as you said, they only go through once, so we cannot afford to make mistakes. If the system that we are using helped to ensure that no single child fails or is failed by us we have to work with that. I think the problem that we have all highlighted this evening is that concrete, hard league tables tell you nothing about the schools we work in or the backgrounds that the children come from. When Ofsted came to my school last year they had a major, major problem trying to get their head round the sheer diversity of the youngsters, many of whom did not speak English at the time the team was there. I think only two members of the team had come across schools themselves personally, in their professional life or their inspection life and in a sense the team came with quite a severe difficulty, luckily we were able to persuade them otherwise. Those are the sort of issues that for us league tables per se tell us nothing. Value added tells a lot. If you look at Haringey itself we are one of the highest performing schools in terms of our own value added analysis, looking at prior attainment and what we achieve out of youngsters. If you look at the hard five A*-C we are third from the bottom.

Anne Cole is getting rid of the parents meeting, which I am sure would save all governors an evening a year, which they would be very happy for, as well as teachers. What is the one thing you would advise the Government to do in order to improve the accountability process, bearing in mind all that you have just said?

(Mr Daniels) I think it would be in terms of the inspection process. Following on from what Anne suggests, I am very much in favour of what used to be the FEFC approach, where colleges are validated internally to run their own self evaluations, on the basis their own systems are externally moderated and are rigorous enough to do so. Schools that are doing well, and the evidence is there to show they are doing well, which have good, robust self evaluation systems could be accredited to do such, either in partnership with local schools or in partnership with schools in similar circumstances. I do not think they necessarily need 16 good men and true descending on them every four or six years to completely turn the school upside down. I do think there is still a case for external bodies to come into schools where there are issues, you do need that external resource, that external view, perhaps to either verify or otherwise what the school believes that it is doing.

Chairman

Following the logic of that, would you like to see less externally administered testing and examining? When we have been to places like New Zealand, they are horrified, they want to move from the position they are at, they would like to know more about achievement of their pupils as they go through the system, but then they looked at us and said, A We do not want to go as far you, testing at seven and 11 and right through the system.@ Do you find that gets in the way of the quality of what you can do in your schools, all this testing and examining?

(Mr Daniels) Measuring beans does not make them grow. We have read that and seen it spoken in so many different venues. I believe we are over-tested. We have almost come to a point of self-delusion, both in government circles and some educational circles, that somehow we have this vast array of data and that in itself intrinsically is going to make a big difference. It is vital that we have robust and quantifiable data but as to the regularity of that data collection, I have some grave misgivings. I think it is the case now that virtually every year in schools children, certainly in the secondary phase, are able to participate in some form of external testing or another. It does take a great amount of time. It sometimes deflects us from looking at those individuals and working with them to make sure that each one achieves. We have to go back and reflect and think what we need. It is the same with some of my staff who collect volumes of data and they bring this along to me at line management meetings and I say, A What does it tell us about the individual? A That is our problem at the moment.

When we were in Northern Ireland last week we had a strong voice that said, A We still have 11-Plus here, right across the piece in primary and secondary schools,@ and they said, A We find that the primary system just teaches for the test,@ that is what it is all about, they teach to get people through the 11-Plus. We were reflecting afterwards on that. If that is true in Northern Ireland in terms of the 11-Plus, how much more so that must be in our own system where there are so many tests? I am really asking Anne here do you get the feeling that too much of what you are doing in a school like yours is about preparing children to be successful?

(Mrs Cole) One can get caught up in the treadmill of testing. We have heard about YELLIS and lots of people use NFER CAT tests. It is about what we value and it is about a review because we almost forget how we got to be here and the thing gathers a momentum of its own. I think there needs to be a review, particularly as the load of examining, examiners, and the whole system is under serious stress at the moment.

(Mr Daniels) Can I pick up a point there, if I may. The current situation, with the lack of examiners, where exam boards are offering schools to take staff out of school during the day to do all this kind of work, if that kind of future is going to be in front of us, it is going to disastrous. One of the problems I have in a school which has been turbulent, which is now relatively calm, is that every time a member of staff goes out for a day, whatever it is, myself included, we have to value that time out because it impacts on the youngsters in one way or another. It impacts on the general tone of the school. While I like to feel that I can be missed and never return again, I think it is important that I do. It is the sheer volume of staff going out for key stage three strategy training, individual CPD, professional development, and a whole plethora of things. If I then have staff being taken out to be examiners as well, whatever the return financially, it is going to be yet another problem in terms of continuity with the children and if we are talking about raising achievement, one of the issues is about good teachers, to think about our colleague, is being in front of those children day in day out, the same teacher doing the same job in a highly planned and organised manner. I have to limit the number of staff going out simply because I do not want a large number of supply teachers coming into school and provided I have got parliamentary privilege I need to say that is because the quality of supply staff coming in is not appropriate to what we need. I have supply teachers on average coming into the school I would not dream of offering a permanent position to, whatever money I was paid to take them, and while that is the situation the whole business of teachers out of school is an important issue if we are not just to raise achievement but to sustain it.

Jonathan Shaw

On supply teachers, it is something that the Committee has asked successive Secretaries of State and Chief Inspectors, and as a former Ofsted inspector yourself, Mr Daniels, I wonder what your views would be on the matter of inspecting supply agencies. If a teacher comes to your school, Mr Daniels or Mrs Cole, and you ring up the agency and say, A Look, I am sorry, please do not send Mrs Jones again, it really does not suit this school, I am seriously unimpressed,@ what happens to Mrs Jones? Is she sent to another school the next day?

(Mr Daniels) I really cannot say what the agency will do. All I know is that the teacher would not enter my gates a second time. Like a number of schools, and Anne was saying they have a different system running that equates in similar ways, I now recruit directly, for example, surplus teachers from South Africa. I shall be going out there in May representing various LEAs. I tend where I can not to use supply teachers produced within the UK. At least by having people coming from abroad, I know who they are and what they are. We tend to see them teach before they come over here. We as a school offer a training scheme of two weeks to prepare with overseas teachers to deal with the kind of classroom management issues which may be different to those they have in their home country. I sincerely hope a supply teacher who is removed from my school does not then go on to another school but I do not know the mechanisms for checking that.

Have you any comments?

(Mrs Cole) I would concur with that. We have had supply teachers at my school who have not returned to us because we have expressed concern to the agency. I think this is a point worth investigating, but I think it relates to the whole issue of teacher supply which is particularly challenging for us.

Chairman

Is it getting better or is it getting worse or is it the same?

(Mrs Cole) It is not getting better. The issue is - I was discussing this with David before we came in - because we have to be creative and flexible we change our structures so that if you ask me how many vacancies there are we change our structures. For example, my school is part of the Collegiate Academy, a group of six schools within the inner city of Birmingham (a DFES Pathfinder initiative) and one of the things we are doing to help generate teachers and train them is we will have a joint graduate teacher programme. We are finding that particularly successful, so we are trying to contribute creatively to the supply of teachers.

David, do you do that as well?

(Mr Daniels) Two years ago when I arrived at White Hart Lane we spent , 90,000 on advertising, which is , 90,000 out of the school's revenue which could be school books or whatever. Last year I spent , 9,000. I do not advertise. We find all sorts of creative ways. In our case I actively go out and recruit teachers who are part of our ethnic minority population locally. We train them on site. We put them through a graduate trainee route, if that is possible, or an overseas trainee route, if possible. At the moment I have got something like ten teachers in training. I plan for succession. If I think a subject area will be needing somebody that is what I look for six months in advance. There is little point in advertising. For a head of English post advertised recently we had one applicant of a very unsatisfactory standard. No, it is not getting better and I do not see it getting better in the short term or even the medium term.

Mr Chaytor

Can I ask one follow-up point on this. In terms of young teachers coming out of training, are you saying that is not getting better or are your remarks only concerned with the flow of supply teachers?

(Mr Daniels) Young teachers coming in. As I say, I stopped advertising for anything apart from the more senior positions because the chances of getting a response are limited, which is why we seek other creative ways of dealing with it. Supply teachers abound, they are numerous. We have no problem in our area getting supply teachers, but we have a problem getting good supply teachers.

Your comments about quality, does that apply equally to supply teachers as well as newly qualified teachers looking for their first appointment?

(Mr Daniels) Of the few NQTs I come across they are of a reasonable quality. It is the supply staff who I really have concerns about.

Paul Holmes

The Ofsted Reports for both schools describe both of them as being comprehensive schools, but when you look at the figures one school has 60 per cent of the children on free school meals and one has 66 per cent and both schools have much lower than average prior attainment when the pupils come in at year seven. One school has 37 per cent on special educational needs, GCSE passes at A-C are 25 per cent in one and 35 per cent in the other, and they are improvements on what it was two or three years ago, can you be described as comprehensive when clearly you do not have a comprehensive intake?

(Mrs Cole) My school certainly cannot be described as comprehensive because in Birmingham LEA there are a number of selective schools, for example that is one of the issues we have about league tables and PANDA benchmarking groups, because they assume all schools within those groupings are comprehensive. I know that seven per cent of the children in the ward which my school is situated in go to grammar schools, so in a comprehensive system one would assume they would be added to the total.

(Mr Daniels) It is a slightly different situation in White Hart Lane, we have some very, very, incredibly able children coming from other countries. Can I anecdotally just mention a young lady who came from Somalia just three years ago with no English, if my memory serves me correctly last year she got five A* and a number of As and Bs. In the sense of aptitude, or whatever you want to describe it as, we have a small number of highly able, highly motivated children, but we have a very long tail of almost other descriptors. The curious thing in our situation is we do not have a selective situation to deal with, although we have some very well known public schools not too far away. We have the north drift. Having been head of Enfield Grammar, where we used to have 1,000 applicants for 180 places, probably about have 30 per cent to 40 per cent of those being children applying from the Haringey area, in particular the White Hart Lane ward, which I hasten to add I am very quickly trying to put right, that too, in a sense, provides a drain of those parents. Here we go back to homes, social environment, and so on, parents who are desirous of what is perceived to be better schooling in other authorities. It is not by selection in this case, it is by parental desire, expectations and perceptions.

(Mrs Cole) Can I make another point. The other thing about my school which needs pointing out is that there are 65 per cent of boys in the school, which obviously in terms of gender differences and achievement is significant. That relates not only to cultural issues - we serve a high proportion of the Pakistani population - but also there are more place for girls-only schools than there are for boys.

Chairman: You have the largest girls school in Europe in Birmingham.

Paul Holmes

Obviously prominent members of the Government and many of their special advisers do not like comprehensive schools and say they have had their day, that the one-size comprehensive has failed the nation and we should be replacing them. In 5 years' time where would you like your school to be, would you like it to be a true comprehensive school or a specialist school that selects by aptitude, for example, or a city technology college? What would you like to be?

(Mr Daniels) We have just applied for business and enterprise status for all sorts of very good reasons, one is that financially it is quite an interesting prospect. We have done it for a particular reason, we would not wish in any way to lose our comprehensive ideal. We would like to be better balanced in the sense of aptitude and then I think we would be able to work in lots of ways more effectively. Haringey, and Tottenham in particular, is an area of small businesses, thriving enterprises, no big industry and we are quite convinced that there is need to have that focused within the school, given that the focus is a possibility. We would not be looking at the other specialisms because they would not suit the children or the area. In particular it is something that the local parents are really quite interested in, they are very eager for many of their offspring to do well, to improve, to achieve and in many cases it is within the business world. In terms of the comprehensive versus selection I have absolutely no doubt that I am wedded and committed totally to comprehensive schools.

(Mrs Cole) In five years my school will be a comprehensive and we are going to be applying for science specialist status and we will not be selecting.

In terms of where you are increasing five A-Cs, whatever we have heard and said about how bad a measure that is, you are going up from 10 per cent to 25 per cent, and presumably aiming to go further, how are you doing that? Is it because you concentrate on the C-D borderline pupils? Is it because you introduce the Milton Keynes IT GCSE that is worked for GCSE grades for one subject? How exactly are you increasing your pass rates?

(Mr Daniels) A whole range of things. I do not think any one school employs one method and is wedded to one method. From my point of view I arrived in a school where A can't do@ was the philosophy. A typical phrase from a member of staff would be, A These are children from poor, disadvantaged backgrounds. They are children who have limited English, low expectations, they will have a go but they won't, they can't@ . I am sure like Anne our motto is A Can do, will do@ because they can and they have shown us in one year effectively that. There is a lot of latent potential out there. I would be the first to make it very clear that we do not just concentrate on the C-D border, although that is one of the issue we use. We have a project called the Gap Project which identifies that. If you look at our results across the board they are all moving up, right the way from grade G upwards, and that is the important thing. It is about raising expectations and raising children's own interest and capabilities. For example, we have them in for Saturday university, Easter university, any university you care to mention, just to get them in there. It is back to parents again, many of our parents are from very, very disadvantaged backgrounds but they are very keen to bring their children in on Saturday mornings for additional schooling because that is sometimes what is required because there has been a gap. Somalian students in some cases may not have had any primary education, Kurdish children may arrive illiterate in their own language, there are lots of barriers to making progress and we have to find ways of getting over these barriers. In a sense the white working-class issue which was raised in the brief is still one that we are grappling with to find real solutions. I must point out there there is an issue, I think about the home, about the number of books, about expectations, and so on, of families. In Haringey there is also a culture of quick-fixing and quick earning and in particular - and these are where generalisations are very dangerous - within the white, working class community it is almost an accepted norm that they will earn somewhere by the back way, by the side way, whatever, without wishing to go into a profession or a regular job. That is not, dare I say, the wish of many of our ethnic minority parents. At a year nine options meeting last week half year nine wanted to be police officers, the others wanted to be brain surgeons, lawyers, and so on. Expectations are incredibly high amongst many of our ethnic minorities, our job is to open those gates and achieve some way of getting over the barriers.

Chairman

You are talking about cultural change, changing the culture of your school?

(Mr Daniels) In the case of white, working-class, yes. The culture of achievement actually comes with many of our ethnic minorities. Our problem is that in a sense unless we can run fast and run with them we lose that culture for whatever reason.

Do you think Professor Fitz-Gibbon was under-estimating that the school is also a good social system to society? What were you thinking at that time? The fact of the matter is schools are cultures, are they not, they can be changed. You obviously came from a school to this school, both of you, and wanted to change the culture and by good management, good leadership, or whatever, you have succeeded. That is what it is about, or is it not?

(Mrs Cole) I think that the focus on achievement and data and all that rigorous system needs to be there but it is not sufficient. It is necessary but it is not sufficient. My staff are relentless in their high expectations. They have now tipped the balance. They have convinced the youngsters that they can do it and they can achieve. Basically it is about a culture of inspiration. It is the human dimension that makes the difference. If I can give an example. Some of my staff are members of the community, they live in the community, they are former pupils at the school. That is not about whether they have been to my school or not, that is about the fact they are embedded in the community. They are local so that regenerates the community, the community sees that it is valued and those are the things that make the difference.

Mr Daniels, in the evidence you gave this Committee you specifically quoted a student who had come from another country who said when they first came to the school the kind of atmosphere, which sounds like it was intimidatory and violent, was something that he had recognised or was worse than where he had came from, and that was one of the things you had to put right, was it not?

(Mr Daniels) Absolutely right. I quoted a boy from Kosovo. I have to say probably one of the reasons he said that was the school fabric was in such an appalling condition - and I mean appalling - where the fascias were shot away, blown away, stones had been at them and so on. This is where PFI has come to the rescue. I would not wish to be political about the rights and wrongs of PFI but what it has done for our youngsters in term of ethos, environment and moving on has been remarkable, and while we talk about leadership and management and all these things and all the Saturday universities and so on we have 1,150 children, or thereabouts, who come to school in bright buildings, recently repainted, in one building= s case gutted completely internally and rebuilt as a brand new building. That sets the seal now. They are saying the school is one of the nicest in Haringey and I believe it is. It is all of that kind of thing that is very important.

Why did the two of you choose schools like this? Mr Daniels, you came from a much more comfortable environment and came to a very difficult school; why?

(Mr Daniels) I have been thinking that for the last two years! I will give you an answer why. It is something I mention to the children at school sometimes in assembly. I cannot wait to get back to White Hart Lane on a Monday morning. That may sound very sad but the school captivates me, grips me, so much so that my daughter says that she does not even recognise me any more, but it is that kind of school and I guess it is similar for Anne in different ways. It is just the sense of challenge, it is the sense of making a difference. Certainly at Enfield Grammar I hope I made a difference, I hope it was well-received and recognised, but I think what I have been able to do at White Hart Lane has been very, very clear and overt and major. I think while that continues I will leap out of bed on Monday mornings with the same alacrity, although getting a bit older not quite so fast, for some time to come.

(Mrs Cole) I think that is true, especially when you start to tip the balance and the progress starts, it gets in your blood, it is infectious and you want to go for the next mile and next mile.

Paul Holmes

On a slightly different tack, we have talked a bit earlier on about Ofsted and the impact of that type of inspection process. The Committee has been to Eire and New Zealand where the inspection process is the absolute opposite. Just one question on Ofsted, starting with David because he is both a head and an Ofsted inspector, we have had the Chief Inspector in front of us and he started to talk about the idea that a teacher who is A satisfactory@ is no longer satisfactory and it is not enough to be satisfactory any more to do your job. What do you think about that?

(Mr Daniels) Michael Barber tells the story frequently when he talks and that is if you are flying on a plane and about to arrive at Heathrow and the pilot simply says there is a 70 per cent chance of landing safely, would you be satisfied? I think in that sense there is some measure of reality here. Satisfactory may be okay but we are dealing with human lives here, lives that have to make successes of themselves and can only do so if what they are getting is better than satisfactory. I think we can all be satisfactory at some points but we need to be striving to be good, very good and, on occasions, excellent. We also have to admit some realities in life that when teachers are teaching 80 per cent timetables, and bearing in mind the amount of preparation for any one lesson and marking and so on, we are not going to make it excellent every single time but I would hate to be one of those satisfactory teachers.

(Mrs Cole) I think there is a bit of a problem with the word A satisfactory@ . We can play with the word A sound@ but there is almost something grudging about the word A satisfactory@ . If satisfactory were replaced with something approaching sound it might be more appropriate. Most of my teachers most of the time are a lot more than satisfactory and have to be because of the circumstances in which they work and all the social factors which impinge daily on their classrooms.

Spinning off slightly from that, you were talking again the problem when you had your Ofsted inspection with a lot of classes with a wide range of linguistic backgrounds with children who were not very fluent in English and so forth, and the fact that your Ofsted team found it quite difficult to get to grips with the reality of that. Would there not be a danger - I am thinking of a school I worked in when we were Ofsted inspected - where they make judgments of whether it is satisfactory or whatever which bear no relation to how difficult it was to be satisfactory in that particular classroom with that particular group of children, but all they got was poor or satisfactory or whatever. Why can Ofsted not take proper account of those sorts of differences in a classroom rather than (it is back to the league tables) comparing the grammar school in the leafy suburb with your school in the inner city and saying they should all be the same?

(Mr Daniels) If I can make a comment which I hope it is not out of place, within the cohort of team inspectors there is a vast range of people, a vast range of experience. I have myself been on teams with inspectors who have never taught in the public sector, only in the private sector, but they are Ofsted inspectors. I remember when I did my training back in 1995 we were talking about the National Curriculum and one would-be inspector said, A What= s that?@ I dare say by this stage that kind of inspector has been weeded out because, as you know, we are all graded after inspections and those who are getting A satisfactory@ probably will not get on to new teams and be re-employed. I think it is a very good reason why people like myself and other colleagues who are serving teachers and who work in these schools put back into the inspection system that experience which we have currently so when I go on inspection I tend to be selected for teams which are looking at schools in challenging circumstances. I did one last year and sadly it did not make the grade but I found myself one of only 16 or 17 with any real experience of (a) running a school facing challenging circumstances and (b) teaching in one. The more active people there are in the service who do inspections, if the inspection system is to carry on in that vein, must make a difference and is vital.

Chairman

I want to wind up and ask you here you are giving evidence to this Select Committee, is there anything you would like to say to the Committee before we finish the session? I do not want you to be going home on the bus or tube or whichever way you go and say, A I wish I had said this to the Committee about what could really change our lives in the educational sector in the next two to five years.@

(Mr Daniels) I have one issue, which I think is puzzling many heads across the country at the moment, depending on where we live, that is an issue of financing. Again, if it is not out of place, I happen to feel that the changes in financial arrangements are actually inappropriate. Next year I am faced with a , 200,000 overspend if I just simply stay still, static, that is simply because the high level of need I have in terms of individual needs, and so on, one-to-one tuition, a whole range of things has been severely crippled by two almost independent, that ought to be joined-up, issues. One, of course, is the basic funding arrangements that are coming through and the re-distribution in terms of EMA and its balance on different parts of the country, but also changes to the standard fund arrangements as well. In a sense we have managed to capture a double whammy which has caused a major situation. Thankfully there has been some assistance from Government but it has caused me a major headache. My problem will be very simple, how do I sustain a 10 per cent to 25 per cent five A*-C, not just that, but all the other cultural advantages that we are offering in the school if I immediately assent into overspend after having managed two budgets since I have been in the school extremely well and come out with money in the black. I am driven into that position. I am not in the business of cutting staff. Tomorrow I shall be declaring a section 188 redundancy notice to unions as a precautionary measure because, as you know, we are not allowed to run with negative budgets unless we can achieve a licensed overdraft. That is going to be a severe problem face Haringey schools, many London schools and other schools round the nation.

Chairman

Thank you for that.

(Mrs Cole) The top of the list is resourcing and teacher supply, those are the two crucial issues. Schools will also continue to need support in all of the aspects of social disadvantage and what we might say is cultural challenge. The role model of Phil Mitchell, for those who watch EastEnders, it is the role model and the machoism that schools will need to continued support with.

Chairman: Thank you both for your evidence, it has been a very good session. Thank you for your time.