Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180
- 191)
WEDNESDAY 11 JUNE 2003
PROFESSOR JOHN
HOWSON, PROFESSOR
BOB MOON
AND MRS
ELIZABETH BIRD
Q180 Jonathan Shaw: They have never
been onto a council estate in their lives.
Professor Howson: Between the
social experience of being a successful student in a comprehensive
school and being in one of our council estate schools in one of
our northern cities, or parts of London or, indeed, in some of
our less successful social schools in terms of rural areas as
well, because it is not entirely an urban problem.
Q181 Jonathan Shaw: What would you
do with the money? Would you do anything differently with the
money?
Professor Moon: Yes. I think the
Government's inquiry into 14-19 education at the moment is actually
crucial to the issue and we are coming to this late in the day.
In one sense the model of teacher supply is posited on the model
of curriculum, but we are going to see change and I think there
will be cross-party support for this change. It is clear that
we have to have more practical applied relevant vocational work
in schools than has been the case, but we have not got the teachers
there necessarily to deal with that.
Q182 Jonathan Shaw: I agree with
that, but neither of you have answered my question. If you were
in charge of the money, and in terms of what we have spoken about
in terms of quality and how much you pay, are we distributing
the money correctly? When I gave you the example that you can
come back into the profession, into a leafy school and get £4,000,
that does not seem to me the best use of the public money when
we are talking about your daughter's school?
Professor Howson: In theory, the
LMS formula, topped-up with the special needs' elements, should
provide for those schools to have more money than the leafy suburb
schools in the same authority, because they will be getting x
amount—
Q183 Jonathan Shaw: Sixth forms,
do you mean?
Professor Howson: Which should,
in theory, mean that they are able to offer more responsibility.
Clearly, it does not work like that for all sorts of reasons,
such as whether the school has got a sixth form, or other factors,
in which case if you want them to be successful you have got to
find some other way of intervening. I am probably arguing that
you need to pay people more to work in the most challenging circumstances,
and you need to find a way of doing that which is acceptable to
everybody. Even, more importantly, you need to identify, right
from the word go, people who are actually socially responsible
and wish to take on the challenge of working in those sort of
schools, and give them the training and the support to enable
them to be successful with those sort of children. I suspect a
greater number of people can succeed teaching leafy suburb children,
who are there because they want to learn, are relatively biddable
and are not facing all these other problems. That is exactly the
sort of school that I spent seven years in at the start of my
career. Professor Moon spent time in London with his career. We
went there, we enjoyed doing it and we were—we hope—successful,
but we need to make sure that the generation who are doing it
now gets as much help as possible to be successful for the education
of these children.
Q184 Chairman: Something that is
not coming through from this very interesting set of questions
from Jonathan in terms of the answers, is it is all very well
to juxtapose the leafy suburb school to the inner city school,
but what is the difference, in your experience and in your knowledge,
of what high quality management of that school brings to the new
teacher coming into that environment? What I think this Committee
needs to know is if you take two leafy suburb schools, or two
inner city schools, which are very similar, what difference does
it make? Some of the evidence that we have had from you and others
suggests that if there is a good head, a good management structure,
who cares about the induction and all the rest, it makes a tremendous
difference between whether that teacher stays or not. Is that
wrong or is it right?
Professor Howson: I would say,
yes. I would say very clearly that the leadership role is critical.
We are in the people business in education. We work with people
and most of what we do is an interaction between people, and if
those interactions in a learning sense can be successful, then
everybody will feel better about it and the outcome, however you
measure it, will be better. Now, as Professor Moon says, it may
be that for some of the age group we are actually doing the wrong
thing. So it is going to be very difficult to make it succeed
because we are not doing the right sort of thing. I would say
you have to have successful leaders, again who are trained to
understand the circumstances in which they find themselves in,
are supported at the local level—whether it is a buddy system,
or whether it is through some sort of local support network—which
allows them when the going gets tough, as it inevitably does,
to recognise that they are not going to be named and shamed, and
that they are not going to be held to account for every mistake
that they make. Inevitably, in challenging circumstances, you
may make mistakes and, if you take risks, of course, you are more
likely to make mistakes. Again, this is a question for the National
College in terms of the National Professional Qualification for
Headship. To what extent is that a bland national qualification,
which assumes that in all schools are the same and should it,
or can it, be tailored to recognise that challenging schools need
their leaders to be able to be equipped to take on those challenges
during the preparation stage, just as I think we are arguing that
those people who go in as newly qualified teachers need the extra
support and training that going to those schools demands.
Q185 Paul Holmes: Two areas on schools
then. The first one is picking up on what you have just been saying.
I was really pleased to hear Professor Moon say that not that
many years ago some teachers went into inner city schools. As
they say in the survey, it was a challenge, they were at the cutting
edge, they were making a real difference, but you said that various
structural changes, or changes in policy, will work against that
for various reasons now. We have just heard that a really good
head, as a leader, can make a big difference. Just to take an
example. The Phoenix School in Hammersmith was one of Labour's
first Fresh Start schools in 1997, and William Atkinson, the head
there, is seen as one of these really great leaders. His school
over the last five or six years has got around 11% A-Cs—11%
of the children got five A-Cs—although in this last year
it has gone up to 25%, which is a very good improvement but still
way behind what the Government want. 60% of the kids are on free
school meals, 60% have got special educational needs and 40% have
got difficulty with spoken and written English. The last Ofsted
report said: "The school's problems were largely beyond its
immediate control, staff recruitment and retention in particular".
How far do you think things like naming and shaming, league tables,
professional staff performance pay—which means you are held
responsible for your kids making certain progress, otherwise you
do not get your pay rise—encourage teachers to go into schools
like these, and how far do they discourage teachers?
Professor Moon: It is in one sense
a very important question, but I have to give the balanced answer.
I think the pressure on schools to improve standards across the
board has been a positive thing. In the schools in the most challenging
circumstances what you often require is the most amount of innovation,
and the context in which the schools now operate actually can
constrain innovation rather than open it, so people go for safe
options, they go for trying to nudge forward, to keep it tight
and so on, and I think that is one of the difficulties that we
face with the system at the moment.
Professor Howson: Yes. I was talking
about risk taking a few minutes ago. I think risk taking is clearly
important there. One of the interesting questions that one would
want to ask the Phoenix School is: "Has your staffing settled
down over the last year after a period of very great difficulty,
and was that one of the reasons why your GCSE results have started
to improve?" It is very difficult for secondary schools,
in those sort of circumstances, where its primary schools are
facing an enormous amount of turbulence and, therefore, are unable
to meet the standards that one would expect of primary schools
normally across the country, for those secondary schools then
to pick it up. This is why it takes so long—it is a bit
like a super tanker—to turn it round. If your primary schools
have stable, good, high quality staff, able to produce the basics,
then those children transfer into secondary schools with the sort
of skills that secondary schools can build on. If the primary
schools have got no secondary staff, are operating on a procession
of overseas-trained teachers from the Commonwealth countries,
or itinerant supply teachers who have no commitment to that school,
it is not surprising that the children in those schools (a) do
not see education as a very worthwhile experience, and (b) may
not succeed. If the secondary schools are then trying to adopt
a normal secondary school process, they are trying to impose success
on failure. One of the things that we did in response to the Bullock
Report in the 1970s—Learning for Life—was to
recognise that 50% of our intake, in the school I taught in in
Tottenham, had a reading age which was two and a half years behind
their chronological age, so we abandoned subject teaching. We
went back to classroom teaching to give the children the settled
environment where they could actually continue to develop their
basic skills. If the staffing in the primary schools settles down—and
it has been particularly settled in parts of London—then
that will have a knock-on effect for secondary schools, but it
will take time. I think to expect the secondary schools, in those
circumstances, to work miracles, and then to name and shame them
when they do not, is hugely counter productive.
Q186 Paul Holmes: Yes. You have talked
about the importance of stability of staffing, like these preferred
examples. We hear a lot these days about teaching should not be
seen as a profession for life, which perhaps it used to be. We
have got the Fast Track Teacher Scheme, for example, which the
Government introduced, that emphasises very much, "We will
take these whizz kid new recruits and we will put them in one
school for two years, then we will move them to another school
for two years, then we will move them to another school for two
years, and then they will be fit to be a super head and so forth".
With some of the old "stick in the mud" teachers, like
I was,—who stayed in one school for 10 or 12 years at a
stretch—we were always a bit sceptical about this, about
wanting a fast churn of teachers all the time, who come in and
leave before the problems materialise from what they have done.
Some of the research that Professor Howson has done on schools
getting A* grades on their PANDAs, on their performance assessment,
shows they tend to be the schools where the head has been in post
for over six years rather than be somebody who is here today,
gone tomorrow, onto another fast track job. Is there more of a
case to be made for stability and service of teachers and heads,
and heads of department, rather than this sort of commercial sector
pressure that we have heard about from Kerry Pollard, for example,
where, as an engineer, he would spend two years with one firm,
four years with another and two years with another? Are we undervaluing
the idea of length of service and stability with teachers within
a school?
Professor Moon: I taught in the
same school for ten years when I started, so I would empathise
with what you are saying there. Is it not a mix of the two? I
think this issue about heads in posts is a really significant
one, but I would also apply that in secondary schools to those
who are in the middle management area. It is quite clear that
the same thing applies, particularly in the major departments
in a secondary school, the core curriculum areas. Those people
who come in to fill those posts may well have benefited from the
sort of moving around that you have talked about, and we do not
manage that very well.
Professor Howson: No, I think
it is the balance. Some people may want to spend a long time,
some people may find it, for all sorts of different reasons, worthwhile
moving around to get the degree of experience. If everybody moves
around at one end of the spectrum, then you get so much turbulence
that there is no continuity for the children and I suspect they
start to fail to understand the advantage of having a settled
thing where they can relate to the people who are delivering their
education. If everybody stays put, the risk is that you get no
new ideas and no fresh blood. If somebody comes in, they are treated
like hero innovators and the dragon eats them as if they are St
George, because their ideas do not fit in with the conceptual
norms of the institution and, therefore, they leave. The worst
possible diversion, I think, is an institution where too many
people are there for too long that they become resistant to new
ideas and become antagonistic to anybody who wants to change the
status quo. So it is finding that right sort of balance for the
institution that is most critical.
Q187 Jonathan Shaw: Were you a history
teacher?
Professor Howson: I was a geography
teacher.
Q188 Jonathan Shaw: I thought that,
because I thought St George slew the dragon.
Professor Howson: Not the hero
in the battle.
Q189 Chairman: Just this last one.
We have found this a very valuable evidence session, that it why
it has gone on for much longer than we predicted, and we have
learned a lot. Are there one or two aspects of this you would
be very discontent if, when we wrote this up, we did not include?
Is there anything you think you have missed informing the Committee
and you would like to see it in the report? Professor Moon?
Professor Moon: I mentioned in
my introduction the issue of ethnic minority communities representation
in the teaching force, and the fact that I think through mature
entrants you will get a greater participation. I really think
that is a terribly important point.
Q190 Chairman: Elizabeth?
Mrs Bird: Nothing more to add,
no.
Q191 Chairman: Professor Howson?
Professor Howson: I think I would
want to put two in. One is the whole issue of data and information,
and how it is managed throughout this large and complex situation
that we call the education organisation in England. Secondly,
this nexus between training and employment and the potential risk
that getting that wrong for retention involves, and the wastage
that that involves in terms of public money that has been spent
on producing high quality training for people. I think as a caveat
to that, I would want to say that the training should be funded
on the basis that it is a training course and not a higher education
course which is subject to the sort of pressures that higher education
funding has been subject to over the last few years, because that
has consequences. It would be interesting to compare the cost
of training a teacher with the cost of training a police constable
at Hendon, with the cost of training an army officer at Sandhurst
and, indeed, the cost of somebody going through the Marks &
Spencer's-type training programme, to see whether or not the Treasury
is still regarding teacher training as effectively higher education
at low cost, to get more out of it through economies of scale
and efficiency costs, and whether that is damaging the recognition
of being able to improve the needs of the individuals who go through
the process and who are on their way to becoming more valuable
members of the teaching profession.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that,
Professor Howson. Thank you.
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