Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 418)
MONDAY 7 JULY 2003
MRS HEATHER
DU QUESNAY
CBE, DAME PATRICIA
COLLARBONE DBE, MR
RALPH TABBERER
AND MISS
MARY DOHERTY
Q400 Valerie Davey: You acknowledged
earlier that the teaching profession has people changing their
career, coming in and out of it, I was not sure whether that was
just realism or whether you were accepting that this was beneficial.
Is career change beneficial or is it just a realism, an acceptance
of a situation you are coming to terms with?
Mr Tabberer: I will start answering
that. I think it starts from realism and a realisation of how
people think about career these days. You must excuse us if we
are prepared to make a virtue out of a necessity. There are benefits.
The more we have identified them and take stories from the people
who recruit these career changers we will promote them very actively
because that is the way to encourage other people to follow.
Miss Doherty: If I may add to
that, if you think about the school curriculum and pupils' learning
needs people who come into teaching from a range of different
backgrounds are going to bring that experience and relevance.
It is a virtue in many respects. Years ago people would criticise
the pattern of people going straight from school to university,
to teaching. There is the enrichment now. I know a lady who is
a solicitor and she has gone into primary teaching. Her head teacher
finds her not only an excellent teacher but really helpful in
terms of all of the legal issues the head teacher is addressing.
She is a very focused classroom teacher, she loves her job and
she is delighted she has made the change. She has brought the
richness of her previous experience into the job, and this is
something very important for the pupils well-being and the experience
they have.
Q401 Valerie Davey: You have made
a virtue of that. Can you similarly think through the reality
that people want to work part-time now and job share? Is that
realism or is that a virtue that you can make of it?
Miss Doherty: You can do both
I think.
Mr Tabberer: I think you have
put your finger on an important issue. We have been following
your evidence and your questioning over the last few weeks. The
teaching profession as a whole has an occupational model which
in history has been family-friendly, the opportunity for parents
to synchronise their children's holidays with their own holidays.
I think there is a lot of scope for more part-time and flexible
working within the profession. If you look to the health sector
and ways in which they have been developing their work force in
that area I think we could do a lot to learn from some of their
examples. I think that is an area where we have to be realistic
and recognise these days that people want flexibility in their
working arrangements, but there really is virtue to it as well,
because it can leave you with very good people, a better work/life
balance and access to other skills.
Q402 Valerie Davey: Can I stay with
teaching for a moment, I want to come back to the college in these
areas, again we are employing overseas teachers, is this a dire
cry? Is this an extreme situation or is it again potentially a
virtue and a benefit to our schools and our young people?
Mr Tabberer: In my view it is
unquestionably a benefit. I have to say there are some outstanding
overseas teachers in London who are enriching the curriculum of
the children that are there. Occasionally they know even more
about the communities in London that they are serving, which is
one of the great qualities of being a good teacher. It seems to
me that is a very good quality. We have also been looking within
initial teacher training and routes into the profession for ways
we make these more suitable for people who want part-time options.
We have introduced part-time PGCEs, flexible PGCEs and we are
constantly trying to make sure that our recruitment end of the
game is as strong as we aspire to be.
Q403 Valerie Davey: We have already
heard the international teaching element for training is a very
good plus. I think Dame Patricia Collarbone was saying earlier
that the international training element for head teachers in particular
has given them a new lease of life, a new insight, would you say
these are all elements which for the retention of teachers and
head teachers are potentially valuable so that both the career
change people, the people who are doing flexible working and those
who are either teachers from overseas or who are teaching themselves
overseas, perhaps secondment work, adds to retention?
Mr Tabberer: It adds and it takes
away. It is going to play differently with different people. Some
of the overseas trained teachers will come here for a short period
of time, so that will not help retention in our schools, some
of them come and stay. The benefits to the overall profession
is that we end up more flexible. A modern employer of any size,
particularly a sector of our size, needs flexibility, needs adaptability.
We cannot run a one-size-fits-all model, we must embrace diversities.
We must accept that we have to have flows. We must attend to improving
retention but not do it in such a way as to close down some of
the very features of the system which elsewhere may be working
in our favour.
Q404 Valerie Davey: Can I move on
to ask, how do ensure that your leadership training embraces these
as positives for future head teachers rather than the rather negative
image which some of these factors still have, ie people coming
in at a later stage or people wanting part-time, flexible working
or indeed coming from overseas? We have heard from Ralph Tabberer,
and I believe very strongly they are all positives for a 21st
century profession and yet how do we make sure your training embraces
these and makes it a positive virtue for the schools they then
lead in headship?
Mrs Du Quesnay: We share Ralph
Tabberer's view that many of these are positive. I think one would
have to add that schools want to be seen trying to be as flexible
as possible in terms of the way they employ people. You always
have that kind of limitation that if you are tied into supporting
youngsters through an exam course or a programme leading towards
tests there does need to be a degree of appropriate continuity
there. We have to work all of the time at the sophistication of
the way we timetable and organise lessons. For our major programmes
we do deal at a pretty generic level so that we encourage people
to look very hard at the way they lead and manage staff, the way
they deal with people, the way in which they plan and organise
the curriculum. I suspect we are going to have to be more sharply
focused on some of these issues in the future. One of the major
developments of the last few months is that the Department has
set up a national remodelling team, which Dame Patricia is going
to lead, and that will focus on these kind of issues.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: The
idea for a national remodelling team came out of some of the work
of the Pathfinders schools, where we were looking at school work
force remodelling and that links directly to the Workforce Monitoring
Group and the implementation of the 24 tasks—I take it you
are familiar with that—by 1 September. It is this whole
business about freeing teachers to teach in order to raise standards
and using the workforce in a very flexible way. What we are doing
at the moment is setting up a team that will be working with all
schools and LEAs across the country in assisting, guiding, giving
advice and sharing knowledge on how we might go about this. The
biggest challenge with all of this is breaking down a culture,
it is a culture change. We are using the changing process to help
schools address their own issues and think about how they might
take those issues forward and how they might creatively think.
I fondly call it zero-based thinking, they might take a fresh
look and say, "do we need to go on doing it in that way?"
or "do we need to do those tasks? Could we employ people
differently to do it?", a whole way of rethinking about how
people use resources, financial and human, and thinking about
how they might bring in different flexible working arrangements.
I do not know where all that will go, suffice it to say that people
are very excited about it. We have to think differently for the
sake of the young people, that is the important issue, that is
why we are doing it.
Q405 Valerie Davey: You talk about
culture change, there is going to be a need for huge culture change,
we are going to get to retirement as quickly as we can and go,
is there a potential in linking up some of these things we were
talking about, namely a secondment overseas or part-time teaching
or a change of profession? How is this being thought of at the
stage where you have this fin shaped curve, where you have a large
number of people in their 50s now, are we going to apply some
of these principles to retain them or is that too late or can
the ethos still be changed?
Dame Patricia Collarbone: It can
still be changed. One of the programmes we have is a programme
for consultant leaders and it is really aimed at people who are
experienced in the role they have, particularly head teachers,
and thinking about how we capture their wisdom and use it to train
the profession itself, getting them to have experiences overseas,
getting them to have experiences in different places and using
their expertise to work as consultants, mentors, coaches and trainers
with other school leaders. At the moment we are doing it with
head teachers. We intend to roll it out to advanced skills teachers,
to deputy heads and even to middle level leaders so that we are
building capacity in the profession. What we found with people
coming on the programme, and we have had about 350 through now,
if not more, is it is kind of giving them a new lease of life
and they can make a contribution and it is about their own professional
development at that stage. What we are not trying to do is take
people out of school. We are trying to get them to remain in school
but perhaps take on different roles with people as well. It has
been quite interesting and successful at the moment.
Q406 Chairman: Are you worried about
the lack of success you are having in recruiting ethnic minority
teachers and heads? The figures that we have been given represent
2.4% of the teaching force compared with 9.1% of the working population
of England. If that was police recruitment you would have recriminations
flying round. It is not very good, is it? Why do you think we
are not getting ethnic minority teachers? Why?
Miss Doherty: I think there are
two things there, firstly, recruitment of teachers into the profession.
We have been working very hard to increase the number of teachers
from minority backgrounds into the profession and our target is
9%. Our target was 6% last year, which we achieved. Our target
for 2005—
Q407 Chairman: That is new recruits?
That is how many?
Miss Doherty: 9% of the 35,000
we recruit, we recruited 7.8% last year. We look like we are on
target for the 9% but we need to be relentless in pursuit of making
teaching diverse and responding to minority ethnic groups. I think
your question might be more about the progression of those recruits
through their career and the opportunity for having more ethnic
minority leaders.
Q408 Chairman: Teachers and heads.
However good you say you are in the last two years the fact is
it is 2.3% compared to 9.7% of the population. This is what we
are asking, both in terms of teachers and in terms of leading
roles in schools.
Mrs Du Quesnay: Is it is a huge
concern. It is certainly a huge concern for areas like Lambeth,
where you just do not get people who are visible role models for
young people from the minority ethnic groups. We have run two
or three pilot programmes which we developed with the National
Union of Teachers, called Equal Access to Promotion, where we
have had a couple of hundred people through, and that seems to
have been quite successful for those individuals. There is a poverty
of data about the ethnic background of head teachers. Plans are
well in hand now for the Department to begin to collect that data.
I would think once we have that we need to do training, as the
Teacher Training Agency is doing, and establish some targets for
NPQH recruitment, for example. It is not really defensible to
be where we are.
Q409 Mr Pollard: Recent research
shows that only one third of head teachers believe that their
workload and management of their teacher workload was their responsibility,
do you have a view on that?
Mr Tabberer: I saw that statistic
and was concerned. I think this refers back to some of Valerie's
questions too, there are times when the profession is quite cautious
and conservative and is still in the process of taking on some
of the human resource responsibilities that come with the local
management of schools. That is understandable because there has
been tremendous pressures on schools to learn financial management
and to then take part in a drive to improve standards. I am not
utterly surprised that at the moment not every head does so, a
small proportion of heads take it as their first responsibility.
Unquestionably for me we will not have an industry best practice
human resource model until structurally we do things in order
to make sure that every individual is looked after and institution
by institution people accept and exercise that responsibility.
Q410 Mr Pollard: What are you doing
at the Leadership College to promote this responsibility of head
teachers?
Mrs Du Quesnay: I think this is
the PricewaterhouseCoopers study, which was the research on which
School Workforce Reform Strategy was founded, I think it is an
incredibly powerful piece of data because I think what you learn
from that PricewaterhouseCoopers study is that head teachers who
do see themselves as powerful people, who actively manage the
perceptions of the school and actively manage all of the external
initiatives and pressures that come into the school can make a
huge difference in terms of the way all those connected with the
school perceive their situation. The successful head teacher makes
teachers and other school staff feel at ease with themselves,
they feel powerful, confident that they can make a constructive
and creative contribution, whereas those heads who allow themselves
to be a sort of an open tap through which everything passes through
to their staff create much more a sense of people being overwhelmed,
victimised, harassed by other people's agendas. It is incredibly
important. The message that the college puts across all of time
in all of our activities is that the role of the head teacher
does imply a powerful, leadership role so you are shaping perceptions,
you are controlling the agenda, you are not just letting everything
through and you have a responsibility to create for your school
an individual identity and ethos, a culture within which people
feel at ease in coping with the outside world. We have a lot of
brilliant head teachers that are doing that. Clearly the study
shows that not enough of them are doing it at the moment. We have
reason to be confident that there are enough people who know how
to do it and through consultant leadership and through the sort
of programmes that Dame Patricia Collarbone has talked about,
we can spread that confidence and those abilities through the
profession.
Q411 Mr Pollard: Being anecdotal,
when I was in Birmingham with the Select Committee we visited
one school, King Edward VI School and had coffee with the teachers
and I asked two or three of the young teachers, "what about
this workload and form-filling?" They said, "what are
you talking about, we do not do any". I just wonder whether
the more mature teachers worry about it more than the younger
teachers I do not know whether they did not do it or it was better
managed in that school. Clearly there is something from what you
were saying. Can I move on really quickly and ask about pupil
behaviour, because that is another thing that teachers say repeatedly
puts them off, the worse an area is the more difficult it is to
recruit and retain. Who wants to work in a school when they can
come to my constituency, St Alban's, and have a wonderful time.
All the pupils are excellent, as you well know. What are you doing
about that to prepare our new leaders for this bad behaviour?
How can we get round that?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is about establishing
a positive ethos and a positive climate within the school. There
is a major component in both the National Professional Qualification
and the Head Teachers Induction Programme that deals with behaviour.
Of course there are a lot of other support strategies coming through
from the Department direct, like the behaviour improvement programmes.
Dame Patricia Collarbone: We are
linking in with what the Department are doing in terms of behaviour
improvement strategies that they have and all of those things
get written into the programmes. What I should say about the programmes
is sometimes it causes us a lot of work and angst but is so worthwhile
doing it because they are dynamic by nature, so we continually
review and update the material. If there are things coming on
line, new pieces of research, new evidence from schools we include
those kind of things within the programme so that people have
access to very up-to-date material. All of those current initiatives
that are moving in terms of behaviour management are written in
to the material.
Q412 Chairman: Can we come back to
you Heather Du Quesnay and Dame Patricia on the comment you made
about the attitude of head teachers. "Research on teacher
workload by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that only one third
of head teachers believed the workload of their staff was their
responsibility and actively managed it". Is that a bit of
a condemnation of your operation? Here you are, the National College
for School Leadership you said at the beginning of this hearing
when I said, "what is the difference between leadership and
management?" you said, "that is a bit of an old chestnut"
as if it was an inappropriate question to ask. I still do not
know the difference between what you teach as leadership and what
I define, something I am very interested in, as management. This
is an appalling situation that two thirds of those heads did not
think their staff workload was part of their responsibility. Someone
is deeply deficient in terms of understanding what their role
is as a school manager, whether that is leadership or management,
but whatever it is it is not good, is it?
Mrs Du Quesnay: It is not good
enough, we are not pretending so. We should bear in mind that
in terms of the college's responsibility this research was conducted
in the autumn of 2001, so the college was barely operating by
then, we only started in 2000 and we started from nothing. Yes,
of course, it is a condemnation but it is a situation that has
been brought about I think by a decade or more of policy initiatives
which have really forced heads or allowed heads in some cases
to fall into a kind of compliance mode so that too many of them
have seen their role as fulfilling other people's requirements
and following instructions and some of them find it difficult
to say no and find it difficult to shape the agenda for themselves.
This kind of research finding bears that out. We know that is
an issue, we know that is a significant issue and we need far
more heads who feel confident, as I say, about shaping their own
agenda, forming their own priorities and recognising what the
national policy thrust is about but seeing how to exploit that
for the particular school they are in and the particular children
they are responsible for, they create something that is individual
and special to that particular school and to which the teachers
and the other staff can sign up. That is what the college's mission
is about. I do not know what the findings would be now, I suspect
it would be a lot better than that. I do not claim that we have
cracked the problem there. We have a massive culture change to
bring about in the profession which will probably take 5 or 10
years fully to achieve.
Q413 Chairman: When you teach these
heads these qualities of leadership if not management—
Mrs Du Quesnay: Both!
Q414 Chairman:—would retention
be part of that? In most organisations I know a sign of a good
manager as opposed to a poor manager could often be that there
is not a high turnover of staff in very similar schools. I am
not comparing a school in challenging circumstances with one as
Kerry described as the idyllic place he represents in the leafy
suburbs, what I am getting at is we know that a good manager enthuses,
motivates and retains staff, whereas a poor manager does not.
Is that something that you are teaching at your college?
Mrs Du Quesnay: We are encouraging
heads more and more to collect data on that kind of thing, so
it is not just a matter of impression, because you can fool yourself
with impression. If they do the Leadership Programme for Serving
Head Teachers they have good 360 degree appraisal data, which
is rigorous and tough about their impact, so that they collect
data on staff absence, staff retention rates, all of those things,
which are really relevant to judging how successful you are being
in creating a healthy, thriving school.
Q415 Chairman: You are the four most
impressive people in the whole of the education sector and it
is a pleasure to have you in front of the Committee but you are
not really what I would call managers, you very much come from
an education background. If I was really rude, a bit of in-breeding
amongst you. That is not meant to be an insult at all. I come
back to the original comment, should there not be more management
expertise in both your organisations? I may have a worry about
cooperation with the private sector, I think there are some private
sector recruitment management experts in your organisations, do
you find that a deficiency?
Mrs Du Quesnay: Something like
40% of our staff come from the private sector. Our corporate services
people who manage lots of contracts for us and money, and on so
forth, they are all private sector people. I resent terribly the
suggestion that people who work in education are not managers.
I managed to the very best of my ability very challenging situations.
Q416 Chairman: I am talking about
people that you would find in the leading management schools in
our country, would they be trained as managers, who have a lot
of experience in management and also trained to teach managers?
I am just wondering how many you have in your organisation? Here
we have a dire situation, a lot of heads do not realise they are
supposed to be managers, managing retention, managing workload
and I am worried that perhaps we are creating government-type
quangos that are not really very knowledgeable about management?
Mrs Du Quesnay: I do not think
we have anybody working for the college who has experience of
a business school, not working for us full-time as employees.
We use the business sector and business school experience all
of the time. We have a termly meeting with key leading edge thinkers
from business schools so they can update us on what is going on.
We regularly meet with people from international leadership centres
from across the world. We commission a lot of work from leadership
experts, whether they are in higher education institutions or
in business schools and we will do more of that. We are really
trying to pull together the expertise and the experience of people
managing in all sorts of sectors. We have a number of business
people, four significant business people, on our governing council.
Pulling that together with the best of what is available in education
and you create something that is special but also has currency
and relevance and would be recognised as being of value by managers
in any part of the economy.
Q417 Chairman: I was in no way trying
to undermine or challenge the professional quality of your organisation,
what I was saying is the Government seems to be sponsoring at
the moment—we as a Select Committee know what management
education is about, we know what MBAs are like and we know where
you can go and get a good MBA—and manufacturing centres
for leadership and it is not altogether clear to many of the people
I represent and to the people who those round this table represent
what the difference is between these leadership courses and good
management? This is what I was trying to tease out.
Mrs Du Quesnay: I do not know
whether I am digging a hole here or am I doing all right, I am
not sure! I think you are asking two different questions, one
is about the extent to which the college and other educational
organisations can draw on generic expertise and knowledge about
leadership and management in other sectors. I am saying vigorously
I hope that is what we are trying to do. I think that the dichotomy
between leadership and management—forgive me Ofsted—is
to some extent a false one, you cannot lead successfully if you
cannot put in place the processes and the structures and the systems
that will carry your vision into reality, nor is management going
to serve very well if the focus of management is on operational
processes that will tend to be more about maintenance when we
live in an age of such dramatic change and when the needs of our
children are crying out for us to do something more imaginative
and more bold and more radical than we have managed to date. It
is really important for us as a college to try and bring those
two things together and give them appropriate emphasis in the
appropriate context. If you go into a school in challenging circumstances
where the kids are climbing the walls you are probably not going
to do big, visionary things, you are going to focus all of your
energy on getting those children behaving properly, sitting down
and getting some basic learning systems in place. On the other
hand there are schools in places like St Albans, but certainly
not St Albans, where there is a degree of complacency and where
they want a bomb put under them. That is precisely what good leaders
should be able to do, to match the style and the approach and
the strategy they take to the particular circumstances and context,
and that requires an appropriate mix of leadership and management.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Q418 Mr Pollard: Sometimes people's
aspirations do not match their ability, do you get much of that
in your leadership schools? I do not mean from the trainers, I
mean from the trainees. How does the weeding-out take place? How
do you establish that somebody will never make a leader?
Mrs Du Quesnay: We just had the
biggest recruitment round for the National Professional Qualification
ever, we recruit twice a year and the weeding-out process resulted
in about 8% of people being found not to have the appropriate
experience and qualities to go forward with NPQH at this stage.
There will be a few more who will drop out as they go through,
perhaps 5% will drop out in the course of the programme. I think
we want to get smarter at doing those things all of the time.
One of the pieces of research that the college is currently doing
is to look at the whole business of career management and succession
planning, which in many businesses and industries is developed
in a very sophisticated way, that is certainly what we understand
our Chair does at Unilever. In education it has been pretty neglected,
partly because I do not think anybody is sure whose responsibility
it should be. Many schools are too small to do it effectively.
LEAs are not sure of their role and their powers in some respects
and you cannot do it at a national level. We want to look at some
of those issues and see if we can do a better job at helping people
to know themselves better, it is much better for you to make your
own judgments about what your capabilities are rather than have
to be found out by somebody else. We certainly do not want to
waste our resources on people who are just not going to make the
grade as head teachers or as any other kind of leader.
Chairman: Thank you all for your evidence.
I often say it is a cruel and unusual punishment to be in front
of these Committees for more than two hours. Thank you very much
for your cooperation. On your way home if you think there is something
that the Committee did not ask you which you would like to have
been asked and would like to tell us then please do communicate
with the Clerk. Thank you.
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