Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 552)
WEDNESDAY 9 JULY 2003
MR DAVID
MILIBAND MP
Q540 Chairman: Are these new recruits
going into primary or secondary?
Mr Miliband: I do not have those
figures, I am afraid. I can try to find out for you.[4]
Q541 Chairman: This is impressionistic,
but when I was at school I would see quite a significant percentage
of people from ethnic minorities as school support workers in
different ways. If we, certainly in primary, use that as a channel
of recruitment and advancement into full teaching status, that
might be a valuable way of supplementing the effort.
Mr Miliband: Remember,
this is an area where one has to tread carefully. I think one
of the significant things that the Committee has done, and which
the Policy Committee is recognising, is that it is dangerous—"dangerous"
is the wrong word—it is wrong to look at ethnic minority
achievement as if it is homogenous. You have got many different
ethnic minorities and their achievement is widely variant, so
even in this area one has to have a sense of the subtlety and
the nuance of what we are talking about. From memory, children
from the Chinese community are higher achievers than any other
ethnic group, white or black, in the country as a whole, so I
want to introduce that notion of recognising the diversity within
what we as a white group can easily say are the ethnic minority
community. There is more to it than that, I would say.
Q542 Jonathan Shaw: You have said
during evidence this morning, and I am sure you will say it again
and many of the Committee will agree, that head teachers are absolutely
key to the performance of a school. In the performance and assessment
comparison details which the Committee have been given, if we
look at a higher-performing school, a PANDA A, you will see the
head teacher staying longer. Where you have the performance and
assessment of a school which is an E, you will find the head teacher
not staying so long, on average. This is worrying, is it not,
in terms of the correlation between head teachers staying and
the performance of schools?
Mr Miliband: I always talk about
school leadership as being not just the sort of John Harvey Jones
figure that comes in at the top and turns things upside down.
The head teacher is obviously critical, but anyone will tell you
it is the senior management, the senior leadership team that is
critical. Any head will tell you that it is the deputies in a
secondary school, the 12-15 people, and in a primary school, the
two or three people, and in a big primary school it might be five
or six, a very big one, so the first point is that it is not just
the head, but it is the senior team. Secondly, it is one of those
chicken and egg things, is it not? Is it the length of service
that is creating a good school or the good school that is supporting
the length of service? I saw research, and this must have been
in the mid to late 1990s, which said that head teachers were at
their peak, that the height of their effectiveness was between
five and eight years. Now, having said that, there are head teachers
who are in a school for 20 years and who are fantastic, but I
think that maybe was some management literature.
Q543 Jonathan Shaw: But we have a
situation where we have the greatest number of schools with teachers
staying less than three years in the E category in terms of their
PANDA reports, so that is very worrying, is it not?
Mr Miliband: It is.
Q544 Jonathan Shaw: Especially from
what you have just said about it being a report that stayed in
your mind from the 1990s.
Mr Miliband: It is worrying. I
will look into that. Are you saying that there is a burn-out rate
in the tougher schools? Is that what the evidence shows?
Q545 Chairman: Churn rather than
burn.
Mr Miliband: Is that by this or
are they being moved on?
Q546 Jonathan Shaw: Well, I will
have to write to you about that.
Mr Miliband: I look forward to
receiving your letter.
Q547 Chairman: It does bring us down
to the fact that we are constantly coming back to the point that
it is the most difficult schools in challenging circumstances
where you are going to find a higher turnover of heads and of
staff, and it is the right measures to guarantee to those schools
in the most challenging circumstances that the students get a
decent education, and that does mean holding and retaining staff
over a period of time. All of us who visit schools and see only
two permanent members of staff where all the rest are either on
short contracts, or they are overseas teachers or supply teachers,
that is a very worrying situation which is not unfamiliar in schools
in challenging circumstances in rather challenging areas.
Mr Miliband: I agree with that.
Q548 Chairman: The policies have
to add up.
Mr Miliband: They have to make
the most difference where it matters most and that is a reflection
of the challenge of the pupils and the challenges that they bring
into the school as well as the challenges of an area whether it
be high costs or anything else. I think that I have got to avoid
being bewitched by the great schools I go to in the toughest areas
which are going from 9% five A-Cs at GCSE to 59%, which is the
school where I was a classroom assistant for the morning, or two
or three, last month. Equally, though, I have got to fight against
the impression that is always easy to get abroad that you cannot
find a good school in a tough area, which is not true either.
We have to get the right balance and we have to give proper respect
and recognition not as a sort of charitable pat on the head, but
as a genuine recognition of the outstanding achievement by any
standard, raw, value added or anything else, in some of those
schools that are doing it. I do not think it is just that they
are extraordinary people and it is a unique thing and it cannot
be done anywhere else. I think it is about sustained, disciplined
engagement with the issues in that school and a real confidence
that schools are institutions that can fight against social and
economic disadvantage in an incredibly powerful way
Q549 Chairman: That is why we, as
a Committee, keep bringing you, as a Minister and Department,
back to evidence-based policy. What works? What has shown to work?
The Government has been in power running the education service
for over six years now and what we want to see is whether there
is evidence from Excellence in Cities investment that some schools
in those areas or particular schools do better in terms of recruitment
and retention. Where are the successes? If there have been government
initiatives, which are the ones that seem to have added value
and can be rolled out? That is our consistent message here. Is
there evidence of something working and is it picked up quickly
enough after evaluation and moved across so that it can help those
schools?
Mr Miliband: As I said to you
on my first appearance here, that is a very, very useful prompt
and pressure for us. The only thing I would say to you is that
I have to think about the evidence on those schools where it is
not the only measure, but it is a good indicator of below 20%
or below 30% five A-Cs, but I have also to think about those schools
that are not chaotic or falling apart, but where 35, 40 or 45%
of kids are getting five good A-Cs, but 40, 50, 60% of kids are
not. We must not create a cliffhanger which says that as long
as you are above 30%, you are fine because in those schools, there
are an awful lot of 7 out of 10 or 6 out of 10 or 5 out of 10
kids who are coming out of those schools without what many of
us would consider to be the basic passport into adult life. We
have got to look at shifting the whole system along. That is the
significance of the Key Stage 3, the determination to translate
the step change in performance in primary into a step change at
Key Stage 3 as well, and that will be the test and I will be interested
to see how that goes this year. We have now had the first full
year of the Key Stage 3 programme and teachers like it, so let's
see how much difference it makes.
Chairman: That is encouraging, Minister.
Can I just pick you up on one thing you said in passing about
the falling rolls in primary schools. You will know well these
figures, that in primary schools the pupil:teacher ratio is far
less generous than in secondary schools. As 50,000 less pupils
are coming in, I think you said, year on year—
Mr Pollard: Except in St Albans.
Q550 Chairman: Except in Kerry's
patch! Is that an opportunity because the figures I have got of
the pupil:teacher ratio are 22.6:1 in primary schools, 16.4:1
in secondary schools, so is there an opportunity at the time of
falling rolls in primary to get a much better balance between
pupils and teachers?
Mr Miliband: Well, I think I would
say two things about that. One is that I am not sure if those
figures include sixth-form pupils. Do they?
Q551 Chairman: They do.
Mr Miliband: Let's be careful
with statistics. I think if you took out the sixth-forms, you
may not see quite such a difference. However, even if it is 22.6
in both, it does not negate the point that falling pupil numbers
are an opportunity to assess how you spend your resource and obviously
if you lose two or three pupils from a roll, it is no question
of getting rid of the teacher because you have still got 28 kids
in the class, and that is why it is a tricky thing. About 80%
of the money is pupil based, pupil number based, lagged by a year
and a half to give time for planning, but 20% of it is not. What
I would say to you in answer to your question as to whether changing
pupil numbers offer you an opportunity to think about the deployment
of your resource is yes, but I would say to you that we should
be thinking about the deployment of our resource anyway. How can
we best use the whole resource, not just the marginal pound? We
have got to get out of the mentality that says that it is only
the marginal pound that is there to be spent. It is the whole
budget that is there to be spent and I think that is a really,
really big challenge. Talk about building capacity, talk about
the role of the national college of schooling, you should talk
about my role. It is about saying how do you use your whole resource
to maximum effect, and if you can help us with that, then we will
really be doing a service to the whole system.
Q552 Chairman: Is there anything
you have achieved in your activity in this area which you wanted
the Committee to know about that we have not asked you?
Mr Miliband: No, I feel I have
had a pretty full canter across the agenda, thank you very much.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your
attendance.
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