Examination of Witnesses (Questions 427
- 439)
WEDNESDAY 12 NOVEMBER 2003
MRS MAUREEN
LAYCOCK, MR
BRIAN JONES
AND MR
MIKE WOOD
Q427 Chairman: Can I welcome Brian
Jones, Mike Wood and Mo Laycock to our deliberations and say that
the Committee, as ever, is very grateful when busy people give
of their time to help the Committee with an inquiry, so thanks
indeed for agreeing to come this morning and help us really to
increase our knowledge about the admissions process. We have been
looking at secondary education for some months now—this
is the final phase of an inquiry—and we are I suppose halfway
through this final phase, so we are just about beginning to ask
the right questions—or we think we are—but as you
are all heads of schools perhaps you will give us an evaluation
of our performance after you have heard us! Just to break the
ice, can I ask if Mo Laycock could just give us a little background
of your school and your experiences briefly? We do know it in
a sense because you are were highly recommended by one of our
members, Paul Holmes—
Mrs Laycock: A former pupil—when
it was a grammar school, I hasten to add!
Q428 Chairman: He did not tell us
that! He is unfortunately unable to be here because his wife is
in hospital, so we have his apologies.
Mrs Laycock: My school is Firth
Park Community Arts College in Sheffield; I have been the head
teacher there since 1995 when the school was in a serious Ofsted
categorisation. It is in Sheffield Brightside and my local MP
is David Blunkett. At the point I went there it was split site,
falling rolls, low expectations, poor community reputation; it
has currently 47% of students on the special needs register for
learning and/or emotional behavioural problems, 43% free school
meals, 25% black ethnic minority students, and a large proportion
of those are refugees and asylum seekers. Its attendance at that
time was 77%. We are now a one site school and full, with waiting
lists and appeals; our results have gone up from 8% in 1995 to
28% this year and we reckon we will get 32% next year; we are
a specialist school in performing arts which has been a significant
area of development for the school, and we are the extended school
for Sheffield. We continue to serve an area of considerable socio
economic deprivation, and low expectations of parents. I think
of our 1,365 students only four parents have gone on to university,
so the issue about raising standards and the issue that is linked
in with admissions and getting students to believe in the value
of education themselves is something we work very hard on, because
we cannot assume that parents are going to give education great
value. In my first few years there in relation to admissions we
had a spare places because the school was not popular, and I do
not know how aware you are of Sheffield but it has huge socio
economic divides. I live in Hallam which is the most advantaged
apparently political ward in Europe and Brightside is the sixth
most disadvantaged in the country, so in relation to the admissions
issue I was instructed on very many occasions to take some of
the most turbulent, difficult children in the authority whilst
trying to improve the school whilst having HMI crawling all over
us and that was hugely challenging. I am not in that situation
now but it still features in other schools so I feel very strongly
about the whole admissions issue.
Mr Wood: I am head of the Cornwallis
School in Maidstone; it is a specialist technology college. It
is a Kent high school and the Kent selective system means we are
what in old parlance would have been a secondary modern. Since
1989 we had 2% 5 As—Cs; we have moved up to 67%. I think
the move from 2 to about 45% was very much on the same intake—in
other words, the school had massive under achievement. We had
gone GM to get independence from the local authority to try to
push up standards because we felt that the local attitude, not
the politicians but the local people, did not believe you could
get a good education in a non selective school. We were about
800 strong at the beginning of the 1990s; now we are 1650. We
had no sixth form until 1992. The sixth form now numbers just
over 300. We do not have nearly as many free school meals, for
instance, as my colleague here—it is about 7% now. Special
needs is about 20%; at the beginning of the 90s it might have
been just over 30%, so there has been a change in the intake,
as I suggested earlier. About 55 youngsters have statements and
we have improved things I think by simply believing in the youngsters
and by trying to raise their self-esteem, by getting parental
support, by lowering class sizes, by putting a lot of individual
help in and a whole series of methods over a long period of years.
Mr Jones: I was the head of Archbishop
Tenison's until I retired on 31 August of this year. I had been
there since 1992. Archbishop Tenison's now is a very different
school from the one I inherited. When I went there in 1992 they
did not have special measures—it was a school of risk, that
was the parlance of that time. Staff morale was pretty low; truancy
was rife, as was vandalism in the school; expectations from the
staff and the children were very low and there was little or no
support coming from the Local Education Authority. We quickly
realised at that time—when I say "we" I am talking
about my governors and myself—that something fairly radical
had to be done if we were to raise standards, and we decided with
the parents that the best solution was to break away from Lambeth
and become grant-maintained. That gave us the freedom as well
as the enhanced resources to begin that very long journey of turning
the school around. In 1996 1% of our youngsters got 5 and more
A—Cs; in the last year I have figures for 56.2% got 5 or
more A—Cs, and I think by anybody's reckoning that is a
fair improvement. If one takes into account the ability of the
cohort on arrival at the school, only about 16% of those youngsters
could be regarded as above average, so we went from 16% which
is what could have been predicted at the start of the secondary
school, to 56.2%. We are in the London borough of Lambeth; about
a third of our children come from Southwark, two thirds from Lambeth,
and we get a small number of children from the other surrounding
boroughs—Westminster, Wandsworth and Lewisham—but
not too many. Eighty per cent of our children are black: 40% of
the total being of Caribbean origin and 40% of the total being
of African origin. You will see from the paper that I prepared,
Chairman, that I have given you a detailed breakdown of the ethnic
results as far as that is concerned, and I think we are hoping
that we can as a school dispel the myths that London schools cannot
cope with black children and produce good results when 75% of
our Caribbean boys get 5 or more A—Cs and 57% of our African
boys do. I think I will leave it there.
Q429 Chairman: It speaks volumes.
What you seem to be saying is that you can get a decent education
in London in the state sector. This is about admissions policy
so can I ask Mo Laycock, firstly, with the success you have had
in driving up your achievements in your school, how far as you
became a specialist college for the performing arts, did you use
this 10% choice not on ability but on aptitude? Did you use it
at all in order to change who you were getting into the school?
Mrs Laycock: No, we did not, and
we will not. Indeed, Sheffield is quite an interesting city in
relation to the fact that, with the exception of the two church
Catholic schools, we are a city of 27 secondary schools that are
comprehensive and we have very good collegial relationships with
one another and with the Local Education Authority. So no, no
Sheffield school selects apart from the two schools that are church
schools who have their own admissions arrangements, so I feel
strongly that I never would select. If parents opt for our school
and put in a preference for our school because they have a child
that is particularly good at the arts then they have to join in
the normal arrangements for trying to get them a place at the
school. The way that we have driven up standards is to work very
hard with the community, with the primary schools, with the students
to get them to believe in themselves, their own self esteem and
self confidence. The arts have driven things up but no, we have
not selected.
Q430 Chairman: As you have improved
your school and as its reputation has improved in the community
as a successful school, has a neighbouring school gone on the
slide?
Mrs Laycock: In my area of Sheffield—and
our area of Sheffield is where the Full Monty was filmed
and where the Sheffield steel workers once lived—there are
three other secondary schools and I think I put in my paper that
two of those were in special measures a few years ago and have
been fresh-started—Firth Vale and Parkwood—Hind House
was in special measures so we were all appointed as head teachers
at a similar time, so on a good day we think our schools are excellent
and on a bad day we are as bad as one another. But the Local Education
Authority is very good. The director of education there has very
much a city wide approach to improvement and to support, but clearly
schools like mine and my three other neighbouring schools have
attained every strategy that is within the Government. I am part
of an EAZ, EIC and all aspects of EIC are in my school; New Opportunities
Fund, Objective 1, MTAG, MTAG EIC—in fact, when I met David
Miliband he thought I had things in my school even he had not
heard of! So it is about joining all of those up into a big picture
and making sure you use those resources as well as you can to
improve the school.
Q431 Chairman: So in a sense you
are saying no, the other schools around you did not go on the
slide.
Mrs Laycock: No, we have all improved
hugely.
Q432 Chairman: Have you become less
of a local community school? In terms of where your pupils come
from, as your achievements went up, do you now find people travelling
further away in order to come to your school rather than going
to their local schools?
Mrs Laycock: No, because when
I went to the school less than 50% of the local children were
coming to the school. There was no belief in the school; they
were travelling the city. We now have 94% of them back. We do
have some spillage into the south west of the city where six schools
do still have sixth forms and with that comes a whole other number
of issues in terms of parental perceptions and their place in
the league table.
Mr Wood: We use a 10% aptitude
test, a standardised NFER test.
Q433 Chairman: What sort of specialism
are you?
Mr Wood: Technology. I would happily
drop the test tomorrow and have discussed dropping it with the
local authority because we feel in a selective area it does not
really make any difference. In other words, we simply are not
bringing in children through that test. Whichever test you use
it tends to correlate quite closely with tests for ability, so
all it is doing is identifying who is going to be in the top 25%
who go to grammar school anyway, so we feel it is having little
or no effect. Where it has been used is over the years, as we
became popular and people could not get in except within a designated
area, as it were, then people from further distance used the test
as a possible means of entering if they were particularly interested
in coming to a specialist school. As far as the improvement in
results goes, I made the point earlier I think that the year we
had 2% we took in the brothers and sisters of those who got 2%
and from those we achieved 45%. Beyond that point, the 45 to the
67/68 we have had in the last two years, I think there is some
influence in terms of a changing intake.
Q434 Chairman: But did you introduce
the 40/40/20 at that time? Was that your school or another?
Mr Wood: No.
Mr Jones: That was mine.
Q435 Chairman: So, Mr Wood, you do
not do anything like that?
Mr Wood: No. I am not quite sure
what it is!
Q436 Chairman: But you do the 10%.
You cannot tell the difference between ability and aptitude?
Mr Wood: I think it is extremely
difficult. It is very difficult to find anyone who will say they
can give you a cast iron test which will demonstrate an aptitude
for technology. We have tried to keep away from any test which
required verbal ability—in other words, we tried to move
towards non verbal tests. Earlier in the whole exercise we used
a different approach which was far more based on an individual
interview; then we were advised that that was not terribly objective.
We felt that produced a more interesting spread of children, and
we used to show them a video and get them to look at the problems
of the elderly in terms of, say, opening tins and then show them
a tin opener and say, "Tell us how you would re-design that",
and you got some very interesting responses from 10-year-olds,
and then we were told, "Well, no, you must not do that; you
must go to an objective test, because otherwise there might be
some serious questions", and we feel now what we are simply
measuring, one way and another, is intelligence.
Q437 Chairman: So you do not interview
now?
Mr Wood: No.
Mrs Laycock: I do not interview
at all.
Q438 Chairman: Now, Mr Jones, you
are the 40/40/20 school?
Mr Jones: That is right, we re-introduced
banding into the school. You remember that the ILEA used to select
for secondary schools on the basis of banding and when the ILEA
disappeared in a lot of London boroughs, including Lambeth, the
banding went out of the window with the result that our school
very quickly became heavily skewed towards the lower ability end,
and it was comprehensive in name only. It really was a secondary
modern school, if I can put it crudely. After a lot of deliberation
we decided that the best thing to do, in order to try and achieve
a balanced intake, was to move towards a banding system. We had
to get the permission of the then Secretary of State, Gillian
Shephard, and that was not easy to get but eventually we got it,
and what we do now is pre test the youngsters with a standard
NFER test, a CAT test, which tests verbal, non verbal and numeracy,
and at the end of the day we get a standard assessment score which
enables us to place the children in one of three bands, Band 1
being above average, 2 average, and Band 3 being below average.
If we are, and we have been every year, over-subscribed in each
of these then as a church school various church qualifications
come in, and those children who attend church regularly get priority
over other children.
Q439 Chairman: How do you know that?
Mr Jones: If they wish to get
priority because they are bona fide worshippers we ask them to
submit a form from their clergyman, their minister or their pastor
commenting on their attendance and whether, in fact, they would
benefit from an education in an Anglican school.
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