Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460
- 479)
WEDNESDAY 12 NOVEMBER 2003
MRS MAUREEN
LAYCOCK, MR
BRIAN JONES
AND MR
MIKE WOOD
Q460 Mr Chaytor: But how can it not
be? If I live in the catchment area of the London Oratory my child
cannot go to the London Oratory because I am not Catholic, so
surely it is the school choosing and not the parent?
Mr Jones: Faith schools are slightly
different. As an Anglican school we obviously give priority to
Anglican children.
Q461 Mr Chaytor: So that is a denial
of parental choice to all parents?
Mr Jones: Well, no. If parents
want to get a place in an Anglican school then the solution is
there for them when they start going to a Church of England church.
Q462 Mr Chaytor: But let us pursue
this. How do you explain the fact that there are more children
in Anglican schools between Monday and Friday than there are children
in Anglican churches on Sunday?
Mr Jones: Simply because not all
of the children that we have in my school are Anglicans but Anglicans
do, in fact, get top priority and then the next tier down are
bona fide worshippers of other Christian denominations.
Q463 Mr Chaytor: But it is still
a denial of parental choice; that is what I am trying to tease
out. Do we have a system of parental choice? Are you arguing for
that?
Mr Jones: What I am arguing for
is obviously that parents have got to have a right to express
a preference. We have 92 places every year; we get 3-400 people
applying; there are going to be parents disappointed. The only
way round that would perhaps be to enlarge the school, which is
physically impossible.
Q464 Mr Chaytor: But is there a case—and
presumably you think there is but I am interested in finding out
what the case is—for the individual school deciding on the
oversubscription criteria, rather than the Local Education Authority
doing it by lottery, for instance?
Mr Jones: If I can stick with
the church sector because that is the sector I know most about,
each church school will have its own different ethos and in order
to maintain that ethos I think you have to have parents and youngsters
committed to supporting that ethos, and it is only right and proper
that that is reflected in the admissions policy.
Q465 Mr Chaytor: But the difficulty
is that with church schools overall, and I am not referring to
yours, part of the ethos is that there are fewer members of children
on free school meals and fewer children with statements. Is this
coincidence or is this part of the ethos of Anglican and Catholic
schools?
Mr Jones: I really would not want
to speak for the Anglican church and I certainly would not want
to speak for the Roman Catholics but, as far as my own school
is concerned, we do get a very broad spread across the socio economic
groups. If you were to push me I would say that perhaps we are
not truly representative in ethnic terms of the local population
because far more black children in south east London go to church
than white children, so they obviously get priority and this is
obviously reflected in the ethnic profile of the school.
Q466 Mr Chaytor: Moving on to the
issue that each of you have raised in your opening presentation,
the impact of league tables, do you think that league tables as
currently constituted are primarily a measure of school achievements
or a measure of school intake?
Mrs Laycock: I believe that school
league tables in general tell you where a child lives, and it
is catchment of the school. I do not believe that school league
tables tell you very much about teaching and learning in that
school. My eldest son who has just completed a politics degree
and is working in London went to the school in Sheffield at the
top of the league table and left with nine A* and As and five
As in his "A" level but he would say the only people
in that school that knew him and really engaged with him were
the PE Department because he was also good at sport but he was
with a hugely critical group.[1]
Those children I knew from being tiny and they all know they would
go to university and all knew they would be successful. I believe
testing and accountability is very important and I want to continue
with that, but I think the league table is destructive and a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Adding value and looking at how children progress on
entry to that school is the way forward. If I can cite some examples
of refugees and asylum seekers in my school who come in years
seven and eight with no English at all and achieve, as they did
last year, many of them A* to C but some a whole range of Ds and
Es, that is incredible added value but it does not show up in
the league table to my school. They have done that in three or
four years whereas everybody else did it in 11 years.
Mr Wood: I do not think there
is any simple answer to this question. I fully respect what you
have just been told about the influence of the league tables.
On the other hand, if I go back to 1989 and see that 2% of the
children at my school were identified in the lists in the local
newspapers as getting five As—Cs, I find myself turning
to staff and saying, "We cannot any longer use the excuse
of selection". Even if we do use it and say that 25% of the
local population have been selected we are getting appallingly
poor results for people in the top 30% of the ability range if
you follow my argument, and 5% would be with us and we are simply
failing them, so that numerical evidence, whether published in
league tables or not I question, has been extremely useful to
us. However, when it did not suit my purposes several years ago,
when in fact it seemed to me that the numbers were suggesting
that we would not do quite as well as I thought we should, I am
afraid I binned the numbers and said, "We are going to do
better" and we did, because some of it is motivation of teachers
and motivation of students. This is an extraordinarily difficult
area and simple answers are probably wrong answers. Now, if one
attempted to get rid of the league tables or did what some are
suggesting and have area league tables, parents would find ways
of putting schools into the hierarchical classification which
you described earlier, which is very usual in different areas.
There are almost three layers of schools.
Q467 Mr Chaytor: But would you say
that had there been a value-added league table it would have been
of equal value to your purpose in driving up standards in school,
or was it the accident of a raw scores league table that enabled
you to make the progress you have?
Mr Wood: I feel there is far greater
validity to value added league tables and had they been there
from the beginning—and I appreciate they could not have
been; we just did not understand how to do that ten years ago—they
would have been very useful and as they are slowly being introduced
I am very interested in their usefulness. What is slightly worrying
me is that there are already arguments about whether one value
added table is better than someone else's, and that is getting
rather silly.
Q468 Mr Chaytor: On the question
of the catchment area, you have each touched on the issue of parents
moving their children across conurbations and large distances.
Do you think there is a positive value in doing that or is there
a positive value in having children able to go to their nearest
school? What should be the objective of policy? Should it maximise
choice to the extent that it encourages people to travel large
distances, or should it encourage parents to have confidence in
their local school?
Mrs Laycock: Children should go
to their local comprehensive school, and that is where they should
go. If all the kids in my community came to us then they would
be welcome but it would still not give me the normal distribution
curve. I then think the Government has to look at how the schools
are funded and recognise that we are not on an even playing field,
so where there is a skewed ability downwards or whether there
are socio economic circumstances, whether they use free school
meals which is a rather blunt tool or whatever, there has to be
some differentiation after that. I do not believe it is good for
students to go to schools outside of their local community and,
indeed, it can be quite damaging sometimes. We have had kids who
have come back to us who have got in at the other end of the city
and culturally they have not coped very well. There are differences
in expectations and in values. Mine is an area which is virtually
all council house, and if our students are moving to the other
end of the city where the values are different they do not sometimes
even fit in and they come back—either by their own choice
or sometimes because they have been kicked out.
Mr Wood: My answer is a rather
cynical one. Over the years we have worked with various schools
on the continent and at a particular school in Germany the head
I was visiting said, "What do you mean travel to school?
Everyone walks or use their bicycle. It is a local school. Is
that not the way everywhere?" I believe there is an obsession
in England that if you tell everyone to go to their local school,
which used to be the case really until the law changed in the
80s, then a proportion of the population begins to be obsessed
by the fact that the grass is greener on the other side, and I
genuinely do not know how to overcome that. I see that as an ideal
solution; it clearly works in Germany, but I no longer believe
that would be tolerated by the local populations in England.
Mr Jones: I am looking at it from
an inner city perspective where you have a huge choice of schools,
and I do wonder sometimes, when people ask me what my community
is, what that community is. We are the only boys church school
in the fairly wide catchment area, boys are going to drive past
other secondary schools to come to mine, and I think that will
probably always be the case as far as the church sector is concerned.
Q469 Helen Jones: All three of you
have taken over schools that were in difficult circumstances and
what interests us as a Committee is you have tackled that problem
in very different ways, so I want to try and tease out something
about your admissions process, if I may. I would be right in saying,
would I, that you, Mr Jones and Mr Wood, represent schools where
the intake has changed fairly substantially since you took over?
Mr Jones: I do not know if I would
use the word "substantially" but there has been a considerable
change in the intake and we are moving towards a more balanced
academic intake. We are not there yet but we are moving towards
it. It is not something where you bring in a new admissions policy
and you think things are going to change—they do not. It
plays only a small part, if you like, in raising and changing
perceptions and raising achievements—an important but small
part.
Q470 Helen Jones: Do you still interview
parents, Mr Jones?
Mr Jones: Only after we have offered
them a place. We do not interview them prior to offering them
a place.
Q471 Helen Jones: You are a church
school. I spent all my teaching career in church schools—albeit
not in the Church of England—and how do you decide, if you
give preference to children who are practising Anglicans, what
constitutes a practising Anglican? How do you know that they are
telling the truth? And how do you cater for parents who suddenly
develop an interest in going to church—who are "born
again"!—a year or so before their children apply to
your school? I am a Catholic: you are either a baptised Catholic
or you are not. Fairly simple!
Mr Jones: When we send out the
pack, there is included in the pack, in addition to the prospectus,
the admissions policy and the application form, what we call a
"clergy form". We invite those parents who want to claim
priority under this to get their clergymen to fill it in for them,
and we are particularly interested in the frequency of church
attendances. The governors have decided that, in order to count,
they have to go to church at least once a fortnight and to have
done that over a 12-month period. So, if the bright parent suddenly
gets the call when the kid is in year 5 and they go regularly
to church, they would then qualify; if they get the call in the
middle of year 6, unless they have an accommodating vicar they
probably will not qualify for priority.
Q472 Helen Jones: You are saying
to us that under your admissions process it is quite possible
for parents, if they so wish, to manipulate the system.
Mr Jones: I would say it was,
yes. I think with any system you are going to get manipulation.
Q473 Helen Jones: I wonder, then,
how you and your governors square that with your duty to look
after children with special educational needs or children who
are in care. And I wonder if the other heads could also tell us
how they see admissions to their schools coping with that. Because
you are often then dealing with people who are not in a position
to manipulate the system but who nevertheless have needs which
I think we would all agree ought to be catered for within a comprehensive
system.
Mr Jones: You will find, if in
fact you look at the profile, that we do have a number of children
in care who come along. One of the reasons they choose us, although
they are church-going as well, is because of the benefits that
they can obtain from the pastoral care system, and we are fortunate
as an Anglican school to have a full-time chaplain on the staff
as well, which bolsters things. A lot of them come in under the
normal criterion that they are going to church (with their foster
mother or with their legal guardian) and they apply in the normal
course of events, so we do get our fair share of children who
perhaps would be regarded as disadvantaged.
Mr Wood: If I may take, just as
the example to answer your question, the statemented pupils I
mentioned earlier. In the last couple of years, since this became
an issue because of the Code of Practice, when our number of statemented
children was rising and they were coming, as it were, from outside
our normal catchment area, the LEA have allowed us just to carry
those 12 as extra pupils. I feel that is a comfortable solution,
because I would worry that taking a statemented child from 10
miles away, because that is the parents' choice and the LEA has
designated our school at the request of the parents, could misplace
a child with enormous social deprivation for all I know. It is
a very hit-and-miss system. But the way in which we have been
allowed, as an oversubscribed school, simply to run over and say,
"If you have 12 statemented children, you can accept 12 more,"
which my governors and I accepted, has made it less of a concern
that someone else would be pushed over the edge and not allowed
in who would previously have got a place.
Q474 Helen Jones: You select 10%
by aptitude, do you not?
Mr Wood: Yes.
Q475 Helen Jones: You previously
said to the Committee that you do not really feel that the tests
are particularly valid. How then does the admission of children
with special needs or children in care fit in with your system?
Do you select the 10% and then you—
Mr Wood: Forgive me, until this
year, the issue of children in care did not enter into it: if
they applied, we did not know that they were in care necessarily
until afterwards. So I cannot comment on how that will affect
things in the future, but it works approximately like this: we
take in 250 children a year. Twenty-five of those would be on
the aptitude test. We have a small unit for visually impaired
children and they would get the next opportunity. That would never
be more, I think, than a maximum of three children a year. We
then move to any special medical reasons—and very rarely
does anyone use that category. We then move to siblings at the
school. That takes in about 40% of the places. Then it begins
to be more on distance.
Q476 Helen Jones: Could I ask Mrs
Laycock. You have experienced this, if you like, from the other
side of the system, where you have had to cope with a lot of children
with particular special needs. How do you feel the needs of those
children should be dealt with within the admissions system and
how do you, as a head who has looked to raising standards in a
very difficult area, feel that schools can have an open admission
system which admits a lot of children with particular difficulties
and still raise standards?
Mrs Laycock: I go back to what
I said earlier, and that is that I do believe children from the
local community should go to their community school. That will
bring to my school a higher number of challenging students and
children with special needs by dint of its actual area, but I
am actually happy to accommodate those in the first place. If
we were looking at an ideal, I would say—and I have said
this as chair of secondary heads in Sheffield—that I believe
all 27 of us are jointly responsible for the education of all
secondary age children in our city. Therefore, the problem that
you have with the current situation in relation to admissions
and movement of students after the age of 11, is that if schools
are full they do not have to take those students, and so if schools
have places they take a disproportionate number. As I mention
in my paper, what we are trying to do in Sheffield—and I
do not know whether we will be successful, but case law allows
it—is to look at a brokerage arrangement, dependent on school
size—if it is a small school of 800, it would allow them
to go over two or three places; mine, a bigger school, five or
six—so that there was a real sharing of the problems of
those young people but also the potential, because they all do
have potential, and it is down to, in the end, a critical mass
issue. But at the level of when they enter your school aged 11,
if they come in having preferenced your school and want to come
there, then I think that is a positive decision and that we there
have a responsibility to educate them and help them achieve.
Q477 Helen Jones: You have raised
quite an important point, which I think is one I would share,
that all the heads in the area have joint responsibility for the
education of children in that area. I would like to hear from
our other two witnesses, if I may, how they think that should
be dealt with. Is there a community responsibility as well as
a responsibility to your particular school? If so, what changes
would both of you like to see in the admissions system that would
cater for that? Or do you think a head's duty is simply to their
particular school?
Mr Wood: I think my view is changing.
As a former GM head, I was keen to have independence in order
to improve the lot of the children in my own school. I now see
some of the long-term effects which have resulted in that hierarchical
set-up which you describe, and I believe we have now to move more
to a wider responsibility. That is a very easy thing to say and
very difficult to put into practice. On a day-to-day basis, if
you have a child in my school, you would expect my concentration
to be on the education of your son or daughter and not worrying
about what is happening on the other side of the town. So there
is a real tension in schools. However, many of the moves that
are now being made towards collaboration and the federation, which
I described earlier, I think are beginning to show signs of alleviating
some of the excesses, and we will begin to tackle some of the
issues about, for instance, difficult to place children all ending
up in the one school. It is difficult to take that to any kind
of natural conclusion, though, in terms of one's community responsibility
in an area which has selection, because how can you define that
issue of my being responsible for the education of children in
a local community when a significant proportion of them will be
taken out of the local community at the wishes of the local population.
Q478 Helen Jones: Do you believe
that hinders an efficient education system, the fact that you
still have selection?
Mr Wood: Yes.
Q479 Helen Jones: Mr Jones, I wonder
what your view is on this, coming from a church school.
Mr Jones: We have always taken
the view that the pupils in our school and their families are
entitled to our first priority but we have never walked on the
other side of the road when our neighbour is in trouble. We have
offered, from time to time, our specialist knowledge and help
to local schools when they have been in difficulty or if we have
some specialism that they do not have. We certainly cooperate
with three other schools now at sixth form level. It is not just
the secondary sector either; we have very good links with our
primary schools as well. We have a very good art department and
we frequently invite children in from the local primary school,
boys and girls—we are a boys school—to come in to
get some specialist tuition, and to be able to use our equipment
which they would not otherwise have the opportunity of doing at
the primary stage.
1 Note by Witness: This consisted of a mass
group of aspirant students. Back
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