Examination of Witnesses (Questions 860
- 879)
MONDAY 1 DECEMBER 2003
MISS HILDA
CLARKE, REVEREND
JEREMY HURST
AND MS
JULIA SHEPARD
Q860 Valerie Davey: I have a factual
point which I would like to clarify, Hilda you mentioned something
like 2,300 sat the grammar school tests for the four schools and
probably 800 or 900 had come from outside, totting up the number
of places, and that is the best estimate I can do without any
background knowledge of Slough, 1,495 places are available in
the total number of secondary schools going in at age 11. It would
appear from that, and I am only doing a quick deduction, that
practically every child is sitting that exam. Is it your understanding
that the Slough youngsters are across the piece sitting this exam?
Miss Clarke: As far as I can see
we do not think that. I am only giving you rough figures. It is
very complicated and we are working on post-codes, the SL post-codes
go way out of the Slough LEA area. There is a problem about looking
at some of these figures here. I cannot give you anything reliable
on that. We also have some Slough children who go to primary schools
out of Slough, so there is registering in a different category.
That is why I would treat all of our figures with some question
mark, I cannot be as accurate as I would like to be. From what
we see in the primary schools now that the test has gone back
into the Slough primary schools and they run them we know not
of all of their Year Six are sitting to do the test. There is
a margin of error. If I was given more time I could come back
with something that would be a little more accurate. We know not
all Year Six sit the test. There are Slough children outside Slough
in primaries who are coming back into the system, they are Slough
children because they have a Slough postal address. I apologise
I cannot give you a clearer picture.
Q861 Valerie Davey: Thank you very
much indeed, I am sure the officers here can help us with figures.
I would now like to move on to the appeal system in Slough. We
have gone through this complicated system for parents and then
they are not satisfied. Can you tell us roughly how many parents
appeal? What is the process? It would appear again just as you
apply in parallel you have an appeal system in parallel. I am
really concerned to know whether it is a worthwhile procedure.
Do you have any idea what it costs? At the end of the day have
you made more parents and children unhappy or in fact more satisfied
as a result of that system?
Miss Clarke: If I do the foundation
schools, the three foundation schools run a common appeals independent
panel, St Bernard's runs its own so I cannot give any data for
that but I can give it for the three foundation grammar schools.
In the 2001 entry there were 254 appeals, of which 50 were successful.
In the 2002 entry there were 334 appeals and 17 first preferences
were allowed, 28 below 110. In 2003 entry there were 331 appeals,
18 on first preference and 58 below 110 below. Over the last two
years the Adjudicator decided there should be a second right to
appeal for those who got over the grammar school mark but did
not get their first preference, the numbers would be 50, 45 and
then the top one is something like 70. I have these available
on paper if you would like those. In my own school out of that
lot we have had 13 successful appeals in 2001, we had 26 in 2002
and 30 in 2003. When they get to the right of appeal you have
to house them whether you have the space or not, it is a significant
number to have to absorb. Once they have done the test everybody
has the right of appeal if they have not got their first preference.
We now run into nearly four weeks of appeals just for those three
foundation grammar schools here in Slough. They have the right
of appeal and if they are not happy with the result of that independent
panel they can go to the local Ombudsman, and he has been dealing
with about seven or eight cases each year. It reached its extreme
this summer when a parent went to judicial review and got refused.
We ended up in the High Court in the summer holidays, which a
parent funded and it must have cost them £10,000 because
they ended up paying our costs. Their child had a mark below 110
but they felt that they should be given the right to appeal, appeal
and appeal. That was a parent from a very modest background indeed.
Q862 Chairman: Surely it would not
have been that modest if it cost £10,000?
Miss Clarke: I mean by that for
what they paid they could have afforded private education, now
that shows a certain desperation. There are lots of other good
schools, not just mine by any stretch of the imagination, and
obviously I am not here to discuss private cases, but I was surprised
that somebody would go to that length. There is a cost to us of
running appeals (and I would have to look carefully at those figures)
we have to hire a hall because we are not allowed to do it in
our school for four weeks. We are allowed to pay our clerks who
run the whole system but we are not allowed to pay the independent
members, and we get through a lot of them. There is the whole
administration. If I can give you a global figure, because we
have to pay for the cost of papers and appeals, I budget something
like £25,000 to £30,000 a year for the 11-plus test
and appeals. I think the appeals might costs about £10,000.
Q863 Valerie Davey: Let me just tell
you, you are the first of the witnesses who have come before us
who has any idea as to cost, so well done.
Miss Clarke: Selection has a massive
impact in Slough, in some ways detrimental, but it also has a
massive impact in Hounslow and Hillingdon as well. A large number
of my pupils come from there and a lot of appeals come from those
areas, it is not just impacting here in Slough it is impacting
in those two areas as well.
Revd Hurst: The system is complex,
expensive and distressing. The complexity of it relates to the
whole complexity of the system and when you have been working
with a system, which I have with the Schools Admission Forum,
you get to know this. Parents do not know this because they only
deal with it once or with siblings perhaps twice. You heard earlier
about the difficulty of understanding the whole admission system,
the appeals system is also complex. That is the first point. It
is expensive, those figures have been given by Hilda. The panel
members are all volunteers and if they were paid for their time
you could pretty near double that figure. It is distressing, and
I returned to David Chaytor's question about parental choice,
because expectations are aroused by the principle of choice, which
has been a politician's slogan for years, you feel that you are
able to choose. I choose Langley Grammar School but I do not get
my child in so therefore I am upset, I go through the whole process,
expectation is still high and I find it is dashed. Some people
do not accept it, they will not even accept the verdict of the
appeals panel.
Q864 Chairman: Can I follow up on
that point, you seem to have devised a system in Slough that is
very off-putting in terms of the original application for a school,
especially if they want to go to a selected school, from all of
the evidence that we have had so far it seems to be set up for
middle-class professionals that know their way round this complex
area, the person who can afford a judicial review and who knows
about judicial review compared to someone living on a local authority
estate with a modest income—it seems to me to be unequal—and
however bright their child is they are going to have difficulty
comparing to your middle-class professional
Revd Hurst: It is not set up for
them but it works to their advantage.
Miss Clarke: Can I make a point
there, you keep talking about middle-class, if you were to look
at the cohort of parents that apply to grammar schools in the
area it is not your standard middle-class category that are doing
it.
Q865 Chairman: Can we have the social
class background of your pupils in terms of proportions?
Miss Clarke: It is very difficult
to ascertain because we are not allowed to say what somebody's
social class is.
Q866 Chairman: You know from free
school meals, and your percentage is very small!
Miss Clarke: It is very small.
There is a significant percentage of my parents who are now unemployed,
who are two income families, they work shift work round the airport,
indeed the whole industry in that area is characteristic of the
description of the employment graphic that you would have seen
for Slough and the surrounding areas. I also know that a lot of
my parents cannot afford significant things at all but the one
thing they spend a lot of money on is education. Their belief,
their high motivation of what they want is the kind of education
they want for their child. The vast majority of those who appeal
are not well-versed and middle-class, they come from very, very
modest backgrounds, backgrounds where many of them are poor English
speakers, so we have to have people who will interpret, all of
the appeal documents have to be in alternative languages as well.
If people want to come they can bring somebody to interpret for
them. It is a very different type of profile than what you would
have found if you looked in one or two other selective areas.
We had Ofsted this last March and I said to them, "Just look
at the school, look at the backgrounds of our pupils, look at
the data and you will not find a predictable profile that you
would expect of a grammar school", that is because in Slough
and Hounslow it is very different, it really is very different.
You are more likely to opt-in to Buckinghamshire Schools to be
honest.
Q867 Valerie Davey: Can I come back
to Julia on the effect of appeals and the expectation that it
raises and where that leaves some of the youngsters who will be
turning up and their families coming to your school?
Ms Shepard: In September despite
a lot of leg work that has been carried out by the admissions
team and my own staff I do hold my breath on the first day of
term because the list of students that we have may or may not
turn up and others may turn up. Some students will have applications
in elsewhere, they may well be waiting for appeals. What does
that do for those youngsters who do not have a smooth start? They
come into school late. We put a lot of work into our induction
process and we try and pick up an run with that but sometimes
a youngster does not understand why they are delayed starting
school—sometimes it is in deference to their parents—some
youngster join the school very late in the year, some students
through the management of their parents have been out of school
for some time despite being offered places in our school or perhaps
in other schools. For some youngsters at the beginning of the
academic year, particularly the transfer into Year Seven, it causes
some difficulty, not for the majority but for a significant minority
of youngsters I would say. I have to say that my experience of
youngsters who have been waiting for appeals in other authorities
and our own authority once they are placed within a school both
the student and parent are positive about their school experience
but rather sadly they have had to go through such a long-winded
and lengthy process. I am sure much of that is added to by some
of the parents' shame for youngsters when they have had to go
through that process and arrive at school late. I also think it
contributes to our overall turbulence in school. We may come back
to young people who arrive in the authority during an academic
year, their route into school is an interesting one.
Valerie Davey: I am tempted to ask you
more about that but I will let my colleagues come in. Please make
sure that issue does come up later.
Q868 Mr Pollard: I was staggered
when I read Slough LEA teacher turnover is 70% annually, is that
okay or is that still as bad four days a week?
Ms Shepard: We are talking history
here. Before I joined Beechwood there were significant issues
round recruitment and retention. Since I took up as head teacher
I have probably had more stability staff wise than most other
schools. I have had three staff in two years move on for promotion.
The school is now growing and I appointed seven extra members
of staff for September. That is a good news story for Beechwood,
however there are some serious issues round recruitment and retention
which we would like to raise in this area. It is very difficult
to recruit in this area, it is not a Beechwood issue or a particular
school issue, we are really not very far from London but we have
very different pay conditions which makes a significant difference,
If somebody were to go a very short distance down the road their
pay is thousands of pounds more. It is a very expensive housing
area, it is very difficult to appoint staff in all sectors perhaps
in the way that we would wish to do. What it does do for us, and
what we have certainly done at Beechwood, is it leads us into
training on our own and certainly at Beechwood we really have,
I have to say, a top quality continual professional development
programme with very powerful expert and experienced teachers to
go back and reflect on their practice and share that with others,
but it is an extra burden on the school, it is an extra work stream,
we are training people as well as the fact that schools need to
improve rapidly and an enormous amount. Anybody in Slough will
tell you that recruitment and retention is an issue because of
the cost of living, because of our proximity to London, because
we have been missed out on the London Challenge. We are in the
M4 corridor, we are a town that is rich and exciting but with
a lot of challenge. We need to be able to pay people an appropriate
amount to work in our area. I believe schools like Beechwood need
to be able to pay well to attract and retain the best.
Q869 Mr Pollard: Does selection on
academic ability encourage or discourage social integration?
Miss Clarke: In my school I see
a lot of social integration as a result of the mixed pupil population
I have there, again I would like people to come and look at what
is happening with the pupil population, it is not what most people
expect, it is multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-faith, it is
slightly more boys than girls, we have families from all kinds
of backgrounds there as well, yes it does encourage social integration
in the area that I am working in in Slough, yes it does, quite
clearly.
Ms Shepard: I do not think it
encourages social integration at all frankly. This is a personal
view, I think it is divisive and I think it moves against the
heart of the community. We have young people who are bussing and
travelling all round Slough and I think it does detract from a
community feel, a community contribution. Having said that we
have said already in Slough we work very positively and very well
across all sectors and we all engage in work to mitigate against
that. For example we have an enterprise Path Finding scheme in
a non-selective school in another part of town and we do work
closely on different projects, our staff mix and some of our students
mix, and we have to engineer that. I think that selection does
not encourage harmony. It matters a lot to the youngsters here
which school they go to and where they live, more than it should
I think.
Revd Hurst: May I go back to your
previous question about staff retention, everything that Julia
says is true but there is one extra factor, if you have a talented
and ambitious teacher who is looking for promotion it is not a
good thing to spend too long in a non-selective school. Slough
schools are relatively small and also we do not have a sixth form
and a teacher will be well advised to move out and not to stay.
Q870 Chairman: That is a surprising
thing to say. Slough is like Kent, quite a small bubble in terms
of selection than in the rest of the country. As Members of Parliament,
and some who do not have selection, we are all looking for talented
teachers of the highest level, why would that be a bar on someone's
promotion to have experience in a non-selective school?
Revd Hurst: A lack of sixth form
teaching, a lack of teaching across the range. Assuming they have
the ability to look for other jobs at their interview the interviewer
will ask, "what experience do you have with A-level teaching?"
I can quote particular people who have been deputy heads or heads
of departments in schools where I have been governor who have
said, "it is now in my interest to move on".
Ms Shepard: Without wishing to
be rude I think the world has moved on. I think the pecking order
in education has changed very significantly and to be quite honest
with you if you can make the grade in a school that has challenges
your school career is set up. I have teaching support staff in
my school and the work they are doing, the pace at which they
change, the developments they are involved in they are highly
appointable, they are building their careers, their careers are
made. The pecking order has changed now. People are looking at
schools in challenging circumstances to be really cutting-edge,
good practice, strong professional development programmes and
they are the people that can do the biz, it has changed.
Revd Hurst: We disagree on that.
On the question of social integration, you have been informed
frequently of the movement in and out of the borough, which is
largely caused by a selective system, it is not good for social
integration if pupils are educated elsewhere.
Q871 Mr Pollard: Competition between
schools, it is competitive within schools?
Ms Shepard: Recently I was reading
some research that was saying that the differences are greater
within a school compared classroom to classroom than they are
amongst schools. I think going back quite some time there was
an element of looking at your neighbour to see how well your neighbour
was doing and looking at some of the practices they were using.
Things did sharpen up in a number of things. I am somebody who
believes that some things did need to be sharpened up. Some of
the level of competition we have seen nationally has been detrimental
and has taken the focus away from the learners, the young people,
and has perhaps engaged us in activities that have drawn away
from that.
Q872 Chairman: If I can pursue you
on that, we have seen across the board over the last couple of
years some policies that seem to have resulted in standards rising,
standards rising in literacy and numeracy, surely you are feeling
the benefit of that whether it is forced up by a testing regime
or not? Are the benefits there or is all this money being wasted?
Ms Shepard: No. Perhaps I have
not put that across strongly enough, there has been a rise in
standards. I do not think the rise in standards has been because
of competition from one school to another, I think the raise in
standards has been around some national strategies that have had
good elements to them. I think it has helped us to review and
monitor and make judgments internally and it has been helpful
to compare ourselves not against our neighbouring schools but
against schools that have similar characteristics so that we know
what range there is in terms of performance. I think there have
been some huge benefits but what does worry me is when I sit down
with one of my Year 11 students and I am mentoring them (all of
them have mentors to help them toward their GCSEs) what that young
man is reflecting to me is he is tested-out and I find it very
hard to get him really highly motivated about his Year 11 exam,
he is not really very nervous about them because he has been hyped
up so many times for so many tests in his education lifetime that
actually he is not very daunted by the GCSEs, the significance
of them has not come across to him, he is sick to death of being
tested. We run the risk in this system of measuring what we can
measure and what we think is worth measuring of performance but
we are actually losing our overall perspective about a young person
as they come through the school system.
Miss Clarke: In terms of the competition
element I think this is a problem for parents because these are
measures that are seemingly about league tables. We could teach
within schools and work within schools and our heads within schools
would say, "our school is much more than that". We are
always forced to make that comparison and of course it is an artificial
comparison because it sets schools inappropriately against each
other and that is what it should not do. I have a high ability
range and I should be held to account for that in the same way
that I should not be matched when the Government publish league
tables, where some schools will be vilified and some will be awarded
in completely the wrong context and the wrong way. Competition
has sharpened schools up but it should be about the quality of
education we all provide to every child that passes our threshold
and that should be equally stimulating and challenging to those
children whatever type of school it is and if we fall below that
we should be taken to account for that.
Q873 Chairman: Would value-added
be a better measure?
Miss Clarke: It is one of the
measures but it should not be exclusive. We would both say there
should be multiple measures and we need parents to appreciate
that. One of the frenetic elements around that is that they look
at the league tables and they will say, "that is a good school,
that is not a good school". That is far, far too simplistic
a judgment that is going on. We need to get a sophisticated picture
over that and we are not helped by the profiling that goes on
at the moment.
Revd Hurst: The only place where
schools should actually compete against each other is on the sports
field. I do not see competition between schools as institutions,
they are arranged in parents' minds in a pecking order, as Hilda
said earlier. Going back to the sports field, all of these extra-curricular
activities are all ways of integration and what happens in the
classroom is not seen but parents do stand on the touchline and
watch the school in action on the rugby field and they see young
Johnny who is going to be a goal kicker in years to come and they
probably go to the school concert or drama production and these
are very prestigious and they help to form the image in the parents'
minds of the school.
Q874 Jonathan Shaw: Jeremy, you said
that politicians should stop using the term "choice".
The Government do not publish league tables, do they, the Government
publish information about schools' results which are available
to the public. Hilda Clarke said that you should be held accountable
to that, perhaps it would be interesting to hear your comment.
For many years there was a group of people within the community
who knew how the schools performed, that was the middle-class,
they knew which schools were performing well. The fact that we
now have the publication of results it has focused the thoughts,
attention and interests of far more parents. I think that is something
that teachers and head teachers are guilty of moaning about too
much quite frankly, and I say that as somebody who comes from
a teaching and social work background. Coming back to what politicians
do, that is a reasonable point but it goes back the other way
too. I find scores of parents say things to me about the league
tables and they say things like Jeremy Hurst, about the achievements
of schools, which are far more positive things than moaning on
about the league tables. I put that to you, ladies and gentleman.
Ms Shepard: Some of those schools
that—to use your term—the middle-classes thought were
doing extremely well have been shown over the years to be significantly
under-performing and were travelling on their comfort zone and
on their reputation. Some of the schools that are judged, and
cruelly judged, as being lower down the league tables—and
it is a fact they have had a greater level of challenge than
others schools—it is inappropriate to compare them in a
great big pot along with everybody else. Where I think education
is finding it damaging is not round accountability—I am
okay with accountability, I am okay about being monitored, I am
okay about being heavily monitored and I would like to think that
everyday in my working life I am working towards helping those
youngsters to achieve in whichever way they possibly can, and
attainment and examination results are a part of that—but
do not compare me with the school down the road that is selective,
do not compare with me with a school that is in a very affluent
area, it is not the same, the level of challenge is different
and we need to understand that. Accountability, yes. Public accountability
that is ignorant, that is not moderated in any way, that is crude,
damages the youngsters and the staff and the community. It is
not actually very good for a youngster who knows they are working
their socks off to go into a school that is being bandied round
in the media for being a school that does not do very well. The
fragile self-esteem of some of our learners is further damage,
it is not helpful and I am very surprised it is something that
has been allowed to continue. DfeS may not publish them as league
tables, they do call them performance tables, and it is crude
and frankly it tells us very little.
Q875 Chairman: That message will
be going quite strongly in our report I suspect.
Miss Clarke: It also does undermine
an enormous amount of work which we do in schools. Schools have
become a lot more sophisticated about getting themselves out into
the community and telling parents what they are doing. Jeremy
is quite right, although perhaps it is not always on the sports
field that schools will show it, it is all of the other dimensions,
it is the creative element, it is the artistic element, there
is a whole area that we are out there showing what our pupils
can do and achieve and also in an area like Slough we are doing
that together through the Creative Partnership Scheme and the
Business Arts Council.[6]
Our schools are all working together and there are fantastic displays
of work and showing the performance of our pupils in many different
areas as well as sport. What I am trying to say is why we get
so irritated about performance tables is because it is not really
a picture, we work very hard to have this broader picture of our
schools, whatever school we are, in all of the many dimensions
and then to see that undercut when they produce the performance
tables. For us, that is professionally very disheartening and
what is it continually doing to our pupils as well in whatever
context they are?
Q876 Jonathan Shaw: If you get a
decent GCSE you stand to earn £80 or £90 extra a week.
If we are about changing the deprivation cycle is that not more
important than some of the other things you have been talking
about? That is not a view that I hold but I am saying it is an
important part if we are to change deprivation?
Revd Hurst: It is not the information,
it is the use to which the information is put. If I went to a
doctor for an examination I would not want that detail to be conveyed
to my life insurance company, that information should be used
for its own particular purposes. When SATs were first introduced
I remember it was said this would be for diagnostic purposes and
it was not used for diagnostic purposes. It was never presented
in the first place for it to be used in the way that it is used
now. The same is true for league tables. Perhaps it is a bit naive
that use would not be made of them. I think this explains the
intense anger that most of the teaching profession feel about
that.
Q877 Mr Chaytor: Can I just come
back to the question of value-added and parental choice and preference
Has the local authority in Slough shared with the schools the
contextual value-added indicator? These indicators are the latest
ones available and suggest that four of the non-selected schools
in Slough are in the top 25% nationally of value-added and that
three of the selected schools in Slough appear in the bottom 25%
of value-added indicators. Do you think that this information
should be available to parents?
Miss Clarke: I have heard about
the non-selective ones, I have not heard of the others. I would
be interested to know where that data is available and whether
you have some data ahead of DfeS' current publication which we
have not seen?
Q878 Mr Chaytor: This is May 2003
data, the new one is due shortly.
Miss Clarke: That is where they
then look at the value-added at different key stages. If I can
make a point there, in my grammar school I take about 30% of the
ability range and that is compared with schools that take between
5% and 12% ability, so I will always appear lower down in achievement
matched against those. Slough does show all of the data very extensively
and has a very good data performance unit that provides a wealth
of data back to the schools. Meetings are held publicly amongst
the heads and we share that data between us. We are very much
held to task, there is open, free use of that data, strong use
of it in Slough and we do use the tools and we are held accountable
to it.
Q879 Mr Chaytor: The question is,
should it be available to parents either in the league tables
or in the inspection reports or on the schools website or in the
Slough Express or Slough Observer? Should it be
available to parents, and I am talking about the value-added information
specifically?
Miss Clarke: The question of value-added
is being able to understand it. If you do not understand how to
read statistics it is useless. I have sat in meetings where that
data has been explained to teachers and it takes a lot of explaining,
so to look at them cold like that is very, very difficult. I know
last year was the first time they published value-added and there
were problems. We did talk about that and parents came back to
us, so we use value-added to get the information we give out to
parents, but we do it in a way that we hope contextualises. So
long as you give them the correct means of interpreting it it
is okay, but like all data it can be misused.
Ms Shepard: I think this is one
of those issues where we cannot have it both ways. We should be
celebrating the huge success of the non-selective schools but
I would not want it to be in the same sentence and comparing it
to where other sector schools were in those particular kind of
tables. Can I come back on the issue round GCSEs, it just seems
incredibly narrow to me that we measure somebody's potential in
adult life against such a narrow band of activity such as GCSEs.
Certainly the tables are beginning to take much more note of vocational
opportunities that we are introducing across our schools. I think
the vocational curriculum and the vocational opportunities will
give a better picture of an individual's achievement and attainment.
If you talk to employers and you talk to some of the skills and
attributes they would like, I actually do not think they are fulfilled
wholly by the GCSE examination. The curriculum development and
the breadth of qualifications that are becoming available to us
are a way forward as long as they can be encompassed in some way
and taken note of. If performance tables continue to use GCSEs,
I know they are not, we would not have any choice, would we, we
would have to plug away at this exam which may be inappropriate
for some youngsters. We actually have to be much more open and
creative about what we consider success to be.
6 Note by Witness: The name of the organisation
is the Education Business Partnership. Back
| 
