Examination of Witnesses (Questions 128-139)
1 NOVEMBER 2004
MR STEVE
SINNOTT, DR
FIONA HAMMANS,
MS KATHRYN
JAMES AND
MS CHRIS
KEATES
Q128 Chairman: It is my great pleasure
to welcome Steve Sinnott, the General Secretary of the NUT. This
is your first appearance, is it not, Steve?
Mr Sinnott: As General Secretary
of the NUT it is.
Q129 Chairman: Welcome indeed. Then we
have Dr Fiona Hammans. Is that the right pronunciation?
Dr Hammans: Yes, it is.
Q130 Chairman: Who is here from Banbury
School in Oxfordshire and a member of SHA, Ms Kathryn James, who
is Senior Assistant Secretary to the Professional Advice Department,
NAHT, and we have Chris Keates, who is General Secretary of NASUWT.
Welcome all of you. You will have had the benefit of experience
of listening to the Committee's questions so far. The bad news
is we have got an entirely different set of questions for you.
It is good to have you all here. Jonathan wants to lead the questioning,
but before you start does anybody want to say anything? I cannot
have all four of you saying something. Are we going to give pride
of place to Steve Sinnott, only because it is his first appearance,
or does Chris Keates, because she has been before us and has great
experience, want to go first?
Ms Keates: It is also my first
appearance, Chairman.
Q131 Chairman: I am sorry, Chris, I thought
you had been here before.
Ms Keates: I have been here before,
but not as General Secretary.
Q132 Chairman: I see. Who would like
to kick off?
Mr Sinnott: I would like to kick
off by congratulating Chris Keates on being General Secretary.
I look forward to working with Chris for a long, long time; so
congratulations to Chris.
Ms Keates: Thank you.
Q133 Chairman: I think that is totally
out of order, but we will let you!
Ms Keates: I think we will go
straight into questions.
Q134 Chairman: Okay. The opener is: did
you find it rather a surprise that we were looking at this subject?
Is it on the periphery of your interest and you thought, "What
on earth is the Select Committee doing dabbling around with this
bit of peripheral stuff"?
Mr Sinnott: I do not think it
is peripheral at all, Chair, I think it is central to what goes
on in education. As well as congratulating Chris and surprising
everyone by congratulating Chris, can I praise the Government?
One of the good things that the Government has done is to emphasise
the relationship—
Q135 Mr Pollard: Can you speak a bit
more slowly; I want to get all this?
Mr Sinnott: —is to emphasise
the relationship between social class and education, and David
Miliband, I think, has done a terrific job in raising the relationship,
the achievement of youngsters and their social class, and there
is no doubt in my mind that what teachers want to do, and what
the Government and the local authorities should be encouraging
to be done, is to ensure that youngsters have a rich experience
of their time at school, and that will include giving an entitlement
to children to go the theatre, to be involved in drama, to be
involved in sporting activities, to visit a foreign country, to
be involved in an outdoor activity of one form or another, to
be involved in a residential activity—all of those activities—and
there is real evidence of the way in which youngsters from economically
deprived backgrounds benefit from them. The recent experience
of September 2004—Ofsted said exactly what I have just said.
At the same time we do know that all youngsters, whether they
are gifted or talented or whether they are struggling at school,
benefit from those activities and schools benefit from having
improved relationships between the youngsters and the teachers
following residential activity. So the benefits are clear and
real, and I congratulate the Committee for picking up this issue?
Q136 Jonathan Shaw: A question to Chris
Keates. In your evidence to the Committee you say that there is
a significant number of schools that conduct visits to venues
of dubious educational value. How many of your members take children
to schools of dubious economic value?
Ms Keates: Educational value.
Q137 Jonathan Shaw: Educational value;
thank you.
Ms Keates: We think there is less
than when we first started to raise issues about educational visits,
the conduct of them and the risk that we felt needed to be minimised
as far as possible because, we accept, there is no activity that
is actually completely risk-free, but we have for some time been
identifying a number of issues and one of the issues we have raised
about minimising risks is about making sure that there is a clear
educational value to the trips that are being taken. It has been
our experience that quite a lot of schools are engaged, particularly
in the summer term, although, as I say, our information back from
our members is it is less now than when we first started to raise
this issue, where you would get the annual trip to the Blackpool
pleasure beach or Alton Towers—things that we would say
might be an interesting experience for the pupils, might be something
they had not done before, but whether it should be the kind of
visit that is conducted by a school and what curriculum relationship
it has, we would have doubts about that.
Q138 Jonathan Shaw: What I am slightly
concerned about is the broad brushes that you are using, Chris,
in your evidence, both written and what you have just said. "Quite
a lot", "significant amounts". What we are trying
to do is to drill down in this issue and to get to the heart of
the matter. When you say "of dubious value educationally"—you
have decided that it is so important that you want to put it in
the evidence to the Select Committee—what are we talking
about? What are the numbers? Does your union know?
Ms Keates: If you are asking me
for statistical evidence to back up for a percentage of schools,
I cannot give you that. What I can give you is the issues that
have been raised with us from our members are on a large-scale
across the country and we judge the impact of an issue by the
response we get from members through our union's casework, and,
since we have been raising the issue of educational visits, we
have had, on a regular basis, from members in schools right across
the country, the issues of concerns they have expressed to us
about some of the educational visits; and so, if you are asking
me for a percentage, I cannot do that. I think that it is perfectly
legitimate for me to say that our casework evidence is demonstrating
that this is a concern to some teachers, particularly arising
from the risks with visits. They have been looking much more closely
at the kinds of activities that a school should be involved in
conducting.
Q139 Jonathan Shaw: How many of your
members, how many of the NASUWT members have been the subject
of false allegations on residential trips?
Ms Keates: Of the tracking that
we have done, I think we have had in the last . . . The percentage
of false allegations on visits, I would say, probably is about
5% of the numbers that we have, and we have been tracking educational
visits now—I am sorry, false allegations now since 1991.
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