Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
MONDAY 12 JANUARY 2004
MR CHRIS
HUMPHRIES AND
PROFESSOR ALISON
WOLF
Q40 Valerie Davey: What we have done
is undervalue the child who learns with their hands, to put it
crudely; the children who learn in that different way other than
with eyes and ears, those children who need to be tactile.
Mr Humphries: It is more than
tactile, it is even about the way one groups young people together,
gets them working in projects. I was Assistant Director for the
Council for Educational Technology until 1988 at the time when
all of that remit was taken off. I left it because that remit
was abolished and the Council for Educational Technology became
entirely about computing; a similar change happened with the Schools
Council. The question the UK needs to look at is to recognise
the amazing work being done in Australia, amazing work being done
in America through MIT, through Harvard, through the universities
in Australia, who are looking at brain science, development in
brain science, learning styles, the whole way in which you shape
learning experiences to suit people. With the exception of some
honourable programmes in individual universities there is no structured
programme on pedagogy left in the UK and yet we are having to
stimulate learning in a far more diverse world. We are trying
to meet the needs of the 100% not the 50%, we are working in a
world in which technology is transforming practice, it is not
the only answer, yet this is the one area where we are woefully
inadequate in our understanding. I would never blame teachers
for this. I think we have failed to support teachers and failed
to undertake the necessary research and development to enable
them. The final thing I would say is that if we look back to the
national curriculum, the arrival of the national curriculum led
essentially to the abolition, the removal from the bookshelves
of almost every piece of learning resource which had existed until
then. If it was not stamped "appropriate for the national
curriculum" it was simply removed from sale. You may remember
some of this at the time. That led to teachers adopting a far
narrower range of practices in the classroom because the resources,
materials and support were no longer available to them which were
supporting that practice. There is a real need for a research
programme investigating pedagogy and learning styles and it is
a big lack in our research and development programme. Teachers
are not the problem: teachers are the receivers of a problematic
system.
Q41 Valerie Davey: I must say I am
delighted we have that on our record. May I move immediately to
something very much more pragmatic? I have not seen some research
which has recently been coming out of Bristol which shows that
there are some young people there who just do not have currently
the link between working hard in school and achieving what they
would like to be, that somehow it is luck that the lottery . .
. It is called the Beckham syndrome. There is no indication about
his skill, his time, effort, but somehow you get there. It is
a quick jump from where you are and it is luck. That presupposes
that we have not actually talked to young people. We have not
given them some of the work experience. Are you in favour of work
experience during this 14-19 period? How do we make that link
between what youngsters are actually doing, giving them motivation
to link into what they, as individuals, might like to choose and
want to do?
Professor Wolf: I am a bit of
a sceptic about mandated work experience, I have to say. It seems
mostly to come down to whether you have the sort of parents who
can find you an amusing week. I am tremendously much in favour
of people having experience of working, but that is rather different
from inviting schools to devote a huge amount of time to setting
up short-term work experience placements which are very expensive
to do. You very often find that the young person cannot do anything
very useful and then they are supposed to come back and write
all sorts of things about it. If you look at the fact that every
school has scarce resources, I am not in the least convinced that
that is the best way to do it. That is very different from saying
that you learn from having experience of work. You do and in terms
of looking at what happens to young people, there is also no question
that having had part-time jobs or serious chunks of work experience—what
the French would call a stage—has tremendously good
effects in terms of your longer term employment prospects and
everything that happens to you. I am something of a sceptic about
mandatory work experience in the school curriculum.
Q42 Helen Jones: As the sceptical
mother of a teenager who is about to go on work experience and
is desperate for us to find him something more interesting, is
there any research to show whether this improves people's chances?
Professor Wolf: I do not know
of any.[9]
Q43 Helen Jones: As opposed to getting
a Saturday job.
Professor Wolf: Exactly. I do
not know of any.
Mr Humphries: You have just hit
on the head there the point about this. Your question is about
the current structure of the work experience programme we are
offering and whether there is evidence that is the best way to
do it. I do not believe there is. Is there evidence that a better
understanding of work and adult life is a sound part of the preparation
of a young person? I am convinced there is. I do not know the
research, but as the parent of two teenagers, I can recognise
the syndrome as you describe it. There is an issue here about
young people's expectations of life as they are beginning to experience
it. I believe strongly that in a curriculum which did have as
its core entitlement this preparation for work and adult life,
a programme of opportunities to see the world of work as it is
could be productive. If you are asking about the current system
of work experience, isolated out of that core curriculum, as a
sound preparation for work and adult life, I am not convinced
that we have it right at all.
Q44 Valerie Davey: There is now an
organisation called SCOOL which is taking all this work away from
schools and does all the organisation of getting young people
into appropriate work-based learning. Part of that is taken away.
I still recognise the problems.
Mr Humphries: It is the context
which is the issue.
Valerie Davey: The context is that youngsters
are now finding a different way into work and into work experience
than the one you and I thought was appropriate. There are different
ways of doing it.
Q45 Mr Chaytor: Later this month
the 14-19 Working Group is due to produce its interim report and
on the evidence of the document they put out in the autumn it
is going to focus on the changes to the curriculum which would
be built on a balanced curriculum with general, specialist and
supplementary elements. Secondly, it is going to propose a form
of overarching diploma at the end of the school career. I am curious
to know first of all what you think about the curriculum and whether
that framework of general, specialist and supplementary studies
makes any sense at all. If it does, what would you like to see
within each one? We have talked about maths and English, but we
have not talked very much about IT as a core skill.
Mr Humphries: I would go back
and re-define Tomlinson slightly differently. I sit on a sub-group
of Tomlinson and we have been looking at what is in the core in
a sense in Tomlinson's terms. He talks about the core and then
the subjects around the edge. For me, that core is the critical
issue and getting that right is the fundamental challenge. It
is much easier to think about how you can extend the core to address
the particular issues associated with subjects which might be
of interest to that young person and how you create subject curricula
around the edges of the core. For me the question we have to get
right is what is in that core and how it differs from what the
current system delivers to young people. I think it is intended
to be much of what we were describing earlier, preparation for
work and adult life. In a sense the principle behind it says that
if every young person has that, it is far less important which
particular subjects they choose, because they are less likely
to narrow their choices at too young an age. For me, if Tomlinson
is to address the key needs, it has to address that fundamental
core and get it right, that foundation, preparation for work and
adult life, it has to provide a good, rich diversity of options
for the young person to assemble around it. It needs to recognise
the fact that if you have a core then the fact that a young person
happens to be interested in design and technology or foreign languages
is much more of a choice for them. For me, the three things which
would have to be in that core—I think I am a lone voice
in pleading for the third element—is language and communication
in English and the ability to communicate effectively in the society
in which you operate. The second one is the ability to apply key
numeric and mathematical concepts to real world problems. The
third one is a practical understanding of the impact science has
on the world in which you have to live. IT, for me, is something
I would be very unlikely to want to teach as a separate subject
unless that young person was at that point ready to begin to specialise,
was willing to narrow it down and see it as a specialist subject.
IT is a part of the core, it will increasingly be a fundamental
competence for living a fulfilled life. It sits for me in the
core. If someone wants to pursue it as a specialist subject because
that is of particular interest, that is fine too.
Q46 Mr Chaytor: So you are talking
about four elements within the core.
Mr Humphries: I would not teach
IT as a subject. You will be using IT from age two probably all
the way through your life in a structured way; it would almost
come through the pedagogy, the learning style, the way in which
you are taught and learn. IT would be ubiquitous in the experience
you would have. In developing maths and the mathematical capability
I believe the context is important; people have to be able to
understand how to apply mathematical knowledge to the solution
of real world problems and that requires structured teaching in
a different way to IT.
Professor Wolf: It is hard to
comment on Tomlinson because it is really devil-in-the-detail
stuff. Until we find out what the core is, we do not really know
whether there is going to be any major change in the current sixth
form, which is where the major changes might come. We have talked
about two areas: the need to re-think the curriculum for those
who are not doing well at GCSE and then dropping out after it;
also the whole issue of the curriculum for those who are staying
on. I should like to say just a little bit about that for a change
because it is highly related to skills. If we do not actually
make any major changes in the sixth form curriculum, we are going
to continue having serious skills shortages in maths and quantitative
areas. That seems to me absolutely clear. We also currently have
a situation in which it is still true that many people are doing
very little serious writing and not that much serious reading
in the final years of full-time pre-tertiary education. There
really is an issue here and whether or not we are going to do
anything serious about this is not clear from the things I have
seen so far. There seems to me in particular to be some slightly
worrying indications that there is not going to be any knock-on
effect on university degrees. If that is true, then it means there
cannot be any serious changes in the school curriculum either.
This is very much a personal view, but it is related to what we
know about skills. I really do think that it is time not merely
to give this clear entitlement in what I call maths and English—and
I should be happy to include science as well—among those
who are not doing well, but also to insist that is part of your
core education right the way through to 18. If we are not prepared
to do that and to seize it, then we are basically playing games.
That has major implications. If we do not do that, then nothing
will really happen. This comes back to the whole issue of how
you run a school or how you run an FE college. You can talk about
core and options until you are blue in the face, but they remain
notional unless you have large enough groups for it to be financially
viable to provide them. That means that if you have quite a restricted
range of options, which you are bound to do, but which do not
include the ones you would like people to do from a skills point
of view, where you actually say everybody has to do some of this,
you will just end up with it being a notional possibility that
nobody actually does. It does seem to me that we can say not that
we are short of level 2 or level 3 qualifications, but we are
actually short of skills. There is a very strong argument for
insisting that all our young people continue to do some very serious
mathematics of very different types—not all of them doing
AS maths, clearly not—and introduce some serious engagement
with the English language. I should also be very happy if they
had some serious engagement with science, but that is less of
a skills and more of a citizenship issue. I should also like to
say that I agree IT is not a separate subject. It is also less
and less of an issue for young people anyway. There may be some
cases where you need to give remedial or intensive help to kids
who have not had the access or who for some reason have not learned
to do it lower down the school, but if you talk to anybody running
an FE or a sixth form college, they will say that the incoming
skills of their students in IT are not an issue.
Mr Humphries: In the Skills Task
Force reports in 1998-2000, mathematics and the need for mathematics
was one of the biggest single issues we highlighted and I would
agree entirely with Alison. From my point of view, the only solution
to that is not to make it current maths as we know it but the
mathematical capability that we have been describing—we
said it then and I believe it now—should be a compulsory
part of the school curriculum for a young person, in the core.
Q47 Mr Chaytor: How does that relate
then to the overarching diploma? Unless at the age of 18 or 19
students do not achieve in mathematics, they do not get the overarching
diploma?
Professor Wolf: If there are no
teeth, it is meaningless. If it is "Yes, it would be nice,
but you do not really have to have it", then people will
not have it.
Q48 Mr Chaytor: You have argued for
changes to the curriculum, but you have also been critical of
teaching hairdressing and bricklaying to 14-year-olds. Where are
you pitching your changes to the curriculum? You want to get away
from a curriculum dominated by three traditional academic subjects
at A-level, but you do not want hairdressing and bricklaying for
14-year-olds.
Professor Wolf: You would not
teach bricklaying to 14-year-olds.
Q49 Mr Chaytor: Why not?
Professor Wolf: Because it is
too early for them.
Q50 Mr Chaytor: Surely it is useful
to know how to lay a brick or build a wall, regardless of whether
you want to become a bricklayer.
Mr Humphries: What are you teaching,
is the question? If what you are seeking to do is to give them
an understanding of some of the range of capabilities and experiences
which work in the construction sector may offer, then it seems
to me to be quite a legitimate thing to be doing and building
into young people's curricula at some appropriate stage in their
development; your original point about why are we talking about
14-19. To make that option available to them is very, very sound.
That is very different from expecting to produce the skilled output
of a bricklayer from that young person because you are doing two
things: one is that you would have to take up so much of the curriculum
time that you would be automatically narrowing their choice and
that is a very bad thing to do at age 14. Equally, you are assuming
that they have sufficient understanding of a range of choices
available to them to begin to narrow down in that depth. It seems
to me that you provide vocational experience almost at the broad
industry sector level as a part of the options which are available
surrounding the core, but you do not assume that suddenly you
are going to complete your modern apprenticeship by the time you
are 16½ because you have narrowed the choices available to
you to such an extent that you can actually give that amount of
time to that subject.
Q51 Mr Chaytor: I see the distinction.
What I am trying to bring out is: how is it different to teach
someone to model with clay as against teaching someone to build
a little wall? Clay is art and it is culture.
Mr Humphries: It is not different.
Professor Wolf: I do not think
it is.
Q52 Mr Chaytor: It is perfectly legitimate
to teach them how to build a wall.
Mr Humphries: Certainly.
Professor Wolf: Oh, yes.
Q53 Mr Chaytor: As long as you are
not trying to teach them to be a bricklayer.
Mr Humphries: Yes.
Professor Wolf: It is also about
schools and colleges doing what they are able to do well and not
being expected to do far more than they can possibly do.
Q54 Mr Chaytor: May I ask briefly
about assessment? What changes to the assessment regime within
the emergence of an overarching diploma and the structure of the
assessment would you like to see?
Professor Wolf: This is a completely
personal view. It goes back to this business of measurement and
the fact that doing assessment well is expensive and that only
a limited number of qualification or assessment occasions are
ever going to have broad recognition and credibility. I have absolutely
no idea what the final outcome will be from the whole Tomlinson
process but it does seem to me that one of the few things everybody
agrees on is that we are over-assessing and spending so much time
and effort on assessment that it is out of proportion to the game
and threatening the quality. My own preference would be to concentrate.
We should not get rid of GCSEs, they have clear labour market
value and recognition. It comes back to the same story I have
been trying to tell all evening, which is that there are key areas
where you want to know how people are doing. You should concentrate
your externally regulated and funded resources on those and not
worry too much about the others. In that sense it is again a core
and periphery, without wanting to go into the detail. The same
is true later: you do not need to assess and record everything
that moves. You need to decide that there is a limited number
of things that you do want to do and then you measure them properly.
Mr Humphries: Allow me to pick
that up outside the 14-19 context. I would not disagree with Alison
inside the 14-19 context. If one is talking not about the young
person who is touching hairdressing or plumbing or English literature
in its 14-19 curriculum but who has made a decision that they
wish to move down a particular occupational or vocational route—this
is a critical issue for the skills strategy—then at that
stage the fundamental thing which is contained in the skills strategy
around vocational qualifications and assessment has to be the
principle of fitness for purpose. We have almost strangled our
vocational qualification system at the moment by all sorts of
hard, fast and quite unjustified rules about what are and are
not acceptable forms of assessment. We have defined one of our
qualifications as predicated upon the only form of assessment
being observation of competence, called an NVQ, yet we have known
for years that any sensible qualification which seeks to develop
the broad range of skills required for an occupation is likely
to involve some degree of knowledge and understanding, some degree
of competence, some degree of synoptic assessment, the ability
to take all the different bits learned together and solve an overarching
problem. What we have defined out of our vocational qualification
system is fit-for-purpose assessment. If we are going to go down
that route within the unitised credit framework, the proposition
in the skills strategy, then we need a single qualification system
and the acceptance that within any particular qualification the
range of assessments which will be needed should be appropriate,
should be fit for purpose and in terms of external assessment
probably do not need to be much more than about one third of the
total assessment of people's experience. At the moment our system
is built upon distrust. It is built upon the belief that the only
way to be sure is to not trust the lecturer and to put in place
external assessment regimes and then audit regimes on top of audit
regimes to check the assessment, upping the cost and fundamentally
compromising a system which employers are now walking away from.
There are some radical needs for real changes in the assessment
regime, in vocational qualifications too. My hope is that the
projects described in the strategy will help us get there.
Q55 Mr Chaytor: Does a unitised system
of assessment invalidate the continuation of GCSE at 16?
Professor Wolf: No. At this point
in a sense one really is trying to grope in the dark. If you are
really seriously talking about going down a unitised system where
everything gets recorded, we had better start building vast systems
now to record every unit which every individual is going to get
across their lifetime and put towards a diploma or not put towards
a diploma. These are major decisions which it is not clear to
me the Tomlinson group has made one way or the other. My own feeling
is that greater things have been expected of unitised systems
than they have delivered, and most people on the whole are not
interested in knowing whether you have a unit of this and a unit
of that. Maybe we should relax a bit about it. If we are seriously
going to do it, then we had better start building the systems
now.
Q56 Mr Gibb: This has been a fascinating
session and I have learned a huge amount. I was very interested
in both your theses that what we need is a better teaching of
the basic academic skills of maths, English, science. That presumably
means a tailored curriculum to deal with the lesser achieving
50% we have been talking about. How will you teach a tailored
curriculum to a mixed ability class? Or are you saying you need
to get rid of mixed ability teaching and have comprehensives?
Mr Humphries: I do not know the
full answer. Let me go back and just describe something which
was quite successful in the 1980s and early 1990s to a degree,
which was around a programme which used to be called supportive
self study. Teachers from the period may remember it. The principle
of this was to say that if you seek to lay down a fairly standardised
approach to teaching and learning across a whole institution it
becomes very difficult to meet the needs of the individual. If
you are going to seek to meet the needs of the individual, you
almost have to restructure completely and entirely the organisation
of the school day. You cannot just tinker; you have to invert
the system. Quite a lot of work was done there about the extent
to which supportive self study techniques, which could enable
the able individual to work in a rich resourced environment, which
provided support tools—and actually some of the new developments
in technology are fantastic in terms of this—do not substitute
for the teacher, but enrich and enhance the learning experience.
If you actually invert the day and then see the teacher as a resource
to be used by individuals, you can release a lot of teaching time
to focus on the less able because the more able are working in
this environment.
Q57 Mr Gibb: How can you do that?
You said you want a tailored curriculum, so you are talking about
trying to teach different tailored curricula in the same classroom.
Is that what you are trying to explain?
Mr Humphries: No, I am saying
you change the nature of the organisation of the day. You do not
work in serried classroom ranks in strictly focused lessons. You
work much more akin to the structure of a college or even the
early stages of university where you have some lectures with quite
large groups, you will have small tutorial groups, you will have
projects which young people will go away and work in small groups
or teams on. For those who are less able to work in such a flexible
environment you have more teaching resource available.
Q58 Mr Gibb: It sounds like the sort
of school Princess Margaret would send her children to.
Professor Wolf: I am less ambitious.
I just think that there are some things which it is quite easy
to teach a mixed ability group and there are other things where
it is really very difficult. The further up the school you get
and the more you have different people following different curricula,
the more you are going to have different groups in different classes.
I agree with your first question which says that if you are teaching
a tailored curriculum and people are doing different things, quite
often they are going to be in different groups to do it. Again
it is the difference between talking about 14-year-olds, which
is the point at which I get very unhappy about people losing large
chunks of the mainstream curriculum because then it is very hard
to come back in again, and teaching 16- or 17-year-olds. By that
point in any system I know, including some of the systems which
have done the best job so far of having alternative ways of delivering
the core skills, yes, you get different groups in different classrooms,
but it is more a question, in old-fashioned jargon, of setting
rather than streaming and that is what you have to do. It comes
back to my original point that you always have to limit the choices
because you cannot afford to have 15 options if you only have
100 in the year group. You do not have the staff, you do not have
the space and you do not have the materials. You want to try to
keep people together for as long as possible, because it is important
for motivation, it is important for not cutting off opportunities.
You also want people to be able to learn and that can push you
the other way. You cannot make a shibboleth of either not having
mixed ability or having mixed ability; it depends. I am looking
at the ex-teachers or teachers here.
Helen Jones: As an ex-teacher, may I
put on the record that every group is mixed ability.
Q59 Mr Gibb: There is a deliberate
decision to mix the abilities from bottom to top in one classroom
which is what is happening in about 62% of lessons in Britain
today according to Ofsted. It is true, I will send you the figures.
It is appalling. You have both been very, very critical of the
education system. Why have we reached the position we have with
our education system where the core skills are so badly taught?
Also, a question for Professor Wolf in particular, do you think
if we did have a better general education system that would then
lead to miraculously solving the 90,000 shortage of plumbers?
Is there a direct link between our specific skills shortages and
the poor general education?
Professor Wolf: If you have a
good education system you will train plumbers a lot more efficiently
when it becomes very profitable to become a plumber, which it
has now become. Having a good general education system always
is important but it never solves all the problems. The lack of
plumbers has not just been because of things to do with the education
system. I am just slightly concerned that I appear to have given
a completely negative view of what is going on in education. Clearly
we were asked questions about the things we wanted to change and
not the things we did not want to change. That is not the impression
I would want to leave. There are areas where, there is absolutely
no question, we have not done a good job, but also areas where
we have done a good job. A lot of what is going on in primary
schools is absolutely excellent and I assume part of the mixed
ability numbers must come from that.
9 Note by witness: The body of evidence showing
that part-time work while a teenager or student helps later career
prospects, and also that even limited work experience (eg in subsidised
employment) in effective in helping the unemployed re-enter regular
employment is, by contrast, large and international. Back
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