Examination of Witnesses (Questions 800
- 806)
MONDAY 19 APRIL 2004
DR KEN
BOSTON AO AND
MS MARY
CURNOCK COOK
OBE
Q800 Paul Holmes: We have had Mike
Tomlinson giving evidence on the 14-19 proposals and then yourselves
and we heard a lot of enthusiasm for the direction we might go,
which I would share. We had Professor Alison Woolf talking to
us and she said that schools should not touch any of these vocational
matters or any of these reforms pre-16, schools should be concentrating
on literacy, numeracy and the basis subjects, whatever you define
those as, and none of this vocational stuff. How would you answer
that?
Dr Boston: I disagree with it.
I think they should. If we have more of the same we will continue
at the 75% participation rate at 16 and we need to increase that
substantially. I also believe, for reasons I have talked at length
about, that the capacity for a young person to grow and develop
notions of self-worth, notions of achievement, of esteem, of individual
growth and development are just as strong with vocational education
as with general education. I would agree with views that have
been in the press recently, that is just as important as the instrumentalist
position of training young people so that their country can be
economically competitive.
Q801 Paul Holmes: If you are going
to move towards these reforms—we heard on maths about the
idea of three years to accumulate the credits to get your GCSE—if
you are going to have pupils spending a day out of school in work
and a couple of days at college can all of that happen if you
still keep the rigorous league table approach which we have had
for the last few years?
Dr Boston: Mr Chairman the league
tables are, of course, beyond my remit, I do not want to—
Q802 Chairman: Go on.
Dr Boston:—duck the question.
I can understand the issue behind Mr Holme's question. I am on
the record in primary education as being an advocate of full cohort
testing for 7, 11, and 14-year-old children. I believe fundamentally
that it is important from the point of view of equity in that
it allows you to identify the performance of some groups within
the community and gives you the potential to target those groups
and achieve genuine equality of outcomes in education, by which
I mean the range and mean of performance of subgroups will equate
with the range and mean of performance as a whole. That is what
equity in education is about. I have argued that strongly from
time to time, I have not argued the case for league tables which
result from it. I certainly believe we should be able to identify
under performing schools and we should be able to take action
to deal with the situation of under performance. I have been on
the record before and I have said personally to the Secretary
of State and to David Miliband I am not sure the best way to do
it is through league tables but I think the value added data that
is being used at the moment is a significant improvement.
Q803 Paul Holmes: Would league tables
in the form we have at the moment militate against schools who
wanted to go in for the more flexible options for pupils and their
doing different things?
Dr Boston: They have the potential
to. One of the design features I think we need to look at through
Tomlinson in achieving these reforms is reaching a situation where
they do not. If they were to work against the interests' of students,
the interests' of learners, which is the primary responsibility,
we would be going to Government expressing concerns about that.
Q804 Paul Holmes: Very diplomatic.
We have had a couple of examples, we heard about maths with Curriculum
2000—and I was teaching Curriculum 2000 for the first year
and a half when it was introduced—we are now hearing people
saying what teachers said back then in many areas—maths
was one we just heard about—that it was out of kilter with
what it was demanding of the students and what teachers would
have advocated doing. We also hear that QCA have now agreed that
Key Stage 3 assessment in English for 14-year-olds should be changed
because 90% of teachers said that the current method was unworkable
and unsuitable. How can you be so out of kilter with what teachers
are saying on Curriculum 2000, certainly parts of it, that on
Key Stage 3 for English you have to revamp the whole thing after
a few years? Why did you not just listen to the teachers in the
first place?
Dr Boston: Again, I do not want
to duck the issue by saying this is a different watch, but the
reality is when you look back to Curriculum 2000, and I have said
this before and to this Committee, its introduction was rushed.
It became very clear with mathematics after the first two years
from all the evidence that the amount of mathematics being taught
was just huge and that the balance between pure and applied mathematics
was out of kilter. As a consequence, we have stripped back the
total content of mathematics, we have arranged it so that the
harder parts are all retained but there would be a different balance
between the pure and applied components which the mathematicians
tell us is of particular benefit. An adjustment has been made
there. In the light of Adrian's report there will be further substantial
developments in mathematics. We would take his point that there
are problems with modularisation of some elements of mathematics,
so in these units that I was talking about previously there will
be in all subjects some units which are large and some units which
are small, some mathematics units obviously cohering larger parcels
than other ones. On the Key Stage 3 English testing programme,
the motivation there to change is substantially to increase the
validity of marking by splitting the marking into the writing
assessment and the reading assessment rather than having the single
assessment done by one teacher, using two different mark scales
and increasing the validity of the marking as a result. As you
will be aware, this is a subject where there has been a large
number of requests for remarking and small but substantial proportions
upheld.
Chairman: The last set of questions go
to Val, who has been very patient.
Q805 Valerie Davey: You just talked
about adjustments to the maths curriculum and we heard earlier
that it possibly needed more than that. In fact, we were told
within Professor Smith's report that in terms of mathematics the
curricula, the assessment and the qualifications are no longer
fit for purpose. Is it reform that is needed or further adjustment?
Dr Boston: It is reform that is
needed. We are responding to the Smith report. We have been given
a remit by the Secretary of State, particularly at the moment
on the place of statistics in the maths curriculum, the extension
curriculum, Key Stages 3 and 4, designations of maths qualifications
and provision for more able mathematicians post-16. We have developed
responses to that which we are putting back to the Secretary of
State for consideration in the light of where we go with Smith.
I would think it fair to say that we understand and acknowledge
that there is a problem with mathematics facing this country,
not only this country but certainly facing this country, which
is of an order different from other problems in parts of the curriculum
and his report provides us with a very constructive way forward
and we are locked in behind it and determined to play our part
in its implementation.
Q806 Valerie Davey: I think he was
very specific with us today as well as in his report about his
description of the AS/A2 split which he repeated was a disaster.
It would seem that needs to be remedied rather more quickly perhaps
than some of the other issues which you have described where careful
consideration is going to be given. Is there any attention going
to be given immediately to the AS/A2 split?
Dr Boston: The remedies that we
have given, the change in balance between the units, the capacity
to do five rather than six and restructure them in different ways,
is an adjustment which has Adrian Smith's support. Indeed, I consulted
closely, and our maths people consulted closely with him, before
that adjustment was made and he assured us that it was consistent
with where his eventual report, which is now out, would go. As
I think he said today, we need to keep an eye on that and see
how it beds down but it has got to be allowed to run for a couple
of years to see whether that result has worked. I think one of
the problems with all of this, and we go back to Curriculum 2000,
is that if we rush to fix everything we see as a potential issue
then we could end up in the same situation next year as we ended
up in 2002 with the A-level problems, which were the result of
rushed introduction fundamentally, were the result of no satisfactory
exemplification material having been produced because the A2 examination
was brought on a year earlier than it really should have been.
Although one sees issues here where we say "we can fix that
by immediately doing that", we could fix it by decoupling
AS and A2, we could immediately change the assessment load, we
have got to be wary of these things. Our view is you could change
the assessment load by 2006 but you cannot really decouple AS
and A2 before you have got a new A2 standard and at the moment
we do not, we have an AS standard and an A-level standard, which
is the two years combined, we do not have an AS standard at the
moment stand alone. We could get one but it would take a couple
of years to do that. You obviously have to trial and pilot it,
get the exemplification materials, get the teachers trained to
understand it and the history surely of the last few years of
English education has been a lesson not to rush change but to
project manage it carefully and well.
Chairman: Can I thank you. We are limited
by a six o'clock stop tonight but I am very fully aware, Ken and
Mary, that we have only started getting to some of the material
that we want to. I hope you will see this in Hollywood terms as
meeting committee one and two will follow shortly because there
are some very important issues that we do have to delve a little
further into. Can I thank you for your attendance, we have learned
a lot. The problem is you have given us so much food for thought
we have got to come back for more. Thank you.
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