Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR KEITH
AJEGBO AND
MR JOHN
CLARKE
24 OCTOBER 2005
Q60 Dr Blackman-Woods: I am very
interested in the results of the Canadian Academic Report. They
say they are using the programme which you have adopted in Hampshire:
A notable change from confrontational and adversarial approaches
to conflict resolution. Pupils less intimidated by bullies et
cetera. There was also a fall in detentions and exclusions. The
first question is can these results be replicated in other schools?
The second question is are we missing a trick here if citizenship
teaching in this way can impact so massively on school behaviour,
detentions and exclusions? Presumably it would also have a wider
impact on community cohesion?
Mr Clarke: The answer to your
two questions is, yes and yes, with a rider to the first one,
and that is that you cannot play at this. If you are tokenist
about it, it does not work. You have to do it seriously and it
is not just convincing the children about the rights' agenda,
it is convincing the adults in the school first that children
have rights and their job is to respect those rights. This is
not just about children learning what their rights are because
that sounds fluffy and flaky, the key to this is their understanding
that others have rights, adults too. It is about the responsibility
to respect the rights of adults as well as understanding the ones
you have yourself now, not when you are 18, not when you are 16
or 17, but now. If it is done like that and people understand
that it is underpinned by the Convention, the evidence we have
in Hampshire is that the effects can be phenomenal, staggering
even to seasoned professionals like myself. Where it does not
work is because people do not take it sufficiently serious and
they do not carry the adult population with them first before
introducing it. Then you arrive at a sort of tokenism which makes
everybody feel somewhat queasy.
Q61 Chairman: How do you measure
that dramatic difference?
Mr Clarke: We have objective data
in terms of that particular incident, reducing the number of days
lost to exclusion of 101 to seven, and we have the testimony of
head teachers who say, "This has made a staggering difference
to my school in these sorts of ways". We have only been doing
it for two years, in no sense can I claim to you that a penetration
across the Hampshire system is anywhere near what we would like
at the moment. We will be considering evaluation, both our own
and with the Canadian academics and with Sussex University as
well. If you like, these are interim results.
Q62 Dr Blackman-Woods: I was going
to ask whether there was ongoing research because it does seem
to me that if there was evidence that meant this could be demonstrated
clearly to other schools it would be easier to get others to adopt
this approach?
Mr Clarke: Certainly, in our dissemination
programme we used those head teachers as ambassadors. I do not
have to say this very often, head teachers of the schools who
are doing this say it.
Q63 Mr Wilson: How long have you
been doing this?
Mr Clarke: Two years.
Q64 Mr Wilson: Is that long enough
to have come to a conclusion about the impact it makes for a particular
school?
Mr Clarke: In some schools this
will be begun in a primary by one teacher working with usually
her class. What tends to happen is there is a contamination effect
and other teachers are beating a path to the door wanting to know
what it is that is suddenly going on in that room which was not
going on there before because things seemed to have changed so
dramatically and they can see it and they want a piece of that
action. You can see the change to this in about six weeks in a
classroom. It may not change the whole school, but you are can
see that with an effective teacher doing this properly. It may
sound like snake oil but we do have the evidence to say that it
is not.
Q65 Mr Wilson: You are saying the
principal change is the behaviour of pupils, students?
Mr Clarke: The principal change
is that children are aware of themselves and the rights they have,
that raises their self-esteem. The second thing that happens is
they begin to understand that others have rights too, so when
there are issues, as there always are in classrooms and in playgrounds
between children, we tend to see them quite quickly, if you like,
adopting rights respecting language in order to try to resolve
those questions. If you take bullying, what you tend to see is
that people are less likely to be the victims of bullying because
they are more likely to stand up for themselves because they understand
the rights they have in their place in the world. People who are
likely to be potential bullies are less likely to bully because
they understand the other people have rights. That is the way
it works, and you see these changes in classrooms and in schools
as a whole. However, I think in the written submission I said:
"This will not cure all the ills". We still have seven
days of fixed term exclusion in that school. It is a preventative
strategy; it is not an intervention strategy. It is not about
managing behaviour, it gets to values and attitudes.
Q66 Mr Wilson: How has that affected
the levels of anti-social behaviour which some young people can
get involved in outside the school gates? Has there been any noticeable
decline of that in areas where schools are implementing this policy?
Mr Clarke: I do not have any data
on that, I am sorry. I would not want to suggest anything.
Q67 Mr Wilson: Is there a link to
the type of school that is doing it? You have been doing it a
couple of years. Perhaps you had some of the better performing
schools and some of the poorer performing schools. Is it the top
performing schools that are doing this better or is it a range?
Can you make some comment on that?
Mr Clarke: The two communities
where this began in Hampshire were in Andover and Eastleigh, and
neither of them is the most advantaged area of the county, particularly
in Andover, those schools serve rather disadvantaged communities.
In terms of their performance, as measured on the traditional
measures, the Andover schools are improving and the head teachers
are convinced that it is because of this programme.
Q68 Mr Wilson: Can I get Keith to
make some comment on that specifically in relation to his own
school in terms of what he has found? Have you noticed any change
in behaviour outside the school gates in light of what you have
been doing?
Mr Ajegbo: I do not have any evidence
about that. Certainly in school we notice some changes in behaviour.
One of the original reasons why we went for citizenship was to
raise achievement. The bottom line was we felt that by giving
children a greater sense of their rights, their self-esteem and
hopefully making them more responsible, we would raise achievement.
We have done insofar as over the four years we have moved from
33% to 54%, five A-Cs. While you cannot say it is only through
citizenship, it is some evidence that we have more participation
in good learning in the school. There was also a lot of evidence
that those pupils are committing less crime out of school. There
is a lot of evidence to suggest that if you are working towards
good exam results, because you feel that is going to further empower
you, then you are less likely to get involved in things out of
school. I think there will be a correlation.
Q69 Mr Wilson: You are finding there
is less bullying within your school and less fights breaking out,
perhaps? Do you think that there is better behaviour all round?
Mr Ajegbo: Yes, we find that is
the case. There are still fights because I think in any school
you are always going to have them, but there are less fights.
They are more easily resolved and less likely to lead to bigger
fights, and the fights escalating. On the back of citizenship
we have also introduced this notion of restorative justice where
we are not looking to necessarily put blame on pupils by punishing
them, but by bringing them together with the victim. That has
made a lot of difference. It gives both pupils a voice and it
has made a lot of the bullies understand the effect of their bullying
on the person they have bullied. There is real evidence that is
making a change, so it is not quite the old punishment, the old
exclusion, it is more of bringing the pupils together in order
to talk about the issues. Again, this is about the student voice,
about pupils participating in what they have done and taking a
bit more responsibility for what they have done as opposed to
the school just punishing them, perhaps excluding them, and leaving
it at that. That had a lot of evidence, and there is a lot of
evidence in the lower school, in Year 7 and 8 where we have been
piloting this, of changes in behaviour. I think it is working
with children in perhaps a slightly different way that has been
the important aspect of citizenship. Perhaps a bit more than the
orders, I think it is this notion of participation that is key
to trying to get them to behave more responsibly. The other side
of this is, of course, you have to work with the adult, but we
have lots of debates in the school about the rights thing against
the responsibility. Staff are saying, "These pupils have
these rights, what about their responsibilities?" We have
tried to work through some of those arguments. In a sense the
rights possibly have to come before the responsibilities, but
in the end you want both.
Q70 Chairman: This is very interesting
in the sense that you are expanding the notion of citizenship,
both of you, to be about the whole school approach that permeates
the school; that is when it is really working. Does that come
out of Sir Bernard's work and how it got on the curriculum or
is it something which was always there in a good school?
Mr Ajegbo: Given that we have
done it in the way we have done it—although the notion of
it might have been there before by taking the Citizenship Orders
and looking at them—we have developed a whole school approach
and we have called it—it is not my invention, it is one
of the citizenship teacher's—the three Cs of citizenship:
the citizenship in the culture of the school, which is like the
whole school council bit of citizenship; the citizenship in the
curriculum, which is the political literacy bit; and the citizenship
in the community, which is those pupils going out into the community
or bringing people from the community into the school. What we
have done is we have made it part of our whole school work and
we are trying, although it is quite difficult, to touch all the
children, so it is not just those who like to be representatives
of the school council, everybody get touched in some way or another.
I think doing it like that, as a whole school issue as part of
our specialist school approach, has made and is making a difference
to the ethos. My feeling and hope is that in the end it softens
the school because the school then becomes a place where children
talk about what they are doing as opposed to hitting each other.
Mr Clarke: I would agree absolutely
with that. If I may I would like to go back to the question you
asked and it relates to behaviour management. I do not think anybody
would say that teachers do not need the skills to manage behaviour
that sometimes can become difficult, but the issue about behaviour
management is it is what it says, it manages behaviour. You can
never be sure, because you have managed behaviour, that when you
are not there that behaviour is not going to revert to what it
was like before. The point being made here about citizenship,
and the points which I have been making about rights, respect
and responsibility, go at it from the other end because fundamentally
those two things are whole school and they are preventative. We
hope—and I think we both have evidence to show—that
if you do those sorts of things then the number of times when
you have to manage the behaviour reduce.
Q71 Tim Farron: On the issue of extended
schools, I suppose the sense that young people need to learn citizenship,
respect and responsibility in their community as much as they
do in school—very often the school is the centre of the
community, not always the case, I represent a rural constituency.
I suppose the problem with our area, as with many other rural
areas, is that the extended school does not desperately help when
you have got the average pupil living a minimum of 10 miles away
from the school. I wonder how we look to promote not just the
out-of-school hours citizenship agenda but also the out-of-school
citizenship agenda in a co-ordinated way? I am talking about youth
work and other things, not just the special one-off projects which
happen from time to time. How does that fit in? I guess it is
a question for rural areas but also just out in the community
in general.
Mr Ajegbo: We are a full service
extended school, so therefore we have a lot of links with the
local youth workers and all the things which are going on. We
try and help co-ordinate what is happening to our pupils through
that. We also have a policewoman who works in the school and she
informs us about issues with our pupils in the local community,
so we then have direct access. The policewoman working in the
school we talk about in citizenship lessons, it becomes part of
citizenship and she is working with the pupils in terms of their
rights on the street, the things which they should and should
not do, getting their mobile phones tagged and all that sort of
stuff. It is a question of building up those networks. The amount
of influence you can have on what is happening outside the school
is obviously in some ways limited. I think the more you can involve
networks of people the more chance you have of making some difference.
Mr Clarke: I have two quick points.
Firstly, the proposals set out in the Youth Matters Green
Paper, if implemented, will answer a lot of those concerns; secondly,
I think it seems to me that everyone who works in offering a service
of whatever type within an extended school framework, working
with children and young people, needs also to understand that
one of the fundamental aims of education is to produce effective
citizens. It is not only to understand that, but understand what
it means in the way in which they work with children and young
people. It is not just an issue for all teachers and other adults
in the school, it is in the extended provision as well.
Q72 Mr Chaytor: Mr Clarke, earlier
Professor Crick was quite dismissive, as I recall, about using
conventions or constitutions as the basis for citizenship education.
What is your response to that? As a supplementary to that, is
your use of the convention in Hampshire at the absolute core of
the citizenship programme or is it a bolt-on? How is it linked
in with the community involvement strand of citizenship, for example?
Mr Clarke: The answer to the first
question is I think what Sir Bernard Crick was saying was that
he saw no point in asking children to learn 12 or 40 or 54 articles
around the convention and neither do I. The important thing is
that they understand what the convention says and that it applies
to them and to other people. That is where the responsibility
to respect other people and the rights of other people comes from.
There is a lot of UNICEF which we work closely with and resources
to support young children in understanding what that convention
is about and means. [2]It
goes beyond knowledge of the convention. It is certainly about
understanding, but it gets into the area of feeling it as well
as a citizen of the world as a six or seven-year-old. In answer
to your second question, we happen to have used this document
as the core of the work we have been developing with primary schools.
I have already said that we have issues in extending this into
secondary schools. The community dimension, which we are seeking
now with primary schools, is where clusters of schools working
together are trying to work with other services supporting them
along the Children Act agenda. In one case we are about to start
a project where we are trying to introduce this work into a residential
children's home because we feel it will help social relationships
within that. We are reaching out into the community with this
work, but it is not the same thing as what you were asking about,
which is where is the community dimension of citizenship which
we would tend to have more, I think in Key Stage 3 and 4
Q73 Mr Chaytor: We do not have to confront
that yet.
Mr Clarke: No.
Q74 Mr Chaytor: How transferable
is it? My instinctive reaction would be after two years of a programme
it is a bit early to be over-evangelical about its successes.
The issue is not necessarily to put it to the United Kingdom as
a whole, how easy would it be to transfer this to areas of inner
London or central Birmingham, for example? Are you confident that
you have got a transferable model?
Mr Clarke: It works in Cape Breton
in Nova Scotia and it works in Hampshire and there is a lot in
between. I see no reason why it cannot work in other places too.
Hampshire is a very diverse community with pockets of deprivation
and some very deprived wards as well as areas of high advantage.
I think there is transferability.
Q75 Chairman: Will you find your
work more difficult with schools once the White Paper is published
tomorrow? Will all of the schools become more independent?
Mr Clarke: Provided that we still
have as a local authority the responsibility to commission services
and monitor standards I do not think it will make a huge amount
of difference to the relationships we have in Hampshire with our
schools. The concept of local authority control is something that
we find quite difficult to understand because we have always had
schools which are autonomous and self-managing since 1993.
Q76 Mrs Dorries: It is difficult
to get a handle on citizenship in schools. We have heard that
it is flexible and variable; it is taught as a participatory subject
and in some subliminal way across the curriculum. We have heard
that evaluating is more of an art than a science. Why would a
head teacher—with all the pressures incumbent on a head
teacher and given that it is almost intangible to evaluate the
effects of teaching citizenship—want to buy into this and
take this on? Keith, your school is a specialist school, can you
take it as an example and think about teachers in other schools
which are not specialist? Why would they want to do that?
Mr Ajegbo: We took it on because
citizenship was about participation and about some ownership of
what was going on in school. We felt very much that our children
sometimes felt daunted and did not own what they were doing. It
evidenced itself in some apathy, perhaps some detachment from
the processes and our hypothesis—which might or might not
have been right, but I think has proved to be right—was
if we could involve them more in how the school operated, how
lessons operated and how they operated with other pupils, there
was more chance of them taking some ownership of their learning,
that was the basis. Our initial thrust for citizenship was to
raise the achievement of the pupils, and it seemed one way of
doing it. I think it is difficult sometimes to measure, but this
was certainly what the DfES said in response to us when we wanted
to become a citizenship school, "How will you measure that?"
I think it is something that is difficult to measure and we have
been trying to find ways of measuring it. As I said, the very
concrete measure we have is an improvement in attainment.
Q77 Mrs Dorries: A moment ago you
mentioned there were children gaining A-Cs. What are they gaining
A-Cs in? Is this science or maths or English?
Mr Ajegbo: Obviously there is
going to be a change, is there not, in term of English and maths
being part of the 5 A*-Cs. We got 54% 5 A*-Cs, but over 40% of
those included maths and English.
Q78 Mrs Dorries: They counted maths
and others, or English and others?
Mr Ajegbo: They had English and
maths and three others to make up that 40% It is less than the
5 A-Cs altogether, but we were moving in the right direction.
Q79 Mrs Dorries: How can you draw
the link between that and citizenship? Are there not things going
on at the same time?
Mr Ajegbo: Yes, there are lots
of other things. You cannot draw a direct link but we feel it
has been a strong element of the improvement we have made because
there appears to have been changes in the ethos of the school
in terms of the relationships between pupils and, perhaps more
crucially, the relationships between pupils and teachers. That
has been really important. That has come out of citizenship in
the sense that citizenship was one of the key elements at building
this sense of participation in the school.
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