Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 239)
MONDAY 5 DECEMBER 2005
SIR ALAN
STEER, MR
STEVE MUNBY
AND MR
RALPH TABBERER
Q220 Chairman: Going back to schools,
Sir Alan, how big is your school?
Sir Alan Steer: My school has
1,360 students.
Q221 Chairman: What would be the
impact on you of taking 200 kids out of that school?
Sir Alan Steer: We would obviously
have a period of considerable disruption. If you take 200 students
out of a big secondary school, you are reducing the resources
by a large amount and the period in which you were doing that
would be one of tricky management.
Q222 Chairman: And 200 more because
you are a popular school?
Sir Alan Steer: We would not want
200 more, Chairman. Not only would one consider that the size
of the school is appropriate to the site, but also we might suggest
that perhaps the reason we are successful is because of the structure.
Also, the particular unique situation for us is we are a very
inclusive school. We have 40 children with physical disabilities,
and I think the governors would resist very vigorously any suggestion
to add children to the school.
Q223 Chairman: Mr Tabberer, Rob has
accused you of dodging the question.
Mr Tabberer: I apologise. I think
in this situation we are ignoring some of the dynamics of schools
with falling roles, of course. Local authorities and schools are
already looking at lower numbers. In some secondary schools they
will be reducing by 200. In fact, if we do not, local authorities
and schools, grapple with the issues of how many schools we have
got, possible mergers, some expansions and some closures, then
we could end up with a situation where Sir Alan and his colleagues
may have the same number of children in their schools, but they
may have a lower unit of resource for each child. There are efficiencies
that we have got to effect over the next year. The interesting
point for me is that all of these matters—expansions, closures,
mergers, federations, whatever—do need local management.
They need the school taking an active part and they need the school
working with its local community. If any of us leave these to
unplanned forces, then individual schools will find themselves
in very difficult positions. That is the context I want to put
forward.
Sir Alan Steer: I would agree
with that, Chairman. I was going to comment that this is a very
good illustration of the complexity of the education system in
England because as a head teacher in outer London, there is no
problem at all about falling roles, our problem is with rising
roles and the pressure on schools with an inadequate number of
places for demand. You have in England a very, very varied pattern
which is just a reminder that all the policies we carry out will
differ according to the context of the area.
Q224 Mr Wilson: Mr Tabberer, I notice
again that you have answered my question in very broad terms without
specifically dealing with the issue that I am trying to grapple
with in the White Paper. The White Paper is giving parents, governors,
and so forth, the power to expand their school without any recourse
to anywhere else. What I am trying to get at is do you agree with
that set of proposals in the White Paper or not?
Mr Tabberer: I do agree. I agree
that we should allow schools to expand. I agree, like most things
in education, that you should exercise that responsibility responsibly.
You should work with other schools within your community and your
local authority. You should identify the risks and you should
arrive at a joint agreement on that. I do not think we should
deny good schools the opportunity to expand. For me this should
be standards driven and quality driven. Again, I would encourage
the local authorities not to sit back and wring their hands about
what might happen, but to do what they normally do well, which
is to get to grips with the local discussions and consultations
which leads this to be used well in order to improve children's
outcomes.
Q225 Mr Wilson: Just to sum up, you
are a fan of parent power over and above local authorities having
the overall school management plan?
Mr Tabberer: I am in favour of
certainly a large measure of parent power. I am in favour of a
large measure of local planning. I am in favour of letting schools
that do things well have more freedom to get on and make a difference
in their areas. It is difficult to square these forces, but for
me that is why the implementation plan for the White Paper is
of so much more interest at the moment than the Bill. It is how
the school commissioner works with local communities to see this
through, which will make this a good measure or not.
Q226 Chairman: You agree that it
has been difficult to tell from what it says?
Mr Tabberer: At this stage but,
again, I am speaking for the White Paper, because I think introducing
these capacities for schools, the greater capacity to federate,
to put schools together is basically a good idea. For the last
15 years we have had 23,500 individual units in English education,
about 20,000 primary schools and 3,500 secondary schools. There
is some real energy in some schools to take on more than just
their own local responsibility. There is some real energy amongst
very good heads to spread their responsibility to taking on more
than some schools. There are some very strong opportunities available,
including in admissions. If you start to get four schools in an
area working under one trust, there are real opportunities to
start looking at admissions as a balanced approach in those schools
rather than one school competing with another maybe for the middle
class children.
Q227 Mr Wilson: Obviously with the
White Paper heads are going to be taking on much more complex
roles, admissions policies and a whole series of other things.
This is really directed at Steve, I suppose. Do you think the
extra freedoms and responsibilities in the White Paper could lead
to a freer hand to improve quality and improve things overall?
Mr Munby: Can I pick up on the
last point first, which is that I support what Ralph has been
saying, but I do think that the expansion of schools should be
standards and quality driven. I am not convinced that is always
the same as the most popular, especially in areas of deprivation.
Let me go back to the question you are asking me which is whether
or not the greater autonomy of schools is going to help. Certainly
I am convinced that one of the reasons why we have such good school
leadership in this country, unlike many other countries, is we
do have self-managing schools. Even community schools are far
more self-managing than they are in many other countries. I think
that is the strength of our system. Whether or not there will
be a great deal of difference in the greater autonomy compared
with what schools currently have, I am not sure. Certainly when
I was Director of Education in my last job I did not get lots
of school leaders asking me for permission to do things, it is
not that kind of world anymore. It may be that the greater autonomy
is going to help, and certainly I think school leaders do need
autonomy to manage their own situation in their own school. They
must not do it in isolation, and that is why I am pleased that
the White Paper also talks about school leaders collaborating
together and school leaders working in a collective around the
needs of the children in that area. They also talk about trusts,
where schools could work in partnership in federation with other
schools. It is not to be just them on their own as an isolated
school leader, I think that would be a bad move for the system.
If we have school leaders who are autonomous who are working together,
either in groups of schools or federations or trusts, I think
that could be a good thing for the system.
Q228 Mr Marsden: Ralph, your replies
to my colleague, Rob Wilson, were broad and interesting but somewhat
discursive. Do they add up—this co-operation you are talking
about—to a strengthened role for local authorities or not?
Mr Tabberer: I think it is a strength
for local authorities to have a clear commissioning role, that
is a helpful move. Local authorities ought to maintain their planning
role and ought to seek to work very closely with their schools
on ensuring that the wider agenda, with which they are concerned,
not least the Children's Agenda, is managed well. Local authorities
still have a major important role, and that is not undermined
by letting the schools have more autonomy.
Q229 Mr Marsden: Are you saying they
should not be worried by the White Paper, they should see opportunities
in it?
Mr Tabberer: As ever, yes.
Q230 Mr Marsden: Can I take you on
to another aspect of the White Paper. The White Paper seems to
be giving us a very sunny uplands view of training in the future.
It talks about school workforce, a wide range of roles, more sports
staff, trained sports coaches, trained administrative staff, and
you will be pleased to know that you are the new modernised agency
for the schools workforce that is expected to deliver this nirvana.
However, you have just referred previously to CPD, and I have
spent nearly two years talking to teachers on particular aspects
of the curriculum which DVOs have been involved in, and that is
the history curriculum. The constant feedback I have had is that
there is very little time in school either for retraining or initial
training for CPD. How you are going to square those two?
Mr Tabberer: There are moves to
give teachers more time in primary schools for planning, preparation
and assessment. The current moves to maintain downward pressures
on teacher workload I think are all necessary steps.
Q231 Mr Marsden: Are these including
the so-called "Kelly days"?
Mr Tabberer: I think it is "Kelly
hours" that you are referring to, no, it does not incorporate
those. I think it is extremely important that we look at the way
the school workforce develops in order to concentrate teachers
on teaching and to help eke out more time for their continuous
professional development.
Q232 Mr Marsden: You can do both
jobs, can you? You can implement the CPD stuff that is now being
talked about as well as taking on this broader role of training
these broader groups of people which the White Paper say are going
to come into our schools? You are confident of that, are you?
Mr Tabberer: I think it is a very
complementary agenda. If we can continue to develop the roles
of support staff in targeted help to individual children, personalised
learning, the roles of support staff working alongside teachers
in classrooms, the roles of interagency staff in speech therapy,
occupational therapy, improving the wider lot of children, then
I think we can concentrate teachers more on teaching and give
them more time for their own professional development. Professional
development and support staff development is not, at the end of
the day, my job; it is the schools' job.
Q233 Mr Marsden: Let us get a quick
reaction from the person who has to deliver this day in and day
out. Sir Alan, I noticed you were looking down at your paper,
but you may just be tired! The truth of the matter is the picture
that I painted in that particular area of history teachers is
a frustration which is expressed across the profession, is it
not? Do you not have your teachers coming and saying, "All
these initiatives from DfES and God knows what, I have got no
time to do CPD even it is given space".
Sir Alan Steer: We do. It is a
very difficult question to answer because whichever answer I give
I think I am going to be hung on that.
Q234 Mr Marsden: It is all right,
we will not hold it against you.
Sir Alan Steer: I am trying to
be truthful. I think training is something that we in schools
have neglected. We have not put sufficient importance on it, and
I will say that against myself. For example, we were talking about
newly qualified teachers, generally, we have been quite good at
training teachers when they first come into the school and quite
bad at continuing that into Year 2, 3, 4, and 5. I think—and
I hope Steve will still be a friend—at head level, if I
look back over my career, the training has been weak. I have always
argued—and I do not know whether I will be popular with
my professional association—that possibly the training for
head teachers should not be a voluntary issue, but it should be
a mandatory issue. It still strikes me as bizarre that I can go
on until the day I retire without, if I do not wish, any form
of training whatsoever, considering the number of children and
the resources that one is responsible for. Having said all that,
there is the potential in schools to vastly improve training if
you get the culture right. That is a very easy thing for a head
teacher to say with all the dangers of the poor classroom teacher
saying, "Well he would, would he not". My school has
embarked, in the last four years, on probably the most exciting
educational initiative of my entire professional career, which
has been the Assessment for Learning, which has very little, if
any, resource implications, is hugely motivational for teachers
and highly effective. It is difficult, but under time pressure
one is going to sound a bit like a headline, often in a school
it is an issue not that we have too many meetings, we have too
many bad meetings.
Q235 Mr Marsden: It happens in politics
as well.
Sir Alan Steer: I am sure it happens
everywhere. Going back to the report you see, what you have not
asked me, were you to ask me what do I think is the most significant
element in it, I think the most significant element in it is the
hope that Ofsted will change its guidance to schools on filling
in the self-evaluation form, so as to encourage schools to have
a learning and teaching policy which provides baseline consistency
and a behaviour policy which is genuinely regularly reviewed because
at present both those things are not universal. We do not—to
answer one or two of your questions—share practice. You
were asking about the experience of going from school to school.
Often it is the experience within school which is just as significant.
The variations inside an institution are often more challenging
than the variations between the institutions. I am not negative
about CPD, I think good CPD can be delivered in a way that is
highly motivational for teachers, but you need to create the climate
first and do it in such a way that it is manageable and relevant.
We have suffered, unfortunately, over the years with some very
bad CPD.
Q236 Mr Marsden: My colleague Jeff
Ennis mentioned citizenship earlier. Is that, for example, something
in your school you have been able to give sufficient time and
training to?
Sir Alan Steer: I think so. Very
clearly citizenship is the moment a child enters the school door,
it is not composed of half an hour a week. It is from greeting
somebody at the school gates, it is throughout the day until they
go home, it is the quality of the food, whether there are carpets
on the floor, whether there are pictures on the wall and whether
the toilets are clean, all those things plus the more formal citizenship
programmes combined. There is not a magic bullet, you advance
on a broad front and have 101 targets. The day you forget it and
you leave off the one key target, you miss the point. It is tough.
Q237 Chairman: Coming back to the
White Paper, you feel more at ease when I take you off the White
Paper, so I am bringing you back. Sir Alan, you have got a lot
of experience. You are a very experienced head. They are not going
to take your knighthood away whatever you tell us. What is your
overall assessment of the White Paper?
Sir Alan Steer: I was genuinely
really pleased about the picking up of the behaviour elements.
There was no recommendation in the Behaviour Report, which I am
not fully happy with. It was a genuine independent body. I think
head teachers and practitioners were sufficiently awkward that
it would not have been possible to be otherwise. I was really
pleased that so many were picked up. There are a number of items
in the White Paper. I want to think more and want to see the ideas
expanded. We have talked today about trust schools. I twitched
when Steve used the expression "even community schools",
I am very proud to be a community school, I know you did not mean
it in that sense. If I had wanted to do certain things, we could
have applied to be a foundation school, but it was not something
that our governors felt was appropriate in our context. Equally,
I thoroughly endorse the independence which Ralph was referring
to and which has been present since 1990. I think this has been
immeasurably wonderful as a head teacher: standards have risen,
resources are better, all sorts of things. I would not want to
give up our freedom. We are a specialist school and we embrace
that culture, but we also embrace working with others. We have
a number of networks which we interlink with other schools, some
in more challenging circumstances than ours. Probably an honest
answer to you is I would want to think much more about the White
Paper. There are certain areas which I am not quite sure I see
the direction of thinking.
Q238 Chairman: You seemed to be more
worried when I pushed you a little on expanding your school or
reducing it.
Sir Alan Steer: I was not worried,
it is just that it is a particular issue because of the factor
I said, particularly the special needs. Special needs is probably
very close to my heart. I was on a government committee for a
couple of years and we have been involved in the integration work
for getting on for 20 years. I am concerned that you might lose
the very thing that makes the school successful, if you do not
recognise at what point extra bodies perhaps become a negative
thing. We are very popular and we could take another 200 children
per year, but I doubt whether parents would want that if we became
such a size that the quality and the culture begin to change.
Personally, I would not be interested in expanding the school,
it would be something that I would be quite resistant to. Other
schools in a different context may see it differently.
Q239 Chairman: A number of the witnesses
we have had so far on the White Paper have already said that one
of the real problems is really discerning what is the role of
the local government in this new world. As you touch on particular
areas, what is going to impact on the admissions? You would have
a view on admissions, would you not, Sir Alan?
Sir Alan Steer: I have read the
reports in the press and I have read the White Paper twice, which
I think is quite good really. I wondered whether the two were
taking about the same thing because I have not really seen the
radical element of admissions in the White Paper as distinct from
what a school could do, for instance, if it become a foundation
school. Presumably it could set up its own admissions policy and
apply to the adjudicator if it so wished. I think some of the
discussion about admissions is more, perhaps, a fear for the future
rather than the present, but it may be my lack of understanding.
I have read this thing carefully, and I see the role of the local
authorities as extremely important in the local strategic planning,
particularly, for instance, you can imagine in a very urban area
where you have got a number of schools close together, somebody
has to provide that strategic direction. I am very comfortable
with the concept in the five-year plan, and in the White Paper
of local authorities as champions of parents and pupils. I would
not want the local authority to be engaged in managing my school.
I think that is something best done at school level. I was very
comfortable with what Ralph said and agree with him entirely.
I think local management has been excellent in raising standards
and would not want to give up a fraction of it, but there is a
role of the local authorities as the overall strategic planner
and the protector of the vulnerable.
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