UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 581-vii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

Citizenship Education

 

 

Monday 6 November 2006

LORD ADONIS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 490 - 608

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 6 November 2006

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Jeff Ennis

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Fiona Mactaggart

Mr Gordon Marsden

Stephen Williams

Mr Rob Wilson

 

________________

Witness: Lord Adonis, a Member of the House of Lords, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, Department for Education and Skills, gave evidence.

Q490 Chairman: Can I welcome Lord Adonis to the proceedings. It is some time since we had you in front of the Committee. If I remember, it was Education Outside the Classroom.

Lord Adonis: It seems all too recently actually, Chairman. Special Education.

Q491 Chairman: I am right in saying that Education Outside the Classroom has been removed from you and across to Jim Knight?

Lord Adonis: It has, and I am sure he would be delighted to appear before you.

Q492 Chairman: Can I welcome you and say that I do not know what magic ingredient you have, Andrew, because we have tried Ken Livingstone, all sorts of people, in front of the Committee in the last couple of weeks to bring in the national press, and suddenly you are here and they are here. Sir Trevor Phillips and Ken Livingstone did not do it; you have done it.

Lord Adonis: I am delighted I provide such a parliamentary service to the Committee.

Q493 Chairman: You know that this is an inquiry that we are coming to the end of on citizenship. In fact, it is a very good day for the Committee because we visited a Muslim school in Tooting this morning, which you know well, which was the last visit of the inquiry. We are more or less ready to write up, but before we can do that, we have an interview with you. This is a difficult area really, is it not? We have taken some time getting what I call some shape on this inquiry, and some of us believe perhaps that is because it is a bit of a shapeless subject out there. Can I invite you to say a few words before we start asking our questions?

Lord Adonis: I would be delighted to, Chairman. Perhaps I can apologise in advance that, although I have got out of most of the votes in my House this afternoon, I may be summoned down for the vote on extradition, but I promise to come back. Thank you, Chairman, for the opportunity to say a few words and, of course, I have been paying close attention to the proceedings on this important inquiry. Citizenship education was only introduced nationally four years ago as a statutory subject, but it obviously takes time to get a completely new subject for which there was previously virtually no specialist teachers or support materials embedded school by school. There has been reasonable progress. We have introduced initial teacher training and continuing professional development opportunities for citizenship teachers; there is an increasingly popular short course GCSE with a full GCSE and A level to follow; support materials for schools have been developed; the Association of Citizenship Teaching is now thriving; and Keith Ajegbo's review is under way and will, we hope, strengthen the subject further. Of course, there is a good deal more to do. Ofsted reported in September that the provision for citizenship education is inadequate in a quarter of schools. We need to continue strengthening the subject, with more specialist teachers, more continuing professional development and more support, and we are seeking to do all these three things. May I also highlight some of the other Ofsted findings to make three broad points. First, when citizenship is taken seriously as a subject by schools, the evidence is that it is being taught well. Of the lessons observed in Ofsted's 2005-06 sample of schools, seven in every ten were judged to be good; less than one in 20 lessons were deemed to be inadequate. The report does note that poorer lessons reflected limitations in teachers' subject knowledge, which is precisely why we need more specialist teachers and more CPD. The Department is funding a new CPD certificate in citizenship for 1,200 teachers over the next two years. Secondly, citizenship is a demanding subject to teach well. It is designed to teach pupils about the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a participatory democracy. Its job is to introduce students to a host of challenging debates which occur locally, nationally and globally, and citizenship should inform the ethos and value system of every school, for example, in volunteering, in the work of schools councils and other exercises in direct pupil participation in their own school community. The Department is giving a good deal of support in particular to schools councils and Professor Geoff Whitty, who is one of your professional advisers and Director of the Institute of Education, will shortly be reporting to Alan Johnson on their future development. Thirdly, can I say a word about Keith Ajegbo's diversity and citizenship curriculum review. Keith and his team are examining best practice on how diversity can be promoted in schools throughout the curriculum. The team is also considering whether modern British history should be incorporated into the secondary citizenship education curriculum. We expect to have his report in the New Year and Alan Johnson will report to Parliament on any proposed curriculum changes before Easter. In conclusion, I am glad to note from your previous hearings that there is a broad consensus that citizenship education can contribute significantly to young people's understanding of the democratic culture and practice of the United Kingdom and their willingness to participate more fully in our society. Without doubt, this is a challenging area, but our schools are to be congratulated on the good progress they have been making and we need to give them appropriate encouragement and support to do better still.

Q494 Chairman: Thank you for that. Can I say to you that you mentioned our special adviser, Geoff Whitty, who we are very pleased and delighted maintains the relationship with this Committee. As I understand it, you have suggested that we can have a copy of his report as soon as it is available. Would you say the same about Keith Ajegbo's report?

Lord Adonis: Absolutely. He is working hard on it at the moment. We hope to have the report shortly before Christmas. It may be that we have an interim report sooner than that, which I will be in a position to send you, or at least, a summary of what it says. If I can do so, I certainly will.

Q495 Chairman: Any material you give to us is treated in the correct way, as you know.

Lord Adonis: Indeed.

Q496 Chairman: We were a little disappointed last week when your comments on our inquiry into the further education system were put on the Department's press coverage before we were communicated with. When you have a team meeting, perhaps you could just say.

Lord Adonis: I will pass on those comments.

Q497 Chairman: That has never happened before.

Lord Adonis: I will see that anything I send you goes straight to you before it goes to anyone else.

Q498 Chairman: Thank you, but you will mention it at a team meeting?

Lord Adonis: I undertake to do so.

Q499 Chairman: Can we get started then? We found it very difficult until quite late on in this inquiry. Normally when you are taking oral evidence, as we do, and all the written evidence that comes in, we do visits, quite early there is some kind of shape, some feeling that you are getting to some conclusions in an inquiry. This one has been more difficult. All our colleagues have said, "Yes, it is difficult to get your hands on this particular subject." We have actually done better as time has gone on, and especially the visits have brought to life not only the challenges of the citizenship agenda but also seeing some good practice in schools like the Blue School in Wells and a very good school in Nailsea that we visited on the same day. But when you talk to people at the sharp end in the schools, on the one hand, they are very enthusiastic about the subject; on the other, they are worried that this was one of the Government's fashions of two or three years ago and perhaps it is waning and the Government has moved on to a new fashion. Would you understand that feeling out there?

Lord Adonis: I do not think that is correct. Of course, this followed Bernard Crick's review. It was introduced as a curriculum subject five years ago and took effect in schools four years ago, but I think if you look at the record of my Department, it has been one of consistent support in terms of the training of teachers, materials provided for teachers and the emphasis we give to citizenship. Getting a completely new subject off the ground from scratch in schools is challenging, particularly when it is one for which there were virtually no specialist teachers before, and which is multifaceted as a subject. Reading through the evidence that has been presented to you, there is a big debate in the citizenship community itself and within the schools about how far citizenship should be a discrete subject, taught discretely in citizenship lessons, how far it can be taught across the curriculum, and what is the overlap with, for example, geography and modern history, where there is clearly a substantial overlap. There are those big and vibrant debates within the education and curriculum communities, and the other big debate which I see in schools the whole time and you will have picked up from your visits is how far citizenship should be regarded as an applied subject, something that schools do in practice. Of course, clearly, they must do both, but how you relate what they do in an applied way with how they actually teach the theory of citizenship, the component parts of political literacy and so on is a debate that schools are having up and down the country. One of the things that has most struck me as a Minister visiting schools and reflecting on the change from when I was at school is the huge development of schools councils, which is the reason we have Geoff Whitty looking at how that area of work can be developed. I should say that on about half of the school visits I make now, without any prompting from me, part of the schedule of my visit is a meeting with the school's council. When I was at school they barely existed - my school never had one, and the idea of democratic participation in the school would have been regarded by my headmaster as some kind of indication of forthcoming anarchy - whereas now they are an established part of schools. They do fantastic work, including in an increasing number of primary schools. That is just one amongst many examples of citizenship in action within schools, and it is the combination of that applied dimension to citizenship in schools with the theory that I think is one of the challenging areas that schools have to wrestle with. As I say, the introduction of citizenship is a multifaceted issue, but I would not say that it is anything other than central to my Department's objectives for the curriculum, and we do recognise that we need to make continuing investment and support available to schools.

Q500 Chairman: Would you recognise the experience the Committee has had in terms of seeing active learning, putting citizenship, without even calling it citizenship but having processes in the school, like the school's council, like being told off by certain members of the Committee? One of the systems we saw was rather like an Athenian democracy. It was pointed out that women were not allowed to participate.

Lord Adonis: There were lots of slaves around as well.

Q501 Chairman: That is right, but in terms of the principle, the forum and much else, it was this active participation that seemed to be delivering real energy to the citizenship agenda. Whereas it seemed to us people thought there was less value in just the subject, where you could argue how much Shakespeare should there be in citizenship, how much British history, which date, where did it start, how much about the British Empire and the pink bits of the map, that one bit seemed to be much more controversial and resistant than the other.

Lord Adonis: If I take those part by part, so far as the applied citizenship is concerned, there is hardly a school in the country which is not seeking to enhance - and rightly seeking to enhance - the role that pupils play in the school, forms of participation, the role of volunteering, the engagement of the school in its community and so on, and all of those are, as it were, the applied aspects of citizenship. Taking schools councils, one of the things that surprised me about this was the extent to which they are developing in primary schools to a huge degree. I should say from what I have seen a majority of primary schools now have schools councils and School Councils UK, with the support of the Department, provides excellent materials for primary schools in how to set them up. As you say, the debate there is not about whether; it is about how. A school I visited, previously a very weak school, which is now making rapid improvements, I visited last week again and they introduced me to the school's council. The school's council had itself been interviewing would-be teachers for posts, and the head teacher told me that he and his colleagues reached the same conclusion as the school's council and it was very much an iterative process between the council and him over the attributes that they wanted in their teachers. Again, that is a big development in the life of schools, and there is a debate going on in the schools community about the appropriate role for councils, including the manner of their election. The Athenian democracy instance you gave may be a reference to debates that I know are going on in schools as to whether or not schools councils should be elected by secret ballots in the manner of parliamentary elections or in a more open process by forms and so on. So there is a big debate going on in those areas. When it comes to teaching citizenship as a subject, of course, it is much less well developed. It is not that it is not a satisfactory subject in its own right; I think the evidence is that it is. If you actually look at the component parts of the subject, they look to me to stand as clearly and satisfactorily as a subject as other subjects. Students can read from the programme of study for Key Stage 4: students should be taught about the legal and human rights and responsibilities underpinning society and how they relate to citizens, including the role and operation of the criminal and civil justice systems; the origins and implications of the diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities of the United Kingdom and the need for mutual respect and understanding; the work of Parliament, the government and the courts in making and shaping the law; the importance of playing an active part in democratic and electoral processes, and so it goes on. I have no difficulty, Chairman, in looking at that and saying that this is a satisfactory subject; it has as much coherence as any other subject in the curriculum. There is at the moment only a limited number of citizenship teachers out there who are teaching it. The tooling up of the profession to be able to teach it in the systematic way that you require of any subject has a lot further to go and I think that is what gives some of the air of uncertainty about it in and out of schools.

Q502 Chairman: Is it partly though your fault, Lord Adonis, in the sense that everyone sees you as the kind of wisdom on this? It is very much related to how people think about the citizenship agenda being very close to your heart. Is your enthusiasm shared by the rest of the ministerial team?

Lord Adonis: It has absolutely been shared by successive Secretaries of State. David Blunkett, of course, introduced it; Estelle Morris's successor had been Minister of State when it was introduced and was very enthusiastic about it and the same has been true of Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly and now Alan. So there has been no shortage of enthusiasm. The issue, of course, has been one of tooling up. We are training now about 220 citizenship teachers a year through initial teacher training. That is 220 more than of course was taking place before the subject started, and that has taken us to about 1,000 teacher training places made available by the end of this academic year. That is a huge advance; in four years we now have nearly 1,000 teachers who will have gone through the system with full ITT training, but of course, there are 3,500 secondary schools, which means that, even assuming that those teachers are spread evenly, the majority of secondary schools still will not have a dedicated citizenship teacher. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, which is that it takes time to train teachers. We are taking another big step forward this year with the new certificate training for in-service training for teachers, 1,200 places over the next two years of in-service training for teachers, including a distance learning option which we are developing with Birkbeck College. Again, if those 1,200 places are taken up, plus the existing 1,000, we may, I hope, get to the position fairly soon where a majority of secondary schools do have a dedicated citizenship teacher, but it does take time to get to that position and that is the objective which is uppermost in our minds.

Chairman: That moves us nicely on to leadership.

Q503 Paul Holmes: At the start of the Committee's inquiry, Sir Bernard Crick gave evidence and he seemed disillusioned. He told us that he thought that some senior politicians either had no faith in the citizenship programme or they had forgotten it existed at all. There seemed to be a suggestion that you had had the headlines four years ago and now you have moved on to other initiatives that would interest the press. How would you comment on that?

Lord Adonis: I read Bernard's evidence in full. I thought what he said was that, of course, he has had a continuing concern about, as it were, seeking to educate the political class about the importance of citizenship education in schools but he also, when he described the progress that had been made, he thought the progress that had been made had been good - that is what he said to you - considering that we were starting from a standing start four years ago. What was interesting about what he said, and what I think is interesting about the debate, is I remember vividly, because I was in Number 10 as an adviser at the time when Bernard first reported and the debate was taking place about whether citizenship should be introduced as a subject. The big concern then was partly a concern about teacher workload, as there always is when introducing new subjects. There was a big concern about whether this would be seen as political indoctrination, unacceptable forms of partisanship in schools and so on. To my mind, as I remember the discussion at the time, that was our biggest concern, that we as a Government at the time would be seen as trying to take politics into the classroom by allowing citizenship education to be taught. One of the things I find very striking about the debate now is that that really does not feature at all. I have looked at the discussion in your Committee, including the questions you have been asking of your witnesses. Very few people have been seeking to argue that those aspects of the system that I read out - legal and human rights and responsibilities, the origins and implications of a diverse national, regional and religious identities, the work of Parliament, government and the courts, the importance of playing an active part in democratic and electoral processes and so on - represent indoctrination. Indeed, when I appeared about six months ago now before the Modernisation Committee with the then Leader of the House in the chair, there was a universal enthusiasm amongst all of the Members present from all parties to see Parliament itself play a bigger part in the development of citizenship education in schools. One of the ideas that we discussed - as it happens it was a long exchange between myself and Theresa May across the Committee - was whether MPs could play a bigger part in mentoring citizenship, trainee citizenship teachers, which I think is an excellent idea because we have 220-odd ITT citizenship teachers a year. Would it not be a great idea, Chair, if we could have each of them partnered with a Member? She thought this was a good idea; the then Chair, Geoff Hoon, did too. As a result of those exchanges we are now, with the Hansard Society, starting a pilot scheme of partnering ITT students in citizenship with Members on a systematic basis as part of the year that they spend doing their ITT. All these sorts of practical proposals I think will increasingly embed citizenship and I think make it, in so far as there is any continuing tinge of controversy about it as a subject, much more of a practical task of embedding it and getting all of those of us who are passionate about the subject to be able to help the community of citizenship teachers make an impact in schools.

Q504 Paul Holmes: You have raised a lot of interesting points but, with respect, none of them answered my question. Let us try again. Sir Bernard Crick specifically said to the Committee he was amazed that from the Prime Minister and other Ministers we now get a great deal of talk about respect, about problems of integration, about problems of youth behaviour but all this was why we set up a Citizenship Advisory Group; it is all embedded in the order itself, and he said "I am amazed that some senior politicians either do not have faith in the citizenship programme or perhaps have forgotten about it in the welter of initiatives that there are. This is a long-term initiative." So he did not really seem very happy with the way things were going.

Lord Adonis: I was giving you an answer to that question, saying I do not agree with that view. In my experience of dealing with senior politicians of all parties, including the Prime Minister, they are thoroughly committed to the embedding of citizenship education, both as a subject and in its applied dimension within schools, and I gave the example of the Modernisation Committee, which is a group of leading Members who exhibited that commitment to me. So I do not recognise that description. If Bernard is meaning to say that of course, there is more that we can all do - by "we" I mean Members, Members of my House as well - I am sure that is true; there is more we can do, for example, in mentoring, in getting engaged in citizenship teaching in our own constituencies, where members go into schools and so on. I am sure there is more that can be done but I have never found any lack of willingness to recognise its importance or to engage in it when invited to do so.

Q505 Paul Holmes: Until last year, 2005, there was a ministerial working party on citizenship that has been disbanded. Would it not have been a good idea to show a commitment to citizenship that that should be reformed and put some weight behind what is happening?

Lord Adonis: There still is a working party on citizenship, an education working party which meets regularly. I meet members of the citizenship community myself bilaterally frequently, both my advisers inside the Department but also the Citizenship Foundation and other organisations, so there is a strong commitment on the part of Ministers.

Q506 Paul Holmes: Who is on this working party, the one that still continues?

Lord Adonis: It embraces leading figures from my Department, from the DCA and from the Home Office. I do not know the membership here but I can supply that.

Q507 Chairman: When did it last meet?

Lord Adonis: I am not sure. It meets regularly. I can provide you with the details.

Q508 Paul Holmes: The other Minister that is on it is yourself?

Lord Adonis: I do not serve on it myself, no. It is an official-level working party.

Q509 Paul Holmes: So the ministerial working party folded last year?

Lord Adonis: I would not say folded. In terms of the work that we have been taking forward, I did not think that it was necessary for me personally to attend the working party itself for that work to be taken forward, but I meet my advisers who serve on the working party frequently and we take forward that work as we need to at ministerial level.

Q510 Paul Holmes: When different things happen and hit the media, we get politicians saying "We can do this through citizenship in schools." There seems to be a lot of confusion in schools and elsewhere: what is the citizenship agenda? Is it about teaching Britishness, or is it about exploring diversity, or is it about bringing up children to be entrepreneurs, or is it about teaching respect, or is it about active citizenship like school councils, or is it about formal political structures like the list you read out at the start of your evidence today? What is the citizenship agenda?

Lord Adonis: If I could first of all answer Mr Holmes' previous question, in fact, I am told that it is chaired by Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who is a member of the other House and a member of your party, and the vice chair is Jan Newton, who is our citizenship adviser. What does the subject entail? It entails all of those things that you mentioned in your question. It has an emphasis---- There are three pillars to it: knowledge and understanding, developing skills of inquiry, and developing skills of participation. All three of those are integral to citizenship, and within each of those is expected to feature social and moral responsibility, community involvement and political literacy and, as I said in my first answer to the Chairman, it is a multifaceted subject. It is both very clearly a subject in its own right in terms of the curriculum concept that it embraces; it is also very much an applied subject too and taking it forward on both of those fronts is a challenge.

Q511 Paul Holmes: Is it primarily a body of knowledge or is it primarily a process that pupils go through?

Lord Adonis: I would say myself that both sides are equally important. If by the applied side you mean that whole programme of activities in schools to do with pupil participation, community engagement, volunteering and so on, which are absolutely vital to the life of a school and to the development of pupils as citizens in due course, I would say that it is just as important that they practise those elements and that they see them in practice in their schools, in participatory systems and so on, as that they learn the theory. I would not want to say that one is more important than the other.

Q512 Paul Holmes: So, although it is a contradiction in terms, should we go along with the IPPR report today and make volunteering in schools compulsory?

Lord Adonis: Would I like to see more volunteering in schools? Absolutely, steadily more, and for it to become increasingly embraced in the work that pupils do, as indeed I believe it is in most schools now because, as you say, as soon as volunteering ceases to be voluntary then it ceases to be volunteering.

Q513 Fiona Mactaggart: You have made a pretty convincing case that successive Secretaries of State are behind this agenda, but what about head teachers? Do you think that head teachers are behind this, and what is your evidence for how head teachers feel about this?

Lord Adonis: I, as ever on these matters, since I only visit a limited number of schools myself and speak to a limited number of head teachers, rely on Ofsted, and you have had Ofsted before you giving evidence. Ofsted's conclusion is that, and I quote, "a minority of schools have embraced citizenship with enthusiasm and have worked hard to establish it as a significant part of their curriculum." Others, also a minority, they stress, have done very little and they say that 25 per cent they think have inadequate position. Sometimes, they say, this is because of the nature or scale of what is intended, but this has been misunderstood. In other cases it is because schools have believed mistakenly that they are doing it already as manifested in their ethos and the good disposition of their pupils. In a small number of schools there is no will to change because of other priorities. In between these extremes are the majority of schools, that have significant elements of citizenship in place but have not yet established a complete programme. That seems to me to reflect Ofsted's view of the position of school leadership.

Q514 Fiona Mactaggart: So what Ofsted say is a quarter are doing well, 50 per cent are bumbling along and a quarter are not doing so well. That is a summary of that.

Lord Adonis: I think "bumbling along" might be slightly unfair interpretation. What they said was that the majority have significant elements of citizenship in place, which I take to be more than bumbling along but less than the minority which have "embraced it with enthusiasm and have worked hard to establish it as a significant part of their curriculum."

Q515 Fiona Mactaggart: One of the things that is very clear from that Ofsted report is the connection between good leadership in schools and those schools which are doing well in this area. They say that schools which are fulfilling the ambition for citizenship are generally those which have a clear view of the leadership and management of citizenship. What I wanted to know is actually what you are doing to get that clear view more widespread, beyond the 25 per cent which have it to the 75 per cent which are not doing badly and to the 25 per cent which are failing to achieve what we have a right to expect on this.

Lord Adonis: My view of how we will actually get to good citizenship education as a subject in school, by which I mean the teaching of the citizenship curriculum, is that it is going to be difficult to do that until you have a trained citizenship teacher in every secondary school and, in fact, the very existence of a trained citizenship teacher is a declaration by the leadership of the school that they take it sufficiently seriously as a subject that they want teachers who actually have accredited expertise in the subject teaching it. You would not think of having science or history or geography, saying that these are important to the life of the school, if you did not have a properly trained teacher. That is why we are placing such emphasis on continuing to roll out ITT in citizenship so we get another few hundred a year coming through of new secondary teachers who are specifically trained in citizenship and also, as I said earlier, rolling out the certificate. If we can get 600 teachers a year through the certificate, all of whom of course are teachers who previously did not have any expertise specifically in citizenship, then I would hope over quite a short period of time we can start to eat into that group of schools which you were describing that do not have citizenship teachers or whose practice has been poor in the past and get to them with trained teachers. We are doing things across the board as well. As you heard in earlier sittings, we have provided a lot of CPD material, for instance, the new professional development handbook Making Sense of Citizenship, which my Department has funded with the Citizenship Foundation and with the Association for Citizenship Teaching. Two copies of that, which has recently been produced, have gone to every school in the country. In the past we have helped to fund the Young Citizen's Passport, which the Citizenship Foundation now sends to every school in the country. There are a whole lot of materials that we have provided to schools. There is a self-evaluation tool for secondary schools available; we have just introduced a self-evaluation tool in citizenship for primary schools too. So in all of those key areas where we believe we can make a difference we have been providing support but, as I say, my analysis of the challenge is that, until you have a trained citizenship teacher in a secondary school, you are unlikely to have it treated with the proper seriousness it deserves as a subject.

Q516 Fiona Mactaggart: That might well be the view of the Committee when we come to report but actually, an awful lot of the citizenship education is happening in primary schools, and we do not expect primary schools to necessarily have specialist citizenship educators. At that point, it really does come down to leadership from the heads in order to ensure that the curriculum does include it well. You have referred to one of your publications which focuses on that but what else are you doing to ensure that, in the primary curriculum, this is an important part of what goes on?

Lord Adonis: I referred to the self-evaluation tool, which I believe can make a big difference. In other discrete areas we have been providing assistance too. For example, we discussed earlier schools councils. We have provided, with the help of School Councils UK, a new tool for all primary schools to be able to establish schools councils, which has a great deal of other material about how they can engage primary school students in participation in their school. We now have NPQH for primary school teachers, which is new, and one of the focuses of NPQH training is how you help to develop whole-school policies which engage pupils and staff more fully than in the past. So there is a set of things going on in primary schools. We also have a scheme of work which we are developing for primary school pupils in citizenship too and, of course, even though it is not a statutory subject in Key Stage 2, there is a scheme of work and there are materials which are available to schools in order that they may teach citizenship in primary schools as well as secondary.

Q517 Chairman: I want to move on. Is this citizenship programme doing any good? I thought I saw a poll last week that suggested we have some of the worst behaved teenagers in Europe. Are you disappointed by that, Lord Adonis?

Lord Adonis: I was very interested to see your exchange with Sir Bernard Crick on that subject, who said that you could not expect to have a wider effect in society as a whole until a whole cohort of students had gone through, and he referred to the eight-year longitudinal study that is taking place. I would hope that it will make a difference. There are those of us who believe that actually, teaching pupils to be better citizens in schools will have an effect after school. We are clearly expecting that it will have a knock-on effect in society at large in due course but Sir Bernard was, of course, right that we are in the early days of citizenship teaching in schools so far, so you cannot expect it to solve all of the ills outside.

Q518 Chairman: Perhaps your Department should have an ability to check some of these so-called surveys for their authenticity and their scientific method. We now have something called the BBC Research Unit, which seems to be the ability to phone up 50 people in a hurry and ask them their opinion. Going round schools, people have been very upset because they do not see our teenagers as the worst in Europe; they see very good students, working well, being absolutely fantastic. The morale of schools is affected by these things.

Lord Adonis: I would, of course, agree with that, Chairman, and of course, what the last seven or eight years has shown is consistently improving quality of education, including the ethos of schools and behaviour as found by Ofsted. So the picture that you have just painted, I think, is the reality of the schools but of course, in terms of the link between other surveys showing behaviour out of schools, I cannot make the direct connection.

Chairman: They should come to some of the schools that we as a Committee visit or even come into Dining Room B today, where we had Clermont School, which is a performing arts specialist school, performing for us excerpts from Carousel. What a talented group of young people!

Q519 Helen Jones: Ofsted found the teaching of citizenship in a quarter of schools as unsatisfactory, and you yourself rightly referred to the need to develop a number of specialist citizenship education teachers in schools. Do you think that aspiration can be fulfilled if the number of initial teacher training places for citizenship is actually going to fall over the next few years?

Lord Adonis: It is not falling by much. In this year, 2006-2007----

The Committee suspended from 4.32 pm to 4.41 pm for a division in the House.

Helen Jones: I think you were in the process of answering my question.

Chairman: Would you like to be reminded of the question?

Q520 Helen Jones: If, as you have rightly said, we need trained teachers and Ofsted says citizenship is taught badly in a quarter of the schools, why are we reducing the training places?

Lord Adonis: The number of training places is 220 this year in ITT. It was 240 last year, so it has reduced by 20, but that is proportionately a smaller reduction than in most subjects, where of course there has been a big reduction because of the demographic downturn.

Q521 Helen Jones: Indeed that is so but those are subjects which are already established and where a large number of trained teachers already exist, whereas they do not exist as far as citizenship is concerned. What is the logic of saying the Government wants to establish this subject and yet cutting the number of teacher training places available?

Lord Adonis: Because that 220 goes hand in hand with the additional 600 certification places a year we are providing for training for existing teachers. To see the contribution we are making to train the workforce in order to teach citizenship as a discrete subject in schools, you need to see the 600 together with the 220. So it is a significant additional number.

Q522 Helen Jones: I do but we do not do that in other subjects, do we? We do not argue that, for instance, if we do not have enough trained science teachers, we will not worry too much about the initial teacher training places; we'll have an in-service certificate, so why is citizenship different? You argued very persuasively that it could be considered as a discrete subject in its own right so why is the training looked at differently?

Lord Adonis: We do think it is important, which is why we are providing 220 places a year, which is 220 more than before the subject started and, as I say, the decrease on 240 is a smaller proportionate decrease than in most subjects at ITT. So we are making a big contribution to training, but could the number be higher? Of course it could be higher. It is a decision we have to take year by year in terms of the funding of places.

Q523 Helen Jones: How did you come to the assessment of how many initial teacher training places would be required in the future?

Lord Adonis: There is a model which the teacher Training and Development Agency uses in terms of numbers of places it believes it can fund within the overall budget which the Department provides and the needs of that particular subject, and that is what has got us to around 200 places a year in recent years but, as I say, that went up to 240 last year and is down to 220 this year, and that is the level at which we see ourselves continuing, I would hope, depending on the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review for the next few years. So we do have a significant ongoing commitment to the subject, but could the number be higher? Of course it could be higher but the TDA would need to weigh the likely take-up of places, the demand on behalf of the schools and so on of a further additional number year on year, because of course, as these 220 are trained each year, they need to find jobs in schools year on year.

Q524 Helen Jones: Of course they do, but I think you said earlier in your evidence that only a third of these schools had a teacher with initial teacher training in citizenship, so there is quite a lot of scope for people to find jobs, is there not?

Lord Adonis: There is more scope for people to find jobs but, as I say, the model which the TDA has used is what has led us to the around 200 a year over the last few years and, as I say, though it has gone down slightly this year, by 20 compared to last year, we have a continuing commitment to training at this kind of level for the period ahead.

Q525 Helen Jones: How many years would it take, do you estimate, until we had a teacher trained in citizenship, with initial teacher training in citizenship, in each secondary school?

Lord Adonis: It would take quite a number of years at the 200 a year rate to have teachers who are trained through initial teacher training in citizenship but it certainly is not the Department's policy that we wish to see in every school, as a realistic early objective, a teacher who has gone through ITT in citizenship. If we did that, of course, it would take a very long time. It is ITT combined with in-service training that we believe is going to provide us with a large body of teachers, and of course, there are many subjects in which it is perfectly possible for teachers who are trained in those subjects, with additional focused in-service training in citizenship, to teach citizenship well. History teachers, geography teachers and others in schools, according to the evidence we have, can teach citizenship to a very high standard if they have a training course in their own subject which has a significant overlap with citizenship plus additional CPD in citizenship itself. We certainly do not take the view that the profession will be sufficiently tooled up to teach citizenship across all schools simply by virtue of ITT. We see ITT plus CPD as going hand in hand.

Q526 Helen Jones: I understand that. Has the Department made any assessment of the number of, say, history and geography teachers who would have extra time on their timetable available to teach citizenship? Surely most of them will be employed full-time in teaching history and geography.

Lord Adonis: Of course, we expect all teachers to engage in CPD now. That is an expectation which the profession itself embraces. Our assessment is that all teachers have the capacity to undertake CPD each year. The CPD course in citizenship is equivalent to about five days' worth of training, so it is absolutely compatible with an in-service teacher to be able to take on that level of CPD. It was the teacher Training and Development Agency's modelling of the likely demand that we could stimulate for in-service training that led us to allocate the 600 places a year for the next two years.

Q527 Helen Jones: I understand what you said about the time taken for CPD. Can I take it from your answer that there has not been an assessment done of how much spare capacity there is in the system for teachers in other subjects to also undertake the teaching of citizenship in their timetable?

Lord Adonis: I do not think you can take that, because the TDA advised us on the likely demand for places if we were to provide and fund places ourselves, which is what we are doing through the certificate, and it was advice to us that led us to the figure of 600 a year. So they will have done this assessment themselves before they made those recommendations to us.

Q528 Helen Jones: If they take up the course, they will have done the equivalent of five days of training. Is that correct?

Lord Adonis: Yes.

Q529 Helen Jones: That is in no way equivalent to a year's initial teacher training in a subject, is it?

Lord Adonis: With all the supporting work that they do too, and all the CPD materials that are available in terms of citizenship education, that is a good deal of training that will equip them to be able to teach the subject in the curriculum. Of course, it is not as much as ITT and I accept that, though it is a good and substantial course, we are advised, which can lead to teachers who are well equipped to teach citizenship in schools.

Q530 Helen Jones: It would be an interesting pattern to apply that to other subjects, would it not? Can I ask you about primary teachers? We have received a lot of evidence that primary teachers, particularly those completing the PGC course, receive really quite limited training in citizenship education. Does that bother you at all? Have you as a Department looked at how that might affect how citizenship is taught in primary schools and the transition from primary school to secondary school, where we do expect it to be taught quite thoroughly?

Lord Adonis: Of course, we have to take this priority by priority and our key priority is in seeing that there is adequate, good-quality teaching at secondary level, where of course it is a statutory and compulsory subject and where an increasing number are actually studying the subject through to the half GCSE. I will be quite frank with the Committee that we have seen secondary as our key priority in terms of the investment we have been making in teacher training both in ITT and in CPD. Is there a role for more citizenship training for primary teachers over time? We would accept that there is but our key priority in terms of resources and seeking to change the culture in schools and in university training departments has been secondary.

Q531 Chairman: I have to say, listening to that exchange, that if I were sitting where you are sitting and I had looked at the number of under-performing schools in this subject, I would have thought there would have been some way of saying urgently "Here are these really under-performing schools. How many of them are without a properly trained, ITT trained teacher, and can't I, as the Minister, quickly train enough to feed through, particularly to those singled out as under-performing?" You and I know, all of this Committee know, that the worst thing for any subject to be not taken seriously is for it to be taught by - I think Ken Boston always uses the phrase "the PE teacher with a gammy knee." That is the case. It is serious. As soon as a subject gets that reputation, there are some long-term consequences. Is it not in your interest, as Minister, to say, "Look, if we need 500, let's find the money to train 500 as fast as possible, because this is an important subject"?

Lord Adonis: As I say, we are actually training more than 500 a year at the moment. We are doing 220 through ITT and 600 a year through CPD.

Q532 Chairman: Six hundred through CPD? That is a five-dayer. You know what I am saying. I am saying, as Helen said, that full training is what you really need. We have evidence: what you need is the full training. We had the person responsible for that sort of training, and what he was clearly saying was if you really want to do it well, you have the one-year trained person. They have the energy, knowledge and enthusiasm to do it. That is what you need in these schools. You do not need the five-day person, do you?

Lord Adonis: I think you need both, do you not? After all, we have a huge stock of teachers.

Q533 Chairman: Come on, Andrew. Do not con us by saying that we are doing more than 500. You are not doing more than 500.

Lord Adonis: I have tried to be frank with the Committee, Chairman, that we do need, over time, to do a great deal more, but we need both: we need existing teachers in schools with a specific competence in citizenship which can come through CPD and we also need more coming through the system. In response to your question about weak and failing schools, of course, I as a Minister - thank goodness - am not in charge of appointing or recruiting teachers school by school at all. The system would never work if Ministers had to try and make those decisions in respect of 23,000 schools. The thing which we have laid great store by, as do local authorities, in the work that they do in following up Ofsted reports which find weaknesses in schools is the quality of leadership in schools, is seeing that schools which are weak or failing get the leadership that they need, including, as now very often happens when Ofsted makes a severely critical report on a school, making rapid changes of leadership in schools. It is now quite common that the leadership will change if a school is put into special measures or given a notice to improve.

Q534 Chairman: You are training heads and aspiring heads to have the qualities of leadership so you can get them into those schools as fast as possible. Why not the people teaching citizenship?

Lord Adonis: One of the things that an effective school leader will do is to see that they have good quality teaching in all of the main curriculum areas, and one of those areas should surely be citizenship. In the system we have it is the job of effective school leaders to see that they have the citizenship teachers that they need, whether that be those that are trained in ITT or whether it be seeing that they have teachers who they can make available to do CPD in citizenship and get the certificate.

Q535 Chairman: Andrew, you and I know that there is a difference between mixing up people who have been trained for a year and people who have had five days up-skilling their professional qualification. It does not help when a Minister tells the Committee that it is really 600 extra when actually they are made up of the two components.

Lord Adonis: With respect, Chairman, I do not actually share that premise because in many schools where you have a teacher who is trained in another subject, for example, a historian, there is a very significant overlap. If you look at the citizenship curriculum, there is a very significant overlap between history and citizenship. It could well be that a well motivated teacher who has the CPD and engages in all the private study that they do as part of that will be an excellent citizenship teacher, and may well be a better one than somebody who has come through ITT.

Q536 Chairman: That is not the evidence we have been getting so far in this inquiry. Anyway, we will agree to disagree.

Lord Adonis: The point I would agree with you on is that the job of an effective school leader is to see that they have somebody good who can teach the subject. The precise route by which they come to be able to teach the subject well I think is another issue.

Q537 Mr Wilson: When we had Ofsted in, one of their representatives said to us, and I quote, "Participative teaching is more difficult to achieve and we are finding that the teachers who have been specifically trained are much more confident in teaching and much more likely to give good lessons." Do you think we have enough well trained teachers, that we are good enough at producing teachers, confident enough and skilled enough to lead discussions about what are very difficult issues?

Lord Adonis: I think we need steadily more, is the answer, if by that you mean in citizenship specifically as part of how a school does ensure that pupils have the range of experience you were describing, we do need steadily more. I should note, though, as I say, that Ofsted found in respect of citizenship, though it is important to see these two recommendations together, that 25 per cent of schools had inadequate whole-school provision, which is something that we need to tackle seriously,. They also found that in seven out of ten lessons which they observed where citizenship was taught, including the kind of practical discussions that you are referring to, the teaching was judged to be good, and it was unsatisfactory in only one in 20. So actually, the quality of teaching in the subject they found to be good; it was the organisation of the subject across schools that they found to be inadequate, and that is where I think we need to make big improvements.

Q538 Mr Wilson: I apologise if I cut across Helen. She might have asked this question. Because of the vote, I was not here. You did announce this roll-out of 600 places for the citizenship continuing professional development programme. Barry said that is a five-day course. Is that really sufficient to meet the needs in this particular area?

Lord Adonis: As I say, as an up-skilling course in the specific skills and subject knowledge that teachers need to acquire, that, together with - because of course it is five days' training together with all the supporting materials that students are expected to study as part of that - we believe that is sufficient, yes.

Q539 Mr Wilson: Is access to these continuing professional development courses going to be targeted according to need or will it be on a first come, first served basis? How is it going to be handled?

Lord Adonis: It is subject to people coming forward wanting to take up the courses, and they will be available to the entire profession nationwide.

Q540 Mr Wilson: Some people have been suggesting these CPD training courses are given a very low priority by heads because they face so many demands on their budgets. Do you see any problems with that?

Lord Adonis: In my experience, when training is made available essentially at a highly subsidised rate or free of charge, as is the case here, heads tend to be quite keen on taking it up, so we found in this area, in PSHE, where there is a certificate available which we also fund on a similar basis, in science, for example, with the Science Learning Centres, where again we fund a very high proportion of the cost of CPD, that the places are taken up. It is too early to say at the moment whether the 600 have been but if they are not, I can tell you we will be acutely concerned and will look and see what further steps we can take to encourage take-up.

Q541 Chairman: The Sutton Trust has done some very interesting research on the relationship between the quality of teaching science and whether the person who has been employed as a science teacher is a science graduate. You would not deny there is a relationship in a subject between having a proper qualification, a proper, dedicated qualification, and the quality of teaching?

Lord Adonis: I certainly do not deny that it is important for those who teach to have a good command of the subject knowledge. The point I was seeking to make, which I do believe, having looked at the curriculum content for citizenship, is that it is not, for example, akin to physics, where in fact, having a systematic training in physics, including a degree, over a long period of time, is going to be essential for a top quality physics teacher. In the case of citizenship, there is a very substantial overlap between the curriculum content and the curriculum content of other degree areas, including, as I say, geography and history. Therefore I do not see it as on a par. But do I believe that further support is needed for teachers to see that they do have that subject knowledge - of course I do - which is the reason we are providing those CPD places.

Q542 Chairman: It may surprise you, Andrew, that I think I would prefer to see someone who is a graduate in a science subject plus the one year as probably preferable to anyone who only has the five days.

Lord Adonis: The problem, of course, as we know from science, is the high proportion of schools that, for example, do not have properly trained physics teachers. You cannot teach A level physics...

Chairman: I was not trying to take you down that track. We could be on that for a long time. I want to move on and look at spreading good practice. We have seen some very good practice. Indeed, we saw some schools where you could franchise the good system they have and roll it out, if the Department were so minded.

Q543 Jeff Ennis: We have already focused on the patchy nature of citizenship education teaching at the present time. Given that scenario, what scope is there for the Government playing a larger role in terms of spreading good practice? Are there any areas where you think the Government should play more of a lead role in that regard?

Lord Adonis: I think there is huge scope for us helping to spread good practice. That is the reason why we produce all these materials, for example, the CPD handbook for all teachers. The Citizenship Foundation has recently produced a comprehensive introduction to effective citizenship education in secondary schools, which has excellent chapters in it on how citizenship can be taught through other subjects as well. There are chapters on geography, on history, on religious education. There are a whole lot of good case studies there. We help fund materials provided by School Councils UK in respect of schools councils. We help fund the Active Citizens in Schools scheme, which provides certificates in best practice for schools in that respect. We help fund the Citizenship Foundation in the Giving Nation resource pack which they provide, which helps schools to follow best practice in encouraging students to volunteer. I am told that 75 per cent of schools have sought the Giving Nation resource packs. There is a whole set of activities that we can continue to support which I think can have just the effect that you are describing, Jeff.

Q544 Jeff Ennis: Obviously, citizenship education is not just confined to this country. There are European examples and examples from further afield where it is being promoted. Are there any best practice models that we could look at from Europe, or that you can recommend us to look at, or that you have liaised with in building up our programme?

Lord Adonis: Of course, when Bernard Crick did his original inquiry, he looked extensively at practice elsewhere and I see when you had him before you that you questioned him about it. I noticed he was not wildly excited by practice in other countries. He thought that some of our European counterparts were unduly rigid in the way that they taught constitution and so on, and that our combination of the applied and the theoretical was better than those others that he had looked at. We have our advisers and they do look at continuing practice abroad, and we do seek to inject that in. For example, I was in Finland recently, where they regard this as an important area. I think the Committee has been there.

Q545 Chairman: We get rather testy when people refer yet again to Finland.

Lord Adonis: If I can yet again refer to Finland, Chairman, and escape your wrath, one of the things I was very struck by, in Finland is the degree of pupil participation in schools. For example, school governing bodies now routinely have pupils as full participating members of the governing body. That is something we do not have here. You have to be 18 or above to be a full member of a governing body in a school in England, though you can be an associate member of a governing body younger, and an increasing number of schools do have pupils on their governing bodies as associate members. These sorts of ideas are ones that I think we should be prepared to look at and see whether there is anything we can learn from them.

Q546 Jeff Ennis: Given the lack f trained teacher specialists in the subject, would you anticipate secondary schools and feeder primary schools liaising and discussing the citizenship agenda which is being taught in the primary schools and that then feeding into the secondary schools? Would that be one of the ways we could promote good practice?

Lord Adonis: Very much so. I think that is an important area. For example, in the specialist schools programme it is now possible, through the humanities specialism, to major in citizenship and, of course, that involves developing links with feeder primary schools and neighbouring secondary schools also. You have had before you Keith Ajegbo who, as well as overseeing the review, was until this summer head teacher of Deptford Green School. Deptford Green School is a humanities specialist school with a particular specialism in citizenship and has been doing precisely the sort of work which you described.

Q547 Jeff Ennis: Does the Department give guidance on pursuing that?

Lord Adonis: The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which, as you know, is the umbrella body of specialist schools, is seeking to develop further guidance for schools taking on that specialism, which I think will encourage a lot more schools to develop citizenship as a first or second specialism, and I would hope it would also develop best practice models for schools that do not take this on as a specialism but, nonetheless, want to see this as an important part of their work and can take it forward in conjunction with feeder primaries.

Q548 Jeff Ennis: You have also mentioned in earlier replies the importance that school councils play in the active participation element of citizenship, and I am a big supporter of school councils. In Wales we are making them compulsory, of course, but we are not biting that particular bullet. Do you think we ought to revisit that and follow the Wales model?

Lord Adonis: This was debated at length in the Lords on the Education and Inspections Bill because Lord Dearing took up precisely your theme. I did consult Geoff Whitty, your own professional adviser, on this issue. Obviously I had to respond to a specific amendment on this in the House of Lords and Geoff advised us that we should wait for his report. He was meeting my Welsh counterparts as Minister and looking at the practice in schools in Wales to see whether there was any virtue in adopting a more prescriptive approach as they have done by regulation. Under the 2002 Education Act we have powers, if we wish to do so, to prescribe arrangements for school councils by order. We have the enabling power but we do not intend to prejudge Geoff's report before doing anything more.

Q549 Jeff Ennis: Given that situation then, is there not a case for more increased guidance from the Department to allow schools to more easily facilitate the secondary schools?

Lord Adonis: We have increased the guidance. As I say, we have worked with Schools Councils UK to develop much better materials for schools in establishing schools councils. We issued the first of such materials for primary schools only last year in this area and we have said that we will seek to update that guidance further when Geoff has reported.

Q550 Jeff Ennis: Some suggest that citizenship education could improve attainment more generally, yet the evidence-base for this is currently weak. Would you consider funding more research in this particular area?

Lord Adonis: We are funding the longitudinal study at the moment and we will pay very careful attention to its results in looking at the whole future of the subject. We do think it is important to take stock of best practice in this area, and we are certainly open-minded about future developments and we see the results being achieved in the study.

Q551 Fiona Mactaggart: You have been quite enthusiastic about the schools councils and how they have changed what schools are like when you go and visit them. One of the things in the Department's evidence to us was a quote from Sir Bernard which suggested that if citizenship is taught well and tailored to local needs its skills and values will enhance democratic life for all of us. One of the things that we saw in The Blue School was a programme which was teaching children about the skills they need to run the school council, to run the working groups, to run the meetings and so on, and I am struck that in many school councils there is not an effort to train children in these skills, we just hope they will pick it up, and often teachers do not have these skills. I am wondering how the Government can support this kind of programme. We were impressed by it and felt that it was a very practical way of helping school councils to work well. I wonder if this is something you have thought about?

Lord Adonis: The tools I referred to earlier that the Schools Councils UK provide - I know Jessica Gold gave evidence to you in one of your earlier sittings - does include precisely the sorts of areas which you are referring to: how you manage meetings, how chairs should be elected and the sort of support they need to do their work and so on. These are very important areas. In my experience of visiting schools councils, usually there is some kind of attached teacher who plays precisely the role you are describing in helping to train up members of the schools council in conducting their affairs. That is an important role, and from what I have seen in some schools, often where there is a citizenship teacher, the citizenship teacher may play that role. I think there is a direct relationship between the quality of teaching in this area and the support that is going to be available for organisations like schools councils. There is a debate in this area also. It is quite interesting. If you look at the Schools Councils UK website and the debates which take place there amongst members of schools councils, issues like how you elect schools councils, how they choose their chairs, the sorts of areas they should discuss, whether, for example, they should play a role in the appointment of staff, these are very live debates within the school community at the moment. There are debates with school leaders also. There are some school leaders, head teachers, who tell me flat-out that they think it is vital that schools councils do express opinions on staff appointments and there are others who regard this as a very undesirable step. I do not know what the answer is on some of these issues; I certainly would not want the Department to be prescribing in detail precisely how schools councils should conduct their affairs in those areas. I do see that we have a role in encouraging further debate in these areas and that is what we do by supporting Schools Councils UK.

Q552 Fiona Mactaggart: If you could encourage skills training then the debate would work better, it seems to me, because if those young people had those sets of skills they would be able, for example, to assess the suitability of a potential teacher much more effectively, they would be able to contribute to the decisions that the governing body might face and so on, more appropriately than very often they can without those very practical skills. I am not necessarily talking about the constitution, if you like.

Lord Adonis: I agree with that. I think a lot of it does not have so much to do with the skills set of the staff but the degree of seriousness with which they treat the schools councils. If I can give you an example, at the secondary school I went to in Merton last week, which had been engaged in interviewing candidates for one of the deputy head posts, one of the existing deputy heads had worked with the council to go through their list of questions that they were going to ask all of the candidates for the post, the appropriateness of the questions, how they should allocate the questions between members of the schools council, all the issues we all have to deal with all the time when we are doing interviews, how they should allow follow-up to questions afterwards, the amount of time they should spend, and this enabled them to conduct that process effectively. Every school has senior staff who are trained in interviewing techniques and conduct interviews the whole time, so the issue there is not whether there is the skills set available within the school which can then be deployed in respect of schools councils, it is whether the school leadership regards this as a sufficiently high priority for them to make the effort to do it. My view is they should make that effort, I think it is immensely worthwhile for them to do so. That is the kind of cultural change we need to spread over an increasing number of schools. From what I have seen in schools, I am convinced that this is all going with the grain because it is happening in a large number of schools already.

Q553 Chairman: Certainly it is true that for some of the schools we have been to it is the energy, it is not the constitution. I would hate to think that as the schools council just putting an obligation on a school would seem to be the magic wand, I do not think it would be, it is energising the relationships that I think Fiona was talking, but you do need someone skilled available in the school to energise the process. That is why I think you and I, and some members of the Committee, were disagreeing about the quality of training amongst that energising.

Lord Adonis: I completely agree about the need to energise these relationships and for the leadership teams of schools to take these issues very seriously indeed. The issue of some debate between us is how far you need to be specifically trained to be able to do some of these things. There are areas of curriculum content where I believe training is desirable, if not essential. For example, when it comes to helping schools councils to develop the skills they need to be able to interact with the senior management of the school to conduct interviews and so on, it should not require specific training for school staff to be able to pass on those skills.

Q554 Chairman: Sometimes they have to hire it in. In response to Jeff Ennis's question you said longitudinal research was going on, how long is the longitudinal research going to be?

Lord Adonis: It is an eight-year programme, as I understand it. I am not sure how far through they are and there will be interim reports from it.

Q555 Chairman: Who is doing it?

Lord Adonis: The National Foundation for Education Research, who are highly skilled.

Q556 Chairman: Can you send us a note on that and on how long into the eight years they are?

Lord Adonis: And whether there will be interim findings that I am in a position to let you know.

Chairman: Can we move on to citizenship and community cohesion, something which has been put uppermost in our minds as we had this visit this morning.

Q557 Mr Chaytor: Minister, what impact do you think the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion will have on the way they deal with citizenship education?

Lord Adonis: I would hope that it would support it significantly. All of the applied aspects of citizenship which we talked about, both the full engagement of all pupils within the life of schools and the engagement of the school as a community much more in the life of its wider community outside, are integral to citizenship as a subject and also vital to a school demonstrating that it is playing its part by community cohesion more widely. There are other aspects too, such as school twinning, exchanges between staff, joint professional development between staff of different schools, particularly schools that educate pupils from very different backgrounds, which I would see as entirely complementary.

Q558 Mr Chaytor: The duty to promote community cohesion is going to be assessed by Ofsted?

Lord Adonis: Yes. It is now in the Bill as it was finally approved by Parliament last Thursday.

Q559 Mr Chaytor: If there is a critical Ofsted report on that element of the whole report, how would you envisage that being dealt with?

Lord Adonis: That would lead to a low grade in that aspect of the inspection by Ofsted to the school and the school would be expected to respond in the way that it is always expected to respond when it has a low grade in any of the main inspection areas, by putting in place a programme of activity to put that right. Of course, it could contribute to an overall low grade for the school as a whole, so it could contribute to a warning notice, a notice to improve, or a school being placed into special measures. Of course, if that were the case then the school would be expected to demonstrate to its local authority, and in due course to a re-inspection by Ofsted itself, that it had put right those elements found to be deeply unsatisfactory in the original inspection.

Q560 Mr Chaytor: In respect of the understanding of the diversity element of citizenship do you detect any difference in the quality of the teaching of the programmes in those schools that are more homogenous as against those schools that have a more mixed student population?

Lord Adonis: No, we do not. I know that a very significant part of your earlier discussions focused on faith schools and that is one example of a school which would tend to recruit pupils from a particular section of the community. We asked Ofsted whether they found the quality of teaching in citizenship varied between faith schools and non-faith schools because, of course, diversity is one of the aspects of citizenship which is taught, and they could not find, and did not identify, any particular issues there over and above those affecting all schools. Perhaps it might be useful, Chairman, if I read out the advice we have had from Ofsted in this area. They found, and I quote: "Faith schools represented in the qualitative sample used by Ofsted for citizenship inspection in 2005-06 showed the same strengths and weaknesses as schools in the sample as a whole. At best they had implemented citizenship well. All had attempted to incorporate citizenship in their curriculum but with varied degrees of success. Some were doing particularly well in getting pupils to participate in citizenship activity. These schools showed no less enthusiasm for citizenship than other schools. A common feature was that on the basis of good self-evaluation, effective, sometimes newly appointed, subject leaders were seeking to raise the quality of citizenship education in those schools." That was Ofsted's judgment. What they have told us is that the same pattern of strengths and weaknesses are found in faith schools as other schools, which I think would apply to your wider point about schools with more or less broad intakes.

Q561 Mr Chaytor: The 25 per cent quota in faith schools is not necessary?

Lord Adonis: There was a wider set of issues that we were seeking to address in that debate which we were having with the faith communities about admissions. It was not by any means just restricted to the issue of community cohesion, this was about promoting access to good quality schools, about bringing pupils together from different backgrounds and seeing that as a desirable objective. It was a whole set of objectives which, as you know, we were seeking to achieve there.

Q562 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask one more question about the longitudinal study because the Department's memorandum makes a reference to the third report of the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study and it concludes that: "Certain citizenship curriculum topic areas are less likely to be taught than others; in particular, topics such as voting and elections, the European Union, parliament and governance", and later in the report it also concludes that: "Students continue to report low levels of intention to participate in conventional politics in the future. They trust their family the most, while politicians and the European Union score the lowest levels of trust". My question is do you see any relationship between this problem of trust in politicians and the European Union and the apparent fact that these are areas of the citizenship curriculum which are less likely to be taught?

Lord Adonis: Since the evidence of opinion surveys is that trust has declined and, of course, has declined over the period we have introduced citizenship education, and indeed over a longer period, clearly citizenship education alone has not been able to reverse that decline, though, as I say, since it has only been going on in schools for four years, and for most of those pupils who have become citizens who are post-18 and voting they would have had little, if any, formal citizenship education in most schools, it is hard to draw much by way of conclusions in those areas. In boosting citizenship education in schools it is our objective to have a more politically literate generation who, for example, regard it as important to vote and to be engaged in politics in its wider sense. Of course that is our objective and that includes the areas you were highlighting, Mr Chaytor, including awareness of the European Union and areas of that kind.

Q563 Mr Chaytor: The heart of the question is, is there a danger that the touchy-feely dimension of citizenship has prevailed over the harder-edged teaching about the basics of democratic procedures and practice?

Lord Adonis: It is definitely the case that that has been true because, of course, the number of trained citizenship teachers has been smaller and we have been ratcheting up the numbers doing, for example, the half GCSE, but I would expect those formal elements to become stronger and stronger as the numbers seeing the subject through to GCSE increase. Those numbers have been increasing. As you will know from the evidence you have taken already, this year 54,000 candidates took the half GCSE in citizenship. That is an increase from only 10,000 in 2004; it is the fastest growing GCSE at the moment. We have got plans for a full GCSE from 2009 and an A level from 2009 also. The more that citizenship is regarded as a mainstream "academic subject" in schools, the more seriously all those aspects you have highlighted will be taught, not only to those doing the GCSE but also to other students as well, I believe.

Q564 Mr Chaytor: How long before the first degrees in citizenship?

Lord Adonis: I believe some universities do degrees in citizenship, do they not? I do not have the list of degrees on offer, but I have certainly seen courses that have citizenship featuring within the wider rubric. In due course, with more students coming through with GCSEs and A levels, that will further encourage the development of higher education in this area also.

Q565 Mr Marsden: Lord Adonis, I want to turn to the issues of Britishness and identity, which you have already referred to and, as we have found, they are issues which have ratcheted up in importance over the last 12 to 18 months. We have had a vigorous debate and discussion among our witnesses about the balance to be struck between top-down instructions about identity and Britishness and discussion of identity and Britishness. Where do you see the balance to be struck between those two views of how this should be communicated?

Lord Adonis: As in all of these areas, I think there is a straightforward curriculum and knowledge-base in this area which it is important that students should be aware of. If you take the programme of study for citizenship at Key Stage 4, it requires that a student should be taught about, "the origins and implications of the diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities in the United Kingdom and the need for mutual respect and understanding". A good deal of that is factual matter, the composition of the ethnic minorities in our country, the composition of religious groups in our country, how this has changed over time and, for example, what are the countries of origin from which new communities in the United Kingdom have come. For example, I thought Trevor was very interesting before your Committee, when he said there were 42 communities in London now where populations are more than 10,000. Understanding facts of that kind, what these communities are, what their settlement patterns are, these are like other subject matters that you can and should teach. The better the teaching in these areas, the better the quality of discussion there is going to be between students about the implications of this, for how different communities get on, what sort of policies we should be having community by community, school by school, to promote good relations between communities, mutual respect, and tolerance and so on. I would see the two in this area, as in other areas, as going very much hand-in-hand: the better the quality of teaching about the basic knowledge in this area, the better the quality of discussion there will be within the schools and in the wider forums we have talked about.

Q566 Mr Marsden: I understand that, and obviously the recommendations you receive from Keith Ajegbo may well significantly strengthen work in that area, but it is true, is it not, that inevitably, and particularly at secondary level, the sort of good and enthusiastic teaching that we have all been talking about is going to lead, sooner rather than later, to some rather knotty subjects and particularly in areas where there is ethnic diversity? For example, issues like attitudes towards the role of women in society and attitudes towards homosexuality are issues which will come up sooner rather than later. How do you see those sorts of things being handled within the context of the discussion about Britishness and British values?

Lord Adonis: What you want is for them to be discussed properly in schools, as in other parts of society, but within a culture of mutual respect and tolerance and with an objective of forging harmony and mutual respect. I see the schools as being a microcosm for society at large in those areas, and I would not expect schools to behave differently from the kind of expectations that we have of other parts of society and forums where these issues are discussed.

Q567 Mr Marsden: The Chairman has already referred to the fact that this morning we went to a Muslim school in Tooting which has just come within the framework as a voluntary-aided school. Do you think the growth of non-Christian, faith-based schools presents particular challenges, if they are to be included within the national framework, to the way in which we discuss Britishness or British values?

Lord Adonis: I think it is a particular issue for them on how they conduct these discussions. I visited the school you visited, the Gatton Primary as it has now become. Did you visit it in the Tooting cinema where it used to be, or did you visit it in the new building?

Q568 Mr Marsden: The new building.

Lord Adonis: I shall never forget the visit because it is an excellent school in all kinds of ways. One of the things which struck me was the importance that they gave to citizenship education at the secondary level. For example, they have a wide range of speakers at their morning assemblies. I spoke at one of their morning assemblies; they heard others from different faiths and different parts of the community and took this very seriously. Their Chair of Governors of the Al Risalah Trust, which is the trust behind that school, is a woman who places immense importance on the education of Muslim women right up to degree level and, as you will have found from discussing with her, they have their own very serious CPD provision which they make in respect of teachers who go through the Trust and take this very seriously. I think it is an issue which affects all schools and it is an issue that Muslim schools will have to address also in their own context.

Q569 Mr Marsden: Is there a trade-off between the ability of faith schools to come within the national framework in the National Curriculum and the way in which they teach Britishness or British values?

Lord Adonis: I would say it is as important that they teach these issues as other schools, not more, not less, it is as important that they do, which means it is very important that they do and that they take these issues seriously. I quoted the Ofsted evidence showing that they do not see any big difference between faith schools and non-faith schools in these areas, but it is as important that they do so. That is why we were glad with the declaration by all of the faith leaders earlier this year, that, for example they wanted to see all religions taught within faith schools, not just the faith or denomination of the particular religion sponsoring the school. The Government strongly welcomes that declaration by the faith leaders. As you know, the non-statutory framework for religious education is now in place; that is widely observed within faith schools themselves also. We think it is important that faith schools take their responsibilities very seriously to see that all faiths are taught and that citizenship education is taught in their schools also.

Q570 Mr Marsden: Through you, Chairman, can I ask a final question about the progression of this discussion of Britishness and values from citizenship in schools because we took earlier evidence about what might be done beyond 16, and although there is good practice there, it is very, very patchy, and yet it is known to many of us that some of the biggest problems in terms of community cohesion come precisely in that post-16 period. What more can you do as the Department to show a greater link between what is done in schools - maybe citizenship teaching in schools - and citizenship teaching in further and higher education?

Lord Adonis: If I can deal with further education, where we have a direct funding relationship with respect to the further education sector. As you know from your evidence, we have been funding the national post-16 pilot programme which involved 120 schools, sixth form colleges, youth services and work-based training settings in a programme which continued until earlier this year. That was judged to be a great success by those who evaluated it. As a result of the success of the Post-16 Active Citizenship Development Programme we are just about to launch the Post-16 Active Citizenship Support Programme which will provide support across the whole of the post-16 chapter in developing effective citizenship programmes. I am personally launching that on 28 November, and we are providing funding for that also.

Q571 Chairman: Let us go into greater depth on that in a minute, Lord Adonis. Before you go off social cohesion, it would be wrong if this Committee did not ask you, what on earth were you up to in the Department, as a Government, when you tried to introduce the amendment of the 25 per cent in faith schools in your House? What was that all about?

Lord Adonis: Let us be clear on what we were seeking to do. If we can go through the chronology of this. The Church of England made a statement earlier in the summer that in respect of all its new schools it would seek to provide at least 25 per cent of places beyond the Anglican community.

Q572 Mr Marsden: What about the Catholic community?

Lord Adonis: Yes, but it was undertaken to do that for all its schools. It was not going to be voluntary in respect of schools, it said all Church of England schools would provide at least 25 per cent of places. There was a vigorous discussion in my House led by the former Conservative Education Secretary, Lord Baker, who sought to introduce a requirement to that effect for all new faith schools, only new faith schools, across the entire faith community. In discussions we had with the other parties we said in principle that we would be prepared to give a local authority power, but not a duty - I should stress there was never going to be a national requirement - to make this requirement in respect of new faith schools. As they say, the rest is history, you know what happened. I was very clear when I spoke about this in the Lords in the first debate on the Baker amendment that we would only move on this issue if there was sufficient consensus. We sought to explore the scope for a consensus and we found a strong consensus for new duties on schools, not just new faith schools, but all faith schools and all schools in promoting community cohesion. The Catholic Church told us that they were keen to discuss with local authorities the making available of additional places beyond their immediate faith communities for new schools but did not want to top-slice the 25 per cent off the existing ones. On the basis of those conversations, we decided to proceed by way of this new duty for community cohesion, but we gladly accepted what the Catholic Church said in respect of making places available to the wider community over and above those which would be available to the Catholic community for new schools.

Q573 Chairman: It did not seem to do much for community cohesion in the way that debate bounced, if you like. Is there a duty to promote community cohesion? How is that going to work through in a system where increasingly the Government seems to be encouraging the development of more faith schools?

Lord Adonis: The duty to promote community cohesion applies equally to faith schools as to other schools, and they will be expected to demonstrate in a self-evaluation that they are so promoting community cohesion. They will be inspected against it both in their Section 5 inspection, which is the inspection against the main Ofsted framework, but also the faith communities have indicated to us that in their Section 48 inspections which, as you will know, Chairman, are the inspections specifically of the faith aspect of the work of faith schools, they will also put a special emphasis on looking at the community engagement of faith schools. We see this as a big step forward in respect of faith schools.

Q574 Chairman: Is it a bit dishonest to talk to anyone, the public or this Committee, about faith schools as though they are all the same? The truth is they are different, are they not? You found that to your cost in terms of the very angry reception you got for your speech on Roman Catholics ---

Lord Adonis: Chairman, I never sought to say that all faith schools are the same, there is a huge diversity within the faith sector as there is within the non-faith sector.

Q575 Chairman: Can I press you on the fact that whatever way the 25 per cent commitment in the House of Lords came, which was debated under Kenneth Baker's name and then taken away, what about the fact that the Government is at this moment fast-tracking Muslim schools into the maintained sector?

Lord Adonis: We are not fast-tracking at all.

Q576 Chairman: Are you not?

Lord Adonis: No, Chairman. Any Muslim school that wants to come into the state sector has to follow exactly the same statutory proposals as any other independent school.

Q577 Chairman: Why did you not correct the press stories that you were fast-tracking Muslim schools?

Lord Adonis: I can assure you, Chairman, whenever I see inaccurate statements in the press I do seek to correct them, and I will happily seek to address that.

Q578 Chairman: There is no fast-tracking of Muslim schools?

Lord Adonis: A Muslim school applying to come into the state system has to undergo the same process of statutory proposals as any other school. For example, the Gatton School which you visited this morning was agreed by the local school organisation committee in Lambeth in the same way as any other school coming into the state system would have to do so. There is no special treatment for Muslim schools at all.

Q579 Chairman: That has reassured the Committee. Let us push you on Gatton School a little. We only went to the junior school which finishes at 11 years of age, but it was made very clear to us by almost everyone, the head and other people who spoke to us in that school, that they saw post-11 education as a segregated education between boys and girls. That is a very strong commitment amongst Muslim faith schools, is it not? Does that not have serious repercussions for the educational system?

Lord Adonis: As it happens, in this country, unlike the United States, there is quite a lot of single sex education anyway, so that particular aspect of Muslim education beyond the age of 11 is not a particularly revolutionary idea, is it, Chairman?

Q580 Chairman: No, it is not, Lord Adonis, but the reasons we were given this morning were not the reasons you would normally be given for single sex education. We were given the reason that it is undesirable for young boys and girls after the age of 11 to be together in an educational institution. I have never heard that from faith schools, Catholic or Anglican or Jewish.

Lord Adonis: It certainly is the case, is it not, Chairman, that quite a number of parents who choose single sex schools for their children do so because they want them to be educated in a single sex environment?

Q581 Chairman: You would be happy to see what this Committee saw in Birmingham replicated, an enormous demand from certain sections of the population in Birmingham for single sex education for girls. Not only is the school, as you must know, the largest girls school in Europe but there is the inability to have gender-balanced education in any other school. Is that not a problem?

Lord Adonis: That is a perfectly relevant issue which local decision-makers should take account of when they decide. For example, as they will no doubt have told you, if the Al Risalah Trust is keen for their secondary school at some point to receive state funding, which they see as a logical development for their primary school which has state funding at the moment, that will be subject to decisions by the local decision-makers which, before the current Education and Inspections Bill takes effect, is the School Organisation Committee and after the Education and Inspections Bill takes effect it will be the relevant local authority. Those are issues which the local authority will itself have to make a judgment upon when and if there is any proposal by the trust to bring a secondary school into the state system.

Q582 Chairman: On the one hand you want to put a duty on schools to promote social cohesion and on the other you are going to wash your hands of what is potentially a very large increase in the number of single sex Muslim schools?

Lord Adonis: I am absolutely not washing my hands of it, I am saying there are established and proper democratic procedures for taking these decisions, and the body that will take these decisions after the Education and Inspections Bill becomes law is the local authority. Local authorities are elected, and one of the criteria that they must assess when proposals come to them is the commitment of promoters, both in respect of trust schools and other promoters coming into the state system, in respect of community cohesion. We absolutely do not wash our hands of it, but it is not me who will take those judgments school by school, it will be the relevant elected local authority. Precisely the issues you refer to, Chairman, the desirability of more single sex education in a community and what this means to both sexes in terms of the quality of education, those and many other issues are ones which councils will have to grapple with.

Chairman: Lord Adonis, we have one last section on policy coherence and most of the questions will be about that.

Q583 Stephen Williams: Can I start by picking up on an answer you gave to Jeff Ennis. In passing you mentioned the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and how citizenship may be a specialism in some schools. The advice we were given is that at the moment you need to have history, geography or English as a key subject in order to get this specialist arts college, humanities, whatever status. Are you saying that citizenship can now rank in parallel esteem with those subjects?

Lord Adonis: You are completely right, part citizenship can be a subsidiary subject within that and schools can then seek to develop links with other schools in the way I was describing to Jeff.

Q584 Stephen Williams: We know that citizenship has only been going for four years, but do you think there will come a time when citizenship will sit alongside history, English and geography as a key subject?

Lord Adonis: Quite frankly, I have had this debate with my officials because the citizenship community would like the school to be able to specialise just in citizenship in the same way they can specialise just in science or maths, whereas, at the moment, as you rightly say, they have to do it in conjunction with other humanity subjects. They take on a humanities specialism and citizenship can be part of that, but they must also have a specialism in another area. The rationale for that is specialisms should be in areas where you can set effective targets because of performance in National Curriculum subjects. For example, in respect of history and geography, you can set targets for performance in those subjects because they are sat widely at GCSE. In respect of citizenship, you cannot do so yet because all that is available is the half GCSE. I have debated that criterion. It may be that your Committee may want to make a case for saying that is too narrow a view of what constitutes the capacity of a school to demonstrate year-on-year improvement in a particular area and there are other ways that you could demonstrate year-on-year improvement of citizenship that are not directly related just to a GCSE. That is a debate we are having inside the Department at the moment and with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, and we would welcome your view on it because it is very important.

Q585 Chairman: There are dual-specialisms.

Lord Adonis: There are, which is one of the reasons why you could take a view that it is perfectly reasonable to have citizenship now as a free-standing first or second specialism in its own right.

Q586 Stephen Williams: Can I move on to Every Child Matters. I have a look at the list of ministerial responsibilities, I do not think it is directly one of yours but it possibly lies with your colleagues. One of the five outcomes of Every Child Matters is making a positive contribution. Are you confident that your ministerial colleagues, both within the DfES and other government departments who have responsibility for children, are aware of the role that citizenship can play in making a positive outcome for a community?

Lord Adonis: Both Beverley Hughes, who is directly responsible for the Every Child Matters agenda, and Bill Rammel, who does further and higher education, are very much aware of this. Bill has been crucial in developing the new post 16 programmes of support I have described, and both Beverley and I, because I had to take the Childcare Bill through the House of Lords, gave a lot of attention to the issue of the child's voice in the development of the new foundation stage curriculum which does place a premium on foundation stage settings seeking to engage even with young children on matters of concern to them in developing provision in their area. I have had similar discussions with Beverley in respect of primary schools also and she has strongly endorsed, for example, the work we are doing in respect of schools councils at primary level. This is a matter of interest to my ministerial colleagues across the Department.

Q587 Stephen Williams: Is there also discussion that your ministerial colleagues mentioned to you that they are exploring how the children's voice can be heard in other fields of children's policy as well, not just directly in the school?

Lord Adonis: Absolutely. If I take another area in schools, for example a very topical area of behaviour management and bullying policy, this was an ongoing debate during the passage of the Education and Inspections Bill in the decision-making process leading to a school adopting a behaviour policy. As the Bill left the Commons, schools were simply required to consult a sample of pupils in developing those policies in behaviour management plans and so on. We changed the Bill in the Lords in response to cross-party discussion on this issue to a requirement on schools to consult all pupils in a school before developing policies in this area precisely for the reason you were giving, Mr Williams, about having pupils more widely engaged in discussion and the setting of policies in such an important area as behaviour management, would be likely to get much stronger support on the part of all pupils in the schools if they have been engaged in making the policy in the first place.

Q588 Stephen Williams: Picking up on another answer that was mentioned in passing, my colleague, Paul Holmes, mentioned today's report by the Institute of Public Policy Research. One of the key findings of that report was that social mobility is affected now by pupils from some backgrounds not having what they call the "soft skills", articulation, negotiation, persuasion and so on, which enables them to make the step-change within a generation to a higher income level or get into a better university. Are you disappointed that they did not identify citizenship as one of the ways that could be improved?

Lord Adonis: I would put it the other way around and say I think citizenship is an important way that students can develop these "soft skills", and all of the applied areas of citizenship which we have talked about this afternoon are ways that schools can develop. There are other ways too, there is all the education outside the classroom agenda which is dear to the heart of the Chairman, and that plays a vital role in developing soft skills, leadership skills, team working, awareness of communities, besides your own, and so on, which are vital in developing well-rounded and confident young people. That is important. Debating is important, for example, and I would like to see a lot more debating in state schools. I always try to give strong encouragement to initiatives in this area since I personally played a part in judging a London-wide debating competition recently specifically to encourage state schools to become more engaged. Outward-bound club activities are important. The report this morning mentioned cadet forces. A large number of state schools do provide opportunities for students in cadet forces and we think that is a thoroughly worthwhile activity also. There is a whole range of activities, including citizenship but extending well beyond, which we need to see developed further in our state schools so that those soft skills can be developed more strongly.

Q589 Stephen Williams: Have you seen The History Boys?

Lord Adonis: I saw the play; I have not seen the film.

Q590 Stephen Williams: I went to see it on Saturday with a history teacher friend and he said to me afterwards, "Of course, there is no room for that sort of teaching in British schools anymore". Is that something you would agree with?

Lord Adonis: I simply do not accept that.

Chairman: I am not sure whether to welcome this or deplore it!

Q591 Stephen Williams: It is not the incident on the motorbike!

Lord Adonis: I shall answer this very carefully as I saw Mr Chaytor's reaction! There are some practices in The History Boys that we would not want to encourage more in our schools.

Q592 Stephen Williams: It was the debating I was thinking about.

Lord Adonis: In terms of debating, a well-run school has good opportunities to be able to develop these aspects, and of course we are seeking to develop the concept of the extended school across the state system which has a full programme of after-school activities as well in areas like debating, volunteering, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, all these sorts of things we want to see more widely developed across the state system.

Q593 Mr Wilson: Can I take you back briefly to the conversation you had some moments ago with the Chairman about the requirements being placed upon governing bodies, this amendment you are bringing, the Education and Inspections Bill. Why has that come so late into the process?

Lord Adonis: Because we are a listening government.

Q594 Chairman: You are a listening government?

Lord Adonis: Yes, we are.

Q595 Chairman: That is a new one!

Lord Adonis: Around my fifty-fifth speech on the Education Bill ---

Q596 Chairman: Who were you listening to?

Lord Adonis: In that particular respect we were listening to Baroness Walmsley who moved an amendment on similar lines on behalf of the Liberal Democrats in the Lords which, as I recall, was strongly supported by your spokesman in the House of Lords, Lady Buscombe, and one or two cross-benchers also. On the basis of that, the argument that we should look more widely at the views of children and the voice of the child, not simply samples of pupils in developing behaviour policies, we said we would consider this issue more widely and we came back with a Government amendment which met that concern.

 

Q597 Mr Wilson: I am not sure but you might be confused; you are talking about Every Child Matters still, are you not?

Lord Adonis: I was talking about behaviour management plans in that respect.

Q598 Mr Wilson: I was asking you about putting the duty to promote community cohesion.

Lord Adonis: I am sorry, that is a different amendment.

Q599 Mr Wilson: Yes.

Lord Adonis: We were a listening government there too. That amendment was promoted by Lord Sutherland, who is a former chief inspector of schools, who was engaged in discussions with myself, both other political parties, and the churches which led to that amendment coming forward.

Q600 Mr Chaytor: Minister, why were you not a listening government 12 months ago when this Committee, in its report on the Bill, suggested exactly the same amendment?

Lord Adonis: Sometimes it takes time for these things to penetrate but I am sure the Committee will be glad that finally the message got through to us.

Chairman: It makes us very happy that we helped you improve the Bill to some extent, Lord Adonis.

Q601 Mr Wilson: Okay, you turned your hearing aid up a year after you should have done, that is a good sign! I want to know what exactly that means in practical terms to schools and governing bodies in terms of what you expect them to do.

Lord Adonis: Schools will need to demonstrate that they have proper programmes of community engagement, of pupil engagement within schools for pupils of all backgrounds, that they have proper programmes of continuing professional development in place which respects community cohesion. All of those aspects will be in the self-evaluation requirements on schools and Ofsted will then inspect against the progress that schools have made in those respects.

Q602 Mr Wilson: Would you not agree that is extremely onerous on individual schools and individual governing bodies to take those sorts of responsibilities on?

Lord Adonis: No, because what became very clear in the discussions that we had is that most good schools do this already. A good school will take these responsibilities seriously and in this area, as in so many other areas of education, what we need to do is replicate existing best practice, and there are thousands of schools nationwide that do all of those aspects I have just referred to extremely successfully. The task is to see that all schools follow the best practice which a large number of schools already demonstrate.

Q603 Mr Wilson: This is a policy for bad schools, is it?

Lord Adonis: We want all schools to demonstrate that they are doing it. Of course it is particularly important that schools that are not doing it at the moment demonstrate that they are taking steps to do so.

Mr Wilson: Can I go to the final question which is about citizenship across stages. Obviously there is a growing and quite rigorous citizenship policy going through schools at the moment, what is the national strategy to take it into other areas like higher or further education? What are you going to do there?

Q604 Chairman: I cut you off a bit because I knew the question was coming later.

Lord Adonis: I described further education and the work that we are doing there, for instance in the Post-16 Active Citizenship Development Programme that we are launching later this month which will make systematic support available. In terms of higher education, as you know, my colleague, Bill Rammell, has been leading a debate about these issues in respect to the universities and how universities themselves can take forward work on community cohesion and promoting mutual respect between different communities at the university level. Bill attaches great seriousness to that work and he has made several speeches about it. He is engaged with the Vice-Chancellors on it and I am sure he would be prepared to write to you and tell you more about the specific projects he has got underway in this area.

Q605 Chairman: Lord Adonis, it has been a really interesting session, but we did have a session - you referred to it - with the Chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Trevor Phillips, and you said as a point of interest you had read it. In that, not in the same language, not using the same words, he did remind us of the Fulmer speech where he said this British society was sleepwalking towards segregation. I think you will find, even when we questioned you today, that this Committee is minded to be quite positive about citizenship education, but do you think the Government is aware of the dangers that Trevor Phillips has outlined? Is he being taken seriously enough?

Lord Adonis: The whole debate that we have had in the last few weeks in Parliament and, I accept, over a longer period in the reports of your Committee about how we take forward community cohesion in schools reflects the importance we attach to seeing that schools are cohesive, both in the way that they bring together different communities within their schools but also in the way that schools interact with a wider community. Those are very important priorities for us, which is the reason why we have laid the new duties that we have in respect of schools.

Q606 Chairman: Do you think if you were starting from here you would be approving of faith schools? If there were not any and you could go back to a time when they did not exist or you could have wished them away, would it make life a lot easier for you?

Lord Adonis: That is an impossible question to answer, Chairman, because faith schools were there before the state was. In 1870, when WE Forster and, my great hero, Mr Gladstone, came to develop what is now our state education system, what did they start with? They started with a national society, with Church of England schools and the newly developing Catholic schools developing in the country. What they sought to do was build a state education system in partnership with the churches that already were the main providers of education in our country. I believe that if you look at the way we have done this over the last 136 years as it now is, we have done it reasonably successfully as a country, including quite significant changes over time. One of the things I was most struck by in the debate with our colleagues in the Catholic education service was how far the character of Catholic education has changed over recent years. One of the figures that the Catholic education service was taking great pride in in our discussions was the fact that 30 per cent of places in Catholic schools now go to families that are not practising Catholics. That is a huge change in the character of Catholic education in our country over the course of the last 10-20 years or so. The kind of statement the Church of England made earlier this year that at least a quarter of the places in all its new schools should be available beyond the Anglican community would have been inconceivable not that long ago in the past. I look at the relationship between the state and faith communities in England as a dynamic one in which they are very alive to wider social change and their wider community responsibilities in this country. They do not have an unchanged model of what a faith school is by any means. Since the churches were there before the state was, it is very difficult to work out what one might have done if it had been the other way around.

Q607 Chairman: I take that point entirely, Lord Adonis, but if you take the other way of phrasing it, do you think societies that do not have a history of church and faith schools will find it easier to tackle the kinds of problems that we see emerging in towns and the inner city?

Lord Adonis: I am very struck, Chairman, if you look at those societies that do have a rigid divorce between church and state in respect of education, there is no evidence that they find it easier to handle these issues. The United States' rigid constitutional divide between the two, there is no evidence that religion plays a lesser role in society at large or within the debates on what constitutes a good education. France is another country where there is this divide, and we know there have been significant issues about community cohesion there. I have not seen - this is a big and important issue - the relationship between whether or not the state itself is prepared to fund faith schools and degrees of community cohesion in society at large. On the contrary, looking at our experience in this country, the fact that, for example, the Catholic and the Jewish communities historically have not had to go private and segment themselves entirely apart from the state education system in order to have a faith-based education has been a great strength of our education system and has helped produce the cohesion we want to see. I know some take different views, but it looks to me as if the evidence is quite convincing in that area. I do not see there is an off-the-shelf model of a society which is broadly similar to ours that does not have faith schools and has a more cohesive society, I see no evidence of that.

Q608 Chairman: Lord Adonis, it has been an interesting session. Thank you very much for your attendance, we enjoyed it.

Lord Adonis: Thank you, Chairman, and I will write to you on those other matters.

Chairman: Thank you.