Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2005
MR WILLIAM
YOUNG, MR
PETER COSGROVE,
SIR KENNETH
BLOOMFIELD, MR
FINBAR MCCALLION
AND DR
HUGH MORRISON
Q1 Chairman: Gentlemen, could I welcome
you formally to this session? This is the first session of the
new Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, appointed at the
beginning of this Parliament, taking evidence in Northern Ireland
itself. This comes about as a result, Mr Young, of your initial
letter to me and then your follow-up letter with your colleagues.
We decided that, whilst we would not be launching a major inquiry
into this, we would give the various interested parties the opportunity
to submit written evidence and to give oral evidence. We are seeing
a number of people today, as you know; you have seen our programme.
Could I point out that you, of course, are welcome to listen to
the evidence given by others as members of the public if you wish
to, and that you, and indeed anybody who listens to this session,
is welcome to submit written evidence or further written evidence
if they wish to do so. The committee will be seeing the Minister
with the responsibility for education under the direct rule arrangements,
that is, Angela Smith, on 14 December in London. We tried to arrange
to see her in Belfast but it was not possible because 7 December,
which was the date we could have done, she could not and so she
is coming on the 14th. Everything is being taken down and you
will be receiving a transcript. If there is anything in the transcript
that you believe is inaccurate in any way then, of course, you
should let our Clerk know and appropriate corrections will be
made. We will, of course, be publishing all the evidence that
we receive and we may or may not choose to publish a brief report
on the subject. That the committee has not yet decided. With those
words of welcome, Mr Young, could I invite you to introduce your
team? I ought perhaps to apologise for the Northern Ireland members
of the committee. All the ones from England are here, but the
Northern Ireland ones are held up in heavy traffic and weather,
we are told, but then we are the ones who need educating on this
subject most of all.
Mr Young: Starting on my left,
Mr Finbar McCallion represents the Governing Bodies Association
of the voluntary grammar schools. Sir Kenneth Bloomfield is representing
the Confederation of Former Pupils' Associations. I, as you know,
am Head of Belfast Royal Academy and I am here representing a
group of heads of voluntary and controlled schools. Dr Hugh Morrison
is an expert witness from the Department of Education at The Queen's
University, and I am afraid Mr Cosgrove of Concerned Parents has
not arrived yet. He is travelling from Cookstown and he has phoned
to say he has been involved in a traffic accident. He is fine
but will be delayed somewhat. That is the team. I would like if
I may to take the opportunity briefly of thanking the committee
very much for giving us this opportunity. It has been a very difficult
five years since I became Principal. No-one appears to be listening
to us and we are deeply grateful to have this opportunity to speak
with people who may be able to change things for us.
Q2 Chairman: We are delighted to
see you and thank you for taking the initiative that you did.
I am glad that Mr Sammy Wilson at least has got through the snow.
Before we begin the questioning, you have given us a short paper.
Is there anything that any of you wish to add to that by way of
an opening statement?
Mr Young: Not really. We wish
to use the time for discussion as much as possible, so we tried
an executive summary to spell out exactly what we feel. We have
great concerns. Most of the points from 3a) to 3d) are educational
but two other points that are very significant too, we believe,
are 3e) the costings, and 3f) the lack of democratic approval.
Q3 Chairman: Thank you very much.
Before I call my colleagues may I ask you a couple of questions?
Would it be true to infer from your written evidence that you
believe that the retention of some form of academic selection,
though not necessarily the current one, is essential to maintain
the high quality of the education that your schools offer?
Mr Young: We believe this very
strongly, that some form of academic selection should be maintained.
We are not here just for grammar schools. We do believe in the
gifts of all the children and opportunities for all the children
in the Province, but when we look at the evidence from England
and from a number of reports that were done in the nineties and
so on, the moment academic selection of some type is removed the
ones that suffer are those children from the deprived areas.
Q4 Chairman: One of the reasons implicit
in the arguments of those who would see change is that the system
as presently constituted does not have a proper balance either
between the two communities—and we still have to talk in
those terms, regretfully—or between those who come from
socially deprived areas and those who come from what I would loosely
call middle-class areas. How would you respond to those two implicit
criticisms, which are really fundamental to the case for change?
Mr Young: To take the first one
about the religious divide, it is still there. My own school I
believe puts forward very much what can be achieved. We are a
non-denominational school and something in the region of 27% or
28% of the young people are from a Catholic background. More needs
to be done than that, I believe, but a lot is happening, not just
in integrated education but also a number of the grammar schools
have a similar representation to my own. In terms of those young
people from deprived areas, there is no doubt more needs to be
done there. Sometimes the charge is laid at the grammar schools,
that the grammar schools are not attracting enough young people
from deprived areas. That is true. It is something that we want
to change but I think there are other factors which should not
be laid at the door of the grammar schools. You will probably
be hearing this from community representatives later, but in deprived
areas, take, for example, the Greater Shankill area, there are
big social problems which affect the ambitions of the parents
so that they do not see the grammar schools; they see it more
that the local school is where the young people should go. It
is a change from my time. I was born in Londonderry. I was very
much working class. In those days my parents gave me the opportunity
and pushed me forward. Sadly, at the moment in some areas like
this there is not the push from the parents for young people to
move beyond. We as a school have tried to do something about that.
One of your members, Dr Alasdair McDonnell, chaired three years
ago a meeting of principals to see what could be done. Since that
time our school has sent sixth-formers into schools in that area,
in no great way, to do reading and so on but primarily to be role
models, to show the young people what they could do. It is something
that as a team we feel really strongly about and we think more
should be done, not just by grammar schools. There are other tricks,
so to speak, that could be done to try and improve the situation.
Q5 Chairman: So those two issues
you accept need addressing and you would argue that you are addressing
them to a degree. Do your colleagues wish to add anything to that
answer?
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: I would
very much support what Mr Young has said about our interest, not
just in the grammar schools but in the whole system. This morning,
reading the welter of comment about the late George Best, I found
it fascinating to reflect—and I had not known this myself—that
he had passed the 11-plus and won a place in a grammar school
and had then voluntarily left it because he did not feel all that
comfortable in it and he went to the local non-grammar school.
One puts this in the context of the Government itself saying to
us, "We are not aiming for a one-size-fits-all solution".
I found that fact interesting about the educational life of George
Best.
Q6 Chairman: And many other facts
followed!
Mr McCallion: When we look to
the future of Northern Ireland one of the things we must look
for is diversity. In most of the tolerant societies we go ahead
and a tolerant society should have tolerance for faith schools.
I think it is very important that they are there. It is also very
important that they follow a national-type curriculum and that
the state and the whole of society can have cognisance of what
is going on inside the schools. There is very strong evidence
from the United States and other countries that, for example,
Catholic education or Jewish education can have great benefits
for communities which are marginalised in the normal state of
affairs. That is one of the issues that is clear in Northern Ireland.
No-one looks at the education system and sees it as divisive in
the sense of outcomes. People see success in both the Catholic
system and the larger system that sits around it. The two systems
should work together and everyone who looks forward wants to see
things working together. One of the things we have learned over
our time is that security, particularly for young men, is a very
important issue, that they feel content inside their skin. I suspect
one of the issues that you are facing in England at the moment
is when you look at the Islamic societies. Are these people secure
in their skin as English people or Welsh people or Scots people
are? That is an issue that has been quite successful in Northern
Ireland through the faith schools, that parents will choose. The
major issue that we would argue is that it is the parents who
the Catholic church and every other church and every other group
in our society think are the first educators of their children
and we want to help those parents make a success for their children
and give hope for their children.
Mr Young: May I add one other
thing? The system is not perfect. There are things that we see
need to be done. One of the great strengths of it is the variety
of schools. Mr McCallion was talking about faith schools. I was
interested in the White Paper how the Prime Minister made the
point that in areas where there is a variety of schools it is
that very thing that drives up standards and I believe that is
what we have here. If we follow Costello we will end up in time—not
immediately but five, seven years down the road—with schools
all of the same type. The evidence shows, and the Prime Minister
agrees, that a variety drives up improvement.
Q7 Chairman: Did you wish to add
anything, Dr Morrison?
Dr Morrison: If I could summarise
the curriculum and assessment aspects in a few words, this debate
is often portrayed as a Catholic/Protestant issue. I am a Catholic
who grew up in pretty difficult circumstances and I see things
in this way. It is often portrayed as something that Protestants
want and Catholics do not. In terms of disadvantage, I think with
the profile we are being offered the wealthy would just bypass
the interests of children from working-class and poor backgrounds
because of the very vague nature of the profile itself. The profile
meets no international standards. The curriculum we are getting
is a progressivist curriculum. The Americans abandoned that curriculum
in the 1960s because of its impact on the poor. The curriculum
itself is extremely innovative, based on American progressivism
where classes should be chaotic and children not see structure
and so on, and I think that would impact negatively on the life
chances of the poor as well.
Q8 Mr Hepburn: You have said that
you need to get more kids from poor backgrounds into your schools.
You say that you need more Catholics in your schools. How long
do you need? You have been in existence all this time. Is it Costello
that has suddenly kicked you into realising that what has gone
on in the past is wrong and you need to change?
Mr Young: If you look at the statistics,
not just in Northern Ireland but in England as well, when the
grammar schools came into being a far greater percentage of young
people from working class areas attended them. Here the extra
element that has to be thrown in, of course, is the Troubles and
it follows the point that Mr McCallion made about people feeling
safe in their own areas. There is no doubt that that has changed
things. The social view of grammar schools has changed as well
but an element that we need to point out to you, of course, is
that Northern Ireland does not just have great schools that are
grammar schools; Northern Ireland has great schools that are secondary
schools doing a superb job. The fact that the numbers going to
university from deprived areas in Northern Ireland is so much
greater than anywhere else in these islands, the Republic or Great
Britain, is due not just to grammar schools but also to superb
secondary schools. It is very important that grammar schools are
there to grab young minds. Placed where we are on the edge of
Europe, we need the engineers, we need the scientists, and so
on. We do not have the problems here that England has. We still
have the physicists and so on. It is important that that is grabbed,
but the job that the secondary schools do is quite superb. You
will know that young men especially (and we see it in our own
school) can develop dramatically at different stages—at
14, at 16, at 18; some even develop at university. What the secondary
schools are doing is coping with ones who are perhaps more tailored
for technical or vocational education but they are also providing
a route, a superb escalator, to university and the proof is in
the number of people from deprived areas who move on at that stage.
Q9 Rosie Cooper: The Costello Report
indicated that they were not in favour of selection and grammar
schools are saying that this is the only way to preserve the ethos
of the schools; yet we know that most of the other academic bodies
are not in favour of selection. Why do you think so much of the
academic area is not in favour of keeping selection?
Mr McCallion: I think you have
to look back to your own history in England. Who brought in comprehensive
education in England? Comprehensive education was brought in by
the education departments and the universities. It was the universities,
it was the middle classes, who very much drove the theory and
the arguments for comprehensive education, and many people who
wrote about it commented afterwards they probably bought their
children into private schools. We do not have a private sector
in Northern Ireland; we do not have one private school. We have
a system that runs in the state sector, very like your direct
grant and secondary schools. A second issue is that for many of
the people in education and in the universities in Northern Ireland
this is the sixties revolution that did not happen. We went off
and fought a war in our community and left the politics behind
and now we are playing catch-up. Many of them seem to be running
through the cycle. The issue is: look at the outcomes for young
people in Northern Ireland. Our GCSE results, our A-level results,
our outcome results are significantly better and it is not only
the grammar schools that are doing it; it is both grammar and
secondary. We do not want an 11-plus. We can see there is a problem
with 11-plus. It is a one-off examination. As a parent who has
put my own children through it, would I want to put anyone else's
children through that? I did not want to do it but I chose to
do it because it was the only show in town. If we could find a
gentler, better way of advising the parents, helping the parents
to think their way through, I would prefer that. My experience
of parents is that you get the parents of P5 and P6 children coming
to you and saying, "I do not know whether my child should
take it". We need a system but we do not need to go back
and fight the sixties revolution. Let that be past history. There
is a situation in Northern Ireland where we do what you are just
about to abandon.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Can I
emphasise that when we say "we" we do not just mean
the few of us around this table. It is interesting that attitude
to all this has been democratically tested. After the original
Burns Report a very wide-ranging consultative exercise was carried
out, probably one of the most wide-ranging consultative exercises
ever carried out, and the outcome of that was that on the one
hand people were saying, yes, they thought the 11-plus was a very
poor way of achieving selection, and we agreed with that, but
on the other hand they were quite clearly saying that they wanted
an academic element to remain in the selection. That has been
repeated in successive tests of opinion and in opinion polls.
We like to feel we are not just expressing the view of some selfish
interest; we are expressing a broadly democratic interest. Can
I say two other things while I have the opportunity to speak?
Looking at what the Belfast Agreement says about major issues,
it says that arrangements to ensure key decisions should be taken
on a cross-community basis, requiring for such key decisions either
parallel consent or a weighted majority. I say with confidence
that if this had been tested or were to be tested in a Northern
Ireland Assembly it would not meet that test. Then I saw the Secretary
of State only the other day making a statement about the Review
of Public Administration, which is going to be an enormous upheaval
in our public services, saying that as far as possible services
and functions which affect only the people in an area should come
under the control of representatives elected by the citizens who
live there. I would say that the citizens who live here and those
who have been elected by the citizens who live here by and large
are oaf the view that some method of academic selection should
be maintained.
Mr Young: If I may, Sir Patrick,
I would like to add one other thing. You mentioned organisations
in particular. It is worth pointing out that in the household
response form which was sent out the majority view prevailed,
not just the population as a whole but also teachers, so I am
afraid the fact is that those people at the top of organisations
do not represent the people in their organisations and the MORI
polls that followed that through the BBC, through the Belfast
Telegraph, confirm it quite clearly. It is supposed to be
consultation. There were three strands in the household survey
in particular. Parental choice was mentioned, the end of the present
11-plus and the retention of some form of academic selection.
In all three there was a majority. The majority wanted parental
choice, the majority wanted the end of the present 11-plus, the
majority wanted academic selection to be retained—and we
agreed with all three of those—and some system has to try
and fit those in as best it can, but I am afraid it was cherry-picked,
not totally accepted and academic selection was rejected.
Q10 Rosie Cooper: You indicated that
you want to keep grammar schools and selection of some form but
maybe not the 11-plus in the form in which it is. What work have
you done on moving that on?
Mr Young: Quite a bit of work.
May I ask Dr Morrison to say what that is?
Dr Morrison: We have proposed
a piece of software that would not be a large IT project but would
be something localised in schools to replace what CCEA has to
offer. The Pupil Profile that CCEA offers to guide parents at
the moment,—
Q11 Chairman: CCEA?
Dr Morrison: CCEA is the curriculum
organisation that produces these tools. This is the description
of the child's mathematical ability: "She can investigate
ways of posing and solving problems and is starting to communicate,
through discussion and writing, better ways of thinking and acting
mathematically in familiar and everyday situations. She can also
record and present data in different ways and explain why she
has chosen her particular method of presentation, as shown in
a recent geography project involving maths and compass work."
Why are there no marks there? Because part of the Costello profile
is comment-only marking. Parents cannot receive grades and marks
from their children's work. The role of assessment for the child
now devolves to the child. In this curriculum the child assesses
its own work and the work of its peers. I cannot see England accepting
an assessment system where the children do their own assessing
or where they are responsible for assessing each other or where
marks and grades are abandoned. The piece of software that we
have recommended is computer-adaptive testing which has been around
for 40 years. It adapts to the child's ability. For a child, say,
who might attempt a question and would ordinarily get zero in
it if they got this question wrong, the software will adapt and
ask the child an easier question so that children even of special
educational need could be in the mainstream. We have produced
a version of the profile and we are not looking for a return to
the test. We want a profile that is not as vague as this. I think
a profile as vague as this would give the middle class a chance
to steal a march on the working class because they would be able
to interpret something as vague as this. When I look for attainment
in maths I want to know how somebody has done in algebra, in geometry
and in arithmetic. This idea of not giving marks, of it being
an ideology that you do not give marks, is what worries us. We
have offered a piece of software which gives a clear score in
the various subjects which would guide parents through objective
information.
Mr Young: This system is based
on international standards. It hits them all. It gives equality
of opportunity, we feel, and is stress-free. One of the great
criticisms of the present test is the stress. There is no distortion
of the curriculum. We believe, unlike what is proposed, that this
is manageable in the primary curriculum. It will not give a massive
headache. It involves ICT. You cannot coach for it; that is very
important. Very important too is that it is diagnostic. It gives
a view, P5, P6, P7, the level the children are at, and we believe
as well, finally, that it gives very good information for the
parents. It equips them to see where their child should be going.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Can I
point to one rather grotesque anomaly in what is being proposed
to us? The centre of this system is supposed to be not only parental
choice but informed parental choice, and the purpose of the Pupil
Profile is to allow that parental choice to be informed, but the
system provides only for advice to the parent from the primary
school head. There is to be no role in this for the potential
receiving school. It seems to me reasonable that the receiving
school should at the very least be able to say to the parent,
"Do you understand what sort of school this is? This is a
school of academic rigour. I am not entirely sure that your child
will survive here." I have some personal experience of this.
People in my own family have found themselves in schools where
they were being asked to leap over hurdles that they kept falling
at and there is nothing less in the interests of a child. If we
are going to have parental choice let there be genuinely informed,
bilateral parental choice, not this half-baked model which is
being presented to us at the moment.
Q12 Chairman: The weather has obviously
allowed your colleague to come and all my colleagues from Northern
Ireland have arrived during the last 10 minutes or so as well.
I am sorry you had an accident. I hope all is well.
Mr Cosgrove: Nobody was hurt.
Q13 Sammy Wilson: On the area of
social disadvantage, I think the representatives here have maybe
done themselves down a little when it comes to how integrated
grammar schools are and also the percentage of youngsters from
working-class backgrounds who get to grammar schools in Northern
Ireland. It is said that the 11-plus disadvantages youngsters
from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, but you have mentioned
that the Pupil Profile is likely to be even more damaging for
youngsters from socially deprived backgrounds. Could you spell
out how in practical ways you believe that is the case?
Mr McCallion: I think you have
clear examples of it already in England. Look at the schools that
are over-subscribed. They are high status schools around London
and the Home Counties, in fact, almost throughout any part of
England. They are over-subscribed six, seven and eight times.
If you are over-subscribed six times that means one sixth of the
children get into the school of their first choice and five-sixths
of those children do not get in. Yet in Northern Ireland something
like 88% of the children manage to get into the school of their
first choice first time. It is partly because there is a form
of guidance offered. If you have an A and you apply to Lumen Christi
in Derry you have a reasonably good chance of getting in, but
you know that if you have got a B or a C or whatever your chances
of getting in there are very small because Lumen Christi is an
all-A school, so there is evidence out there. The second issue
is that if you go down the line of saying, "We will allow
a free-for-all", what you will find is that the middle classes
in Northern Ireland will do what the middle classes in England
have done very successfully. They will move house, buy a property,
get accommodation addresses, work the system in whatever way they
can. That is not a uniquely English problem; it is also a Scots
problem, and if you really want to see it at its worst, go and
look in the Republic of Ireland where people move primary school
to primary school to be in the catchment area of their ideal or
favourite school. We have avoided that in Northern Ireland to
a huge extent because what we have said is that we will try and
match pupils to schools. What we are looking for here is to try
and do a better job of that. Who will manage any system anywhere
on the planet? The middle classes. The only way you can do that
is by a system that we saw working for ourselves. When I was a
young man and went to St Mary's Grammar School in 1957, there
were 120 of us gathered together there. There were no doctors
or lawyers, but you see those old, grey-haired men now. That is
what they are. They have become middle class and their children
are now identified as middle class, so one of the problems that
the grammar school system and the secondary school system has
in Northern Ireland is that we have been so successful we have
escalated a set of people and now they want to send their children
to the schools that they went to.
Mr Young: It is a very important
point that Mr Wilson makes in three areas. First of all, if you
look at the reports on this that are around, there is Maeve O'Brien
"Making a Move" in which she looks at what happens in
the Republic of Ireland and there, frankly, what happens in a
comprehensive system with private schools is that the middle classes,
the ones who have the economic capital, work the system. Intergenerational
Mobility by Blandon, Machin and Gregg says quite clearly that
comprehensives do not deliver, and that was an intergenerational
mobility study in Europe and the States. The last one, by Ball,
Bowe and Gerwitz, talks about choice being eroded and choice being
illusory. The facts are there. On a practical basis the Principal
of Down High School is here today, and he handed me today a breakdown
of where last year's upper sixth went and their background, 88
of them. This will give you a flavour of what grammar schools
are delivering for people from deprived areas and different social
backgrounds—eight clerical, 10 engineering, seven tradesmen,
10 teaching, six nurses, three care assistants, four drivers,
four working in social services, three shopkeepers, seven farmers,
three medical, four police, nine finance, four law, three architecture/planning,
eight business, four others and one unemployed. That picture I
am sure would be the same in lots of schools, not just grammar
schools but also in some of these superb secondary schools. Lastly,
because this comes to what practically will happen under this
proposed system, a parent will go along and meet the primary principal.
The hope is that those parents will then pick the right school.
There are two things that are going to work against that. One
is that the people in the good suits will put pressure on the
teacher and it will be very hard for them to go against that.
That, I am afraid, is a fact of life. Secondly, it goes totally
against what my view of human nature is. If I am a parent and
I am told that that is the right school for my child and I see
another school that I reckon is a much better one, then I know
what I would probably do, and that is go to what I think is the
best school. In practice, therefore, you will not have a situation
like here, where 88% of people are satisfied with the school of
their choice. You will have a situation, as Mr McCallion said,
as in England where—and it is well documented—in lots
of ways there is great dissatisfaction. People are not getting
the schools they want and the proportion is six to one and in
some cases eight to one. The practicalities, I am afraid, backed
up by international research and by an example of one school's
background, show this to me very clearly. I think you have a sense
that I care deeply about this. I care deeply about this Province
and what I see being thrust on us as something that has failed
in England.
Q14 Sammy Wilson: How integrated
is your school?
Mr Young: I think we have a figure
on it. We are non-denominational. I do not ask anybody or want
to know what religion they are, but there is a thing they take
when they come in because the department from time to time ask
us for figures. Even those are not all that accurate because some
people might see themselves as Protestant but tick something else.
Some people might see themselves as Catholic and tick something
else. We have in the grammar school 1,400 pupils. At the last
check there were 400 confirmed as Catholic children, which I am
delighted about. At every open evening—and it is not something
that I have said first but my predecessor and my predecessor's
predecessor said—these are the words I say to the parents.
This is the situation: a crammed assembly hall, people wanting
to come to my school, and in these days of competition I want
them to come, but I say this because I believe in it: "If
you are unhappy about your son or daughter sitting beside a Protestant
or a Catholic or a Hindu or Jew or a Muslim or one of no religion
at all, then Belfast Royal Academy is not the place for you".
Parents know it and it is something I feel really strongly about.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: I want
to make one very brief point. I realise only too well that your
committee has to confine itself to a particular area or it gets
very untidy, but it always seems to me rather a tragedy that from
time to time we look at the education system in bits and pieces.
We look at the primary level at one stage, we look at the secondary
level at another stage, the tertiary level at another stage. As
it happens I have been involved in both the primary and tertiary
sectors as well as the secondary sector. In the primary sector
I was involved in an initiative some years ago called "Making
Belfast Work". It was trying to deal with social and economic
conditions in the most deprived areas of north and west Belfast
and it brought through to me with great clarity why it was that
not as many children from an area like the Shankill as had been
the case in my day were coming forward to my kind of school. It
had nothing to do with the native ability of the children, nothing
to do with the excellence of the teaching force. It was simply
the social and economic conditions and the unrest prevailing there.
There is a problem there and the solution of it, I am afraid,
is going to be a multi-faceted solution. But then I was for eight
years, as it happens, the first Chairman of the Northern Ireland
Higher Education Council, the local equivalent of HEFCE, and we
spent a lot of our time talking about access to higher education
and, of course, we saw the targets that were being set by the
government nationally for this. Not only were we meeting those
targets earlier than everybody else but The Times newspaper
published recently a hierarchy of all the universities in the
United Kingdom showing the proportion of their undergraduates
who had come from under-privileged backgrounds. What were the
universities right at the top of the list? The Queen's University,
Belfast, ahead of all the other civic universities, the University
of Ulster, way ahead, for instance, of a place like Queen Mary
& Westfield College, which is on the Mile End Road in the
east end of London, which I know very well. That is the result
of the success of our system as an escalator for the able children
of the working class.
Q15 Lady Hermon: I do apologise to
everyone for being so late. Unfortunately, we had at least two
car accidents in Northdown and traffic chaos; it was not the weather.
If, therefore, I am going over ground that has already been covered
I apologise in advance. I was particularly struck by the phrase
"cherry-picking in the household survey". Cherry-picking
has a particular resonance in a different context but we will
concentrate on the household survey. Who do you perceive is known
to be doing the cherry-picking? Is it a clique within the Department
of Education? Is it the department generally? Is it a series of
ministers? When you have identified to us who is doing the cherry-picking
can I find out from you what capacity there has been for you to
make representations to those people?
Mr Young: I will make an initial
statement. I cannot really get a handle on it but it seems to
me that a small group somewhere in the Department of Education
is determined to push this through. I think as well our local
ministers are determined to push it through. I personally have
asked three times to meet with the Minister of Education and have
been turned down three times.
Mr McCallion: Could I quote a
sentence from Monseignor M'Quillan, who is Vicar General in the
Derry Diocese and sent this in to the RPA: "We have unfortunately
a DoE that is weak in its leadership, divided in its divisional
planning, dismissive of the views of parents, misleading in its
information policy and planning statements, and contradictory
in its outworkings."
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Otherwise
we love it dearly.
Q16 Chairman: Can I ask for clarification
on the point you made a moment ago, Mr Young? You said the Minister
had refused to see you. Was that a personal refusal of a personal
interview or a refusal to see representatives as you are this
morning?
Mr Young: It was to meet with
me as a representative of my school, Belfast Royal Academy.
Q17 Chairman: But she has presumably
met with a group like this?
Mr Young: She has met with the
Governing Bodies Association.
Chairman: I just wanted to clarify that
because we are seeing her. Lady Herman, does that answer your
question?
Q18 Lady Hermon: Yes. I was more
interested in what capacity there has been for a group, as yourselves,
to make representations directly to the department and to various
ministers, including the Minister before the present Minister,
Angela Smith?
Dr Morrison: In 50 years of education
research I cannot find anything like what is being proposed in
any country in the world. The Pupil Profile meets no international
measurement standards. That is horrifying to most people. Secondly,
the curriculum has an exact equivalence to American progressivism
which America abandoned in the 1960s because of its impact on
children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Being able to
debate that, being able to get anyone to respond to me on that—and
I do not think they should respond to me as an individual. I have
25-30 international peer review articles in this area. You would
expect some sort of debate but the only way you can get a debate
is on the pages of the Belfast Telegraph. No-one will talk
to you, so the instrument has no measurement qualities and the
curriculum is one that no-one in their right mind would take up.
That is our problem.
Chairman: But we are talking to you and
we are jolly interested in what you are saying, and I know David
Anderson wants to come in.
Q19 Mr Anderson: Whatever system
you put in there is going to be some sort of selection system
and there will be winners and losers. One of the things that sticks
in my mind, going back to my mother, is that my mother failed
the 11-plus in 1932 or 1933 and the fact that she failed stuck
with her all her life. What, in any system, either the one you
are proposing, Dr Morrison, or others, would do away with that
fear of failure at 11?
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Could
I reply to that? I get very tired sometimes of the terminology
of winners and losers. "Fitness for purpose" is the
phrase you want to keep in your mind. It is in the interests of
the child to go to the school that best suits him or her. Not
everybody is academically strong. That is a reality. They have
many other strengths. We need a community where some people become
PhDs and get first-class honours degrees and we need a community
where other people do the rest of the work that society demands.
If I, for instance, who am the most awful sportsman in the world,
were sent to a school that majored on sport how miserable I would
be. Fitness for purpose is what we should be aiming for above
all. The terminology of winners and losers I think is profoundly
unhelpful.
Mr Cosgrove: The concept of failure
really only came to the fore after 1989 when the common curriculum
came in. Prior to that people went, based on the selection system,—and
we are not arguing in favour of the 11-plus here—to the
local intermediate schools where they had lathes and woodworking
machines. I am an accountant; I am not an educational person at
all. I deal with businessmen, loads of guys who went through the
local intermediate schools and who are a lot wealthier than most
of us. They have done extremely well and they are saying to me,
"Where are the young kids like I was 30 years ago?".
Our schools are not producing them. In our Concerned Parents for
Education group we have teachers who teach electronics in the
technical schools and they are saying there are no kids coming
forward to do electronics any more; they are doing beauty, hairdressing,
media studies. They are not coming to do the hard-core, engineering-type
subjects that the old CSEs would have brought in. We did not have
this thing about failure. It is the middle class, to criticise
them, who are most sensitive if they have a kid who might not
get the 11-plus and they do not want their child to go in a different
uniform from the other children. They are the ones that have been
more wrapped up with this concept of failure since 1989. It is
a class thing. If a child of working class people gets the 11-plus
and goes on to grammar school, great. If the child does not he
is going to go to a local technical school and they will get him
out as a plasterer or a bricklayer and they will just think about
their tea, what they are going to eat next. They are not going
to anguish over it. The concept of failure comes, I think, from
the common curriculum. I go down to my local intermediate school.
I live in East Tyrone where we do have a greater degree of diversity
of education and mixing between the schools. I myself went as
a Catholic to a Catholic school up to my O-levels and then I switched
to a Presbyterian school for my A-levels. We do have effective
organic integration, but as a mathematician I also argue in favour
of differentiation. We have to have differentiated schools in
order to work to people's skills or academic strengths or whatever,
and then we have transfers. I make a point of going to my local
intermediate school in Cookstown regularly because I take on quite
a lot of their students as temporary employees in my office either
for a couple of weeks or for a couple of months over the summer.
They come in, we talk to them about whether they will go to the
university or not and things like that, and they are, I find,
very resilient kids, but I believe that we have to emphasise the
differentiation in core subjects and then the concept of failure
will evaporate.
Mr Young: To take head-on your
question, the concept of failure is there; there is no doubt about
it. It is maybe exaggerated a bit, but I know a lot of primary
school teachers who would say it is the parents, particularly
middle-class parents, who put the pressure on. Nevertheless it
is there, and it is a two-test, sudden-death system and it would
be very difficult for this not to be there. The system that we
are talking about is much more gradual than that. It is computer
adaptive testing where young people can do it at any stage in
their primary school. They can do it again and again. If you are
asked a question and you get it right, well and good, you get
a harder question; if you get that right you get a harder question.
If you get it wrong you get an easier question, so the levels
are given.
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