Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2005
MR WILLIAM
YOUNG, MR
PETER COSGROVE,
SIR KENNETH
BLOOMFIELD, MR
FINBAR MCCALLION
AND DR
HUGH MORRISON
Q20 Chairman: Who wants to be a millionaire,
eh?
Mr Young: Absolutely. You understand
that we are very aware of that. I think the effect it has may
be overplayed but I take your personal experience very much. We
want to have a system whereby that is minimised as much as possible,
and I do feel that this system that we propose does that.
Dr Morrison: I share that experience.
I failed the test but went on later and joined a grammar school,
and so there is movement back and forward. One thing I would want
to say is that the grammar schools do perform a service as well
for the secondary schools. I teach in the Graduate School of Education.
We currently have on our PGC course—and we reject lots of
people—38 mathematicians, qualified around 3Bs/3As standard
at A-level, with degrees, in many cases Cambridge degrees, so
we do not have any of the problems of recruiting teachers. Those
teachers come in, maybe attracted to the idea of teaching in a
grammar school, and teach in the secondary school system and enjoy
teaching in the secondary school system. In a sense, therefore,
the system is organic and we talk in terms of the system's performance
rather than the performance of the grammar schools and secondary
schools separately. It is a system thing.
Mr Young: Just taking on what
Dr Morrison talked about in modern languages and the hard sciences,
we all know what is happening in England at the moment, that certainly
in the state sector there are ones teaching physics who do not
even have an A-level in physics. We do not have that problem here
but we will have that problem if we go down this road. From our
very good secondary schools and from grammar schools there are
ones in the hard sciences going to university and coming back
into the system to teach, and that is a strength which we must
not forget about. If that is removed then the specialists will
go, and for youngsters from the deprived areas I have seen in
school there is no greater escalator than a young person from
a poor background coming in and being grabbed by the specialist,
being excited by the specialist and saying, "That is what
I want to do with my life".
Q21 Dr McDonnell: Mr Young and colleagues,
I welcome your evidence. I have a couple of questions which only
require brief answers, and the first is a question I have put
to you personally before. What do you feel you can offer the poor
child from a poor background with a poor educational performance?
Again in a sentence, we have talked a little bit about a selection
process of some sort. Would you countenance any serious changes
to the present education system?
Mr Young: You probably were not
in when I took your name in vain.
Q22 Dr McDonnell: It was reported
to me!
Mr Young: I remember clearly the
meeting that you and someone else held in the Methodist College.
You invited along grammar school heads to look at ways in which
we could influence the system, and I know your main interest was
the Greater Shankill area. One of the weaknesses I perceived was
that there were no secondary heads at that meeting and I suggested
we have another meeting with grammar and secondary there. Arising
out of that, I was convinced by what you said, that we needed
to do more, and on a personal school level for the past three
years since then we have sent young people to the primary schools
in that area as role models. In the current year we have 35. Actually,
60 volunteered but I could not get the transport to get them across.
They are simply doing that, as I think you hoped, on a one-to-one
basis and a one-to-three basis as a role model, and schools especially
look for young men. That model that we are doing is something
that could happen in a lot of areas. I would gladly serve on any
committee free to look at a way ahead. I would not charge as Costello
has charged to give my advice. If we were to do it and, for example,
grammar schools and secondary schools were to adopt primary schools
and do that sort of thing, that would be a real escalator. We
can talk about why enough are not applying to grammar schools
but this is the key. What changes would I make to the whole thing?
The process we have talked about. I would give a lot of money
to primary schools in these deprived areas. There is no point
in our saying that we are down on literacy and down on numeracy.
We are not that far down actually; we are sitting pretty well
in the world, but more needs to be done. Primary schools in deprived
areas need a lot of money on a one-to-one basis to try and bring
the levels up. At the other level, people talk about specialist
schools. At the last A-level exams in our school, out of 600 subject
entries only five failed. In other words, all departments passed.
Am I going to say to one, "You are going to be a specialist"?
We have specialists. That is why the grammar school system should
be retained. I have said before that some secondary schools are
doing a superb job. Others find they need more assistance. If
assistance is needed, give them assistance, give them specialists.
Q23 Chairman: I think we get the
message!
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: It was
an old boy at my school who invented Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.
In answer to that question, we want a mutually reinforcing system
at all levels. An interesting example of that is Derry, which
Mr Campbell knows very well, where the university has a step-up
programme, and the step-up programme involves university students,
teachers in the university, going into areas where the whole idea
of higher education has been anathema. You cannot even think of
it, "It is not the sort of thing we do". That kind of
mutual reinforcement can and should take place at all levels of
the education system.
Mr McCallion: One of the side
features that is coming through Costello is what is called 24/27,
that every school should be able to offer children 24 GCSEs and
27 A-levels. For many of our secondary schools that is an impossible
task; they are far too small. In the documentation, which has
been secret up until fairly recently, there was a sentence which
said, "Very small schools would be unable to offer the Costello
entitlement", and then someone at the last meeting of Costello
drew a line through "very" and decided that small schools
would be unable to offer the entitlement. Small schools in Northern
Ireland are 500-pupil schools. That is schools with intakes of
round about 90 pupils. In most of rural Northern Ireland that
is regarded as quite a large secondary school. We are going to
put that at enormous risk. We are secondly going to put it at
enormous risk with the curriculum that is on offer because they
are saying one third of it should be vocational subjects. I was
principal of a secondary school for part of my career and I assure
you that not one of the subjects that was available could have
been or would be taught within my school. The subjects that the
Department of Education put out in June to the schools was an
FE curriculum, so what we are looking at so far as the secondary
schools of Northern Ireland are concerned is that they feel themselves
damaged by the grammar schools, that we are creaming off the good
pupils. We are back now to 1985 figures of 11-year olds but we
now have 18,000 children in integrated schools, so they (secondary
schools) are being cut that way, and the third feature that is
bound to come out of Costello is that the FE colleges will cut
back on secondary schools as well. To try and build a good system
in Northern Ireland when people feel that they are being cut from
all directions is impossible.
Chairman: Perhaps we ought to see this
Costello chap at some stage but we will talk about that later.
He will come here free!
Q24 Gordon Banks: The panel has talked
this morning already a little bit about the Pupil Profile but
I wonder if you could emphasise two points: how the grammar school
suggested profile would differ from the Costello model, and do
you believe that the profile that is used by receiving schools
does effectively still allow selection to continue?
Dr Morrison: I suppose the distinction
between what we are offering and what is in Costello is that Costello
was extremely vague. All the evidence says that the middle class
will get round that, will be able to interpret this prose in the
most positive way for their children. That really worries me about
Costello. Our profile is based on marks with an assured reliability
and validity measure so that the technical robustness, as it is
referred to, of the measure is in the profile, so it is clear
that the profile is giving a reliable measure. There is no reliability
associated with it. Indeed, I do not think it could be computed.
Q25 Chairman: Could I interject:
not marks based on a specific test done at a specific time?
Dr Morrison: There are no marks
in it at all. It is comment only.
Q26 Chairman: Sorry—your test
is not based on marks on a specific day, sitting down on a Saturday
morning filling in a form?
Dr Morrison: Correct. I should
make that clear. It is a profile gathered over three years. It
could be conceivably P5, P6, P7. The child could cancel parts
of the profile which might be regarded as atypical but it would
give a graph of the child's performance over the three years and
it would adapt to the child's ability. The worry people have about
this is that the coaches who coach the test will now do the child's
profile for them. There is a great deal of worry about plagiarism
in course work. This is a high stakes decision for parents. I
think this is open to all sorts of plagiarism, whereas what we
are proposing is not open to anything of that sort. In a sense
all we are asking for is a change in the profile. We just want
another profile; it is as simple as that. With regard to the curriculum
part of it, which is based on American progressivism, all the
evidence is that American blacks, for instance, did not perform
particularly well in open classrooms where children were investigating
things. They needed structure in their lives. They needed to be
instructed. If we were to tell Northern Ireland parents, "Your
child is now assessing himself", I think they would find
that pretty unpalatable, but because of the teacher assessment
dimension of it they would have to do that for issues of reliability
and validity which I will not go into. That would be the fundamental
difference. It would not be a hot day in June, as people say.
It would not be a test on a specific occasion. It would be a rich
profile over time that all children could engage in. At the moment,
unfortunately, some children do not engage in the transfer test.
They sit at the back of classrooms and that horrifies us. They
would all be engaged from the word go and parents would have a
clear idea of how they were doing over time. That statement I
read to you about maths does not involve the words "algebra",
"geometry", "arithmetic". It involves statements
like, "She can record and present data in different ways
and explain why she has chosen her particular method of presentation,
as shown in her recent work in geography". I think parents
will want under "mathematics" to read things like "arithmetic"
and "place value" and "fractions".
Mr Young: High expectation is
really important. If you set it high young people will go for
it. Set it low and they will settle for it. That is what happens
in comprehensive education: young people settle for it. The vagueness
that is being proposed I believe is taken away by the system that
Dr Morrison refers to.
Q27 Meg Hillier: Just touching on
the Pupil Profile, I have been chairman of governors at a primary
school in a very deprived area of London and there, when the teacher
did pupil profiling alongside SATS testing, which is the prevailing
testing system in England, when it is done well it can be very
good. Is one of your concerns that there is not a certain level
of quality and experience among primary teachers to do that level
of profiling?
Dr Morrison: Yes, and I think
it is interesting that Harvard in 1908, when it admitted students
by test, had 55% of undergraduates from the public school system.
They changed it to a profile and, because of the very concerns
you have expressed, the way the profile is used by teachers and
so on, there are now virtually no students from the public schools
as undergraduates in Harvard.
Q28 Meg Hillier: Maybe it is an issue
about training and support for those primary teachers because
when it is done well, as I say, it is excellent.
Dr Morrison: What concerns us
is ideologies like comment-only marking, that you must not give
marks or you must not grade children because it leads to competition.
I think that, no matter how well the training might be, with a
statement as vague as that a middle-class parent would have the
ability to interpret it in its best possible light and a working-class
parent might not even be able to make sense of why maths is being
portrayed in this way, and the training would be very difficult.
Mr McCallion: One of the strange
features about the household survey is that the more working-class
sections of the population had great faith in pupil profiling
and the more middle-class sections of the population had less
confidence in the Pupil Profile, whereas I suspect the reality
of it is that the middle classes could use the profile much more
successfully, and I suspect that is why the difference is there.
Q29 Meg Hillier: Going into the issues
about social deprivation that you mentioned, and the interesting
comments and quite compelling arguments about the social progression
that people can make, and certainly there is evidence of that
from the system in the past in England, is it not true that in
Northern Ireland, while the best pupils do much better than pupils
in England, Scotland and Wales, there are too many children leaving
at 15 without qualifications?
Mr Young: That, I am afraid, is
incorrect. This is spread around quite a bit. This will be a fairly
lengthy answer. They cannot quite compare, but if you compare
Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 results between Northern Ireland,
say, and England, there is not that much difference at Key Stage
2. At Key Stage 3 in English we see England slightly ahead. If
you project that further on, and we look at PISA, two studies
have been done in 2000 and 2003. If you look at the 2003 study,
in English, in maths and in science there are quite startling
differences. Northern Ireland in 2003 was placed in those at sixth,
12th and sixth. In the 2000 study Northern Ireland was tenth,
tenth and tenth. This is out of 43 countries, a quarter of a million
children, so we were sixth, 12th and sixth. In Europe in those
three we are second, seventh and third. If you look at England,
England has gone down from eighth, eighth and fourth to 12th,
18th and 11th and it now puts England in about 18th place. In
fact, England is not officially recorded because not enough people
sent returns in and most people believe that that happened because
the results were probably worse in those schools. We see the two
systems going like that. If you then progress to the GCSE level
you see Northern Ireland with the five passes 10% better, and
in the England figure we have to remember that it was Hyman, I
think, who was with Tony Blair up to 2003, has written an essay
and he said that wherever he went any school that improved in
England only improved because they used the Thomas Telford GNVQ
Intermediate ICT, which is worth four GCSE grades, and that is
a thing which you can do in a year, have another go, have another
go and have another go. There is a 10% difference and in the England
figures you also have the GNVQ being used to bolster the figure.
When you take it a stage further to advanced level, there you
see us about 7% better at the two A-levels passes, generally better,
and if you take the average A-level pass, startlingly, in England
it is 75.1 and in Northern Ireland it is 90.9. That is based on
the UCAS code of 120 for A, 100 for B, 80 for C and so on. Think
of that: 75.1, Northern Ireland 90.9. You can see from the same
sort of base suddenly it projects. To go back to what you said
about not performing just as well, I would have to say that if
you take any education system and look at it you would say that
too. There are young people that need help. It is not ideal. We
need things. But I suspect that concerns are based on the GCSE
point score. The GCSE point score is eight for an A-star, seven
for an A and so on. There are figures that would show on the average
GCSE point score that Northern Ireland is about two points below
England. That is what the whole thing is based on. How ridiculous
that is is illustrated by this point: five passes at C grade are
worth 25 points, five D grades and two E's (which are not passes)
are worth 26 points, so it is not something you can rely on at
all.
Q30 Chairman: I really must come
in because that was a very long answer. I will ask you to send
a little note on that because we only have another six or seven
minutes.
Mr Cosgrove: Of the percentage
that allegedly leave school without qualifications I would ask,
and I do not know the answer to this, how many of them are unemployed?
My empirical observation from my close workings with the local
intermediate schools down my way is that builders are going into
the schools and suggesting to the kids, "Come on out, We'll
train you", even suggesting to the kids that they leave school
as early as 14. I would suspect that a lot of those young kids
that have left school have been headhunted by the builders, by
the bricklayers, people wanting them to train.
Mr Young: I will send you details
on this, but in participation rate and full time education, at
age 16 Northern Ireland is 9% ahead; at 17, startlingly, it is
15%.
Q31 Chairman: You are a wonderful
advocate for Northern Ireland.
Mr Young: Sir Patrick, I hope
I am.
Chairman: Could we have a written answer
to the next question?
Q32 Meg Hillier: Can I ask a question
and the answer can be put in writing because I am aware that colleagues
need to come in on other things? You talked a lot about some of
the action that you were taking particularly at school level at
Belfast Royal Academy about going to deprived areas to encourage
children in. I would be interested to know your thoughts about
how to encourage children from those areas to apply but also the
lower level improvement maybe that is needed. In Britain Sure
Start has been very popular and very effective at improving the
chances of young people. It is too much of a subject to get into
in the next few minutes but perhaps we could have something in
writing.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: I have
mentioned the fact that I was involved with the programme Making
Belfast Work. We were a lot of middle-aged male under-secretaries
talking about this. I said to the guys one day, "A lot of
our people in the Civil Service live in these areas but because
they are low down the hierarchy nobody ever talks to them. I want
you to come to the next meeting and bring half a dozen of these
young people". It presented to us the reality that in some
of these areas the whole idea of going to a grammar school and
wearing a blazer and pursuing an academic curriculum was somehow
sissy: "It is not quite the sort of thing that people like
us do". One has to find a way of breaking through that attitudinal
difficulty. It is not easy but it has to be done.
Q33 Stephen Pound: Costello contains
the dread phrase, "The status quo is not an option".
We heard from Fi McCallion. I think you were talking about Lumen
Christi. You described it as an A-school. Presumably that means
that they will only accept pupils who get As. If you have a falling
population, if you have major demographic changes, what happens?
Do you admit pupils at a lower level of attainment or do you close
grammar schools? In other words, is Costello right and is the
status quo not an option or, within the context of demographic
change, can you still provide the clearly excellent provision
that you are doing?
Mr McCallion: We have spent the
last five years arguing about 11-plus. The reality is that we
should have spent the last five years planning an education system.
We are back to the numbers we had in 1985. We have the same number
of 11-year olds today. The numbers going into grammar schools
are the same as they were then. The numbers going into secondary
schools are fewer because we have opened new schools without planning
and managing that process. If the grammar schools want to be academic
schools they will have to live by their words. You cannot keep
on hunting the numbers down so that everyone ends up in a grammar
school. Suppose our population halved again. It is unlikely to
but suppose it did. Where would we be? Would we have grammar schools
which were full to the doors and no other schools in Northern
Ireland? That is crazy. The GBA went and saw the political parties
in Northern Ireland when the Labour Government was elected, and
said, "We need to start thinking ahead of a future for education
in Northern Ireland and we will take our lumps". It was put
as bluntly as that. We know what is going to happen here. The
numbers are going down, we can see ahead and we were looking towards
2005. That was nine or 10 years ago. We have wasted the in-between
period. That is one of the tragedies of it. We have wasted a whole
set of children that have gone through. If the grammar schools
want to be academic they will have to pay the price. Lumen Christi
is an A-school because it has 120 places and about 150 As apply.
There are some grammar schools which are like that. Grammar schools
in Northern Ireland are not like grammar schools in GB. They are
much more mixed and much wider, but at the end of the day there
will have to be a limit; we all accept that.
Q34 Stephen Pound: But would you
close grammar schools?
Mr McCallion: We have closed grammar
schools. In 1980 there were two Royal Schools in Armagh; there
is now one. There were two Catholic boys' grammar schools in Armagh;
there is now one, Sacred Hearth of Mary, Hollywod and Our Lady
& St Pat's in Knock were two separate grammar schools. They
are now joined together as one. There was a grammar school at
Whitehead, Whitehead Grammar School; it has gone. There was a
grammar school at Bushmills; it has gone. There was a grammar
school—
Chairman: You have made your point.
Q35 Mr Campbell: A more emphatic
response I could not have thought of. I wanted to raise the issue
about the social scale. We have had some considerable discussion
in the education debate about the difficulties in working class
areas and it has been alluded to this morning, and that is a fundamentally
important point. Mr McCallion and I think maybe one other of the
witnesses referred in passing to the other end of the scale. I
am just wondering if any of the witnesses have personal experience
of the problems in other parts of the UK or the Republic of Ireland
or elsewhere, where there is a greater degree of disposable income
in the middle to upper income brackets which is then channelled
into relocation, second homes or what and an education system
has emerged that may well emerge post-Costello. There was some
brief reference to it by Mr McCallion. I wonder if anyone has
any first-hand experience of it.
Mr Young: The notes are there.
I do not think you were in when I quoted three major studies done
on comprehensive education and those who have economic capital
and social capital. There are plenty of studies that I could send
you details of.
Q36 Chairman: Perhaps you could do
that.
Mr Cosgrove: I am an accountant
but I taught for one day in a private school in Oxford.
Q37 Chairman: You are clearly very
well qualified.
Mr Cosgrove: A friend of mine
brought me over. It just struck me that it was all about money.
You were bright on this side and you were dim on this side of
the class. That is the way she split the class up. I just had
to go along. This was a secondary school. We do not have private
schools here at all.
Q38 Chairman: You have some.
Mr Cosgrove: Very marginally but
they do not impact on me.
Q39 Chairman: We have had one or
two letters from those who purport to go to them, so I think you
have some.
Mr Cosgrove: All I am saying is
that we do not have them but we have loads of people who are first
time generation at university and we in Cookstown have loads of
buses leave Cookstown because we have no grammar school in Cookstown.
Four buses go to Magherafelt, four buses go to Dungannon, buses
go from very heavily populated hinterlands to allow people that
choice, ordinary people who have never been to university before.
They get on those buses and they go to those schools and I feel
that is all going to be undermined because the criteria are not
defined.
Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: I have
a personal experience although it is rather outdated. I lived
some years ago in New York, in Manhattan. There was only one public
school, as the Americans say, in Manhattan that anybody wanted
their children to go to, and guess what that did to the property
prices within the catchment area? They were simply buying places
in that school.
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