Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2005
ANGELA E SMITH
MP, MR DAVID
WOODS AND
MS JACQUI
MCLAUGHLIN
Q240 Chairman: Would you be prepared
to invite him?
Angela Smith: I should welcome
him speaking to me about it. I am a bit disappointed that he has
not chosen to do so. He has addressed the papers, but I do think
it is inappropriate to have this kind of discussion in the letters
page of the Belfast Telegraph. I have asked CCEA to look
at his papers; I have both of them with me. I should welcome more
information from him.
Chairman: That is helpful. We shall take
this as a publicly issued invitation and let us hope he accepts
it.
Gordon Banks: We shall look forward to
the response.
Q241 Chairman: Yes, we shall look
forward to the response. Could you keep us informed?
Angela Smith: I should be very
happy to do so.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q242 Sammy Wilson: Earlier on the
Minister said that as far as she was concerned, and she is quite
right of course, the pupil profile must have rigour and robustness.
Angela Smith: Yes.
Q243 Sammy Wilson: I have to say
that when I look at the pupil profile here, it is peppered with
these boxes asking for teacher comments. Having been a teacher
myself and having seen the wide variation just within one school
in the kind of subjective comments and subjective ways in which
teachers can make those comments about youngsters where you would
expect some consistency, yet you sometimes get some complaints
about that, how are you going to ensure rigour and robustness
in a document which relies mostly on teacher comments, though
I accept that there are parts here which talk about levels?
Angela Smith: It is a mixture
of having the level and the comments. That is why I said the computer
assessment support was important and that has been undertaken,
which seems to have been forgotten in this and that is why they
have been piloted in the way they have. I do not know whether
you have had the opportunity to look at the results of the pilot
on the website and look at the information. You may be quite reassured
by the kind of information which has been put on the profiles.
I have had the opportunity to see them and read them. It is also
a professional judgment and teachers are being trained in how
to do this and the best way to do it. I think you are implying
that it is very hit and miss, there is no professionalism behind
them. I can reassure you that there is a great deal of professionalism
and assessment behind them which ensures that they are robust
and stand up to those kinds of tests which you want them to do.
Q244 Sammy Wilson: The test it has
to meet, given that these are going to be used as guidance documents
for parents in making selections for youngsters as to which is
the best school to send them to, is how parents will react to
them. They have not been used for that purpose yet, so we do not
know how parents are likely to react.
Angela Smith: We have involved
parents in the profiles; parents have been very much part of the
profiles.
Q245 Sammy Wilson: The point is that
they will only be a meaningful document when a parent is faced
with having to go to a series of schools and use this as the basis
for choosing which school is best for their youngster. Can you
honestly say that when parents, who may have a desire to send
their youngster to a grammar school—as you have said, that
will be the preference for most parents, even currently—read
through a document like this and it does not really show that
a grammar school is best for his youngster, at that stage do you
really think the parents are going to take this document as a
robust and rigorous assessment of their youngster or will they
simply say the teacher did not really like their youngster?
Angela Smith: You seem to be working
on the basis that the parent will be presented with a pupil profile
and that is it and they go away and make a choice. There will
be a relationship. Instead of the annual report the parent will
get the pupil profile each year of the child's education in primary
school. As well as the profile, the parents are getting clear
guidance from CCEA on how to use the profile, they will get guidance
from the school as well. It is not just a case of "Here's
a document, go away and do what you will with it". There
is a relationship between the parent and the school and guidance
from CCEA on how the profile can be used.
Q246 Lady Hermon: You seem extraordinarily
confident about the success and usefulness of pupil profiling.
Can you actually point to some evidence, whether it be international
or whether it be in another part of the United Kingdom, where
in fact it has actually worked and been successful?
Angela Smith: It is very difficult
to do so, because there is no education system like that in Northern
Ireland anywhere else in the world.
Q247 Lady Hermon: Are our children
being guinea pigs?
Angela Smith: No, because we have
a different system. We have to look at something which is right
for Northern Ireland and the confidence I have on this is because
I have had the opportunity to speak to CCEA, to look at the information,
to see how it is working. We do have the opportunity, where we
think there are deficiencies in it, to alter or change it, because
it is an ongoing process until it comes into operation. I suppose
the confidence I have comes from seeing the deficiencies in the
current system which has enormous benefits but also is letting
down a number of children as well.
Q248 Chairman: I think your confidence
is based on faith rather than experience.
Angela Smith: In some ways it
is, but it is experience of looking at how it is working. The
reason we profile anything and pilot things is to see how effective
it can be. I have been quite prepared, if I was not happy with
the results of those pilots, to say "Forget it. We're not
going to do this. It doesn't work".
Q249 Lady Hermon: How large is the
pilot?
Angela Smith: Fairly small at
the moment; initially small though it has been extended.
Q250 Chairman: How small is small?
Angela Smith: About 20[6]
schools at present. One of the things I was a little concerned
about and I pressed the question of what kind of schools they
were, whether they were schools where the parents would be the
easiest to engage? I am assured that is not the case. I have seen
evidence for myself. I have a school in my constituency where
the primary head said pupils would not get their annual report
unless parents came to receive it and talk. Every single parent
except one went in and spoke to the head to get the report. In
the same way, we can engage parents in pupil profiles in the most
difficult areas, because you build up a relationship between the
school and the parents and that in itself is important for the
development of the young person in primary school.
Q251 Rosie Cooper: Earlier you mentioned
a possible future announcement of specialist schools. Will the
development of specialist schools result in more fragmentation
or will it result in a real increase in parental choice? What
about the cost of it?
Angela Smith: Development of specialist
schools is not another group of schools but something which overlays
the schools we have at present. The applications went out to all
post-primary schools and they could apply to be included in the
pilot for specialist schools. We had 46 applications and the geographical
spread was not as great as I should have liked, but there was
a spread across different kinds of schools. We have short-listed
13 of those schools, purely on the basis of the quality of the
applications they put in: four controlled secondary; four maintained
secondary; one integrated; two maintained grammar; two controlled
grammar, although one controlled grammar school has pulled out
at present. I do not know whether they are likely to want to be
considered in the future, but they are running a number of initiatives
at present and do not wish to be included at this stage. The specialisms
are: ICT, performing arts, business and enterprise, science, music
and languages, across those areas. It is a way of giving a distinctive
ethos to a school. My experience in my constituency, when I was
initially a little sceptical of specialist schools, has been very
encouraging. Let us test it to see whether it works in the Northern
Ireland system. There is additional funding for the schools which
take on specialist status, they will get an extra £100 per
pupil for four years and a one-off capital grant of £100,000.
Q252 Chairman: A capital grant of
£100,000 and £100 per pupil for four years.
Angela Smith: Yes. We can calculate
the final totals once we have announced the list of schools, but
it gives a distinct ethos to those schools and I cannot at this
stage tell you which will be successful; hopefully around ten,.
Q253 Chairman: Are those figures
irrespective of the size of the school, the number of pupils?
Angela Smith: It is an amount
per pupil.
Q254 Chairman: No, the capital provided.
Angela Smith: Yes, it is.
Q255 Lady Hermon: You said you were
disappointed with the geographical spread. Are the ones which
have been short-listed across Northern Ireland, or are they concentrated
in one area?
Angela Smith: Four ELB areas are
represented overall. There was a good spread from the applications
we had in, but the short-list has not quite such a good spread.
Four Education and Library Board areas are represented on the
short-list.
Q256 Chairman: Is there a reasonable
balance between town and country?
Angela Smith: They are mostly
urban, though not entirely.
Q257 Sammy Wilson: Some of the rural
ones mentioned to me that the big problem was, especially in a
small town, the £25,000 which they had to raise. In some
of the bigger urban areas it was possible to get sponsors, but
there was a difficulty getting sponsors if you were in a small
town. Is that something you could look at?
Angela Smith: That is right. It
was half the amount which was required in England; we reduced
it to try to make it easier. That is something we can look at
in the future. This is just a pilot to see how effective it can
be in a Northern Ireland setting. As we analyse the results of
the first wave, if it has been effective, I should like to see
a second wave. That is something we need to look at.
Q258 Chairman: Can you keep the Committee
informed on that, because I think this is an area in which we
are all interested?
Angela Smith: I shall be very
happy to do that.
Q259 Rosie Cooper: May I throw you
one from left field, which is a misnomer on this page. I really
want to knock the last three letters off and talk about special
schools in the way we talk about them in England? Where do those
children who are visually or hearing impaired, perhaps multi-handicapped,
fit into the Northern Ireland education system?
Angela Smith: Under the SENDO,
the Special Educational Needs and Disability (NI) Order, parents
have an opportunity to put children into mainstream education.
We have special schools as well and we have special schools units
within mainstream schools. There is a range of provision, but
there is the opportunity now for parents who wish their children
to be educated in the mainstream, with the appropriate support
provided, to have mainstream education. We have seen a growth
in the requirement for special needs education and quite dramatic
increases. I have put significant additional money into special
needs education in the last year. I cannot recall the exact figure,
but I can let the Committee have the exact figures. It is a need.
One of the things which concerns me is that we need to identify
children who have special needs very early on so we can meet those
needs better and sometimes prevent those becoming more acute special
needs, if we have identified them early on. There is a lot of
work going on in that area. The more we can provide classroom
assistants in schools the better. This has been a budgetary pressure,
or there has been an issue where you might have three or four
classroom assistants in one class and none in another because
it has been led by statementing. We are improving the provision
for children with special educational needs.
6 Correction from Minister: [delete 20 and] insert
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