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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 726-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE NORTHERN IRELAND AFFAIRs COMMITTEE Senate Chamber, Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast
Monday 28 November 2005 MR WILLIAM YOUNG, MR PETER COSGROVE, SIR KENNETH BLOOMFIELD, MR FINBAR MCCALLION and DR HUGH MORRISON
MR DONAL FLANAGAN, MR JIM CLARKE and MS MARGARET MARTIN Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 111
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on Monday 28 November 2005 Members present Sir Patrick Cormack, in the Chair Mr David Anderson Gordon Banks Mr Gregory Campbell Rosie Cooper Mr Stephen Hepburn Lady Hermon Meg Hillier Dr Alasdair McDonnell Stephen Pound Sammy Wilson ________________ Memorandum submitted by Grammar Principals' Group, Concerned Parents for Education, Confederation of Grammar Schools' Former Pupils' Associations and Governing Bodies' Association
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr William Young, Headmaster, Belfast Royal Academy, Mr Peter Cosgrove, Concerned Parents for Education, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, Confederation of Grammar Schools' Former Pupils' Associations, Mr Finbar McCallion, Governing Bodies Association, and Dr Hugh Morrison, The Queen's University, Belfast, examined. 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 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 minute 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 that 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 then probably brought 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, 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 ten 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 Christie 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 Christie 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 Neville Grimes making at move in which he 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, Bow 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, ten engineering, seven tradesmen, ten 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, in England where - and it is well documented - in lots of where 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 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 are 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 Mr McCullagh, 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. 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 they 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 that is a key one. What changes would I make to the whole thing? The process we have talked about. I would chuck a lot of money at 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, 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 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 them 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 Highman, 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 and ICT, which is worth four, 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 is 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 nearly 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 Finbar McCallion. I think you were talking about Lumen Christie. 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 ten 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 Christie 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, (?); Hollywood(?) 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. Q40 Chairman: We can all give anecdotal evidence of that. You talked about bright and dim. I think we have got bright on this side of the table and very much brighter on that. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence. I know that there will be points that you will wish to have made and you must feel completely free, Mr Young and all your colleagues, to send us supplementary evidence, and we may well wish to send you some questions to which we want answers when we have our private deliberative session. I am sorry that this has, by the very nature of things, had to be a relatively brief session, but you have put your case with panache and based on a lot of experience and we are very grateful to you. Mr Young: Finally, two very important areas that I had hoped we would get on to were population figures and projections given in Costello that are totally wrong and, secondly, no costing. That is a very serious matter. Both those we have not talked about but your committee need to look at that. Q41 Chairman: Indeed, and you must send us that information. Any information that you feel has not been adequately put or put at all you must feel free to send to us and we will look at it. We are very grateful to all five of you gentlemen. Sir Kenneth Bloomfield: Chairman, one last word. We are so grateful to be heard. We feel at times we have been engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. We plead not to be overtaken by events. It would really be extraordinary when you have been taking this evidence from us if early next month we have some binding decision taken by the Minister and the whole thing proves to have been a waste of time. We sincerely hope that is not going to happen. Chairman: We hope so too. The Minister is coming before the committee on 14 December. There is a draft order going to be published for consultation. I am assured it is indeed a draft order for consultation and this committee will certainly treat it as a draft order for consultation. We shall want to make representations to the Minister based on what we have heard. I cannot tell you what representations the committee will make because we shall want to hear the other witnesses today and we shall want to deliberate among ourselves. You have put up a very good show, if I may say so. Thank you very much indeed for coming.
Memorandum submitted by Council for Catholic Maintained Schools Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Donal Flanagan, Chief Executive, Mr Jim Clarke, Deputy Chief Executive, and Ms Margaret Martin, Principal, St Catherine's College, Armagh, examined. Q42 Chairman: Could I welcome you, Mr Flanagan, and your colleagues? As you will know, this series of sessions comes about as a result of approaches which were made to the committee initially by those who were very concerned about the impact on the grammar schools of the Costello Report implementation. They put forward a series of submissions which we felt we should give them chance to expand upon in public session, but we also felt that if we were going to that we would have a more wide-ranging series of evidence-taking sessions, which is why you are here, and we are seeing others this afternoon and others in Londonderry tomorrow. We are very grateful to you for coming. Could I first of all ask if you would like to introduce your two colleagues and tell us what you all do, and then if you would like to make an opening submission before we ask you questions you are most welcome to do so. Mr Flanagan: Thank you, Sir Patrick, and thank you for the invitation for myself and my colleagues to present ourselves this morning. My name is Donald Flanagan. I am the Chief Executive of the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools. On my right hand is Mr Jim Clarke, who is my Deputy Chief Executive and has primary responsibility for standards within our organisation, and on my left hand side is Ms Margaret Martin, who is the Principal of St Catherine's College in Armagh. There is a very interesting background to that particular college which is perhaps, pound for pound, our highest achieving school in Northern Ireland at this particular point in time. Q43 Chairman: Is there anything you would like to say by way of opening submission? Mr Flanagan: Mr Clarke was the person who was our representative on the Costello Report so I will ask him to make an initial address and then we will pick up the issues thereafter. Mr Clarke: Good morning, Chairman. I think it is important that if we are going to have this debate that we see education where it sits within a whole range of public services in Northern Ireland and beyond. If I could quote the Secretary of State in his comments last week in relation to the Review of Public Administration, he mirrored to some extent Tony Blair's "Education, education, education". His opening remarks were, "Education provides the cornerstone for the future prosperity of the Northern Ireland economy and is the key platform upon which to build long-term peace based on mutual respect." I think that is a key issue when we come to look at education. The Burns Report was entitled Education for the 21st Century and I think it is very important that we take a look at what education is about. It is not about defending schools, any particular institution, nor any particular type of institution. It is about meeting the needs of children, but children who are growing up in the 21st century and whose needs are 21st century needs, not 20th century needs. It needs to be a recognition that we are all individuals. We learn differentially, we are motivated by different things, we have different interests. We are also people who live in a society which is changing and which requires us to have a whole new range of skills for living and, particularly in Northern Ireland, skills which allow us to live together. Thirdly, we can only live prosperously in any community if we have an economic background which is going to support that. Indeed, I suppose underpinning much of what the Secretary of State and the ministers have said of late is about Northern Ireland paying its way. In many respects Northern Ireland pays its way more than people recognise in terms of its educational contribution, not just to Northern Ireland but specifically to GB, Europe and the rest of Ireland. The key issue here is that we need a relationship between the economy, our society and our education system and to date that is absent from what we have. The purpose of the proposals for the 24 and 27 subjects which have come up was to provide for that motivating interest in education so that we had an inclusive system which allowed every child to find something in the education system which would benefit them, not just as they moved through the education system but as they moved into a social and economic life beyond. We also felt it important that we looked to the economy which exists in Northern Ireland. It is a fact that we produce very high levels of students with very good A-level results but it is also a fact that we do not have an economy to employ them. We export 30% of our A-level plus students at the age of 18. Of the 30% who go away only 28% ever return but we lose a further 13% of graduates. Q44 Chairman: Is that the fault of the education system? Mr Clarke: It is the fault of the economy. My point, Sir Patrick, is that we need to have a mechanism to link our education system to our economy and we have failed to do that. We have also a cultural issue in Northern Ireland, which is the aspiration not just of the middle classes, that there is safety in public services, and there is safety in the professions. There is no groundswell for people to take risks in our economy and indeed there may well be aspects of the economy which discourage risk. The simple fact of life is that in a global economy we have to find our niche. We have not found that niche yet, evidenced by the fact that 67% of employees in Northern Ireland are linked one way or another to the public service and we also have levels of salary in the public service here which on average are better than in the private sector. We have to redress the balance. We have to have an education system which works for Northern Ireland and for all the young people of Northern Ireland as they move towards the future. The proposals in the Costello Report aimed to do that. They were not defending any philosophical base to education. They were about including everyone in order to get the best possible advantage for education. Our beliefs are that what we should be looking at here are the interests of the children and the interests of Northern Ireland and our education system should be part of the process of meeting those needs. Q45 Chairman: Is that something that you associate yourselves with? You are full supporters of the Costello Report, are you? Ms Martin: I also served on the Post-Primary Review, known as the Costello Report. I would like to come at it from a slightly different angle because I am the practitioner here. It is very important that we hear not statistics but the reality as it is on the ground. I would like to preface all of that by saying that I am dismayed that we are not really focusing on the young person. That is central to all of this. Education is about young people and about systems that support them. The Post-Primary Review, ie, the Costello Report, has done something very significant and that is put the young person at the centre of the system and allow the structures to work round them. I come at it with the belief that the best way of proving that you are right is to do it, and that has been our reality in Armagh in St Catherine's College. We amalgamated a grammar school and a secondary school in 1973. Just to give you a little bit of information about that amalgamation, the students in the secondary school which was amalgamated with the grammar school never took any examinations, so we were coming at it from one section of the school-going population who had never access to any examinations. We have built a very successful school predicated on the idea of high expectations for absolutely everyone. Our agenda is one of equality, it is one of access and it is one of inclusivity. Earlier this morning I listened to the debate about social disadvantage, about young people who were deemed at 11 perhaps not to be academically able. That is not our reality. We welcome everyone. We have a complete social, economic and ability range in St Catherine's College. Q46 Chairman: How many pupils do you have? Ms Martin: We have 1,050, so we are a reasonably large school. We believe in equality, we believe in access, and we believe in ensuring that the potential that is in every single student is realised. I can give you examples of statistical information as to how our level of achievement has risen over the years, and earlier this morning I listened to one of our colleagues here speak about the amalgamation of two other schools in Armagh in the grammar sector. We out-perform them every single year and yet we have students coming through to us with varying levels of ability but they are all treated equally and given a chance to perform. There is no sense of failure. Our agenda is one of high expectation. It is of redressing any sense of disadvantage that those young people have and ensuring not only that they will achieve their potential but also that they will go out and make a contribution to society, the contribution that Jim has talked about. We will have 80-90% of our leavers going into higher and further education and the remainder going straight into employment. We are doing a significant job of work for the 21st century, for the young people who come to us, and they come to us from varying backgrounds. I will leave for your perusal an article on St Catherine's College published in The Guardian newspaper last year which commented on the ethos of the school and on the fact that there is no religious or racial prejudice even though our mix is right across the board. Q47 Chairman: What is your mix? Ms Martin: Basically we are in the Catholic tradition but that does not prevent us accepting people from other traditions, from other backgrounds, and in a climate I suppose which has seen a very difficult 30 years in Northern Ireland. We have to pay tribute to the work that our schools have done as being the only safe haven for many of our young people. Q48 Chairman: But what is your mix? Ms Martin: In terms of? Q49 Chairman: In terms of percentages. Mr Young said that although his was a non-denominational school there were 400 Catholics there. Yours is a Catholic school and we accept that but how many Protestants and others are there? Ms Martin: We are in the Catholic tradition so they would be in a significant minority. Q50 Chairman: 10%? Ms Martin: Yes, possibly at 10%, no more than that. We are multi-ethnic as well, so we have that mix also. In addition to that we have an Irish-medium sector, so we have students in our school who are educated through the medium of Irish. That is another mix and that is very unusual in the north of Ireland. Q51 Lady Hermon: How about your staff? How mixed are your staff? Ms Martin: Our staff are very mixed. Q52 Chairman: What sort of mix? Ms Martin: We have probably 75/25, and in the north of Ireland that would be quite high. Q53 Chairman: And you have been Principal for how long? Ms Martin: This is my 15th year as Principal. Q54 Chairman: So what you have been describing to us is very much what you have created? Ms Martin: And what I helped to create. I have been Principal since 1991 but the school was established in 1973 and I have been on staff for all of that time. Q55 Chairman: For the whole period? Ms Martin: As a young member of staff, then as Deputy Principal and then as Principal, so I have seen it grow from its infancy to the success that it enjoys today. That bears testimony to something that lives. Q56 Chairman: It bears testimony to your leadership, if I may say so. Ms Martin: In all of this, and I think it needs to be said, leadership is vital. In whatever way the education system goes here we are going to need good leaders and we are going to have to face the challenges which have also been mentioned this morning but which I think need to be spoken of, and my colleagues will speak about those. That is a demographic downturn and also a changing world for which we need a changing curriculum. Q57 Chairman: I want to get my colleagues in but I know Mr Flanagan now wants to say something briefly. Mr Flanagan: You have heard from Jim who gave a global perspective and from Margaret a micro-perspective. Can I briefly give a strategic perspective? When my organisation was set up it was because of human rights concerns about the standards within the Catholic-maintained sector and there were significant differentials in terms of outcomes in the mid eighties to early nineties. Early in 1990 my organisation set up a working party to look at raising standards in education and from that working party we clearly set out a strategy which we have followed over the last ten to 12 years. There were four elements to the strategy. One was to make sure that the focus for all schools was primarily on the raising of standards. We exercised that focus by beginning to challenge weak management and poor leadership and it is a role that we have managed fairly effectively. Secondly, it was to make sure we got the very best leaders and teachers within our schools, and we have a very rigorous and robust process to achieve that. Thirdly, we wanted to ensure that our young people were educated in an environment which was conducive to learning outcomes and, fourthly, we identified in our working party report that selection was a structural impediment to raising standards overall in Northern Ireland, that it, if you like, condemned many children to a wasteland in education. The impact of that is still resonant in many people in Northern Ireland. For example, it would be referred to in some quarters as a mortal sin of education. Almost within any few minutes of talking to anybody in Northern Ireland we get round to the business, "Did you pass or fail?", and that is a legacy that runs right through our a system and a legacy which creates differences and separates people in many ways. We have been working on a process to remove selection over that period of time. We have called upon the research; we have got the research. We have called upon the Government to set up particular bodies to manage this. We have got that and we have got the responses and we are moving forward today to try to find solutions. In all of the conversation this morning I heard a very gallant defence of grammar schools. We are not here to diminish grammar schools in any way. What we are trying to do is find a better way forward for all our young people. Q58 Chairman: Did you all hear this morning's evidence? Ms Martin: Yes. Mr Flanagan: Yes. Mr Clarke: Most of it, not all. Chairman: Thank you. That is helpful for my colleagues in asking questions because you know the base from which we are coming, having heard Mr Young and his colleagues. Q59 Meg Hillier: Would it be fair to say that one of your missions is to improve rigour - you mentioned leadership as well - in secondary schools? When you talk about the important programme it is to invest special rigour in the system? It is a yes or no answer. Mr Flanagan: We have developed a number of strategies and the first one was to challenge weak management and poor leadership. It was evident in our sector and over a period of ten years there has been significant leadership change in a number of schools. The outcome of that has been quite significant in terms of standards overall. We have developed rigour in terms of persuading the Department of Education to set up a range of initiatives to support those schools that were having difficulties and those initiatives have proved to be extremely useful, but we have bought into it as well. The evidence would be, particularly in our sector, that the level of improvement within Catholic maintained schools is sustained for a much longer time than other schools who have been involved in the programme because we have clearly set ourselves up as a standards body. Equally, in terms of our school plant there has been very significant change. Some of our schools have been operating in mobile classrooms for a long period of time and that change has enhanced and improved the performance overall, not only for the children but also for many of our teachers, incidentally, whose levels of attendance overall have increased on the basis of a new school being built. There are lots of interesting statistics around that. Critically, we did recognise that selection was a structural impediment and that is where your committee comes to this equation: why do so many of our young people continue to achieve such low standards overall? Q60 Meg Hillier: I want to pick up on the issue of leadership. Margaret Martin has obviously had 15 years as Principal. In Britain now, certainly in England in my experience, head teachers in London in deprived areas with challenging schools are being paid a great deal now. Are head teachers' salaries comparable here? Mr Flanagan: Jim was one of those people. Mr Clarke: I was Principal of a school in north Belfast that you might be visiting today. It was what was called a Group One school - the Group One Initiative was something that was inspired by CCMS with the Department of Education - which, incidentally, has just over 79% free school meals, and I think that should be taken alongside the view that the average in the grammar sector is around 7%. What Group One was about was recognising that there were structural impediments to schools making improvements. One of those was the curriculum. We need to go back to the curriculum issue. In 1989 Northern Ireland followed the model of England, much against the advice of many educationalists here in Northern Ireland, because we had been pursuing a programme of schools examining themselves and setting in place their own structures for renewal through an initiative called The 11 and 16 Programme. The Northern Ireland curriculum from 1989, which mirrored the English model, was an academic curriculum which diminished many of the vocational areas which were being developed, so we started out with a process to raise standards but which in many cases diminished standards in areas of schools where there was a significant enrolment from a disadvantaged background. There are several of these Group One schools, four of them in Belfast. In north Belfast there are three, in west Belfast one and there is one in Derry. Open enrolment, selection, the LMS formula based on pupil numbers, meant that these schools were at the mercy of demographic downturn. They also were at the mercy of the vagaries of the transfer system, so the numbers transferring each year could not be planned. There was no potential for future planning in many of these schools and this initiative was introduced with a financial resource but also a series of Member of Parliament initiatives through the Education and Library Boards which they supported. All of the schools have shown improvement but in very differential ways. One of the things that we led the way on was the disapplication of the absolute straitjacket of the Northern Ireland curriculum to allow much more flexibility and to allow involvement with further education and with training organisations as part of what those children experienced. We have raised standards in those schools but it is against a backdrop of continuing demographic downturn. There is no history in Northern Ireland of secondary principals being paid more than principals in other schools, which was your original question. Q61 Chairman: It was, yes! Mr Clarke: I am glad I was able to elaborate! Q62 Chairman: We have discovered that elaboration is a gift of those who live in Northern Ireland. Ms Martin: Can I come in on that because Jim has raised an important point: we need to focus on the curriculum and we need to see the link between the curriculum and the economy. Meg Hillier: I do not want to stop you but I was particularly asking about the leadership. We are attracting very high calibre head teachers. I am not saying people in Northern Ireland are not high calibre but the pay issue has been quite instrumental in that. Q63 Chairman: Do you need a financial inducement to have people of your quality leading schools, is really the nub of the question. Ms Martin: Do you want my honest answer? Q64 Chairman: Yes we do. Ms Martin: My honest answer is that we are fortunate here in the calibre of our teachers and their commitment to our young people, that education still is a vocation and that people see the challenge and the opportunity to make life better for our young people as sufficient. There is no financial inducement. We do it because we believe ----- Q65 Meg Hillier: How will it compare with a head teacher in a big comprehensive in England? Ms Martin: It would possibly be £30,000 or £40,000 less, but it is about commitment, it is about what drives us, and what drives us is the vision of making a difference to the lives of the young people who are entrusted to our care. That is a very significant statement to make but it is one that I passionately believe. Chairman: Thank you very much for that. As a former schoolmaster I am delighted to hear somebody use the word "vocation". Q66 Meg Hillier: Could I just pick up on the school support programme and the fact that it has not worked in all schools? I wondered if you could make any brief comments about why that may be. If you are an organisation that has set yourselves up as a standards board, as you said, Mr Flanagan, where are the problems? Perhaps you could also touch on the issue about rigorous standards when you have this differential system that you have across the board. Mr Clarke: We have got to acknowledge that standards are improving generally but one of the things we have to look at is the gap between the highest and lowest achieving. PISA identified as characteristics of good and poor education systems that those where the differential is less tend to be good systems and those where the differential is wide tend to be poorer systems. Northern Ireland has one of the widest differentials. Within that there have been a number of schools taking part in the Raising School Standards initiative and then the Schools Support Programme dating back to the paper which we sent to the department in 1993. There were about ten schools from each Education and Library Board invited each year to participate in those initiatives. The number of schools invited has significantly declined over the last number of years, which is what you would expect when you go through a programme. There were a number of characteristics. Donald made the point that schools from the Catholic sector have tended to be more successful in those initiatives and have sustained their improvement longer. One of the reasons was the fact that we used three strategies and in some others perhaps only one strategy was used. Because these initiatives were managed by a board consisting of the Education and Library Board and CCMS personnel, and that CCMS do not have a training role in schools, the Education and Library Boards have that role, the Catholic maintained schools in the initiatives had the benefit of what might be called the support dimension from the Education and Library Boards and the challenge function from within CCMS which dealt with issues like leadership and the management of the school. The tendency in the controlled sector, and I say "the tendency" because it was not the case everywhere, was that one individual supported and challenged the school and invariably they failed more on the side of support rather than challenge. The third element was intervention. CCMS has never sacked a principal but we have encouraged people to look at their contribution and their career profile and we have created circumstances where we have been able to engage and change management at leadership level. That has been very important in securing a change of direction for schools and maintaining that change. Q67 Chairman: Could I ask you a couple of questions about selection? You heard this morning a very eloquent defence of academic selection. You also heard the grammar schools and you have yourself gone out of your way to say you do not want to threaten them. You have heard them say that without that selection the system could not survive with the qualities that it presently encapsulates, and you also heard a very eloquent description of a new form of computer modelled profiling, Dr Morrison outlining it. Would you like to comment on those points, and I address you particularly, if I may, Ms Martin? Ms Martin: I am happy to respond. I think you only got one side of the picture this morning, and obviously that is why we are here. Can I just quote you something that I think is very important? This comes from Costello: "Students tend to perform better in schools characterised by high expectations, the enjoyment of learning, a strong disciplinary culture and good teacher/student relationships". I think that is at the heart of what we should be debating. The structures and what is there have to be based around that and not the other way round. Secondly, we need to see that the way forward envisages a common curriculum to 14 and that choice only becomes operative at 14. That is something which again I do not think was addressed this morning. We have also got to look at the whole notion of partnership with parents. We do not have transfer in Armagh, in St Catherine's College. Our pupils come to us. They self-select. They are not selected by the school, so they choose to come to us. Q68 Chairman: Do you stream within the school? Ms Martin: No, we do not stream; we band. We have three bands in each year group. We have an above average, an average and special needs. Q69 Chairman: Based on academic selection? Ms Martin: No. We do not have academic selection. Q70 Chairman: But how do you band? Ms Martin: Based on the Pupil Profile which comes to us from our primary colleagues. Q71 Chairman: How is that profile done? Is it done along the way that Costello would advocate or along the lines that Dr Morrison outlined? Ms Martin: It would be done similar to what is proposed by Costello. In fact, we are already well down the road to being a model for a future possibility of a school along the Costello model. Q72 Lady Hermon: Are you over-subscribed? Ms Martin: Yes, we are. Q73 Lady Hermon: How do you say no to those who self-select and want to come to St Catherine's? Ms Martin: We have to use the admissions criteria which are drawn up for every school and I know at the moment the Department of Education are working very hard on drawing up admissions criteria which can be used in every school. Q74 Sammy Wilson: What are your admissions criteria? Ms Martin: Currently we look at siblings. We look at the children of members of staff who are parents, and then we begin to look at the eldest female child and then we look in a geographical way at our hinterland. Q75 Chairman: How over-subscribed are you? Ms Martin: We are over-subscribed somewhere in the region of ten pupils per year. We currently have an intake of 150 and into our Irish-medium that is a more flexible figure. We have about 30 coming into our Irish-medium so we would have a total intake of 180 per year. Q76 Chairman: And for that intake you would have about 200 applications? Ms Martin: Yes, we would. Q77 Chairman: It is not vast over-subscription? Ms Martin: No, because the demographic downturns that have been spoken of are already a reality for many of our schools. Q78 Chairman: Having got them there, you talk about the banding. You were very fierce with me when I suggested there might be some form of academic selection within that but how do you determine what is above average and what is special need? Presumably you take ability, however you define it, as some form of criterion. Ms Martin: It is one of the elements. It is not the sole determinant but it is one of the elements, obviously based on their performance over seven years in the primary sector, looking at their literacy skills and their numeracy skills. The one that perhaps we focus most on is literacy because it is my view, and I know it is a view which would be shared around this table, that if you teach a child to read you are opening up all kinds of possibilities for them. Can I just give you a figure and it is a very important figure? 93% of our intake at the end of Key Stage 3 have reached at least Level 5 in English. Given the all-ability nature of our intake, that is a startling figure. That does not fit comfortably any of the statistics you have been given. That will out-perform the majority of our grammar schools but that is based on our belief that literacy is at the heart of what we do in schools. That is one of the key components that we look at when we are transferring from the primary to the post-primary. Secondly, we have a cross-phase committee. We are one of the very few schools in the north which has a cross-phase committee, where we sit down with our primary colleagues, look at how they give us information, look at how we use that information, and we feed back twice a year to them on the placing of their former pupils. Q79 Chairman: This all seems to me exemplary but can I touch on another point that you raised? There was almost an implicit rebuke of those who gave evidence this morning for not talking about selection at 14 rather than at 11. Would you like to say a little bit about that? Do you believe that it is necessary at 14 to have some form of academic selection? Ms Martin: I believe it is important at 14 to have the element of choice begin to play a part in the dialogue that happens between the students and their tutors, their year heads and the parents. That triangle really begins to play a significant part at 14. In terms of that choice, it has to be much more informed than it currently is, and it has to be real choice. Therefore, our schools, in order to provide the kind of choice that I am talking about, have to expand the options that they currently offer post-14. Q80 Chairman: And presumably the rigour of the tests that they apply? Ms Martin: I am not talking about testing in terms of choice here. I am talking about young people in the first three years of their post-primary education being schooled to enable them to begin to see a general direction in which their life might go. Q81 Chairman: But there has to be some form of testing of ability presumably, however you do it. Ms Martin: That currently happens at the end of Key Stage 3 in any case. I do not necessarily see that as the most important factor in determining the choices that the young people will make. I think we have to look much more closely at the kind of diet that our schools make available post-14. That is why I would be supporting the whole notion of the vocational courses having parity of esteem with our current perhaps more traditional courses. Sammy Wilson: Donal, I am glad to hear that your representatives have talked about not changing particular schools or types of school systems. We would be interested at some other stage to hear their response to RPA which I think contradicts that statement on the changes under the administration and the role for CCMS, but we will come to that maybe another day with the representatives from CCMS. Can I come back to your test of a good system, one of the things I would have assumed must have the confidence of the people it is going to serve? All of the indications so far, both in the actions which you have taken in CCMS and in the surveys done by the Government, a survey which over a quarter of a million people responded to, are that 66% of parents and teachers have opposed the Costello changes. Indeed, we heard from Mr Young this morning that many Catholic parents are opting, because they want a grammar school education, to go to Methody, Inst, BRA, all of which have got over 30% of their school population as Catholics even though they are perceived as Protestant schools. Indeed, I noticed that when you talked about the amalgamation in Armagh you did not amalgamate the grammar school with the secondary school; you amalgamated the secondary school with the grammar school, which may well explain why people did not feel short-changed by the amalgamation, by the way. You have talked about choice and you have talked about the sovereignty of parents. How do you answer that? Q82 Chairman: Let us give him a chance to answer. Mr Flanagan: There are very few parents in Armagh who would be critical of the system. The only people who are critical of the system in Armagh are those parents of boys who have not got the same privilege for their boys as they have for their girls. That is a fact. Similarly, in other areas, such as St Patrick's, Keady, in south Armagh, where there is no selection, very few parents in that particular area leave that area to have their children educated. When we undertook a major reorganisation in Strabane we met with everybody in that town over a period of four days. We had 31 objections out of a total population of over 2,000 children to that particular proposal. Q83 Sammy Wilson: You are keeping a grammar school element in the Strabane amalgamation of schools. Mr Flanagan: We did not ever say that we would not. We have never ever said within CCMS that we wanted to get rid of grammar schools. We want to build on the very best of schools. Our grammar schools have done an excellent job. Our post-primary secondary schools in a amore difficult situation have done an outstanding job, and our primary schools overall have done an extraordinary job. We have a very good system of education in Northern Ireland where parents buy in very highly to that particular system of schools. In any area where we have been involved in reorganisation there has been a high level of parental support and commitment to that particular project. Our process in terms of finding the way forward in relation to post-primary reform is first and foremost to address communities. We have not sought and we will not seek to go out with answers to everyone. We will find the answers which local people will support. Q84 Sammy Wilson: All of them to date have either included, in the case of Armagh, amalgamating the secondary school with the grammar school so the grammar school is kept or, as in Strabane, having a grammar school element. Mr Flanagan: Is there something wrong with that? Q85 Sammy Wilson: No, but the Costello proposals are designed to destroy any element of selection. Can you tell me then how you keep the ethos of a school which has got an academic thrust to it if you do not in some way have some indicator of a person's academic ability? Mr Clarke: Every school has an academic ethos. What we are saying is that how we interpret that needs to be broadened for the 21st century. What we do not need is a narrowness based on what was good in the past and I think we have to recognise that the grammar school system was good at its time. It did create opportunities but it has now created further social differentiation in Northern Ireland. Some people would claim that the latter has been pulled up and some communities have lost out in that process. You personally have spoken to us about the opportunity that the transfer gave to some children in areas that you know well, and we accept that, but we ask the question: what about those for whom the transfer did not provide that opportunity? What are they left with? What we are saying is that everyone has abilities. What we have to do is harness those abilities and build on the strengths. There is nothing in Costello, nor is there anything in any proposal that CCMS have made, to diminish the academic. What we are saying is that we should expand and include and allow some of those children deemed to be academic to extend and have options the same as everyone else to areas that are vocational, which will be motivating to them as individuals. I think it is worth noting that research carried out by NFER (the National Foundation for Educational Research) on behalf of the Council for Curriculum and Assessment, which was a cohort study following children in all sectors of education through their time at school and asking them what the experience they had was, found that it was a very negative experience in the majority of cases. They talked about a curriculum which was overloaded with knowledge and content and very little on practical learning. They talked about subjects which motivated and interested them not being supported because they were not deemed to be academic in certain schools. They talked about the fact that the learning experience was limiting in many respects. To be fair, some of them, on reflection, once they had seen the benefits of their education system, were slightly more positive about it, but that was the experience at the time and I think we have to recognise that. Ms Martin: Sammy, just to respond to you, this is not about the death knell of the grammar system in the north of Ireland; this is about focusing on the 21st century and providing schools which meet the needs of the 21st century. From all the research that we have, and we can all quote research until the cows come home, it is clear that our education system does not meet the needs of the 21st century. We have got to make changes. That is the first point. The second point is that we have to value all of our young people equally. The history of our education system over the last 50 years has shown that, sadly, we have not done that. The challenge for us is to find a way forward to enable all of our young people to be valued equally in schools which are focused on high levels of attainment for everyone. Chairman: You were trying to get my eye. Dr McDonnell: I am generally happy enough. The point I was trying to make earlier was to probe the question of grammar schools. Your intention is not to damage grammar schools. I think that has been clarified. Chairman: Can you tell us, therefore, if that is your intention, how you can carry that intention into effect on the basis of Costello? Q86 Dr McDonnell: And the second point I might address to Margaret is the other side of Sammy's question, Chairman, about amalgamating the secondary school into the grammar school, with maybe some reference to St Patrick's in Keady, which was a secondary school but which now is excelling. Ms Martin: We can all bandy words around, Sammy. St Catherine's College was created from two schools. One was not grafted on to the other. It was a new entity which had as its earlier antecedents a convent grammar school and a convent intermediate school. It was a new entity and there was no sense that one was grafted on to the other. New entity, new uniform, new ethos and meeting the needs of all the girls in the Armagh area. It was not a crafty move to gain friends because St Catherine's College had very few friends in the 1970s, both within the Catholic sector and without. That has been a long hard road. Mr Flanagan: Part and parcel of our consultation and the basic principle that we are building into all the consultations is that we seem to copper fasten for every parent a pathway that they wish for their children through the education system, be that academic, be it vocational, be it technical or be it a number of those. What we want to do is provide the range of choice and access to all young people to achieve that, and I think we can accommodate that. Q87 Chairman: So you wish to keep the grammar schools but you just wish to change slightly the way they get into them? Is that right? Mr Clarke: We are using language here which is imposed. We are talking about grammar schools and I think we need a definition of what a grammar school is. If we are talking about schools which select pupils on the basis of academic ability we are not wishing to retain that system. We want to remove selection. We want to build schools which are inclusive and which are high quality in every aspect and which will cater for the needs of all kinds of children. We need to bear in mind that there has been significant research over the last 15 years which has taught all of us in education an awful lot more about how individuals learn and that is something we need to reflect in our education system, not just structurally but very specifically within classrooms. Mr Flanagan: One of the most distinguishing features of our grammar schools is the level of autonomy they hold. Some of our grammar schools would say that that principle of autonomy is much more important to them than the principle of academic ability. In our proposals we will bring forward schools' situations which have the same levels of autonomy as the voluntary grammar sector. Q88 Rosie Cooper: Returning to your method of selection, or not selection in your case, in schools ------ Ms Martin: Our intake. Q89 Rosie Cooper: ----- you talked about banding and you said you did that based on the Pupil Profile. Is the Pupil Profile that Costello talks about exactly the system you use? Ms Martin: No. It would be similar. I think the proposed Pupil Profile will expand what we currently do. It is the notion that education is a continuum from five through, in most instances now, to 18. For far too long in our system we closed a door at 11 and said that whatever you did in those seven years no longer mattered. It is building the whole notion of the continuum, building on their strengths, building on their interests, so that when the boy or girl arrives with us we have a sense of their strengths, we have a sense of the areas where we need to concentrate, so that we have a picture of their needs and are better placed to meet those needs. Q90 Rosie Cooper: Will that profile be available in total to the secondary school and will there be any great impact on the primary schools in the production of it? Ms Martin: Yes. I think we are going to have to build much more on the notion of trust and partnership between the primary and the post-primary in the sense that under the old system primary schools were quite reluctant to be seen as making the decision as to where a young person was going to go for their post-primary education. If we have schools which are deemed to be equal then I think the notion of the transfer of information will be easier. Q91 Chairman: Do you see a place for the computerised testing that Dr Morrison talked about? You did not answer the question earlier. Ms Martin: The answer is no. Q92 Chairman: You do not like it? Ms Martin: No, I do not like it. I think it is cumbersome. I think it will add to work and I see no place for it. I think this is about dialogue, this is about transfer of information. It is not about putting in any other kind of a test which is going in some way to hinder the learning which takes place in the primary sector. Mr Clarke: Can I make a comment on this? I saw it in the presentation, that there is a fair degree of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the Pupil Profile. First of all, it was not created by Costello. It was something that the Department of Education had asked the Exams Council to work on alongside Costello. The second thing is that the Pupil Profile will be with the child throughout their education. It was not specifically intended to be an instrument to replace transfer at 11. It was there to assist the process in a non-selective environment. Much of Dr Morrison's work seems to be about high stakes testing. I have no difficulty with all of his assumptions and assertions about reliability and all the rest of it. We are into a situation where we are not into high stakes testing. The focus through the Pupil Profile is assessment for learning as opposed to assessment of learning. The intention was that it should guide both the pupil (in so far as in primary school the pupil can be guided), the parent and the teacher. It was very much a diagnostic element. I believe that the Pupil Profile can contain evidence based on a range of testing regimes, including computer-based testing which, as Mr Young acknowledged, is a diagnostic. In the context of learning for assessment the diagnostic test has a role but it is not a summative test. It is information that can be used by teachers and by parents to plot the educational direction of the child to identify those areas which can be improved upon and to identify those areas of strength which can be built upon. We need to be clear as to the purpose of the Pupil Profile. Q93 Lady Hermon: Would you not accept that in fact pupil profiling will expose teachers to influence from angry parents and put a lot of pressure on teachers? How do they feel about that sort of pressure? Mr Clarke: First of all, I think it is important to recognise that any good teacher assesses and in my experience teachers are very good at assessing. However, if we introduce a high stakes element to it where parents' pressures impose themselves upon children for the purpose of getting them into one school or another, then you will find teachers not wanting to play that game, but if the focus is on the child and identifying what is best for the child without the intrusion of this instrument for selective purposes, I think teachers will be in a much stronger position to make honest assessments. It is not about pleasing parents. It is about meeting the needs of children. Q94 Sammy Wilson: I am not sure you have answered the question. Mr Clarke: I think we would say this is a matter for the schools themselves. Let us be clear about it. The Key Stage 3 curriculum is a common curriculum as it currently is. It will not change. The choice element is going to be in the 14-19 range. In terms of choosing a school what parents need to be mindful of is not the curriculum that is on offer at Key Stage 3 but the opportunities that that school, in association with other schools or by itself, can offer their child at 14 and 16. Mr Flanagan: Can I make a comment in terms of Lady Herman's question? As a former primary school teacher and former primary school head, I was in the position of dialoguing with parents over a period of time essentially from about P4 right through to P7 in relation to their child's abilities, and in some cases lack of ability, or their strengths and weaknesses, etc. I have found in all my experience as an educator that there are very few parents who do not have a complete understanding of their children's ability and what they wish for their children. What we have created in the system in Northern Ireland is the notion that one school is better than the other and obviously every parent, when faced with that scenario, will always seek to do what they believe to be best for their children. Q95 Rosie Cooper: Would this Pupil Profile be available to the parents at all times? Mr Flanagan: Yes. Q96 Rosie Cooper: Do you think that would influence what the teachers would write down and we would get into that culture of ----- Mr Clarke: One of the characteristics of the Pupil Profile is that it is a combination of a range of testing regimes and assessment regimes that are focused on academic areas. It is also about other areas of personal and social development that the child would engage in. It is intended to give a rounded picture. Part of the plus side in my view of the Pupil Profile is that it is going to involve the parent much more in the discussion of their child's education. The challenge for that, if I could pick up some of the strands from earlier, is that that gives the middle-class parent an advantage, but it only gives an advantage if you have a selective system. What we want to do is encourage parents to become more involved in the education of their child throughout, not at the age of 10 going to 11 but very much so at every stage and particularly as they reach the real decision points at 14 and 16. We also have to recognise that a Pupil Profile in the early years of primary education in the foundation stage is very much a document between the parent and the teacher. As the child grows through age 14 into 16 it becomes more of a dialogue between the student, the teacher and the parent. We have to involve parents and it is about transparency but it is not about absolutes. With respect to the argument in Dr Morrison's paper about levels, levels were never intended to be absolute. They were never supposed to be reliable in the academic sense that Dr Morrison refers to them. They were intended to draw evidence on performance in literacy, in numeracy, from a wide range of sources, some of which were quite clear testing regimes. Q97 Gordon Banks: Margaret Martin, you mentioned the student situation you have. I would be interested to hear what movement there is between streams. Ms Martin: I am very glad you asked me that; it is very important. As I said, we have above average, average and special needs. The partnership I spoke of between school and home is one that we value so that at every stage in Key Stage 3, which is a three-year cycle, we will sit down and look at the placement of our pupils. If we find that the level of maturity has brought about a significant progression then we will take the opportunity to move that pupil so that there is tremendous flexibility built into our system. That is why we do not stream, we band, so that we have parallel bands and that ensures that we have competition, which I think is essential, and we do not have mixed ability but that, as young people mature and as very often they take a leap forward, we can move within our banding system in order to support their own progression. Yes, that does happen and we will do that at the end of every year and very significantly, obviously, at the end of Key Stage 3. Q98 Gordon Banks: My other question is about the collaborative arrangements. I have long been a supporter of collaboration in education systems, especially involving further education colleges, but what do you think are the practical difficulties and disruptions that might come about from trying to collaborate between school and further education? Ms Martin: We have a history of this. Since 1985 we have been involved in collaboration with what were originally the two boys' grammar schools. We have a three-way system going there for a sixth form consortium. It puts constraints on us, obviously. The timetabling demands a lot of liaison. It is possible and it is feasible and in the last number of years we have expanded that further into the links that we have with Armagh College of Further Education, so we already have those collaborative links well established. In addition to that, bearing in mind that I think education has a role to play in healing some of the social and religious divisions that we have in our community, we have very strong links with Armagh Royal School and also with the City of Armagh High School. All of those are very significant. Q99 Gordon Banks: When you talk about the links with further education, is it one-way traffic? Ms Martin: At the moment, yes, it is one-way traffic, which I say with regret. We go to them. As yet they do not come to us. That is another stage in the development that I would like to see happen. Q100 Sammy Wilson: You talk about the sixth form level. How many people would be involved in moving from one school to another currently within your system? Ms Martin: You mean in our consortium arrangements with St Patrick's Grammar School? Q101 Sammy Wilson: How many pupils would be involved in that? Ms Martin: We are talking of between 20 and 30. Q102 Sammy Wilson: Is that not significant? What Costello was talking about was perhaps a consortium which would have to facilitate up to 27 subjects where from GCSE level onwards you would have maybe that movement. It is one thing to manage 20 pupils out of your 1,050, but is it not another thing to manage a consortium arrangement which involves people moving from GCSE right through to A-level and having to spend a third of their time probably out of school? Ms Martin: My colleague is very keen to come in on that. Currently we have almost 27 subjects at sixth form level in any case. Q103 Sammy Wilson: Yes, but you are a large school and in many rural areas you are not going to have that. In fact, you are going to have maybe more than third of the subjects having to be taught in other schools. Mr Clarke: Can I, as an aside to Gordon Banks, say that in my experience in north Belfast we did bring the FE college in to deliver in the school at Key Stage 4 and there are other schools that do that. Sammy is right, but really what he is hitting at here is the issue of demographics as well as the practicalities of organising schools. One of the things which has bedevilled this post-primary debate is the notion that every school will stay the same. The fact is that demographics are kicking in here big time and, while the previous group may have wished to challenge that, even if they are right a little bit the simple fact of life is that we are losing 10% of the 2002 enrolment by 2010; by 2015 we are down 16% and by 2041 we are down 26%. That is a quarter of the entire school-going population at the age of 11-16. Even if we have got it a percentage or two wrong we are into significant demographic downturn. We are not in the business of closing schools, nor are we in the business of keeping schools open where children are not accessing choice which is motivating to them. You will see in St Gabriel's and some other schools that there are choices of maybe one or two subjects post-14. That is the reality. You are right that people moving from one area to another is not necessarily the way that all these arrangements can be delivered. I have enclosed with your papers Appendix 7, Sir Patrick, which identifies at one point theoretical delivery models which include (I have put them into five different groups) a single 11-19 school on a single site, a single managed school on several sites with options for 11-14, 14-19 and all kinds of collaborations in between. I have also suggested models which look at some schools specialising in whatever area is agreed with the group within the particular area, and we have also looked at other more imaginative models which would include things like seven to 14, or four to 14 models of various federations, and part of that is to reflect both the demographics and the fact that Northern Ireland is a rural community. One of the issues which we addressed in Costello was the fact that a child living in Beleek, Fermanagh, was entitled to have the same access to choice as a child living in Belfast. That is essentially the underpinning logic of the 24 and 27. Also within the 24 and 27 there is the notion that one third should be copper-fastened academic, one third should be copper-fastened vocational, and that was to respond to the needs of individual children to have an education which motivated them. Chairman: And what about very special children? Q104 Mr Hepburn: What benefits or otherwise do you think specialist schools can bring to the education system, bearing in mind that a specialist school does entail an element of selection? Mr Clarke: We in CCMS have not supported the specialist schools project which is currently being run in Northern Ireland, largely because we saw it built on an English model which was primarily a school improvement model. However, we do see the logic of specialisms emerging within schools but those specialisms we believe need to be drawn by that particularly community and they need to be part of the system which is reflecting the economic profile of that area, or at least the aspiring economic profile of that area. We would not necessarily feel that we should be predetermining what the specialism is and the way forward. We believe that a local discussion needs to take place to identify what areas of specialism would interest the pupils, would interest the schools in terms of delivery, and would interest the employers in terms of supporting them. Q105 Mr Hepburn: What about the question of selection, because obviously it entails an element of selection? Mr Clarke: It depends. On the model that we are proposing we believe that the choice element is internal and that, while you might have an element of specialism within one part of the school, you can supplement that, as is the case in England, with a much broader education. Let us be clear: in England specialism accounts for only about 10% of the curriculum and the mechanism to provide a means of children choosing that is one of the complicating factors of the admissions criteria debate in England. We do not believe that it is necessary to have that complication. We believe that the specialism should respond to the market need in a particular area. Indeed, part of our thinking in terms of how schools are funded is about maybe having elements which allow areas, particularly newly developed curricular areas, to be promoted within the formula. Q106 Lady Hermon: How would you describe the relationship between CCMS and the Department of Education? Is it a good working relationship? Is it a close working relationship? Mr Flanagan: I had better say it is a good working relationship. It is a good working relationship. It is in no-one's interest to have anything other than that it is a good working relationship. There is challenge, there is debate. We do not always agree. Sometimes the department convince us of the error of our ways and vice versa. It is very much part of the centralised/localised dimension. We have been involved with the department and with the Education and Library Boards for a long period of time and in every area that we work in to find post-primary solutions we will involve the Education and Library Board, we will involve NICIE, we will involve CNED(?), we will involve the voluntary grammar and the FE sector because they all have a voice in there. Q107 Lady Hermon: Specifically, if I could narrow it down to the response on the Costello Report, and I ask that particularly because the previous set of witnesses gave a very clear indication to the committee that they had not had a welcome on the mat from the Department of Education when they had asked for meetings, has it been the opposite for CCMS? Mr Flanagan: No, it has not been the opposite for CCMS, and CCMS has struggled more than any other body in Northern Ireland to get the funding that it needs to do the work. Q108 Chairman: The question is not about funds. Mr Flanagan: The question is about relationship. The word that we get back from the department repeatedly over the years, and this is our real criticism of how we operate in Northern Ireland, is that presentationally it has been difficult to allow CCMS to grow. Mr Clarke: We have had significant difficulties with the Department of Education. We have had this now since 26 January 2003. The amount of progress that we have made on implementing Costello in our view is not satisfactory. We believe that communication of information strategy has been lacking and we have made this point to the department on a number of occasions. We have had much more difficulty getting meetings with ministers than the GBA, particularly in relation to the previous Minister, where the GBA seemed to have ready access to the Minister. We have been very frustrated in our relationship with the department and very frustrated in encouraging the department to work on the policy which is government policy. We continue to have that experience today. Q109 Lady Hermon: Even with the present Minister? Mr Clarke: I think the present Minister has at least made a very clear statement that selection is ending. We have not been absolutely certain of that until three or four weeks ago when the Secretary of State made the comment and I think that is significant. Q110 Chairman: It is not an announcement that would be welcome in every quarter, of course. Mr Clarke: But it is government policy. Q111 Meg Hillier: The Review of Public Administration was naming the new proposals last week. I was wondering if you had a quick comment about how you felt the proposed single education board would make a difference to the future of education in Northern Ireland. It is something which we should have asked our previous witnesses. Mr Flanagan: I suppose if ever there was a time for it to come this would not be the right time because there are two major changes of agenda on the books. One is in terms of the new curricular change and the second one is post-primary review. We cannot set everything aside and wait to get the structures in place before we can move forward with these. The new curriculum needs to be embedded within the next three years. The post-primary review is already under way and should continue apace. Structures have a great habit of, if you like, dissipating energies because people begin to look at their own future and their own jobs. There is a job in education. We have said to the Department of Education that that is our agenda and we will wish to continue with this even though the RPA will attract some of our energies over this period of time. Chairman: We are going to draw this to a close now because we are going to visit some schools and we will be visiting a school of which you used to be head. Thank you very much indeed for your evidence. You, Margaret Martin, clearly are head of a school that we really ought to try and visit at some stage and I would welcome that opportunity personally and I am sure colleagues would. Lady Hermon: It is a very good girls' school. Chairman: We are aware it is a girls' school. You see, I even get heckled by members of the committee. We are very grateful to you. Could I make the same point that I made to witnesses earlier this morning, that if there are any points you wish to amplify if there is anything that you feel we should have asked you about please let our Clerk know and we will take everything into account. We are seeing the Minister on 14 December so it would be helpful to have any additional submissions fairly sharply, but if you could do that we would be grateful. You will, of course, be receiving a transcript of your evidence and if you have any corrections to make please let our Clerk know and that evidence will in due course be published. Thank you very much indeed. |