Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR PAUL
COLLARD AND
MS ALTHEA
EFUNSHILE
8 OCTOBER 2007
Q20 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask a bit about
the structures and I think the first question is to Althea: do
you feel that the fact that the Arts Council is the lead body
and DCMS therefore the lead Department and that the DCMS is putting
in 15 times as much as DCSF limits, to some extent, the way in
which the programme will be perceived as impacting across the
curriculum, particularly having impact on the scientific and technical
areas of the curriculum? Will it not reinforce the view that this
is just about getting more kids into ballet and dance and music
and painting and so on? Is there a structural problem with the
Arts Council being the lead organisation?
Ms Efunshile: I do not think there
is a structural problem with the Arts Council being the lead organisation.
I do think that there is an issue with the fact that this is a
programme that is largely about reaching schools and reaching
young people in schools. Paul has described it as a programme
of continuing professional development for teachers and there
is therefore a question to be asked as to the extent to which
the balance is right at the moment in terms of the support between
DCSF and DCMS, so the answer to your question is yes and no. I
do not think who the lead body is an issue really, but I do think
that the message from the DCSF would be stronger perhaps in terms
of its support for the programme and its belief in the impact
across the broader curriculum if it was able to afford to have
more support in the resources capacity of the programmes.
Q21 Mr Chaytor: But in terms of the
strategy of the Arts Council, would you say that your overall
objective is to not only encourage greater interest and love of
the arts amongst young people but also encourage greater creativity
in resolving scientific and technical problems? Are they objectives
of equal priority, in your view of the world, or will you always
be required to prioritise the enhancement of the aesthetic dimension?
Ms Efunshile: If I was to say
what is the Arts Council about, the Arts Council is about promoting
the arts—it is the "Arts" Council—so that
is what we are here to do, to promote the arts and to act as a
development agency for the arts across England. As I have said
earlier, we see the arts as a key vehicle to encourage creativity
amongst young people. We also see the arts as being pretty central
to developing the creative economy and there is a key relationship
there, so the arts are important to the wider economy and we want
to promote that and make that very clear and ensure that people
understand that. Again therefore, it is of real benefit to the
Arts Council if there are increased creative skills amongst young
people because what we are then doing, hopefully and potentially,
is building up the next generation of audiences, the next generation
of artists, the next generation of people who are engaged in that
wider creative economy, so they are linked priorities but, to
be clear, the Arts Council is about the arts; it is about trying
to make sure that we have the widest possible engagement in the
arts with the widest possible range and broad base of people.
Q22 Mr Chaytor: But the arts in its
widest sense includes design and I suppose the point I want to
pursue is whether there would be an advantage or a strengthening
of the programme if there were a greater involvement of industry
and science in the planning and the design of the projects. This
is an issue that crops up time and time again, a question mark
of has it impacted across the curriculum. The Government's priority
for education, and for post-16 education particularly, is to strengthen
the skills base of the economy, but what I am concerned about
is the linkages between your emphasis on creativity and creative
industries—and I can see the point about the growth of the
creative industries being important to job creation—across
the curriculum and I am not confident that we have yet got those
linkages and we have not explored the potential of increasing
creativity in traditional industrial processes and technical and
scientific job sectors. It is rather a complex question but you
can see the point I am trying to get at.
Ms Efunshile: Yes, but I think
what we have been at pains to say is that this is about developing
creativity across that whole curriculum.
Q23 Mr Chaytor: I understand that,
but would it not be more likely that that was achieved across
the curriculum if you had representation from what I would broadly
call the scientific and technical centre? If you had some scientists
who said, "We desperately need more creative physicists",
if you had something like IT people who said, "We desperately
need computer consultants who can communicate with their clients
and not just press the buttons", would that not strengthen
the programme, or would that be a distraction from it?
Mr Collard: From my point of view
it certainly would not be a distraction and is what we try to
do. If we can come back to your central point first of all about
the perception around the arts, my view is that there is some
problem about the perception but again that is external to the
Arts Council, not internal to the Arts Council, that people have
a rather limited view of what the arts are. In my view, if you
take the broad cultural thing, the differences between the arts
and science are far smaller than we have allowed them to become,
and in fact the greatest phases of civilisation have always been
when there has been much more interaction between science and
technology and the arts, because science and technology ultimately
are helping us create a world view and so are the arts, and those
two things ought to be working together. There are some recent
examples. There was a fantastic play done in the National Theatre
in 1997, I think, called Copenhagen, which essentially
was a two and a half hour discussion between two scientists on
quantum physics. It is the most riveting and extraordinary play
I have ever seen and it absolutely makes the point that science
and the arts are inextricably linked and if we cannot understand
them as being the same thing both will fail.
Q24 Chairman: Should you not then
go back to the development of the human brain in the sense that
when we did our Early Years inquiry some time ago for the first
time this Committee hired a psychologist to help us understand
how children's brains develop at what ages. We went to places
like Denmark where they have a much later start into formal education,
round about seven, and up until then highly qualified and well
paid professionals encourage creativity and creative play amongst
young people. In a sense I am following on from David's point.
Is there a point where you say, "Okay. How does the human
brain in a child work? When do they get into creativity? What
stimuli are right at a particular time?", whether it is in
science or the arts or whatever? Does the Department look at that
sort of stuff, Althea?
Ms Efunshile: Sorry?
Q25 Chairman: Does the Department
still look at that sort of stuff? Is the Department for Education
in your view, whatever it is called now, still interested in how
children's brains develop?
Ms Efunshile: I believe so.
Mr Collard: I think most of the
evidence suggests that we turn children off, not that we develop
them, if you see what I mean, and that there are a set of skills,
and therefore at one level we do wonderful work at reception and
year one and so forth but it is later on in the system that we
have to focus more of our resources because something seems to
turn those bits off in young people which they clearly had when
they were younger and therefore we need to adjust our resource
allocation, if you like, in that particular way. Continuing with
David's point, I think the Arts Council recognises that the arts
and science are inextricably linked and we have to create space
in Arts Council programmes for that to be properly explored, but
that does pose challenges for people who have a slightly different
view of where the arts fit. I think we do bring scientists, industrialists,
technologists and other such people into schools. I do not think
we have communicated that as effectively as we could so far, and
therefore I think we should be looking—and Althea has been
hinting at this—at some structure that allows us to continue
to be delivering a key Arts Council objective but nonetheless
have a little bit more independence so we can have those scientists
and industrialists on our boards signalling to people that this
is not just about traditional arts practice; it is about a bigger
and more coherent vision, so I agree there is work to be done
on that.
Q26 Mr Chaytor: Is there an example
that readily springs to mind of where that participation from
industry is acting on one of your projects? The impression so
far is that it is all about getting more kids to go to their local
theatre or doing more face painting or doing more street theatre.
Is there a good example of where you have an industrialist dimension
to a Creative Partnerships project?
Mr Collard: I am sorry that is
the impression. New Heys School on Merseyside have as their main
partner Scottish Power. The school is a very interesting school
in any case because it is divided into houses but each house,
so to speak, is associated with a major industrialist on Merseyside
and we have helped support developing particular programmes in
each one of those relationships which do that. We are working
with an engineering college in Stoke which got designated as a
BSF school. It is a secondary school and we have supported them
to help the children design the new school and because we got
in early in that particular example the children were brought
to London, spent several days looking at lots of different buildings,
went back, thought up things and came up with a series of ideas
which are now part of the brief for that school, and the architects
have been told, "This is what you have to do because it is
done by the children".
Q27 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about
numbers? In the DCSF's submission to the Committee it says, "The
programme has involved 2,000 schools with a further 1,000 receiving
CPD".[2]
That sounds a huge number, particularly when the Ofsted evaluation
criticised the selection of schools. In my recollection it said
that there was a concern about the criteria by which schools are
selected. Are those figures of 2,000 and a further 1,000 benefiting
from CPD right?
Mr Collard: Yes.
Q28 Mr Chaytor: Secondly, what do
you say about the criticism of arbitrary criteria for selection?
Mr Collard: Those figures are
right. Ofsted made a very important point. We had a set of criteria
by which schools were selected and they started off by identifying
communities in which we would look for schools and they used standard
indices of deprivation to steer us in the direction of particular
communities. Then schools in those communities were allowed to
bid and we selected the ones which appeared to have the clearest
vision, the best ideas and so on. What Ofsted criticised was that
in choosing those schools we were not sufficiently clear at that
early stage—and do not forget they visited a lot of schools
that had been selected in 2002-2003, so this was very early in
the programme—as to what the point of working with those
schools was. It was not that that was not a reasonable process.
It was that to be effective you need to have identified the point
of working with that school right from the start, and I think
we were not consistent in doing that, and this is part of what
we learned from that in that they helped us understand the wealth
of information that is out there about the challenges that individual
schools face and that we should have studied that evidence and
challenged the schools to prove what it was that they were asking
us to do that was going to address those issues in those schools.
Now we have learned that we do it, and in the future model all
schools are going to have to submit their school improvement plan
as a subset of the evidence that they are providing on why we
should be working with them so that their specific proposal is
rooted in the real priorities of those schools. We had selected
fine schools and we were doing interesting work but Ofsted said,
"No; focus on the really big issues in every school and work
on those, not just because that is what you should be focused
on but because the evidence is that when you are dealing with
the main priorities of those schools the schools engage in a way
much more deeply and in the end you travel far further with them".
Q29 Mr Chaytor: On the deprivation
criteria, are those based on local authority boundaries or individual
ward boundaries?
Mr Collard: Those were done on
local authority boundaries.
Q30 Mr Chaytor: Whose decision was
it to decide on local authority boundaries when the Index of Multiple
Deprivation that the Department for Communities and Local Government
uses also includes detailed information about individual wards?
Has there ever been any discussion about focusing on individual
wards as against the whole local authority?
Mr Collard: There has not been
discussion of that yet. In fact, all the decisions about where
CP was going to be located were taken in 2002-2004, so it was
at that period, long before I got here, so I am not sure what
evidence was available in 2003 when they took the decisions on
36 places and whether that information was available to them at
that stage. We did involve local authorities in the selection
of every school that we did select. It is worth saying that Ofsted's
concern about us is that that set of deprivation criteria does
not necessarily take you to the schools that most need an injection
of creativity but who are not letting down children in other ways.
There is an assumption that if a school is getting 75% A's to
C's it is succeeding and Ofsted is saying that that is not a safe
assumption, and they have gone into schools with that level and
put them in special measures, and that therefore you need to look
more deeply into what is happening in those schools to really
understand what is going on and work more closely with local schools.
Q31 Mr Chaytor: From your selection
criteria then is it more important that you target a school that
is deficient in its approach to teaching creativity, whatever
we mean by that, or more important that you target a school that
is serving an extremely deprived catchment area?
Mr Collard: My priority, as we
are discussing the future role of CP, would still be on (b) because
a lot of the skills and behaviours that we value and describe,
children in more affluent backgrounds find from somewhere else,
but the focus on the deprivation is because if we do not do that
they almost definitely will not get it in those schools, so that
should continue to be a priority. There are plenty of places in
the country where you will have a secondary school drawing mainly
from a fairly affluent group but will have some really significant
pockets of deprivation, and often those children get worse treatment
than if they were in a very bad secondary school in the middle
of a very deprived community because a lot of resource is going
into that secondary school whilst virtually no additional resource
is going into the one on the outside. Deprivation can be found
in lots of different places and that is where Ofsted keeps saying,
"Go back to the detailed information. Look at the performance
of free school meals children in affluent secondary schools versus
in some of the other ones and you will find some secondary schools
that really need a lot more help".
Q32 Fiona Mactaggart: I am interested
in the model that you use of bringing professionals into schools.
I cannot think of very many other programmes which do this, particularly
in primary schools but also throughout the curriculum, getting
someone who does something as a job to work beside children showing
what they do as a job is like and giving children an experience
of that. In my view it is one of the most compelling bits of Creative
Partnerships. In a way I think it is very depressing that it only
happens with creative artists and so on. I think it should happen
with other kinds of work too in schools. I am wondering if you
are aware of any other programmes which do this and if you have
talked to them and shared experiences, and, secondly, how much
of what you spend is spent on those professionals and how much
is spent on capacity building in schools as a proportion of your
expenditure.
Mr Collard: The Education Business
Partnerships, for instance, around the country do try to engage
business professionals in going into schools and spending time
there. What we have found is that you need long term relationships
between those professionals who come to understand the schools
and the challenges of education before doing that, and therefore
we spend a lot of time training our professionals before they
go into schools, and we think that that is key. In short, "I
pop in today. I run the bakery shop round the corner and I will
do a workshop on bakery", and coming out again does not build
the kind of relationship with the young people which helps them
understand what those opportunities are. Therefore, there is a
significant rhetoric, I think, everywhere across education and
in communities that there should be far more professionals in
schools. I think it has to be done our way, which is that they
have to be trained to do it effectively and it has to be about
long term relationships, or at least mediated by someone who is
in a long term relationship with that school. I would not limit
it at all to creative professionals. It happens to be what we
do, but we would love, and I think all the schools that we work
with would love, to see far more of those. We would also like
to see them on the boards of those schools and all that kind of
thing, but they are difficult to find and that is partly what
we do, go out and find them. On percentages, we estimate from
the research that we have done that about 70% of all our funding
goes directly to the creative professionals to enable them to
be there, to train them, to prepare them and to pay them, and
30% goes on everything else, so out of the total cost of our Creative
Partnerships to 31 March 2008 of £165 million it will be
70% of that, which will be £120 million to £130 million,
which is one of the reasons it is very significant to the Arts
Council, because it is a very significant investment in that community.
Q33 Fiona Mactaggart: When you train
those creative professionals are the teachers involved too?
Mr Collard: We train the creative
professionals, we train the teachers in preparation, and then
we provide the opportunity for them to work together and plan,
and in a sense that becomes the training they each do. We also
support a lot of mentoring programmes, creative professionals
mentoring teachers. I think we should do some more the other way
round, teachers mentoring creative professionals. I think there
is a lot of scope for doing that.
Q34 Chairman: It is interesting because
you are saying it goes one way, that the professionals coming
into the school or helping to run the programmes in the school
do not actually have much knowledge or experience of teaching
the subject.
Mr Collard: No, or what schools
are like nowadays. Schools have changed incredibly in the last
12 or 15 years. An adult going into a primary school, even in
their early thirties, would hardly recognise what was going on
in the classroom now, or the assumptions that go there, but in
terms of that equality our evidence is—and, in fact, Anne
Bamford, looking across the world, says that the evidence all
across the world that comes in says the same—that these
programmes are most effective when the creative professional,
the teacher and the children are all co-learning together and
they are all listening to each other and learning from each other.
That is when it is at its most powerful.
Chairman: I want to move on to what happens
outside the classroom.
Q35 Mr Carswell: Turning to the QCA
and the national curriculum, I would be interested in your view.
Why do we have a National Curriculum? If you want to be truly
creative surely we should end the system where a group of technocrats
decides what goes on in schools?
Mr Collard: No, is my answer,
and the reason for no is that we must not forget that the subjects
are terribly important. We need people who speak foreign languages,
who become doctors, who become lawyers, and move into all those
professions and things as well. What we are saying is that that
lot is not enough. There is a set of behaviours and skills which
are broadly described as creative and we want to encourage those
as well and we want to make sure that we encourage them in such
a way that they do not undermine our attempts to develop their
capacities in certain subjects as well.
Q36 Mr Carswell: Do you have anything
you want to add, Althea?
Ms Efunshile: I am a fan of the
National Curriculum as it has developed and I think there are
flexibilities within it now which are helpful, but if we look
back at when the National Curriculum was introduced there was
an absolute need for some more rigour in schools and some more
sense of what is it that children should be achieving, what should
they be attaining and how we can make sure that we have a more
equable standard right across the country, so I think that is
really important. I think that where we have got to now is that
schools are more practised at teaching and learning what those
subjects should be and that what we have been talking about is
how the curriculum can be delivered in a creative and empowering
way for those children and young people. I would not want to see
the National Curriculum thrown out of the window.
Chairman: It is almost to the day the
20th birthday party for the National Curriculum, introduced by
Ken Baker, if I recall.
Q37 Mr Carswell: Creative Partnerships
are keen on the idea of topic-based thematic learning; is that
right, and you like the idea of a thematic, topic-based approach
to the curriculum? Have you ever come across Bishops Park College
in Clacton?
Mr Collard: I have.
Q38 Mr Carswell: They have pioneered,
if that is the right word, this approach. Has it been successful
there?
Mr Collard: It is a very new school,
as you know, and in fact you as a Committee discussed it quite
a lot in August because it has only been there four years now
and it is a brand new school and it is now closing down, I understand.
Q39 Mr Carswell: Correct. Has it
been successful, the thematic approach?
Mr Collard: As far as I can tell.
The school introduced that scheme from the bottom upwards, if
you see what I mean, and therefore it has been very hard to see
what the impact of that has been. I have been in and met the children.
I think they are wonderful. I was shown round the school by the
children, and you learn a lot from a headteacher who is confident
enough to let the children take you round and introduce you and
describe the school, and I was very impressed by what I saw of
them, and I witnessed a lot of the behaviours that we have been
talking about today, so I like it.
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