Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR PAUL
COLLARD AND
MS ALTHEA
EFUNSHILE
8 OCTOBER 2007
Q40 Mr Carswell: You think it is
a success?
Mr Collard: Yes.
Q41 Mr Carswell: Do you think, and
I have no evidence that I can bring before the Committee, that
perhaps one of the reasons why it was not as popular a choice
amongst parents as it could have been was that the thematic approach
was somewhat offputting to parents of would-be pupils of that
school?
Mr Collard: I do not think that
was the case. I think the location of the school is the fundamental
problem there, having been to it. It is a very isolated school
physically and I understand there are problems with bus routes
to it and other things like that, and therefore to really build
up that sense of community engagement which I think a school needs
was difficult to do from that location. If I can just take another
example, there is a secondary school in Barnsley called The Kingston
School, which pioneered what they call in the jargon a collapsed
curriculum at year seven and we helped them do that. They have
nine class intakes; it is a big secondary school, and they took
four which did the collapsed curriculum for a year and five which
did not, and at the end of the year the staff and the headteacher
were so impressed by the results that they rolled that out to
all nine classes and now everybody does collapsed curriculum at
year seven and there is absolutely no indication that it is anything
other than thriving as a school.
Q42 Mr Carswell: So you would be
happy for the thematic approach at Bishops Park as an advertisement
for this approach to education?
Mr Collard: From what I have seen,
yes.
Q43 Mr Carswell: Changing tack slightly,
are you aware of any criticisms from some schools that perhaps
as it is currently practised Creative Partnerships is a bit top-down
and could be made even better and that the way it is unrolled
in certain schools could give them more control so that they have
more ownership of it? Could that be improved?
Mr Collard: Absolutely. I think
there are times when we have been inappropriately controlling
and we must not be. Ofsted made this point to us very forcefully,
that what we should not become is a hybrid set of school improvement
officers. We bring something different to schools that schools
do not have. Let the school improvement officers and the schools
decide how to use that most effectively. Therefore, schools have
to be in the driving seat with this. We are changing our programme
as we move forward from essentially a one programme model where
we have what we call core schools like Bishops Park School which
we work with over a three-year period intensively. Ofsted said
to us: "Not all schools need that level of resource. There
are schools which have particular issues and questions that you
can help them with and they will begin to understand what you
are talking about with a much lighter touch", and we are
now launching a new programme called Inquiry Schools that allows
schools to come in with a fairly light touch to explore a particular
subject and then move out again, but we think that they will get
the deeper messages as well as the practical support. We are also
developing a programme called Schools and Creativity which will
be to create schools which will lead in this area and will take
on, if you like, the advocacy and the development of this programme
in networks of schools in their area directly as opposed to us
needing to have area teams. In a sense this is part of our exit
strategy, that if we can develop a cohort of really super-creative
schools around the country between now and 2014 we feel we would
like to leave the programme entirely in their control and we at
that stage would be able to back out and you would have lead schools
which would have that expertise role that we now play but that
would be owned inside the education system.
Q44 Mr Carswell: Fantastic; thank
you. Turning to special schools, how involved are you and how
involved is the CP programme with special schools? Do you have
a particular bias in favour of special schools?
Mr Collard: We always select some
special schools in every area that we operate in, so every area
office has a brief saying, "You have got to come up with
two or three special schools that you will work with". I
have to say that I constantly see the most inspiring work in special
schools, really extraordinarily dedicated staff and teachers achieving
incredible things with young people, and in particular one of
the themes that we have been exploring with them which I think
the mainstream education system could learn from is that they
have developed systems for spotting very small improvements. One
of the problems that you have in mainstream education is that
you have these big steps that you are supposed to go up and if
you fail to make the step everyone assumes you are down here when
actually you are not, but we do not have the systems in some of
our more challenged schools and with our more difficult children
to be able to say, "Actually, they have made progress",
and if we used some of those systems from special education in
mainstream education I think we would be more likely to get a
virtuous circle going where you are saying to a child, "Actually,
you have achieved something", and they think, "Oh, I
have achieved something", and it gives them the confidence
to go the next step and so that continues to build up. I think
that special schools themselves have quite important lessons to
give mainstream education about how you build that process of
encouragement up by spotting these other kinds of changes. The
final thing I would say about that is that we did an event in
which we got lots of children up from a school together for Paul
Roberts who was conducting a review of creativity in schools.
It was a whole day when young people from schools just turned
up and talked about stuff they had done, and the audience was
all the children who had come as well. The children got up and
made presentations and then children in the audience would ask
questions. One of the children from a non-special school asked
this group from Leicester which had done a fantastic presentation,
"Are children in special schools more creative?", and
they said, "You know, we are. The world is not designed for
us, and therefore almost everything we do takes creativity to
find a way of solving it, so you have got a lot to learn from
us". It was a really great moment.
Q45 Chairman: Althea, have you anything
to say about those questions?
Ms Efunshile: No.
Q46 Chairman: We are going to start
talking about creativity out of school. One of the things that
happens to us all the time when we are looking at particular inquiries
is how does a particular programme embed itself into the training
of teachers? We had an ambition in this Committee to look at the
training of teachers because so much SEN and everything else going
back to teaching children to read, all that led back to what on
earth was going on in the teacher training colleges and in the
various qualifications of teachers. What is your opinion, Althea,
in terms of how this creativity could be embedded at that stage?
Do you talk to the TDA[3]
and do Paul and his colleagues and you and your colleagues go
to colleges where they are training the teachers to talk about
creativity?
Mr Collard: We definitely do.
Q47 Chairman: Althea, no, come on.
I am asking Althea. You are doing an English rugby thing, Paul.
The ball is in your court, Althea.
Ms Efunshile: The reason I was
passing it to Paul was that in terms of the way we are working
with the TDA it is very much run from Creative Partnerships rather
than from the Arts Council per se. There are two parts,
are there not? There is the initial teacher training and the continuing
professional development. We would certainly be wanting to see
more capacity within the initial teacher training for the development
of those skills which are about, "How do I teach in a creative
manner?". The sorts of skills and confidence in terms of
risk taking that we are seeing being promoted by Creative Partnerships
when teachers are teaching is something that we would certainly
want to see more of when people are learning to become teachers
in that training and in the training within the classroom. We
have been working with the TDA to look at what are the ways in
which we can promote that level of creativity at those stages.
Mr Collard: We have been doing
that. We have been working with ITT colleges developing, if you
like, creativity modules that they can drop into courses. My personal
view, for what it is worth, is that the ITT curriculum, both through
PGCE and the other ones, is very crowded and there is a huge number
of people saying, "I want my three days' worth. I want my
units", and so on, and these poor prospective teachers are
inundated with information, advice and so on. I think we are strongest
in early professional development so that we are in the school
when you get there and you have spent a year or two experimenting
and now you really need some more help, and that is crucial. Anecdotally
I would say to you that the teachers who are most enthusiastic
tend to be at years four and five in their career. They were about
to leave and CP helped them remember why they went into education
in the first place and how to achieve what that earlier vision
of theirs was, and we invigorated them. It is very powerful there.
Secondly, we are very powerful in developing the skills that create
great school leaders. One of the problems is that every school
that we operate in has to nominate a CP co-ordinator and we lose
them very quickly because they use their experience of working
with CP to apply for headships and move on to other schools. They
then often come back and say, "Can I be a CP school and I
will pay because I like it so much", if you see what I mean,
so we are now working with the National College of School Leadership
to look at modules that we can put into the headteachers' curriculum,
the national qualification for headteachers, which will ensure
that the sorts of headteachers who make this work very effectively
and are really good leaders have this developed and explored in
them before they get there.
Q48 Chairman: I am a bit worried
about this Arts Extend programme because I am very keen on this
development of the extended school and I would have thought that
this was a perfect opportunity for your organisation to fill that
space with something really interesting and exciting. I am just
a bit worried that you call it Arts Extend. It sounds straight
out of your new camp, not your old camp, Althea. It is not a very
exciting title, is it, Arts Extend? Again, to go back to the way
that David was pursuing this, it is arts, is it not? It is not
creativity. You have gone back into your comfort zone, have you
not?
Ms Efunshile: The simple reason
why it is called that is that it is testing the extent to which
arts can play a vibrant part in extended schools, so it is not
so much a programme as a kind of pilot testing and the results
of that research are not yet out.
Q49 Chairman: It is interesting that
when you applied this creativity model you dropped the word "creativity"
and it went to arts. At the beginning everything you two came
back on was that it is about creativity and you are trying to
push the boundaries. Vocabulary is important in education, is
it not? You have called it Arts Extend.
Ms Efunshile: But I think sometimes
we are about promoting the arts and there are times when we are
about promoting creativity.
Q50 Chairman: The information you
gave us was that the Arts Extend programme is designed to tie
in with extended schools. I thought it was meshing beautifully
with Creative Partnerships.
Ms Efunshile: No.
Q51 Chairman: It is not?
Ms Efunshile: It is a separate
piece of work.
Q52 Chairman: My apologies. I thought
it was a very close partnership with Creative Partnerships.
Mr Collard: I will be absolutely
clear what my position is on this. I come from an arts background.
I have worked in the arts for most of my life, not in education,
and I know that the big trap for the arts is always that it takes
on every agenda that is thrown at it for no additional resources,
and so I arrived in Creative Partnerships and very early on there
were lots of people who said, "Absolutely wonderful. Will
you run our extended schools programmes?", and I said, "No,
not without additional money. I do not think I have enough money
to do the job I am set up to do properly. I am not taking on that
agenda unless you come up with more money in order to be able
to do it". Could we do fantastic stuff in extended schools?
Absolutely. Would it not be best to ask Creative Partnerships
to do that because we are already there on the ground so you would
not need to build a new infrastructure to do it? Absolutely, but
you have got to come up with some more money because otherwise
I will just take away the money with which I am trying to sort
out another problem in order to fund it and I am not going to
do that.
Q53 Chairman: That was a wonderful
bit of lobbying, Paul.
Ms Efunshile: Can I just follow
it up? Arts Extend is separate to Creative Partnerships. It is
nine pilots around the country which are testing the extent to
which the arts can play a significant part in family learning,
in community cohesion, in parent support, that sort of programme.
That is what it is doing.
Chairman: Thanks for clarifying that.
The briefing I got rather seemed to merge the two, which was probably
my reading, not the very good work that Nerys, our Committee Specialist,
does for us.
Q54 Fiona Mactaggart: I want to follow
up Paul's point about money. You said you do not have enough money
to do what you are doing at the moment.
Mr Collard: Yes.
Q55 Fiona Mactaggart: Tell me about
it.
Mr Collard: It is about embedding.
We are very clear that we do not want to be there for ever but
we feel that we need to have worked with enough schools over an
intense enough period to bring around a culture change in the
education system as a whole. We have a model for going forward
which assumes that we can deliver the same impact. We can effectively
work with twice the number of schools we are working with at the
same level of funding but we do not feel that we will be able
to reach out widely enough into the education community to engage
enough schools on that level of funding and we want more money
to reach more schools in the next six-year period. That is the
heart of our proposition.
Q56 Fiona Mactaggart: And what has
been the response of DCMS and DCSF?
Mr Collard: DCMS have been very
supportive of Creative Partnerships and throughout this period
Ministers, through Althea and Peter, I think have been assured
that both the Department and the Arts Council see this as a priority,
so as far as I am aware there were no proposals put forward by
either, which assumed that if there was a big funding cut CP would
take the hit. My view is that if there is to be expansion and
there is a good case for it should not DCSF be putting more in?
I think that is still the view as to where the additional funding
should come from, but it is not the view that DCSF has.
Q57 Fiona Mactaggart: I would like
to link this back to something that you said earlier. I was really
pleased to hear what you said about initial teacher training.
As someone who used to train teachers I was always fed up with
the number of people who said, "Oh, look, we have just got
one day on PE and then two days on citizenship". There was
no way these poor students were ever going to swallow all these
bricks we were giving them, so I really welcomed what you said
about not trying to stuff it into the initial teacher training
curriculum, but at the same time it is clear that these skills
that you have talked about are critical to children's development,
to creating children who can do the things that we as society
want them to do. I think you have shown a pretty convincing case
that CP can do that. You also pointed out, I think in two bits
of what you said, that first of all we do not have a mechanism
for assessing these skills, although in special schools there
are some mechanisms which assess bits of skills like this in rather
small ways. It occurred to me that this might also be at the heart
of your problem with the DCSF, that what you are operating in
is an area where there is not a test, where there is not an assessment.
It is very interesting. Much of the background briefing that we
have had from our excellent researchers focused on how can you
prove what difference CP has made. Your evidence was a set of
researches on what Ofsted thinks, what NFER thinks, and it is
clear to me that, more than almost any other programme that I
can think of, people are pushing research, not just the anecdotes,
not just, "Our Lady of Peace School said, `And then we did
a performance of", which I saw, actually, "`of Roald
Dahl's Sleeping Beauty'", which was a joy, or Priory
School talking about doing all its work through art in a very
good example of thematic learning in probably one of the most
excellent primary schools in a very deprived area in the country.
But I keep coming back to why is DCSF not investing? Why is this
not more important? I think it is to do with assessment and I
want to know what you are doing to try to create assessment tools
which can show what young people learn in terms of risk-taking,
communication, team working, these so-called soft skills, which
I think you have rather compellingly suggested you are good at.
What are you doing to make sure there is a way of assessing them?
Mr Collard: First of all, in the
last few weeks we have been having conversations with DCSF about
a fundamental change to our monitoring and evaluation process
by which we can link all the information that we gather to schools
as being the unit of change that we operate with, and link our
database directly with theirs so that rather than us duplicating
a lot of the questions we ask schools we can access it directly
from DCSF so there is one system looking at that and schools have
to give us far less information in order to be able to do that.
The question in my mind, and it sounds like a kind of cop-out
but it is not, is you are right that assessment lies at the heart
of the problem here because DCSF has no system for assessing it
and, therefore, we are having to produce it and then they are
saying, "I am not sure if I am convinced". Actually,
DCSF should have had a system which was able to see whether our
interventions were making a difference to the lives of young people
in their schools, given how important we all—QCA, DCSF,
yourselves—think these things are. There are various ways
we can take it forward which are more or less onerous. Part of
the response we get from DCSF is we are already very bureaucratic,
and we say, "All right then, what is the solution, DCSF?
You do not want it to be bureaucratic, you think it is important,
it has to be done, come up with the thing" and if there was
one thing that came out of this inquiry it would be that DCSF
actually came up with a system for identifying whether children
were progressing in these areas or not. Ofsted are interested
and it is something that Ofsted now looks at. They will look at
it particularly if a school mentions it in its Self Evaluation
Form (SEF) and, therefore, we encourage all our schools to make
big play of it because then Ofsted can go in and say, "Yes,
we went and we saw it and it really was happening" and feed
it back. It needs to be systemic. The education system needs to
say, "This is so important we are going to find a way to
measure it" because then programmes like ours would flourish
because everyone would say, "Oh, it works, there you are".
But if it is always our evidence and them challenging it, it does
not work in quite the same way. The other issue DCSF have is they
will say that we are a very old-fashioned model. We have now given
all the money to schools and schools can do it if they want to,
that is how we operate. Retaining money like this is not how we
operate any more. It goes back to the Mongolian system. Read Anne
Bamford, that is what happened in Mongolia and it did not work;
the new curriculum did not take because there were not the resources
in the continuing professional development for the teachers, and
that is what we are about. If particularly you do not think it
needs to go on forever then the last thing you need to do is to
hand it all over to the schools because you are never going to
get it back again, so the next time there is a short-term initiative
that you need to invest in you are going to have to find more
money.
Q58 Fiona Mactaggart: What other
recommendations would you want us to make?
Mr Collard: Whew!
Fiona Mactaggart: It is okay, I have
already sent a note to the Clerk suggesting one of the ones that
you have just suggested.
Q59 Chairman: Before we move off
that, there are many ways in which you can get an independent
assessment and not a heavily bureaucratic one. There is no doubt
the Department could ask a university department or an independent
consultancy to assess the programme. You would welcome that, I
presume?
Mr Collard: Absolutely, but for
me the issue is that the DCSF takes ownership of that system and
says—it comes back to the QCA document—"If we
think these are the important things then we should be able to
tell parents whether children who go to that school end up being
more confident". We have said that is the point of education
but where do you find that out from.
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