Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540-559)
LORD ADONIS
6 NOVEMBER 2006
Q540 Mr Wilson: Some people have
been suggesting these CPD training courses are given a very low
priority by heads because they face so many demands on their budgets.
Do you see any problems with that?
Lord Adonis: In my experience,
when training is made available essentially at a highly subsidised
rate or free of charge, as is the case here, heads tend to be
quite keen on taking it up, so we found in this area, in PSHE,
where there is a certificate available which we also fund on a
similar basis, in science, for example, with the Science Learning
Centres, where again we fund a very high proportion of the cost
of CPD, that the places are taken up. It is too early to say at
the moment whether the 600 have been but if they are not, I can
tell you we will be acutely concerned and will look and see what
further steps we can take to encourage take-up.
Q541 Chairman: The Sutton Trust has
done some very interesting research on the relationship between
the quality of teaching science and whether the person who has
been employed as a science teacher is a science graduate. You
would not deny there is a relationship in a subject between having
a proper qualification, a proper, dedicated qualification, and
the quality of teaching?
Lord Adonis: I certainly do not
deny that it is important for those who teach to have a good command
of the subject knowledge. The point I was seeking to make, which
I do believe, having looked at the curriculum content for citizenship,
is that it is not, for example, akin to physics, where in fact,
having a systematic training in physics, including a degree, over
a long period of time, is going to be essential for a top quality
physics teacher. In the case of citizenship, there is a very substantial
overlap between the curriculum content and the curriculum content
of other degree areas, including, as I say, geography and history.
Therefore I do not see it as on a par. But do I believe that further
support is needed for teachers to see that they do have that subject
knowledge—of course I do—which is the reason we are
providing those CPD places.
Q542 Chairman: It may surprise you,
Andrew, that I think I would prefer to see someone who is a graduate
in a science subject plus the one year as probably preferable
to anyone who only has the five days.
Lord Adonis: The problem, of course,
as we know from science, is the high proportion of schools that,
for example, do not have properly trained physics teachers. You
cannot teach A level physics [...]
Chairman: I was not trying to take you
down that track. We could be on that for a long time. I want to
move on and look at spreading good practice. We have seen some
very good practice. Indeed, we saw some schools where you could
franchise the good system they have and roll it out, if the Department
were so minded.
Q543 Jeff Ennis: We have already
focused on the patchy nature of citizenship education teaching
at the present time. Given that scenario, what scope is there
for the Government playing a larger role in terms of spreading
good practice? Are there any areas where you think the Government
should play more of a lead role in that regard?
Lord Adonis: I think there is
huge scope for us helping to spread good practice. That is the
reason why we produce all these materials, for example, the CPD
handbook for all teachers. The Citizenship Foundation has recently
produced a comprehensive introduction to effective citizenship
education in secondary schools, which has excellent chapters in
it on how citizenship can be taught through other subjects as
well. There are chapters on geography, on history, on religious
education. There are a whole lot of good case studies there. We
help fund materials provided by School Councils UK in respect
of school councils. We help fund the Active Citizens in Schools
scheme, which provides certificates in best practice for schools
in that respect. We help fund the Citizenship Foundation in the
Giving Nation resource pack which they provide, which helps schools
to follow best practice in encouraging students to volunteer.
I am told that 75% of schools have sought the Giving Nation resource
packs. There is a whole set of activities that we can continue
to support which I think can have just the effect that you are
describing, Jeff.
Q544 Jeff Ennis: Obviously, citizenship
education is not just confined to this country. There are European
examples and examples from further afield where it is being promoted.
Are there any best practice models that we could look at from
Europe, or that you can recommend us to look at, or that you have
liaised with in building up our programme?
Lord Adonis: Of course, when Bernard
Crick did his original inquiry, he looked extensively at practice
elsewhere and I see when you had him before you that you questioned
him about it. I noticed he was not wildly excited by practice
in other countries. He thought that some of our European counterparts
were unduly rigid in the way that they taught constitution and
so on, and that our combination of the applied and the theoretical
was better than those others that he had looked at. We have our
advisers and they do look at continuing practice abroad, and we
do seek to inject that in. For example, I was in Finland recently,
where they regard this as an important area. I think the Committee
has been there.
Q545 Chairman: We get rather testy
when people refer yet again to Finland.
Lord Adonis: If I can yet again
refer to Finland, Chairman, and escape your wrath, one of the
things I was very struck by, in Finland is the degree of pupil
participation in schools. For example, school governing bodies
now routinely have pupils as full participating members of the
governing body. That is something we do not have here. You have
to be 18 or above to be a full member of a governing body in a
school in England, though you can be an associate member of a
governing body younger, and an increasing number of schools do
have pupils on their governing bodies as associate members. These
sorts of ideas are ones that I think we should be prepared to
look at and see whether there is anything we can learn from them.
Q546 Jeff Ennis: Given the lack of
trained teacher specialists in the subject, would you anticipate
secondary schools and feeder primary schools liaising and discussing
the citizenship agenda which is being taught in the primary schools
and that then feeding into the secondary schools? Would that be
one of the ways we could promote good practice?
Lord Adonis: Very much so. I think
that is an important area. For example, in the specialist schools
programme it is now possible, through the humanities specialism,
to major in citizenship and, of course, that involves developing
links with feeder primary schools and neighbouring secondary schools
also. You have had before you Keith Ajegbo who, as well as overseeing
the review, was until this summer head teacher of Deptford Green
School. Deptford Green School is a humanities specialist school
with a particular specialism in citizenship and has been doing
precisely the sort of work which you described.
Q547 Jeff Ennis: Does the Department
give guidance on pursuing that?
Lord Adonis: The Specialist Schools
and Academies Trust, which, as you know, is the umbrella body
of specialist schools, is seeking to develop further guidance
for schools taking on that specialism, which I think will encourage
a lot more schools to develop citizenship as a first or second
specialism, and I would hope it would also develop best practice
models for schools that do not take this on as a specialism but,
nonetheless, want to see this as an important part of their work
and can take it forward in conjunction with feeder primaries.
Q548 Jeff Ennis: You have also mentioned
in earlier replies the importance that school councils play in
the active participation element of citizenship, and I am a big
supporter of school councils. In Wales we are making them compulsory,
of course, but we are not biting that particular bullet. Do you
think we ought to revisit that and follow the Wales model?
Lord Adonis: This was debated
at length in the Lords on the Education and Inspections Bill because
Lord Dearing took up precisely your theme. I did consult Geoff
Whitty, your own specialist adviser, on this issue. Obviously
I had to respond to a specific amendment on this in the House
of Lords and Geoff advised us that we should wait for his report.
He was meeting my Welsh ministerial counterpart and looking at
the practice in schools in Wales to see whether there was any
virtue in adopting a more prescriptive approach as they have done
by regulation. Under the 2002 Education Act we have powers, if
we wish to do so, to prescribe arrangements for school councils
by order. We have the enabling power but we do not intend to prejudge
Geoff's report before doing anything more.
Q549 Jeff Ennis: Given that situation
then, is there not a case for more increased guidance from the
Department to allow schools to more easily facilitate the secondary
schools?
Lord Adonis: We have increased
the guidance. As I say, we have worked with School Councils UK
to develop much better materials for schools in establishing schools
councils. We issued the first of such materials for primary schools
only last year in this area and we have said that we will seek
to update that guidance further when Geoff has reported.
Q550 Jeff Ennis: Some suggest that
citizenship education could improve attainment more generally,
yet the evidence-base for this is currently weak. Would you consider
funding more research in this particular area?
Lord Adonis: We are funding the
longitudinal study at the moment and we will pay very careful
attention to its results in looking at the whole future of the
subject. We do think it is important to take stock of best practice
in this area, and we are certainly open-minded about future developments
and we see the results being achieved in the study.
Q551 Fiona Mactaggart: You have been
quite enthusiastic about the schools councils and how they have
changed what schools are like when you go and visit them. One
of the things in the Department's evidence to us was a quote from
Sir Bernard which suggested that if citizenship is taught well
and tailored to local needs its skills and values will enhance
democratic life for all of us. One of the things that we saw in
The Blue School was a programme which was teaching children about
the skills they need to run the school council, to run the working
groups, to run the meetings and so on, and I am struck that in
many school councils there is not an effort to train children
in these skills, we just hope they will pick it up, and often
teachers do not have these skills. I am wondering how the Government
can support this kind of programme. We were impressed by it and
felt that it was a very practical way of helping school councils
to work well. I wonder if this is something you have thought about?
Lord Adonis: The tools I referred
to earlier that the School Councils UK provide—I know Jessica
Gold gave evidence to you in one of your earlier sittings—does
include precisely the sorts of areas which you are referring to:
how you manage meetings, how chairs should be elected and the
sort of support they need to do their work and so on. These are
very important areas. In my experience of visiting school councils,
usually there is some kind of attached teacher who plays precisely
the role you are describing in helping to train up members of
the school council in conducting their affairs. That is an important
role, and from what I have seen in some schools, often where there
is a citizenship teacher, the citizenship teacher may play that
role. I think there is a direct relationship between the quality
of teaching in this area and the support that is going to be available
for organisations like school councils. There is a debate in this
area also. It is quite interesting. If you look at the School
Councils UK website and the debates which take place there amongst
members of school councils, issues like how you elect school councils,
how they choose their chairs, the sorts of areas they should discuss,
whether, for example, they should play a role in the appointment
of staff, these are very live debates within the school community
at the moment. There are debates with school leaders also. There
are some school leaders, head teachers, who tell me flat-out that
they think it is vital that schools councils do express opinions
on staff appointments and there are others who regard this as
a very undesirable step. I do not know what the answer is on some
of these issues; I certainly would not want the Department to
be prescribing in detail precisely how schools councils should
conduct their affairs in those areas. I do see that we have a
role in encouraging further debate in these areas and that is
what we do by supporting Schools Councils UK.
Q552 Fiona Mactaggart: If you could
encourage skills training then the debate would work better, it
seems to me, because if those young people had those sets of skills
they would be able, for example, to assess the suitability of
a potential teacher much more effectively, they would be able
to contribute to the decisions that the governing body might face
and so on, more appropriately than very often they can without
those very practical skills. I am not necessarily talking about
the constitution, if you like.
Lord Adonis: I agree with that.
I think a lot of it does not have so much to do with the skills
set of the staff but the degree of seriousness with which they
treat the schools councils. If I can give you an example, at the
secondary school I went to in Merton last week, which had been
engaged in interviewing candidates for one of the deputy head
posts, one of the existing deputy heads had worked with the council
to go through their list of questions that they were going to
ask all of the candidates for the post, the appropriateness of
the questions, how they should allocate the questions between
members of the schools council, all the issues we all have to
deal with all the time when we are doing interviews, how they
should allow follow-up to questions afterwards, the amount of
time they should spend, and this enabled them to conduct that
process effectively. Every school has senior staff who are trained
in interviewing techniques and conduct interviews the whole time,
so the issue there is not whether there is the skills set available
within the school which can then be deployed in respect of schools
councils, it is whether the school leadership regards this as
a sufficiently high priority for them to make the effort to do
it. My view is they should make that effort, I think it is immensely
worthwhile for them to do so. That is the kind of cultural change
we need to spread over an increasing number of schools. From what
I have seen in schools, I am convinced that this is all going
with the grain because it is happening in a large number of schools
already.
Q553 Chairman: Certainly it is true
that for some of the schools we have been to it is the energy,
it is not the constitution. I would hate to think that as the
schools council just putting an obligation on a school would seem
to be the magic wand, I do not think it would be, it is energising
the relationships that I think Fiona was talking about, but you
do need someone skilled available in the school to energise the
process. That is why I think you and I, and some members of the
Committee, were disagreeing about the quality of training amongst
that energising.
Lord Adonis: I completely agree
about the need to energise these relationships and for the leadership
teams of schools to take these issues very seriously indeed. The
issue of some debate between us is how far you need to be specifically
trained to be able to do some of these things. There are areas
of curriculum content where I believe training is desirable, if
not essential. For example, when it comes to helping schools councils
to develop the skills they need to be able to interact with the
senior management of the school to conduct interviews and so on,
it should not require specific training for school staff to be
able to pass on those skills.
Q554 Chairman: Sometimes they have
to hire it in. In response to Jeff Ennis's question you said longitudinal
research was going on, how long is the longitudinal research going
to be?
Lord Adonis: It is an eight-year
programme, as I understand it. I am not sure how far through they
are and there will be interim reports from it.
Q555 Chairman: Who is doing it?
Lord Adonis: The National Foundation
for Education Research, who are highly skilled.
Q556 Chairman: Can you send us a
note on that and on how long into the eight years they are?
Lord Adonis: And whether there
will be interim findings that I am in a position to let you know.[2]
Chairman: Can we move on to citizenship
and community cohesion, something which has been put uppermost
in our minds as we had this visit this morning.
Q557 Mr Chaytor: Minister, what impact
do you think the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion
will have on the way they deal with citizenship education?
Lord Adonis: I would hope that
it would support it significantly. All of the applied aspects
of citizenship which we talked about, both the full engagement
of all pupils within the life of schools and the engagement of
the school as a community much more in the life of its wider community
outside, are integral to citizenship as a subject and also vital
to a school demonstrating that it is playing its part by community
cohesion more widely. There are other aspects too, such as school
twinning, exchanges between staff, joint professional development
between staff of different schools, particularly schools that
educate pupils from very different backgrounds, which I would
see as entirely complementary.
Q558 Mr Chaytor: The duty to promote
community cohesion is going to be assessed by Ofsted?
Lord Adonis: Yes. It is now in
the Bill as it was finally approved by Parliament last Thursday.
Q559 Mr Chaytor: If there is a critical
Ofsted report on that element of the whole report, how would you
envisage that being dealt with?
Lord Adonis: That would lead to
a low grade in that aspect of the inspection by Ofsted to the
school and the school would be expected to respond in the way
that it is always expected to respond when it has a low grade
in any of the main inspection areas, by putting in place a programme
of activity to put that right. Of course, it could contribute
to an overall low grade for the school as a whole, so it could
contribute to a warning notice, a notice to improve, or a school
being placed into special measures. Of course, if that were the
case then the school would be expected to demonstrate to its local
authority, and in due course to a re-inspection by Ofsted itself,
that it had put right those elements found to be deeply unsatisfactory
in the original inspection.
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