Examination of Witnesses (Questions 673-679)
MR RAJINDER
SINGH SANDHU,
RABBI MARK
KAMPF, MR
TIM MILLER
AND MS
RACHEL ALLARD
11 DECEMBER 2006
Q673 Chairman: Can I welcome Tim Miller,
who is a Deputy Head of the Jewish Free School, Rabbi Mark Kampf,
who is a Deputy Head of the Jewish Free School, Rachel Allard,
who is the Head Teacher of The Grey Coat Hospital Church of England
Girls Comprehensive School, and Rajinder Singh Sandhu, Head Teacher
of the Guru Nanak Sikh School? Welcome to you all, and thank you
for sitting there listening to the first session, to which I saw
you all paying rapt attention, better attention than some members
of my Committee, I think, sometimes. This is going to be quite
a brisk session, so I am going to persuade my colleagues to ask
relatively succinct questions and I hope and know that you are
going to come back with reasonably succinct answers. I will start
with Rachel, just in terms of your view, you are really hands-on
people in schools, you are really at the sharp end; how is citizenship
embedding in the institution which you head, Rachel?
Ms Allard: My school is 300 years
old and its original charter set it out as one of its goals to
bring children up to be solid citizens; so, for us, citizenship
is something we have been doing for 300 years. When the actual
requirements of citizenship education as part of the National
Curriculum were brought in, we reviewed what we were doing already,
because we felt that our aim is to prepare our students to take
their place in society and to understand that they have a role
and know how to play that role. We were very interested to see
where we felt we were actually already doing the things that were
required and where we needed to reflect on how we could introduce
more; we felt that schools equally were encouraged to teach citizenship
across the curriculum, to have separate lessons. I think possibly
the emphasis is changing, or has changed, but at the time we felt
that what we wanted to do was do it in a cross-curricular way
and that we were able to achieve good citizenship education that
way. I think we still have work to do on that in some of the areas
in which we were not doing so well before, for example, the financial
preparation areas.
Q674 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Rajinder Singh?
Mr Singh Sandhu: In contrast with
Rachel, we are one of the younger schools. We opened as an independent
school in 1993 and became a state school in 1999. As somebody
who had come through the system in the UK, I went to primary and
secondary school in Wolverhampton, in the state comprehensive
system, when our Chairman told me that he wanted to open a school
I was in two minds until he said that the purpose of opening this
particular school was to create our future Mother Teresas, Nelson
Mandelas and people who would go out and help humanity. That was
a brief given to me in 1993. Through the early years, the school
struggled very much financially because it was a new concept.
We were given plenty of advice on how to become elitist, how to
open up a school which would cater towards private education and
therefore would make money, but the school never wavered from
its early concepts. I think the current citizenship syllabus,
if anything, has formalised what the school did. There are lots
of very good things about citizenship and in a lot of ways it
fits in very, very nicely with the concepts in Sikhism, and the
"three pillars" the school has always worked upon, always
remembering God, irrespective of the religion which you are in.
The school works very closely with other faith schools and other
state schools to ensure that it is encompassing everybody's views.
Alongside that, our key concept is "Kimt Karna" which
means working very, very hard, and, if you are an employer, treating
people with sensitivity. The third aspect is sharing your fortune
with others. These are the key principles on which the school
has always functioned and I think lots of it has come into the
current citizenship syllabus, in terms of teaching them things,
although there are aspects within our RE department, I might say,
within the citizenship and we had to make decisions. For example,
on citizenship the teacher has a log, I ask the kids to make a
log of all the things they do to help out in the local community,
but within the religious side if you do good things they should
be kept invisible, so there is a sort of slight contradiction
in terms. We welcome it and it has helped to form us into a Guru
school.
Q675 Chairman: Thank you. Rabbi Mark
Kampf?
Rabbi Kampf: I would echo much
of what my colleague said before. Your question was about embedding
and I was embedded in the school. This is a question which I think
we need to elaborate on. Our school was started in 1732 and its
purpose was to have our students live in a diverse society. We
also took a strategic view, when citizenship came in, we took
a cross-curricular approach, plus it is being taught within what
we call Jewish education within the school, so it has the framework
of the Jewish faith, together with the cross-curricular approach,
and we did an audit of the curriculum, the syllabus, and saw what
was not being taught. Because the teachers' workload was as such,
we took a pragmatic view of what could best be delivered, things
like political literacy, for example, through assemblies; so we
did an audit of what we could deliver, where was it best delivered
and that is the sort of programme we are on now.
Q676 Chairman: Thank you. Tim, do
you want to add anything to that?
Mr Miller: I think all I would
wish perhaps to add to what Mark has said is that, in a way, our
approach has been that we do not stop the clock at 12 o'clock
and say "We're now doing citizenship," it is very much
an approach of students learning by doing, and I think that relates
to all three of the central tenets of social and moral responsibility,
political literacy and community involvement. It is a very, very
key part of the school and our approach that we involve our students,
and we have 2,000, so that is a lot of people to involve all the
time. I would not claim that every single one of them is entirely
active in this respect, but we involve as many students as we
possibly can in a whole range of what might well be called citizenship
activities, which might involve work in terms of supporting younger
students, it might involve work within student council, within
our buddying systems and our peer mentoring systems, work in which
they are exposed to the concept that they are members of a community
in school. We hope they understand the sense of being a good citizen,
in the first instance, through that. The purpose of both Mark
and I coming, the "two for the price of one" deal that
the Committee is getting today, from JFS, is very much I think
that, from my perspective, and my role in the school is Head of
Sixth Form, I am seeing the outcomes, if you like, in terms of
what has been the experience of students over their first five
years and then their last two years in school before they go on,
as almost all of them do, to university. I think, when one is
conducting the interviews we do to write their UCAS references,
one of the things we are looking at, and we have a checklist of
things we are asking them about, is their experience in school,
out of school in their communities, their youth groups, and so
on, where they have become active as citizens in society in that
way. I think, when they go on to university, certainly our evidence,
as far as we have got it, and we try to keep in close touch with
our alumni, very much so, is that they do adapt well, having come
from a faith school, they adapt well to the outside world, to
university life, participate in that fully, and in the secular
world they enter thereafter.
Q677 Chairman: Can we whiz through,
in terms of essential information about you? Are all the students
at your school Jewish?
Mr Miller: Yes.
Q678 Chairman: You have to be Jewish
to attend?
Mr Miller: They have to be Jewish.
That stipulation, however, in a sense, is a very broad one. Although
the school's outlook is Orthodox Judaism, it is, in a sense, a
very broad church, if I may use that word, in relation to the
practice of the students, I think. When the students come into
the school, for the most part they are not particularly rooted
within their Jewish faith. One of the things that the school,
in its ethos, strives to do, besides creating tolerant and caring
citizens of the wider community, is introduce those students to
and provide them with that framework within their own faith.
Q679 Chairman: What percentage of
free school meals would you have?
Mr Miller: It is 10%. In terms
of social class and all of the other indicators, students from
single-parent families and all of that, it is a pretty average
school, from that perspective.
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