Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
SIR CYRIL
TAYLOR GBE AND
MS ELIZABETH
REID
23 MAY 2007
Q140 Mr Marsden: Sir Cyril, when
we did a major inquiry on special educational needs, the results
of which, again, have been published recently, you may recall
that there was some swapping of statistics about how well academies
did or did not do in terms of admitting children with special
educational needs, and I think Lord Adonis actually produced,
at least produced to my mind, some rather cogent figures suggesting
that intake was reasonable. It does not alter the question that
that is just as it is at the moment. There is no requirement for
academies, in the way there is for schools within the state system,
to conform to policies on admission of SEN children, as far as
I am aware. Why do you not put yourself within the system and
therefore avoid accusations that you are not taking your fair
share of children with special educational needs?
Sir Cyril Taylor: I have to disagree
with you. The admissions code applies to academies and they must
give preference to children with special educational needs.
Q141 Mr Marsden: You are saying that
the position in terms of academies is exactly the same as in the
state sector?
Sir Cyril Taylor: Absolutely.
Q142 Mr Marsden: There is a legal
requirement for that?
Sir Cyril Taylor: Yes, a legal
requirement.
Q143 Mr Marsden: That was not the
information that we were given originally so I would be interested
to see the detail of that, if you could let the Committee have
it.
Sir Cyril Taylor: We would be
happy to supply that.
Q144 Mr Marsden: I just want to move
from that. The issue, of course, of SEN inclusion as opposed to
special schools raises the much broader issue of the extent to
which there is co-operation between academies and schools in the
community around. You talked earlier about the importance of specialist
schools in spreading ideas across the community. Are you satisfied
that academies have begun to do their bit in terms of expanding
best practice to schools in LAs?
Sir Cyril Taylor: I think it is
early days.
Q145 Mr Marsden: Can you give me
any specific examples of it? Can Liz give any specific examples
of where academies are working with the broader set of local authority
schools?
Ms Reid: I think that, for example,
the Peckham Academy has been thoroughly integrated into the local
family of schools in Southwark. I believe that the principal of
the academy has chaired the local Excellence in Schools partnership
and is fully involved in all of the deliberations with secondary
head teachers.
Q146 Mr Marsden: Is that something
as a principle—and again, it is an anecdote, and it is an
impressive anecdote—that you within the Trust would be arguing
is part of your future work, that academies should co-operate
more with the local family of schools?
Sir Cyril Taylor: Absolutely.
Ms Reid: It is a principle that
we are acting out now. I said in an earlier answer, Chairman,
that we have all of the academies in membership of the network,
that all academies are participating in the network and participating
in a range of continuing professional development opportunities,
events, conferences and workshops, and working very much with
other schools. Of course, at this point in their development,
many academies are deploying the best practice that has been developed
in specialist and in other schools, because the principals of
academies are generally previously principals of ...
Q147 Mr Marsden: That is deploying
it for their own benefit. I am talking about deploying it for
the benefit of the broader family of community schools.
Ms Reid: As I think we have made
clear, academies have a very difficult task in many cases and
they are not yet at the stage necessarily where they have developed
innovative new practice. They are using existing practice and
deploying the experience of the generality of schools actually
in tackling some of these very entrenched difficulties.
Chairman: Can we now move on to last
section, on trusts.
Q148 Fiona Mactaggart: I am muddled
about the different categories that we have here. I feel there
has been a bit of mission creep and it would be helpful to try
and be clear what all these different kinds of schools do, trust
schools, academies and so on. As I said, when I looked at the
original point of academies, I thought it was to replace schools
that were so bad that we needed to start again, and yet there
seems to be some shift in that, with private schools, volunteering,
federations and so on. That seems to be one shift. There is the
trust school drive. I am not quite sure that I really understand
what all these different things are for and, because the definitions
seem to change over time, I think it is quite helpful for us to
have a very clear view right now from you.
Sir Cyril Taylor: These two documents
spell out precisely what specialist schools are and what academies
are. The prime purpose of academies is to turn round low-attaining
schools. There are particular areas where a new school is required,
like in Southwark; the City of London Corporation sponsored that.
In Liverpool the Belvedere School is providing a huge expansion
in high quality post-16 courses which are needed locally but the
prime purpose of the academy is to turn round these failing schools.
We are always talking about what individual head teachers and
their governing bodies want to do. Ninety per cent of them have
said they want to be specialist and they have to re-bid every
three years to keep that status and Ofsted are looking into that.
Academies are primarily focused on the 400 low-attaining schools.
The trust structure: it is early days although, surprisingly,
200 schools have already raised their hands and said they want
to do that. I think that is potentially very exciting as a way
of encouraging collaboration and co-operation between groups of
schools, joint post-16 provision, apprenticeship programmes, but
again, it is up to the schools to decide. I do not know whether
you have had a chance to glance at the book that I wrote with
Conor Ryan, Excellence in Education: The Making of Great Schools.
The National Foundation for Educational Research visited, on two
series of inspections, 20 of our best performing schools to identify
what were the characteristics, what created a good school, and
I keep going back to those principles: leadership, ethos, but
you can use different legal mechanisms to achieve that.
Q149 Fiona Mactaggart: I completely
agree with you about leadership. One of the things that I feel
anxious about in relation to trust schools is that if the leadership
of a trust school decides that it does not want to collaborate,
that it wants to whirl off on its own, I do not see what the mechanism
is that anyone else can encourage that collaboration, apart from
hoping they will, and I am wondering whether you can tell me whether
there is a mechanism. If you are saying there is this great opportunity
to collaborate, great! I really like that. That is why Slough
became a better education authority, because the schools decided
it was worth collaborating with each other in Slough and they
had not seen the point in Berkshire. I want to know how we can
do that. We emphasise leadership. Sometimes leaders decide "I
want my own territory here and you can't touch it", do they
not?
Ms Reid: Two things, if I may.
The first is that trust schools are local authority maintained
schools, they are part of the local family of schools; that is
how they are structured. The second thing I would say is that
there is this big interest in trust schools. There are over 200
already signed up and many more exploring it now. Those are all
schools that are active in our network and in the network they
collaborate. That is the purpose of the network. So I am actually
quite confident that the schools that are really interested in
being trust schools have collaboration pretty much hard-wired
into the way they go about their business.
Sir Cyril Taylor: The Co-op movement,
which is a living example of collaboration and co-operation, are
strong supporters of trust schools and we would like to have many
Co-op schools.
Q150 Fiona Mactaggart: Let me be
clear: I am not opposed to them but the reason I asked who does
what at the beginning is because I see trust schools as a kind
of successor to foundation schools and I have had some struggles
in encouraging foundation schools lately to collaborate in this
way, because they say, "We don't have to."
Ms Reid: If I may, Chairman, I
think one of the things that has changed over the last 10 years
is that schools, if they ever really were, are certainly no longer
islands unto themselves. They are not focused inwards; they focus
outwards, they focus outwards to the community, to the great range
of organisations, including business in the community, they engage
differently and more effectively with parents, with young people
in schools in terms of engaging and listening to young people.
Schools have opened up, and there are a whole range of policies
that support that: 14-19 collaborations, the extended school collaborations,
the community part in the specialist schools programme, the sponsorship
requirement that we were talking about earlier. All of that has
led to a shift in the culture and schools now expect to collaborate
with a wide range of organisations, including other schools, because
there is so much now to be gained, and that is one of the things
that is actually floating and driving the rising standards in
schools.
Q151 Chairman: Is not the big difference
though that where collaboration really works is when there is
money in it, and there is not much money in this particular focus,
is there?
Ms Reid: It does help but I would
argue that one of the reasons the Trust is a successful organisation
is that the collaboration that drives the network is voluntary
and in fact schools pay for it, and they pay for what they value
because it helps them do their work. So I do not think collaboration
always has to be about handing out money. Sometimes people are
willing to contribute resource in order to collaborate in ways
that make sense to them and are effective in supporting schools
in a myriad of ways, because each school is unique, in helping
them to raise standards for their students.
Q152 Fiona Mactaggart: On that point
about contributing resource, when it comes to potential trust
sponsors, are there any about which you have thought "Actually,
we don't want you to be sponsors"? I do not expect you to
break a confidence but what type of criteria might ...
Ms Reid: Chairman, we might have,
as an organisation, views about sponsorship but the decision about
the suitability of sponsors lies with the Department.
Sir Cyril Taylor: Plus the local
authority.
Ms Reid: Indeed, and I think the
other thing just to say about trust schools in passing is that
it does not necessarily involve a financial relationship. A partnership
can be structured that can involve the use of expertise, knowledge
and resources and, of course, there is a very wide range of partners
in trust arrangements: universities, further education colleges,
other kinds of learning organisations, and that may yet be one
of the most interesting features of the way this develops, that
schools, colleges and universities become used to working together
in tighter partnerships, so that you begin to see vertical partnerships
of a kind that we have not seen before.
Q153 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you think
this ever creates issues in relation to competition? We have very
strong mechanisms in the commercial world which say actually,
there needs to be a fair playing field in terms of competition
and so on, but if you had a partner who had a particular way of
doing things, are there issues about fairness and competition
within a school?
Ms Reid: I do not think we have
seen such an issue or an instance of difficulty yet. That is not
to say that it could not arise but up and down the country now
schools have a myriad of different relationships. What I would
say about that is that I think they nearly always work for the
individual school, and that is the issue, because it keeps coming
back to ethos and leadership and distinctiveness and what drives
and motivates a school.
Sir Cyril Taylor: I do not know
whether you are aware or not but academy sponsors are now very
carefully vetted. First of all, we want to know whether they actually
have the money to put up. We found that some of the ones who said
they did have the money did not, and some we just do not think
are appropriate to be involved. The academy initiative is not
open to anybody who has £2 million. There are people we will
not take the £2 million from.
Q154 Fiona Mactaggart: Who decides
who not to take?
Sir Cyril Taylor: The Department,
the Ministers basically. They use highly prestigious City accounting
firms, who will do an investigation. Obviously, it is confidential.
I think the trust is more of a movement of schools joining together.
There was this fascinating example we learned about yesterday
in Reading: Thames Valley University is actively involved in that
partnership. That is wonderful, to have that sort of initiative.
Q155 Fiona Mactaggart: Let me tell
you about another partnership between a grammar school and a failing
school—a failing school which is actually shortly to become
an academy but it has nothing to do with that—which happens
in my constituency, with Langley Grammar School, the best grammar
school in Slough in terms of its results. I do not believe that
that is being driven by any of these relationships. There is just
a sense that in a town with four grammar schools and a number
of secondary modern schools there is a duty to actually partner.
I am just wondering. This is to do with the feeling amongst the
head teachers and the governors and a desire to improve the standards
of education in the town. Some of my questions might have sounded
hostile. It is partly because I cannot work out what it is that
you do and that these structures do which is any different to
that or which adds anything to that. That is what I cannot unpick.
Ms Reid: It is difficult to unpick,
Chairman, and I think we need to be careful not to claim too much.
What I would claim is that the Trust's networks, which thrive
and grow and are very, very active, have made a contribution nationally
to changing the climate about co-operation and working together,
because that is what the network is about and that is what happens
on the ground. I do not think anybody would want to claim any
credit for something that two schools are doing together, but
I do think that there is a climate now that makes it easier for
people to see that this is the right way to go and that, indeed,
there is a model of responsibility to develop these kinds of partnerships
because that is the bread and butter work, day in, day out, that
I and the schools that my colleagues and I work with—and
increasingly, of course, we talk about the Trust having a large
number of employees; many of them are colleagues who have come
from schools and have been back to schools, and in that sense
it is very porous. We are an organisation of schools.
Q156 Mr Chaytor: Sir Cyril, the office
of Schools Commissioner was established largely to promote the
expansion of trusts schools but you also, as Chairman of the SSAT,
have an involvement in encouraging and promoting trust schools.
Where is the dividing line between the Schools Commissioner's
statutory responsibilities and your voluntary activities?
Sir Cyril Taylor: We have no statutory
powers over anybody; we are an advisory group. We maybe have influence.
Sir Bruce Liddington is one of our former head teachers in Northampton.
It is a boys' specialist school. The Secretary of State has the
statutory power, together with the LA, that if the school is in
special measures and their period of probation is not showing
signs of progress, then together with the LA they have the right
to close a failing school and that is, I think, a very important
focus because it will concentrate the minds of people, especially
the local education authority. We work very closely with Sir Bruce.
He has a very wide remit.
Q157 Mr Chaytor: Can you define more
clearly what your role is? I am not challenging the fact that
you do have a role or should have a role but what is the dividing
line? Who is actually responsible for seeking out potential sponsors
of trust schools?
Ms Reid: We have no responsibility
in that matter and I honestly do not think that sponsorship is
the key issue here. The question is partnerships and I think partnerships
generally where business is involved are more partnerships in
kind, support of various kinds rather than ...
Q158 Mr Chaytor: There cannot be
a trust school without a sponsor, surely. It is intrinsic to the
concept of trust schools that there has to be an external partner.
Ms Reid: They are generally partners
and very often they are more than one partner and more than one
school.
Q159 Chairman: Does a trust have
to have a sponsor?
Ms Reid: Not in the way that you
understand it for a specialist school or for an academy, no.
Sir Cyril Taylor: I do not think
trust schools are required to raise sponsorship.
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