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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1034-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS AND THE CURRICULUM
Monday 8 October 2007 MR PAUL COLLARD and MS ALTHEA EFUNSHILE Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 88
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 8 October 2007 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr Douglas Carswell Mr David Chaytor Fiona Mactaggart ________________ Memorandum submitted by Arts Council England
Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Paul Collard, National Director, Creative Partnerships; and Ms Althea Efunshile, Executive Director, Arts Planning and Investment, Arts Council England, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome Paul Collard and Althea Efunshile to our proceedings. I will put their minds at rest immediately and say that the demonstrations outside are nothing to do with creativity and their programmes but about some other matter that is being discussed at this moment, the statement on Iraq. Apologies for the thin attendance today but some of our members have been poached by ministers for various jobs and shadow jobs, so we are a depleted number until we are reborn as a new Committee after the Queen's Speech. However, we were determined to finish both a small inquiry that we are undertaking on Special Educational Needs, which is dear to our hearts, but also this look at creativity in schools, which has been a passion of Fiona's for a long time. She has been pushing us to pay serious attention to it for a long time and we were delighted to do it, even though we are going to push it into this last bit of the old session of Parliament, so it is thanks to Fiona that we are all here and discussing something that is certainly close to the hearts of the three members of the Committee you have with you today. You have got a tremendous amount of experience and Althea is an old hand at presenting evidence to this Committee and we were very impressed when she was here before when she helped us make the Special Educational Needs inquiry a lot better than it could have been. Paul and Althea, tell us what difference this programme has made? Have you any general remarks before you start and who is going to go first? Ms Efunshile: If I can just say we very much welcome the opportunity so thank you very much indeed for having this inquiry. Creative Partnerships is really very important to the Arts Council. Paul will be answering most of the questions because Paul, as you know, has been leading this programme very successfully for quite some time. However, I certainly wanted to make sure that you were aware of the commitment that the Arts Council has, both to the wider subject of creativity and young people, and how important that is, but also to the part that Creative Partnerships plays in that role. I think that is probably all that I wanted to say rather than read out a long statement at the outset. Q2 Chairman: Paul? Mr Collard: I will plunge right in at the deep end and talk about the impact that I think the programme has had. To start off with I think we need to define what impact we are looking to have. Essentially, we are concerned with developing a series of skills and behaviours in young people that we think will make them not only more successful at school but more successful in life broadly afterwards. This set of skills, which we loosely call the creative skills, centres around not only the ability to think imaginatively but to communicate effectively, to work well in teams, to take risks, to challenge, to ask questions, to be undismayed by failure, to be very resilient in the work that they do, and to come to school motivated and to enjoy that experience. It is that set of behaviours we would like to see happen. Our belief is that when you talk outside school, to employers for instance, and you ask them what they are looking for in young people, they are very clear that they need numerate, literate young people but they also need this wider set of skills and behaviour that I think we are about delivering for them. Terry Leahy, the Chief Executive of Tesco's, just three weeks ago gave a speech in which he was talking about the need for that wider set of skills and behaviours to be present in all young people going into employment. There was a recent big report on IT graduates and their lack of social skills. They are now nearly all doing jobs in other organisations where they need to be able to communicate about the IT to lay people, and that requires skills and so on and so forth. You see that being consistently reflected back. Clearly what you do not want is for those skills to be developed at the expense of any academic attainment; what you want is both those things going on simultaneously, and therefore for us the research into our impact has to prove that we are getting both those things - improvements in narrow educational standards but also these wider behaviours. We also need to try and do it in a way that is relatively light touch, so in beginning to identify a set of additional things that we want to ensure that young people have, we do not want to develop a whole network of confidence inspectors descending on schools and checking on the confidence of young people. So how do we collect that information in a light touch way and how do we collect it effectively? That is what we are setting out to do. One of the first things that we did was we asked David Lammy, the Minister, to invite Ofsted to inspect our programme because we thought these people are the experts but also they are the people who should tell us how to make our programme better. A lot of us do not come from an educational background (although we take a lot of educational advice) and here was an opportunity to make sure we got that better. Secondly, we went out and asked a lot of headteachers who are running our programmes in their schools what impact that is having there. Thirdly, we have been tracking, as far as we can, the performance of young people directly involved in the programme. So if I pick up on some of those bits of the research, there is a set of figures that we have recently compiled putting in the 2006 GCSE results. We have looked at all the CP secondary schools and we have looked at how the percentage achieving five GCSEs has gone up over the period since we started operating in 2002. We have compared it with other schools in the same local authorities, because they have a lot of the same characteristics, and we have also looked at the national figures, the national average, and what you get - and I can send this formally afterwards - is an average improvement in GCSE results of 10.4 per cent for CP secondary schools; 7.7 per cent for non-CP secondary school in the same local authorities, and six per cent nationally, so it is going on for double the rate. We deal with difficult schools, we deal with schools that are at very low levels, but we are by no means the only programme in those schools and we would not say for a moment that it is entirely down to us. It is just allaying the notion right from the start that there is any conflict between what we do and improving standards. If you look at the Ofsted report they said the same thing. At all the schools they visited standards are higher. They cannot prove it was CP but it is certainly not doing anything to put that aside. So we then move on to saying, all right then, we can show that, and the study of 13,000 young people that NFER completed for us showed exactly the same. Children in schools who had done CP work improved at a rate faster than other children in the same school who had not and they improved at a faster rate at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 than the national average. They met the Key Stage 3 national average but that was far above their expected performance level. What we wanted to do was get a sense of: "But what about these behaviours; are the behaviours present and there?" The first thing we did was go and interview all our headteachers. This was not a survey of a sample of them; we actually went after asking all of them what difference Creative Partnerships had actually made to children in their schools, and particularly focusing on their performance. You can see in evidence that we have already submitted that 90 per cent said behaviour was better, motivation was better, enjoyment was better, communications were better; all those skills and behaviours that we were looking for had improved. This comes back to my point of saying actually the only way you can observe this is by asking adults who work with the children whether it is true. You can check, triangulate it if you like, by asking Ofsted to go and ask the same questions; we did and Ofsted said exactly the same thing. In the schools that we went into what we saw is what the headteachers saw: more confident and better communicators; more enjoyment; more motivation and so forth generally across the piece. There is quite a lot of other research that we are doing, but I think those are the headlines that we wanted to get across. We certainly do not seem in any way to impact negatively on standards. In fact, the general evidence is schools that do CP do better than other schools, but in addition there is a set of skills and behaviours that we have nurtured which is evident to the people meeting those young people and has been reported as such. Q3 Chairman: Good so let us get the questioning started then. Let me open by asking what does this look like on the ground? One of the problems is that apart from individual visits the Committee has not got time to go to schools and look at programmes that are operating, which we do with every other inquiry, and so where does creativity begin and where does it end? When I went to school I suppose we always thought that creativity was somebody coming in and playing the piano or performing arts or a small theatre group, and of course all of us have seen some very interesting innovation that is not part of this partnership in schools, it is not the only show in town, and some of the evidence that we were given sort of hinted that "we do this on a much smaller budget just as effectively". What does it look like on the ground? I was talking to John Sorrell on Saturday and of course joined-up design in schools is wonderfully creative in my view. Does that sort of thing fit into your programme? Mr Collard: Yes, we are doing quite a lot of work on the BSF programme in working with young people and teachers to create opportunities to develop visions for Schools for the Future in order to be able to articulate that back to architects as they become clients. It is very similar to the work that John Sorrell has been doing. I would say I love what he does. I think we do a lot of that as well and it is desperately needed because I think otherwise - and you as a Committee have reflected upon this recently with your report on Sustainable Schools - without better thinking by schools and teachers about what schools of the future will look like, we are just going to end up with old schools providing the same education. I see that as really key. How does this operate on the ground? In our best practice - and that is what Ofsted were pointing to and we are now trying to roll out consistently across it all - is that we need to identify when we start with a school exactly what issue in the school it is that we are dealing with. We can then identify appropriate creative professionals to come in and work with that school on dealing with that issue. The issue can vary enormously. In one school it can be listening and speaking skills in reception class; in the next school you will be starting with truancy; in another school you will be doing BSF and so on and so forth, so there is a wide range of starting points that we work on, and I think Ofsted are very clear in their report that we work best when we are clear when we start exactly what issue it is that we are going to address. Q4 Chairman: That sounds like a professional from outside coming into the school and taking hold of this. Is that always the way it happens or what do you do in terms of professional development of the in-house teaching staff? Mr Collard: I think you should think of Creative Partnerships as being a professional development programme for teaching staff. That is what we do. What we have learnt in our experience from working with teachers is that teachers are not terribly good classroom learners; they are very good experiential learners, and when you go and talk to a teacher in the first case and say, "You could do this," when you get them in a seminar room, what you tend to hear a lot is, "Oh that's very good and that's a good example but it would not work with my children." Until you have done it in their class with their children it is very hard to persuade them that it is really going to work, so therefore what we are really doing is going into their classrooms with their children, with other professionals, and showing them that it works. Once we have done that they then adopt it for themselves. A couple of weeks ago Althea and I visited a couple of schools in Basildon in which we operate, and what was interesting about it is I do not think any of the schools were doing anything other than what they had permission for, were encouraged to do in current DCFS guidelines and may possibly have had the money to do, but they did not know how to do and they did not want to take the risk until they had been shown how to do it. That for us is what we are about. We do not believe we need to be there forever. We need to be there for a while until we have got them to the point of confidence to do that for themselves and we have opened up a whole series of new opportunities for them. Q5 Chairman: Althea, how do you view this in terms of the Arts Council? I ought to declare an interest; I have a member of my family who works for your organisation but that does not mean to say I cannot give you a hard time! Althea, how does it look from your perspective from the Arts Council? It is rather new territory for you, is it not? Ms Efunshile: I will start with the visit to the schools in Thurrock and Essex and then move back --- Q6 Chairman: It has moved, it was not Thurrock. Mr Collard: Thurrock and Basildon. We were at one school in each; it was the same visit. Ms Efunshile: --- And then move back to the Arts Council. Creative Partnerships is new territory so I have come at it with fresh eyes really. What I found difficult at first was that question that you have just asked: what does it look like? I think it is a programme where you do have to see it and feel it to understand it. I have been very impressed by the extent to which in the schools that I have visited teachers have been given, if you like, permission to take risks around the sorts of issues that they are concerned about. It is not that there is a programme with a set of ingredients that they then work their way through; it is that as a teacher I am trying to think through how I deliver this aspect of the curriculum and I want to make it more interesting and more engaging and for children, and as a school we have an attendance issue and so on and so forth, very much as Paul has described. I too was very struck by the fact that this is very much about developing creativity, not just amongst the pupils but amongst the teaching staff as well, so it is that sense of Creative Partnerships as a form of continuing professional development and a way in which creative practitioners from outside the school and the pupils and the teachers engage together and learn from each other. It is not about imparting the arts in school; it is about using the arts in order to encourage creativity. As an Arts Council this is really very important to us because we work to get more great art to more people. We are a development agency, we are there to develop and promote the arts right across the country. We fund approximately 1,000 organisations regularly in order that they can produce the arts. We see the arts as having substantial power, if you like, to change people's lives and to impact on local communities. Children and young people are a key to that vision. Children and young people are key because if we work with children at a very young age then we are more likely to encourage a passion for the arts at that younger age. We think it is important that we build a passion for the arts and a knowledge of how to be creative in young people so that they can take the opportunity later on to be members of the creative industries and so on. Creative Partnerships is one of the routes in and through that. We have a range of other programmes with children and young people as well but certainly Creative Partnership is one of those ways through, hence my opening comments about the importance of such programmes to the Arts Council. Q7 Chairman: One more thing before Fiona and David take over and that is in terms of listening to what you are saying and reading all the material that I have read in relation to this I got a feeling - and these two will groan about this - when we were look at citizenship it seemed to me we needed to get the mind-set of children opened to a more participatory mode of behaviour in school, which we saw in some of the schools that we went to, and indeed I was with Andrew Denison at the launch of the Schools Councils Report a couple of weeks ago. It just seems to me that you need a synthesis for this work between how children operate in the school as a young citizen and being able to think and act creatively. It just seemed to me that it was the whole package. Are you not in danger of giving it that brand: this is creativity, it is dancing, it is singing, it is performing, rather than actually sitting at your computer and doing fascinating things in quite different ways? Bill Gates is creative, is he not? Ms Efunshile: One of your questions early on, to which Paul answered, was something along the lines of how would we define creativity, and what Paul did not say was that it was about the arts. Creativity is not synonymous with the arts, it is not synonymous with music or dance and so on. Creativity is about that ability to be questioning, that ability to think outside of the box, that ability to use one's imagination in a purposeful and valuable way. I think the way that we would be wanting to think about creativity from an Arts Council perspective is rather more about the behaviours that it generates in the child rather than the route through. What Creative Partnerships does and what the Arts Council would seek to do is to use the arts in order to invoke and encourage that creativity. I would certainly argue and have seen that the arts are a very powerful route in. Artists are creative and so what they are doing is transferring their creative skills, if you like, into the school right across the curriculum. I think that is what is very important. This is not about teaching the arts; it is about using the arts so that the teaching of mathematics or the teaching of history or the teaching of science can be more successful. Q8 Chairman: I understand that. I came across a very interesting scheme with a football club recently which said for a long long time that they had been just going to a school, finding the talented kids who have got a natural interest and can kick a ball reasonably well and all the other kids were left alone, and they have started this new programme where the kids come in and they design the fan magazine and they help at the turnstiles and they do all the other things associated with a premier sports club. The worry I had on reading some of the material was that the kids who were not natural singers or musicians or whatever might again be left on the sidelines. Mr Collard: No, I do not think so at all. It is very much not about that. It is a product, if you like, of Creative Partnerships that young people are exposed to the arts and artists but it is not the purpose to do that. The purpose is to develop behaviours and skills in them, as Althea said, as well as helping the teachers teach more imaginatively and creatively. You have mentioned citizenship, you have mentioned football clubs, and I will mention enterprise and the work of Enterprise Insight and say that we have worked very closely with the Citizenship Foundation. What citizenship has is a curriculum and a lot of teachers wanting to know how to make it work, and we work very effectively with them. Very often the issue that the school will identify is "can you help us with citizenship?", and we are able to bring in the professionals to help make the citizenship bit work. Enterprise Insight, which is trying to develop a set of behaviours and skills which is interchangeable with that which we would identify, do not have networks of schools, so therefore in Enterprise Week a lot of the projects are Creative Partnerships projects because we have the network of organisations on the ground that can find it. Where do the football clubs come in? If the football clubs are doing it, that is fine. If the school says, "I want something that is not a football club," our job is to find that, if you see what I mean, and to broker that. I think all these things do join up and there are a lot of similarities, but I think our network of brokers and trainers is what distinguishes us from the other programmes. Chairman: I am going through the five sets of questions, I started I hope broadly on one, so who wants to pick up on that? Q9 Fiona Mactaggart: I would like to pick up on that. Althea, I was very interested in what you said at the beginning because I have to say my impression at the start of the Creative Partnership programme was that the Arts Council was rather miffed in that it felt that money that ought to be going to proper arts was now being diverted into stuff in schools. Are you telling us that there is a change in heart or that in practice something has made the Arts Council feel that this is an appropriate way of spending its money? Ms Efunshile: I was not around seven years ago so I will skip along from there, but children and young people certainly are a priority for the Arts Council, so in terms of the current corporate plan, our current agenda for the Arts Council, children and young people are one of the six priorities. In terms of where does one access children and young people, how do we do that, we access children and young people and impact on them in a number of ways, I suppose the key ways are through the regularly funded organisations. 90 per cent of those have some sort of programme for children and young people and that is something that we encourage and that we welcome and that we want to see more of, so that is one way through. We also have a range of projects and programmes which are not necessarily the focus of this session such as Arts Award, Arts Extend, Cultural hubs and so on, where we have the ability to work with children and young people. There is also partnership work increasingly with children's trusts in local authorities and so on. Creative Partnerships therefore sits within that family of programmes, initiatives, work and partnerships that the Arts Council has and has developed in order that we can pursue that priority. I think there are questions that the Arts Council would ask about the extent to which it is appropriate for it to be delivering a programme such as Creative Partnerships as opposed to commissioning a programme in that way, and certainly there are conversations which have been on-going within the Arts Council for the last year or so now which are about the extent to which we can move to a position where in fact there is more of a commissioning role of creative partnerships rather than the Arts Council delivering it, but that does not change what would happen on the ground, and certainly Creative Partnerships across the nine regions in the Arts Council is playing an increasingly important part in those nine regional strategies for arts development in that area. I am thinking particularly of examples in the East of England where Creative Partnerships is playing an important role in that regional strategy in terms of regeneration of the local area, using Creative Partnerships as a vehicle. In other areas, Creative Partnerships is very central to the wider strategy for children and young people. I would want to say, yes, I think there has been a shift, and I am aware that there may well have been questions at the outset, but I think certainly under Paul's leadership the programme is vibrant, it is successful, it is thriving and the possibilities are very clear. Mr Collard: I have been here a little bit longer but again I was not here at the start. I was on the National Council of the Arts Council when Creative Partnerships was invented and then I left and then I came back to run this programme because I, like the Council, thought it was fantastically important. I do not think the Arts Council has doubted it. I think that there has been rhetoric from some of the regularly funded organisations of the Arts Council that the money should have gone directly to them. I think that the Arts Council recognised that the money was a new opportunity. It was an opportunity to connect with creative professionals and cultural organisations it had not connected with before. Out of the 5,500 individuals or organisations we have commissioned to work in schools to date we know from research that we have done that 60 per cent of them have never worked with the Arts Council before. We see that as a real success. 40 per cent of them have never worked in the public sector before and they are now working in schools and delivering schools programmes, and we think that that is a real success. So the way that we have brought more people into this and reached out is very significant. Secondly, and you will know this from your personal experience, in a lot of the places we set up shop there was no regularly funded organisation. There were probably museums or theatres up the road who felt they could have done it for you. In Slough there was nothing and CP arrived in Slough and became that and has brought into existence some cultural organisations which did not exist before and done a whole lot of things to develop the cultural infrastructure and the opportunities which now exist for people in Slough. That is much more typical of the places that we operate. Whether it is Margate in East Kent or Bolsover or the Forest of Dean or up in the Cumbrian Coast, and so on and so forth, these are places where there was nobody to deliver and we have gone and trained people to deliver. We have brought cultural organisations into existence in order to be able to do that and support that and for the Arts Council that was really important. I think it has changed the geographical reach of the Arts Council very dramatically. I think the National Council and the senior staff believe that but amongst the regularly funded organisations there will always be some who will say, "Give it to us," and it is not the only constituency that says, "Give us the money and we would have done it, you would not have needed all this"; you sometimes find that from local authorities saying, "You do not need Creative Partnerships, just give us the money and we would do it much more effectively." However, I do not think in reality it can be duplicated in quite that way. Q10 Fiona Mactaggart: You also said, Paul, that one of the things that creativity is about is encouraging young people to challenge and ask questions. I think that is true. How well do you think that fits with the National Curriculum? Do you think Creative Partnerships feels as though it goes with the grain or feels as though it goes against the grain? Mr Collard: There have been a number of reviews of the curriculum recently which have all been rolled out. If you go into those documents and look at their ambition they would describe young people like we see them, that is what they are trying to do. The question arises as to whether sufficient investment has been made in the professionals in the classroom who are actually having to do it to help them be able to manage young people in this way because it is clearly different from what they have had to achieve before. In the many submissions that you received as a Committee there is a very good one from Anne Bancroft --- sorry Anne Bamford --- Q11 Chairman: Anne Bancroft was the star of The Graduate! Mr Collard: It may have been her but I suspect not! Q12 Chairman: She is dead! Mr Collard: Anne Bamford has done a summary of all the research on arts interventions and education in the world and she contrasts the approaches of different countries, and in particular she talks about the Mongolian experience where they developed a series of really excellent national curricula but which have made no real difference to the curriculum because nobody was training the teachers how to do it. I am a big fan of the Mongolian education system but I am thinking that we need to go one better than them on this, to support the teachers to be able to do that. The CPD element is partly what we do and we are there to provide the support to the teachers to learn how to do that - and we do that - but there is another part where the education system now needs to support us in this, which is to put in place some form of evaluation of those behaviours which show that we recognise them as much as the other forms of evaluation that we have in place. The QCA have a very useful document which you will have all seen, it is the structure of the whole of education --- Q13 Chairman: This is a little naughty in the sense that our scribes cannot describe it so it will make no sense at all in the written record! Mr Collard: QCA, in describing the purposes of education, have three headlines which are that they want to end up with successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens. What we currently measure is successful learners insofar as they past tests, but we do not actually have people coming out with certificates in confidence and communication; we do not have certificates of responsible citizenship. I do not want to impose on the education system yet another Labyrinthine way of measuring that, but we have to come up with something which says that these outcomes which we have described in our National Curriculum are given as much value and as much importance as the ones that are subject specific. We do not do that currently. Often DCFS, as they are now, will say to us, "What evidence have you got you are achieving confident individuals and responsible citizens?" and our reply is, frankly, "What evidence have you got that you are doing it?" because you have said that is the point of education. Q14 Chairman: I am sorry I described your behaviour just now as "naughty". I was at a four-year-old's birthday party yesterday and that is the reason that escaped! Mr Collard: I am used to it! Q15 Fiona Mactaggart: Have Creative Partnerships developed tools for assessing those sorts of things? Mr Collard: I think we know it when we see it and headteachers know it. We have asked headteachers and they have said, "Yes, when you come in, we see it," and we said to Ofsted, "Well, Ofsted, did you see it?" and when Ofsted came in they said, "Yes, we saw that as well." However, people say it is very subjective, it was just the headteachers and maybe they would have said that anyway, and so on and so forth. We are saying no, they would not. I do not think that is true. What else do you want? Do you want confidence inspectors or are we willing to trust headteachers to tell us that this programme works? At the end of the day I do not believe there is any headteacher in the country who is going to lie about the programme. For what benefit? Either it works for their kids or it does not work for their kids. In the way schools describe themselves and in the way that the education system describes what success is in schools, we have to find ways of identifying what confident, strong communicators and successful citizens look like and recognise that. I do not think it is hard to do. We know it is there; we just sometimes do not trust the messengers. Q16 Chairman: Headteachers sometimes say nice things about things that bring extra resources into their schools. Mr Collard: They do. Q17 Chairman: How much does a school get if they are part of this deal? Mr Collard: A core school, which is the model that we have been operating up until now, would expect to get something like £20,000 to £25,000 a year coming into the school. £25,000 to £30,000 would be at the upper end and that would be in a secondary school and the average secondary school budget is £4.5 million. Are you going to lie about it in that particular context? And given the pressure you are under as a headteacher today to be delivering, have you got time to be distracted in a sense by something that you are really not convinced is making a difference to your school? No, you do not, you absolutely do not. Q18 Chairman: But you are delivering a programme through mostly secondary schools, are you not? Mr Collard: No, it is almost the same as the national model of about seven primaries to a secondary. Q19 Chairman: Do you poll the students to see what they think of it? Mr Collard: We have not yet actually; that is something we ought to do. There was an early piece of research which we were contemplating and it did raise a particular question. Most of the impact research would tend to ask the young person: "Are you different because this happened to you?" and the thing about young people is that they change, that is their state, they change dramatically, and for them to be able to identify an input on a 13-year-old: "Have you changed much in the last year?" "Yes, I've hit puberty." "Was it Creative Partnerships?" "I don't think so." It is quite hard for them to place this kind of change because they do not necessarily know any alternatives. One of the ways that you can get them to do it, which we encourage a lot, is getting students from CP schools to visit other schools and say, "Do you think this school is different?" and, "Are there things you like or dislike about it?" Chairman: You could get a reasonably articulate response from schools councils where the students are empowered and would have an opinion, but let us move on, David? 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 at 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". 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 per cent 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 schools and behaviours that we value and describe children in more affluent background 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 per cent 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 children 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. 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 goes 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 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 blogging, 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 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 said, 'And then we did a performance of", which I saw, actually, "'of Roald Dahl's Sleeping Beauty'", which was a joy, or Priory 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 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. Q60 Fiona Mactaggart: I am particularly interested in assessing the children rather than the programme. Mr Collard: Yes, absolutely. Q61 Fiona Mactaggart: Because that is what I think there is an absence of. If we could assess this change in the children then there would be less dispute about whether the programme made a difference and actually we would also be clearer what does make a difference. Mr Collard: Absolutely. Ms Efunshile: We need to find an appropriate way to undertake that assessment. I was struck by what you were saying about having confidence inspectors. It is, is it about asking the children, is it about talking to the headteachers, is it about correlations and being more creative in the way in which we would be able to judge whether confidence has increased in a child or whether creativity has increased in a child. I am nervous about anything which could be interpreted as saying we want something which is heavy and onerous and, in terms of an assessment, more further assessment of children. Q62 Fiona Mactaggart: A class teacher needs to assess these things and actually if someone develops the tools to help them to do that, that would be a good thing. Mr Collard: Absolutely. That is a very good point. At classroom level we have developed a whole set of tools, and I would be very happy to send you some of them. In particular the one which is gaining the most currency is called the creativity wheel. I will not explain the whole thing, but it is a tool for a teacher to use in class to assess the extent to which an individual child has progressed in these behaviours. We have done a lot of work like that. We would like teachers to be able to do that. It is the point of when it leaves the classroom and the view that the teacher has taken and the point at which it is then accepted that it is really happening, it is in that area that we have got to find out. In my view, I think headteachers on the whole are very honest about this stuff, they cannot afford not to be, and that is why actually getting headteachers to talk about it, to reflect it in their SEF and getting Ofsted to look at it solves it for me. The thing is we have done it, we have done the headteachers' survey, it is in the SEFs, it is not just the Ofsted report on us but you can read loads of Ofsted reports on CP schools which will talk about, "Yes, we went in and they said they did this". It is all out there. If you say that is happening and it is out there it needs to be headlined in the way schools promote themselves and reflected and it needs to be owned by the whole system which says, "Actually, this is as important as numeracy and literacy", because that is what the world outside is saying to us about our young people. Q63 Chairman: Perhaps you should link in with I CAN that I launched on National Poetry Day last Thursday. The Prime Minister made this speech about the emphasis on every child a reader, every child a writer, and of course I CAN and others believe every child a speaker, an articulator. Mr Collard: Yes. Q64 Chairman: It fits in beautifully, does it not, this whole programme? Mr Collard: Yes, absolutely. Q65 Chairman: Listening to your answers, and I will come back to Althea in a moment, I can think of a list of organisations that could assess your organisations intelligently. It must be the old social scientist in me that believes this can be assessed, but not in a heavy or onerous way. Boston Consulting could it; the LSE could do it. I can think of a whole range of people who could assess your programme and make it a convincing analysis that would be independent and, I would have thought, have some influence on both of the departments that fund you. Mr Collard: Beneath the programme level of things there is a lot of other research going on. The LSE, in fact, is doing a big research exactly on this area but it is on a set of schools in East London that we are working in. The problem that we are finding is getting from a detailed understanding of what is happening in these places and scaling it up to, "And, therefore, this is what it means for the whole programme". Without that set of people having been in all 2,500 schools and witnessing it for themselves how can we collect that information. I would just like to mention, because it has not come up but it is a really key one, that we have just had a piece of research handed in to us on parents and the impact of CP on parents. I would very much like to send it to you because it has only just arrived. It does make the point that Creative Partnerships programmes are very, very influential in engaging parents in their young people's learning. They have been studying a number of schools and talking to parents about doing things like this. Children doing these programmes go home and talk about them and they do not talk about the other programmes in the same way. Chairman: I am aware that Fiona has to go and speak in the main debate that is coming on soon. Fiona, do you want a last couple of questions? Q66 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes. I remember a parent once saying to me, "I think this school is too creative". I have a sense that is part of your problem, that there is a sense that creativity is about fluffiness, it is not about rigour. I wonder what your response to that is, how you are trying to deal with that and whether you think that is part of your problem with the DCSF? Mr Collard: Ofsted talked about this. I think they felt that this was a rhetoric which came particularly from pushy middle-class parents who were very distraught that their children appeared to have been taken out of their intensive maths lesson for a session which they may possibly have enjoyed. We have just got to take on the rhetoric and explain to people why this is extremely important. It is not actually an issue with the parents in most of the areas in which we operate, it is in very ambitious parents wanting simply to count the number of A*s. I think Ofsted is saying that is not necessarily a very good count of what the capacity and the achievements of that young person are. It is an issue out there, yes. Ms Efunshile: Another answer to that surely is this is not about competing with the curriculum, it is not about competing with other subjects, it is not an alternative to attainment or an alternative to achievement, and that is the key answer. It is not about doing Creative Partnerships or doing science, it is about how you can get children to engage more and, therefore, learn better and be more powerful learners. The way in is to make sure that there are ways in which we can demonstrate that and demonstrate, in fact, the importance of creativity in its widest sense and Creative Partnerships, for example to the five outcomes. I have been at sessions like this before where we have talked about Every Child Matters and the five outcomes in the same sort of way: is it a distraction or not? I think our answer would be that, no, it is not a distraction, it needs to be looked at in terms of the synergy and the way in which it leads to the development of the whole child. Mr Collard: Just to finish off answering your question about the list of recommendations you could make. In the ones we have done, which are a systemic approach to measuring success in this area, which the education system owns, and more money, we are stressing the point that we have created a network that has the capacity to deliver a lot more programmes into schools than just the ones we are doing. If one is talking in the long-term about the cultural offer and the creativity offer then look at CP as being a mechanism for being able to do that. I also want to refer to the international importance of this work. You have had quite a lot of responses internationally to the fact that you are doing this. I would like to show you this because this is an area in which we in Britain are now world leaders. This is a book that we produced called Building Creative Partnerships: A Handbook for Schools. This is the Korean version of that book produced by the Korean Ministry for Education. Q67 Chairman: Which part of Korea? Mr Collard: South Korea, I am pleased to say. This is produced under licence from us and distributed to all schools in Korea as the model for doing this. Education systems all over the world are trying to do this and we are the best model for doing this, we have the most research, we have the most tools for being able to do this and I think Britain can really exploit that if it wants to. Q68 Chairman: You also said that if you had the resources you would like to move into the extended schools space. Mr Collard: I would, absolutely. Q69 Mr Carswell: I am sorry, I could not let something go. You criticised pushy middle-class parents. Mr Collard: I was not criticising them at all, all I was saying was there is a difficulty in getting the message across to some of them that there is more to being a successful young person. Q70 Mr Carswell: But who is to say what is best for their child? Mr Collard: They are clearly the best person to do that and I would not take that away for one minute, but Ofsted have just remarked that sometimes a school's desire to open up this opportunity for a lot of schoolchildren in their school who need it get challenged by some parents who come in and feel that it is a distraction. It may well be a distraction for their child, and it is certainly their right to express it, but it should not then be imposed on all the other children in the school. Q71 Mr Carswell: Does that not rather suggest that there should be greater parental choice as to their schools and what is taught in their schools? Mr Collard: There should always be parental choice, absolutely, I am not trying to take that away, it is just that the messages about what it is we can achieve we need to go out and sell to those people. Q72 Mr Chaytor: Just coming back to the question of evaluation, could I ask Althea what do you think are the implications for conventional league tables on this issue of the assessments of the value of the work of Creative Partnerships? Ms Efunshile: The traditional league tables are already enhanced by value-added tables, for example, where the Department for Children, Schools and Families is increasingly trying to have a broader base, if you like, a broader menu of ways in which you can see whether children have done well or not, or indeed whether the schools are doing well or not and the extent to which the pupils within those schools are progressing. It is probably within that area of value-added tables where one is looking at what are the different ways in which children have progressed, what were their starting points and what is the extent to which programmes like this have made a difference. Q73 Mr Chaytor: Is it realistic? The VA scores are pretty minute shades of statistical significance, are they not? Is it realistic that an evaluation of a Creative Partnerships programme could produce an increase of 0.2 points on the value-added scale and that would mean anything to parents? Do you not feel there is a case here for a broader presentation of information to parents about a school's achievement that may reflect the activity of Creative Partnerships? Ms Efunshile: That is not just about Creative Partnerships though, is it? Q74 Mr Chaytor: No, no. Ms Efunshile: That is about trying to get that information to parents about the type of teacher, the type of learning and type of experience that the child has and the sorts of ingredients that lead to success or otherwise in the school, so school self-assessments, the way that they report themselves to parents about what makes a difference. I would be surprised if we were not seeing much of that in schools' annual reports and so on to parents now. You can confirm that. It is perhaps not so much in the league table value-added but just that holistic picture of how a school is performing and what it values, what it thinks is important. Q75 Mr Chaytor: My next question is, is this something that the Arts Council as a body could and should be lobbying the DCSF over, ie a broader description of a school's achievements? Should this be a specific lobbying point for the Arts Council? Ms Efunshile: I think we would have to think about that. Paul might have a different point of view. It is about thinking through what is the role of the Arts Council as opposed to the role, for example, of the Department. It is something that we would be interested in but the extent to which it would be a top priority for us I think we would want to take away and think about. Q76 Mr Chaytor: The Arts Council for a number of years has expressed concern that the aesthetic side of the curriculum has been squeezed out because of the focus on numeracy, literacy and so on. Is it not logical that to strengthen the aesthetic side of the curriculum you should be looking at a broader description of how a school reports its achievements? Ms Efunshile: What I am saying is we would need to think about what are the different ways in which we would be able to make that sort of assessment or judgment as to the extent that the arts - we are talking about the arts, because you used the word "aesthetic", not creativity - is impacting on children and young people both in and out of school. For example, I am interested in the extent to which we could use the five outcomes and the sorts of different measures being used there as a way to hook in some of the work that is being promoted by the Arts Council and its various programmes. I am not saying we would not want to do that, it is just that we would need to think about how we are going to do it and what would be the sorts of measures that we would want to be lobbying towards. Q77 Mr Chaytor: A question to Paul in terms of the evaluations that have taken place. You referred to some work by the LSE. Mr Collard: Yes. Q78 Mr Chaytor: You referred to another piece of work that is in the course of being --- Mr Collard: On the impact on parents. Q79 Mr Chaytor: There has been an evaluation by Ofsted, there has been an evaluation by the NFER. Mr Collard: Yes. Q80 Mr Chaytor: And the programme has only been rolled-out since 2004, so in three years there have been four kinds of evaluation that have taken place. Do I take it that the Ofsted and the NFER are the two major ones? Mr Collard: I think the headteachers' survey in my view is really significant. Q81 Mr Chaytor: Okay. In each of the major evaluations which were the most telling criticisms of weaknesses in the programme, what were those weaknesses and how have you tried to set about arresting them? Mr Collard: The key ones were Ofsted because we asked Ofsted to tell us how to get things better on what we do. If you went through them, you have already mentioned the reasons for selection in particular schools of individual pupils were unclear and us being clearer before we start as to why we are working and what we are hoping to achieve with those particular schools and those particular young people. We have restructured the whole programme in such a way that that has to be identified much more clearly upfront before we sign up to engage in a programme at all. They talked about the fact that the children were not taking the behaviours and skills and applying them in other subject areas, so we would go in and work with the science department and that would be very effective and the science would get really good but they were not taking that into English and then applying it there. This is about how we communicate to teachers about how they communicate to the children to apply this across the different areas. It is easier to achieve in primary school where it is the same teacher who will then find ways to do it but it is harder to achieve in secondary school when you are trying to persuade the geography teacher to build on the learning that the science teacher has done, but we have to do that, and one of the structural weaknesses of secondary schools is they do not learn enough from each other about what children are capable of doing in other areas. We have got to get better at doing that. There was a long discussion with them about creativity and we have talked about the skills and behaviours, and everybody is confident we can identify the skills and behaviours and see whether the children have them, but it then became a question as to whether their science projects should be more creative as a result or should they just be better science. The Ofsted review said they should be more creative and we were saying we did not think that with a nine year-old's science project you were ending up with a more creative science project, you were just ending up with a better science project because of the process that you have gone through. There was quite a lot of discussion about that which we have not resolved about how we take that on board. I think those were most of them. We have a matrix, which I could let you have, of all the stuff that Ofsted said and all the stuff that we are doing about it because we really did find it a very useful and creative relationship that we had with them on this because they did challenge us and brought lots to the table that we did not know and properly understand and I think we are a much stronger programme because of that. Q82 Mr Chaytor: On the statistics, you quoted some figures earlier indicating a positive effect. Mr Collard: Yes. Q83 Mr Chaytor: We have had a piece of evidence from one school that claimed before Creative Partnerships their languages GCSE scores were 18 per cent and after Creative Partnerships they went up to 45 per cent and this year they are predicted to go to 60 per cent. I do not find it credible that you can translate something directly into increased GCSE scores like that. What did the NFER say overall about the impact on CP schools' GCSE scores? Do you think that is ever going to be a strong argument to support the work of Creative Partnerships, that you boost your GCSE scores by 2.3 percentage points? Mr Collard: There seems to be lots of anecdotal evidence which suggests that it is this but I have read --- Q84 Mr Chaytor: Has the NFER --- Mr Collard: Looking at the case of the NFER, NFER tracked 13,000 young people against about another 47,000 in the same schools who were not involved in the programmes and they said that those who were in the programmes outperformed those who were not by statistically significant margins at every single key stage, but they went on to say it was not educationally significant and we said, "What is educationally significant?" Q85 Mr Chaytor: What is the difference? Mr Collard: They said if it is educationally significant you have proved beyond reasonable doubt that there was a causal relationship. I do not think in any school we operate in we could ever prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was Creative Partnerships rather than anything else. The evidence is that there is never any one thing that makes a school as a whole perform better for its young people. The NFER then went on to say that the young people who had done Creative Partnerships' activities outperformed the national average at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 and met it at Key Stage 3, but this was in a context where none of them would have been expected to meet the national average at all because of where they came from and the expectations from their school, so that was significant. It was a significant statistical difference but, again, not educationally significant. In my view, we should not be in the game of trying to prove that there is a direct causal relationship as there may be with phonics, for instance, and learning to read. It is part of the mix of what makes a successful school. The evidence is that those schools we work with perform better but it is because they have managed all their resources effectively and used CP where appropriate, and in other places it will be other things that they need to do. It is part of the cocktail of a successful school, it is not the sole solution. Q86 Chairman: Some of your remarks, Paul and Althea, seem to be a bit on the back foot. You are obviously worried that you might lose your funding. It worries me that some of the ways you explain and defend - I do not say this in an offensive way - are inappropriate in the sense I would want you to be defending it much more on the overall value that this brings to a school, not just the measurable improvement in results. For goodness' sake, if that is the only measure of a school's performance we are in a very sad state. I would have thought what creativity brings to a school would be shown in many other ways, still measurable ways but not just in GCSE A-C. This is why I keep prodding you to get a good external assessment that is independent and clever and can measure it not by the A-C results. This is what worries me a bit. I feel you should get more on the front foot on this. Ms Efunshile: I am sorry it has come across as defensive. Q87 Chairman: A little bit. Ms Efunshile: I think some of that is about the answers to the specific questions. We would want to go back to the beginning, which is that we value the arts for the arts' sake, we value creativity in children and young people in terms of the sorts of behaviours which are exhibited by those children which can enhance their lives later on. It is that power of the arts and power of creativity that we are about rather than whether schools succeed or not, although we think that might be a happy by-product of some of the work that we are engaging in. That is more the emphasis. Are we worried about losing funding? This is an interesting week in terms of what is likely to be announced later on. If I were to take a guess at it I would be surprised if we were going to lose funding for Creative Partnerships as part of the settlement, but who knows what might happen. We would perhaps have a different view if your question was are we going to get increased funding for Creative Partnerships because that is a rather different question. I do not think we are very worried about the future. My view is that both departments involved in this, the Department for Children, Schools and Families and DCMS, actually recognise the value of this programme, they recognise the value of creativity and, indeed, will be wanting to look at how they can work strategically and with the Arts Council to look at what a cultural offer in the future might mean. I am rather hoping that is something we see in the future and we will want to see what the role of Creative Partnerships is in the context of that wider cultural offer to schools. I do not know that we are feeling defensive. This is a programme that is perhaps difficult to assess and measure in the way that some others might not be in terms of assessment programmes and so on. Sometimes one has to look at the assessments that you are talking about, pieces of research, but also to rely on what we are being told by children, by pupils, by teachers, headteachers and schools, and that can be of value in itself as well. The research that has been undertaken is quite powerful for a programme at this stage in its lifecycle. Q88 Chairman: I start from being positive about this whole programme and the one thing I would say about it is I would hope quite soon you would be spinning off some kind of model where the schools that were not in the first pilot or the second roll-out, the schools that have not got and will not get these extra resources, could have a model of what transforms the notion of creativity in the school that they can also buy into and could say, "This is a really interesting model, we could adapt this to our school, to our budget, to our circumstances", so you have got people franchising off something that really makes things happen creatively in a school that you do not have to do. You touched on this when you said, "I want to leave it by 2014 that there are certain schools everyone can go to". I thought that was a little bit old-fashioned in a way, I thought by that stage, and much before that, you should have a franchisable model putting it out and saying, "Why on earth are you not part of the Creative Schools Partnership which means you can be a member even though you are not getting the £25,000". Mr Collard: Absolutely. I think the whole point of our plans for the next few years is to be able to achieve that so that by having a light touch programme it means we can work with a lot more schools just to help them explore that, so we spend a few days with them in some cases being able to get them to understand. We are producing publications like this one and we have produced a whole series of these. This one is a general one on partnerships and we have done them on science, on maths, other things like that. We want to develop a much more effective website where a lot of that information is well-designed and effective so that any school that is interested can contact us and get something from us over that period so that by that time we have invested enough in those schools for it to start to self-combust, which is what we are looking for. Skills and creativity is only one strand of that. I think everything we are doing is aimed at being able to achieve that. If you come back to the question about the tone of defensiveness, I feel we have done a lot of research and we have certainly looked at a lot of research on other programmes, if you see what I mean, and most education programmes as evaluations and assessments are a mix of talking to the headteachers and staff who are involved, tracking a certain number of pupils and looking at the impact on them, getting Ofsted to come in and have a look, and so on and so forth, some really deep academic studies looking at particular things, and we have done all that, we have put that on the table to DCSF and said, "This is as good as most of the programmes you run". If I do sound defensive it is because I just do not know what to say any more which will have them engage in the programme more. We talked about money; money is an easy way to persuade me you are taking me seriously but it is not the only way and there could well be other ways in which DCSF could engage with the programme to indicate how seriously they are involved and how important it is. It comes back to this thing of do we want a new league table? I want some way of expressing that schools succeed in many different ways and have many objectives and these are given as much weight as anything else, and ultimately that has to come from DCSF in some way. Chairman: I think that is a good note on which to end. Paul and Althea, thank you very much, it has been lovely to see you both here and we have learnt a lot. Thank you.
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