Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-122)
DEPARTMENT FOR
CHILDREN, SCHOOLS
AND FAMILIES
5 MARCH 2008
Q120 Mr Williams: You said that is
the case with the older ones. What about the younger ones? They
also might have to move. Looking at it in terms of winter evenings
and so on, how can we be sure that the younger ones are being
moved around in a way that will mean they will end up near home
at the end?
Mr Coles: Sorry. I was not clear.
This is for the younger ones so the ones who are still at compulsory
school age, the 14 to 16 year olds, would move once. They would
be taken somewhere at the beginning of the day. They would stay
there for the whole day and they would go home from there at the
end of the day. The transport problem for those young people is
just the same as it is to get them to their school and home again
rather than, as certainly did happen in the very early days of
this, people moving in the middle of the day which certainly had
the effect that you are describing of people missing lessons.
The solution to that has been for the timetabling to address that
issue as much as the transport.
Mr Bell: One of the features of
the programme so far is that where you have innovative solutions
to the work, there is a lot of sharing that around. People are
keen to find out so this is a model that others have developed
out of St Helen's recently. Exactly the same thing has happened.
Q121 Mr Williams: I wish you well
in what you are trying to achieve but my mind boggles at how you
are going to achieve it. It says here, "The Department does
not yet have a clear measure of the training and retraining needed
for practitioners." How is that going to be provided? Is
it going to be provided out of school time, in school holidays?
Are they expected to be retrained while doing the training? How
is the training and retraining of existing staff going to be achieved?
Mr Bell: There has been a very
substantial set of training arrangements in place. We have had
face to face training days. There have been additional training
days for secondary schools. There are people using web support.
There is online and—
Q122 Mr Williams: When you say "additional
training days", do you mean in their own time?
Mr Bell: No. That is an additional
one that has been allocated to the school to do. There is also
professional development training that teachers have been offered.
We have also been quite keen through this programme to set up
what I might describe as "twinning arrangements". You
rightly pointed out some of the logistical issues about students
moving from place to place. It is going to be really important
that the secondary school teacher understands how the FE teacher
works and understands the business perspective. We have done quite
a lot of training in different places to allow that to happen.
The various national bodies like National College and School Leadership
have been doing training for heads of departments, so there is
quite a wide suite of training that has gone on, particularly
in the last year.
Chairman: Thank you. That concludes our
hearing. By international standards, this country still has a
low proportion of 17 year olds in educational training so we all
wish you well in your monumental task, but I think you will accept
that we have identified in this hearing some considerable risks
about it and you will have to be relentless in meeting them. One
thing is absolutely certain. There is no point in the Department
just saying that these developments are as good as GCSEs and A
levels. They have to convince the employers and parents that they
are. Thank you very much.
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