Examination of Witnesses (Questions 146-159)
CARMEL GALLAGHER,
DAVID ROBB
AND COLIN
WILLMAN
11 JUNE 2008
Q146 Chairman: I welcome Carmel Gallagher,
Colin Willman and David Robb to our proceedings. I am sorry that
we are running a tiny bit late, but we will make up time. It is
a pleasure to have you here. We invited you because we wanted
to learn from your experience on curriculum matters. Carmel, Colin
and David, I hope that you do not mind if we use first names because
it is easier. Carmel, your reputation and innovative approach
to curriculum matters is well known. Would you like to take two
minutes to tell us a bit about your views?
Carmel Gallagher: Thank you for
inviting me. I would like to ask the members of the Committee
what they remember from school. How much of it do you think was
important, or was school more about shaping you as a person—your
motivations, disposition and your relationships with your friends
and teachers? Was it more about motivating you about what you
would achieve in your life and what you would do with your life?
Was it about making you lifelong learners—the sort of people
who hold an inquiry into education? Think about how we were educated
and then think of how, potentially, it is so much much easier
for kids to learn now. I have two sons and they spend their lives
on the Internet. They spend time on Facebook and Bebo and Google,
they use iTunes and download films. That is their world. One of
them did a very academic grammar school A-level course and the
other did a vocationally orientated, business IT-related course.
I have to say that the second one is the better learner because
he knows how to research and access information and how to manipulate,
interrogate and change it, solve problems with it, and make decisions
with it. What I am saying is that we are in an entirely different
world. The world of teachers conveying bodies of knowledge to
children is not entirely irrelevant, but it is now more about
teachers being there to guide children to become great learners.
My plea would be for relevance. We carried out a cohort study
in which we asked 3,000 kids over a seven year period what they
thought of the curriculum. We asked "the real customers"
ie young people themselves, what they wanted from the education
system. They said, "Well, it's good for passing exams and
going to university and higher education," but at Key Stage
3 they also said, "It's irrelevant to our lives as we live
now and irrelevant to our preparation for work." When they
got to A-level and looked back, they said, "Yes, in retrospect
we can see some connections, but our plea would be to make it
more relevant, enjoyable and active." Teachers come out of
school exhausted, when it is the children who should come out
of school exhausted because they are the ones who should be engaged
in the learning and making connections across subjects—if
teachers allow them to and if teachers are aware of the connections
that can be made across subjects. In Northern Ireland, we have,
to some extent thrown content up in the air and decided that we
should have more of a skills-based and values-based framework
for the curriculum. We should state clearly what skills we want
our young people to develop and what we want for young people
as individuals— ie to think, be emotionally balanced and
be able to handle their lives—and also as contributors to
society, including how they deal with issues such as multiculturalism,
with understanding the media, and with the big ethical issues
of the world. We have to prepare them to address these challenges.
During the research study they said, "Prepare us to be employable,
to be economically aware." They also care deeply about the
planet, and want to contribute to sustainable development. So,
basically we arrived at that set of aims. I have to tell you that
in my 20 years as a curriculum developer, the lobbyist telephone
caller generally did not ask, "What geography, languages
or science are you teaching?" Rather, they seemed to want
to know what we were doing about things like health, citizenship
and sustainable development. What we cleverly did was to decide
that we could not throw out subjects entirely—much as some
quite radical head teachers wanted to—as we knew all hell
would probably have broken loose from subject associations in
the world asking, "How can you get rid of subjects?"
We had also looked at what had happened to the New Basics project
in Queensland, Australia—I suggest that you look at that
amazing project, in which they attempted to throw knowledge all
up in the air and re-order it in different ways, but they found
that that was a step too far; the teachers could not quite deal
with it. So, what we have done is to keep the subject structure,
but to structure every subject under the same aim and the same
objectives,—the higher order objectives of developing young
people as individuals and contributors to society, the economy
and the environment—and under the same key elements or ideas,
for example citizenship, sustainability, employability and health.
And we have structured each subject in this same way on one page—which
is another breakthrough. Teachers are so busy; they are covering
either all of the primary curriculum or all of Key Stage 3, together
with GCSE and A-level, and they do not have time to wade through
documents. So we communicated on one page how every subject could
contribute to the same aims, objectives and big ideas. The challenge
now is whether teachers can embrace that. The big issue,—apart
from giving teachers these ideas for them to interpret professionally—is
that their main task is to help kids become great learners by
developing skills. We are challenging them not to teach about
skills, but to allow kids to inquire, manage information, solve
problems and make decisions for themselves. The challenge to teachers
is not to tell kids the answers, but enable them to find out the
answers for themselves and in that way develop as young thinkers
and decision-makers.
Chairman: Thank you.
Colin Willman: We approach this
in a slightly different way. We look at the product that is coming
out of schools. Most of our members think that that product is
getting worse. Our members expect employability skills to be the
ability to read, write, communicate, turn up on time and speak
civilly, but they are not seeing that, mainly because there is
too much concentration in the current system on getting people
to university. Getting 50% of people to university is wrong. You
cannot put a percentage on that. University should be something
that is open to all of us, at some time in our lives. The education
system should be preparing people for adult life, in whatever
way. We have argued for ages that we want two streams, one vocational
and one academic or focused on going to university, so children
would choose which way they wanted to go, instead of the system,
the Government or the teachers choosing. There would be no wrong
turns: there would be some basic skills there, some core subjects
that all take; they then would have the option of moving from
one stream to the other. Someone could start off by leaving school
without any qualifications but stay in the system, progress through,
and perhaps in old age go to university and study a subject that
they were really interested in. The current system does not allow
for that, and it makes the people who are disengaged from the
university idea—the potential employees of micro and small
business—not pick up the basic skills that are required
to get them to where society could do them justice, and where
they could do themselves justice.
David Robb: First, I will introduce
myself. I am a mechanical engineer and admissions tutor in the
Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College. I am also
Chairman of the Undergraduate Admissions Committee, so I am an
end user of a narrow band of school output at the high academic
end. You have already asked about quality, and I think that we
would like to focus on that later on. I hope that you all got
an e-mail copy of the graph I sent to you yesterday, because that
is the core to my starting point.[10]
Over the last 20 years, we have been looking at the A-level scores,
the number of people sitting A-levels and the number of A grades.
When I started doing this job just over 20 years ago, we were
looking at grade Bs as a standard entry requirement. Last year
we asked for three grade As and I was totally oversubscribed,
and if you look at the lower graph you can see why: more and more
people are getting grade As. The A-level assessment at the moment
is not providing the filter that we require. Probably some of
you are aware that last week our Rector made a statement about
the possible introduction of entrance tests. That may be something
that you want to pick up on later. From a specialist college point
of view, we are interested in maths and science, particularly
physics and maths, and we require students to be totally conversant
with those at a high level. One of the previous speakers was talking
about foundations, and if you are not absolutely convinced about
the basic foundations and the core material, errors get made.
I have just spent two days marking examination questions and about
15 students have forgotten what the area of a circle is. When
you try to calculate the pressure for a required force, things
can stop working because you have used the wrong equation. It
is not a question of whether the idea is right; the facts have
to be right. The important point is that we need students coming
into our universities who are really confident with their basic
mathematical and physical principles, to build on that. As was
referred to earlier, a lot of our first year is now spent bringing
students up to the level of knowledge that they would have had
automatically 20 years ago. To finish off on that point, because
I think it is quite important, about a third of our students are
international, from countries outside the EU. Looking at last
year's exam results, four out of the top five students at the
end of the first year were from Singapore. They come in, typically,
with double maths. When I did my engineering degree—a long
time ago now—we were required to have pure maths, applied
maths and physics. Now, less than 30% of our students are coming
in with double maths. Maths has dropped down in schools, perhaps
with the ability to teach it, which you might want to explore.
Students' confidence in using what they do know has dropped also
and I support what you said just now, that their ability to handle
data is actually less than it was 15 years ago.
Chairman: Thanks for those openers.
Q147 Fiona Mactaggart: I am not going
to start with the question that I originally wanted to start with,
which was aimed at you, Carmel, but I want to ask you something
that follows straight on from what David said about undergraduates
not remembering pr2. In your curriculum, how can you deal with
that issue? That is part of the struggle that we are looking at.
Carmel Gallagher: There are two
key issues that simply cannot be sidelined: literacy and numeracy.
I know that you have already conducted an early years inquiry,
so you know all about that. My view is that if you took all the
money for literacy strategies and poured it into provision for
young children, parenting, supporting parents in getting kids
ready for school, and then if we had a more play-based curriculum
until children are really ready to learn, that would go a long
way to solve the literacy issue. Interestingly, however, as you
might have read in The Observer on Sunday, the problem
really is to do with our orthography—that our language is
very difficult, particularly our spelling. The suggestion in a
recent article in The Observer, which I thought was brilliant,
was that we change our spelling system to a phonetic one. The
reason why the Finns are at the top of the tree in terms of literacy
is that it is so easy to learn Finnish, because it is spelt as
it is spoken. There is a big question. Could we dispense with
all of our age-old history of how our language has evolved and
do something radical, and let kids learn phonetically? They do
it in texting. It is all about making a shift from the old to
the new. How far are we prepared to go? I am with you absolutely
that we must have literacy and we must get it right from the very
beginning in the early years. We should do far more before the
age of seven to detect where the problems are and then throw our
energies and resources at those children, to try to get them reading
by the age of eight. In Northern Ireland we have changed our foundation
stage, like you have, but ours is a more radical change than yours.
We are recommending that children not be engaged in formal learning
to read until they show the disposition to speak well and to want
to read. We have more of a play-based emphasis now—read
to them, develop their oral language, develop their confidence,
develop their social skills. Our inquiry showed that the children
who were taught formal reading at the age of four and the children
who were taught formal reading from the age of six were in the
same place in terms of literacy proficiency at the age of eight.
There is absolutely no difference. So two years were wasted in
a sense by making young children do what some of them could do,
but many of them could not. I agree that numeracy is also a necessary
foundation. Look at how it is taught in the far east and in places
like Hungary and central and northern Europe: it is taught through
play. By the time children are six they have a vocabulary of mathematics
that is just astounding in terms of geometric shapes and everything
because they are dealing with it in play. We really need to look
radically at how we teach in the very early years. I was interested
when my colleague, David, was talking about the grasp of mathematics.
They did a study of how mathematics was taught in Japan, Germany
and America. It was almost like a sliding scale. The interesting
thing was that the Japanese system concentrates on the concept
for quite a bit of the class until the kids know and understand
it, and then they play with the concept. The students are then
very conversant and motivated by it, as opposed to the system
in America at the other end of the scale, which is about repetition,
repetition, repetition, but not really understanding the concept.
So, we have to have those two foundations, but apart from them,
I wonder how much other knowledge is absolutely necessary. It
is more about developing the inquiring mind, developing the enthusiastic
learner and finding where kids' interests are. Great teachers
or natural talent will do it. Science is a case in point. We now
teach science from primary school through Key Stage 3 and it is
compulsory through GCSE, but do we have any more kids doing science?
No, we have fewer. We have fewer young people studying science
at A-level and university because we have in a sense "beaten
it to death" by the time young people come to GCSE. Some
good science is taught in primary, but it was found that primary
teachers often did not really have the conceptual understanding
of science to teach it well, so kids were getting the wrong foundations.
Then we "beat it to death" at Key Stage 3 by the way
we examined it. The theory of science that my kids were learning
at Key Stage 3 was awful, so they did not do it at GCSE and A-level.
In our time, we started science when we went to secondary school.
At least some enthusiasm was then built up. The other striking
statistic is that 97% of people who use science in their careers
use it in different contexts from the pure science that we teach
at school. I think that was your point, Paul. We drag everyone
through the same body of knowledge so that the 3% can go off and
do their purist bit after A-level. We have to "get real"
and ask for much more relevant science which kids really enjoy
and which helps them to understand the world and how the economy
and society work. Then, using the "just in time" delivery
principle from supermarkets we can provide some in-depth enrichment
for people who want to go on to study pure maths, pure science
or whatever after GCSE at A-level.
Q148 Fiona Mactaggart: Let me try
to understand. The Northern Ireland system looks very interesting
in having a curriculum that can be expressed as briefly as it
is. That seems to be being introduced with quite a lot of attention,
discussion and reflection in schools. I should like you to comment
on that later. What is the most important bit of it? Is it developing
pupils' knowledge and understanding; is it the objectives; or
is it the skills? I am not absolutely clear whether it is the
objectives of developing children as individuals and contributors
to society and the economy, or the knowledge and understanding,
or the skills. There are different sides to this square and I
do not know which is top.
Carmel Gallagher: Yes, and I would
add that it is not just the knowledge and understanding, but the
attitudes, dispositions and values that go along with the knowledge.
The answer to your question is: skills in context—allow
skills to be developed in the most relevant contexts. You cannot
teach skills unless we are teaching them in a relevant context,
because they would not mean anything. So kids are learning to
manage information in the context of mathematics, science, history
and geography. They are learning to manage information in different
subjects in different ways. For example, in science, they are
doing fair tests; in history, they are looking at different types
of evidence and, in geography, they might gather primary evidence
and manipulate it. They are learning to manipulate information
differently to solve problems and make decisions. Skills are fundamental
and all teachers must know that they have a responsibility to
help develop them. Then, knowledge should be linked to big ideas
within the subjects and to issues that need to be solved throughout
the world, so that relevance is increased. Knowledge is also set
in a values context. For example, what do we want for society?
How do we make society better? How do we contribute to society?
How can we understand better? What does the economy need? What
does the Northern Ireland economy in particular need? As colleagues
have said, we need much more creative and innovative thinkers
who will create new business. Our economy is 60% public sector,
so we in particular need much more innovative and creative thinking
to help develop the economy. The answer, Fiona, is both, but I
would always say that it is the inquiry process that excites kids.
It is the relevance of context. They may not even know that they
are developing the skills; it is just part of their learning process
where teachers are not telling them the answers; but giving them
the problem and asking, "How do we solve it? Where will you
go for your information? How will you put it together? What are
the different points of view?"
Q149 Fiona Mactaggart: Reading the
report of the education and training inspectorate into the new
curriculum and how it is being implemented, it sounded as though
you are facing some of the things that we heard about in earlier
evidence: the safety zone is doing what we have always done, which
is banging out our subject. People think that that is how to pass
tests and that that is what parents want. How is the process of
changing the curriculum helping people move from the safety zone
to something that might end up with children who understand more?
Carmel Gallagher: We had a dichotomy
in the debates. Mainly grammar schools said that they wanted to
retain the subjects, the content and the knowledge and yet some
of our grammar schools are very innovative and bringing about
exciting change. Some schools are really going for it. It is a
bit like marketing; it is a 33:33:33 position. We will always
have 33% out there in front who are great leaders in their schools.
I heard you mention leadership earlier. School leaders who want
to excite staff and make their schools more effective are the
key. The next 33% will follow on eventually, when it is proven
that it is a good idea. Then we have the 33% who may always do
what they have always done. The whole business of effective schools
and the current debate about failing schools needs to be informed
by a better understanding of where schools are located and their
intake, and allowing them to create a local curriculum that really
excites the children.
Q150 Fiona Mactaggart: I do not expect
Colin or David to be experts on the Northern Ireland curriculum,
but I would like to know their reaction to what Carmel has said.
David Robb: The point about the
Japanese and getting people excited is important. The earlier
discussion was about whether teachers were actually confident
with their material. I suspect that the answer is that they are
not as good as they should be. Looking back on the change at the
other end, Combined Science rather than three separate sciences
at GCSE was supposedly introduced to try to increase people's
interest in going into science-type courses at post-16. If you
look at the data I gave you earlier, it has had no effect whatsoever
on that.[11]
Motivating people is much more important than teaching by rote.
I come back to the original point that they (both the teachers
and pupils) have also got to be fairly confident with the basic
facts--it is not an either/or. Motivation is what we look at in
students--what they have done or why they want to do engineering.
That is the core of the matter, and that is my reaction to the
question.
Colin Willman: I think it is wonderful.
I am thinking of relocating.
Q151 Fiona Mactaggart: Why?
Colin Willman: I do know a bit
about Northern Ireland. Its FE sector is producing children of
far better quality than we are seeing from the English sector.
The community there might be 60% public sector, but the other
40% is small and micro-businesses. There is a union—a community--already
working together. Here, when we talk about school leadership,
you have got teachers, pupils and parents. You miss out the community.
It is a bit like a three-legged square table; it misses out the
other part and does not involve the community, which includes
the employers, in taking forward what is needed in society. We
need to be more inclusive with leadership in this country to help
to decide what is there, and to look at appropriateness, as Carmel
was saying. We all have an ability to achieve a certain level
and we expect everybody to have the same format. But that is like
saying that everybody will have the same suit, when it is for
the average person and will not fit everybody.
Q152 Chairman: Sorry, Colin, to push
you on this, but I do not recognise that picture. As a Committee,
we take evidence all the time, visit schools and see enormous
diversity. There is increasing diversity in schools and the ways
in which people teach. I do not see the dull uniformity in the
English system that you seem to see.
Colin Willman: We see the dull
uniformity in the bottom section of it, which tends to be a large
part of the pool from which we draw employees. Most small and
micro-businesses do not recruit graduates. They do not usually
recruit people from further education colleges; they usually send
people to further education colleges. They see the people who
come out who are struggling and do not turn up to interviews—well,
they do not see them, but that is the group from which they try
to recruit. That is where the gloomy view comes from.
Q153 Paul Holmes: You have answered
what I was going to ask you. You started off by being pessimistic
about the children who are coming out of school to work for small
businesses. You said that the quality was getting worse and that
they could not talk to adults. I taught for 22 years and I do
not recognise that from the schools in which I have worked. I
talk to the friends of my 15-year-old daughter and I do not recognise
that as being the case in that age group in 2008. I think that
you have just answered the question. As you say, you are not mainly
recruiting those who have done well in school and will go on to
FE and higher education; you are recruiting from lower down the
pool. In 1980, 20% went to university; now 44% go. The sort of
people you might have got at 16 or 18 with A-levels are now going
to university. Do you agree that the system is not getting worse,
but that people are going on to a higher level and so you are
recruiting from the bottom end of the pool?
Colin Willman: In one way, yes.
In another way I disagree because out of that 44%, a lot of people
do not make it all the way through university. They pick up debt,
but they are bright, and alert. One option is often to come out
of that and try to start a business on their own, rather than
finding an employer and admitting that they have dropped out of
university. They already have debt around their neck like a millstone,
which they then have to cover. That makes it far more difficult
for them to pick up finance for a business or progress forward.
Things have improved, but I still have some questions about further
education colleges.
Q154 Paul Holmes: But that is a different
point to the one you mentioned. Initially, you said that those
coming out of schools are getting worse. Actually, I think you
mean that they are not getting worse, but that you are drawing
from the lower end of the pool.
Colin Willman: I said in my introduction
that it is the 50% who are not going to university who often get
disengaged. They are our potential employees.
Q155 Fiona Mactaggart: We heard,
Carmel, from the earlier witnesses--I think you were here while
they were speaking--a desire to have less central direction and
more local determination. In reading the inspectorate report on
the introduction to the curriculum process in Northern Ireland—the
process is going on between 2006 and 2010, so it is pretty extended—one
sees that there are a lot of discussions about how it is happening
in schools, about the requirement for leadership, about the need
for teachers' teams to reflect, and so on. If we are producing
a report on the National Curriculum in Britain, it seems to me
that one of the things we have not yet thought of is how to implement
change. What do you think are the most important things in implementing
change? I am asking about not just what the change is, but the
process of making change happen. Looking at that report, it seems
to me that that is critical.
Carmel Gallagher: Yes, absolutely.
Some of the things I value most are the overview reports, which
look at research from across the world and then distil the main
factors. The Confederation for British Teachers—I can get
the acronym right but I am not sure about the long name—did
a marvellous report on managing educational change and the factors
that have worked in the past.[12]
We used that as a guiding light for planning the roll-out of our
curriculum. It says that the issue is about school leadership
and, first of all, about shared vision within society.
Q156 Chairman: Carmel, may I halt you
for a moment? You are making a very important point about looking
at what other countries are achieving. But when David came back
to us, he mentioned students not from the developed world—what,
in old parlance, we used to call the west—and the research
shows us that the decision not to go into engineering, science
and the other hard subjects is not a UK phenomenon. It is also
seen in the United States, Canada, Germany and France. It is seen
right across a whole range of countries. Interestingly, David,
you did not point to your bright students coming from those countries;
you mentioned Singapore. It is not just an English or British
phenomenon, is it? Carmel, you must have picked this up. A range
of teaching styles in different societies is coming to the same
results.
David Robb: To follow on from
the point about Singapore, they use the overseas Cambridge exams,
which are in the same style as the A-level we had 20 years ago.
They have continued with very high-quality teachers teaching a
very high-quality course. Therefore, in terms of quality, Singapore
is where we were 20 years ago. As far as the United States is
concerned, there has been a massive drop in the number of students
at school wanting to go into science and engineering courses at
graduate level.
Chairman: And in Germany.
David Robb: In Germany as well.
There could be all sorts of reasons, but what is happening in
the United States is that a lot of people are going there to do
degrees—from China, in particular—because they are
being accepted there. They have the ability and interest to cope
with the things I was talking about earlier on. Students from
the UK are not going so much into those areas.
Carmel Gallagher: I do not know
whether I am exaggerating the issue about science, but we did
not use to teach it right through from 4-16 before, but we are
doing so now and it has not improved the situation. I think that
enthusiasm for the sciences is lost because of this tougher compulsion
in the curriculum.
Q157 Chairman: How does that compare
with all the research that shows that the earlier you start teaching
children languages, the better they do? It is about starting very
early on. Would you say they would get bored by languages, too,
by the time they get to a certain age?
Carmel Gallagher: With languages,
it is a brain issue. It is about that area of the brain being
most receptive from the age of three till the age of seven. In
fact, the very time when we start teaching—at 11—is
almost the switch-off time for that dedicated language area of
the brain.
Q158 Chairman: So languages are different
from science?
Carmel Gallagher: I think that
they are. I think that the way that science has been taught in
schools has turned a lot of young people off. In our neck of the
woods, a further issue is more that those who do sciences go into
elite professions such as medicine. We have a very professions-based
focus, and one of our problems is that we are not exciting bright
young people about the opportunities in business or giving them
opportunities for more vocational-style courses. There is this
dichotomy that grammar schools can do the elite courses and go
for the professions and the rest can go for business-related courses.
We want to make all young people aware of their potential to contribute
to the economy and to go into exciting business-related careers
such as engineering.
Q159 Mr Chaytor: May I first ask
David a question following on from the previous exchange about
the students from Singapore? I do not dispute that there are serious
problems in science teaching in our schools system, but is not
there another factor related to the globalisation of education?
Given that it is now much easier for students to be educated in
different countries, we are perhaps seeing a different intake
in the British system than we did 24 or 25 years ago. Imperial
college and other leading research universities will be able to
recruit the international elite on a scale that just did not apply
25 years ago.
David Robb: Absolutely.
10 See Ev 97 Back
11
Note by witness: Regarding Combined Science from 2000
to 2008: The total A level entries rose by 2.8%. Over the same
period, Biology numbers dropped by 0.4%, Chemistry by 1.4% and
Physics by 14.3%. Back
12
Note by witness: Large-Scale Education Reform: Life Cycles
and Implications for Sustainability, Lorna Earl, Nancy Watson
and Steven Katz, Confederation for British Teachers (CfBT) Education
Trust; See also School effectiveness and equity: making connections,
Pamela Sammons, CfBT Education Trust, www.cfbt.com Back
|
