Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520-539)
MICK WATERS,
TERESA BERGIN,
PROFESSOR DAVID
HARGREAVES AND
TIM OATES
17 NOVEMBER 2008
Q520 Chairman: Douglas, can we
ask the other two witnesses these questions? They also have wide
experience in this field. David, what is your view?
Professor Hargreaves: I have a
different view from Mick's. When I was chief executive of the
QCA, I thought that there was an absurd overlap between people
in the Department with curriculum expertise and those in the QCA.
Indeed, the Department often stole the curriculum people from
the QCA by offering them a better salary. It was absurd. It happened
because people began to want to deal with matters regarding the
curriculum internally within the Department and not via the QCA.
In my view, it led to a ridiculous overlap. I cannot speak for
where we are now; I am speaking historically. On the wider issue,
there is a lot of confusion about what constitutes an independent
review in the curriculum area. If you look at the remit letter
to Sir Jim Rose on the primary curriculum, it is two sides of
A4 long and is a bit like the remit that was given to the Gilbert
committee when I was on that. In other words, there are pages
telling you what you can and cannot do. That worries me, as there
is only one independent review of the primary curriculum going
on—that led by Professor Robin Alexander and funded by the
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. That is going on concurrently
and is truly independent. He is accountable to nobody, and there
are no restrictions. There are very severe restrictions on Jim
Rose, and we must be very careful about what we call an independent
review when there is a very heavy remit from Ministers. "Independent"
implies that someone can decide what is relevant to the issue
and what the terms of reference are. It is not left to Jim Rose,
good a man as he is, to decide what is relevant to his review
of the primary curriculum. My concern is that the remit is probably
too narrow for the current climate. It would have been fine in
the 1980s, but now it is unusually narrow. My last comment is
that, when the QCA was set up, the Secretary of State could demand
advice from it on any matter that he determined. However, within
the Act was a power for the QCA to give advice to the Secretary
of State, whether or not he wanted it. From time to time, while
there, I drew on that empowerment and gave advice, although it
was not always welcome. I hope that, under the new arrangements,
the QCA will be given the responsibility and power to give advice
whether called for or not. That is very helpful to the QCA and
gives it a degree independence, although less than you have, Chairman.
Your Committee is much more independent than the QCA has ever
been, but it is still very important to ensure that it keeps that
power.
Mr Carswell: Does anyone else want to
come in on that point?
Tim Oates: It is vital to consider
the balance of the activities that the QCA has taken forward in
the past. It has a series of responsibilities on childhood enshrined
in law, but over and above that are the specific activities set
in motion by the remit letters. While I was with the organisation,
I had concerns about the balance of allocation of expenditure
for its central functions under legislation, including keeping
the national curriculum under review, ensuring that the national
curriculum assessments are discharged effectively, compared to
matters relating to the large collection of development projects
put in place by the individual remit letters.
In my more recent experience, from my perspective
inside an assessment agency, I have noticed that the exchange
of remit letters associated with particular aspects of qualifications
often delve into very detailed technical matters of assessment.
For example, under stretch and challenge, remit letters contained
explicit proposals about how it could best be done in assessments.
After many months of wrangling, discussions and recourse to research
evidence, it turned out that the processes being proposed were
completely inappropriate. In other words, the detail driven through
the remit process was too detailed. The broad objectives should
be expressed clearly, but the detail of the technology of assessment
or delivery of the curriculum in the classrooms should be the
business of specialist agencies using evidence to drive the processes.
Q521 Mr Carswell: Professor Hargreaves,
I want to pick up on something that you said that made me think.
You talked about the role of a reformed QCA and about how one
person's independence is another person's lack of accountability—they
are two sides of the same coin. The Prime Minister has indicated
that he wants to ensure that the heads of various agencies can
sometimes have their appointments ratified by House of Commons
Select Committees, which would give them some authority and accountability
perhaps, as you suggest, to say and do things that the Executive
and civil servants might not want. Would you favour the new QCA
having a head that had gone through some sort of confirmation
hearing?
Professor Hargreaves: Indeed,
I would. However, I would want that backed up by legislation on
which this Committee could rely, so that the head of the QCA had
powers to give advice that is not necessarily called for. That
would be a good step forward.
Q522 Mr Carswell: So would you
welcome confirmation hearings and the ability to act upon them?
Professor Hargreaves: I think
that confirmation would be helpful.
Chairman: Douglas, we have confirmation
hearings already. Do you realise that?
Mr Carswell: Yes, but may I ask a simple
question?
Chairman: Yes, carry on.
Q523 Mr Carswell: Would you welcome
such a development, Mr Waters?
Mick Waters: It would be more
appropriate to ask the chair and chief executive of the QCA.
Q524 Mr Carswell: Mr Oates, given
your role within an assessment agency and looking forward to the
reform of the regulatory bodies, what would you like to see? Are
you happy with the role of regulators? Should anything be done
differently?
Tim Oates: The devil is in the
detail. The extent of the new agency's powers will reach into
the detail of the way in which public qualifications and related
assessments are actually discharged. I have talked already about
the importance, as we see it, of increased diversity in the forms
of qualifications, better to meet learner requirements and needs.
We are also very concerned to ensure that the process of determining
the mechanisms of assessment is not the subject of inappropriate
centralised regulation. The technology of assessment is very technical
and needs to be worked out in the design of individual qualifications.
If too much of that design resides at the centre, mistakes will
be made. We have seen mistakes in the wholesale movement towards
modularisation in certain areas of the qualifications arena, for
example, that stored up significant problems in the aggregation
of grades. Historical problems are associated with unilateral
decisions about certain forms of assessment and accreditation.
We are very concerned that too great an intervention in the technical
aspects of assessment will lead to similar problems in future.
Q525 Mr Carswell: Professor Hargreaves,
you spoke at length about the need to redesign schools, what shape
that they may take in future and the future role of the curriculum.
You talked eloquently about customisation, but of course, customisation
in industry was driven by competition and choice. There was no
QCA to design it and no line to what goes on to iPods. Will central
Government institutions be any more successful at planning education
in the future than they have been at planning heavy industry or
the economy? You may think that it is not central planning. You
may say that it is not top-down and that it is liberalisation
and less prescription; but, ultimately, if it is not a form of
central planning, why not just let go altogether?
Professor Hargreaves: Why not
let go altogether? That is a dramatic choice. The central Government
are not competent to specify in detail what form personalisation
or redesign should take in our schools any more than the Department
of Trade and Industry would have been competent to tell industry
how it should customise its services. That varies in the business
world from industry to industry and firm to firm. The role of
the Government should be to specify what customisation is about
and what the issues are, and leave it to local people to decide.
The truth is that personalisation has not actually grown particularly,
because of action taken by central Government. It has grown because
it was led from below. That is why it has flourished, and why
it has flourished in industry. Customisation saw major firms such
as IBM reach near-bankruptcy. Michael Dell became a multimillionaire
because he knew how to do what IBM could not do. The same is true
in the schools area. We shall see schools innovating now that
will set the new models for the future. They will not come out
of the Department, but from schools. When he left No. 10, Geoff
Mulgan said that he thought that the smarter Governments throughout
the world looked out to see what was happening in the business
world or in the education world and then bring into policy the
best of what they saw. He learned that from 10 years at No. 10.
It is a powerful message, but it does not mean letting go. It
means recognising that the best ideas are likely to come from
the front line, not from the back office. The back office has
a different role.
Q526 Chairman: Before we round
up the session, let me bring you, David, back to the heart of
the curriculum. The reason why we are lighter in membership in
Committee is that a Bill on education is going through on the
Floor of the House. Tell us what you think of the reforms? You
were deeply embedded in the QCA as almost no one has been. You
have a long history of understanding the QCA. Are the present
reforms absolutely necessary to sort out what the problem was
in the first place? If there was a problem, what was it?
Professor Hargreaves: In my view,
the reforms have not gone far enough. The national curriculum
is still specifying too much.
Q527 Chairman: By whom?
Professor Hargreaves: Through
the QCA and whatever Ministers decide. I see nowhere in the system
where the current reforms and the work of Mick Waters have not
been widely welcomed, but sufficient changes are taking place
in our schools to mean that more flexibility is needed. Of course,
alongside that would need to be much better monitoring of what
is going on and much better intelligence about what is occurring
in the system. The problem, which you must remember, Chairman,
is that a teacher under 40 has never taught in a school where
there was not a national curriculum.
Chairman: True.
Professor Hargreaves: So they
have never lived in a world where there was greater freedom.
Q528 Chairman: But when Douglas
suggested going back to that model, you looked horrified.
Professor Hargreaves: I would
be horrified if we said that anything goes, because you would
lose the concept of entitlement. I think that was fought for very
hard by both Conservatives and Labour people in the 1970s and
1980s. There was a consensus around that. I should be very sorry
if we lost that. The fact that we went too far in prescription
does not mean that we should go back to laissez-faire.
Q529 Chairman: You said prescription.
It was a politicisation of the curriculum, was it not? Most of
the stuff we have seen has been, under all parties, heavily politically
driven.
Professor Hargreaves: That may
be so, in which case I would say that any democratic society is
bound to politicise the curriculum to some degree. It seems to
be right in a democratic society that Parliament should have a
view about the content of what is taught in our schools.
Q530 Chairman: Should there be
the buffer of the QCA, which tries to set this independently?
Professor Hargreaves: If you did
not have the QCA, you would have to have parts of the Department
doing functions that are very similar to the QCA. I quite like
the notion of the QCA having a distance from the Department, but
it is a complex relationship. Any relationship between a non-departmental
public body and its host Department is a complex relationship.
Q531 Mr Carswell: Can I put it
to you that, if you have a QCA, you still politicise the question
of what is taught? You still politicise the question of what goes
in the national curriculum; it is just that there is zero accountability
and there is nothing that people who disagree with the leftist
assumptions that we found in that institution can do about it.
Further, you talk about liberalisation and a less top-down approach,
but is it not the case that innovation is allowed only if it is
a one-way embrace of the worst aspects of current educational
theory and thematic nonsense? The QCA and the people who run it
will never want to let go, because if they do, they are terrified
that they will see a reverse in education back to the rigorous
and fact-based, subject-based system that they have in other parts
of the world?
Professor Hargreaves: I do not
see the QCA as being out of touch and attempting to restrict what
goes on in schools. I think that that is much more likely to come
from the Department, to be honest. The mistake we have made in
recent years is that there has been a tendency for Ministers,
when something comes up, to think that we can impose new regulation
through the national curriculum. The original notion, as I recall,
was that it would be reviewed on a regular basis, every five years
or so. That happened for a couple of times. What has happened
is that that commitment to a regular review has disappeared and
Ministers can now chip in and change it if it is something to
do with obesity, or something or other. They chip in and say that
it should be in there. That is very confusing to schools. It is
very difficult for them to implement. In my view, it would be
much better if Ministers said that they would invite the QCA to
conduct a review on their behalf every five years. Then you would
build up a stock of what you think ought to be done and then do
it carefully from time to time. This constant changing of the
curriculum seems to me unhelpful, and probably it is politicisation
in the negative sense, as opposed to the positive sense that politicians
should have a say on what goes on in our schools.
Chairman: Teresa is looking very frustrated;
she has not got a word in here.
Teresa Bergin: Thank you, Chairman.
On a point of information, there will be one regulator only—Ofqual.
QCDA will be a development agency, and I wanted to put that on
the record. On the second point, around the way in which QCA works,
as you will know, in the context of the diploma and the new secondary
curriculum, there has been extensive consultation. In my own work,
something like 5,000 employers were involved in designing the
curriculum that underpins the diploma. So it is important that,
when you think and talk about the work of QCA, you recognise the
hundreds of thousands of people who have been involved in consultation.
The outcomes of that work clearly take due account not of any
particular agenda within the QCA, but of what is needed and wanted
by the system out there.
Q532 Chairman: Thank you. Tim,
Douglas did not get an answer. This has been a conspiracy stopping
us going back to standards-based, traditional ways of teaching
and learning. Come on: do you agree with that? We want to get
an answer from you because you are the—
Tim Oates: Of course. I think
we have touched on the issues that are embedded in your question.
We welcome the opportunity to bring structure and support to bottom-up
curriculum initiatives, which we have described as fundamental
to invigorating the education system. But we feel the current
criteria and approval processes are over-restrictive, precisely
in the area of allowing a range of specifications that adopt different
approaches, some of which embody linear qualifications that focus
on coherent bodies of subject knowledge, of the kind implicit
in your question. The qualifications catalogue—the curriculum
provision of the country—should have those as part of the
catalogue available to be selected by schools and by bodies of
students for whom they are suitable. We certainly feel that the
current criteria rule out certain forms of qualifications, because
of their restrictive nature, which should be within the national
catalogue and available to schools.
Q533 Chairman: Which ones are
ruled out?
Tim Oates: Linear qualifications
that allow conceptual development in the first year of two years
of study, which concentrate assessment in the second part of the
programme, have been very difficult to get through the national
criteria, which emphasise post-16 qualifications of a wholly unitised
and modularised nature.
Q534 Mrs Hodgson: Coming back
to where we were before, on personalisation, if we are to move
beyond personalisation and assessment for learning, what would
you as a panel recommend that we as a Committee should propose
as a way forward?
Chairman: That sounds like a tasty morsel
to finish on. Teresa?
Teresa Bergin: I was hoping you
would pick on Mick first.
Mick Waters: I think the way forward
is to encourage consistent and continuing debate about how the
curriculum should look, in a positive way, so that you build a
consensus about what is best for learning in our country, and
enable schools to take the lead from a national parameter into
their own community and design a curriculum that matters to their
children, so that the children relish the challenge and opportunity
that the curriculum offers them. One of the sadnesses for me is
that many youngsters across the country hear grown-ups grizzling
about different aspects of it. They must wonder why they need
to learn when the grown-ups cannot even agree on the importance
of certain parts of their well-being and needs. May I just come
back for a second on the descriptions of the QCA?
Chairman: Yes.
Mick Waters: I did not recognise
the descriptions. Just as earlier we were talking about the collective
nouns given to all children, all QCA people are not as described.
At the beginning I said that we have to deal with polarities,
and we have dealt with plenty of them today. We have to deal with
people in different camps who have a different view on different
things—territories where certain people want a bigger slice
of the pie, and sometimes tantrums. I think I will stop there.
Chairman: I think we can go further than
a tantrum.
Mr Carswell: Is the implication that
someone here has had a tantrum? I did not understand what was
meant.
Chairman: I think Mick was talking about
somebody in the QCA.
Q535 Mr Carswell: He did not like
the description of the QCA.
Mick Waters: I just feel that
to use some of the language you did in association with people
in the QCA is a little easy, given that you do not have to name
anybody.
Q536 Mr Carswell: But I think
it is a leftist organisation.
Mick Waters: It is an organisation.
Chairman: Let us draw stumps there.
Mr Carswell: Publicly accountable officials
should be publicly accountable. Is that not correct?
Chairman: I think Mick Waters has the
right to say he did not like your description of his colleagues
as leftist.
Q537 Mr Carswell: Is there is
something improper in my saying it?
Chairman: No one is saying that. He has
got every right to say he did not like it.
Mick Waters: I did not recognise
it.
Q538 Chairman: We leave it there.
David Hargreaves, what is the way forward?
Professor Hargreaves: What the
central bodies need is a much better system of gathering intelligence
about what is happening in our schools, which are busy at work
redesigning themselves for the future. To go alongside that, support
for the innovation is needed, but in a way that allows you to
be sure that what emerges is rigorously based and really good
practice. If the centre was to do both those things, we would
advance our education service very fast.
Q539 Chairman: Are we better off
now than we were 10 or 20 years ago?
Professor Hargreaves: We are much
better off, because two great things have been achieved in the
past 10 or 15 years. One is that schools have become more diverse.
I was one of those people who were glad to see the back of the
bog-standard comprehensive. Schools have to be diverse to meet
the needs of their local clients. That is a good thing. Alongside
that growing diversification, we have seen a much more rigorous
view of what constitutes standards, good work and children's achievement.
Teachers talk about teaching of learning and assessment in a much
richer way than they did 20 years ago, which is all to the benefit.
As long as we do not have a standard model and allow schools to
be highly responsive to where they are, but have a common rigour,
rather than common content, I think that that would allow our
system to grow.
Tim Oates: As a researcher also
involved in the development of qualifications, you would imagine
that I would say that as a nation we are not making enough use
of national and international research into these matters. We
indeed are not making enough use of it. I mentioned work on curriculum
coherence—learning from other national systems to examine
what sort of structures we should put in place to realise the
benefits of the kind of flexibilities that have been introduced
into the national curriculum. I share the concerns of members
of your Committee about there being inappropriate structuring
at the right points to enable us to readdress things such as inequality
of access to high-quality education. I believe we shall continue
to see the impact of social and economic background on attainment
unless we examine at what points or levels in the system we should
introduce what types of structure. My own view is that we should
look at assessment and qualifications as a principal structuring
element within the curriculum, and that we are not making enough
of the linkages between curriculum, qualifications and assessment,
and learning materials. My final point is that I share David's
concerns about the paucity of evidence driving innovation, inasmuch
as many of our pilots are of insufficient duration or scale. They
are not ethically based in terms of the protections given to those
participating in the trials. Frequently, there is not enough attention
paid to ensuring that the pilots operate in a context in which
we can genuinely examine their characteristics and generalise
from them. I would exemplify that by pointing to my earlier point:
that existing assessment arrangements have not been suspended
under powers to innovate, which means that many of the important
initiatives that have been trialled have not, as it were, been
trialled in fair circumstances, so that we could genuinely appraise
what their benefits were.
Chairman: Fantastic. Teresa, you are
looking discontented.
Teresa Bergin: No, not at all.
I wanted to make one more comment, about my wish for it all. I
accept Tim's point about varied forms of assessment, but young
people must understand the qualifications that they are getting.
They must have utility and you must give those young people progression.
Having a free market in which young people do not necessarily
have the buying power, but are fed a diet of qualifications, is
something that we need to be very careful of.
Chairman: That was a very good way to
end. You have been a fantastic group. It has got really interesting
just as we have to call a halt to it, but that is often the way
with this Committee. Colleagues, I am conscious that we have gone
later on this sitting than I can remember. You have been very
patient; thank you. Please keep in touch with the Committee, which
is going to start writing up soon, after the ministerial visit.
Please continue the dialogue; we want to make the report as good
as we can make it.
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