Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
100-121)
JOHN COPPS,
SHAKS GHOSH,
SONIA SODHA
AND DR
RICHARD WILLIAMS
27 JANUARY 2010
Q100 Paul Holmes: In her opening
comments, Sonia said quite a bit about young people—five-year-olds
and 11-year-olds—and how early this problem occurred. Shaks
gave the example of a Tower Hamlets primary school where there
was no horizon beyond high unemployment, and no aspirations. The
"engaging youth" inquiry noted that many young people
disengage astonishingly early in their learning careers. If we
look at 16 to 18-year-olds or 14-year-olds, are we shutting the
door after the horse has bolted? Should we be looking much earlier?
Sonia Sodha: That has really been
the thrust of our work, and the thrust of our arguments in relation
to the work that we have done on early intervention and prevention.
We have always argued that it is very important to think about
the 16-to-18 and 16-plus issues, which others have been talking
about, but we also need to think much earlier on. It is very difficult
to say whether there is one key point at which disengagement might
occur in a child, and that is because of the complexity of what
underlies disengagement. You will see, if you have had a chance
to look at our report, that there are a number of different factors
that might underpin disengagement at the child level in terms
of the child's environment—for example, family factors,
community factors, peer group factors, whether they are experiencing
bullying, and structural factors, such as experiences of poverty
and disadvantage. There is not a simple, neat answer to your question
that says, "This is the age that we should be looking at—the
age at which disengagement starts." There are some very interesting
statistics that I can point you towards. For example, Sir Mike
Tomlinson thinks that 10,000 children are lost to the education
system by the time they reach Key Stage 4 at age 14. We know that
8% of children leave primary school not being able to read properly.
I have banged on and on about that statistic. It is never too
early to start thinking about disengagement; that is the key thing.
If, for example, a child is experiencing a risk factor at age
5, or if they have experienced quite poor parenting—in some
areas it has been estimated that up to half of children are starting
school without the communication skills that they need if they
are to benefit from school—the teacher has an uphill battle.
I think the emphasis, in terms of the disengagement agenda, has
to be on a really big, joined-up, child-centred approach that
starts from zero, from birth onwards.
Q101 Chairman: But that is
what Sure Start and children's centres are all about. It is what
the foundation stage is all about. Government policies do recognise
that if a child's brain is unstimulated by the age of two, it
will hold that child back for the rest of their life. These are
policies that we have applauded in this Committee because they
are evidence-based.
Sonia Sodha: Absolutely, and I
think Sure Start has been great. There is evidence that it is
having an impact, but I do not think that we can be complacent
and say, "The box is ticked; Sure Start is done." The
evidence shows that the impact of Sure Start, while it has been
there, has actually been quite modest. We know there is a set
of very strongly evidence-based interventions that work in tackling
these issues early. We know there are programmes such as the nurse-family
partnership and Reading Recovery. Over the past few years, the
Government have really got behind some of these programmes and
put funding in, but we still know that they are not happening
enough at the local level. We are not seeing enough evidence-based
intervention. So the question is, how do we get services such
as Sure Start—Sure Start is a service, not a particular
intervention—doing things that we know are very evidence-based?
May I just make one more point in relation to what policy has
not done over the past decade—a question that Graham raised?
An important point to make is that we need to think about policy
in a joined-up way. A couple of areas of policy have been neglected
by the Government. In the main, education policy has served children
at the average or mean level fairly well in this country, but
those whom we really need to be concerned about are children affected
by the intractable, long tail of underachievement—those
at the bottom of the attainments spectrum. I know that the Committee
has already considered children identified as having special educational
needs, but our education system deals with poor behaviour in a
very punitive way. For example, 75% of children who are excluded
have been identified as having special educational needs, particularly
behavioural problems. There are key, systemic issues in our system,
such as the way in which we deal with special educational needs,
that have not been looking at properly over the past decade, and
we should not forget that when talking about 16 to 18-year-olds.
We need to think about those areas that have become a bit siloed,
and are not part of mainstream policy. When the Committee writes
the report, my plea is that you think about how that area joins
up with some of the other areas that you have looked at.
Chairman: Sonia, you are good, but you
are hard to control.
Q102 Paul Holmes: Richard
said something slightly contradictory earlier when he said that
too much emphasis has been placed on reforming the curriculum
to deliver outcomes. A couple of sentences later, he said that
there have been interesting experiments in making the curriculum
relevant at about 14 years. So it is all about curriculum reform,
is it?
Dr Williams: What I was trying
to get at, particularly with regard to diplomas, is that it seems
that the response to disengagement is to vocationalise the curriculum,
as if vocationalising the curriculum would, of itself, re-engage
and re-motivate young people. As someone who has been a teacher
with this particular group, my wider, personal reflection is that
that is probably true for a constituency of young people who,
in GCSE terms, are probably at the C or D boundary. That is intrinsically
true for young people who are deeply alienated from the whole
process of being at school. What came through in the "engaging
youth" inquiry is that, in a sense, we have collapsed re-engagement
with learning into a particular curriculum strategy. That does
not necessarily take full account of the school experience of
those young people. That has also led to an over-reliance on diplomas
as the vehicle for preparing young people for work, which goes
back to my point about the important distinction between work-related
general vocational education and work-based education. We have
lost a vision of work-based learning in favour of what is really
general vocational provision. That has never had a big appeal
to this group. Diplomas are the current iteration, or a version,
of that kind of provision, which has been around for a long time,
and which is not the answer. What is reflected in the report is
the need for a much more sophisticated view of how we start changing
the experience of school so that we re-engage young people; it
is not just about how we vocationalise bits of the curriculum.
Q103 Paul Holmes: Just one
more question. The compulsory participation age will now be raised
from 16 to 17, and then to 18. Will that solve the problem, or
will it just move it into a new category? We will have people
in compulsory training or education who really don't want to be
there.
Chairman: We will have Shaks to answer
first.
Shaks Ghosh: There is no substitute
for having an A1 education system. We have to keep with that.
We have to aspire to it. We have to keep going at it, because
it is preventive. I have explained about our portfolio; some of
the organisations that we support do very early intervention,
while some do the post-16 stuff. What is exciting about working
with post-16 young people is that we target in a way that we cannot
in schools. In schools, the intention is to raise the general
standard, but with 16-year-olds we can start to be much more personalised
in the packages of support and care given to young people. That
takes me on to my point about increasing the age of participation.
I think that could be a real opportunity to keep young people
engaged, but there could not have been a worse time for it to
happen, just as we are going into public expenditure cuts. That
is going to be the tragedy of it.
Q104 Chairman: The last group
of witnesses told us that it would save us money if we could solve
the NEETs problem.
Shaks Ghosh: We can't keep our
young people in school up to the age of 16. If we are really serious
about keeping them—
Chairman: The policy isn't to keep children
in school longer; it's about participation, linked with work with
training, FE and HE. It's not just raising the school leaving
age.
Shaks Ghosh: To create the imaginative
offers that we need to keep those young people engaged, to get
them engaged—
Q105 Chairman: It is for people
like you, sitting in front of this Committee, to come up with
those ideas, surely.
Shaks Ghosh: To come up with the
ideas, with some of the money—
Chairman: The ideas on how you fill this
new participation opportunity with the right kinds of programme.
I have called on the Government to have a commission on this.
We have a standing commission, if you like, in the expertise we've
got in this country in this area, but I haven't seen bold and
imaginative programmes coming out to fill that opportunity at
17 and 18. Do you agree?
Shaks Ghosh: Let me talk about
City Year and national service, for example. If that could count
as what you did in those years, it would be a fantastic opportunity
to continue learning, to serve in your community—maybe to
serve some of the kids coming through—and to create a different
kind of imagery around young people that is inspiring and aspirational.
It would also help young people to connect to some of the skills
that they need for the world of work, including getting up in
the morning, making a commitment, taking responsibility, going
somewhere and being part of a team. All of these things could
be learned. But these programmes don't come cheap.
Chairman: Shaks, you know I like everything
you're saying, but I'm going to have to put you on hold, because
Graham will be upset if he doesn't get to ask some questions.
Q106 Paul Holmes: Could I
just ask one more question, arising out of something Shaks said.
She said we must have an A1 education system. Is an A1 education
system one that drills children through SATS and through large
numbers of external exams, such as 8, 10, 12 GCSEs and so on?
Or is it like the Chairman's and David Cameron's favourite education
system in Finland, where everybody attends the local comprehensive,
there is mixed-ability teaching, almost no external exams and
a huge emphasis on learning the soft skills that Sonia was saying
are crucial to solving the problem of NEETs? What is an A1 education
system?
Chairman: This is going to have to be
brief.
Shaks Ghosh: We have to turn out
young people from our school system who are rounded, creative,
prepared to learn more and to continue their learning through
their early years at work.
Q107 Chairman: Shaks, I must
come back on this because Paul knows of my disdain for comparing
this country with Finland or any other Nordic or small country.
I have recently, with other Select Committee Chairs, met leading
people from the OECD. The truth is that if you strip away the
Nordics and New Zealand and compare us with other large mature
industrial countries, they all have the same problem and some
have it worse. According to the OECD, France is worse and Germany
is on a par with us. They all have what we call the NEETs problem.
Something is going on that is deeper and more challenging. We
are looking at our navel in the UK, but actually this is a big,
mature industrial societies' problem, isn't it? No one who has
given evidence to our Committee has given that dimension yet.
Shaks Ghosh: May I just throw
one statistic at you which bears out your point about the big
industrial nations and the OECD. In preparing for this Committee,
I looked at the United States, which has this phenomenon. They
don't call them NEETs, they call them drop-outs, which is much
more direct. They have a mind-blowing statistic which is that
51% of their drop-outs come from drop-out factories, which are
13% of the schools. So 2,000 schools in the United States produce
51% of the drop-outs. We have not addressed the issue of geography,
but if, with limited resources, you are trying to attack a problem,
it is probably really important just to have a look at that data.
I understand the Department for Children, Schools and Families
has a lot of data that comes from the Connexions service. Are
there hot spots, is it particular schools, like the drop-out factories
in America, that are churning out these NEETs? That might give
us some of the answers.
Chairman: That is very interesting.
Q108 Mr Stuart: I am about
to come on to apprenticeships, but I should like to push you,
Richard, on the more sophisticated policy response within schools.
You said that having more vocational offers was not in itself
the answer and that we need to look at the whole experience. Could
you explain what you mean by that and how in policy terms we would
effect that?
Dr Williams: Where I do not agree
with Shaks is that I think the whole issue of providing personalised
support in school should not be any greater a challenge than providing
it post-16 out of school. Certainly, of the young people we meet,
a lot of the factors that result in their disengagement from school
are things like bullying, a continuous and reinforced sense of
being a failure, having particularly dysfunctional relationships
with particular teachers and, I guess, just lacking some of the
coping skills needed to be in what feels like a large, quite authoritarian
institution. If you go back through the transcripts of our workshops,
there are many examples of young people saying that they were
essentially bored. That is not an original thing to say. I guess
that what those of us who were involved with this inquiry started
to explore was whether some of the pressure to achieve at 16,
say, should be lifted and, in relation to some young people, schools
should be much freer to innovate and to build relationships with,
for example, the voluntary sector from the point of view of providing
the personal support that may be needed to keep those young people
engaged. This is a completely bizarre example but it is quite
telling. On Monday I chaired a conference in Manchester on NEET
and the people from the Gateshead 14 to 19 consortium were there.
They are currently running an authority-wide initiative called
"Spark" and at Key Stage 4, for example, they are exploring
teaching Shakespeare through kickboxing, multi-media and scriptwriting.
For example, in north Somerset we have a centre for excluded pupils,
teaching science in partnership with a forest school. It is, in
a way, trying to find innovative means of delivering the mainstream
curriculum, rather than giving up on young people and letting
them drift off, or simply diverting them to a diploma.
Q109 Mr Stuart: That was an
interesting and sophisticated answer. I am making it less sophisticated
so I will remember it. What you seem to be talking about was better
schools with better teachers. Even within all the strictures of
government, the best people transcend all that and manage to be
innovative—
Chairman: Hang on, Richard. I have to
bring some of the others in. Something Sonia said about tackling
those children was important and Shaks talked about the immobility
of children, never getting off their estate, never seeing the
opportunities outside a very narrow horizon. Could somebody else
come back to Graham on that question? I'll bring you back in in
a minute, Richard.
Sonia Sodha: One of the important
things, when we are thinking about the nature of curriculum, which
isn't a written document but is what children actively learn,
is that all children should have an entitlement to some of the
broader forms of learning that Richard has been talking about.
That is the only way that you can ensure that all children have
access to a learning style that might suit them. We know that
learning experientially—by doing, for example—and
in different environments outside the classroom—Ofsted has
done a lot of work on that—is very important. Chairman,
you're nodding your head.
Chairman: I am shaking my head because
it was this Committee that did the original report on the value
of out-of-school learning. Ofsted came in our trail.
Sonia Sodha: My apologies for
not realising that. You are obviously very well versed on the
matter.
Chairman: It seems that it's teaching
unions who have put the kibosh on out-of-school learning now.
Mr Stuart: As on so much else.
Chairman: Yes—sorry, I didn't say
"yes" to that.
Sonia Sodha: That is a problem.
One of the things that we have always argued at Demos is that
all young people have an entitlement to learn in different ways
through different forms of learning. The emphasis needs to be
on ensuring that schools have the support they need to get in
flexible forms of provision. The important thing to say is that
in the 21st century, it is not just schools that are our hot houses
of curriculum and learning. We need to think about how we buy
in organisations in the community as well. There are some examples
of excellent initiatives, for example one run by the Helen Hamlyn
Foundation, which was set up to encourage local organisations
in the community—local chefs and agriculturalists, for example—to
work with children in schools on different forms of learning.
That has been very successful in the schools in which they operate.
Q110 Mr Stuart: Sonia, you
talked about drop-out factories—
Chairman: It was Shaks.
Mr Stuart: Picking up on what Richard
was saying, I wonder whether it's something that policy makers
can drive other than by trying to raise standards of teaching
in schools. If we have a poor institution, poorly led and with
too many poor practitioners in it, it doesn't matter what brilliant
curricula come up or what brilliant best practice we bring, the
truth is that it is not going to work. To what extent is the problem
that we have too many drop-out factories rather than thinking,
"If only we had offered a bit more best practice and given
a little flexibility on the curriculum, we would suddenly have
a flowering?" How much of it is a lack of tools, and how
much of it is a lack of people who can pick up the tools, whatever
you give them?
Chairman: Richard, briefly. Then I will
come back to Sonia.
Dr Williams: Rhetorically, how
much of it is a function of the performance management regime
within which schools work? That, in a sense, is a disincentive
to experimentation. I am not legs-crossed-schooled by any means,
but my overwhelming impression of the many young people whom I
have talked to in the time that I have been at Rathbone is that
there is a commonly shared experience that is close to humiliation,
simply by being in school. A woman, whom I was talking to in the
centre of Wigan, said that when she came to Rathbone, it was the
first time that she felt she was being noticed. We often lose
sight of the sophisticated discussion of the basic hygiene issues
that surround a young person's experience of being in school.
What I am really pointing to is a need, in some way, to think
about that.
Q111 Mr Stuart: May I just
push you further. I am trying to understand to what extent this
is a general issue for which a general policy response is needed,
and how much of it is particular. In other words, is the same
group of people, with exactly the same experience and lack of
support at home, in the right institutions, doing fine and not
becoming NEET, notwithstanding labour market barriers? If they
go to the right school, have the right teacher from reception
onwards and are lucky, does one person do fine and not end up
NEET, whereas another person with exactly the same characteristics
does? I am trying to differentiate between the general situation
and the specifics of particular institutions and pathways that
lead people. We then make it their fault when in fact it isn't—it
is not their condition, but aspects of the system.
Dr Williams: Clearly, there will
be individual differences. All that I am observing is that Rathbone
works across the UK—as I said at the beginning, with 17,000
young people—and I think you can generalise that experience.
There is a cohort of young people in the school system, almost
irrespective of where they are geographically, who have profoundly
unpleasant experiences of simply being in school. That is a fundamental
feature of drop-out and disengagement.
Q112 Mr Stuart: Is it all schools,
or is it drop-out in particular schools?
Dr Williams: I am generalising,
because Rathbone has centres all over the country. You could go
to any Rathbone centre and you would encounter young people who
have had that experience.
Chairman: There will always be a percentage
of children who hate school.
Dr Williams: It is not so much
about hating school.
Chairman: I know people from our so-called
finest public schools who say that they had nothing but a ghastly
experience at school.
Mr Stuart: Thirty-one terms and I only
enjoyed the last.
Dr Williams: But Chair, it doesn't
make it a less real experience and it doesn't have less influence.
Q113 Chairman: That is true,
but what this Committee is looking to you for, Richard, are solutions.
We know that the problem is out there. People think that Ministers
and politicians know about this stuff, but they only know it and
can only find solutions because of good evidence, good research
and because they are being well informed. Are Rathbone, Demos
and other organisations coming up with the answers? If there is
a group of people in every school who are not getting the appropriate
stimulation, what are we doing about it in terms of targeting
programmes? Sonia, you are not going to go through your list again,
are you?
Sonia Sodha: No, I am not going
to go through the list. I am going to come back to the issue that
Graham raised about whether it is about the teachers or the system
as a whole. Obviously, teaching quality is massively important.
We know that. We also know that Government policy cannot ensure
that particular things are happening in every school across the
land. That is down to the quality of professionals on the front
line. I think the other important question to ask is: to what
extent is policy hindering those professionals in doing what is
right for their children? If you look at the structure of the
schools system at the moment, the structure of the accountability
framework and the way in which things such as special educational
needs and behaviour work, what do you do if you are a teacher
at a school where a child is behaving very poorly? Too often,
the answer is that you go down the punitive exclusion route, because
as a school you do not have the proper support structures in place
to deal with the root issues that are causing problems for that
child. I know that you shun looking at Finland as an example,
Barry, but I am going to point to it.
Mr Stuart: Well done, Sonia.
Sonia Sodha: One thing that Finland
does well is that it has excellent multi-agency support for its
schools. Yes, you could say that issues crop up less often there
because of the nature of the population, and because there is
less inequality there, so perhaps it takes less resource for them
to deal with the issues. But when you look at what schools there
do when a child has a behavioural issue, you see that they have
a multi-agency team that comes around to discuss the case of the
child and the kind of support that they need, and makes sure that
they get it. That is the exception in this country rather than
the rule.
Q114 Chairman: But Sonia,
I thought that was exactly what Sure Start children's centres
did for pre-school, and what the Government were trying to develop
through extended school. That isn't happening fast enough, presumably,
but there are elements of the provision that you mention, aren't
there?
Sonia Sodha: There are definitely
some elements, but I don't think we've cracked the nut just yet.
We have had initiatives; for example, there have been behaviour
and education support teams in schools, which, again, are multi-agency
teams, but a lot of the funding to deal with these things is quite
short-term and unsustainable. For example, in "Excellence
in Cities", you had great initiatives, such as learning support
mentors and learning support units. We know that they worked,
and we know that behaviour and education support teams in schools
work, but the problem was that the money was all siloed and short
term, and given to schools for two or three years. When that funding
stream comes to an end, schools are supposed to fund those initiatives
from their own budget. If we want schools to do the preventive
work and the evidence-based stuff with children who are right
at the bottom of the attainment spectrum, we need to give schools
much more flexibility and freedom over their funding—again,
there are some systemic issues here—but we also need to
hold them accountable for what is happening at the bottom. We
need to give them more support in doing what works, and we need
to build up the evidence base about what works with children with
severe behavioural problems. For example, the National Academy
for Parenting Practitioners is responsible for saying which programmes
work and which ones do not. It has only five programmes—parenting
programmes—on its database that attract the highest level
of evidence-based standards. That is because we do not know very
much; we do not know as much about interventions that work with
children as we know, for example, about medical interventions.
I don't think we can be complacent and say, "We've got Sure
Start and extended schools—box ticked." We need much
more strategic thinking about how we spread evidence-based, effective
practices in our schools, and in centres such as Sure Start.
Q115 Mr Stuart: Excellent.
The apprenticeship schemes I have seen in my local area in east
Yorkshire are very selective and highly competitive. What proportion
of young people who are currently NEET, or at risk of being NEET,
are actually in a position to take up a formal apprenticeship?
Chairman: John, you haven't been getting
a fair crack of the whip here.
John Copps: I think apprenticeships
are very competitive. I have spoken to employers who take on apprentices,
and often they are not very patient. If a young person regularly
does not turn up on time, or if they are rude to the customer,
they will not last very long. For some of the young people we
are talking about, at the bottom end of the bracket, that does
not meet their needs. We need to think more in terms of gradations
of achievement. Sometimes, with the really hard-to-reach young
people, it is about getting them to shake someone's hand and look
them in the eye—to do the simple things. Then there are
basic skills—learning functional literacy and numeracy.
You need to be ready to get a job before you go in. To go back
to what Shaks said, if you go on a short, six-week course and
come out not ready, it just demotivates you even further.
Q116 Mr Stuart: My question
was what proportion of them, or how many, were not capable of
a formal apprenticeship. You keep saying that employers are not
very patient; well, they are not. If you do not turn up for work
on time then you are out. That is the world of work, that is business;
businesses are not going to change.
Shaks Ghosh: The whole national
apprenticeship service needs to bed in a little bit more. It is
wrong to criticise it at this stage; the systems are still being
set up and so on. One of the programmes that I am very excited
about, Mr Chairman, addresses your concern about where solutions
are coming from within the voluntary sector. One of the organisations
that we work with in Germany, Hamburger Hauptschulmodell, works
with business people in a very close way, bringing them into the
schools. That also speaks to your question about what we can do
to make schools better at doing the things that schools have to
do. At the school level, the relationship with the world of work
is something that we see a lot more in Germany than here. That
is because of the whole apprenticeship system. Hamburger Hauptschulmodell
targets the Hauptschulen, the schools where students tend to learn
vocational skills. There are problems with the Hauptschule system,
as any German would tell you, but the Hauptschulen bring in these
business people to work with their students, helping them to make
that transition into the world of apprenticeships. You see business
people walking around their schools.
Mr Stuart: I bet you they don't have
to be CRB checked.
Shaks Ghosh: They probably do;
I am sure the whole German system is as obsessed with that stuff
as we are. Those are technicalities. We can do it; there just
has to be the will to do it. One of the things that I certainly
found here was resistance from schools to having such relationships
with employers.
Q117 Mr Stuart: Was it more
from the schools than the employers?
Shaks Ghosh: Probably from both.
Going back to what I said right at the beginning, helping people
with their transition from one world to the next world means that
those two worlds have to create the seamless systems.
Chairman: With the Young Foundation,
Huddersfield will have the first studio school, where industry
will work in the school with the children.
Shaks Ghosh: Again, that is a
very exciting opportunity.
Chairman: It is one of only two pilots,
but there are 3,500 secondary schools.
Shaks Ghosh: You've got to start
somewhere.
Q118 Mr Timpson: May I take
us back to current Government policy to try to tackle the whole
NEETs issue, and in particular to the foundation learning pathways
as part of the 14-to-19 curriculum reform. Richard, in your written
response to our call for evidence, you raised a number of concerns
about that. Could you explain your concerns, and may I then ask
the other witnesses to give their view on Richard's opinion?
Dr Williams: Rathbone is currently
part of the national pilot for the transition from "Entry
to Employment" to the foundation learning tier. The essence
of the concerns that we are feeding into the development of the
pilot is that the full-time equivalent foundation learning programme
is built around five qualifications: three functional skills,
a vocational certificate at Level 1, and a personal and social
development certificate. The key challenge is that many of the
young people we work with aren't actually anywhere near ready
to pursue five qualification-bearing programmes. The funding for
their learning is linked to the qualification. If you have a young
person who is able to engage with one qualification, nominally
you would draw down a fifth of the funding, even though that young
person may have very chronic personal and social development support
needs. Moving from "Entry to Employment" to foundation
learning—to a much more qualification-bearing approach to
engaging with the learning needs of these sorts of young people—is
potentially very problematic, unless the funding and the learning
are decoupled. That is what we felt, and I know that the Young
People's Learning Agency is also aware of that issue. Again, it
is a classic perverse effect of wanting to enable more young people
to have credit in the form of qualifications on the one hand,
and creating structures that, in a sense, do not allow those who
are most in need to participate on the other. That is the risk
that we are drawing attention to in the evidence.
Q119 Mr Timpson: Just before
the others answer, you said earlier that some Government policy
development actually diminishes opportunity for people to learn,
qualify and get a job at the end of it. Is this an example of
that?
Dr Williams: I would say that
this is an example of a case where there is a higher risk of a
perverse effect. The objective of trying to enable more young
people to have more qualifications could actually mean that fewer
young people participate. The other side of this, of course, is
that those involved in making this provision then become performance
managed, in terms of achieving outcomes that link to five qualifications.
That in turn inclines them to be more selective. There is a history
of that through everything to do with apprenticeships. It has
been the same history and the same pattern. So it is a bit of
a problem, and there is a tension between how we fund a personalised
approach to learning, particularly at the end of the spectrum
where young people have the most complex needs, and performance
managing to increase numbers of qualifications outcomes. That
is the tension that we are pointing to.
Chairman: Shaks, what do you think of
the points that Richard made? Edward wants your response.
Shaks Ghosh: There is an issue
to do with qualifications that needs resolution, but I'm not sure
I entirely have the solution to this. A lot of employers will
look at qualifications and say, "They are meaningless to
us. What we need are young people with the basic skills for work:
people who can turn up on time, shake your hand, and give you
the eye contact that you need. We completely discount these qualifications."
Yet it seems to me—I think that some of this comes out of
the work that Rathbone has done as well—that young people
have to have some basic qualifications. It is very clear that
those who are sitting out of the world of work have fewer qualifications—they
just do. So something is going wrong in that discussion between
policy makers, Government and those bodies responsible for producing
the qualifications. We haven't got a qualifications system that
employers recognise as a real facility for getting young people
into the world of work, but I don't know what the answer is.
Chairman: A lot of people, such as City
and Guilds, are complaining that very good, specific qualifications
at an early level are being squeezed out because the Department
wants to rationalise and put a framework around qualifications.
A lot of employers know and trust a qualification that they have
worked with for years and use it as the way in which they induce
people to come into their industry.
Shaks Ghosh: I have spent many
years trying to understand the world of qualifications, and it
is a minefield.
Chairman: John.
John Copps: My reading of the
foundation learning tier is that it is designed to keep people
in school, and to ensure that they get a qualification at the
end. As we said before, now, if you do not get a qualification,
you are more disadvantaged than ever. There are two issues related
to the learning tier. One is: does it tackle the real problem?
Is the problem the curriculum, or is it the structure of being
in school and not being able to cope with that? The other is:
what do young people think of it? Do they hold the qualifications
they get from the foundation learning tier in the same esteem
as they do a normal GCSE? Those two points are really important
to whether or not it will succeed.
Sonia Sodha: I don't have anything
to add.
Q120 Chairman: You don't want to
respond—you agree with everything John and Richard said?
Sonia Sodha: Well, I guess I could
respond to something that John said about experiences of school
and whether it is the curriculum or the structure of schooling
that young people are not responding to. It might be interesting
to point to an international example in Canada, where they operate
a system of schools called outreach schools, or storefront schools.
I do not know whether this is something the Committee is familiar
with, but it is something I have pointed to in my research work.
I visited a couple of these schools on a research trip to Canada.
They are structured in a different way from mainstream schools.
Children who find it difficult to benefit from a very structured
system of schooling—a very structured school day—find
it a system based round a flexible learning pattern. There are
people working in the schools who have high levels of experience
of working with young people with specific behavioural issues,
for example, or with young people with additional learning needs.
The key is that the staff are of high quality and are genuinely
interested in working with those groups of young people. There
is also strong accountability for those schools. It is interesting
to note that some of them have graduation rates on a par with
mainstream Canadian high schools. It is an interesting example
of a case where alternative provision has done well, so I would
urge the Committee to look at some of that evidence, which I can
supply in writing, if you like.
Mr Timpson: Just one more question—
Chairman: If you want to get to Richard,
he has to leave soon, so you have to get in now.
Q121 Mr Timpson: I am thinking
about the need for ongoing engagement with learning throughout
the whole of a child's life, from nought to 18. We talk a lot
about the early years—nought to five; we talk a little more
than we used to about the seven to 11s; and we obviously now concentrate
on the 14-to-19 group, as it is termed for the curriculum reform.
There is, though, that 11 to 14 group, those that move on to secondary
education—which is a big leap for many—who often do
not have the basic skills in place to engage in learning at that
next level. Is there anything that you can recommend that the
Committee should be considering to tackle that specific age group
and ensure that it does not fall into the NEET category that we
discussed?
Chairman: Very quick from everyone on
this.
Dr Williams: One of the reasons
that we changed our target cohort to 11-plus rather than 14-plus
was to engage exactly this issue. There are now parts of the country—Bolton
is one—where we have a very positive relationship with the
schools at Key Stage 3, providing essentially additional support
to young people with the kind of characteristics you described.
That is very much support in addressing young people's personal,
social and basic skills needs, or helping young people to cope
better with being in school. So we get that partnership between
ourselves and schools. More than that, it is a great area for
development.
Sonia Sodha: I think that you
have highlighted a really important issue. The 11 to 14 age group
is often an age group that gets missed out. There is obviously
a lot of literature on the transition from primary to secondary
school and on how difficult some children find that transition.
However, that literature is sometimes focused too much on the
move from one school to another, rather than on the exact structure
of the school that the child is moving to and what that structure
looks like. We know that secondary schools are much bigger institutions
than primary schools. Children are moving from a system where
they have contact with a very limited number of teachers—maybe
two or three, and only one for most of their time in primary school—to
a system in which, between the ages of 11 and 14, they are often
taught by 13 teachers a week, in a revolving cycle of rooms, lessons
and timetables. It is a very different system for children to
get used to, particularly those who have not developed some of
the basic skills in primary school. So some children adjust very
well to secondary school; if you speak to teachers, you will find
that some children adjust less well. There are some very interesting
developments in this area. Some schools in the US and in England
are experimenting with different ways of organising 11 to 14 schooling.
For example, some of them are trying to ensure that 11 and 12-year-olds
come into contact with a smaller number of teachers who teach
a broader range of the curriculum. The evidence on the effectiveness
of those approaches is still yet to be determined, but I think
that they are very interesting case studies. So there is a very
important point here, which is about the structure of 11 to 14
schooling and the fact that it seems a bit paradoxical that when
you are very young you have one or two teachers who know you very
well and who teach you for most of the time; as you become older
and more specialised, for example when you are doing A-levels,
you again have that very close relationship or bond with your
teacher; but between 11 and 14 you are seeing a huge number of
teachers every week. I think that there are real questions to
be asked about how well any of those teachers can know you. So
that is a very interesting point.
Chairman: Does anyone else want to speak
on that point? Shaks?
Shaks Ghosh: Yes, a lot of our
charities talk about the young people that they work with, the
shock to the system that kids experience when they move to the
big school, how they just get lost at that stage and how a lot
of the input from primary school is this phenomenon called wash-out—how
much actually washes out at that moment when children move to
the big school. There are two practical examples. School-Home
Support is one of the voluntary organisations that we are supporting,
helping them to spread across the country. Where they identify
young people who will have that difficulty in making the transition
from primary to secondary school, they will ensure that that relationship
with the significant other—the School-Home Support worker—actually
moves from the primary school to the big school for a certain
amount of time. The other practical example that I was trying
to mention was about City Year, the national service organisation
that I have talked about already. We have been talking to primary
school head teachers about bringing City Year teams in. One of
the things that has been really interesting is that head teachers
of primary schools have said, "We are deluged with voluntary
organisations coming and selling their services to us, wanting
to work alongside us". However, at secondary school level
there isn't any of that. So there is something, and I don't know
what it is, about the voluntary sector preferring to work with
primary schools and less so with secondary schools. That is an
issue that could do with an organisation like ours looking at
it a little more and encouraging more of the social work-type
organisations, which travel in parallel with the schools in supporting
young people, to work with secondary schools.
Chairman: John?
John Copps: I think that the 11
to 14 age group is more of a neglected age group regarding this
issue. I'm a governor of a secondary school in Eltham in south-east
London. I do a lot of disciplinary committees there, and the young
people who come are always in years 9 and 10, but the teachers
know that there are problems before that. We've got limited resources
and, often, you can see that we are not able to do enough for
these young people. I think that there is no substitute for one-to-one
support. It's expensive, but there is no substitute, when you
spot a problem at that age, for support with a learning mentor
or some sort of outside agency that works with that young person,
such as the School-Home Support example that Shaks gave.
Sonia Sodha: I just wanted to
respond to what John said about the expense. We know that a lot
of these interventions are very expensive up front. For example,
we know that something such as Reading Recovery—intensive
one-to-one tuition with 6-year-olds who are falling behind—is
expensive. We know that the nurse-family partnership is expensive.
We know that School-Home Support, on a per-child basis, costs
money. However, when you look over the long term at how much can
be saved by avoiding some of the problems, such as young people
having experience of the youth justice system and being locked
up in young offender institutions, and avoiding the issues and
the costs to society, which we know are immense, associated with
young people being NEET, we can see that the savings over the
long term are really strong. There has been a lot of cost-benefit
analysis, in the US, of early-intervention programmes, which shows
that for some programmes, such as life skills training—a
programme that is delivered in school—every dollar spent
returns $25 to the state over the long term. It is a question
of finding the up-front investment now to save money later. Of
course, that is difficult because it doesn't accord with political
time horizons. It is very difficult in this fiscal climate to
find money for up-front investment but we need to do it. There
are a couple of really innovative examples where that has been
done that I would like to draw the Committee's attention to. One
is in Washington state, where the state legislature commissioned
a public policy institute in Washington state to undertake a cost-benefit
analysis of the returns from early intervention programmes. Washington
state decided to build fewer prisons now for 20 years' time as
a result of money that it is investing in early intervention work.
The second example is from Birmingham, here in England. Birmingham
local authority has invested a considerable sum of money into
the Brighter Futures commissioning programme, which looks specifically
at early intervention. I think that it is £50 million over
five years, I can get you the exact figures.[2]
It has struck a deal with the council that it will invest £50
million on the understanding that there is—I think—a
£150-million return over the long term. Washington state
and Birmingham are examples of very strong political leadership
working against some of the structural and political disincentives
to invest in these programmes that deliver very long-term gains.
Obviously, there is not a lot that we can do about the politics—maybe
scrap democracy, which no one would advocate. However, in terms
of the structural disincentives, there are some disincentives
at the local level, for example, we know that money is very siloed.
It goes to health at the local level and to education, which means,
too often, that one agency is reluctant to put up the up-front
investment that is going to save another agency money. There is
shared responsibility for outcomes across different agencies,
across schools, the police and PCTs, which means that too often,
no one is wiling to put their hands up and take responsibility
for a child's outcome. Again, I am banging the drum for structural
reform. There are some things that we could probably do at the
local level, in terms of the siloed nature of local budgets, which
would make it easier for some of this early intervention and prevention
work to happen.
Chairman: Thanks for that. I have to
pull stumps now because we've run out of time. We'd love to have
gone on for longer because we have learnt a lot. We've really
enjoyed the invigoration of discussion and debate, as well as
the answers to the questions. Would you stay in touch with the
Committee? We want to make this a really first-class report. You'll
go away and say, "Why didn't I say that? Why didn't they
ask me this? Why didn't they give me a chance to say some remarks
at the end?", because we ran out of time. Would you stay
with it? That's the way we write good reports. Thanks to the team
for hanging in there.
2 Note by witness: Birmingham City Council has
invested £41.75 million over 5 years in its early intervention
Brighter Futures programme on the expectation that this will return
£102 million of cashable benefits over 15 years. The wider
benefits-including those to the local authority, but also more
broadly, are estimated to be £600 million over 15 years. Back
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