Young people not in education, employment or training - Children, Schools and Families Committee Contents


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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