Examination of Witnesses (Question 190-199)
ANNA FAZACKERLEY,
PROFESSOR JOHN
MACBEATH
AND ANASTASIA
DE WAAL
29 APRIL 2009
Q190 Chairman: Can I welcome Professor
John MacBeath, Anastasia de Waal—her name is hidden from
me but I know her well—and Anna Fazackerley, also well known
to the Committee in terms of her contribution in this area. We
are in this rather different environment, the Ramsay MacDonald
room. We were just commenting on the fact that it would make a
good school essay to compare Harold Wilson with Ramsay MacDonald—the
Harold Wilson room being the one that we normally sit in. We are
not asking you to answer that question. We usually get started
by saying that we are doing an inquiry into school accountability.
It is a part of the way that we are looking at the three major
reforms affecting the education and school sector, going back
20 years. You know that we have done testing and assessment and
the national curriculum, and now this is the third of them. We
want to make this a good inquiry. If we do not get good evidence
and we do not listen, we do not produce a good report. We want
your help, so let's get started. We will use first names because
it aids us with the problem of lords, knights and professors and
cuts it down. Is that all right—no titles? John, is everything
all right with accountability? Should we leave well alone and
write a report that says, "Fine. Touch a little here, touch
a little there, but basically everything is all right"?
Professor MacBeath:
You could theoretically write a report like that, but no. I will
not go as far as saying it is all wrong. One of the things that
I worry about is the terminology and the co-option of language
that we are now faced with. I do a lot of work with a lot of other
countries, and when we talk about accountability in an international
forum with, say, the Italians or the French, they do not understand,
or they do not have a word for that notion. Trying to explain
it actually gets quite difficult. You have to explain something
about the politics and history of what has happened in the UK.
I was going to say in England but I think that the same thing
is true in Scotland where I also do a lot of work. Some people
are quite mystified by the extent to which the situation is so
top-down in England, particularly, and the extent to which, as
the Dutch have said, there is a lack of reciprocity. That is where
I would put my emphasis on accountability. Of course, accountability
is something that we need and aspire to, and we want to do it
well, but there is a lack of reciprocity in the system between
schools and government, or between schools and local authorities.
I know we will come to things like school improvement partners
and so on. But do schools evaluate Ofsted? Do schools evaluate
government? Do schools evaluate the pressures that are on them,
which are very much top-down pressures. It is that pressure-down,
accountability-up that I think we have got wrong and needs to
be addressed.
Q191 Chairman: Thank you for
that, John. We shall probe that a little further later, especially
that reciprocity argument. Anastasia, is all well, or should there
be some changes?
Anastasia de Waal: There need
to be some drastic changes. Criticism of the two main forms of
accountability that we have at the moment—testing and the
inspectorate—tends to say, "Well, let's just do away
with both of them." I do not think that that is the solution
at all. Testing has a place and it can be effective—it can
be beneficial for teachers and for pupils, as well as a good accountability
mechanism. An inspectorate is vital, and I think that a good inspectorate,
which looks thoroughly at schools, provision and where there are
strengths and weaknesses, and which works on a progress route
as well as an identifying and judging route, is incredibly important.
I would say that, rather than getting rid of either, we need to
overhaul them, to the extent of probably renaming Ofsted and definitely
renaming SATs. It would need to be more than an exercise in rebranding.
The problem at the moment is not with either testing, inspection
or even the system of inspection per se, but with their role.
What is happening at the moment is that the role of accountability
is not working—it sounds a little trite, but I suppose we
should be thinking more along the lines of being accountable as
teachers and schools to children. What I have found is happening
with the accountability system at the moment is that teachers
and schools feel much more accountable to national targets and
government pressures. Because of the pressures sometimes to create
improvement when there has not necessarily been organic improvement,
accountability has had a distorting effect rather than a beneficial
one. That is the key problem at the moment: what is happening
with these accountability methods, rather than with the accountability
methods per se.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Anna Fazackerley: To take a slightly
different angle, although I agree with quite a lot of the points
that have already been made, if we bear it in mind that we might
well in this country be moving towards more of a market in education—certainly
that is something that Policy Exchange would advocate and has
advocated strongly—then accountability becomes more and
more important. While we believe in the importance of markets,
we think that a market in education cannot function properly without
some real accountability. The holy grail, which all countries
are or should be questing after when it comes to accountability,
is to achieve the difficult balance between allowing schools the
freedom to innovate and also having some proper oversight. In
this country, we do not think that we have it right. We would
not say that we have the accountability bit right, but we also
think that we are trying to control things too much from Whitehall.
Looking at Sweden as an interesting example—we are hearing
lots about the fact that we are supposed to be following the Swedish
model now—one thing that people are perhaps less aware of
is that, although Sweden has been very successful at introducing
a truly demand-led system, which is exciting and has lots of benefits
that we can learn from, the problem is that schools are simply
not sufficiently accountable. It is a problem that they are beginning
to be aware of. John mentioned the language issue, and Sweden
is one of the countries that does not have a word for accountability.
There are big gaps there, which I can talk to you about in a little
more detail, if you like. To pick up on Anastasia's final point,
I would agree that, yes, of course we have to be accountable to
children, but for us accountability is about information being
provided to parents. An accountability system that works is a
system that has the right information available easily to parents—information
that they understand. We think that a lot of the information that
is out there at the moment is pretty incomprehensible as well
as perhaps being misleading.
Chairman: Good. That gets us started.
Let us get into further questioning.
Q192 Annette Brooke: I want
to start with what Anna has just touched on. It is not a usual
starting point for me, looking at market forces and to what extent
accountability can come into the framework with market forces.
We often talk about people choosing between supermarkets or products
and, clearly, if a product fails then changes take place. To what
extent can we apply a market model? I ask you also to consider—given
that there will be limitations with market failure—what
sort of framework should we be building around a market model
to make it work that way?
Chairman: Do you want to start with Anna
or do you want all the panel to answer?
Annette Brooke: All the panel.
Chairman: Let us change the order. Anastasia,
you start please.
Anastasia de Waal: I am not a
big advocate of a market in schooling because I think parents
and children want a local school. One reason we have turned to
a market system or market ideas is that there are not enough good
schools. It is a lack. School choice in that sense is portrayed
in a positive way but if you need choice, it is probably—and
we are not talking about specialisms but basics in primary school—because
you need to look to find a satisfactory school. In that respect,
I am not going to try to sell a market system to you because I
am not an advocate. Civitas has produced a book, Swedish Lessons,
about how good a Swedish system would be, but I am not necessarily
an advocate of that. It is interesting that the Conservative government
have said, "We will turn to a market system."
Chairman: Conservative government?
Anastasia de Waal: Sorry, a prospective
Conservative government have said that they would want to implement
a Swedish-based or market-based system, which to me suggests that
they would not, as a government, be able to run schools. My bottom
line is, if government cannot run a state school system, then
it is going to be very difficult to run any other public services.
Looking at other countries and other examples, that is not a huge
task to ask. In some ways it is a cop-out.
Chairman: John?
Professor MacBeath: The notion
of a market system is highly problematic. We currently have something
in between a demand-led, kind of quasi-market system and that
is one of the problems—that we are trying to run a quasi-market.
We know from data over the past decade or more that the gap created
by informed parent choice—parents who have the background
and the wherewithal to make the choice—has not narrowed
at all. It is partly parental choice that allows a school not
far from here to be drained off by Westminster school, for example,
where there is huge demand and a very informed supply line. All
our work with schools in disadvantaged areas looks at how much
they suffer from a quasi-market system, partly due to parents
lacking information or the right kind of information to make the
right choice. We have a problem at the moment with a market system
that is working to the detriment of the most disadvantaged. In
some Utopian world we might have a demand-led system. That would
be very nice in theory, but how do we get there from where we
are now? I think we have to address what Jonathan Kozol called
"the savage inequalities" in the current system.
Anna Fazackerley: You are right
that there is not enough information, so considering the idea
of a market now is quite alarming. I hope that one of the things
we are going to do today is work through the sort of information
that we ought to be providing to parents to get them to a point
where they can make an informed choice about schools. At the moment,
obviously, schools are terrified of failing and that failure is
generally driven by league table performance and, as the Committee
knows well, there are real problems with national assessment tests
such as SATs. Those are areas we might want to touch on in a little
more detail. I will refer back to the Swedish system, because
I think it is useful to look at evidence rather than just talk
about the theory of markets and whether we like or dislike them.
One of the problems in Sweden at the moment is that, while there
is obviously an exciting variety of schools, the Government are
thinking about toughening up the inspection system and about introducing
more regular national assessment so that the inspectors have something
a bit more real to work with. But right now, if parents want to
find out more about schools and the quality of schools, pretty
much the only way that they can do that is by going to a recruitment
fair, which is obviously extremely unfair and means that if you
have a big marketing budget or sexy sounding courses that do not
actually have very much merit, you can attract business. So one
of the things that I would like to discuss in a little more detail
with the Committee is the idea of a record card, which is something
that Policy Exchange has suggested.
Chairman: We will come to that later.
Anna Fazackerley: Well, I hope
that that would provide a wealth of information for parents, and
that it would be the sort of information that would allow people
to make an informed choice, rather than simply being led by perhaps
misleading assessment data and league tables, which as we know
are compiled by newspapers that want to sell themselves.
Q193 Annette Brooke: I am
quite annoyed that I am getting stuck with the market side, but
never mind. If I could just follow on from that, Anna, you referred
to the information that parents would need; could you expand on
that? And John, you referred to the crucial issue, as far as I
am concerned, of inequalities. Would it ever be possible to empower
all parents, even with the information that Anna is going to suggest
they should have, to follow through with those choices?
Chairman: Anna has just had a bite, so
let's go to John and then back to the other point.
Professor MacBeath: This is a
big, big issue—can you provide the kind of information to
parents that helps them make an informed, rational choice about
the welfare of their children? This is a bit ironic, because the
day before yesterday I gave evidence to the Scottish Government
on a report we have just done for them. One of the things they
said was, "We would like you to take some of the very strong
language about what is happening in deprived and disadvantaged
neighbourhoods out of the report." One of the quotes from
a head teacher was, "These children crawl out of hell to
come to school in the morning, and a granny says to me, `Don't
listen to their mother; she's better off out of this life.'"
That is at the extreme end, and is the kind of thing that the
press will make hay with, but I should add that it is not a purely
Scottish thing either. Where we work with schools in very disadvantaged
areas, the big challenge is getting to parents in those fractured,
disadvantaged and alienated communities, which we have written
an awful lot about. That is the challenge for schools, and the
schools that are at the leading edge of trying to address it have
sought all kinds of ways to bridge their relationship with parents
through inter-agency work, for example with community workers.
For one of the schools in our research project, 50% of the staff
were actually parents, local community people, social workers
and others who were helping to be the vicars or the advocates
for parents with the school. So it is not just a case of how we
get to the parents, but of how we get to the people who act as
advocates and supporters for parents to make the bridge between
some of the arcane things about school that totally baffle parents.
Many parents just do not want to go through the school gate again,
because it brings back the memory the horrible experience that
they had at school. They attend a parents' evening and sit on
a little seat at their child's desk while the teacher sits behind
his or her desk. As Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has written in her
book The Essential Conversation, schools are saturated
with immaturity, and parents often find that coming in is just
too redolent of all the things that they went through. I am of
course talking about the parents who left school early, who were
the low achievers and so on. Other parents know the conversation,
the language, the ritual, and how to deal with that. That is unless,
of course, you are a professor of education, because when you
want to go to your child's school, they say, "Don't you dare
go up there because I know what you will say to them!" So
there is a little bit at that end as well, but parents are an
incredibly important—hugely important—and complex
aspect of this whole area of accountability.
Chairman: Annette, who do you want next?
Q194 Annette Brooke: I want
Anna to comment just briefly on what information she thought should
be made available.
Anna Fazackerley: We can supply
some more serious detail on this if that would be helpful, but
just as a starting point I would say that a good accountability
system has to include an indication of progress over time, rather
than just a snapshot of performance in a given year. I think that
that is something that parents really care about and it then means
that schools cannot coast—there would be an incentive, even
for schools that are doing very well, to keep improving. I think
that parents ought to want to see performance indicators beyond
academic results in national assessment tests. It is important
to make it easy for parents to compare schools with similar sorts
of students clearly. At the moment, I do not think that it automatically
happens that you can make a fair comparison of schools—by
comparing schools with similarly difficult student populations,
for example.
Q195 Annette Brooke: Can I
just tease out—clearly we have different indications of
parents needing some accountability—which bits of the school,
or which part of a school's work, you think the school should
be accountable for in the parent set-up? Apart from some accountability
to parents, what other accountability routes do we need, given
the sort of situation that John described?
Anastasia de Waal: There needs
to be a much more holistic approach to accountability. At the
moment it is very heavily focused at primary level on SATs results,
which look at only literacy, numeracy and science—literacy
and numeracy are eclipsing science to quite an extent. There also
needs to be an emphasis on the other subjects that are being neglected.
One of the issues with inspection is that parents think that inspection,
as a form of checking up on schools, is giving an alternative
to the SATs results that they see. However, because of the heavy
reliance on data—and results in particular—Ofsted
is actually duplicating a lot of what SATs are already telling
parents, and that is very problematic. We would like Ofsted to
be looking at other elements as well as the academic subjects,
which might be provision of extra-curricular activities and sporting
activities, or pastoral care and things such as school trips—a
lot of things which, in many ways, have become very much sidelined
with an emphasis on accountability with literacy, numeracy and
test scores. I also think that particular interest, from a parental
perspective, is on teaching quality, which is something else that
an inspection system could look at much more thoroughly. It could
look at not just how children progress in class—I think
that that is the main priority for parents, because levels do
not mean anything to them in many ways, and it is progress that
actually illustrates how their child is getting on—but whether
children enjoy their class and whether they are particularly interested
in a particular subject. We might see those sorts of elements
as woolly now, but they have very much been lost in this contracted
focus on what is quantifiable. One of the dangers—one of
the really knotty areas—about accountability is that we
seem to be able to try to be accountable only with quantifiable
elements. That is very problematic, because clearly, when looking
at a whole school, many of the things that are going to have an
incredibly beneficial impact on learning, never mind on the wider
development of a child, will be very difficult to quantify. Arguably,
things such as the report card might address that, but I think
that there is a danger with what is going to happen to the role
of accountability. Are we going to try to quantify everything
so that it fits on this neat report card, and is that going to
skew broader measures of how well a school is doing? There are
an awful lot of schools, particularly in inner-city areas, in
which schooling has probably an even bigger impact on children's
life chances than in some of the leafy suburbs. We are hearing
from quite a lot of frustrated teachers who put a huge amount
of effort into creating a very rich learning experience, but find
that that does not necessarily equate to very high SATs results.
They are getting penalised for that, and then they probably have
to take the option of narrowing their approach and focusing on
results, to the detriment of the school experience.
Professor MacBeath: I cannot disagree
with any of that, except the ambiguity about levels. You said
that parents do not understand levels; that is true for some,
but others talk about them, saying, "Well, my child is a
Level 2," or, "My child is a Level 4." I am never
quite sure which level is better because Scotland has it the other
way round. Libby, at the Institute of Education in London, has
written about the detrimental effect of the whole notion of levels
that label a child as a 2 or a 4. In our ESRC study, Learning
how to Learn, we looked in depth at a number of case studies
of schools and found head teachers who could say, "I can
go into any class in this school and I can ask any child what
level they are at, and any child can say to me, `I'm a Level 2,'
or, `I'm a Level 3.'" That is how they define themselves.
I think that this tyranny of numbers runs through the whole of
the system, from classroom assessment to school accountability,
local authorities and government. I agree entirely with Anastasia
about the marginalisation of all the other things—drama,
music and art—that can be far more life-enhancing than some
of the core curriculum. The Government say, "Okay, we recognise
that these things are important, therefore let's find ways of
quantifying them," but some things defy quantification. For
example, with the five Every Child Matters outcomes, which I have
a problem with right away, their view was, "Well, if we want
these to have equal status with the core curriculum—maths
and literacy, numeracy and English—we need to find ways
of putting numbers on them." At the level of language, the
notion of outcomes has been so corrupted that to justify things
such as excellence and enjoyment, we talk about them as outcomes.
Are they? Are these five Every Child Matters outcomes absolutely
crucial aspects of children's life and learning? Are they outcomes,
or are they something much deeper than that? Because we have the
language of outcomes and the language of quantification, the big
challenge is to go back seriously and look again at the other
qualitative aspects of children's life and learning for which
we have to be accountable. I will talk about Hong Kong, because
I have been working there now for 10 years. They are worried there
about this performative and accountability pressure on narrowly
defined outcomes, so they have just brought in something called
"other learning experiences"—OLE—meaning
that 15% of children's time in secondary schools has to be spent
on other learning experiences. I am going next month to Hong Kong
to start the evaluation of how these things become embedded and
are given as much status as the core curriculum. I do not like
the term "other learning experiences" because I think
that they are vital learning experiences. They are the things
that Anastasia refers to, which tend to get marginalised when
we go for the so-called core curriculum.
Q196 Annette Brooke: You have
touched on lots of the points that I was going to raise. I think
that you have all indicated that the current system is punitive,
and that there is perhaps not enough support and challenge in
it. We will put the school report cards on one side for now, but
do you have any alternative models of accountability that could
involve more support and challenge?
Chairman: There is a section of our discussion
on school report cards, so bear that in mind. Otherwise, members
of my Committee will sulk that their questions have been taken
from them. Apart from on school report cards, do you want to respond,
Anna?
Anna Fazackerley: To pull in one
more international model, I would say that there are some interesting
examples from Canada in Ontario and Alberta. They are absolutely
clear that they are not interested in the big stick approach to
accountability. Accountability is very important to them, but
for them, it is all about helping schools to improve and having
conversations with them about how they can do that. We are probably
far too much in the direction of the stick, and we ought to be
thinking more about working with schools to improve them. We would
like Ofsted not to inspect everybody—we do not think that
there is such a need. However, if we are going to bring Ofsted
in to inspect the schools that are not coming up to scratch on
report cards, for example, it ought to be involved much more in
an ongoing process of improvement. Key to that is the point that
Anastasia just raised—I do not think we can over-emphasise
it—that we have to concentrate on the actual quality of
teaching. It is something that Ofsted is not very good at looking
at, as we all know.
Q197 Chairman: I thought that
Anastasia said that we have to concentrate on the quality of learning,
because she wanted it to be much more child-centred.
Anna Fazackerley: I think that
she also commented on the importance of the quality of the teaching.
I would be very surprised if Anastasia did not agree with that.
I think that that has been clearly proven to be right.
Q198 Chairman: I am just trying
to get the emphasis. What was your emphasis?
Anastasia de Waal: Well, I think
they go hand in hand. An emphasis on learning means that the teachers
have to be responsive to the pupils.
Chairman: So I misinterpreted that.
Anna Fazackerley: Simply, I think
that if a school is perceived to be weak, one of the things that
we ought to be looking at is what is going on in the classroom.
Q199 Mr Slaughter: Let us
carry on from where we are—you are allowed to mention report
cards. We are talking about methods of accountability. I find
that these discussions just go around in circles all the time,
because everybody you ask has a different opinion. I wonder if
that was how the system was developed over the last 15 to 20 years—that
we keep bolting extra things on, or saying, "Well, that does
not give the picture, so perhaps we will do that as well."
Perhaps the report card is a refinement of that, where you are
now trying to pull everything together in a way that is digestible,
but not open to the criticism that you are only measuring one
item. Looking at that, and including the report card, you may
start off by saying—I think somebody said this—"We
should look not at mechanisms, but at what we are trying to test."
But we do have to have mechanisms, because that is the practicality
of how the system is going to work. What is your faith in the
system for doing this, and do you think that the report card is
achieving that?
Chairman: Let's start with John and move
across. There is a lot of material to get through, so could all
of you be quite punchy with your replies.
Professor MacBeath: The language
of report cards immediately sends shivers down my spine—too
many things are redolent of my own school experience. I would
like it to have a different kind of name, if that is going to
be the case. To address the question of which model, I have advocated
for a long time a very strong, rigorous school self-evaluation,
complemented by an external review—I am not necessarily
talking about an inspection—that looks at how rigorous the
school self-evaluation is and how it takes into account things
such as the quality of learning, teaching, and the culture and
ethos of the school in the long term. All the things that we have
talked about are part of school self-evaluation. I know that other
people have talked about this in previous Committee reports but,
in lauding the fact that Ofsted have moved to a system of self-evaluation,
it is still not what I mean when I talk about something that is
deeply imbedded in the day-to-day work of teachers and young people.
It is not an event that happens once a year when you fill out
something called a self-evaluation form, and it is not something
that happens when the inspectors arrive, but it breathes through
the whole culture of the school, and people—the students
and pupils themselves—have the tools to look constantly
at the quality of their learning and are sophisticated enough
to do so because they understand how to account for it. I would
put the quality of learning before the quality of teaching, with
our ex-chief inspector's remark in mind. In his book, he writes,
"Teachers teach and children learn. It is as simple as that",
but it is not as simple as that. It is far more complex, because
the bulk of children's learning is out of school. I think that
part of the issue for self-evaluation and accountability is looking
at the learning that takes place in and out of school. Chairman,
I am aware of the time constraints, but may I add a quick plea
for the work going on with the Children's University, which will
be launched in the House of Lords in June? Children who take part
in out-of-school activities—the kind of activities that
Anastasia has been talking about—are absolutely vital to
feeding back into what happens in the classroom, so we cannot
have an accountability or self-evaluation system that does not
look at learning in school and outside it—with the family
and in the neighbourhood, community and so on.
Anastasia de Waal: As I have already
said, I do not think that we need to overhaul the principles of
the system, so we do not need to replace an inspection system
or replace testing. I think that we could have much less testing,
in the sense that we could just have testing at the end of primary
school. One set of tests at primary school is definitely sufficient.
John mentioned the problem of things being an event, and I think
that is the big issue at the moment. There is huge pressure around
inspection and testing. They should be by the by processes that
check out the quality of the school and the levels of the pupils.
A lot of criticism about testing has talked about the pressures
and difficulties that it creates for children and the terrible
stress that they are under. I do not think that testing is actually
problematic per se for children. Children quite like a test; it
is quite exciting to be able to show what you know. The problem
is that schools are being coerced into trying to demonstrate progress
that they have not been able to make, and in many cases that is
perfectly legitimate. They may be doing a fantastic job but, because
of circumstances, they are not reaching the benchmark. One of
the problems at the moment, and why that is happening, is because
of the terribly standardised approach to children and the teaching
situation. We are only talking about homogenous entities. We tried
to address that a bit with things such as contextual value added
but it has not really had an impact, and I think that the same
applies to inspection—it is about very rigid and narrow
criteria. If you are doing fantastic things that do not fall within
that remit, quite frankly, Ofsted does not have time now to look
at them. A lot of inspectors feel very frustrated that they cannot
look at the great things that schools are doing; they just need
to look at their criteria. The important thing is that testing
actually tests what the pupils know, and it needs to be done in
a randomised way. To do that we need to sever national testing,
accountability and how the Government are doing in education policy
from school-level accountability. How Johnny at Key Stage 2 in
class 6 performs in his SATs test is different from how the Government's
education policy is doing. The problem at the moment is that they
are inextricable, which is leading to all the distortions. The
same applies to inspection. There is a lot of emphasis on getting
schools to a certain inspection level so that the local authority
can make sure that it is hitting its target and we can say that
schools in this country are doing better than before. But that
is not beneficial to schools, and it is one of the reasons why
there is a climate whereby people feel that teachers do not want
to be accountable, do not want to be told when there are weaknesses
and do not want to improve. I disagree with that. They do, but
the problem is that the interventions are not actually helpful
in the long term. They are short-term interventions, which will
help them reach a superficial level. That will get a better result,
but not necessarily improve learning and teaching.
Anna Fazackerley: We would like
a system with a report card. In fact, the report card was our
idea last March.
|
