Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-259)
DAVID BUTLER,
CLARE COLLINS
AND DEBORAH
ISHIHARA
29 APRIL 2009
Q240 Mr Stuart: Leaving aside
the institutional level, we need excellent teachers, and we need
to remove those who are below an acceptable standard. Do you think
that governing bodies are effective in trying to ensure both those
things? Do they need additional powers? What would help them to
be able to challenge risk-averse local authorities and get the
powers to take action?
David Butler: Governing bodies
are already an effective tool at a school level and also, to a
degree, at a community level as well. Remember that part of the
responsibility for some schools now moves into the area of extended
services. If you look at governors being, let us call them, the
board of the school, they are the people who are ultimately responsible
for the strategic vision. It is their job to ensure that what
is in place will actually deliver what parents want, if you like,
from my perspective, which is an effective piece of teaching and
learning for the children at that school. Yes, they can do that,
and yes, they have the powers to do that, but as Clare has already
cited, there are instances where sometimes local authorities may
not be quite on stream with the governing body, which just makes
it a little bit more difficult for them to perform their role.
I suspect that the powers are there, and it is not a question
of saying that we should give them additional powers.
Chairman: Fiona wants to come in on this
point.
Fiona Mactaggart: No, I wanted to come
in on the point about governing bodies generally as soon as Graham
is finished.
Q241 Mr Stuart: Deborah, can
I follow up on that, particularly focusing on being able to tackle
teaching underperformance?
Deborah Ishihara: That is very
difficult. From what we hear on the telephone lines, if a parent
has an issue with a teacher because of things that are going on
in the classroom, that is almost our most difficult question:
how to get at the school to address that without completely destroying
the relationship between the parent and child and the school.
From our perspective, what we need to see is the ability of governors
to act independently, as I have said before, as a check and balance
on the school. Very often they can do so, but there are occasions
when they can't. For instance, with exclusions, I have heard of
governors who make the decision to exclude a child along with
the head. In which case, when parents want to go and make representations
to the governors about the exclusion, and they worked together
with the head in coming to that decision, it is not a proper independent
process. I have also heard on the lines about cases where the
governors are completely circumvented. I heard of one case a few
weeks ago where a year 11 pupil had been excluded for allegedly
kicking another boy, but his father said that he had reason to
believe that his son had not done it. He was excluded for an indefinite
period until a meeting could be held. Then, when the meeting was
held, they said, "You can come back to school for one hour
a week, indefinitely," which was not exactly an education.
The parent said, "I want to complain to the governors about
this," and the head said, "No, you can't. I'm a governor,
and I've made my decision." I was completely horrified by
that.
Chairman: Can you repeat that?
Deborah Ishihara: "No, you
can't complain to the governors. I'm a governor, and I've made
my decision." The head was on the governing body, which is
fine—the head can be on the governing body—but not
saying, "I'm the governor, and I've made my decision."
As I said, I was horrified by that. I have to say that at ACE,
we hear about poor practice day in, day out, so we come out with
a skewed vision of the world. I know that there is a lot of good
practice out there, but equally, we do come across things that
need to be addressed.
Q242 Mr Stuart: The requirement
to produce an annual report was phased out, and many governing
bodies seized the opportunity not to produce one. If governing
bodies do not publish their views on the performance of the school
and share them with the parents, is it any surprise that they
are perceived, not least by Ofsted, as being less important in
the overall accountability system?
David Butler: If I may be so bold,
that is perhaps a red herring. I think that there were a number
of reasons why annual governing reports disappeared. I dare to
suggest that part of the reason why they disappeared was the considerable
lack of interest from parents who wanted to attend a particular
annual meeting. I have served my time as governor and gone along
to such meetings to find that the governing body outnumbered the
parents. Let us not lose sight of the fact that parents want good
information and accountability. We must find what is effective
today rather than say we should simply bring back the annual reports
for governors. That is one tool, but perhaps it is not the most
appropriate one. There are other things that we could do today
and we should concentrate on that.
Q243 Mr Stuart: Such as?
David Butler: We have heard hints
that a school report card should be introduced. Our research that
we put before you last night shows that there is substantial parental
favour for that report card.
Q244 Mr Stuart: But that doesn't
empower governors, does it? It seems to further sideline external
people who come in.
David Butler: I don't think so
because it becomes part of the overall accountability process.
It would not be fair for us to look at single segments of accountability;
there are many things that we can look at. Ofsted is one, as are
governors' impact, school report cards, exam results and so on.
Clare Collins: I want to clarify
that what we seized on was the discontinued requirement to have
an annual meeting. There were a lot of governing bodies in schools
that were very happy to carry on producing a report of some sort.
It was long and unwieldy, and most of us are in favour of the
school report card as a replacement for that. Much of the stuff
that has been reported on by the Government's reports is reported
on elsewhere.
Chairman: Deborah, respond to Graham
and then I shall move on to Fiona.
Deborah Ishihara: Not having an
annual report by the governors is a bit of a shame because they
produced a lot of very good stuff. In our written submission,
we looked back at what governors were supposed to produce and
thought that it was very good and included some of those things.
I am not sure whether the report card will replace all that, but
we are clear that a lot more detail needs to be produced for parents.
Q245 Chairman: Are you based
in Cambridge?
Deborah Ishihara: No.
Chairman: Where is your base?
Deborah Ishihara: Islington.
Clare Collins: One of the things
that fell out when the annual report died was any financial reporting.
Mr Stuart: It was killed—it didn't
die.
Clare Collins: That is a personal
view. It is a shame that there isn't a public report every year
on the school's finances.
Q246 Fiona Mactaggart: In
your submission, you used ACE's experience in representing children
and parents in dispute with schools to suggest that some of the
reports will not include things that are important to parents
and schools. If we had a report card, it would not necessarily
include those things.
Deborah Ishihara: We wanted to
add two categories—parental complaints and regulatory compliance.
We think that those two things will work together well. If you
are talking about accountability, you can talk about educational
attainment, but that is only one aspect of it. From our perspective,
it is about regulatory compliance, but that is difficult to pin
down. It is easy to say to schools, "We will produce something
that explains how you are complying with the law." However,
you also need a parental complaints section in which you can see
if there are any discrepancies. For example, a school will say—as
sometimes happens on our phone lines—"There is no bullying
issue here. We have no bullying in our schools." If something
such as that is expressed in a report card on the part of the
school and yet there are several complaints about bullying from
parents, then you have something you can use to say, "There
is clearly a discrepancy here." Ofsted could use that and
make a comment in its reports about regulatory compliance. It
is difficult to get a handle on the issue, but that would be one
way of doing it.
Q247 Fiona Mactaggart: I was
struck by what you were saying in response to Graham, which is
that you tend to see the hard end. Because you represent people
when they are in dispute with a school, you tend to see the system
when it is in failure. I am concerned that, at present, we do
not have sensible enough mechanisms to deal with those schools
that, for example, turn too quickly to exclusion or expulsion,
or where the governors are in the pocket of the head teacher and
always back that decision. I don't know about the case that you
were talking about, but I can think of a school in my constituency
where it is quite probable that the whole governing body would
say, "Oh yes, our head teacher is absolutely right and that
child can happily be educated for an hour a week." One of
the things that I have found—this is a school that is very
successful in its results—is that is it difficult to find
any mechanism that can hold that school to account about that
issue. It educates the children—it educates fine—
but guess what? The children that the head teacher doesn't like—it
sometimes feels like—get picked on, excluded, and the whole
thing is silenced. I am interested—not just for the general
report of the Committee—in how we could have a better system
of accountability about things like that.
Deborah Ishihara: I think that
you have hit on a very good point here. The better that schools
do in educational attainment, sometimes the worse they are doing
in these other factors. A rebalancing is needed here. It is very
easy for schools, say with something like SEN, to concentrate
on getting good educational attainment and therefore be less happy
to deal with children who don't fit that mould or who are vulnerable
in some way. So you get very skewed emphasis in schools, which
means that in some ways the better a school is doing is perhaps,
for some children, the worse it is doing. That is the kind of
information that it is very difficult for parents to get at, which
is why I think you need a whole range of factors to be made clear,
and to be put in one place as well, which is why the report card
would be good—via the report card, you could access all
this information. What you find is that most parents are happy
to have a few fairly simple overall marks to do with the school,
but other parents, who have a child with SEN or is vulnerable
in some way, would need something much more detailed. Exclusions
are a very good example; they are often linked to SEN. The other
day we had a case in which a boy with SEN was officially excluded
for three days, which was all fine—he had a proper letter
etc—but at a reintegration meeting he was then told that
he could only come in from now on in the mornings, between 9 am
and 11.30 am. There was nothing in writing and no end point was
set. It is not just a matter of how proper exclusions are done;
it is how we get a lot of informal—therefore, illegal—exclusions.
It would be very difficult to hold a school to account for that.
As I said, we think that you can possibly do it by making a public
statement about what you do in a range of circumstances: how you
comply with the law, which is asking the school by implication
to state publicly that what it says is true, but also to have
some other checks and balances in the system, including the governors,
but also parental complaints. So, you can get in there in some
way.
Q248 Fiona Mactaggart: Does
the school have a duty to record and report to governors all parental
complaints?
Clare Collins: Yes.
Q249 Fiona Mactaggart: Do
all schools do it?
Clare Collins: It is formal complaints.
Q250 Fiona Mactaggart: Does
a parent know what a formal complaint is?
Deborah Ishihara: Not necessarily.
Clare Collins: And governing bodies
don't. It is one of the difficult jobs that a chair of governors
often has to do, which is to make the decision that a complaint
goes formal—you are almost looking for the worst to be put
in front of you, for the parents to say, "I am making a formal
complaint." A lot of parents don't know. You give them the
complaints procedure—every school has to have a complaints
policy—and point out to them, which is what I do as a chair
of governors, that this is the process and ask at what point each
side would want to make the complaint formal. I would then set
up the process to make it happen, and my clerk would make the
process happen. However, what you are looking at is actually a
quite sophisticated level of process and of judgement-making.
I started this evidence session by saying that strengthening governance
means that you need to have better training for governing bodies
and for chairs of governing bodies who are having to make such
tricky decisions. It is important that the decisions are right.
Chairman: Do you want briefly to give
me an answer on that one, David?
David Butler: I am conscious that
this echoes some of the points that we put in our own submission
about the accessibility of the complaints processes generally.
Our submission makes some comments in relation to the Ofsted complaints
process, for example, but it applies here as well. It is difficult
sometimes for parents to access, understand and know the process.
I am struck by what Clare is saying. Where good governance works,
it can help parents to understand the process, but that is only
when you have very good chairs of governors and very good systems.
One of the factors that could make things more accessible is making
the language more straightforward. That would be very helpful.
Chairman: We are hard against time, so
I call Edward to take us through to the next session.
Q251 Mr Timpson: David, could
I pick you up on the submission to which you just referred. One
of the striking findings from your questioning of parents to get
their view of the current system of school accountability was
that 96% say that they have a greater demand for schools to be
assessed on a wider range of measures. That it is extremely high—you
don't need me to tell you that. What wider measures are parents
looking for from schools to ensure that the performance of the
school that their child attends is at the level that they want
it to be?
David Butler: We initially asked
them whether they find things like exam and test results helpful
as a measure of accountability. The answer was yes, they do, but
that was about 75% or 76%. We went on and asked whether they would
appreciate a wider range of measures on which they could judge
the school, which is what is proposed in the school report card,
and there was, if you like, near universal agreement. One debate
to have is on what those wider measures should be. Our suggestion
in our submission is that a good starting point would be the various
factors that we have in the documentation on Every Child Matters,
but, as we heard earlier from Deborah, it is possible that we
should introduce an additional feature. I do not think that the
debate on what should be in the school report card has ended—there
is still a lot of debate to be had—but we are seeing that
parents are very interested in having that more holistic view,
rather than just a single public pronouncement of exam results.
Q252 Mr Timpson: There are
two different angles from which parents may be coming at this.
First, if their child is already at a school, they want to know
how that school is performing as the child goes through it. Secondly,
some are looking to send their child to a school and making a
choice. What type of information do parents want when they are
looking to choose a school, as opposed to when they are looking
at the accountability of a school that their child is already
at? Is there any differential?
David Butler: I would go back
to my point about that wider range of measures. I will give the
example of when we were looking at an appropriate secondary school
for my son. To a large extent, we put to one side the issues of
effective learning and teaching because he presented as someone
who ought to do reasonably well, but he had a strong interest
in music. We were therefore looking at what music offerings available
schools had and at how he could best access them. That was us
making a decision for our child. If you have two or three children,
you might be looking at two or three different things, because
they are not all the same, as we know. You are then looking at
what you might call the additional features. How do schools encourage
sport, extra-curricular activity or art and drama? How is the
child's health and well-being looked after at school? We have
got a high level of encouragement and favour for the school report
card because it gives those measures.
Deborah Ishihara: We hear every
day that it is very individual, actually. Obviously, educational
attainment is one aspect. However, you may have a child, for example,
who you know is very sensitive and who has had difficulty with
bullying in their primary school. Therefore, you want to know
what sort of things a secondary school would do to address that
problem. Does it have good supervision, or a good, strong anti-bullying
policy? What does the school do if there is a problem, and how
supportive is it? That is just one example, but there are many
different cases where individual parents come to us and say, "How
do I find out about this?"
Clare Collins: Absolutely, parents
are concerned about attainment levels in school and we hope that
they are as concerned with progress levels. Those levels will
be the next thing that parents will focus on, as there is more
data about it and parents become more familiar with that data.
In our experience, however, parents are incredibly concerned about
behaviour in school. Certainly, schools get a "name"
for behaviour and a "name" for dealing with bullying,
or for not dealing with those issues, as the case may be. How
decisions are made on those sorts of issues is, I think, quite
complicated. We would also say that the profile of the school
is important for parents when they are choosing a school. Above
all, however, we would say that a lot of parents don't have a
choice of school and the school that they need to be good is the
one that is down the road. Every child in this country should
have the right to go to a good local school.
Q253 Mr Timpson: I want to
go back to Deborah's point that each parent is perhaps looking
for something individual for their child and they are concerned
about what the school has to meet those needs. Given that, how
do we go about encapsulating all those separate views and all
those different levels of engagement with the education system
that parents have?
Deborah Ishihara: That is why
we support the principle of having a lot of information available.
For instance, if you have a report card, whatever way it is set
out you might have a simple front page where there is quite simple
data, but parents would need to be able to drill down to what
exactly it is that they as individuals are looking for. That is
why we suggest that approach.
Chairman: We are getting some good information
here.
Q254 Mr Timpson: One of the
points that was raised in the previous session was that children
learn as much, if not more, outside of school as they do in school.
Some schools are very good at engaging children with after-school
clubs, school trips and other activities that are generated by
the school. How would that sort of information be made readily
available to parents in a report card, if a report card is the
type of model that you are all advocating? Perhaps I should have
asked before if that is the type of model that you are all advocating,
but I know that both David and Deborah have spoken about a report
card in a positive sense. So, should that type of information
about activities outside school be available to parents too?
Clare Collins: It should be quite
easy to capture that information; it is already captured in school
prospectuses. What is more important is that we don't just capture
certain children. There will always be the A team, who will play
football after school. What you are looking for is whether or
not you are capturing those kids who are the C team. They like
to play football, even though they will not represent the school,
and it will do them good to play football and be part of the school,
or whatever; football is a simple example. If you can't capture
that information, then we might as well all go home.
Chairman: Excellent. I like that.
Q255 Mr Timpson: I would just
like to put two more short questions. I know that we all have
our individual cases, but from my perspective the relationship
that you have with your child's teacher is extremely important.
That goes back to Graham's point that you need to have good teachers,
because the type of information that they can give you as a parent
is much better than anything you can get that is written down
on a piece of paper. However, teacher turnover is something that
a lot of my constituents complain to me about, in that they have
to engage with a new teacher almost on an annual basis and sometimes
with two or three teachers within a school year. Is that type
of information something that we would want, as a progressive
part of the child's education, so that the school's turnover of
teachers can be taken into consideration by parents when they
are choosing a school?
Deborah Ishihara: I think that
we have actually put in as one of the categories in our written
submission that staffing arrangements should be reported on.
David Butler: If you have a good
school, a good institution, you rely on your leadership team to
deliver a good experience for the children who attend it. Teachers
will leave; they might progress and go on to another role at another
school, and I think that it is important that the leadership team
recognises that. There comes a point when we have to be able to
trust some aspects of the system, so I am not sure whether we
want to micro-manage too much, but I recognise that if you have
a school where every teacher seems to stay only for a term, that
gives cause for concern. I want to return to the issue of information
flow and how we can ensure that we get information to parents,
as well as what information they want to base their selection
on. This relates to what you have talked about regarding teachers
being able to tell parents about their children. I know that there
is progress and I am pleased to see it in terms of making more
information available electronically, which I wholly support.
But I would not like to see—I do not believe that parents
would like to see this either—that replace the opportunity
for parents to talk to their child's teacher. Previous research,
which is not contained in this submission, has told us that what
parents value most is the opportunity for a face-to-face discussion
with their child's teacher, because that is when they learn about
their child.
Q256 Mr Heppell: I think that
I agree with your point about parents, but surely the new technology
is very valuable. I remember that what really frustrated me in
relation to my own children was finding out that things were wrong
only when I had a face-to-face meeting at the end of each year,
when I would be told about something that had been happening for
nine months. I like the idea of being able to tap into something
where I can look and see what is happening with behaviour and
homework. As parents, we have all had the experience of asking
our children, "What homework have you got?" and the
answer being, "None." That can go on for weeks.
David Butler: I would absolutely
support that, but what I am really saying is please do not make
that the only thing available to parents. You are quite right
that if you have a good school, a doorway is opening into the
information system—most of them now have very good information
systems—whereby parents can get answers to questions about
whether the homework has been given in, what the homework is for
next week, and how a child's attendance and behaviour is. That
valuable information should be shared, but please don't remove
the opportunity for parents to talk to teachers at the same time.
Q257 Mr Heppell: I think that
I accept that, but I don't want people to be dismissive of new
technology. There is an idea that parents will somehow not be
able to manage it, but everybody of a younger generation texts
and uses the internet all the time.
David Butler: I wish to put in
one caveat, which is that while I believe the ability of parents
to grasp such information has grown enormously, when we start
to bring this in, let us please encourage those who are delivering
it to ensure that it is accessible and that all parents, particularly
those in disadvantaged areas and those whose first language might
not be English, can understand it.
Chairman: Okay, we are going to move
on.
Q258 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask
Clare and David specifically, in terms of the identification of
schools for school improvement programmes, do you have any evidence
of situations where governors or parents are utterly outraged
by the choice of their school? That is to say, is there ever a
conflict between the perceptions of governors and parents on the
one hand, and the criteria established by Ofsted for school improvement
programmes on the other?
Clare Collins: Are you asking
whether, if Ofsted puts a school in a category, for example, that
surprises people?
Mr Chaytor: Yes.
Clare Collins: Absolutely; there
is evidence of that.
Q259 Mr Chaytor: I want to
try to assess the scale of the problem. There are always going
to be isolated instances where some governor says, "Our school
isn't that bad," and so on, but what is the scale of the
mismatch between the perception of governors and parents, and
the perception of Ofsted?
Clare Collins: I cannot give you
hard figures. In my local authority there have been some very
nasty surprises in the last couple of years—that should
not be happening at this stage of the game—but there is
also the other end of the spectrum where the data are so sophisticated
that schools that are, in effect, coasting schools are being identified.
I think that we have had our first grammar school being put into
an Ofsted category, and there has been shock, horror on a lot
of faces. I have to say, though, that we have got to welcome that,
because it is not just that the poor schools have got to get better;
but that the good schools should be even better.
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