Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-23)
Tom Burkard, Kate Fallon, Professor Pam Maras, David
Moore CBE, Professor Carl Parsons
13 October 2010
Q1 Chair: Good morning. Thank
you all very much for coming here this morning. I know that some
of you travelled down last night, and I appreciate your effort
in attending and giving evidence to us today in this session on
behaviour and discipline. The Committee is holding this inquiry
because of the impact of behaviour and discipline not only on
educational outcomes within our schools, but the general well-being
of children within them. Will you start by telling us why you
think behaviour and discipline policies are important and say
whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the new Government
in terms of where we are moving from here? We will refer to you
all by your Christian names, if you are happy with that. I shall
start on my right with Professor Parsons—Carl.
Professor Parsons: Behaviour and
discipline should be linked with relationships. The problem is
not just out there with the young people. It is a relationship
thing. It is about how the adults are trained, and how the professionals
who teach or deal in other ways with young people can relate to
them. Schools certainly need to think really hard about behaviour
and discipline, and the response to it. I conclude by saying
that too often we have escalating discipline policy practices,
and if one step does not work, we get more and more severe. We
do not have to do that. As parents, we do not necessarily do
that with our children. We work to contain it, and we expect
young people to develop and grow through some of the problems
that they exhibit at certain ages.
Tom Burkard: I must admit that
this is the first time that I have participated in a consultation
when I find myself defending the Secretary of State. That is
to a large extent because of the fact that the Government have
taken on board the essential message. We believe that it really
has to be considered, given the overwhelming problems of school
behaviour. We now have a situation when about 400 pupils a day
return to school after a temporary exclusion for assaulting either
a teacher or a fellow pupil. We have a quarter of a million children
attending schools when Ofsted had judged that the state of their
behaviour was unsatisfactory. The endemic problem that we have
had for far too long is that we are looking at the child and what
is wrong with the child, not looking at what is wrong with the
learning environment. I am speaking from the standpoint of someone
who has been in private enterprise for the better part of my life.
Anyone who ran a business by trying to decide what was wrong
with their customers rather than what was wrong with their services
would soon be out of business. In short, we have two problems
to consider when looking at behaviour. One is the long-term problem
of what to do about the endemic, structural faults in our education
system. I believe that the Secretary of State and the Schools
Minister understand the problems quite accurately, but doing something
about them is another matter. We also have to look at the current
crisis—what we do now. Schools and education do not change
overnight. It will take a generation to effect the sort of structural
and cultural changes in schools that will make it suitable for
all children to get the education that they need. In the meantime,
we have to look at what kind of short-term alternatives must be
enacted right now and, in that respect, I should like very much
to commend the Secretary of State for having adopted our suggestion
that Skills Force and organisations train ex-service personnel
to work in schools. That has an excellent record in reducing
the rate of NEETs and exclusions. They should be given a much
more prominent role in the running of pupil referral units and
mainstream schools.
David Moore: It is important that
the Committee remembers that the majority of teachers manage most
children well most of the time. That is a fact. The number of
permanent exclusions averages about 10,000 a year. Out of 8 million
schoolchildren, it is 0.25%. That is the extreme end. There
are graduations between all of that, but most teachers manage
youngsters well, despite the fact that in initial teacher training,
since Kenneth Baker was Secretary of State for Education, there
has been no training in child development and child psychology.
That is extraordinary. If you do a three-year course, you get
four to five hours if you are lucky, and if you are on a PGCE
course—on which most teachers now come into the profession—you
are lucky if you get between an hour and two hours on classroom
management and behaviour. Marks and Spencer spends more money
on training their staff to handle angry customers than we actually
give teachers, which is extraordinary. The behaviour policies
of a school are essential because they should be the expression
of the value system of the institution and the ways of working
that are expected by all. What we do know is that when behaviour
starts to break down, it is often triggered by the inconsistency
of the staff applying what have been agreed as the mechanisms
for the well-being and running of the school. I also think that
in terms of in-service training, which is now predominantly in
the hands of the schools themselves, too often behaviour is not
seen as being linked to quality teaching and learning. As the
quality of teaching and learning increases, disruption reduces.
The inspection evidence over time has come up with that and it
has been said over and over again. Where teaching and learning
is less well organised, the opportunities for buoyancy to take
place in a classroom increase.
Professor Maras: I agree with
and echo David's comments, especially that teachers manage behaviour
very well and that there is virtually no child development in
any teacher training. Even in the three-year course, it is at
a very low level, and for the British Psychological Society, child
development is crucial in terms of developing this. It is important
to think about how we define this. The notion that antisocial
behaviour is a homogeneous kind of thing is problematic, because
it talks about disturbance and disturbing, and it makes it very
difficult for schools and organisations to deal with it. A lot
of the time, it is very emotional and schools are dealing with
it in terms of the effects rather than the implications for the
young person. It is important that we take account of the complexity
of behaviour—there are different reasons why children might
have behavioural difficulties—and the different types of
behavioural difficulties, from the one-off incident that occurs
in school that has to be dealt with straight away, to the low-level
disturbance that seems to bother teachers the most, especially
when it involves groups of children. The ways that you deal with
that are very different, and that is the problem with these very
general definitions of behaviour and joining it with the notion
of discipline. We are going to talk about special educational
needs later, so I will leave that. Those are my main points at
this point.
Kate Fallon: I'm Kate Fallon from
the Association of Educational Psychologists. Being fourth, I
agree with quite a lot of what my colleagues have said. The question
was whether behaviour and discipline is important. Yes, it is
immensely important, but it has to be very closely linked to our
overall approach to the nurture, care and development of children
and young people. We can't have one without the other. Am I pessimistic?
I tend to agree with the colleagues to my left that in many situations
inside and outside schools you see a lot of children and young
people behaving appropriately, responding to adults around them,
and taking responsibility for their own behaviour and actions
in the environment in which they operate. So generally, I don't
think I am pessimistic, although I accept that some behaviours
are causing huge concern. We have to look at how we initially
prevent those behaviours from occurring, how we prevent them from
occurring later on, and at what treatment and care need to be
given to youngsters displaying the behaviours that we don't want
to see anywhere. I think that behaviour and discipline is something
that we need to focus on. One of the things we need to do is improve
adult skills. Pam and David have talked about child development
in teacher training courses. However, there seems to be a lack
of knowledge of child development within the whole children's
workforce training, not just in teacher training courses. When
I have contributed to training within local authorities and we
have looked at child development for nursery workers or teachers,
they are the ones that are the most popular and the ones that
people leave saying, "That was really useful and interesting,"
and, "I didn't know that." We have had that feedback
from people, but it is about centring approaches to behaviour
and discipline within that whole-child approach of how you nurture
and develop our young. We have to be honest and say that we actually
observe some of the behaviours that we observe now in children
and young people in older people, too. We see within society less
automatic respect for professionals and elders among all of us
sitting here, I suspect. I also think that we see behaviours not
terribly far from here that might be described as low-level disruption,
such as people talking over one another, interrupting and not
showing respect for the other speaker. We can't say it is just
children's behaviour. We have to look at it in the context of
the behaviour that we see around us—there is lots of emoting
and road rage and so on, and it's not children's fault that those
things occur. One of the things we have to look at is helping
adults to have confidence to manage and bring up children. I think
that a lot of adults now lack that confidence. It is about developing
not an authoritarian approach to children but an authoritative
approach that helps them feel secure—that the adults around
them are in charge, not necessarily in control, and that they
will keep them safe and meet their basic needs. I will leave it
there because I am sure something else will be picked up later.
Chair: Excellent. Talking about authority
is a perfect prompt to bring in the next question.
Q2 Nic Dakin: In 2009, Ofsted
said that standards of behaviour were good or outstanding in 95%
of primary schools and 80% of secondary schools, and it only identified
1% of primary schools and 1% of secondary schools where standards
of behaviour were judged to be inadequate. That would seem to
pick up the points that David and Pam were making about emphasising
positive behaviour. Do you agree with that? Sir Alan Steer's recent
conclusion is that publicised incidents are unrepresentative and
rare. Do you think that he is exaggerating that too much the other
way?
Professor Maras: I think that
you have just indicated that it is not actually supported by the
data. It's an emotive subject, and it is good news. It is bad
news, but good for news. It is my view that it is not supported
by the data. There is a perception among all of us that there
is an increase in antisocial behaviour generally, and as Kate
has just said, that weighs into how people view children.
Q3 Nic Dakin: Does anybody else
want to comment on that? What circumstances do you think need
to be present in a classroom or school to encourage positive behaviour?
David Moore: First of all,
the adults have to model the behaviours that they want because
otherwise how does the child learn? Children come from homes where
they see a variety of types of parenting and they bring those
models with them. It is called received behaviour. The key for
a youngster, particularly at secondary level where you change
the adult every 45 to 50 minutes so their expectations may be
slightly different, is that you have to adapt your behaviour to
the new context. If you can't adapt your behaviour to context,
you are in difficulty. There is an increasing number of youngsters
who find that difficult. The staff then have to decide for their
individual school what is inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour,
so there is a common agreement about what it means in that school.
You then have to explain that to youngsters so that they know
what it is rather than simply saying, "I think that your
behaviour is unacceptable." In that case, the child does
not know what they have done. They are doing what they ordinarily
do. The point that one of my colleagues made is that if you go
into any shopping area on a Saturday and you watch parents interacting
with their youngsters, you can see why the youngsters behave in
the way in which they do—they model the behaviour of the
adults. There is a very big training issue for teachers around
how you all follow agreed procedures and expectations. For example,
in the summer, the NASUWT runs a course on behaviour for newly
qualified teachers. I think that the course runs for about a day
or two. I have been in schools where those newly qualified young
teachers say that was some of the best training that they have
had to date to help them to move into the classroom. It is left
to a particular organisation to do that for its members and that
is very worthy, but how does it happen for everyone else?
Kate Fallon: You asked about
what needs to be in the classroom. I very often used to use a
checklist when I worked with teachers. This is going back to the
model of the great paediatrician, Mia Kellmer Pringle, in "The
Needs of Children". The basic needs are love and security,
new experiences, praise and recognition and responsibility. We
used to unpick those and say, "Are those present in this
classroom?" Love and security does not necessarily mean hugging
and kissing all the time; it is about the children feeling valued
and secure. Do they know what is expected of them and do they
know that the adult is in charge and can look after them? So,
do they feel secure and valued in there? The new experiences can
relate to whether the curriculum is appropriate to the levels
of the children in the classroom. If a particular child is causing
difficulties, have we checked out their cognitive abilities, reading
and numerical skills? Have we checked their hearing and their
eyesight? There is a whole list of things that you go down to
check whether the experiences that are occurring in this classroom
are appropriate for the children. Praise and recognition are not
always about saying, "Well done, you," all the time,
if that is not appropriate, but recognising sometimes when something
is difficult for somebody and saying, "I know you tried really
hard there—let's see how we can learn from that in the future."
On responsibility, are the children made to feel participative
members of the community? Do we try and choose those who are not
engaging particularly well with tasks of responsibility? Do we
engage in their own learning? I could go on, but if you go back
to those four major needs—love and security, new experiences,
praise and recognition, and responsibility—and unpick those,
a lot of teachers and adults can start working out themselves
how best to deliver a good classroom environment.
Tom Burkard: One of the things
that has been neglected here is the importance of how children
are taught and what they learn. If you go back to 1998, there
was a rather remarkable article written by Minette Marrin, who
is now with The Sunday Times, but was at that time with
the Telegraph. She visited Kobi Nazrul primary school in
Whitechapel, where 80% of its pupils were of Bangladeshi origin,
of which I think 60% were on free school meals. Essentially, it
had virtually every disadvantage you could possibly imagine. At
that time, it had exactly 3% of its pupils on the special needs
register. The reason why was that the headmistress at that time,
Ruth Miskin, succeeded in teaching every single one of her children
to read, which was a remarkable accomplishment. There was a lot
of scepticism within the Tower Hamlets local authority about this.
I tested her pupils independently, when they were up to about
year 4, at age 9, and every single one was there—there were
no convenient absences, which you often find on these occasions.
It turned out that, on average, its pupils were 22 months ahead
of norms in spelling. I was teaching at that time at a Norwich
suburban comprehensive—Kobi Nazrul's spelling ability at
year 4 was almost as good as our pupils at year 7. Now the thing
is that that school had no discipline problems. Just two weeks
ago, I visited another school that is exemplary, which is the
Durand Academy in Stockwell. It has 900 pupils in probably the
biggest primary school in England, of whom 95% are black minority
ethnic. Yet, in a period of two hours when I went through the
school—looking at all the classrooms and going into all
the classrooms—every single pupil was very busily at work.
Two things are really striking about Durand's policy. One, it
does not have mixed-ability teaching. In other words, its goals
are academic rather than social, but by achieving its academic
goals it manages to achieve its social goals at the same time.
The other thing is that Durand recruits and trains its own teachers
under school-centred ITT programmes. This means that it is freed
from a lot of the nonsense we have got about schools being all
about social engineering as opposed to learning. Once you take
care of the learning dimension, the vast majority of social problems
fall away. This leaves room for the professional services, which
we still need, to devote their attention to the children who have
the most severe special needs—the ones that have medical
problems, the ones that come from severely abusive homes and this
sort of thing. It is sheer fantasy to pretend that any of our
excellent services that work with children who have behavioural
problems can possibly even begin to touch the magnitude of the
problem that we have right now.
David Moore: In the initial survey
that we did in 1996 on exclusions from schools, two thirds of
all the pupils who were in the disciplinary systems of secondary
schools had reading ages between 8.5 and 10 years. The average
readability of textbooks given to children in year 7 in maths,
science and geography had reading ages around 14 years. It is
also interesting at the same time that Judge Stephen Tumim's team,
looking at prisons, found that three quarters of all prisoners
on remand had reading ages below 10 years. If you cannot read,
you cannot access the curriculum. If your vocabulary is not sufficiently
developed, you cannot understand what the teachers are saying.
And if you cannot change your social mode of behaviour once every
50 minutes, you really start to get into difficulty. Tom's right—once
those youngsters start to achieve and to feel they are achieving,
their attitudes shift significantly.
Q4 Damian Hinds:
Tom, you have quite rightly mentioned that anybody who has worked
in business would say that if you have a business problem, you
do not blame your customers, you look at changing your services.
However, we also segment our customers to try to understand their
different motivations and their different worth in business terms
and, in those terms, their different behavioural characteristics.
If you had to take a class of children and predict which ones
were going to be more difficult—if you could know everything
about their background—what are the key predictors in terms
of socio-economic background, family type, older siblings or younger
siblings and birth month within year?
Tom Burkard: A very interesting
American study, which was financed by the United States Department
of Education, discovered that reading failure was the only one
of all the various indicators which accurately predicted the later
incidence of violent antisocial behaviour. That study was conducted
in 1974, which makes it fairly ancient, but to my knowledge no
one has ever disputed its findings. The reason that that factor
was most important is not only the reading failure per se, but
the child's frustration at the continual and repeated failure
to achieve their aims. In other words, there is this feeling of
failure that comes with not being able to read. For a number
of years I was at the sharp end, working with children in social
work programmes, in schools and in the military. It is safe to
say that the real MacGuffin when you are talking about antisocial
behaviour—I am not talking about a tiny minority of psychopaths
who are going to be in trouble anyway—is that these kids
have been so humiliated by their educational experience that they
have developed a hostility to it. It was axiomatic in my work
with the Suffolk probation service that when we were dealing with
kids who were on probation or care orders, you never did anything
that reminded them of school. When I was working with the Territorials
as a military instructor, we found that once those pupils with
marginal literacy and numeracy skills started succeeding in technical
subjects such as map reading and signals—which was what
I taught—their whole attitude changed. You could see them
swelling with pride, because they were able to sit in a classroom
and learn. The point is that when you have children who are failing
all the time, it is hardly surprising that some of them go off
the deep end and start assaulting both teachers and fellow pupils.
Although this does not excuse that behaviour by any means, most
children who fail do not do that—that is something that
we have to recognise. You cannot carry on with an education system
which is so manifestly failing to meet the needs of so many pupils.
Some 17% of our 18-year-olds are NEETs. What does that say about
the schooling that they have received?
Professor Parsons: There is a
hinterground behind not being able to pick up reading between
the ages of six and 10, which relates, statistically, to poverty
and free schools meals. The exclusion statistics year on year
show disproportionality, because white and black Caribbean children,
those on special needs and those on free school meals are much
more likely to be excluded. The background that those children
bring with them to school makes it more difficult for them to
engage. On the other side, the schools do not sufficiently target
those at risk of reading failure and all the other failures that
follow it. The fact is that early intervention by a number of
means—they are spread around the country, with projects
here and initiatives there—does work with children who come
to school with the fewest advantages, from workless households,
disruptive backgrounds and, in many cases, from sheer poverty.
Those means can obviate the later dangers and failures and underperformance
that often occur. I am in and out of schools that are like that.
One that I am spending a lot of time in was in the press in 2003
as the worst school in England. It was a secondary school that
was almost unmanageable—it was one of Nic's 1% of horror
schools and it is not even in the middle of a city. It has turned
around now and good work can do that.
Q5 Damian Hinds: Free school meals is
such a blunt instrument when we talk about any statistic. You
could be out of work and poor, in work and poor—you get
all sorts of family structures. Sometimes—I am not saying
that you are—as a country we get lazy and we say that you
can predict all these things by who is on free school meals. Sadly,
that does not tell you what to do about it.
Professor Parsons: May I give
one quick response? It is a statistical likelihood; it is not
that all who have free school meals will go that way. Even when
you get clever and bring in the index of educational deprivation
it does not make a lot of difference, it still gives you the same
message.
Professor Maras: We have
been counting—we always count, we are very good at that
in this country. In 1988, when Warnock came in, we started to
count and give money in terms of that. Behaviour has been a major
concern for teachers and schools for an awful long time. I absolutely
agree with my colleague's comments about reading. However, we
are really in danger of moving down a route where not being able
to read is a predictor of antisocial behaviour. One of the problems
is the definition of antisocial behaviour, because there are many
reasons why children behave badly in school as well as feeling
bad about not being able to read. That is why early assessment
is crucial in terms of defining what that reason is. What you
do will be different at the individual level. Of course, well-led
schools have less disruptive behaviour, but we have known that
for quite a long time. What we need to know is how to work with
specific children who have specific difficulties, who are really
not learning. It is not just that they are disturbing others;
they are not intellectually gaining anything at all from education.
They will go into the prison system or other services, so there
will be a cost, and they will lose out from that.
Q6 Chair: Is that about the child
or about the institution? Tom's point that I was picking up on
was the sense that when you have the right policies in place,
children who could be seen in a weaker context as having a particular
problem may turn out not to have a problem. If you run the institution
properly the child gets engaged, their behaviour improves and
they learn.
Professor Maras: I think that
it is both. We have done numerous studies, which have all been
published, that show that if you ask schools the cause of individual
children's behaviour, they very rarely say the school. It is mostly
internalised or it is given to the child or given to the parents.
It is both. There is a real danger of moving down the path: we
will find one really good intervention and that will work. Carl
is absolutely right that the UK system relies on local management
of schools, which means that people have to manage, within a local
area, the behaviour of those schools. They buy in really good
interventions, but we do not know what it is about those specific
interventions that works. Until we do, we will keep adding on
more really good interventions without looking at the needs of
the individual children and the different reasons why they might
have behaviour problems.
Q7 Chair: Can I press you on that,
Pam? Famously, the commitment of British Leyland in regard to
the quality of its car was shown by how many people it had at
the end of the line fixing all the problems. The Japanese approach
was of getting it right the first time and stopping the production
line at any point. I would hate to turn children into manufactured
cars, but I am sure that if you get it right the first time you
do not have to have brilliant interventions later.
Professor Maras: I absolutely
agree with you.
Q8 Chair: Most children's behavioural
difficulties are anticipated and corrected by getting it right
the first time rather than having ever more brilliant interventions
to pick up the cost of failure.
Professor Maras: The two things
merge. For some young people and children, an assessment when
they come into school would show that they have some difficulties
for various reasons. In other situations, being in school and
the interaction between school and family, and a child's social
background, mean that things go wrong and therefore the behaviour
goes wrong. There is a danger that we come up with only one really
good fix and we cannot do that, because a lot of things have got
to change. Schools that are well led have low levels of low-level
disturbance, but they will still have within them children who
need to have some interventions. The two things converge and it
is not straightforward, which is one of the problems with the
very simple definitions of antisocial behaviour.
David Moore: Can I comment?
Q9 Damian Hinds: I think that
Kate is waiting patiently to say something.
Kate Fallon: You asked the question:
if you knew everything about the children in your classroom at
quite a young age, would you be able to predict which children
are likely to be affected? You know there are particular at-risk
factors, which have been talked about. Boys are more at risk—summer-born
boys, going to school just as they are turning four, for example.
Some summer-born boys have mums with low educational achievement,
which is another factor, along with poverty and the stresses and
strains that go with that. Poor attachment with early carers is
one of the most crucial and reliable predictors of poor behaviour
later on, if a child has not had good, strong early attachments—not
necessarily with mum, but with a good carer in those early days.
You can look at all those and say those are risk factors, and
you will find some children who, despite all that, actually do
okay. Because something happened to address one of those factors—by
the teachers, staff or nursery workers—resilience has been
built, which has alleviated the possible effects of those others.
But if we look at those particular factors, we know there are
a number of things you can do at different stages. For example,
there has been a well researched project over a longitudinal period
in Canada—the nurse-family partnership—which highlighted
young, single, pregnant girls aged 15 to 17. They started working
with them during their pregnancy and getting them aware of the
fact that they were going to take responsibility for a human being—how
you build up attachment and love and care for a child. Followed
up 25 or 30 years later against a control group, it has shown
immense improvement on what you would expect. I think the nurse-family
partnership is being piloted in a couple of places in Britain
at the moment. Clearly, it's too soon to know what the effects
are, because it is a longitudinal thing, but we have concrete
research from a very good study in Canada. The trouble with a
lot of the early years interventions is that some of them are
so short-term at the moment, you don't know what the long-term
effects are going to be. We've had other early years interventions.
There are schools with nurture groups, where a head has looked
specifically at children who come in with poor relationships and
poor attachments. They are occurring all over Britain. If you
were to go and look at projects that are taking place, I would
urge you to look at schools and authorities that have nurture
groups and nurturing schools. That is a very educational, school-based
short-term intervention that has been shown to have an immense
effect on children's social behaviour, and also on their achievements
and attainments as well. I set up a couple in Lancashire when
I was working there. We did a reasonable research project with
the University of Huddersfield. We expected the social and emotional
behaviours to improve and we expected attainment to improve. We
didn't expect quite the significant improvement we got in achievements
as well. That is something I would urge you to go and have a look
at. Look at the evaluations that have been done on those. That
is when they have come into school and you haven't been able to
do those things before school, but you can do it with a trained
teacher and a trained nursery nurse—trained well in child
development and knowing how to meet the needs of the children.
Q10 Damian Hinds: Chairman, I
know time marches on—you probably want me to skip on. I
had a number of things I wanted to ask about the school environment,
which I suggest we skip and perhaps come back to if there is time
in the second session. There is one thing I really want to ask
while this panel is here—Tom brought it up. It won't always
be possible, depending on the size of school and so on, but you
were talking specifically about the role of mixed ability teaching
versus anything else. Nobody else mentioned it. In every single
one of your submissions, you've talked about the absolute importance
of reading, having achievement and being seen to have achievement
and so on. I wonder what your comments are on mixed ability.
Tom Burkard: I'll start off if
you want, because obviously I'm going to have the heterodox view
here. I'd like to quote something from the Teaching Battleground
blog. It says, "the movement for mixed ability classes is
indistinguishable from the movement against teaching. The mixed
ability class teacher is not a teacher at all. They are, often
quite explicitly, a facilitator. They are a person who designs
educational activities for children but doesn't actually tell
them what they need to know. They are a friend to the child, but
not an expert on an academic subject." This really resonated
with me because when I worked for Suffolk social services, if
you asked kids what they thought about their schools one thing
they would always say was, "They didn't teach you nothing."
That was something that was repeated, right down to the double
negative, with such accuracy that I think we have to listen to
it. We also have to think in terms of the study on truancy that
was done by my colleague Professor Dennis O'Keeffe. He was commissioned
by the DFE, or whatever it was back in 1994, to try to discover
what the reasons for truancy were. He took the novel step of actually
interviewing truants to find out why they truanted and, lo and
behold, it turned out that the vast majority of truancy was not
their not registering for school, but what he called post-registration
truancy, when they left because there was a class they didn't
like or a teacher they couldn't stand. So, when we are looking
at these problems we do have to think, "Why is it that they
can't cope with this?" One of the problems here is that if
you are dealing with a mixed-ability class, you are dealing with
children who are engaged in a lot of group work, project work
and various independent activities, and a key thing that has come
up in recent years about children at the low end of the ability
range is that certain children who are quite frequently diagnosed
as having attention deficit disorder have, in fact, problems with
working memory. Working memory is the facility we have that holds
all the words in a sentence together until we can form them into
a meaningful whole. It is the sort of thing that enables us to
take a lot of related information and come up with a meaningful
conclusion. If you don't have this ability and you're sitting
in a mixed-ability class, which is relying to a large extent upon
your investigations—shall we say—you are going to
find the whole procedure totally and utterly meaningless. If you're
lucky, the child will sit at the back of the class and do very
little; if not, they're going to act up. I think that one of the
things that we have to take into consideration is that the whole
edifice of modern pedagogy that was installed under the terms
of the Gilbert review under new Labour, almost guarantees that
a very large percentage of children are so disengaged from the
educational process that this happens. Personalised learning was
theoretically supposed to engage this problem, but unfortunately
it is an absolute fantasy to assume that you can take teachers
and impose on them the burden of trying to design learning programmes
for each and every child and think that each child is going to
get an adequate amount of attention. The more duties you impose
on teachers, in terms of—
Chair: Can I cut you off there, Tom?
I think that your point is clear. David was indicating.
David Moore: This is just an observation
from inspection. The issue isn't whether it's mixed-ability or
streamed teaching; the issue is whether it works for those children.
Does it deliver? Simply saying that mixed ability is good or bad,
or streaming is good or bad, is nonsense. The issue is: does it
work? In exactly the same way as when—
Q11 Damian Hinds: So, how is that
a different question? You said that it is not a question of whether
streaming is good or bad but of whether it works.
David Moore: For example, if you
go into a school that has streaming, and you sit through three
lessons in the same year group, by ability, does the teaching
strategy change for each of those groups or do they get the same?
If they're getting the same, why are they divided up? The thing
is based on the outcome that the children provide, not necessarily
the teacher. There is a point on which I agree with Tom. In some
of our inner-area schools they use mixed-ability teaching but
some of those schools have very high levels of transience. So,
at the beginning of the term that group might be balanced in ability,
but within six to eight weeks it isn't; it's a random grouping,
because when the new children come they just have to be fitted
into a class. So the planning is thrown by the transience.
Q12 Damian Hinds:
With respect, these are different arguments; they are about the
operational simplicity and the doability. I think that the issue
is more whether it is done well. Presumably you can do mixed ability
well and you can do setting well, assuming you've got a bright
person doing it and doing it quite well. I appreciate that there
are many other arguments and angles to this but today's subject
is discipline—compare and contrast: setting, streaming and
mixed ability.
David Moore: If the teaching is
good and the children are involved and motivated, it really doesn't
make that much difference whether it is mixed ability or streaming.
That is by and large, but you will always find exceptions.
Q13 Chair: What is the evidence
for that?
David Moore: If you go back through
Ofsted reports, you will see that they have never come down on
one particular teaching strategy as being either the best or the
worst.
Q14 Damian Hinds: For discipline,
specifically, because that is today's subject. Ofsted is concerned
with lots of angles.
David Moore: Looking at discipline
as part of that, in well organised classrooms, irrespective of
whether they are mixed ability, streamed or any other grouping,
it is about the quality of the organisation and the engagement
of the youngsters through the actions of the teacher.
Kate Fallon: Most schools actually
now have pretty good systems for assessing and evaluating both
achievement and behaviour. If a school decides that, in a particular
situation, the behaviour of a group is not as it should be, it
will ask itself whether that is because it is a mixed ability
group, whereby the school is not getting the curriculum differentiation
right for those children and, therefore, whether they should be
put into ability or setting groups for that subject. Conversely,
the school may have setting and streaming that isn't working well,
because some of the children are not getting good models of behaviour
from others, and that might be stretching. In some situations,
mixed ability teaching can work well, and it can produce a very
disciplined and ordered environment, and so can streaming and
setting. It depends on the particular context that you are looking
at. Sorry, you would expect that answer from a psychologist—it
depends.
Q15 Damian Hinds: If you were a head
teacher or on a board of governors and you had to make that decision,
what contextual differences would you look for to help you make
that decision? You say that it depends on the context, will you
explain how?
Kate Fallon: The head teacher
and the staff are looking all the time at what they are achieving,
on a daily basis, on a weekly basis and on a departmental basis.
A school isn't a static place, is it? A school has to respond
to its children.
Q16 Damian Hinds: I'm not seeing
a decision tree emerge from that.
Kate Fallon: The decision tree
would be created by sitting down at a management meeting and,
after looking at the data and observing that there seems to be
an issue with discipline and behaviour within a group, asking
why that is happening. If the discipline problem is within a mixed-ability
group, is it because it is a mixed-ability group? If the problem
is within a high-flying set group, is it because, for example,
they are winding one another up about being too smart? Such questions
will very clearly be asked within a school's decision-making management
system.
Q17 Charlotte Leslie: I want to
talk about preventing and managing exclusions, but I will start
off with prevention. I have carried out some very meagre work
on that subject, and I want to run some ideas and thoughts past
the panel in order to gain from your expertise. First, I have
interviewed a young offender who had truanted and had behavioural
difficulties—I have interviewed quite a few such people,
and the same thing kept coming out—and, although one expects
the problems to be just about kids, the tragic thing was that
this chap said, "I wanted to be an electrician, but every
time that I thought I was actually going to do some wiring of
a plug or do some electronics, I was just given a paper on how
to do it. I can't do paper, but I can do stuff." To what
extent does the panel think that our practical and technical curriculum—I
hesitate to call it vocational, because I don't quite know what
"vocational" means—has let down children, and
to what extent does that contribute to behavioural difficulties?
Professor Maras: I have done a
lot of work on what is now commonly known as the year 10 effect,
which is the developmental dip that our young people have in their
attitude to most things that aren't to do with other young people,
music and stuff like that. That developmental dip happens at a
time when young people are now making more and more decisions.
In fact, they are making the decisions before the dip occurs,
so all young people become a bit more negative. The options that
they have at that time are now so limited. If they are not supported
and have some reason for their behavioural difficulties—they
might be inclined to behave badly or have a history of bad behaviour—that
is the time when they are most likely to drop out of school. I
absolutely agree with you that opportunities and choices for young
people occur at the time when all young people are most likely
to be a bit more negative about life other than other young people.
Charlotte Leslie: The tragedy there was
that here was a young man who had something positive that he wanted
to do but the system just did not provide it: all it offered was
paper.
Professor Maras: May I add one
point? The interesting thing is that the alternative curriculum,
which is really brilliant in lots of instances, only comes in
when you hit a really bad episode. It is not available to young
people who have not reached the situation where the school says,
"What are we going to do now because this is serious?"
The problem is that it comes in a little bit too late. The alternative
curriculum is probably something he would have taken had he been
offered it earlier.
David Moore: The alternative curriculum
has made a significant difference to a lot of youngsters. The
links between schools and colleges increases at a very fast rate.
However, there is an issue around year 9 because the colleges
only take youngsters when they are in year 10 and there is a whole
group of youngsters in year 9, and some stretching back to year
8, who are totally switched off by the paper curriculum. Yet some
schools have managed to do things with them and so their engagement
is better. Their attendance increases. The incidence of them walking
out of classrooms or being difficult decreases and they engage
better. Their attendance, particularly at the colleges, is very
high. It pulls up their school attendance and so makes a significant
shift for a number of youngsters, but there are some youngsters
for whom it makes no difference in the end.
Professor Maras: There is evidence
from France and the US that it is a very effective thing to do,
but it has a different status there.
David Moore: It is breaking it
away from the idea that the naughties get this and that if you
are naughty you go on a practical course. It is about how you
make the thing open to all youngsters.
Professor Parsons: Can I build
on that? It is not just that we suddenly have a solution at year
10. What we don't do is design a system of education for the client
group that is coming in then. We certainly don't do it collectively
as an educational community locally. It is a single school that
gets the input. What we have been recommending to prevent exclusions
is to look at it as community-based inclusion. A collection of
schools in an area will sort itself out so that it has the full
range of provision necessary to accommodate all of those children.
Attendance is a huge thing. Don't let them be out of school. Having
them in is important. It is one of the things that bothers us
about exclusion, whether it is fixed term or whether it is permanent
where you wait for 15 days while the governors deal with it and
a further 15 days so that it can go to an independent appeals
panel. If you design locally—this is a matter also of adjusting
whether you have mixed ability, setting or streaming—you
have detailed information online on individual children and you
know what the needs of individual children are. I was in a school
last week in Cheshire that did without PRUs, but in this one school
there were three different bases. One was certainly for Key Stage
4 and kids who would not work well in the ordinary classroom.
There was a youth-based input there. These are kids who struggle
to get to bed before 2 am and so on. But there was provision for
them. They were there. They were working with good adults and
what I witnessed there was good. But they had another sort of
base for those at Key Stage 3. There were practical things. It
was a matter of sorting out things from which they would learn,
to which they would relate and from which they would benefit.
There were also good links across the schools so that if things
get really tough in the one school—the behaviour is astonishing
and it breaks down-then there are systems of in-year fair access
where children are moved, although not necessarily in a compulsory
way as it can be mediated and there is that agreement with parents
and children that things have broken down here. But the four things
we talk about as managing exclusion are broadening the school
in that way so that you have a range of other bases. You also
have off-site provision, which can include special schools, units
and so on. You have multi-agency provision, which has to work
quickly; casework where people are in with difficult children
and families and so on, building bridges so that there can be
movement of children, where things break down, without this quasi-legalistic
exclusion process.
Q18 Charlotte Leslie: Two things
follow on from that. First, the progress through school. I know
the transition from primary to secondary school is often a rocky
time for attendance and behaviour. Has the panel evidence as to
how all-through schools perform on behaviour and attendance measures
compared to stand-alone secondary schools? That is, schools that
start from junior/primary and go right through to sixth form.
Has the panel any experience or evidence on how they perform,
the differences?
Professor Maras: I think it would
be difficult to monitor this to be sure enough. I have done work
on transitions for children with special educational needs and
I agree that transitions are the most difficult time. The transitions
within secondary are particularly difficult, especially when you
take account of child development. I know we keep banging on about
that, but it is really important, because there is normal and
then there is what is out of the ordinary and what we should worry
about. I would say that they have not been around sufficiently
long to be able to look at them.
Q19 Charlotte Leslie: When tackling
that gulf—from the nest to the jungle, to put it simply—from
primary to secondary, does the panel think that the structural
change of putting primary and secondary schools together for an
all-through school might alleviate some behaviour and attendance
difficulties?
Professor Maras: I think the transition
isn't just physical; the style of teaching is very different.
I can't cite evidence. David might have some.
David Moore: No. The point is
about the change from being with one teacher and a number of other
adults in the room all day, to having to switch to the foibles
of up to six adults. That is what makes it difficult.
Professor Maras: I have seen some
very good work locally in London—in Bromley—on transitions
for children who would find it particularly difficult. There are
some excellent case studies of transitions between primary and
secondary, including following the bus in a car, all the stuff—the
different things—that you encounter. That was aimed at children
who find that transition particularly difficult, who will be deemed
likely to have some kind of behaviour difficulties.
Q20 Charlotte Leslie: Another
thing also interested me. A while ago I did some rudimentary work
on children who fall out of the system altogether. I had an estimate
of about 7,000 per year who go missing. Do you think the current
idea of excluding from school—and in a sense from education—is
contributory to that problem of invisible children? How do you
think we can solve it, or is it inevitable?
Professor Parsons: Can I say it
does contribute? The number who disappear from education is much
greater than those who experience permanent exclusion. It is easier
for a parent just to remove their child, kid the system that it
is home-educating, say, "She's gone to live with her dad
in Leicester," and so on. We need much better tracking of
these children.
Q21 Charlotte Leslie: Finally,
there are two ideologies—I am always a bit worried about
ideologies—zero tolerance and zero exclusion. Is one of
those ideologies wrong or can and how should they work together?
Professor Parsons: There are 17
local authorities in the country that operate zero exclusion.
There are clusters of schools that use zero exclusion. There is
also zero tolerance of disruptive behaviour. There is zero tolerance
of neglect of needy individuals. I don't see the clash. I leave
it with a plea: places are doing it, places are managing, and
they are designing their systems to accommodate all but without
the damaging, punitive, rejecting experience of exclusion.
Professor Maras: Then we have
an overriding ideology of doing the best for young people in their
school, making sure they are stimulated. The other bit is probably
a result of that I would imagine.
Charlotte Leslie: I am going to annoy
the Chairman and come in with one final thing.
Chair: No, I don't think you are actually,
Charlotte. There really isn't the time. I'm terribly sorry. I
am going to cut you off and bring in Lisa on special educational
needs.
Q22 Lisa Nandy: We have received
two types of written evidence about children with special educational
need. On the one hand, it seems that SEN classifications are being
used to cover up schools' own failings. Some of you have touched
on that. On the other hand, we have been told that there are children
with special educational needs—often factors such as autism—who
are overlooked and seen purely as having behavioural problems,
rather than the serious issues they are. Which of those views
is correct and what can be done about it?
Tom Burkard: I think that you
have to bear in mind that there is a spectrum of problems. I would
not, for a moment, doubt that there are some children who, for
the lack of a better word, are psychopaths and are extremely difficult
to contain, even with the most highly skilled professional help.
On the other hand, of the approximately 18 to 20% of children
who get labelled as special needs, probably only 3 or 4% of those
actually have the problems that are predominantly or individually
part of the child, as opposed to the school environment. In other
words, there are 3 or 4% of the children who would have difficulty
no matter how good their educational environment is.
Q23 Lisa Nandy:
I suppose I am really interested in what the solution to that
is. I do not think that those two things necessarily conflict.
It may well be that both are happening concurrently, but what
can be done to deal with that?
Kate Fallon: Both are potentially
true, depending on what your approach is. We may have to get away—and
some would say, controversially—from the term special educational
needs, and actually start looking at what the individual needs
of the individual children who are coming into our schools are.
You are right; some children with autism are perceived as children
with behavioural difficulties. Having said that, if the manifestations
of their autism are behaviours that are disrupting the learning
of others, it is about managing their behaviour, as well as improving
some of their particular skills and teaching them to manage their
behaviour in a classroom situation so that it does not affect
other children. Boringly, I would go back to those points I was
making at the beginning about what the needs of children are.
We can have children who have particular inherent difficulties—if
you like, some cognitive difficulties—or difficulties that
they have brought into school because of environmental factors.
It is about saying, "Okay, here is this child, what are their
strengths, challenges and difficulties? How can we make sure that
the classroom environment, school environment and wider environment
are best suited to help that child grow, develop and learn within
this setting?" I will stop there, and keep my answer short.
Professor Maras: Schools find
it very difficult to interpret SEN policies in relation to behaviour,
because, of course, behaviour is also dealt with through disciplinary
action and, unless you have a label of ADHD, or autism, or Asperger's,
or one of the spectrums, that is also difficult for parents. I
absolutely agree with what Kate said. There is, however, an issue
about the label of SEN and the way it has been conceptualised.
Chair: Thank you all very much indeed
for giving evidence this morning.
Witnesses: Christine
Blower, General Secretary, National Union
of Teachers, Dr Mary Bousted, General Secretary, Association
of Teachers and Lecturers, Dr Patrick Roach, Deputy General
Secretary, NASUWT, and Ian Toone, Senior Professional Officer
(Education), Voice the Union, gave evidence.
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