CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 516-ii

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

EDUCATION COMMITTEE

BEHAVIOUR AND DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOLS

WEDNESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2010

SIR ALAN STEER

SUE BAINBRIDGE

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in private and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course.

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education Committee

on Wednesday 20 October 2010

Members present:

Mr Graham Stuart (Chair)

Nic Dakin

Pat Glass

Damian Hinds

Charlotte Leslie

Ian Mearns

Tessa Munt

Craig Whittaker

Examination of Witness

Witness: Sir Alan Steer, Chair of the 2005 Practitioners’ Group on School Behaviour and Discipline, gave evidence.

Q57 Chair: Good morning, Sir Alan. Thank you very much for joining us today to give evidence to our behaviour and discipline inquiry. Are you happy for us to call you Alan?

Sir Alan Steer: As you wish. I am entirely happy and very relaxed.

Q58 Chair: Excellent. In your last report for the previous Government for whom you were obviously the "behaviour tsar"-

Sir Alan Steer: I am not quite so happy to be called that.

Q59 Chair: You were a highly distinguished adviser to the last Government. You suggested that, generally speaking, from a behaviour and discipline point of view, things were getting better. Will you tell us whether you stick by that and give us evidence for your decision?

Sir Alan Steer: I think that I do stick by that. I know that the topic is right at the centre of discussion. There was a range of conflicting evidence, which I put in my report. You will see that in the section on reality etc. My judgment puts a lot of emphasis on Ofsted. One has to have very, very strong grounds for disregarding Ofsted evidence. If you are going to say that the national inspection service, which goes into large numbers of school and focuses on this topic has got it wrong, you must have good grounds to say that-and I haven’t got those good grounds.

I also think that there is other supporting evidence. I wrote in my report about a survey that I think the NUT did in 2007 when members reported that circumstances had improved since the last survey in 2001. In an interesting report by Brian Apter in 2008 on primary education he, too, commented on that.

The difficulty when I make those comments is that the audience often feels, "Ah, you are saying, Alan, that there is not a problem." I have never said that. I would hardly have spent five years-much of it on a voluntary basis-working on this topic if I did not think that there was a problem. I think that our analysis of the situation is often poor and, because our analysis is poor, we then do not hit the bull’s-eye in terms of the actions we want to take. So most schools, as I think Dr Patrick Roach said last week, and you do want to feel that if the NAS, who’ve made a big point about behaviour and discipline are actually saying that in most schools and for most teachers the standards are good, that has a weight. It has been quite a major plank of NAS policy over recent years and I think that’s true and I stand by it.

In some schools, there are significant problems. In other schools, you have problems with some teachers for some periods. We need to have that at the front of our minds when we are looking for solutions. One of the big issues that we do not talk sufficiently about in this country’s education system is the variation. We have superb schools and superb practice. What we have not cracked yet is the consistency within and between schools. It is not that we do not have good practice and excellent school systems, but we do not sufficiently yet have it everywhere.

Q60 Chair: Yes. You said in your report that no school policy is of any value if it is not understood and applied consistently by all staff. That is quite a stark statement. People tend to talk about good schools and bad schools or less good schools, and they tend to talk very much about the institution. If you read an Ofsted report, it is always talking about "the school". Are you saying that there is insufficient focus on individual practitioners and on ensuring that consistency in performance is managed, and indeed perhaps inspected, within institutions?

Sir Alan Steer: That is an interesting question. Consistency is an absolutely essential point. There is a danger when one talks about consistency. Sometimes when I am doing a conference, to wake the audience up I will say, "We ought to think of consistency as a sexy word", because in fact it is a slightly dull word. It does not exactly excite, particularly early in the morning. But it is actually very sexy. Consistency is what makes the difference. We know that. Research indicates, and we know it in our bones and from our experience, that particularly with vulnerable children who are finding life difficult, a consistent approach over a period of time makes a huge difference. To put it crudely, children from my family could cope with a mixed experience. They have very strong parental support, interests and all the sort of things that you would say of your own children, too. Vulnerable children do not have those strengths. Really high quality classroom experience is, in my book, one of the biggest equal opportunities issues that you could ever find, because those are the children who are the most vulnerable if they get a weak experience. It is the biggest way in which to raise that standard.

Q61 Chair: Do you think that the most vulnerable children are more likely to be subjected to poor classroom practice? Do you have any evidence for that?

Sir Alan Steer: That point is worth unpicking. You talked last week about setting and how you arrange children. I am a setting man; I am not a streaming man, and you can pick up that point with me later. I would have resigned on the spot if there had been a move to have streaming in my school. I taught at a school that had streaming in the 1970s and regarded it as an absolute abomination. I am very much a setting man. The issue with that is that simple arrangements, as David Moore said last week, can often mask the issue. The question is, does it work and how do you do it? If you are setting with the result that all of your best teachers are teaching the most able children and all your least experienced teachers, or the ones who you have just appointed, are teaching the least able children, the answer to your question could be yes. It is a question of how you approach that and where you devote your resources, which reflects the moral ethos and principles of the school.

You asked me just now whether I thought there was too much of a focus on schools and not enough on children. I do think that.

Q62 Chair: My question was whether there was too much emphasis on the institution and not enough on the individual practitioners within it. By practitioners I meant the teachers. You said that it was about consistency not only between schools but within schools.

Sir Alan Steer: I come from a position, so that members of the Committee know, of being very sympathetic towards schools. You will probably say, "Well, he would, wouldn’t he?". I see schools as providing solutions to society’s problems and rarely causing them. You will think of some examples in which that would not be true, and I accept that. In any organisation, you will find some situations in which the school causes the problem. That is not usual. Schools generally solve society’s problems, and they jolly well ought to; that is what they are there for. We should have the highest expectations that they do.

My feeling, as a head teacher and subsequently, has been that schools are not always the sum of their parts. In other words, it is not that teachers are lacking in motivation, commitment or skills. If you don’t pull people together into a cohesive unit, it can be very frustrating and leave the teacher discontented because they are not getting the outcomes from their efforts that they ought to get. That can also lead to ineffectiveness.

As a secondary head teacher, I find that that can be particularly true at moments of transition-for instance, the early years of secondary school. Those of us who have children have experienced this. A child from a primary school has had one teacher, or not much more than that, and they come into a secondary school where they have perhaps 11. Unless you manage that carefully, and you have everyone singing from the same song sheet-or whatever language you want to use-it can become a magical mystery tour for children. Those who are less motivated because of their home background or difficulties with language learning, or whatever the reasons might be, are much more likely to fall off the achievement ladder. We need to focus on individual skills, and ensure that we are the sum of our parts. That is one of the challenges for the schools system.

Q63 Chair: You didn’t answer my question. I asked whether you had any evidence that the more vulnerable children are more likely to receive poorer teaching. You said that it could happen, and if it did it reflected on the ethos. You didn’t tell us whether it was happening.

Sir Alan Steer: I don’t think that I could say that. I can only speculate. Later on, I would very much like to raise with you the issue of alternative provision.

Q64 Chair: We will indeed come to that. You have no evidence to suggest that more vulnerable children are subject to worse teaching?

Sir Alan Steer: No, that would be putting it far too strongly.

Q65 Chair: You were talking about individual schools and teachers. Ofsted is now saying that it is going to focus its efforts more on lower performing schools, which would again suggest an institutional bias-that it is all about the institution, and whether it is poor-and will not be inspecting higher performing schools. You said that one of the issues within schools, even in better or higher performing ones, is that there may be practice that needs to be challenged. Is there a danger that Ofsted’s new lighter touch approach will make it less likely that underperforming teachers or underperforming practice will be challenged?

Sir Alan Steer: As you may know, I am on the board of Ofsted, so I probably ought to declare that before I answer the question.

Ofsted acts as it is required to do by government. We need to say that right from the start. I, personally, am a supporter of inspection and I would not be reducing the amount of inspection of schools. We should see inspection far more as an agent for change and school improvement than we tend to. Schools-I, too, I probably would have to admit-do not leap with joy when a brown envelope comes through the letterbox saying that they are going to be inspected. But, as a head teacher in the period before Ofsted, who witnessed the lack of external accountability, I have always been a total supporter of Ofsted. We should see the impact of Ofsted as it is-as a major focus for school improvement. The answer to your question is that I would not have gone in the direction that Ofsted has been instructed to take. I would have maintained much more of an Ofsted inspection system for all schools.

Q66 Chair: Right. That could have an impact on behaviour as a result.

Sir Alan Steer: I don’t understand how one can judge on day one that a school is outstanding and just does not need to be inspected. I would argue that, if you really buy into the culture of school improvement, that is negative to that. There is no organisation in the world that is not capable of further improvement and does not need external scrutiny. The danger for schools, and for other organisations that you may be familiar with, is that you get enclosed-you begin to feel that what you do is the only way it can be done. You need external challenge and, to me, that is Ofsted.

Chair: Thank you very much. I hand over to Damian to continue the questioning.

Q67 Damian Hinds: Everything you say in your ’09 report about the primacy of the quality of teaching, and everything you have said today about the variability you can get within a single school, certainly chimes with me from my childhood. I guess it would with most people, and intuitively it is correct.

I wanted to ask about other factors, which we have not heard so much about in our evidence sessions, although some of them came up once or twice in a visit we did yesterday. The first is about what I would call standards of behaviour. These are the sort of things that you often hear teachers who have taught, or do teach, in very successful schools talking about-the role of uniform, the role of zero tolerance of litter, graffiti or general deterioration, rules on what happens when a teacher walks into a room and how names are used, and how strictly those rules are applied. Could you comment on that area first?

Sir Alan Steer: It is absolutely essential in a school that you have a very clear statement of values and practice. I imagine that you might want to ask me about leadership, because in a sense I am heading into that. One of the key roles of school leaders is to set the tone-the ethos-of the school. I see children not as unruly, and all the rest of it; actually, I quite like them, and I also see schoolchildren as conformist, which they are. The sadness, often, is that children want to be proud of their school; they want all the things that we want for them. When it does not happen-this really rocks one as a teacher or an educational person-the word "disappointment" is used. Children should not be disappointed. So, I absolutely agree with you. We had a school uniform-we imposed it but I did not send children home, as that seemed to be silly. If you imposed it properly, you took children with you, and you had a school uniform that was not silly and did not make them embarrassed.

Q68 Damian Hinds: What counts as silly for a school uniform?

Sir Alan Steer: I shouldn’t have said that because I can’t think of an example. Well, I was a creature of the ’60s and I had to wear a cap when I was going back and forth on the bus. The girls I knew had to wear straw boaters and those silly felt things. I think they felt very silly and they were very pleased when they didn’t have to do so.

Q69 Damian Hinds: But, for example, a tie and a blazer?

Sir Alan Steer: Absolutely. A tie and a blazer, but without it looking like a Henley regatta is what I had in mind. It should be something that you can buy reasonably cheaply-schools have to be reasonable with their parent body-and something that won’t stand out like a Belisha beacon.

Q70 Damian Hinds: Sure. And rudimentary use of names?

Sir Alan Steer: Absolutely. Sometimes it doesn’t matter about particular things-often they suit the circumstances-but classroom management was an obsession of mine as a head teacher. I can give an example-I hope I’m not getting off the point-between primary and secondary transition. In my opinion, in the secondary sector we do not put enough importance on basic issues of classroom management. When you visit a primary school and ask a teacher, "Are the children allowed to sit where they like in the classroom?", they look at you as though you’re being slightly rude, because of course they’re not. Any primary teacher manages their classroom. In large numbers of secondary schools, that is dropped at the age of 11, and it’s dropped without thinking.

I remember hearing David Reynolds talking two years ago. He said that the single most effective thing you can do to improve behaviour standards in secondary schools is to have a good classroom seating policy. That’s what we did. You then as the leader have to follow that through. Why? Just to be awkward? No. If you don’t, you have sub-climates in the classroom. It is really interesting-I hope I’m making it interesting for you. When you see a classroom, you can see it is rowdy or quiet. If you a look a bit deeper, you will find sub-climates. You will find, for instance, that when a class is quiet, a group of children-let us stereotype and say that it is boys at the back-are not participating and they’re being left quietly to amuse themselves. They are not going to annoy the teacher and the teacher is not going to annoy them. You don’t want that, so you arrange your classroom for learning purposes-you should do everything in the classroom for learning purposes-but you are also making a very clear statement to the children that the teacher is in charge of that classroom. It’s not to be authoritarian-someone used that expression last week-but to be authoritative. There is a huge difference. You exercise authority and children respond to it. I am very self-conscious about coming across as simplistic, but it is an article of faith that we know what works. The issue is that we do not do it consistently. Pursuing endless-forgive me-education Bills or new policies or anything else is often an avoidance tactic. We know what works. We just don’t do it.

Q71 Damian Hinds: The second of the three groups that I want to ask about is what I call school community factors, and in particular the difference between schools that have regular assemblies and those that don’t. I want to know what happens at lunchtime-whether everyone sits down and has lunch or whether there is general mayhem. There is also the size of the school and whether it is possible for teachers to know every pupil and to walk around without security identification badges.

Finally, I want to touch on something that you mentioned a moment ago-streaming versus setting, although I would frame it slightly differently-in terms of class size and whether classes stay together. You could stay together as a class either by being streamed or by being a mixed ability class, but not by being setted. Can you comment on those?

Sir Alan Steer: Tell me if I miss any of those. It is a challenge in a big school-in my school there were 1,500. Could I recognise every child? The answer would probably be no. Would they be able to recognise me? The answer would definitely be yes. I keep going back to leadership. It is a key role for school leaders-sorry for the jargon-to walk the walk. For example, for 23 years I and my deputies welcomed children at the school gate. Rain, snow or sunshine, you’re there at the school gate. Part of it was discipline originally. You wanted to set the ethos, but it rapidly became less of an issue. It was actually setting the tone. You’re welcoming kids in. You’re making them laugh about how West Ham got on or whatever else it might be.

School facilities don’t always allow for the sort of things you implied. The image of everyone sitting down at lunchtime is not so, and the same with assemblies. Most schools have to work around some system.

Q72 Damian Hinds: You can have year group assemblies.

Sir Alan Steer: Quite right. But if you are asking whether we use those measures as a means of setting the school identity, the answer is very much so. Absolutely so. The eating matter is interesting. I came to that quite late in my career, when I realised what a rubbish experience we were providing. It was not that kids were creating mayhem-that is not always the alternative-but we were not treating the children with the respect that we demanded from them. We invested a large sum of money in turning a grotty old canteen into a proper restaurant. We did not allow children off the school site at lunch time-no child was allowed off the site. Was that because they were creating mayhem? No, but lunch time was part of the school experience. Also, we did not want to expose them to risks. In an okay urban area there are risks in the neighbourhood, such as traffic, and other things. It is about imposing a school culture.

In all things that we do in schools, we have to recognise that if you leave a vacuum, it is filled. The skill is in being authoritative, not authoritarian-not being the petty despot, which is silly. You want children to grow, to be creative and to explore their own personalities. If you leave a vacuum-in moral terms, or if there is no ethos-it may be filled by things that you do not want. That is particularly true in difficult, challenging areas. I referred to children as being conformist-they will conform to things that we do not like if we do not present alternatives. If your status is about conforming to negative groups outside the school, you will conform. We then have a job in challenging that and presenting alternative models of behaviour and conformity.

Q73 Damian Hinds: And on classes staying together versus being split?

Sir Alan Steer: I described streaming as an abomination. Perhaps I sometimes get trapped into using over-the-top language, but I regarded it as such because children never moved. In the years that I worked at that school I could not remember a child ever moving stream, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Children were placed in a stream on the basis of quite dodgy analysis and evidence and they never moved.

It is also true that streaming does not recognise that children will have all sorts of different talents. A setting arrangement allows for different abilities in different subjects, which is perfectly possible. A child who is good at maths is in the right set for that, or they might be good in French or something else.

Q74Damian Hinds: But what about from a discipline point of view? I am trying to isolate whether the factor of a class staying together or not makes a difference.

Sir Alan Steer: I do not think that that is the issue. I go back to what I said: if you get the learning and the learning culture right, the discipline follows, which I think was shown by the evidence that you received last week. It is so obvious that you feel it is almost too simplistic, but it is true: if children are engaged, and if they understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, they are far less likely to play up. All of us around this table can think back to our own school days, when we either participated in or witnessed low-level disruption. I would be surprised if we could not remember instances of that. We know that, from our own experience, we did not do that with all teachers; we would do it with some and not others. You could probably analyse why that was so.

The classroom experience is paramount. But I want to say before I am judged by outsiders-as well as you-as being too simplistic, that that applies to the majority of the discipline issues that we have in schools, which involve low-level disruption. Low level does not mean unimportant; it means things like cheek, talking and being silly.

There are other discipline issues, which are different. As you know, and as Elton said 20-odd years ago, this is a highly complex issue. The trouble with discussing behaviour is that people sometimes arrive with a fixed view in their minds and it is more complex than that. We must ask, what are we talking about?

Chair: Let Charlotte come in quickly and then we will come back to that.

Q75 Charlotte Leslie: Thank you very much for coming to see us. I was struck by what you said about being simplistic. I wonder whether sometimes it is not a question of being too simplistic, but that the answer is quite simple and what is not simple is doing it. It reminds me of Tolstoy saying that every happy family is happy in the same way, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way. It seems to be the same with schools-successful behaviour in every school is good in the same way. From my amateur point of view, I think that there are things that always work: kids standing up when you come into the classroom, and certain forms of teaching. You could write a list of things that work.

It strikes me that in medicine, if an operation is performed in a way that works, that is the way you do it, and every single hospital and every single surgeon does it in that way. I remain perplexed as to why, if we have a list of things that work, such as ways in which children learn, we are still talking about the abstract methods of delivery of various things. We are not just saying, "Here is a list of things. Let’s get them right-let’s just do it." I know it is simplistic.

Sir Alan Steer: I am not going to agree with all the examples you gave, but I agree with the thrust of what you are saying. I think that your comparison with medicine is interesting, because I do not think we would have said that was true 30 years ago. One thing that has happened in health is that there has been more of a challenge about professional individuality. The case of the Bristol heart babies is one that comes to mind. I have two sons in the medical profession, so I see it from their point of view too.

You gave the example of children standing up when you come into the classroom. We did not do that, partly because we would see it as sometimes disruptive. If I were going into a classroom and the class was engaged in a really good experience with the teacher, I would not actually want to break that up by everybody leaping to their feet. Different examples are appropriate. I absolutely agree with the thrust of what you are saying. It is not that teachers are not committed, or that they do not work hard, but we do not always get the sum of our parts. I am being repetitive.

I have brought in one or two things that may or may not be of interest to Committee members. This booklet is a learning and teaching policy from my school. Over recent years, under both Conservative and Labour Governments, schools have been required to have policies on everything under the sun. If the head teacher piled them up, they would be higher than the level of this desk. I find it amazing that the one thing schools are not required to have is a policy on the sole purpose for which they are built, which is learning and teaching. I argued very strongly in here that we should review the policy requirements for schools because, as I have said, if everything is a target nothing is a target.

Q76 Chair: Could you read out the title of the document for Hansard?

Sir Alan Steer: I beg your pardon; it is "Learning and Teaching". It is the learning and teaching policy, and I am happy to give it to you.

Q77 Chair: From which school?

Sir Alan Steer: From my old school, which is Seven Kings high school.

Q78 Charlotte Leslie: Sorry to interrupt, but it strikes me that it all seems terribly morally relative. People talk about the importance of a school having values, but no-one actually says, "These are the values a school should have and this is how it should be delivered."

Sir Alan Steer: I do not think that schools are like that. Good schools are absolutely up front with moral values. Again, I am going to sound very soft on children, but children are actually very moral. I get very cross at the demonisation of youngsters, and for every child who appears in the media doing something ghastly we do not think of the hundred who are sole carers for their family at home, or those who are doing the Princess Diana awards or voluntary activity in their community. So children are highly moral, they need leadership, and they need that expression. Schools do not just have to say it-I think most do-they have to do it.

When the practitioners’ group did the first report, back in 2005, we were very keen that it was based on what we called core values. We had six of them, and I will not read them out again, but one was related to the word "respect", which was very much the word of the year in 2005. It seemed to come up in everything. It said that respect had to go two ways, and none of us would disagree with that. What is interesting is to say, "What does it look like?", which is an expression that we should use constantly as policy makers, either as head teachers or as the Government.

When you talk about respect, the instinctive reaction from the audience is to see it as children being respectful to teachers. What does it look like if you are a child? My son’s English homework from his first day at school-it was a lovely comprehensive school with good academic results, and with a nice white shirt, good uniform and everything else-took two and a half hours, because he wanted to do it well, and was marked in the middle of November. How is that respect? How is that teaching children anything other than bad behaviour?

We need someone to ask, "What does respect look like, and how does it work?" How do we respect parents? We command respect from parents, but are we actually respecting parents? I did not agree-I am going to be controversial here-with the proposal that parents were not required to have 24 hours’ notice of detention. I think that is disrespectful. I think that the requirement that they did have notice came in under the previous Conservative Government, in 1996. It is not an issue-I have never heard anybody complain about the 24 hours’ notice requirement. It is really Don Quixote politics to me-a problem doesn’t exist, but you charge at it. Why do it? It is disrespectful. You do not teach good behaviour by behaving badly. You teach good behaviour by people seeing you behave well and doing it every moment of the day-today, tomorrow, next week, next year. When you don’t, you undermine a huge amount of what you have achieved.

Chair: Thank you very much. On the subject of leadership, I will come over to Nic.

Q79 Nic Dakin: You said earlier that we know what works, but that we just don’t do it. You have just said that we want to know what it looks like. On leadership, what is good leadership-I think you have said a few things on that-and how do we get that consistency across the whole of the country?

Sir Alan Steer: We mentioned a number of things about good leadership: setting a tone, certainly, and acting as a whole, so that you get the sum of the parts, as I was saying, so that you don’t get disparate experiences, which can so often happen. What does it look like in terms of classroom practice? Do children understand, when they are working, what they have got to do in order to meet teachers’ ambitions? When you say that to an audience of perhaps our age range, you generally get a nod from people that they didn’t. I went through a highly academic direct grant grammar school education and spent seven years without anybody ever saying to me, "Alan, if you’d done this differently, you would have got that, not that." Yet it is so obvious that it is almost not worth saying.

As a young head teacher, you make mistakes. I can remember leaping around as a young head master saying, "Expectations are all." I would probably still stick to that, to a degree. But equally, it is a stupid expression. What is the point of having expectations if the recipients do not know how to meet them? Whether they are adults or children, you need to go to the next layer down. I have described children having a magical mystery tour, which children often do. If we don’t actually clearly explain, so that when the work comes back they understand what it was that caused them to get grade A, or whatever it may be, how are they going to improve in the future? So you engage with children, teach in such a way and have an atmosphere in the school that is orientated towards children’s progress. We didn’t always have that. The ’70s was not a golden age of educational progress; it was an age when, in fact, there was far too little focus, in my book, on learning and children. There was too much focus on organisation and control, and very often not very effective control. So I am much more of an optimist about the education system than I ever am a pessimist.

Why I brought that booklet in-you are welcome to have a copy, if it is of any interest to the Committee-is that it is a "must do" document. We identified core things that we said must happen in all lessons. Now, that can be controversial. People say, "Alan, you’re challenging individual professionalism." Yes, I am. I would argue that we need to move from individual professionalism to a concept of collegiate professionalism, which is much more powerful and much more supportive for teachers. People such as Patrick Roach and others rightly get upset when they think that there isn’t a communal support for their members in what they are doing, and that people are left on their own.

Q80 Nic Dakin: So do you think that there is not sufficient investment in training teachers in behaviour management?

Sir Alan Steer: I didn’t answer your question on that, did I? I put a recommendation in here. I think teacher training-

Chair: Can I push you?

Sir Alan Steer: To get a move on?

Chair: Sorry if I’m being unfair. As briefly as you can manage.

Sir Alan Steer: I put as a recommendation that we should look at initial teacher training and that we should always do that. It should never be static. We should always be looking at it and tweaking it, but we must be realistic. We have a got a system where, for secondary-trained teachers-I think I am correct-two thirds of their time is spent in school. So the amount of time in a one-year training course that is actually based in the initial teacher training institution is pretty small. I think in primary it is 50%. In my opinion, it is the right issue to raise, but it misses the bull’s-eye. We need to look at training over an initial period of time. You train as your experience develops. We need in schools to focus much more on how we develop people not just over that first year, which generally schools do okay, but over subsequent years.

Something which you asked me and I did not answer is this: it is absolute nonsense to say that we are going to transform our educational system by looking at initial teacher training. You can train somebody brilliantly, but if they go into an environment that is not receptive to their skills, what will their skill level be after three years? If, like me, they have to wait 15 years to become a head teacher, it’s not going to be transformed quickly. It strikes me as absolute nonsense-I know that I have used that expression already-that somebody like me could be a head teacher for 23 years without any requirement to undergo training. That is not professional. I know we have things like NPQH now, but once you become a head teacher, where is the requirement to maintain your skill level? It depends on individual desire, and that is not good enough.

Q81 Nic Dakin: May I pick up one other area of leadership? You gave the example of the school restaurant in relation to buildings. Is there any evidence that leadership and building design has an impact on student behaviour?

Sir Alan Steer: There is. I think it is-I’m tempted to use the word "flaky". When we did our report in 2005, we were extremely strong on the school environment and the impact of that. It is one of those things where you know in your heart that it is a truth, and it is depressing when you sometimes visit places where children are in uninspiring surroundings. We know ourselves how our behaviour alters according to circumstances. We have only just finished a report, and a piece of work came out of Newcastle university which drew a link between children’s progress and the physical environment. I don’t think there has been anything like enough research on that connection. If you ask me what I believe, I absolutely believe that if you put children in pleasant surroundings you get a better response.

Q82 Nic Dakin: That is a belief rather than evidence.

Sir Alan Steer: There is some evidence, but it is not a topic on which sufficient work has been done. My view is that there is a connection between behaviour and the physical environment that children go into. I think that school organisation follows on from that line of thought, not just the physical environment, but how you use it.

Q83 Craig Whittaker: Just a quick question. You said that you had not had any training for 23 years as a head teacher, albeit that there is provision now. In schools where there are good examples or good leadership teams, how good are they at disseminating good practice out to poor performing schools within the community?

Sir Alan Steer: I didn’t say I hadn’t; I said that I hadn’t been required to-I did undergo training, but it was off my own bat. It varies, like so much in our system. You get wonderful examples. I visited a group of schools in east Leeds 18 months ago, where the most stunning work was being done on a collaborative basis between schools led by an inspiring head teacher. He was the catalyst that got that going. It was very impressive.

One of my concerns about policy direction is over this issue of getting the autonomy balance right. I need to be quick here before I’m judged as a conservative in this respect. I was a head teacher from the generation who worked on the development of local management of schools. I would no more want to go back to a pre-autonomy world than fly in the air, but it seems to me that we have not yet done sufficient thinking about what autonomy looks like and what the context for it is.

You would be horrified if I said to you that the best way to teach was to go into a classroom and tell children that there was to be little central direction and that they had full autonomy. I think my credibility would go through the floor. Why is that different with our schools? We need to have baselines. This policy is a baseline document. As a head, you are an idiot if you get your baselines too high, because you take away individual flexibility and creativity. Having no baselines at all is daft and can lead to anarchy.

To go back to your question, in this report I had a recommendation that all schools should be members of behaviour and attendance partnerships and that everybody should because to me it empowers the front line. When I worked on the children’s plan, we were extremely strong on services being in the control of the school. As a head teacher I would have loved to have had access to a psychiatric social worker-somebody with the skills that I did not have and with which I was not confident. I couldn’t have occupied such a person full time-it would have been ridiculous. Working with another secondary school and, perhaps, our four partner primary schools would have been fantastic, and we could have done that.

For the primary sector in particular, so much policy from the centre-if you will forgive me-always has a secondary image in it. We are not thinking sufficiently when we talk about things such as school autonomy. What does that look like in the one-form entry Hertfordshire primary school where my wife is a governor with 200 children? It looks very different from a 1,500 secondary school with all its structures and strength. I absolutely support the autonomy concept, but I think that you would have far more effective autonomy with schools working collectively in groups without losing that creativity of individuality.

Look at the academy chains, which are really interesting. I attended a conference organised by the current Ministers last December and listened to one of the academy chief executives talk about what was standard in all the academy schools. It was very impressive and excellent practice. A wicked thought went through my mind that, as an academy head, I would have less autonomy than I had as a community comprehensive head. It is a very good brand. To me, this is the future: empower the front line, absolutely, and be radical-that’s where the skills are-but schools need to work collaboratively in order to share training and resources, and to have the continual challenge that Ofsted provides once however many years.

Q84 Chair: May I push you on the issue of governance? Somebody recently said that you wouldn’t have a board for every little electricity sub-station; you have a central board so that you have strategic governance throughout the organisation, and then you have local information groups. Have we got governance wrong? We struggle to find enough great leaders for our schools. Is it even more impossible to find fantastic sets of governors who can provide the strategic challenge? Do we need more of what the academy chains have, namely a board that sets standards across a number of institutions?

Sir Alan Steer: That is a difficult to get into, and one that I don’t particularly want to get into, because I don’t know the answer. I would be tempted to leave it alone, because I don’t think that is a key change agent for driving a situation forward.

Q85 Chair: You don’t think that governance is important to the way in which schools are run?

Sir Alan Steer: No, I didn’t say that. I said that transforming the governance system may not be a key change aid. Of course governors are important to how the schools are run, but the absolutely key thing is the school leader. Volunteers and governors do an incredibly valuable job, and we should be hugely grateful to them, but they cannot and should not replace the leadership of the school leader. Their job is to make sure that the school leader leads, not to replace the school leader. It would not be a prime objective of mine to transform the nation’s governance system. I would be much more interested in Craig’s question.

Q86 Chair: A bit of small "c" conservatism from you there, Sir Alan.

Sir Alan Steer: There is no small "c" conservatism-I am a radical, Mr Stuart!

Chair: With a capital "R"! We may try to challenge others to have provision to look at improvements to governance.

Q87 Ian Mearns: Good morning, Sir Alan. As a school governor myself, I have been around long enough to remember the time before school exclusion appeals panels at governor level and at authority level. I remember some bad experiences as a relatively new school governor in the ’80s, when head teachers would sit in on an exclusion hearing with the parents and the child. The parents and the child would then retire and the head teacher would revisit the whole issue with the governors, who would then make a decision. That seemed to me to be very much against the rules of natural justice, inasmuch as the person who was prosecuting the exclusion did it all over again while the governors made their decision. I wrote to my LEA at the time and we got some clear guidance from it on how to manage these things, and that was set up very much like discipline appeals panels and so on within the local authority’s human resources framework.

I understand that the larger of the coalition parties, prior to coming to power, had a policy to abolish recourse to independent appeals panels for children who have been excluded. I understand that that is still the policy. How do you feel about that, given that the levels of support for children who are exhibiting problematic behaviour can vary dramatically between schools and given that the capacity within schools to work effectively with children who have difficult behaviour problems can also vary dramatically? If we do not have that recourse to an independent appeals panel, is it not the case that we could potentially have a race to the bottom for some youngsters.

Sir Alan Steer: I do not approve of the proposal to abolish independent appeal panels, and I have been very clear on that both in my reports and in other statements. In saying that, I am expressing the view of both, as I understand it, of the professional associations of head teachers. I agree with you; I think that it is wrong. You are speaking to somebody who sometimes had to sit in appeals panels-it is not a nice experience; it is actually very stressful. It is morally wrong to have a decision made by the state about an individual without having the right of appeal. That seems to me to be quite contrary to our traditions. I hope that there will be a rethink on that, and that people will see it differently.

On a practical basis, and I think that this view is shared by the head teacher associations, there is the risk that you will turn this into much more of a legal, judicial problem and that those head teachers-I do not think that most actually think this-who say, "Oh good, we won’t have an independent appeals panel", will learn to regret that when they find themselves being taken to the courts. I do not support that; I think that it is wrong. Schools and organisations need to model good behaviour if they expect good behaviour. Taking away the right to appeal is not good behaviour.

Q88 Ian Mearns: As a chair of governors myself until recently, I have had to go along to education appeals panels to defend the school’s position, having made the ultimate decision to exclude a pupil myself. I have to say that you are right-it is not pleasant, but frankly, I think that it is entirely fair.

Sir Alan Steer: The other thing that you could say is that it is also not true that vast numbers of children are being reinstated in schools. I have made recommendations in reports, and I stand by them, that we need to ensure that appeal panels are of quality. There should be a training element and people, where they can, should come from the same sector. We should do everything that we can to ensure that those appeals panels are of a decent quality. My view is that they are absolutely essential and that they are morally right.

Q89 Pat Glass: I agree with you entirely about the ethos and the culture within schools and its effect upon behaviour, but can we look at the impact that the curriculum has on behaviour. We probably have the highest identification levels of SEN in Europe. In terms of behaviour, we tend to lump together disaffected children with those children who have got neurological issues and in some cases mental health issues-autism being a collection of behaviours. Within that identification of SEN, almost the biggest group are the children with behavioural problems. How far does the curriculum impact on that? There is a very strong argument that, in primary particularly, we become far too formal far too soon, and these children are thrown up and are identified as SEN very quickly, when, in fact, changes and flexibilities within the curriculum are all that is needed.

Sir Alan Steer: There are a range of issues within that question. When you mentioned SEN, I did wonder whether you were going to ask about the item that I saw on the BBC website this morning before I set off, which claimed that one in four boys in primaries have SEN.

I worry about our SEN identification, and I have talked about that in the report. I thought that the recent report by Ofsted was excellent. I know that it provoked reaction, but after measured thought people subsequently concluded, "Yup, it hits the button; it is right." We rightly tend to get concerned when schools don’t recognise children’s special needs and don’t respond, as we should. The obvious examples that I have seen are children having hearing aids, hearing difficulties or eyesight problems. It is ludicrous and shouldn’t happen, and generally it doesn’t.

We should be equally concerned about wrong identification of special needs. Schools doing a fantastic job doesn’t mean that we cannot improve. The debate ought not to be about schools failing, which isn’t true, but about how we take school improvement further and whether it has improved faster. That is the intelligent debate. In the area of SEN, we have major work to do. It is not credible that a summer-born child is twice as likely to be on the SEN register as an autumn-born child-that is ludicrous. What does that say about our work?

Q90 Pat Glass: But in a sense, Sir Alan, I am more concerned about the curriculum and how that impacts on throwing off children with SEN and children with behavioural issues.

Sir Alan Steer: I am not going to get deeply into primary curriculum, because it is an area where you need to talk to others who have expertise.

I am hesitating because I am going to say something that will sound very simplistic. I have quite an article of faith that it isn’t always about the content, but how it is taught. All through my professional career, we’ve had brand new ideas about new courses to be offered-this, that and something else-particularly in the secondary sector. I can name, by heart, a dozen of them by all sorts of letters that have come and gone-CPVE and all sorts of things. They do not always address the issue because we don’t address the issue about the means of teaching those courses.

I think there is more flexibility in school curricula, which schools have taken advantage of. It goes back to the issues of leadership and confidence. We don’t have to do things that way. Good, effective school leaders look at what is required and interpret it, and take it in the interest of their children.

That isn’t answering your question; I know that partly because I am not going to go down the path that I don’t feel qualified to go down. I think you need to talk to curriculum experts.

Chair: Okay, thank you.

Q91 Pat Glass: Can I move on quickly then to CAMH services? Certainly, my experience with CAMH services-I am perhaps being more critical-is that there are too few, and the quality is variable. I am particularly critical when children with serious difficulties who don’t turn up to appointments are simply taken off the list. What is your view about CAMH services across the country? Are there too few and is the quality variable? Or is it simply about access?

Sir Alan Steer: I regard that as a balanced and mild viewpoint, as I would be far more critical. I think this hovers around-I don’t want to use intemperate language and question my credibility-a national scandal on the issues of children’s mental health. We have come to this issue quite belatedly. As a young headteacher I found it extremely difficult to get medical acceptance that children had mental health problems. I understood why that was, but when you had extreme cases, it was pretty disastrous.

You are absolutely right in terms of variation. You want centres of excellence, and you have them, but you have other places where it is dire. I was working at a conference last week when I heard the record in terms of the waiting time between a referral and a child getting the appointment. It was a record for me-it may be worse. In this area there were 18 months between referring a child and the child being seen and having an appointment; it is normal for it to be nine months. If that child genuinely has mental illness, that is a scandal. What would we say if we had a child with appendicitis, or some physical illness? We would be absolutely shocked. The variation, nationally, is enormous.

The only way I can answer your question, from the knowledge that I have, which isn’t deeper than that, is that when I do conferences in various parts of the country, I have yet to have people put their hands up and say, "Our CAMH service is great," and that is depressing. It is variations of discontent, and it is generally quite severe.

Q92 Pat Glass: So you agree with me that it isn’t a case of lack of awareness of what’s available, but it is, in many cases, far too few and far too variable?

Sir Alan Steer: That is probably true. Again, I don’t want to be trapped into displaying knowledge I don’t have. I suspect that that’s true. I think it can also be about working practices. I think it’s about being proactive. We haven’t got on to certain things, because there are time limits, but one of the key recommendations in 2005 related to parent support advisers, which then came in. A lot of our thinking was that schools needed to have the capacity to provide support for these sorts of families, because you reacted when I talked about the length of time waiting for an appointment. What used to incense me as a head teacher-a red mist would come over my eyes-is when you would find out, having worked your socks off to get an appointment, that the family hadn’t kept it. It had been lost, and you then had another six months’ delay or whatever it was.

What we wanted, with our parent support workers, was to have the capacity in schools to phone up the night before and say, "Hello, Mrs Steer. Do you remember the appointment tomorrow? Do you want me to come and fetch you and take you down? Are you okay?" I have mentioned psychiatric social workers. You need to have the skills at the front line to be able to give advice and say, "We don’t think that’s a mental health problem." That needs to be championed. I know the people and the buttons to press to get that child rapidly through the system and not hung up in the bureaucracy, which, in education and in health, all too often stops things from happening.

Q93 Chair: Yesterday, we visited New Woodlands school in Lewisham. What is your assessment of the provision for children who are either at risk of exclusion or who have been excluded, and the consistency and quality thereof?

Sir Alan Steer: Again, it is extremely varied. I really wanted you to ask me about alternative provision, and I would have raised it otherwise.

Chair: I try to keep you happy.

Sir Alan Steer: I am very grateful for your concern. Again, in some areas, we have a situation that is hard to describe as anything but scandalous. We have excellent provision in certain places-you may have seen it yesterday. In other parts of the country, we have children who are out of school, receiving as little as one hour a week of home tuition, week after week, month after month.

I am accepting part of the blame for this. I think the blame for this situation is to be shared by the education world, by policymakers and by everybody. If we had the same focus on the well-being of those children, as we have-rightly so-when we are horrified by ill treatment of toddlers, we would see things very differently. I do not have the evidence for this, and this is speculation, but I would bet that some of those 11, 12, 13 and 14-year-olds go into drugs, crime and prostitution. I would be amazed if that wasn’t true. It would be inconceivable that that wasn’t true.

Yet, despite the Education Act 1996 putting a requirement on local authorities to meet the needs of children, as it did, we still have a situation where some children are either getting as little home tuition as that or, in some cases, nothing. That, to me, is a scandal. It is also stupid, because what on earth do we think is happening to those children? What is their impact on society? If we back pick-my language is going-from, say, the prison population, I bet we could trace back a number of those people to that.

Alternative provision actually became quite an emotional and moral issue, and that is from somebody who didn’t know much about it until asked by the Secretary of State to look at it. I put it into my report that national minimum standards should be established-not by me, I don’t have the expertise, but they should be. I would have thought that the most basic one is that there should be a minimum amount of education, training and experience that a child should have in a week. That appears to me to be fairly obvious, and that was accepted in the wash-up, and I am grateful. All parties accepted that, but it seems to have got stuck on the funding issue, on which, I am afraid, I will be very robust and say that some authorities are doing it, which indicates to me that there has been money allocated to it. If others aren’t, it is because they have chosen to spend the money elsewhere, but it is not negotiable. I understand the problem, but it is not negotiable. These children cannot be left on the streets in the way that they are being. It is actually scandalous.

Q94 Chair: Indeed, and left to themselves, as you say, the vacuum will be filled, and they will provide the model alternative to any other child who gets into trouble and is excluded temporarily or for a longer time.

Sir Alan Steer: It is wrong, and it is stupid, which is a combination of things that you definitely don’t want.

Chair: Quickly, Tessa. Then we must bring this part of the sitting to a close.

Q95 Tessa Munt: I am interested in your statement that said, admittedly with an air of frustration, "Schools should solve society’s problems." I want to look at the other part of that deal, which is the parental input. I want to put that in the context that we have very large schools, certainly in the secondary sector, where there are 1,200 to 1,500 pupils. I come from a rural area where travel distances are extreme-easily eight, 10 or 12 miles. There are many distractions where often both parents or carers are working, and they may have other caring responsibilities. My own experience is that parents’ evenings are 10 minutes here, 10 minutes here, and, by the way, you can’t see them because there is not enough time left in the evening. Those happen once a year. I wondered what you thought was the best approach to involving parents and constructing school and parent relationships.

Sir Alan Steer: My starting point is absolutely that parents are responsible for their children; I have made that comment. I was that sort of parent. The idea that the state was going to nationalise my children-under no circumstances. Parental responsibility is paramount. One needs to say that. Teachers sometimes think, "Hang on. The entire responsibility is given over to us. It shouldn’t be; that is not right." What is right is that schools do accept that responsibility, as I said before, to try to solve society’s problems-and generally, I would argue, they are very good at it and often not given credit for it.

On the subject of involvement of parents, you mentioned the example of parents’ evenings. Many schools, slightly under cover, have days when they are open to parents. They are not actually supposed to, because you are not supposed to close the school for that and it would count as unauthorised closure. It actually makes it far easier for parents to come in during the course of the day and have an in-depth conversation with teachers. That is one tactic schools use.

I think schools need to be proactive. I mentioned the parent support advisers. That is a significant development. When I have seen those people in operation, they always seem to me to be members of the local community, so they have a rapport with the parent body. They are not very well paid but they are highly committed and making a big impact. That is something that I hope survives all the issues that we are thinking about today and everything else.

Communication between school and parents is important. Kindliness to parents is important. Earlier I raised the issue of respect and asked what it looks like to a parent. How are you greeted when you approach a school? How are your concerns seen? How accessible are the people that you want to be accessible, accepting that a school must run? What is the quality of the information that you get? When something difficult happens and a school makes a mistake-my school made tonnes of mistakes-you need to be able to phone up and have that difficult conversation, not hide behind things. You need to work constantly. If I’m waffling slightly it’s because it is hard to have an individual thing. You need to practise what you preach in terms of your relations to parents, and you need to do it all the time.

Q96 Tessa Munt: May I ask you a small sub-question? What do you feel about teachers’ e-mail addresses being available to parents?

Sir Alan Steer: I would not have had it.

Q97 Tessa Munt: How accessible do you want staff to be?

Sir Alan Steer: I would not have done that. I might have had it for key people. The world moves on so rapidly in its thinking. In a secondary school, we had a team of highly skilled people. It is a skill, because sometimes parents come into school emotional, upset-all sorts of things like that. I would not have wanted open access. I don’t think that is fair on the parent or the teacher. I would be perfectly happy to have an e-mail contact with key members of staff, but I would have managed the situation; I would not have had open access.

Q98 Chair: Sir Alan, thank you very much. It has been an extremely stimulating session and very useful. Please do stay in touch with the Committee if you have anything you would like to add. We could have talked to you more about children with SEN being eight times more likely to be suspended from school, and about early intervention in speech and language when so many children with communication, speech and language difficulties tend to be seen as troublesome rather than having a need to be addressed. On those issues or others we would be delighted to hear from you again if you wish.

Sir Alan Steer: Would you like these documents? Are they of use to you? There is something on school teaching and learning in class, and a copy of the last report, which I imagine you have. There is also a section on principles and practice.

Chair: Yes, thank you very much.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Sue Bainbridge, Programme Lead for Behaviour and School Partnerships, National Strategies, gave evidence.

Q99 Chair: I am delighted to welcome Sue Bainbridge, the programme lead for behaviour and school partnerships at National Strategies, to the second part of this morning’s session, on the historic day of the comprehensive spending review. Can you talk us through the types of challenging behaviour that teachers encounter in schools and give some examples of how National Strategies is helping to tackle those?

Sue Bainbridge: First, I thought I would very quickly give you an overview of what the National Strategies programme is about, to ensure that we are all starting from the same place. The National Strategies behaviour and attendance programme actually supports all local authorities to improve behaviour in 153 local authorities. We are working in and supporting all primary schools, secondary schools, special schools and all PRUs. In more recent times, we have been supporting the developing and growing area of alternative provision.

In terms of the types of behaviour that we see in schools, we start from three different areas. In the majority of schools, we have very good behaviour, but in terms of the types of behaviour that we support, we are largely talking about low-level disruption within schools-the types of behaviour that present themselves to teachers and niggle at them. That can be chattering classes, or pupils coming into the classroom without their materials and things that make them ready to learn. Perhaps they are actually not listening to the teacher, or interfering with each other while the lessons are going on.

On the types of behaviour that we see at that level, as a national strategy, we have looked at our consultant field force, who work in local authorities, to see how they can work with school teachers to look at different strategies and build, importantly, the confidence and skills of the staff. We work with leaders in schools. When it comes to the behaviours that we see at low levels and the more challenging behaviours that we see in schools, it is important, as Alan has already said, that the leadership in the school takes responsibility.

Whether it is the low-level disruption that we see in many schools, or the more challenging incidents of behaviour-such incidents might have been brought about by tensions outside in the community from different gangs, or they may be verbal and physical threats that occur in schools from time to time-part of our role is to ensure that the school has a consistent approach to dealing with that behaviour. First and foremost, the school should have really high expectations of behaviour within their school and from that point, it should ensure that it takes on board the views of the parents, all the staff and the views of young people.

Q100 Chair: How do you do that exactly?

Sue Bainbridge: It is one of things that we have worked hard at in a lot of our schools. In 2005, we had 72 schools that had inadequate behaviour, and at the end of 2009, that figure was down to 18 schools. Working with those schools with inadequate behaviour, we found it effective to go in as a regional team and work with our consultants and with the senior leadership team. It is absolutely crucial that part of the National Strategies behaviour programme has had an opportunity to work at that level. If we don’t work at the senior team level, we are not going to make a difference across the school to improve behaviour.

With the senior team, we get them to unpick what their principles, values and beliefs around behaviour are, and we get them to bring the staff on board through a number of different strategies and through training materials that we have. Those strategies and materials engage all staff on their basic beliefs and feelings on behaviour. The views of pupils should also be taken on board, so that the whole school takes responsibility and ownership. I think that the way we have moved that forward is by working with those teams. For instance, I have worked for the last year with a school where there is inadequate behaviour. I don’t just go in and advise them; I go in and sit in on their senior leadership team meetings, I review what they’re doing, and I actually follow them into the classroom.

Q101 Chair: I assume that it’s a school that used to have inadequate behaviour.

Sue Bainbridge: I am absolutely certain that it’s just about to be told, at its next HMI visit, that it has got satisfactory behaviour. But it had some other entrenched difficulties.

Q102 Chair: I assume you’re sort of the Steer implementation team, aren’t you? He had the grand thoughts and the knighthood, and you go in and do what he used to do on the ground, delivering day to day in the most difficult circumstances.

Sue Bainbridge: What we have done as a national strategy is to take forward the advice that we have had from the practitioners’ group and the advice that we’ve had from Steer, but what we have really based our practice on is the best practice in schools. Part of what we’re about is not only going into schools, parachuting in and supporting them-

Q103 Chair: You are there, you’ve been doing it yourself for the last year, in one of the small number of schools with particularly poor behaviour, or difficult behaviour issues. Take us through it. What have you been doing? How do you work? At what level? Do you start with the head and then the department heads? Or do you start with each classroom teacher? Do you start with the youngest teachers in the school, or the most experienced teachers? Where do you go? Who do you work with the most?

Sue Bainbridge: We started with the head teacher first of all and her senior leadership team, getting them to identify two or three things that they wanted to do. First, we identified how they wanted to get together some very simple rules that everybody could agree to, that everybody could put into the classroom, that everybody would remember and that everyone would deliver on.

Q104 Chair: Can you rattle some off for us?

Sue Bainbridge: It is things like-and again, it is about the ownership of them-"We will go into classrooms ready and prepared to learn," "We will go into classrooms and we will listen to each other when we talk," "We will go into classrooms and"-very simply-"we will keep our hands and feet to ourselves." That actually covers so many things. When conflict arises in the class, you’ve got those rules that everybody has agreed to-pupils, teachers and the senior leadership team. Therefore, the conversation’s very simple. "Did we keep in line with these rules?" "No, we didn’t." "What do we do after that point?" And we know what is going to happen, in terms of the kinds of consequences that there might be. So it is very, very simplistic, as Alan was saying before. It is keeping things as easy as possible for young people to remember. If they’ve got 40 school rules, they won’t remember them. So that’s how we focus on it. In terms of then working with that school, we have tried to identify good practice in a department, because what you want to do is to build on strengths. In this particular school that I am referring to, the humanities department was very good, with some very strong, skilled teachers. So we worked with them to start looking at how they could share the strategies that they use with other departments. And then we work department by department, building their skills, including their skills to coach other teachers, and then we move on through the school.

Q105 Chair: So how much training have individual teachers had?

Sue Bainbridge: Within the school, over the last year individuals have probably had five or six very intensive sessions on looking at behaviour strategies. But to be perfectly frank, because of what the other schools got to develop, they have been totally aligned to the quality of teaching and learning. The whole focus has been on engagement of pupils and developing positive attitudes to learning, as opposed to the behaviour management side of things.

Q106 Chair: Has it led to the departure of some of the teachers? Sir Alan said that the biggest link is that good teaching-best practice-leads to good behaviour. If you’ve got a school that’s got inadequate behaviour, it’s probably because there’s a lot of lousy teaching. Some of that needs to be challenged and improved, and in some cases people perhaps need to find some more useful thing to do with their time.

Sue Bainbridge: What we find when we are working in a school that has got inadequate behaviour is that quite often some teachers will move on, or will be encouraged to move on by head teachers.

Q107 Chair: To another school?

Sue Bainbridge: Yes, to another school or another post, or to retire from the profession, given their age. In other cases, we work very hard with consultants to support and develop skills and, most importantly, on the confidence of those staff to work with young people. We also look at things like ensuring that, when an incident occurs, the young person is not taken away and then the teacher has to face them again another day. Instead, at the end of the day teachers are taught to have a conversation with that young person and they are brought back together to resolve that conflict.

Pat Glass: I want to clarify that. When you talk about consultants, what you mean is specialists employed by the authority. That’s the name that’s given to them. They’re not people who come in at huge cost from the private sector.

Q108 Chair: What evidence have you got that National Strategies interventions are effective?

Sue Bainbridge: The data that we have are, as I said before, that we’ve moved the number of inadequate behaviour schools from 72 to 18. In 2006, we introduced a new programme around securing good behaviour in all schools. In the inspection tranche last year, 80% of schools had moved to good or outstanding, whereas in the inspection tranche the year before, it was only 70% of schools.

Those kinds of data are the hard data, obviously based on Ofsted figures, but we’ve also got data around the impact of good behaviour on attendance. The SFR figures that came out yesterday showed the best possible PA figures: we’re down to 4.3% in terms of persistent absenteeism now. I think the strong link between improving behaviour and getting young people into school is absolutely crucial, so that when they’re in school, they can engage and start to learn.

We’ve got really good figures on our social and emotional skills programme and the types of things that are coming out there. We know that 90% of our primary schools are engaged in that programme. A primary school in Wiltshire took on board the social and emotional aspects of learning approach. It had very high levels of exclusions. Straight away, a year into developing SEAL, they’re down to zero exclusions within that school. Nothing else had changed within the school other than taking on board that programme across all staff. There’s a 65% take-up of the social and emotional programme within secondary schools. Again, we’re really starting to see the impact there. There are things like family SEAL, and there is the impact on families engaging.

I think the other area that’s big within the behaviour programme is our national programme for specialist leaders in behaviour and attendance. We currently have over 7,000 participants in that programme, and 63% of participants are focusing on the behavioural, emotional and social difficulties aspect of that training. That’s a training programme that is given over to schools and individuals, where they actually take responsibility for their own continuing professional development. They lead the cluster sessions, and they have opportunities to go back into school. As for the impact of that particular programme, through testimonies we’re getting, especially from the north-east, there is already really strong evidence of how those members of staff-they’re not always teachers-are really starting to have career prospects. They’re getting that confidence. They’re more skilled and more able to address those behaviour issues.

Q109 Chair: Can I ask you about SEN? What does National Strategies do to help differentiate between general behaviour difficulties and early identification of, and support for, children with special educational needs?

Sue Bainbridge: We actually have a National Strategies programme that leads on SEN, and we work hand in hand with it. There’s an element there that skills up staff in being aware of, and being able to identify, such things as communication difficulties, BESD issues and autistic spectrum disorders as soon as possible. One of the things that we’ve done, working alongside those colleagues, is look very carefully at how early we can help schools to identify need.

One of the things within behaviour improvement that we’re taking forward is looking at data tracking. We’re very keen as early as possible to encourage schools and local authorities to look at a profile of need, so that when we have issues emerging-for instance, in year 9, if suddenly behaviours are presenting-we track those young people back to when those triggers first came about, and start to look at whether they were presenting earlier as having communication difficulties or mental health difficulties.

Q110 Chair: Is it working? Anecdotally, it seems from parents in my constituency with autistic children, from the National Autistic Society and from evidence from people I meet, that it is still a complete battle with local authorities to get any recognition of the child’s needs. Even if you can get it, there can be a long delay and often non-implementation of those things that are specifically prescribed to help. The whole thing looks pretty disastrous at every stage.

Sue Bainbridge: I think that we are only at one stage within that journey. Now we have encouraged schools to look very clearly at the needs of young people, as opposed to very quickly labelling young people with a special need. Once we look at the need, we can usually address the kinds of strategies and interventions that are needed. With our data tracking, we have really encouraged schools not just to collect the numbers, but to start looking at the quality of the intervention, and to start tracking the impact of the intervention; for example, with a young person with a communication difficulty, at what point would we intervene and see how effective that intervention was?

Quite often, we find that we don’t actually measure the impact of the intervention. We keep intervening, and then wonder why we are not getting anywhere. I think that that is really important. One of the things that we have tried to do is encourage all staff, when they have a vulnerable young person with presenting needs who is not engaging, to dig really deep and try different things, and then see if that makes a difference to their engagement with a learning opportunity.

Q111 Chair: How important is local collaboration on, or between, education, social care and health services in identifying and addressing behavioural issues related to SEN? How do you think that that collaboration can be fostered and improved in the future? Are there any threats to it? Sorry to add to my question.

Sue Bainbridge: On types of support, six or seven years ago, when we had the BIP programme, there were BEST teams-behaviour and education support teams-wrapped around a number of schools that were in the programme. What has developed from those teams is that a number of schools have taken on that model, and they have those teams within their school or wrapped around their school. Those teams work largely within the school and the community, and also in some cases work across all ages. They get to know some of the family issues so, when they are coming into support, they know the context of the school. They know the context of the family and can actually intervene much more quickly.

Where we see those services in short supply-an example is community mental health services, as Pat said earlier, and some speech and language services are often in quite short supply-we have seen schools and local authorities being quite creative in the way that they have addressed some of the issues. Two years ago, Hammersmith and Fulham had a look at the number of young people it was sending out of city. It realised the expense that that was costing and decided that it would not do that any more, but that it would invest some money in providing CAMH services and speech and language services to its primary schools. That was not to every primary school, but there is a much-enhanced service within schools. It then put in place nurture groups in year 7 in secondary schools, focusing on speech and language. Those are the kinds of approaches where teams of specialist identified services are really making a difference. Those schools are utilising those services to skill up other mainstream teaching staff. They are putting a speech and language therapist alongside a teacher to enable them.

What we are seeing now with partnership working is schools coming together creatively. Instead of funding being top-sliced, and that money being in the authority, schools are retaining some of those funds and starting to look at sharing their resources. Where one school in a partnership of five has a good facility-it might have a community mental health building on its site, while another has a youth centre-schools are using and swapping those services. We even have teachers and single-issue teams that are now starting to think about how they can best make joint appointments, as Sir Alan was saying earlier; they are starting to take that forward. For the future, there is real potential for schools to use their own resources better to look at the services they need. We need to ensure that those services are there, and that skilled professionals are there to fill the gaps.

Chair: Thank you very much. It was a long introduction from me. Nic?

Q112 Nic Dakin: We have had a vast amount of evidence to the Committee already, and you have given a very positive picture of National Strategies, but in that evidence there was very little reference to National Strategies. Why was that?

Sue Bainbridge: Because it was evidence from National Strategies, we assumed that what we presented was about National Strategies.

Q113 Nic Dakin: I was thinking of evidence from other people. People aren’t pointing to National Strategies and saying that it has made a positive impact. They are not saying, "Look at National Strategies as part of the solution."

Sue Bainbridge: We have focused on getting ourselves into schools and on working to skill up a consultant field force within local authorities. The feedback that we often get when we go into local authorities is on the value of the behaviour and attendance consultants who work in those authorities and on the work that they do. It isn’t necessarily about our having a wider audience. To be perfectly honest, we offer a universal service to all schools, but, as often happens, there are a number of outstanding schools. We support local authorities to make decisions about whom they support, but it is entirely up to them to use their knowledge of schools to decide where they take that support.

On working closely with Ofsted, Ofsted is very aware of the work that we do and of the number of organisations that we work with in partnership.

Q114 Nic Dakin: The Secretary of State has said that National Strategies has wasted huge amounts of money. What do you say to that? Have there been any cost-benefit analyses?

Sue Bainbridge: In taking forward this particular programme, my focus has been on developing high quality materials and approaches and on providing quality training to people so that that training and those materials can be cascaded. As a programme, we are contracted to the Department for Education, and, as such, the specification and any funding and costs sit within the remit of the contract manager in the Department, Dave Sleep. So if you have any further questions on costs, I would advise you to go to him and ask for more specific information about that.

Q115 Nic Dakin: So you would not agree that it was a waste of money?

Sue Bainbridge: I would not agree, because the data show the improvements that we have made year on year. If you were to go into a number of local authorities, you would find that there are networks of leads, especially from secondary schools, that come together on a termly basis to discuss and share good practice. If you were to go into the regions, you would find that there are regional teams. We are looking at an exit strategy for ourselves from March onwards, but those local authorities are coming together of their own accord to carry on sharing and promoting the kind of opportunities that we provided to them and to work together to share that good practice.

We will leave a mark. We have left materials, which are being used. The social and emotional aspects of learning programme is the most frequently downloaded programme on the Department for Education website. The fact that people are using the materials that are out there shows that we are making a mark.

Q116 Nic Dakin: Do you believe that there will be a sustainable legacy from this programme as we move forward and that schools can manage in the future without national guidance?

Sue Bainbridge: From day one, our remit was to build the capacity of local authorities to work with schools by developing the skills and competence for them to deliver themselves. We were never building a dependency on our role. The materials, which we know are used regularly, will continue to be used by schools. Schools will develop the materials and they will move them on. The future will be in partnership working, with schools coming together to adapt those materials and to develop their own materials. There will always be a need to drive, advise and guide. For example, last week I went into one of our 20 lead behaviour schools, which is an outstanding school across the board, and the message that I received was, "No one has ever come in, no one has ever helped me, no one has ever challenged me and no one has come in and had this conversation, from which we could really benefit." Schools will always need that challenge, drive and support, but we have done our best to provide them with the skills and the materials to take forward.

Q117 Nic Dakin: Where will that capacity be in the future? Those consultants in local authorities are likely to disappear, aren’t they? Where will the capacity be to ensure that, five years down the line, we don’t slip back again?

Sue Bainbridge: We have some very, very good schools that are really addressing the issue of behaviour. We have 20 lead behaviour schools. That is only 20, I know, but they are already networking with other schools in their regions. We have schools that have taken forward specific aspects of programmes. On local authorities, Hull springs to mind in terms of taking forward things like restorative practice and trying to drive forward and address the really entrenched issues that they have in some of their schools. On those kinds of pockets of practice, local authorities will work together-they have worked together in the past. But, more importantly, groups of schools will work together. What we will see is champions within those schools really start to take forward the practice, develop the practice and make it their own. That is what they need to do.

Q118 Craig Whittaker: Sue, I want to clarify a couple of things. You explained that the schools have gone from 72 inadequate down to 18, and you have dealt with that by addressing the skills gaps with a lot of teachers within schools and, of course, local authorities. We also know that a huge amount of data tracking and, indeed, profiling of needs is done. Are you therefore suggesting that because of the skills gap, which you also spoke about, that perhaps this data tracking and profiling of needs is not quite as it should be, because of the skills gap? If the answer is no-as I suspect that it is-is it not therefore down to the quality of the teachers and the leadership, more than anything else?

Sue Bainbridge: At the end of the day, you cannot pull apart the quality of teaching and the types of behaviour that you see within school. We know that the two are inextricably linked. What we find as well is that if you don’t have a strong leader and a strong leadership team that has a vision and high expectations regarding where they want the school to be, which everybody buys into and takes responsibility for, it isn’t going to work in terms of driving that forward. All teachers-all staff-need to model good behaviour at any point. I think Alan talked about meeting and greeting young people on the way in and being around at lunch times and other times. All that is as important as the quality of teaching and learning. But, fundamentally, what we find is that if young people are not engaging in their learning, that is where we first and foremost must address the skills needs of those teachers.

Q119 Craig Whittaker: I am particularly interested in what I said about the data tracking and profiling of needs. If there is a skills gap there, particularly with the teachers, does that bring a question mark over the quality of data tracking and the profiling of needs?

Sue Bainbridge: It does. What we have found is that we have gone into schools where they have been collecting numbers as opposed to really analysing the data they have, not only on the basis of what the pupils are doing, but in terms of the timetable areas where those issues are emerging-having a look at the different staff where those issues are emerging and the different subject areas. That is where that data tracking is important. If people are collecting that information but doing nothing with it, which is often the case, that is the point at which we have to say, "Okay, you’ve got this information now. What is it telling you, what are you going to do with it and how regularly and quickly are you going to address it?" One of the things we find is that where we have a system-a consequent system or whatever-within a school, if that’s addressed very regularly and staff and young people are flagged up, those issues can be addressed before they become entrenched and those young people start to disengage and spend less time in the classroom.

Q120 Ian Mearns: Hi Sue. In 2005, Sir Alan’s report suggested that all secondary schools, including academies and foundation schools should be part of a local partnership and that this should cease to be a voluntary option by 2008. However, since this September, the Government have taken the decision to revoke the requirement for schools to work together in behaviour and attendance partnerships. So what are the threats and the opportunities created by a diminution of the role of local authorities in relation to behaviour and discipline in schools? Will the removal of the requirement to form behaviour and attendance partnerships have any meaningful impact, and does the prospect of local authority behaviour support services being outsourced or disbanded concern you at all?

Sue Bainbridge: On schools working in partnership, the strongest partnerships that we have seen across the country are in places such as Bradford, where they have a really strong partnership and operate in three different clusters. They have engaged in those partnerships because they wanted to and not because anyone told them to. They saw the benefits of working in partnership. When I have been called to management committee meetings across the country to explain what it is they have to do to be in a partnership, you almost get the feeling that that partnership will not work until they have really engaged with the individuals and made them see the reason for being in a partnership. Revoking the requirement to be in partnership will have less impact if those partnerships are already formed and if they are making a difference. What we found was that, historically, those partnerships were based on fair access and managed move protocols in local authorities. Whether sustainability has anything to do with being in partnership is to do with whether those partnerships have moved on-whether they are sharing the development of their policies, considering sharing their continuing professional development opportunities, sharing staff and looking at resources. They know already what it is that they are doing and why they want to work together.

One really good example of partnership working is in Tower Hamlets. No one told those schools to work together; they decided to work together. They share their data now. They not only openly share data with heads and senior leadership teams, but flag up the youngsters who are causing them concern. They ask each other for help with strategies to address a problem. A youngster never comes to that table for a managed move or any kind of support because they are at risk of exclusion. That is the sort of early intervention that those kinds of partnerships are now working towards.

As for revoking the requirement to be in partnerships, I don’t see that as an enormous problem for those partnerships that are working already. Some partnerships will use it as an excuse now for schools to drop out. At the end of the day, schools will work with schools that they can benefit from. As for the future, it is only by working together in partnerships that schools can best afford the services that they need. Each individual school cannot buy in all the services that it wants, but five or six schools working together might be able to afford to share those services between them and use them more effectively. They can then start to influence what those services look like for those young people in need.

We did some training recently in the south-east. Schools were very keen to start looking at how they could influence what their alternative and PRU provision looked like. Where there were gaps, they wanted to see how they could ensure that those gaps did not exist in the future.

Q121 Ian Mearns: The problem is you have given us a couple of examples of effective partnership working. There are 150 or so local education authorities. I guess from the way in which you have phrased your answer there are a number of education authorities where those partnerships don’t really exist in the way in which you want them to. Have you any concerns for those areas?

Sue Bainbridge: I have a concern when local authorities are purely based on a managed move. What we might find is that if schools don’t have to engage in that fair access protocol-being part of that sort of agreement between schools-some schools will find themselves with a higher level of excluded pupils, because they are willing to take those young people in that move. We may find that others are not as welcome into the partnership, because they negatively contribute to the number of excluded pupils without doing their bit to contribute in a positive way-to offer services and support to schools. That is despite the fact that they are, quite often, outstanding schools with an awful lot of skills and expertise to offer. One of the roles that we played in National Strategies was to facilitate some of the conversations around looking at the benefits that every school would have in taking forward that partnership. In the future, some schools will opt out and be in it for them.

Chair: Sorry, Ian, I must cut you off there.

Q122 Ian Mearns: This is important, because Sue’s answer has elicited in my mind another question. It is the question that I asked Sir Alan before. You mentioned that some outstanding schools are not acting as part of a partnership. Those outstanding schools could well have the recourse for parents to an independent appeals panel removed. If they are not playing the game in terms of being in partnership with other local community schools, how will that work and where will those kids end up?

Sue Bainbridge: At the moment, one of the things that we are working very hard on-and will continue to work very hard on until the end of the contract-is encouraging those schools to look at the benefits of working in partnership. We’ve really got to make outstanding schools understand that they will not stay outstanding as individual schools. We have to try to sell to them the fact that by working with other schools, there will be a lot of benefits. To be honest, I’ve only been into the 20 lead behaviour schools-outstanding ones-in the last six months, so I haven’t got a lot more knowledge than that. But in those 20, they are all willing to engage with other schools. They all want to be part of that partnership, and offer and develop their own skills. They are not complacent, and they want to carry on.

Chair: We are coming to the end. Tessa would like quickly to ask about governance.

Q123 Tessa Munt: Quickly, I want to ask you whose job you would cite as being to challenge school leaders.

Sue Bainbridge: At the moment, it is the local authorities’ responsibility to intervene if they feel that school leaders are not taking forward their role and are falling down in terms of their responsibilities.

Q124 Tessa Munt: What access do governors have to that work?

Sue Bainbridge: The governing body’s role is also to challenge the head. It has a very clear role in many schools in taking forward certain aspects of the school’s role, in terms of bringing in responsible policies, overseeing the data and looking at what the issues are in the school. I think that a lot of our governing bodies, currently, will challenge the data. We did some work in Sheffield, where there were high levels of disproportionate exclusions. In that school, the governors were very challenging. They analysed that data down to four teachers whose confidence and skills not only were lacking in terms of addressing fairness within some of the young people they were teaching, but hadn’t changed in terms of the support they were being offered. The governors were very challenging in terms of what they wanted that head teacher to do in order to take the school forward, so that young people didn’t miss out on learning.

Q125 Tessa Munt: So is it primarily a local authority role?

Sue Bainbridge: In terms of local authorities, our team has worked with assistant directors who have responsibility for behaviour strategically within an authority. What I am seeing is their role in going in and challenging head teachers on behaviour and exclusion levels, and I am seeing it very much as their having a very strong role within schools. But that’s perhaps because I meet very few governing bodies. I operate more with local authorities and their relationships with heads than I do with governing bodies and their relationships.

Chair: Tessa and Sue, thank you very much. Thank you very much for giving evidence to us today. It has been a fascinating morning.