Schools for the future / Reform

Schools for the future / Reform

The state of education The state has gradually expanded its role in education. There are Sure Start centres, the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, school curricula that tell teachers how to teach, targets on community cohesion and spiritual and cultural development and weekly cash payments to encourage 17 and 18 year olds to stay in school. We have become used to the idea that the state should do increasingly more in education, in terms of both prescription and provision. This has come at a significant cost, with per pupil funding now more than double the level of 1997-98. The danger is that all this activity distracts from what really matters – children learning the knowledge and skills they need to go on to bigger and better things. It is time to consider what the state can and should provide. The state is withdrawing from some parts of education – notably through the introduction of tuition fees in higher education. The new Government should take the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to refocus state education on what it should be about – giving every child the start in life that will allow them to go on to great things.

Professor Francis O’Gorman One piece of the puzzle

We should be ambitious for education. But we should also not make the mistake of assuming it can do the work of a whole society. Almost all established academic subjects, well taught, develop invaluable skills and impart invaluable knowledge. Almost all established academic subjects have exceptional significance in an educational system that aims to prepare young people for life and work (not one or the other).Welltaught and well-conceptualised, those subjects give the student the capacity, apart from anything else, to learn how to learn. Education is not about learning skills in the abstract, though it is about skill; it is not about learning knowledge in the abstract, though it is about knowledge. An education that is overwhelmed by techniques, by defined and confined skills, risks becoming quickly out of date.The ability to carry on learning and developing is a companion for life, and it is essential for us all in enabling us to meet the challenges of a changing society, a changing workplace, and a changing nation.

Education works best where there is passion, encouragement, and expertise. Education delivers most where it is believed in, and where institutions, teachers, and leaders, know it has a transformative power. Education works best, too, where institutions are ambitious for their students, but not oppressive in over-burdening assessment, in regulation, in expectation. In an environment that tries to define in exhaustive detail exactly what can and should be achieved in a class room, the surprise and passion of education can be stunted into routine and judged by false standards of what constitutes success. Education is partly a science, partly an art – but it also needs some alchemy. It is worth educators becoming students themselves every now and again. Doing this helps re-invigorate an understanding of what we can do as teachers, and affirm how central passion, encouragement, and expertise are. How flat the word “competence” sounds. And yet how important it is. Education can transform, but it cannot transform everything. It cannot entirely mend what it did not break. A country that puts faith in education is wise. But one that puts too much faith in it may be trying to shift attention from social problems that education alone cannot change. Professor Francis O’Gorman, Professor ofVictorian Literature and Head of the School of English, University of Leeds www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Paul Woodgates Policy into practice

Schools matter. Our social, economic and cultural future relies upon schools that ensure our young people develop, learn, and fulfil their potential. The pressure on our schools to improve is therefore unrelenting. Increasingly, the consensus is that putting communities in control of the schools that educate their children should be at the heart of reform; the passion people feel for education should be harnessed to achieve schools that are focused on children and best equipped to deliver the education that parents want. The challenge now is implementation – defining the practical steps needed to make change happen. In the past, education reform was implemented through two types of intervention: by applying new and ring-fenced money, and by setting rules, targets and performance frameworks. But neither approach is now applicable – it goes without saying that there will be no new money (indeed substantial savings will be required) and where the very purpose of reform is to enable localism and decentralisation, top-down centrally-managed implementation is hardly likely to be appropriate. A new way of making change happen is therefore required. Instead of top-down planning driving action, this new approach must release the latent energy within the system and create change bottom-up. Instead of issuing directives to be cascaded down through management structures, it must take a system-wide view of the schools sector and promote those elements of that system that will drive reform. There cannot be a blueprint for every school, but it is 60

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possible to set out a range of models for how schools can operate – how they can collaborate, how they can define their distinctive identities, how they can source their support services, how they can innovate, and how they can meet the aspirations of the communities they serve. Above all, implementation must reflect the fact that schools are not just institutions: they are the sum of the children, teachers, heads, governors, parents and partners that make them up. Policy implementation must recognise that school reform depends entirely upon them.

PaulWoodgates, Head of Consulting to the Education Sector, PA Consulting Group

Professor Dylan Wiliam Making our existing teachers better

With higher educational achievement, individuals live longer, are healthier, and earn more money. Society also benefits from higher educational achievement in the form of reduced health-care costs, reduced criminal justice costs, and increased economic growth. Raising the scores of all England’s 15-year olds by 25 points (roughly half the gap between England and Finland) on PISA (the tests used by the OECD to compare educational achievement in literacy, mathematics and science) would have a net present value of £4 trillion—roughly the value of everything in England, and more than enough to wipe out current and future budget deficits. Understandably, therefore, governments have tried various measures to raise student achievement. The previous government spent over £1 billion

on the national strategies, which, over five years, appears to have resulted in approximately one extra child per primary school reaching level 4 in the key stage 2 tests. Worse, a similar amount is being spent each year on classroom assistants who actually lower the performance of the students they are intended to help. Other reforms have changed school governance and structures. Specialist schools do get better results than nonspecialist schools, but that is only because they get more money, and academies improve no quicker than similarly low-performing schools that are not converted into academies. The Conservatives promise parent-led schools along Swedish lines even though the evidence is that they have had no effect on student achievement. These reforms have failed because they fail to address head on the dominant variable in the education system: teacher quality. As Sir Michael Barber says the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. Getting better entrants into the profession is part of the answer, but only a small part, for two reasons. First, it is very slow: it will be 30 years before the effect of new entrants into the profession works its way through the system, and we just can’t wait that long. Second, it is hard to identify good teachers until they teach. “Teach for America”— the model for Teach First — has attracted able graduates into teaching, but they turn out to be no better than those trained in traditional ways. If we are serious about securing our future economic prosperity, therefore, we need to improve the performance of teachers already working in schools. Previous models of teacher professional development have failed to deliver the improvements we need, so we need a relentless focusing of professional development on what improves outcomes for students.

Nick Gibb MP Raising standards

Professor Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director, Institute of Education

Nick Gibb MP, Minister of State for Schools

This Coalition Government is determined to raise standards right across the education sector. To achieve this we will provide more freedoms for teachers and heads, more choice for parents, less bureaucracy, and a diverse system of education provision in which all children and parents benefit from high standards and real choice. There is no doubt in my mind that our school system needs reforming if we are to tackle the educational inequality, which has widened in recent years.We have started this process of reform by opening up the state sector to more talent and more innovation by giving parents, teachers, charities and local communities the chance to set up new schools. Alongside this, we must ensure that there are robust standards and the highest quality teaching. We will give schools greater freedom over the curriculum, but we will ensure that the acquisition of knowledge is at its heart, and subject disciplines are valued. It is through deepening knowledge that real understanding and thinking skills are embedded. As well as freeing up schools from bureaucratic control, we intend to create more flexibility in the exams system so that state schools can offer qualifications similar to those offered by independent schools. For too long there has been a target driven approach in state education, which has increased the gap between our state and independent schools. Above all, I want an education system that reflects the will of society, one that ensures potential is realised, and that makes sure every child gets the best possible education.

Schools for the future / Reform

Supporting quality teaching Spending on the workforce makes up the largest proportion of the schools budget. On average 78 per cent of a school’s budget goes on staffing. There has been a substantial increase in numbers, with 10 per cent more teachers and two-and-a-half times as many teaching assistants as a decade ago. Yet there is a danger of focusing on quantity instead of quality. Academic evidence consistently shows that teacher quality is by far the biggest factor that affects educational outcomes. A teacher whose quality is two standard deviations above the average will double a pupil’s speed of learning. Given the financial investment in the workforce and teachers’ importance in improving the quality of education, government policy must focus on driving up the quality of teaching, through the right recruitment, management and continuing professional development (CPD). Just putting more adults in a classroom is not the right course of action. It is time for policymakers to reverse their priorities.

Rt Hon Lord Knight of Weymouth Supporting quality teaching

We know that quality of teaching is the most important thing to influence educational outcomes. In the same way the success of a school is determined by the quality of leadership. The success of individual children is first and foremost down to the quality of parenting. It therefore follows that supporting quality teaching cannot be seen in isolation but must in part be about how to ease the collaboration with other teachers, with school management and with home. The Government is right to expand Teach First, and to develop Transition to Teaching. They have inherited a great legacy of the best generation of young teachers we have ever seen. This is vital to continue the improvement in recent years, especially in the basics of English, mathematics and ICT. I include ICT because it is now a fundamental skill in the workplace almost regardless of what occupation a child pursues. It is also now a key tool in engaging children in learning across the curriculum and the new generation of teachers are using technology more and more in the classroom. With the demise of BECTA it is now vital we continue to share next practice in technology-enabled pedagogy. Good use of technology allows learners to collaborate, to learn from each other, to proceed at their own pace and for the teacher to personalise the learning. Of course it also allows management to monitor performance. Finally it is crucial in improving the home-school relationship as real time reporting develops

and evolves into real time accountability. Online collaboration is especially powerful in developing subject specialism. Sharing of best practice, rating material that works in the classroom and linking parts of the curriculum are all made easier and cheaper online. Society is changing rapidly. The demands and needs of young people change with it. The fundamental truth of the importance of quality teaching remains a constant, but the pedagogy needs to be dynamic if we are to keep up with the world outside the school gate. Rt Hon Lord Knight ofWeymouth, former Minister of State for Schools and Learners

Rod Bristow Improving educational attainment

Pearson, the world’s leading education company has a simple goal: to improve educational attainment and so help people make progress in their lives. That is why we are so pleased to sponsor this conference. We understand the critical role that teachers play in truly engaging and stretching learners to achieve more. We are the teachers’ and parents’ partners in helping learners achieve more. It is at home as well as at school where the framework for success for young people is built and yet often where the need for support is greatest. Although any framework needs to be flexible enough to be able to respond to individual needs, we believe three features are critical. First, qualifications that can inspire learning, enthuse teachers and provide nationally recognised benchmarks of www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform success.We worked closely with teachers and professional bodies to re-design our suite of Edexcel and BTEC qualifications to ensure they provide the skills and knowledge young people need. These provide a range of alternatives for teachers and students and we are pleased about the new Secretary of State’s commitment to providing as much choice as possible within the qualification system. Second, an assessment regime that can record progress, generate feedback and uphold public confidence whatever the form of learning undertaken. As a major contractor for national tests and a leading player in developing assessment systems for applied learning, we have helped transform exam and assessment systems, using new technology to speed up the transmission of data while being developing individualised data on student performance. Third, the right support that brings together learning materials, published resources and teacher support within easy to use packages along with regular professional development and updating. We are using technology to tailor the learning ‘relationship’ between the learner, the teacher and the parent through the development of the fronter learning platform and other learning technologies. Rod Bristow, President, Pearson UK

Professor Sir John Holman The importance of subjects

Subject expertise is at the heart of teachers’ professionalism, especially in secondary schools. The large majority of a teacher’s time is spent in a classroom or laboratory teaching a specific subject and it is this that defines 62

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pupils’ experiences, day in, day out. For most teachers, teaching a subject well is the main way they judge their success. This has always been true, but we may have lost sight of it a bit over the last ten years as we have followed an ever-wider agenda in schools, trying to solve more and more of society’s problems (health, obesity, happiness or lack of it, antisocial behaviour …) as well as pursuing better and better grades in examinations. How do teachers become expert in their subject? Part of it is about their initial degree subject. Evidence from Ofsted makes it clear that, other things being equal, a subject specialist gets better outcomes than a non-specialist. Of course, we all know examples of teachers with superb subject qualifications who are ineffective and vice-versa. But these are exceptions to the rule that deep subject knowledge and understanding makes a teacher better equipped to explain – and to inspire with insights into the subject beyond the exam syllabus. So we must continue to recruit and, if necessary, retrain specialist teachers, especially in shortage subjects like mathematics and the sciences. And we need a stronger emphasis on subject-specific continuing professional development. In a 2005 study, the Wellcome Trust found that 50 per cent of all secondary school science teachers have had no subject knowledge CPD in the past five years. Teachers need opportunities to keep up with developments in their subject and to meet other teachers of the same subject to share ideas. Does this mean that whole-school issues like health and behaviour are no longer important? Of course not, but if we get the basics of subject specialist teaching right, much of the rest – such as behaviour – will follow.

Professor Sir John Holman, Director, National Science Learning Centre

Professor Judy Sebba What policy makers can do to support high quality teaching

Research evidence tells us that two factors make the greatest impact on pupils’ learning; quality of teaching and quality of school leadership. There is well established evidence on what contributes to high quality teaching. There are three ways in which policy makers and school leaders can contribute to improving the quality of teaching. They do not require additional investment as they involve doing things differently, rather than increasing what is done. We know that learning in children and adults is more likely to occur when feedback on performance is negotiated, focused, clear and identifies possible improvements. This can be provided for teachers through coaching. However, the most effective way of implementing this is least often used. The person who learns most from “coaching” is the coach or person undertaking the observation of teaching, not the person being observed teaching. However, we persist (e.g. through the Masters in Teaching and Learning) to set up coaching that assumes that the person observed is being coached. Secondly, feedback on teaching must be given by those who consume it hourly – the pupils. Those who argue that pupils evaluating teaching is a threat to the profession are missing the point that pupils observe teachers all the time, though we rarely invite their feedback. Schools that seek pupil feedback from pupils, who are trained to give it sensitively, improve the quality of their teaching.

Finally, teachers’ practice has been “mandated” for the last 13 years. We need to give teachers back the responsibility to make professional judgements in the classroom and support them by providing accessible, synthesised, robust evidence about what works and how it works. Informed by this evidence, teachers need a licence to “experiment” or what some have referred to as “tinker”, in order to improve their own quality of teaching. Professor Judy Sebba, Professor of Education, University of Sussex

Schools for the future / Reform

Raising the bar For everything else that the education system does, it is impossible to get away from the fact that still, in the second decade of the 21st century, more than half of all 16 year olds leave school without five decent GCSEs including English and maths. Successive governments’ response to this problem has been to fashion alternative “vocational” qualifications for those pupils deemed unsuited to academic study. “Parity of esteem” have been pursued, with non-academic qualifications assigned “equivalent” values to academic ones.

Simon Lebus Liberalise qualifications, improve standards?

There is a need for students to have a sensible set of choices according to their interests and the way they learn best. Whether that it is through vocational or academic routes, following modular or linear courses, the educational imperative is how best to drive learning and ensure that a good education is delivered to all students. Dominance of the centre over the qualifications system is not the way to drive up standards. Central control of A-levels for example, through regulator-specified qualification and subject criteria, has reduced flexibility and restricted the scope for innovation, while inhibiting the alignment of curriculum,

teaching and assessment that is desirable for the best educational results. Now more than ever, in a time of economic certainty, what is important is enabling a qualifications system which is flexible, encouraging bottomup innovation in direct response to the economy. What will not help is a system fixated on coherence, which stifles a rapid response to economic change. Flexibility is also needed in the system when teachers and students are making decisions about which type of qualifications to pursue. Steering those who learn best by hands-on activity towards purely theoretical lessons will benefit no-one. In fact, the argument between vocational and academic qualifications is in no way as stark as a division between two different ‘types’ of student. Many students now combine some GCSEs with one or two vocational programmes, and many subject areas can be approached in either an academic or vocational style. Where the problem lies is in the attempt to compare academic and vocational

The result is that fewer and fewer pupils are studying once-core academic subjects: only 30 per cent study history; the proportion of pupils studying languages at GCSE has fallen from 70 per cent to 45 per cent since this was dropped as a compulsory requirement. But, as ever, it is those most in need who suffer. 70 per cent of Teach First teachers (high-flying graduates in poorly-performing schools) thought their schools encouraged pupils to pick qualifications that were in the school’s interest, rather than the pupil’s. That is no way to offer opportunity to all.

qualifications through an artificial system of equivalencies created for the purpose of school accountability. One solution would be to get rid of the points system for measuring schools, retaining English and Maths to ensure that an element of accountability remains, but freeing up everything else, allowing teachers to pick the academic or vocational route that works best for students. And just as genuine choice should enable students to decide between academic and vocational routes, it should also allow state schools to access provision available in the independent sector. The decision to make the International GCSE available to state school students is one example of this choice – and one we believe is crucial in giving all students the flexibility to learn in the most appropriate way for them.

Simon Lebus, Chief Executive, Cambridge Assessment

Professor Deborah Eyre Making the cut

Everyone says they want a high performing education system but what that looks like is certainly a matter for debate. My interest is in securing high cognitive performance in students and again how best to do that is contested. In the UK we continue to assume that that only a small minority can reach these levels and structure our system accordingly. And since it is only a small minority we give them little attention. Indeed we go further and presume that child’s educational destiny can be more-or-less determined at birth by looking at a combination of their genetics and family background. Those who do well and come from disadvantaged backgrounds surprise us – they are said to www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform succeed against the odds. Can we afford to be so complacent and squander talent in this way is a question to consider? Meanwhile some of our economic rivals are taking a different view. Their education systems have much greater aspirations. They equate high educational outcomes with future economic growth and success. They are more optimistic about what can be achieved educationally with this generation of children and they structure their education systems with this in mind. These countries are looking at the contemporary evidence around children’s cognitive development and concluding that high cognitive performance is so strongly influenced by environmental factors that we could and should expect it from far more students. They are not looking to label students as unable to cope with traditional academic work but rather expecting excellence in a wide variety of domains and valuing them all. Their debate is not who is capable of doing what but rather what do we need as a country and how can we secure it. In these systems the individual student from any background is empowered to achieve. In our system students and their families are always keeping one eye on whether they will ‘make the cut’. Isn’t it time for a change?

choice between carrying on to university and pursuing the career of their choice. Since our schools in the main serve areas of high disadvantage, this vision represents a very high aspiration and correspondingly high expectations of schools, teachers and students. How does this mean we view “academic” versus “vocational” routes? The short answer is that we do not want them to be alternatives, especially at age 14. We want our 14 year olds to continue studying a range of academic subjects that is broad enough to give them a proper range of A-level or similar choices post 16.We are also happy for schools to offer high quality vocational qualifications for pupils who want them; but as an addition to rather than as an alternative to academic study. We are also not comfortable with the current equivalence model, because it puts too much pressure on schools to steer pupils into heavily vocational routes from age 14. In our transition schools we have found many bright pupils in Key Stage 4 signed up to English, maths and double science – but beyond that only to vocational qualifications in (say) IT and business studies.This often amounts to closing down their options prematurely. So what will help ARK and our pupils? Our wish list would include:

Professor Deborah Eyre, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford

s A qualifications regime that supports good education rather than micro-prescribing the post-14 curriculum and teaching. s An accountability framework that treats academic qualifications fairly. s Academic qualifications that fully reflect university expectations of entrants. s Fewer vocational qualifications, but of greater value to employers.

Amanda Spielman The right qualifications

ARK Schools has a clear educational vision: for all our pupils to be fully equipped for higher education by the age of 18, so that they have a true 64

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Amanda Spielman, Research and Development Director, ARK Schools

Ros McMullen Raising the bar

David Young Community Academy opened in 2006 replacing two low-performing secondary schools (83 per cent student attendance in both schools, with 18 per cent in the smaller and 10 per cent in the larger of students achieving five or more GCSE passes including English and maths). Student attendance at the Academy is over 90 per cent and the GCSE results expected this summer will see over 90 per cent of students obtaining 5 or more grade A* to C passes, with a real chance of around 40 per cent achieving 5 or more A* to C grades including English and maths. I have adopted a strategy of utilising the broadest range of qualifications available to build genuine personalisation into the curriculum and to establish a culture of success. One of the major problems with all curriculum change is that too often we talk as if “one size fits all”. We can clearly see that the rush to improve places in school league tables and collect as many exam certificates as possible has had a limiting effect on the development of students’ abilities to analyse, interpret and formulate innovative argument and ideas backed up with academic rigour. This needs to be remedied, particularly for the most able students who need this academic rigour for success at university and for leadership and entrepreneurship in public service and industry. By the same token developing a curriculum which treats the academic and vocational as completely separate pathways leads to a lack of respect for core competencies required by all students to succeed in the workplace and can demotivate and undervalue students.

In “Raising the Bar” at DYCA, leaders were challenged to ensure that all students experienced success, began to see that education was not something that would finish at 16 and that they needed to become life long learners to prepare for economic activity. For all these reason Diplomas have been embraced by the Academy, and in addition to GCSEs and BTECs, City and Guilds qualifications are being introduced, as well as the International Baccalaureate. The Academy attempts to personalise the curriculum for every student with a clear focus on destinations and raising the aspiration of every student and family. Ros McMullen, Principal, David Young Community Academy

Schools for the future / Reform

Education for less School education is becoming more and more expensive, but a doubling of per-pupil funding over the past decade has not seen a doubling in results. (And, even if it had, concerns over quality and grade inflation remain.) Reform has identified three principal causes of poor value for money in schools. Firstly, politicians like to spend money on the wrong things. They prefer to fund visible legacies like staff numbers and buildings, despite evidence that class sizes and the building environment make a negligible difference to outcomes. They should instead focus on the one thing that really affects outcomes – teacher quality. Secondly, there is a problem with culture and management in many schools, which have rigid ideas about pay and are (understandably) focused on what happens in the classroom rather than fiddling with budgets. This can be tackled with the help of businesses and charities who know how to budget, and by creating incentives for schools and parents to save money. The third factor is the great “mission creep” – the expansion of education under successive government into areas away from – and at the expense of – the academic core. To solve this, policymakers must ask what they really want education to be for. Steve Beswick Partnerships with professionals

Our commitment at Microsoft is to the success of each teacher and student, to help them realise their full potential. To do this we create partnerships with education communities around the world to deliver relevant, effective, and scalable technologies, services and programs that focus the contributions of many on improved learning outcomes for all.We recognise that students use technology widely, in their social life as well as in school, and they will need the right skills to work in the technology-rich workplace. We have a role to play in helping education professionals to reach,

motivate and ensure the success of every student and teacher with education-specific tools and technologies that can help them achieve their greatest potential. We also see that our technology can be used to enable vibrant learning communities with programs and services that help bring people together to communicate and collaborate – professionals, students and families. There is demand to help schools, teachers, and students to meet evolving education needs without increasing costs, and to provide schools with the flexibility to respond to rapid change. Our technology sits at the heart of many of the innovations in schools today, and is being used to develop new styles of teaching and learning. Microsoft solutions also create the foundation for scalable, data-driven education, through an open, interoperable technology infrastructure that is specific to education and scales easily and cost-effectively. You can find out more about the work of the Education Team

at Microsoft, and the work that we do with schools, on our website at www.microsoft.com/ uk/education. Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft

Chris Davies The pupil premium

School finance is hardly the raciest topic when it comes to thinking about education reform.Where it appeared in the election debate, it was mainly in relation to introduction of the pupil premium. Now the politicians are stuck into the business of government, however, it is a subject which will have to attract their attention. School finance has remained

a fairly uncontroversial subject up until now thanks largely to increases in spending: between 1997/8 and 2009/10, funding per pupil increased by 109 per cent, almost three times the rate of inflation. These years of plenty have treated schools well. In 2008, there were 40,000 more teachers than in 1997 (an increase of 10 per cent), while the number of teaching assistants increased by almost 200 per cent over the same period, to 177,000. Few headteachers in post today have had to manage in straitened times: indeed, the last time there was a hint of financial trouble – over the increase in national insurance in 2003 – the previous government stepped in to bail schools out. All this means that few school leaders have had to make difficult choices about how to use their resources. It also means that many think of efficiency exclusively in terms of non-pay spend; “how can I make savings when 80 per cent of my budget goes on staffing?” is a common refrain. Any toughening of the financial regime for schools will therefore present school leaders with a set of novel challenges. They will need to think more carefully about what works to improve educational outcomes – and what that means about the way staff are used. Fundamental questions will need to be asked about the staffing models that have become received wisdom, particularly the use of teaching assistants. And school leaders will have to grapple with the consequences of restructuring, often without the help from local authorities that they have become used to. There is no doubt that schools can make savings and even become more efficient.The move to greater independence may help many with this process. But while schools are encouraged to stand on their own at the same time as the downward pressure on public spending increases, the challenges facing schools are likely only to grow. We may be about to enter one of those rare times when school finance comes back to the top of the agenda. Chris Davies, Education Director, Tribal www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform

Transcript Nick Seddon: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this major Reform conference on reforming education. My name is Nick Seddon and I am the deputy director at Reform, which is an independent, non-party think thank whose mission is to set out a better way to deliver public services and economic prosperity.You’ll notice that I am not Andrew Haldenby, Director. He is going to be slightly late – although, hopefully, on time for the first session – because he has been invited to breakfast at Number Eleven. Before we go on: two bits of housekeeping. If there is a fire, I am told to tell you not to panic. Try to get out and congregate in an orderly fashion outside Marks and Spencer on Victoria Street. And I should also say that, for those avid Twitter feeders who are less Luddite than myself, that you need to use the hash tag, which is now not up there … Oh, yes it is … #reformschools – up there. This is the second of four major policy conferences that we are holding. And our aim is to bring together the people that matter, to discuss the issues that matter in the first hundred days of the new government. For those of you that are interested, today is number 50. There is a magnificent attendance today and that really delights me because I think it is going to give the discussions that we have real authority, both in the panel and the conversations that are had with the floor. The other thing to say is that we are recording today. We will write it up and we are going to submit it to each of the three main political parties and also to the Treasury, as a submission for the spending review. And you will all get a copy of that document when it comes out. Andrew has just arrived. So let me talk you through the programme on page one of the brochure because we are going to talk through four main things. The first is the state of education in the UK. With half of sixteen year-olds still leaving school without a basic set of educational qualifications, the really big question that we have to examine a bit further is ‘What can be done?’ There are radical ideas being advanced and radical ideas have been advanced – such as putting universities in charge of the curriculum, allowing profit-making companies to run schools – and the question that we have to keep on returning to is ‘Can these proposals transform schools?’ The second question that we are going to look at is that of supporting quality teaching. The evidence consistently shows that the quality of teachers is more important than the quantity of teachers; indeed, this is the single most important factor in determining educational outcomes. And so this session is going to examine how we can sponsor and promote and support quality teaching. And then we are going to have a speech by Nick Gibb, the Minister for Schools, chaired by Andrew. We are absolutely thrilled that he has agreed to come and speak today and give us the new government’s view on the reform of education. And then we will go for lunch. The third panel discussion, in the afternoon, is about raising the bar. The quality of school education and the differences between educational and vocational 66

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routes are more hotly debated than ever and we are going to ask the question, ‘Which one is more important?’ or ‘What are the different things that are most important in raising the quality of education?’ And the fourth session is about Education for Less. The schools’ budget is going to come under increasing pressure in this brave new world as public spending is brought under pressure. And here, the question is, ‘does a reduction in spending automatically have to lead to reduction in the quality?’ As the physicist, Ernest Rutherford pointed out, ‘we haven’t got the money so we’ll have to think.’ We will then close, hopefully promptly, at 3 pm. Because this event has very, very generous sponsors, we have been able to produce it properly for a big audience and, more importantly, we are going to benefit from their intellectual capital. Paul Woodgates of PA Consulting, who’s on the panel now, is going to talk about the state of education. Rod Bristow from Pearson will talk about supporting quality teaching. Steve Lebus of Cambridge Assessment will talk about raising the bar and Steve Beswick of Microsoft will talk about education for less. I am extremely grateful to all of you for your support and, of course, my profound thanks to Microsoft for hosting today and giving us such wonderful hospitality. So it is a great pleasure to have you all here today. I am looking forward to our discussions. Thank you.

The state of education Andrew Haldenby: Well, thank you Nick. Let’s go straight into the first session – the state of education. What we are going to do, I hope, in the next hour, is to think in advance: ‘What should Nick Gibb tell us later?’ Imagine you are the new education minister – or one of them. What are the headings of the speech that he should give today? What is it that he is really thinking about? We all know the answer to this question. What is good in state education? What is not so good? And in the other sectors as well: given that there are limited resources, where should we all – as a policy community – really be focussing our attention. And what I would like to do is ask our four speakers to give us five minutes each on that subject and I will try and be tough here so we have got time – a lot of time – for questions, which is really the purpose of today – or discussion. Let me introduce the panel. Paul Woodgates is the head of consulting to the education sector at PA Consulting, which is one of the key consulting firms, working with the private sector and the public sector in the UK. Paul’s remit goes from the start of education to the end of it, whenever that is, and he has worked in the UK and the Middle East. Next to Paul, Camilla Cavendish is the chief leader writer at The Times. She was Campaigning Journalist of the Year last year. And, given that she is pretty-much now the only campaigning journalist, I suspect she’ll win it again this year. Francis O’Gorman is the professor of Victorian literature and head of the School of English at the University of Leeds. And Professor Dylan Wiliam is the deputy director of

Schools for the future / Reform the Institute of Education and, in his distinguished career, has also worked in all levels of education and has been voted teacher and a teacher of teachers, having been the dean of a school of education. So, Paul: you go first. Paul Woodgates: Thank you. I am going to stand up because it is a flat room but, also, because it is tough for management consultants at the moment so I need all the sympathy I can get and you should know about that. So I will stand up for a few minutes. I think we are here today because we probably all agree that schools matter: schools are really important. And, whatever your view of the reform agenda that there’s been in the past, probably we can agree that it is a really important thing for the future that schools improve and continue to improve. That is important from an individual perspective of fulfilling individuals potential; it is important for social reasons. It is important for economic reasons and so on. There has been a lot of radical thought going on, I think, about the education agenda and how it can be reformed. I am sure we’re going to hear some of that throughout the day. The general consensus – or perhaps the locus of thought – has been towards notions of decentralisation, notions of localism, notions of allowing schools – and, indeed the communities that they serve – to take control of school level education and to have much more ownership and the ability to drive that education in their locality. Now, others are going to talk today about what that really means and the policies that will enable that.What I wanted to do, just in the next few minutes, is to say something about implementation and how those policy changes can become real. And the reason for doing that at the beginning is to suggest that that needs to be borne in mind all the way through these discussions. History is littered with great ideas for education reform that have been poorly executed. So my suggestion is we need to think about implementation from the very start and how we can make great ideas into real practice that make a difference in classrooms to children. Now, the reason I think that implementation is challenging is because, in the recent past, there have been essentially two approaches to delivering government policy on education reform.The first is, broadly speaking, to chuck money at it. And, whenever the government has wanted to reform the curriculum or assessment or put more technology in or whatever, it’s put a pot of money – new money – in place to do that. It may not feel like that in schools but that is what’s happened essentially at national level. Now, as Nick said, let us not even pretend that there is any possibility of that in the future.There is not going to be new money; indeed, we have got to make better use of the money that is there. So that, realistically, is not going to work. The second thing that has happened in the past is that central government has defined a set of rules and targets and guidance and frameworks and so on that it has sort of cascaded down through the system. And that, I suppose, has worked in the context of centrallydriven change. But if, here, we are talking about decentralisation – about localisation, about empowering schools – the notion of a sort of performance management driven approach to implementation clearly does not make sense anymore and it cannot be

driven from the centre in the same way. So those two approaches to implementation are unlikely to be a valid way of proceeding in the future. That suggests a new model is required: a model that is going to release the latent energy that exists in schools and in communities. And that’s easy to say – a bit of cliché. There is evidence for it, though; there is evidence that it is there.You have only got to look at the interest in academies and, indeed, in free schools. And all of us, probably, have met heads and teachers and governors and parents and, indeed, children, who passionately want to make their schools better and, indeed, have the capability to do so if we can just harness that energy and release it in a way that will have a positive impact. So, ‘What does that mean then in terms of implementation?’ – which I said I would touch on. What it cannot mean is a sort of blueprint for reform in every school. That cannot work in this notion of decentralisation. But it could mean a set of different sorts of models under which schools work, different ways that they can innovate, different ways in which they can create their own identity, different We need to think about ways in which they can implementation from the collaborate between very start and how we each other. So, in can make great ideas into practice, that will mean real practice that make a different models of difference in the classrooms working for different sorts of schools: for academies, for free schools, for local authority managed schools and so on. It’s going to mean a very different role for chains and federations and, indeed, probably new models emerging around the way schools collaborate. It is also, I think, going to mean the emergence of what I would broadly call ‘providers’ in the sector. And, most obviously, that will be organisations providing back office and support services but it might also mean technology infrastructure, for example, and other things that are actually supporting classroom teaching. Now, that might be on a proper outsourced – ‘proper’ in inverted commas – full-scale, outsourced basis. Or it might simply be collaboration between schools in new ways that will emerge over the coming years. I am going to stop there, in the spirit of keeping to five minutes. So, my plea for today is that we think about implementation; that we think about policy and reform in the context of how it can be delivered, not just in conceptual terms – and that we think of decentralisation and localism as not being simply leaving schools to go it alone, but allowing them to collaborate and work together to deliver substantial reform. Thank you. Andrew Haldenby: Paul, that is fantastic. Camilla Cavendish. Camilla Cavendish: I think I am going to stand up too because I cannot see anybody at the back otherwise. I am afraid all pretence I had to be an expert on the subject has vanished this morning because, apparently, The Times has printed the supplement of the big business summit we had on Monday where I was chairing a group on education – we had various other things – and, apparently, we have spelt the word ‘education’ wrong. So that is a great start to my day. www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Very briefly, on the state of education, I do think this argument gets rather polarised. The fact is it is all the way from alpha to gamma, is not it? I was talking on Monday to Martin Rhys at Cambridge. We have Silicon Fair – if you like – in Cambridge, which is not quite Silicon Valley but it is extraordinary. We have universities pairing up with businesses, creating patents, building the economy, creating amazing technological ideas. On the other hand, we have one in six kids between the age of eighteen to twenty-four not in a job or in training or in education. I mean, we have got this very polarised system. And I was absolutely inspired, a few years ago, to see, [Irina Tyck] who is actually here – I saw her this morning – who is a fantastic head-teacher, sitting in Toynbee Hall in East London – which is a dilapidated old Victorian building – in two big rooms which I am sure did not meet any Health and Safety requirement – I do not know how they got away with it – teaching Bangladeshi children in a summer school. I think Irena basically raised the level of those children’s reading, writing and mathematics skills within two weeks beyond where they had come to in the entire year of education in the comprehensive system. So there are fantastic examples of that. On the other hand, as one of the Bangladeshi fathers said to me – because he was educated here – he said, ‘do you know, I really feel the kind of school I went to just does not exist anymore.’ And that is obviously a problem. The ‘could do better’ on the report card, to me, comes down to the growing gulf between the independent sector and the state sector. And the figures are just absolutely shocking. And I am sure you all know them. Independent schools produce more pupils with three As at A level than all the state schools put together. There is something fundamentally wrong about that in terms of our aspirations, in terms of our expectations, in terms of our ability to get children through the system. And just one more statistic for you: children on free school meals – which is about one in eight of children – 40 per cent of children on free school meals last year did not get a single C at GCSE. And I think we have to stop fussing about independent schools and public benefit and ‘oh, my God! Can we cream a bit off them?’ and start focussing on the rest of the system and ‘what are we doing for the children at the bottom?’ A friend of mine from Italy said to me the other day, she said ‘in Italy, children repeat a year. If they do not get it right, they repeat a year. And, actually, she said, ‘when I was …’ She was at school in Italy, she said, ‘it was the one thing I did not want to do. The one motivation I had was to not be with the younger kids.’ You just sort of think: there must be a few basic psychological things we could do. Perhaps in the Tory nudge – the new fashion for nudging – maybe that is just one of the things we should do. On the structures that Paul … I mean Paul talked about … You said, ‘releasing the latent energy that is there’ and, obviously, there is a lot of this around. And I am sure Nick Gibb will talk, later on, about the free schools. I just wanted to make one point on that, Andrew, which is, I am slightly worried that the Free Schools Initiative is actually going to be far too limited. And one of the reasons why is – I have not realised until recently – I thought it was going to parents and other providers are going to come in and create this, supposedly, great pluristic, diversified system. Now, my understanding – I am sure you know this better than I 68

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do – but my understanding is that, actually, the trust has to be set up by parents. That means it is quite … At the moment – and I think you should ask Nick Gibb about this – it is quite limited because I think the deal has so far had about forty or fifty parents’ groups of which probably about twenty are going to meet the criteria. There are quite a lot of big, private companies out there with very, very deep pockets, which I think Can you somehow tap the big providers who have would quite like to into this market. got very deep pockets and come At the moment they are could be investing? going to have to be contractors to the parents’ trusts. Now that raises a real question of financial risk. “Who takes the financial risk?” Because, in fact, if you are a parents’ group, you are going to get the government funding per pupil but, if you do not fill your school, you have got a serious cash flow problem. So I just think you should raise that with Nick as to who is actually going to be taking the risk on those schools? Can you somehow tap the big providers who have got very deep pockets and could be investing? I just think there’s an issue there that I suspect the government has not thought about, which is just it is a business issue. In the interest of time, I am just going to come onto … There are so many issues in the education system but, to me, they always do come back to teaching. And we get obsessed with standards and structures and everything else; teaching is what we all remember. It was the great teacher; it was the teacher who was, usually, cleverer than we were – person who actually just spotted the one thing that made us tick and got on with it. And I think teaching is a very peculiar profession. I’ve worked in business most of my life and I was at Pearson – which I’m delighted to see have sponsored this conference – for a while. A lot of the people we had at Pearson were teachers – because Pearson is a very large education company – particularly in America – it is a fantastic educational publisher. Now a lot of the best staff we had were people who were refugees from teaching because it was one of the only organisations where they could work because they always had a direct interest. A lot of those people, very able, they had actually got a bit tired of teaching; they had got tired of the politics of the staff room; they had got tired of the problems with discipline – particularly in this country where, obviously, that is a whole issue that the government are trying to address. And one of the things that really struck me and has struck me again and again when I visited schools in America and Britain is that teaching has become increasingly peculiar in the sense that we regard it as a job for life. And there are very few other professions now that you regard as a job for life. And a lot of people leaving university today think ‘well, I’d quite like to try that. I might not be any good at it’ – because, obviously, your ability to teach does not really relate to the quality of your degree; it is a really different skill – and they are thinking ‘well, I don’t want to get trapped in this.’ And one of the reasons that Teach First was started – which is something I was involved in many years ago – was because some of us discovered Teach For America, where they had gone to Ivy League universities, said to students ‘come on, you’re going to get a job at Goldman Sachs but why

Schools for the future / Reform don’t you teach for two years first and then Goldman Sachs will actually give you the job?’ Now, the result in America was that 50 per cent of the people who tried teaching stayed in teaching and were some of the best people they had. The other 50 per cent probably were not very good at it, did not have the patience, could not figure out how to teach kids who were not as clever as them and did not have that mentality. But it was a really enormous injection of quality into the system. And a lot of the schools here, which have been taking on Teach First students have actually been very flexible about the way that they have welcomed these students and taken them in. So I think, for me, that just raises a bigger question really – about how government looks at the teaching profession. Do the pensions create a problem? Should we actually be just divorcing pensions now from pay? – Which is true for most of us, certainly in my generation. I mean, we are not expecting our companies to pay us a pension anymore. Pensions have become a drag on people. They are building up a pot of money and they are thinking, ‘God! Actually, I’d better not leave because I’m not going to get the benefit at the end.’ One of the best people I met in New York when I was visiting charter schools there is guy called Steve Mariani, who was [inaudible] the Bronx. He was working in Wall Street. He was freaked out working in the Bronx. For some reason, he decided that the way to deal with his personal problem was to go and teach in the toughest school in the city. He decided to teach maths because he did not really know anything else. He had an entire term in which no child listened to anything he said; they all shuffled their feet and threw things at each other. Despaired he took the four worst kids out to dinner and said to them ‘do you remember anything I have taught you?’ And one of them said ‘well, you know, it was quite interesting that time when you talked about your business – what you did in the City.’ And this guy had remembered every If we can be more open single figure. And he about who we take into said ‘and I thought … teaching, if we can see That must have meant it as a flexible profession – you’d made a profit of and maybe, controversially, … Your margin was …’ if we can let teachers have This guy – Steve Mariani – as a result of more control over the that conversation and curriculum – we might get several others created an entirely new way of a better product teaching maths which is now called ‘The National Foundation for Entrepreneurship’, I think, in the States. And he decided that, obviously, kids at that level, ‘what are they interested in?’ They’re interested in making money. And that curriculum has swept through the States. It is being used here. I suppose my only argument there would simply be, if we can be more open about who we take into teaching, if we can see it as a flexible profession – and maybe, controversially, if we can let teachers have more control over the curriculum – we might get a better product. And I had better sit down because my time up. Andrew Haldenby: Camilla, thank you very much. Straight on to Francis O’Gorman.

Francis O’Gorman: Thanks very much. I am used to talking in fifty-five minute slots! So, faced with this radical contraction, the only thing I can come up with is a list, which I hope is coherent in some way. But, forgive its disjointedness, I think I would like to use this opportunity to say something I have always wanted to say to Radio 4 and the news on the television, which is that education does not consist only of schools. The slippage that you see between the equivalence of ‘Education = Schools’ – and therefore, what exactly do universities do? ‘Oh, they do business and they put things back into the economy.’ We need to watch that. I am very conscious, as a literary historian, of the nineteenth century – of the circularity of many arguments about education. And I think this is one of the two big challenges that always faces anybody talking about education. We do cover the same ground that has been covered in the past. And I do think it is very helpful to have some awareness of that. The other thing that is a challenge for us is that, rather like Arthur and the Roundtable, education is absolutely steeped in myth. I think we have to stop repeatedly when articulating any idea about education and just ask whether it springs from some intuitive sense of how things should be, our own experience of being at school or being a teacher, or whether it has anything more substantial behind it than that. This is a debate full of belief – and that’s a good thing because it engenders passion – and it is a bad thing, because it does not always engender clarity of thought. We, in universities are a little bit, I think, like car mechanics or plumbers when it comes to schools: we have a wonderful habit of looking at our first year students and saying, ‘oh, for goodness’ sake! Who did that? Who taught them to think like this or to write like that or to have such a reckless regard for the semicolon?” That is a myth. We need to be careful of that. And I am probably about to […] in my own words, but I will just give some perspectives on where I see things particularly challenging for my subject at the moment. I do think we do have quite a serious problem with expectations about independence of thought and I think that comes from a regime of high – if not over – assessment. The setting of hoops to jump through tends to produce among good students people who are very good at jumping through hoops, rather than somehow thinking a little bit more broader than that. It is one of the unintended consequences of an admirable effort to give people clear markers as to how they are getting on. And certainly, of course, we do struggle also with the assumption – quite rife, in my experience – that education ought to be, at some profound level, easy: that it should be a matter – as for us in the National Students Survey – we are told – should be a matter of student satisfaction. Ah! We don’t do satisfaction! We give people desires and ambitions and knowledge and competences that they did not know when they started, that they might have or be able to obtain. So we might say we are in the creative dissatisfaction business. But we are a bit stalled by, I think, the assumption that we, as it were, should give what is asked for. I do think that confidence – real, personal confidence – the real transformative effect of education – comes through attempting that which is challenging and succeeding – or partially succeeding – or, at any rate, doing better than we had thought. And, in order for that to happen, I do think we need space for students to www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform be able to make mistakes: in a sense, to be able to fail this or that, rather than being relentlessly pursued by the dark shadow of ‘assessment’ all the time. I do not particularly want to get into the skills versus knowledge debate, although I am sure, like everybody in this room, I have plenty of views on it. I am very interested – I told you this was a list – I am very interested in the notion of the free schools and I would like to hear more about this. I do have a big question about what exactly they might be free from because I think there are some serious impediments to the development of education across the board. In my little patch some 1970s’ assumptions about industrial relations are significant impediments and I should be very interested to know whether free schools might be free of those. And, on that philosophic point, I shall stop. Andrew Haldenby: Fantastic. Professor Dylan Wiliam. Dylan Wiliam: Thank you. I think our future economic prosperity is going to depend on our ability to distinguish myth from fact in these debates. And what is extraordinary is how many myths pervade so much government policy. So, for example – and you are not going to like this, but it is true – the quality of teaching in the average independent school is worse than the quality of teaching in the average state school. We know this from OECD data that shows the gap between private and state schools is bigger in England than it is in any other country, but entirely accounted for by the social class of the students going to those schools. Take that effect out and the superiority of the private schools disappears. And the private schools are teaching those kids in classes of thirteen and the state schools are teaching those kids in classes of twenty-five. So either, class size makes no difference at all or the teaching is worse in private schools. Classes are small in private schools because their teaching is so bad, they have to get the class size down to thirteen to match what the state schools are doing in classes of twenty-five. If we are going to improve education we have to look at the data and what is extraordinary is how much we have failed to do that. There is still this discourse of ‘good schools’ and ‘bad schools.’ Some schools are much worse than others but they do not have that big an impact on student achievement. So, of the difference in results that we see between high performing schools and low performing schools, about 93 per cent of that is Class size does not make nothing to do with the that much of a difference; school. It is the kids and their family what matters is teacher backgrounds that quality explains that difference. If you go to a good school, you will do better but not that much. So, if you have got an average school and you end up with, say, a class of thirty kids getting five good grades at GCSE. In a so-called ‘good school’, seventeen will and, in a so-called ‘bad school’, thirteen will. So, for those four kids it makes a difference but the differences are much smaller than most people assume. By and large, as long as you go to school, it does not matter very much which school you go to, but it 70

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matters very much which class you are in that school. And, as we have heard already, class size does not make that much of a difference; what matters is teacher quality. And, in fact, class size reduction programmes generally lower teacher quality. It is axiomatic. When you reduce class size, you need more teachers and, when you need more teachers, you tend to train them quickly and you let in people who should not have been let in. So it all comes down to improving teacher quality. Now one of the things we know is that pay is not important. Finland pays their teachers about 108 per cent of average Imagine having this salaries – whereas we conversation with your GP: pay our teachers about 130 per cent of average ‘Why did you end up as a So that is not GP?’ ‘Well, I wanted to be salaries. what is making a teacher but I was not Finland’s teachers so good. Finland does good enough.’ have this smart habit of getting the cleverest people in the country to want to be teachers. There are so many universities in Finland, where it is harder to get into the teacher training programme than it is to get into medical school. Imagine having this conversation with your GP: ‘Why did you end up as a GP?’ ‘Well, I wanted to be a teacher but I was not good enough.’ But Ireland provides an example of the countercase, which is that just getting the smartest people to want to be teachers is not enough by itself, because Ireland also chooses its teachers from the top 10 or 20 per cent of the college-going population and has a very modest set of outcomes, even though they pay their teachers well, give them great conditions of service – and yet the outcomes are modest. So, what we need to be aware of is that we need to be much more careful about analysing these positive formulations. And, what I really find most depressing of all is this idea that almost all policies tinker around the edges. So, first of all, ‘how many free schools are there going to be?’ ‘Are there going to be 5,000?’ – I doubt it very much. So, if you are not going to get 5,000 of these things then you are wasting your time. And these things, by-and-large, are not generally harmful. I mean, academies are not generally worse than the schools that they are replacing but, actually, no better than the schools they are replacing. Steve Machin’s research shows that academies do get better results than non-academies but they start from a lower baseline, which is why they get made into academies in the first place. And academies improve at the same rate as non-academies, starting from the same baseline. Specialist schools get better results than non-specialist schools but they get more money: they get £129 per student per year more. And, by a spooky coincidence, the improvement of results that you get is exactly what you’d expect if you just gave the schools £129 per student, per year. So we need to be very clear about the logic of our reforms. And one of the things I am suggesting – and this picks up on Paul’s point – we need to have a very clearly articulated logic model: ‘If we do this, then we think this is likely the result and this will be the consequence and then, and then, and then … and this is how it is going to result in higher student achievement.’ And, when you force people to articulate a logic model, it does two things: it makes them, first of

Schools for the future / Reform all, look at the existing research evidence to see ‘are the links in the chain supported by the existing research evidence?’ But then – and this is crucial in terms of Paul’s point – it provides you with a framework that I call ‘tight but loose.’ We have to make our reforms loose enough to be able to adapt into settings that are different from the ones that were envisaged. And, sometimes, you need to take advantages of affordances that are present in those settings that we had not envisaged: things that will make the form run better. But, at the same time, we must not allow the reforms to be so loosely articulated that they lose their effectiveness when implemented. Most educational reforms I see suffer from what Ed Hartle calls ‘lethal mutations.’ They get changed as they move through the layers of the system and, by the time they actually get into the classroom, they are completely ineffective. So, what you have is schools, trying to broaden their recruitment. I have seen it already. I was looking in Newham and the governors are discussing how to get more kids from the nice, middle-class primary schools coming to their school because that will make more of a difference than improving the quality of teaching and learning. So we need intelligent accountability that holds schools accountable for the kinds of progress the kids make. And, with that – and then focussing on leadership for that – then we also will have a chance of success. One last point about leadership: I work a lot with heads and one of the things that I find is that most heads never saw an educational idea they did not like. So some heads have got something like seventy or eighty things going on in their schools at the same time. And one of the things I say to those heads is that ‘when everything is a priority, nothing is.’ And effective leadership, in my view, consists of stopping people doing good and valuable things to give them the time and the mental energy to focus on even better things. And so, if we are going to succeed, we need to simplify the agenda so that most heads are focusing on one or two small things: i.e., improving the daily living experience of every single kid in every single classroom. If that is our focus, we will succeed. If we allow it to be dissipated by focusing on other things, then we will be a third-world country in forty years’ time. Thank you. Andrew Haldenby: Thank you. We have covered the ground. Paul Woodgates said that we need to think about how all this works and he said that we need to start thinking, in an open minded way, about new ways of delivering school education. Camilla Cavendish said that there is a polarisation in education and the best way to deal with problems of low achievement in the schools’ system is to be more flexible about the curriculum and teachers. Francis O’Gorman said ‘for God’s sake, don’t just talk about schools.’ Don’t worry, Francis, we will also talk about universities. And, I guess, then, if your constituency, Francis, as it were, is the kids at university, you are worried about over assessment and therefore a lack of independent thought. And you raised the value of education, which you thought was about challenge and so kids are not consumers in that sense; they have to be taught. Excuse the word! And Professor Wiliam said that ‘don’t fall into the temptation of over politicising education,’ if you like, ‘there are the fundamentals here about kids’ achievement being as much about their background as

about other things which maybe put education into the wider economic debate: how do we become a wealthier society?’ But he also stressed the quality of teaching and the right methods to make teaching better. So the question is ‘are those the right headings that we need Nick Gibb to tell us about later?’ Let me open it up: do we agree? Or there other things we want Nick to tell us? I will take questions in twos or threes. But there is one here. And the microphone will come round. Will you just say who you are? David Perks: Hi. David Perks. I am a teacher from South London. The one thing that I think strikes me as being absolutely vital, if this new administration is going to clear the decks and give us a new start, is to tell the truth about where we are. And so, if we look at the school improvement agenda and what it has produced over the past ten or so years, then it has produced schools which are determined to get their position on the league table and If we look at the school nothing else. And, in improvement agenda and terms of how they do they will ditch what it has produced over that, education for anything the past ten or so years, that gives them that then it has produced position. So my one way of explaining this schools which are clearly is – I am a determined to get their science teacher – school on the league table physics teacher – is that and nothing else. the number of state schools now who are rushing away from academic science education at GCSE is unbelievable – and using pseudo vocational qualifications to lie about their achievements in the league tables. If you do not understand that, level two BTech is worth two or four GCSEs grade C, 100 per cent internally assessed, kids sit no exam. In fact, if you understand that, it means the teacher drives it or, in a lot of cases, does it for them. What does that mean? It means that the league tables that we have mean nothing. And, if you actually took that equivalence being slightly facetious fake qualifications away, then you would find that schools have nothing – absolutely nothing – to give. Now, that is not to say that the teachers are rubbish, the schools are rubbish: it is to say they have been driven down that by an agenda that absolutely needs to be squashed flat now. So my question for Nick Gibb is ‘are you getting rid of the equivalences now?’ and ‘if not, then you’re going to get labelled with the same thing the previous administration did.’ Andrew Haldenby: Does anybody else want to come in to support that? The gentleman … I can just see your hand in the white shirt … That’s it. Audience Member: Thank you. Actually, it is a question really that could be picked up by Dylan Wiliam. I absolutely agree entirely. I am the headteacher of a school in Cheltenham. I’ve worked with Dylan Wiliam before and it is one of the pleasures of my career to see some of the proper research on the impact on learning that Dylan Wiliam and his team have developed. But the www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform point about the social capital that a child and their family can bring to a school being often this story that lies behind an improved school – the school is gentrified – that, I think, is at the crux … I agree with the equivalences issue but, at a more fundamental level, ‘how do we overcome that?’ Because, if we overcome that, then we can … So many other things are really just about how we do it. But the fundamental question is ‘if we can overcome the social background’. Tony Gardiner: Tony Gardiner, University of Birmingham, mathematician. I hope the four strands we saw at the front will get bound together, rather than remaining separate streams, as I think they often do. I am not sure that I can accept Dylan’s comment that there is no difference – or that the teaching in independent schools is worse – I am not sure. But I think the last comments are focussed on the fact that what is different between state and independent schools is the ethos within which the teachers they have got are working. I have no independent school background at all and I would not want one. But my wife teaches in one and I observe what happens. And I started the National Mathematics Challenges and ran them for a long time and I see the response from schools to extra-curricular opportunities that challenge with hard stuff. And state schools find it harder to respond because they are in the position that we heard here: trying to get their position in the league tables up. Somehow, it has got to change, the ethos and free state schools, not from controls, but to educate – to rediscover – not to throw out education, but to rethink, ‘What is education?’ And, if we can do that, we will get somewhere; if we do not, we’ll go the way Dylan has told us we’re going. Andrew Haldenby: Let’s just put those to the panel. So, if you like the questions for Nick Gibb would be – and the panel can tell us their answers – the last Conservative government introduced, it was the last Conservative government, wasn’t it, introduced league tables, which have been modified over the years, but it’s the same point, they’ve driven schools towards something which actually isn’t education – and David used the word ‘fake.’ It sounds a bit like the financial markets selling products which don’t even have any value. So we’ve created this completely fake activity. Is that right? What are you going to do about that? I don’t think you gave a name, the headteacher from Cheltenham, but, absolutely fundamental: ‘Nick Gibb, what are you going to do, faced with the fact that the social background of kids is one of the key determinants of education?’ ‘How would you respond to that?’ And then, as Tony Gardiner says, ‘how do you encourage the ethos of schools,’ which might actually be stronger in independent schools. The real question is ‘how do we foster the ethos of education in schools?’ And we won’t do it in the same order. So why don’t we start with Francis and Dylan, then Camilla and Paul? Francis O’Gorman: I very much agree with what Camilla said about the division between independent and state schools being fundamental. I think, crudely put, a substantial amount of the middle classes have a real interest in state education and do not have the option of simply 72

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buying their way out it. We have a real problem. I think, for me, the question of league tables was very clearly put and enabling. It connects slightly awkwardly, I think, with what Dylan had been saying about accountability because I think league tables are often the product of an attempt to create the regime of accountability. That’s a noble aim but its consequences have been very … they’ve driven very unacceptable behaviours. And that’s true in the university sector as well as in the schools sector. So I think that, picking up on what Dylan had said about … was it supportive accountability? Dylan Wiliam: Intelligent accountability. Francis O’Gorman: … Intelligent accountability … Dylan Wiliam: And supportive accountability. Francis O’Gorman: Wow! I would like to hear a hell of a lot more about that. Dylan Wiliam: Let me flesh out a few of the elements of an intelligent accountability system. So, for example, one of the first things I recommend for Nick Gibb to do is to take the equivalence tariff – the read off table – off the DFE [Department for Education] and give it to Ofqual. We have to have an independent assessment of whether the standards reached in these quadruple GCSEs in information technology – which I’m told schools do in an afternoon a week We need to turn our schools these days – and yet into being talent factories give you four GCSEs those really so that we are generating –arewhether equivalent to a talent; we are nurturing it; GCSE grade C in we are incubating it and we computer science. So I mean, I think we need are finding talent where to take that away from we didn’t think it existed, government because, rather than just being clearly, there’s been a neutral about hoping that vested interest. We’re the talent will rise to the top. letting the fox guard the hen house and that’s not a good idea. The other important thing about the intelligent accountability is that it needs to not to create incentives for people to do things we don’t want them to do. It’s the simplest idea in the world. And yet, we do things that are exactly counter to what we want them to do. We put in place incentives for schools to choose the highest achieving students. So now we’re moving away from CVA [Contextualised Valued Added] – which people may not like it but it is, by some margin, the best measure we have of how much kids are learning in a school – and we’re placing more emphasis on raw results. Ofsted has reduced its emphasis on CVA and is now looking at the quality of teaching. I have no faith in Ofsted’s ability to know good teaching when it sees it because the kinds of schools it celebrates are actually not that good. Of the 12 outstanding secondary schools, six had got worse the following year. So I call this ‘the curse of Ofsted.’ I think the other important thing is then to see ‘what are schools doing to advantage the

Schools for the future / Reform kinds of things a society wants them to do?’ And I think, in particular, this notion of combating disadvantage is particularly relevant here. What we’ve discovered recently is that … For many years, I believed that schools cannot compensate for society and I listened to [Russell Bernstein] when he said that. And what I have been amazed to discover is that, in the classrooms of the very best teachers, children with disadvantaged backgrounds learn just as much as those from advantaged backgrounds. Those with emotional and behavioural difficulties learn just as much as those without those difficulties. And so, what we have is a fundamental paradox: equal distribution of teacher quality does not produce equal outcomes. Because, being middle class confers an immunity against bad teaching. Middle class kids make sense of bad teaching in a way that working class kids can’t. And therefore, if we’re serious about maximising the talent in this country, we have to make sure that we’re getting the best teachers for the kids who need them most. Our current policy is treating education like a talent refinery: we allow kids to come up … We put a little knowledge in front of kids and we expect the best ones to rise to the top. And, if they don’t rise to the top, ‘Well, they’re not meant to do that subject.’ We need to change our schools into being talent factories so that we are generating talent; we are nurturing it; we are incubating it and we are finding talent where we didn’t think it existed, rather than just being neutral about hoping that the talent will rise to the top. Camilla Cavendish: Yes. Just on that point that’s one of the things that Teach for America and Teach First will try to do – is put supposedly bright, energetic people into the worst schools. So there is a sort of model there, perhaps. On the league tables, there are a number of other factors, I would suggest, which are also driving this problem. One is the early specialisation. I mean we are asking children to choose a very narrow range of subjects at a very early age. And that, I think, also first of all, it’s not very good for late developers but, also, it does encourage, even more, the choice of soft subjects over hard ones. And, in fact, at this summit we had at The Times on Monday, Sir John Rolls, who’s head of Rolls Royce, said ‘do you think that people in China and India are worrying about the thousands and tens of thousands of graduates in media studies?’ None of whom, have ever, to my knowledge have got a job in journalism. So it’s back to David Perks’ point, we are constantly misleading our kids about what actually represents value later on and how they’re going to get a job. So early specialisation is a problem. I think one of the other issues between independent and state schools is that, of course, as you know, the independent schools are now able to choose international exams. They’re able to choose We are constantly the IGCSE, the misleading our kids about International Baccalaureate; state what actually represents schools are not allowed value later on and how to move to those they’re going to get a job. exams. Again, that’s going to be another gulf: if we don’t have challenging enough exams. Then you’ve got the modularisation problem. A lot of bright

kids at schools I go to feel they’ve absolutely lost all interest in learning anything with these … They’ve got the multiple choice problem; you’ve got the modularisation problem; it’s absolutely … It’s exactly … As you said, it’s the unintended consequence of this that we’re just squashing out all creativity from the system. And the only other thing I’d say is that, on Francis’ point, I know exactly what you mean about independent versus state and I’m always surprised. But we still only seem to have seven per cent of people in the independent sector. So we’ve got a hell of a lot of other middle class people who are not actually buying their way out. But they’re doing it through post code, aren’t they? Which is a slightly different thing. Andrew Haldenby: They’re buying property in catchment areas, aren’t they? Camilla Cavendish: Yes, but they’re still in the state-funded sector. Andrew Haldenby: Yes. Paul? Paul Woodgates: I was struck by the last comment from the floor about the binding together some of the things that we’d spoken about in our introductory pieces – which is absolutely right. We’re talking here about a system which is a system in the true sense of the word. A whole series of things that are hugely interlinked and really quite complex. And that, I think, draws us to Dylan’s point about having a logic model that really lets us understand ‘if you do this and if you do that, then this will happen.’ And that has to be based on evidence. It has to based on a proper understanding and testing and real research of the fact that ‘if you do these two things, this will be the outcome.’ That’s how we avoid the unintended outcomes. The other thing that struck me was, Camilla, I think it was you that mentioned that everybody’s an expert in education. And, I have to admit, I find myself doing that. It’s very, very easy, based on eleven years of schooling and three years of university to believe that you know all about how education works. And, actually, as Dylan shows, it’s actually a bit more complex than you think. I have traditionally believed that small class sizes are a good thing. Having seen some of Dylan’s research, actually, it’s not a simple as that. There’s a whole lot more stuff going on in there. And it’s that that needs to be brought into that debate about ‘if you do A and if you B, then C happens.’ And part of that has to be about the implementation challenge as well: that there are some human behaviours in here – that individual people need to do individual things in order for reform to happen. And it’s that, in the end, that will drive it. Otherwise, it’s purely an academic exercise. One other thing I want to point out: Francis, I absolutely agree, it absolutely is about universities. Schools don’t exist in isolation. Just, let’s also not forget there’s a further education sector and a whole set of stuff around that which is important as well. And, actually, this is about the whole span of education, from birth to grave, of which schools is clearly an important part but not the only part. www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Andrew Haldenby: Seven minutes to go till coffee. Let me just take another three from you. Just an observation: the tendency in discussions like this is almost to slightly look to the negative and whether people want to touch on things that don’t need to be ripped up and can be encouraged, we might have a bit of that. And now there’s thirty hands so this is impossible. So I’ll be unfair and just pick another three. So the gentleman here and the two hands that were at the front here. Bene’t Steinberg: Hi. Bene’t Steinberg from Cambridge Assessment. When we look at things like this we also need to look – as Professor O’Gorman said – back to the past and ‘what was the case before we started?’ When we didn’t have league tables, nobody actually knew anything about schools and there was very little accountability and you had to go round and ask all sorts of people to find out whether the school you wanted to go to was actually any good. That was the first thing. The second thing is league tables weren’t invented by the government, they were invented by The Sunday Telegraph. Once the government started producing the figures The Telegraph started producing league tables and everybody else went along with it and the league tables are different for every newspaper because they all had their own axe to grind. Thirdly, before there were equivalences, hardly anybody did any vocational qualifications at all, they came out of school with no qualifications at sixteen and they got some kind of peasant job. Peasant jobs don’t exist in this country anymore, so one can think about what you do with equivalences but, again, back to the usual, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Tessa Keswick: Tessa Keswick. So many interesting points have been raised. It’s a fascinating discussion but I just wanted to say, if we want to improve … I think the section we’re talking about really is primary level and learning to read, write and add up. The statistics there remain extremely as they were in 1997 – about 28 per cent, I think, on the HMI or Ofsted figures. If we want to do something quickly about this key area, surely we do have to look at getting rid of bad teachers. I understand, and I hate to say this in this august company, but I understand less than a dozen teachers have been sacked in the last ten years. And this does seem completely incredible really. We need to do things quicker to get these children up to speed. And I go all over the Far East where we see children learning – admittedly by rote – two alphabets, quite often, and they all learn to read. They work very, very hard at it, they learn to add up, they learn the basics. I’d ask Camilla – second question – it’s all very well, these new schools – which, no doubt will be excellent – but, unless you work out exactly who the good teachers are, you’re giving independence and freedom to people who may not be very good. And where do you go from there? How do you control it? Who controls it? And who will be the authority there? Andrew Haldenby: Thank you. And one other hand is just behind. Forgive me; this is a bit arbitrary. 74

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Chris Kirk: Chris Kirk from PricewaterhouseCoopers. I guess I just want to lift the descending gloom a little bit as well because I feel more optimistic about some of the things that we could do now. And I think we have to be careful not to let the average statistics – which, I agree with Dylan, entirely show that social background is the big determinate – get us away from the fact that one can still find case studies of schools which completely buck that trend. And that is possible. I was in a very inspiring school just a few days ago where the previous school regime had pretty well given up on the community that it was in. And a new head came in, decided ‘actually, the first thing we need to do is really, is not so much about “how can the community learn about our school?” it’s “how can our school learn about the community, what it needs, how we can really engage with it and then start to find a way to help pupils learn?”’ And we’ve been doing some work on ‘capable communities’ with IPPR and, I guess, looking at the notion of Big Society, ‘can it be made to work if the background is such a big determinate?’ ‘What can schools do to get involved in that?’ I believe they can, I believe they do and I think we’ve probably all seen schools that have achieved that. I think the big question for me is ‘how do we scale that?’ ‘Is that scalable and what do we do?’ And I would caution against thinking that simply academies or free schools is the answer. Some of them will be. As with the academies programmes, some of them won’t be. And I think we need to understand what sits behind that that’s been the recipes for success. Andrew Haldenby: So those comments are a little bit more now into the detail of it. Bene’t Steinberg said that these things may not be perfect, they were invented for a reason. And then two points on teaching: firstly, isn’t there just an immediate thing for Nick Gibb or any minister to do, if teaching matters, then about poor quality teachers? But then, on the positive side, ‘how can effective teaching, and how that works in a school setting, be scaled up? So can we just take comments on that from the panel and we’ll start with Professor Wiliam and go this way. Dylan Wiliam: It turns out to be much more difficult than it looks because Teach for America – for example – doesn’t seem to produce any better student progress than teachers brought in through other routes. But we do know that teacher IQ matters. One of the extraordinary successes of our educational system over the past thirty or forty years is to get anything like the quality we used to have when women – very smart young women – are no longer tied to teaching in the way that they were thirty, forty, fifty years ago. So there is evidence in the US – slightly less strong evidence here – that teacher IQs are actually dropping in this country, mostly because females are now having a wider set of opportunities. But, having smarter teachers does seem to make a difference. So I’m in favour of anything that will actually improve the quality of teachers. So, let’s, by all means, deselect the bad teachers but there’s no point in deselecting them if the ones you end up replacing them with are worse. So Dunlop’s approach was to fire 10 per cent of every company’s workforce and replace them. But it worked because, generally, you could get in better

Schools for the future / Reform people. But you’d better check that you can get in better people, otherwise you’ll be hiring back the people you’ve just sacked. But the point is that, if we’re serious about scaling these solutions, the top end – Teach for America – getting really smart Oxbridge graduates into our schools and getting rid of the least effective teachers – are not going to move the system in any kind of way that’s scalable over a timescale of less than twenty years. If you’re serious about improving education, you have to have a relentless focus on getting teachers to improve their practice – their day-to-day, in the classroom, practice. That’s what’s got to get better. We know how to do it in groups of twenty or thirty teachers, we don’t know how to do it across 300,000 classrooms. Francis O’Gorman: I guess, this sounds a perverse thing to say, I don’t really like the equivalence between smartness and IQ. And I, personally, think that smartness is quite a challenging metric to use for ‘good teaching.’ It seems to me that there’s a nature of belief in a good teacher – a kind of passion and a commitment – which is from themselves, which is fundamental. And I wouldn’t want to use any other metrics – so-to-speak – at the top of the pile – than that. I think I’m going to pause it there. Camilla Cavendish: Okay. Very briefly because we’re running out of time. On Tessa’s specific point about ‘who will control the free schools?’ I mean, it’s going to be governing bodies. So there is an issue about ‘are governing bodies good enough to make these sorts of decisions?’ I mean that’s quite an interesting issue. But, on the general teaching point, I spent most of my career in business What we need to do is decide what’s important – before I became a journalist. And we seem which, based on this to forget about discussion, is all about management. I mean, a teacher quality – and create lot of employees – just an accountability framework like teachers – are not good or bad that’s specifically designed necessarily at their job. They can be to improve teacher quality. doing terribly badly but, if they have right management, they can do a hell of a lot better. So I think, obviously, you’ve always got some bad apples but I think a lot of this goes back to what I said at the beginning about teaching about being a rather odd profession and being regarded in a different way to every other. Well, actually, the truth is you’ve got a team: you’ve got a headteacher, you manage those people. Frankly, you should probably also pay them by performance and a whole lot of other things that you would do if you were in the private sector. But I just think the management issue should not be overlooked. Paul Woodgates: A final thought from me. In terms of a word that’s come up a number of times in this debate – it is ‘accountability’ and the problems with accountability that have been driven down into league tables and so on. At heart it seems to me that that debate is actually quite simple. What we need to do is decide what’s important – which, based on this discussion, is all about teacher quality – and create an accountability framework that’s specifically

designed to improve teacher quality. If that happens, then the right dynamics go into the system and the right things – whether that’s dismissing poor teachers or coaching existing teachers or recruiting better new teachers – all of those things come out if the accountability framework is fundamentally designed to deliver that outcome. Andrew Haldenby: Right. Well, that’s finished now because we’re four minutes over – for which I apologise. So, what I’ll do is, I’ll say to Nick Gibb that in our previous discussion, we thought that what he needs to focus on is teacher quality and also a sense that state education has become skewed by the wrong kind of accountability – David made the point which everyone has supported – and he needs to stop that right now and think about the right model of accountability to move the system. So thank you. That’s a very lively way to begin the day, which is great. And thank you for your enthusiasm. We will go straight to coffee and come back five minutes later – 10.35. And thank you to our panel.

Supporting quality teaching Nick Seddon: Thank you for joining us again for the next session. Before I start, I’m told that Cambridge Assessment want to tell you that you shouldn’t worry too much about ethics and they want you to steal stuff from the stand over there. So we’re going to talk about quality in this session, and of course we’ve already started, we’ve already done a fair amount of talking about quality in the first session and hopefully we’ll be able to continue and develop the thinking that’s happened there, but I was just remembering as I was sitting watching, in the spirit of erudition, that there’s a line in Hamlet when he says ‘come, show us a taste of your quality,’ and that I hope what we’ll get a chance to do today. There are lots of issues to talk about, and some of those were started off this morning, the question of the quality of teaching and quality and quantity, and what the most important factors are, and Dylan Wiliam of course made it very clear that it was about the quality of the teaching not the quantity. But we’re also going to talk about technology and about innovation, and about the kinds of tools that will help teaching to become more effective and help schools to deliver teaching in a more effective way, and of course I’m sure we’ll also talk about accountability and the different accountability measures that we were talking about this morning and develop some of our thinking there. I’m joined by a superb panel of speakers and each will speak for five minutes, and then we’ll go to the same kind of Q&A that we had this morning. We have the recently lauded, I don’t know what the phrase is? Jim Knight: Ennobled is the term. Nick Seddon: Ennobled, there we go, ennobled Jim Knight, for which should go many congratulations, who is going to have to leave slightly early because he is going to give his maiden speech today in the House of Lords, which is very exciting. As many of you will know, Jim spent nine years as an MP and five of those as a Minister with www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform portfolios across a number of different departments, Environment, Education, Employment and Digital Technology, so he knows what he’s talking about. As do, indeed, the other people that are on the panel, many of whom, I think all of whom, have spent their entire lives in education one way or another. We have Rod Bristow, who has certainly spent his entire time in education, and he’s the President of Pearson UK. We have Sir John Holman, who has spent his life in science and particularly chemistry as far as I understand it, in both the school and the university context, and is now the Director of The National Science Learning Centre at the University of York. And we have Professor Judy Sebba, who has been both a teacher and a senior civil servant, and researcher at Cambridge and Manchester Universities. She is now Professor of Education and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Sussex. So we will, Jim Knight, Lord Knight, sorry, I’m terrible. Jim Knight: Call me Jim. Nick Seddon: Lord Knight is not going to start the speaking. Jim Knight: I can if you like? Nick Seddon: Let’s start with Rod and we’ll go down, and then we’ll come to Jim last. So, Rod, thank you. Rod Bristow: Okay, thank you. Well I feel quite privileged to work for Pearson, not just because Pearson is one of the UK’s leading education companies at a time when education is more important than it has ever been, but also because of the diversity of things that we get the opportunity to get involved in, whether it be with publishing, through technology or through our awarding body, Edexcel. I often get asked ‘what is it, you know, of all the things that you’re involved in, what are the things that make the most difference, what are the things that improve learning more than anything?’, and my answer is invariably: ‘I’m afraid it is not great publishing, it is not great textbooks, it’s not the great curriculum that we’ve devised, it’s not even the great technology that we’ve got, it is actually great teachers.’ It is great teaching that really does make the biggest difference in education, and I know that not just through my experience, I still do remember when I was at school, but I know it as a parent, and I know how important the teachers are to my kids, and I know what a difference it makes having really great teachers. I do think a lot about what it is about a teacher that really does make that difference, and I wouldn’t like to actually come up with just a list of characteristics because I actually think that there are many. There’s real value in diversity and I think there are lots of different teachers, who are quite different than each other, that can be great teachers. But I do think that all great teachers have the ability to get the very most out of the students, the kids that are in their charge: if you like they get their kids to really work hard.You can express that in terms of they’re really well engaged or they knuckle down, whichever way you want to put it, they really do have 76

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the ability, and I think really, really great teachers have the ability to get the kids to actually want to do it without being made to. So I think that having great teachers, of course, is central to our ability to improve learning. But, I think as we look forward the pressures that teachers are under and thinking about the fact that education is more important than it has ever been, that the expectations of education are more important, that we’re constantly looking for improvements, improvements in learning outcomes: we’re in an environment where everybody is demanding more, whether it be employers, parents, indeed politicians, are looking for more to come out, rightly to come out of the education system. And it is not just looking at our improvement year-on-year, I think increasingly we’re looking at how we as a country are doing when we compare ourselves with other countries in the world. So even though great teachers in their own right are crucially important, it seems to me that great teachers are going to need more help as time goes on, for them to do it on their own as time goes on, it’s unlikely to be enough. And when I think about what great teachers have to do, it is about getting kids to work hard, to really, truly engage, to engage in something that’s not just engaging but is also worthwhile, stretching if you like that is meaningful, that really does take the learner to a different place, a different level of understanding. So they’ve got to do that on the one hand, but the other thing that a teacher has to do is to have a pretty good understanding of the needs of the students in front of them, to know where they are in their learning, for the whole class but for the individual learner as well, to really understand what it is for that particular student that they may be struggling with, what they may have mastered particularly well. So that engagement and that understanding, if you like, the data, are the two really important things that teachers have to do. On the data point, I think it’s something that Michael Gove calls ‘intelligent accountability,’ and increasingly we are bound to be looking more and more to an evidence based approach to education. How well are our kids really doing and what can we learn from how well they’re really doing? That data is crucially important. Now, as an industry, in education, we’ve made a lot of progress. There’s a lot more data available now than there’s ever been. It’s true of Edexcel. But it’s not only true of Edexcel, other exam boards have also implemented systems of on-screen marking, whereby a huge amount of data, as a result of the technology that’s been used to do the marking, is now available to schools. They can see how well individual cohorts have done in an exam, they can compare their performance with other schools, other similar schools, and they can look in a very, very granular way down as well into individual papers, into individual questions, individual students on individual questions, and as a result of that are able to form conclusions about where maybe for the next cohort they could improve, what types of learning did they perhaps fall down on in that last paper. So there’s a huge amount of data available. Not all that data is being used, I have to say. There is the take-up of it, it’s patchy, and when I talk to teachers about it they often tell me, ‘well yeah, actually we haven’t got round to it, we didn’t know about it.’ There are many reasons why they’re not using it, but it’s not all being used as much as it could be.

Schools for the future / Reform The other thing that is afforded through technology is this idea of engagement. The thing that technology can really bring is this idea of learning-bydoing, and we know that this is not just about vocational learning, even for academic subjects the learning-by-doing approach makes an enormous difference. If you take mathematics, most teachers, and indeed mathematics professors that I talk to, all talk about the importance of learning-by-doing in terms of really getting to understand those concepts. Learningby-doing is a lot harder when you’re sitting down with a blank bit of paper and textbook than it is when you’re sitting with a piece of technology, a Bring a teacher from 100 years ago to today, they’d sophisticated homework system that pretty much know where can tell you where they were. They’d be you’ve gone wrong, not standing in front of a class just that you’ve gone wrong but where … and they’d be doing you’ve gone wrong. whole class teaching And in my case, when I’ve been trying to help my son, who’s doing his GCSE maths, or has just done his GCSE maths, I’ve been trying to help him do his homework and every now and then I might stumble across a question that I actually get right and I don’t know why I’ve got it right, it tells you, it might tell you why you’ve got it right as well. You can click on a button and you can find out, you can get a lot more ‘try this,’ ‘try that,’ you can get an infinite number of worked examples which a textbook can never give you, and it gives you a lot of data as well, it gives you the data as a learner as to where you’re going wrong and it can create a personalised learning plan for you, and it gives that data back to the teacher. But it’s very much learningby-doing, and the nature of it being relatively impersonal because it is computer-based, there’s no threat to you as a learner, it really does improve, it really does improve that engagement and that idea of learning-by-doing, and we know that the kids actually work harder when they’ve got these systems than they do when they’ve got to sit down with a pen and paper, they do more work. Now the interesting thing about all these fantastic technologies that are out there is they’re not yet really being used. There is that old analogy that if you were to bring a doctor from a 100 years ago into the future and bring them into a hospital and they were surrounded by computer screens and medical equipment and scanners and the like, they really wouldn’t know where they were or what to do. If you do the same thing for a teacher, bring a teacher from 100 years ago to today, they’d pretty much know where they were. They’d be standing in front of a class, they might have an electronic whiteboard but they’d still have something at the front, they’d be standing there and they’d be doing whole class teaching. The environment hasn’t yet been really transformed in education, but it seems to me that it is just a question of time. Why would education be immune from the progress that technology has brought to every other sphere of life? But it is about the commitment, the belief in that technology, and I think we’re at a very important point in our development in that regard.

Nick Seddon: Thank you very much. John, would you like to? John Holman: I think we’re all implicitly assuming that what we’re talking here today about is England, but I’d just like to remind everyone that the UK includes three other education systems as well. [Really?] Where are you from? I actually want to talk about something that you will think is blindingly obvious, but I think it’s so important that I’m going to say it and spend five minutes developing it, and that is that the really important thing about what goes on in schools is teaching subjects well, and good teaching and learning in schools is about good teaching of a particular subject by a person who really knows that subject well. So that’s my thesis. Now, as I said, this may seem blindingly obvious, but it’s quite easy to take your eye off that particular ball. When you’re a head teacher, for example, you have many other agendas going on; obesity, healthy schools, teenage pregnancy, we can think of many, many other things which schools are often expected to deal with. And in handling all of those agendas head teachers and their management teams often tend to take away what should be a relentless focus on people, teachers in classrooms teaching subjects very well, because that’s what goes on day in, day out in schools. Subject teaching is what defines the agenda in schools, and what children take home from schools is about what happened in a particular subject with a particular teacher; that’s particularly true in secondary schools, but it’s true in primary schools as well. And for teachers, being an expert in teaching your subject is, for most teachers, the definition of their professionalism. It’s how they feel about themselves, about their position in that school, and about whether they’re doing their job well or not, it’s at the heart of their professionalism. And by the way, that is also true in primary schools, despite the fact that teachers have to be specialist across more than one subject. Why is this so important? Well it’s important because, firstly, there is very clear evidence that teachers who are specialist in their subject teach that subject more successfully than those who aren’t, as evidenced from Ofsted and elsewhere about that. Now we can all think of examples. For There is very clear evidence example, a physics teacher who has a PhD, that teachers who are knew everything there specialist in their subject was to know about teach that subject more physics: terrible teacher. successfully than those We can all think of opposite examples, of a who aren’t PE teacher who didn’t know much history but was a superb history teacher. But those cases don’t prove that the rule is not generally true, that when other things are equal subject specialist are more effective, and particularly if they are up-todate with their subject and the ways of teaching it. I have to say that head teachers don’t always have that at the top of their mind when appointing. I know that, and I’ve been a head teacher, and I know that when faced with a vacancy for a mathematics teacher at the end of May, what you really want to do is to get someone in front of those kids, who will be able to control them and get some kind of learning going on. www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Those sorts of considerations often drive head teachers to make compromises, which in the long-term are not in the best interest of high quality subject teaching. So there’s a lot here about school management and about the behaviour of head teachers and leadership teams and governors around celebrating really good subject knowledge and subject teaching, and publicly celebrating it and publicly prioritising it, and helping teachers to see that that is where they should focus and to help them to navigate their way through all the many other agendas that go on in schools during the day, for example, behaviour management. Just to develop once more why subject knowledge is so important, if a teacher is teaching a mixed ability class, he or she will often have a situation where they need to explain in depth a complex idea. If their knowledge is in depth, if their understanding of that complex idea is secure, they can think around how to explain it. Now I know that that physicist PhD who knows everything there is to know about physics may not have a clear feeling for where the class’ sense lies, but that’s about training and that’s about professional development. The rule There’s still a long, long way still applies. And to go in bedding in schools another point about knowledge and with head teachers a culture subject depth of subject that says ‘continuing knowledge is that if professional development bright youngsters, youngsters who are is important for teachers’ very much ahead of things, they’re miles ahead of where the class is, keep asking questions, a teacher with good, rich, deep subject knowledge can respond and stimulate. So that’s the thesis, now what do we do about it? It’s about, as always with issues around teacher quality, it’s about recruiting and about training those who are already in place. So it’s about recruiting subject specialists into teaching who have the best possible qualifications we have, so we’ve heard earlier about the importance of teacher quality. There is some good news around there, the Training and Development Agency has just reported very significant increases in applications to train as teachers; 40 per cent, for example, increase in science, 33 per cent increase in mathematics. They’ve also reported an increase in the quality, so 5 per cent increase in the numbers of teachers who have Firsts or 2.1s. Of course this is a result of all sorts of things, many of them economic. We have a spike we should take advantage of, keep recruiting, get them into the schools, and give them great experiences so that those teachers stay in schools. So that’s about the recruitment. The second part of it is about up-to-date subject knowledge, and here continuing professional development, there’s still a long, long way to go in bedding in schools with head teachers a culture that says ‘continuing professional development is important for teachers,’ and that the most important part of it is around their subject knowledge. Much professional development in schools tends to be generic, whole school issues. I’m not saying that these aren’t important, but this can take the eye off the really important part of keeping a teacher up-to-date with his or her subject knowledge and skills in how to teach it. So this isn’t a call for back to basics, let me be very clear about that. I’ve deliberately not defined what subjects are, haven’t said anything about skills and facts 78

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and learning and any of those issues. It’s not about going back to a particular type of subject or type of curriculum, it’s about focusing on subjects for the benefit of teacher and for the pupils that they teach. Subject teaching is part of the rhythm of school life, it defines the experience for pupils and teachers, and if you get subject teaching right most of the other whole school thing such as behaviour will follow. Nick Seddon: Thank you very much. Judy? We’re still going to squeeze in I think. Judy Sebba: Okay. Right, well thank you very much, it’s always a challenge to squeeze 35 years of research in education into five minutes, so it’s no different to what I had to do in my six years in the Department. Okay, in the current climate nothing I’m going to say is going to imply extra funding.That won’t surprise you. I really am concerned to build on a point actually that Rod has made, that we have a great deal more evidence than we use and a great deal more data than we use, and therefore how we jig things so that people can make better use of it is what underlies what I want to say. We have two major factors which we know impact on pupils’ learning – school leadership and the quality of teaching. Today, this session is about specifically the quality of teaching, but therefore I’d like to see the school leaders alongside the policy makers as facilitators and supporters of that quality of teaching, and so I want to make four points. The first is not in the little written bit in there I’m afraid, that a recent study on teacher effectiveness defined in terms of pupil outcomes concluded that, first of all, teachers in the later phases of their careers were more vulnerable to pressures of various sorts, such as illness or family circumstances or whatever, even professional pressures within the school. Yet we very understandably, given the early dropout rate, sorry, the high dropout rate from early teachers, we focus our investment I think at the moment predominantly in the early years of teaching, and I think this is a bit of a problem that we need to reconsider. I’m not saying we don’t need to do that, to invest in the early years, I’m simply saying we need to look at that balance. Secondly, that teachers who are on an upward trajectory, and we don’t have time in this session to define what that is, or a stable trajectory, in other words they are developing and that is well explained in the research, have better outcomes for pupils, which merely goes to confirm what other speakers have already said this morning, that while schools matter, teaching matters more, and that is regardless of either levels of deprivation or school context. My second main point is to say that we all learn better when we get feedback on our performance that identifies the next steps we need to take to improve, and teachers are no different, but one of the main ways in which we’ve implemented support for teachers on this, and are continuing to do so and I’m delighted about this, is through teacher coaching of one another. However, the way in which we’ve implemented teacher coaching, and continue to do so, is actually not the way that the research suggests is most effective, and that’s because the research findings in this area are counter intuitive. The person who learns most in the coaching situation is the observer, not the person being observed, and yet we

Schools for the future / Reform continue to persist in implementing a coaching policy, and I’m delighted that it is being implemented but let’s try and get it right, which works the other way round. Thirdly, pupils are ongoing consumers of teaching. There has been a small but very vocal proportion of the teaching profession who have regarded pupils’ evaluation of teaching as a threat, and that has been rather highly publicised in the press. Schools that seek pupils’ evaluation of teaching on a regular basis, train pupils to evaluate sensitively and feedback sensitively, manage to improve the quality of their teaching considerably, and we have excellent examples of this from the UNICEF UK’s Rights Respecting Schools Programme, which now has a thousand schools in it, one of the best examples actually is in your area of Dorset. So I would argue here that we need to reconsider this, it can’t be right for us to say ‘we can’t have pupils evaluating teaching,’ they do so every day of their school life, it’s just that we don’t ask them for the feedback. Fourthly, and finally, dictating to teachers every step that they must take has been a misinterpretation of developing an evidence-informed profession. We need to provide accessible, synthesised, robust evidence for teachers. We’ve made some progress on this but nowhere near enough, and, more problematically, we need to create an expectation and space in their busy days for them to use it, which comes back to your data use problem, because at the moment some other professions, not many have expectation to use research and to use evidence in their professional standards, and teaching does not in the regular standard, and then to let teachers experiment, or what some colleagues have called ‘tinker’, in order to improve the quality of teaching for all pupils for whom they’re responsible. So, in conclusion, I would say accessible evidence and a licence to experiment, with ongoing feedback from pupils and properly implemented coaching, the quality of teaching will improve. It is now up to the policy makers and the school leaders to implement it. Nick Seddon: Thank you. Jim? I’m sorry we’ve overrun. Jim Knight: That’s fine, but I will magically disappear in six minutes. It’s really good to be back in front of an education audience again after a year’s break in the world of employment. It was slightly challenging to see all of the problems that we didn’t fix in education then coming home to roost for me in employment, but it is generally good to be back and I’ve chosen to be here rather than being told to be here by my diary secretary, and that’s also a good thing because it is an area where I want to dwell on as a member now in the House of Lords. In respect of high quality teaching I almost choked on my muesli a couple of weeks ago when the new Secretary of State, my good friend, Michael, talked about what a good generation of new teachers we’ve got. It’s about the first time he’s paid tribute to the legacy that he’s received, and in many ways I think he does have a good legacy in respect of the quality of the teaching profession, and as the introduction to this in the Reform brochure says, we’ve got many more teachers and support staff, and in many ways that is

why I think we’ve seen the steady improvement in educational performance over the last 10-15 years. It’s because we have invested in the workforce and they’ve got better, so it shouldn’t really be a great surprise. The challenge now is of course that there probably isn’t going to be any more growth in the numbers of teachers Whilst the biggest because of funding constraints, and we’ve determinant of success to get their in a classroom is teaching, got productivity up and success for a school is keep that improvement. more down to the quality But, alongside it, if we are going to make the of leadership big step changes in improvement, you’ve also got to look at leadership, because whilst the biggest determinants of success in a classroom is teaching, success for a school is more down to the quality of leadership, and of course the success of the child, him or herself, is down to the quality of the parenting. So this isn’t just about teaching, so that’s a bit of a warning shot around the subject for discussion, but I’ll just leave that aside. In terms of recruitment, as we’ve heard, recession helps, and my recent background in employment makes me worry somewhat that unemployment will go back up again. So I think we will have a nice window over a period of time where people will want to go into teaching as long as public servants aren’t ridiculed too much in the popular press, and so that’s a good opportunity with things like Teach First, with things like the Graduate Teacher Programme, Transition to Teaching as well as the traditional routes in, to bring in a really good swathe of new and enthusiastic teachers, particularly in the shortage subjects like science that John looks after, and then continue I hope with some of the CPD, like a Masters in Teaching and Learning I think, from what Judy’s been saying, around making sure we get that collaborative coaching right, but I think we’ve got some really good practice to build on there. Similarly, I hope that, in a time of funding constraint, that it’s the support staff and the teaching assistants who don’t then pay the price and that we lose those in classrooms again, because I think they’re a fantastic resource in supporting high quality teaching. I have my worries about how they’re being deployed in some cases, that they’ve been used as the place to park the difficult children, those with special needs, those who are just struggling to be with the majority that the teaching is being aimed at, and that in the end you therefore get the more highly qualified teacher in the classroom focusing on those that need the help less than the minority, who get parked with the less qualified. I think that’s something that we need to have the confidence to address within schools and within classrooms, and that requires flexibility. Some of you may remember that the moment when I got into the most trouble I think, apart from my spelling as Schools Minister, was when I had an ATL conference, someone asked me about class size, and I said I’d seen a fantastic maths class I think it was in a class size of 70. Now what I went on to say was that there was more than one teacher in that class, but the headline was good so they ran with it, but that kind of practice, of having more than one teacher in larger, more flexible spaces, it goes back to www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform what was said about getting the design right, has the opportunity to create much more engaging, much more personalised learning. If you then are also using technology and you’re using the possibility of collaboration between pupils as well as between teachers, teachers learning from each other in a classroom, that is an opportunity that we should grasp more, alongside a more flexible curriculum. And I have to say I regret the Rose Primary Curriculum being abandoned because I think that was offering much more flexibility within the curriculum for teachers to be able to use their professionalism better, but there are new tools now that then we can use to increase the productivity and the success of teaching further. We’ve talked a bit about accountability, I share some of my friends and the unions’ concerns about something as crude as Rate My Teacher, but I absolutely agree around pupil evaluation, and we should systematise that and roll that out as widely and as rapidly as we can, done sensitively, with proper training for pupils, and technology and data does allow better accountability. There is a problem around measurability and what is measurable, because I think we focus too much in this country and in many educational jurisdictions on the academic. We have a system that’s still designed around creating professors rather than necessarily meeting the skills needs of the wider economy, and again, as a former Employment Minister, I’m a little bit more conscious of that. So we need a system of accountability that also measures things that are much more difficult to measure. Creativity is something that employers tell me all the time they want to see; collaboration, leadership, communication, all of those things that are somewhat more challenging than whether or not you’re good at maths, perhaps. Technology also allows us better parental engagement and allows us to develop new pedagogy, it allows us true subject associations and brings subject teachers together online to develop more collaboration and to extend and deepen that subject specialism and share what works in the classroom better. So I think there are plenty of things we can use the new tools for. We’ve got to be cautious about the market. I was very concerned around school management systems, that there was a market that was pretty much dominated by one or two players, and bringing in new products, new flexibilities within that market is something that needs to be managed. But in the end what I’d say to you about the future is, we have to grasp, particularly with the demise of BECTA, there’s a challenge for us now to make sure that we’ve got good enough engagement and good enough collaboration across the system to really use these tools, because the future, and education is about that, the future workplace that people are going into, the future world and leisure world that people are going into, is about collaboration and creativity. These technology tools allow us to do that, they allow us to do education in a more engaging and exciting way, and if we don’t grasp that opportunity and learn from each other and collaborate with each other on how we do that best then we miss a massive trick for the country as a whole, as well as for all the children who live here. Thank you, I must go. 80

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Nick Seddon: Thank you. Thank you very much. Right, l’ve lots and lots to chew on here. Clearly a very, very strong stress on the importance of teaching across each of the speakers, with also an emphasis on the importance of tools that can help transform the way that they teach and support teaching. John put a particularly strong emphasis on the importance of teaching subjects and subject specialism, and also you expressed some optimism about the quality and specialism of teachers, which is also something that Jim Knight did. And Judy, you put a very strong stress not only on the quality of teaching but also on the accessibility of evidence and evaluation, and also the way that teachers are managed, that school leaders deploy teachers. And then Jim talked about the connection between employment and education quite a lot, and the way that education feeds into the wider economy. I mean, that was a lovely phrase, ‘the problems we didn’t fix in education are coming home to roost in employment.’ So there are all sorts of things for us to feed on, so if questions come I’ll take them in clutches and then we can go through them. Okay, yes, gentleman here? Robert Butler: Name’s Robert Butler, I come from deepest Devon, and that’s enough said really. My question is about leadership, and in a way it’s not really a question, it’s the hope that you might have dealt with it before I asked, and I know Professor Sebba chose between two choices, to talk about quality rather than leadership, and so I’m afraid we might get to Mr Gibb without ever bringing it up as a question he should consider, because it is in the end now I think a politician’s problem. Michael Gove has dropped us a bundle of spillikins on the table with this academy programme, and down in Devon it’s a huge problem, its unsettling everybody, we’re taking it on all frightened of it, as we might be, and the local authority is not going to be able to cope with the problem and shows us they don’t really know what to do about it, so everyone’s on the back foot. Leadership is the core there, but in any case it’s a core problem, and Professor Sebba herself used the commercial expression of a school leader and I’m sure didn’t mean it as such, leadership is a very tricky, difficult thing, school management is usually what you get. I was in the services, so I know a system where leadership is terribly important, it’s getting people to do something they don’t want to do, and that’s the teachers. What I wonder is whether Michael Gove and Mr Gibb will find a way to project leadership right down to those teachers, through the rest of us, in order to wake them up to do what at the moment they don’t want to do. Nick Seddon: Okay, thank you, thank you. There was a question further, gentleman over there, and then we’ll take one more, the lady. David Daniels: Yes, good morning, David Daniels, Principal of the Petchey Academy in Hackney. I’m a bit puzzled by the emphasis on the word ‘teaching’ here, because five years ago when we planned and opened the new

Schools for the future / Reform Academy, we determined that all our staff were going to be educators, not just as teaching staff. At the moment 95 per cent of my staff are in some way implicitly involved in the educational progress of children, we are One of the most effective predicting 86 per cent five A* to C, including people I employ is a man and maths who has done time at Her English next year, and I put Majesty’s pleasure and in that down to the fact dealing with some of our that the team work of more challenging children all the educators is part of that he has an amazing impact actually success rate. I’ll give on their motivation, their you one example, one self worth and so on. Not of the most effective people I employ is a to call him an educator who has done and to actually talk about man time at Her Majesty’s the quality of education pleasure and in dealing would be a total mistake with some of our more challenging children in my view. he has an amazing impact on their motivation, their self worth and so on. Not to call him an educator and to actually talk about the quality of education would be a total mistake in my view. Thank you. Nick Seddon: Thank you and the lady down here as well, third row. We’ve got about 10 minutes, so if we can keep the questions as short as possible, sorry. Irina Tyk: There was a perception this morning I felt of a chasm that exists between the state and the independent sector. I would just like to add a word of caution. Both, if you like, are beholden to Ofsted, to the education establishment, and one of the tragedies I think that has come through in the last however many years is the emphasis on child-centred education. Now it’s a lovely word, of course children matter, but what matters is the teacher in the classroom. Now we have had a suggestion of subject knowledge, subject knowledge is extremely important because it allows a teacher to improvise on the spot, so to speak, with a wider subject knowledge. Teachers have to be able to communicate, that is important. This all comes in something that has been lost, the art of whole class teaching. This is not in the schools because you have to tutor, you have to go on a one-to-one, and I think this is a tragedy. Lastly, accountability, a lot of the accountability stresses through Ofsted that we must do health and safety, that we are not doing something incorrect in the classroom, that we have to prove everything but the intellectual development of the child. So if I can just throw that in. Thank you very much. Nick Seddon: Thank you very much. So we have three questions here. One is that of leadership, one is the idea that educational progress is about more than just teachers, and the other is about the particular techniques of teaching, child-centred, and the accountability structures around them. John, would you like to start us off?

John Holman: Could I just say something about leadership, it’s a very interesting and important question. I think often the question focuses almost exclusively on head teachers and their leadership teams, and I think there are important questions to be asked about governing bodies, particularly when we’re talking about the difficulties that are caused if the accountability systems aren’t right. Governing bodies are a very important part of holding schools to account, and I think we need some very clear thinking about the quality of governing bodies, their ability to hold schools to account, thinking about the quality of governing bodies that brings you to thoughts about particularly Chairs of Governors, they’re crucial, and have we simply got too many governing bodies, with so many primary schools each having a governing body? Can we have some wins about quality of governing bodies, their ability to hold schools to account and help the leaders to lead by thinking creatively about governing bodies? Maybe we should be paying Chairs for example. Nick Seddon: Thank you. Judy? Judy Sebba: Yes. Well thank you for the question about leadership. The reason I focused on quality of teaching was simply because of the nature of this particular session, but I certainly wouldn’t want to have given the impression I didn’t think the school leadership was important. Also, you’re quite right, I did slip into making it sound as if we were only talking about head teachers, and certainly that was not intentional. Interestingly we’ve seen, not many, but a few schools improve dramatically despite the head teacher rather than because of the head teacher. I have to say, I think the head teacher usually helps, but there are exceptions, there have been exceptions in some of the school improvement work I’ve been involved with in the past. The key thing we know now, and it’s only relatively recently, that we’ve been able to link pupil outcomes to the quality of school leadership successfully. There were many attempts to do this for many years, where people have been unable to demonstrate the relationship, and it’s only just beginning to be a bit better established. One thing we do know is that we need those school leaders to focus on teaching and learning issues, that’s quite problematic given the very large number of other problems and issues which they face. So I’ll leave it at that. Nick Seddon: Thank you, that’s great. Rod, do you want to pick up on any of this? Rod Bristow: Perhaps a couple of points. On the leadership point I wholeheartedly agree with the point about the school leaders being critically important, and just an example of it, relating it to my theme around technology, in London we have the London Grid For Learning, and the Chief Executive of the London Grid For Learning, Brian Durrant, who’s done an excellent job in encouraging schools in London to adopt these sort of communication and collaboration technologies, a lot of proactivity tools as well as learning technologies that Jim Knight was talking about. His focus in doing that, and www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform he’s made huge progress, we’ve worked with him and he’s made much more progress than I thought he ever would I have to say, but the approach that he’s taken is very much one of focusing on school leadership and on the leaders and engaging the leaders of the schools in the technology, realising that if you just sort of put it out there and hope that the teachers will pick it up it will not happen, it does require leadership, it does require a sense of purpose in setting these objectives. So I think leadership is crucially important when it comes to technology, and, perhaps related to the leadership point, this issue of the gentleman who was talking about having a lot more, you know, 85 per cent educators or whatever, more people who are on the front line of doing the teaching if you like. I also think that’s very, very important, but I wonder if it also says that those people who perhaps aren’t every day on that front line in teaching, that they also, if there are fewer of them, in themselves they become much more important too. It’s much more important that the quality of the people that are in those roles is also upgraded, especially if there are fewer of them, it’s important the contribution they make is even more. I was thinking, within our own company, and its true for any company, we have a lot of data about how we’re doing on lots and lots of different measures, that data would never get picked up by the managers that need to pick it up in our organisation were it not for a very few people, very talented people who get to grips with it and understand how to interpret it for the managers in the company, these are really high quality people. Do we have enough high quality people in these kinds of roles in schools? Nick Seddon: Thank you. I’m slightly in two minds. We’ve got about two minutes left because we overran slightly. I just wonder whether or not we can take questions, if anybody can make quick-stab questions rather than statements, and then quick responses from each of the panel, that would be fantastic. Yes, gentleman here? Yes, here. Mark Dale-Emberton: Mark Dale-Emberton, Charlton School, special school, secondary. With the demise of local authorities school improvement teams in effect, how can we collectively, as a head teacher and others, support high quality teaching so that our high quality teachers that are already there can share their best practice with their colleagues? Those mechanisms are going to be extremely difficult for head teachers and their teams to manage, but clearly that’s a real big task upon us. Where do we purchase and procure the high quality support from? Who will they be? How much will it cost us if the local authorities are no longer there? Nick Seddon: Thank you.We’ve had a hand that’s stayed up over there? Daniel Cremin: Daniel Cremin, Bellenden. Do you see the concept of chain schools, of multi-area providers, being a good thing for CPD? Do you see there being innovative things we could do with their Continued Professional Development and subject knowledge as a result of having across large swathes of the country different schools operating over the similar ethos in a more 82

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diverse curriculum? And, how can we get teachers in different parts of the country to meet and collaborate more effectively? Thanks. Nick Seddon: Thank you, and whoever puts up their hand fastest? There’s actually somebody at the back there. Sorry, I know this is very unfair. Catherine Holston: It’s a very quick question. Catherine Holston from One Plus One, my history is in research in education. I think what’s really important is to cut across all of the speakers and really try and understand how we’re defining education and what the role of the school is? So that’s just a quick question. Nick Seddon: Thank you very much. So we have three small statements. The question of the demise of local authorities and how mechanisms will be instituted to replace or support quality, how the chain schools might work and the role of Continuous Professional Development and what is education. In five seconds each. Rob, do you want to go first? Rod Bristow: Five seconds, okay. I’m going to link the first two, how do we get more access, better access to school improvement, and this issue of innovating in CPD collaboration. Perhaps they’re linked actually, you know, there is going to be a need for capturing the best, you know, the best practice if you like around the country, and I think that it’s a really big need, I think it’s a huge need. I think it is a need that will get bigger of course with the advent of more independent, if you like, free, schools. I can certainly say, as an organisation, we are thinking very hard about the role that we can play to help facilitate that, but I think it’s a huge issue. What is education? Well I’m going to give a personal, and its highly personal, view, it is about giving young people confidence to engage in society and make real progress in their lives, make a contribution, and it links into the employability agenda as well, and I think education is therefore much more than about just an academic learning, it also includes this idea of skills and employability, and we must make sure that our education system embraces both of those ideas going forwards. John Holman: Well I’ll duck the third question and join the first two together, because they are very linked. One is that it’s about support and professional development, and those are essentially the same Governing bodies are a very thing. I think we can do more for less where important part of holding schools to account, and I professional development is think we need some very concerned, schools are clear thinking about the already often in some quality of governing bodies places working extremely well together, you need to have more of that, schools supporting each other in professional development. But we’ve got to remember that it’s possible to share bad practice as well as good practice, so you do need to have, in some sense, a kind of external validation and the feeding in of

Schools for the future / Reform external expertise. So we can’t do without, for example, science learning centres, support specialists, we can probably do more though with less of them, and I think we’re going to have to. Judy Sebba: I’ll just make a quick comment about mainly the first one, it links to the second one, and that is that I think your particular challenge as a special school is that local authorities have been good about trying to bring together special schools who are sometimes quite isolated because there isn’t another one like them nearby, and so that’s a particular challenge. More broadly, local authorities have worked hard to bring schools together in different ways, and what I think we mustn’t lose out of this, what other people have talked about in terms of getting schools to help each other on CPD, is the challenge aspect. The problem, as you said, John, I think, is that you can be regurgitating less effective practice, you do need an external challenge there. I don’t see that actually that necessarily requires again more money, it’s about a different use of expenditure. Thank you all very, very much. So we’ve heard quite clearly I think today that teaching quality is axiomatic, about the importance of subject knowledge for teachers, but also that teachers need to be very well managed and that the leadership in schools and perhaps more generally locally is important. We’ve also heard something about the importance of accountability, whether that be the use of information or of pupil feedback and evaluation, and the importance of accessible evidence has come through as a theme and much of what’s been said, and also the importance of tools to support, that while teaching is absolutely important, teachers can be aided with good support. And finally we also did quite well to get a good stab at what education is, and I was very glad to hear from John that we can do more for less. Thank you very, very much indeed. Please can we thank all the speakers in the usual way.

Keynote speech by Nick Gibb MP Andrew Haldenby: We are absolutely thrilled that you are able to join us. I was reflecting on this idea of the hundred days, the first hundred days of the government, and I just cannot imagine your in-tray and the demands on you and the demands on your time. So for you to even give up an hour, including travel time, to come to this event is really extremely good of you and I think we have got a good and lively audience to give you some ideas. Just let me summarise where we have got today, because I said I would. In our first session we heard from particularly a school system which in some ways is crying out for relief. Somehow good ideas about accountability have gone wrong and have led to something going on in schools whether it is teaching the wrong kind of curriculum or trying to improve your results by getting kids from the better estate down the road rather than the worst estates. This isn’t education and something has been lost sight of. So that was the first session and much more positively in that session there was a great focus on teaching and obviously while there is support for things like Teach First and ways of getting new people into the

profession, there is a strong feeling that what this is about is improving the quality of the existing workforce and there is a huge amount that can be done, particularly around subject teaching and CPD, around that, which could make a difference. So I just wanted to feed that back to you before your words and then let me just introduce Nick and then I think you are going to take some questions afterwards which is great. As you know Nick Gibb is the Minister of State for Schools, has been an MP since 1997 and has held the education brief for his party since 2005.Yesterday we had a similar conference on welfare policy where Iain Duncan Smith spoke and I said that it’s not often in politics that someone who has a passion for a job gets to do that job. Iain Duncan Smith is one of those people and actually of course, Nick, you are another one of those people so thank you very much indeed for joining us and we look forward to your words. Nick Gibb: Thank you very much Andrew. Going back to the previous session, to Professor Sebba, I’m not sure how many schools do improve despite their head teacher but I bet there are a lot of schools that improve despite education ministers! Andrew, can I just say thank you very much for that introduction and for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I greatly admire the work you and your colleagues do and in these difficult economic times that this government has inherited, Reform is, I believe, very well placed to have a real and lasting influence. Over the last decade, Reform has developed a deep understanding of the problems facing Britain’s public services and has brought together people of real experience from across the world to a I’m not sure how many schools do improve despite really practical agenda for reform and while their head teacher but I bet you have recognised there are a lot of schools that investment can be that improve despite their part of the solution, you have also argued education ministers! that reform of the way money is spent is just as important and sometimes more important as a driver of improvement. That insight is always important but it is particularly important in the current climate and the years ahead. You have also taken a serious and independent approach. Reform’s publications are based on firm research and you have worked with reform minded politicians from across the political spectrum and in education you have I believe rightly argued for the extension of choice as a driver for improved standards but have also recognised that there is a role that government has to play to ensure greater concentration on academic rigour and the passing on of core knowledge. So as I start work as the Minister responsible for driving through significant changes to help raise standards in schools, I know that Reform will be a friend but like the best friends, will never be afraid to tell us when you think we have got things wrong, or indeed where we can do things better. Like everything in the agreement that unites the Coalition Government, education policies are guided by the three principles of freedom, responsibility and www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform fairness. We are going to give schools a greater freedom and parents more opportunity to choose good schools. We are going to place greater trust in professionals to give teachers more freedom to decide how to teach and we are going to reduce bureaucracy so that schools can get on with their core business. In just one year under the last government, the Department produced over 6,000 pages of guidance for schools, more than twice the length of the Complete Works of Shakespeare but much less illuminating and certainly less readable. We want to put an end to the reams of paperwork Britain’s school system and bureaucratic today is frankly unfair. burdens piled on to Too often provision is teachers and schools, denied in a lottery of not just the jargoneducation position where heavy instructions telling people how to do geography or parental their jobs but the income determines posters and DVDs that outcomes rather than gather dust in supply cupboards. academic ability or hard Outstanding schools work and the figures are will be freed from familiar but nonetheless inspection to refocus shocking for all their Ofsted’s resources on those schools that are repetition coasting or struggling and which are failing to deliver the best quality of education to their students. We agree with Reform that extending choice will improve quality. Academies introduced by the last government have been very successful in raising standards so we want to see many more. And the Academies Bill which is now going through the House of Lords will allow more schools to benefit from the freedoms of academy status including, for the first time, primary schools and indeed special schools. Academies are free from local authority control, they can deploy resources as they deem best and they have the ability to set their own pay and conditions for staff. They have greater freedoms over the curriculum and the length of terms and school days yet they operate within a broad framework of accountability which is designed to ensure that standards remain high and consistent. Already more than 1,700 schools have expressed an interest in becoming an academy and those schools that have been rated outstanding by Ofsted will have their applications fast-tracked so that some can become academies this September. We are making it much easier for parents, for teachers and for education providers to set up new schools so that there is real choice in every area. The second Coalition principle I mentioned is responsibility and everyone must take their share in the education system. The government has a responsibility to ensure high standards. Schools have a responsibility to promote an ethos of excellence and aspiration with opportunities for extra curricular activities and sport. And it is the responsibility of pupils and their parents to ensure that their behaviour at school is of a standard that delivers a safe and happy environment where children can concentrate and learn. We will support that by giving teachers and head teachers the powers they need to deal effectively with poor behaviour and we are working to ensure that teachers are protected from the professional and social humiliation of false accusations. But the Coalition 84

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principle I want to concentrate on now is fairness. Britain’s school system today is frankly unfair, too often provision is denied in a lottery of education position where geography or parental income determines outcomes rather than academic ability or hard work and the figures are familiar but nonetheless shocking for all their repetition. The chances of a child who is eligible for free school meals getting five good GCSEs including English and Maths are less than one third for those of children from better off families. 42 per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals didn’t achieve a single GCSE above a Grade D in 2008 and in the last year for which we have data, more pupils from Eton went to Oxford or Cambridge than from the entire cohort of the 80,000 students eligible for free school meals. This is simply unacceptable and I don’t believe that less able children or those children from disadvantaged backgrounds are not capable of having an academic education or indeed that their parents necessarily hold lower ambitions for their children. I absolutely agree with Alan Milburn in his speech to the National Education Trust in March when he said, and I quote, “it is sometimes argued that parents in the most disadvantaged areas are less aspirational for their children in better off areas. The figures on school appeals repudiates such assumptions with a large number of parents from disadvantaged parts of the country using the appeal system to try to get their children out of poorly performing schools and in to better ones.” Alan Milburn is absolutely right, it is a natural instinct for parents to want the best for their children and to want better opportunities than they had themselves. Britain’s educational problems are not primarily the result of a lack of private aspiration; it is rather the state’s failure to provide enough good schools. It is socially unfair and economically damaging. As Reform has highlighted, England’s performance in international league tables is now amongst the worst of large developed economies. The Progress in Reading Literacy Study, PIRLS, of 10 year olds, marks England fourth and third out of 35 countries in 2001 to 15th out of 40 countries in 2006 and a PISA study shows that only two countries out of 57 have a wider gap in attainment between the lowest and highest achievers compared to England. Now I don’t cite these figures in order to attack the last government or to criticise the fantastic work that is done in our schools by teachers and pupils alike, rather this is an issue which highlights a fundamental ideological debate about education which runs much deeper than decisions of Ministers in the last few years. Indeed I pay tribute to the work done by Andrew Adonis and Jim Knight, who I saw running to make his maiden speech on the way in and tribute also to previous Conservative Secretaries of State such as Ken Baker and John Patten who tried to tackle some of the underlying causes of the problems we face. On one side of the ideological debate are those who believe that children should learn when they are ready through child-initiated activities and self discovery, what Plowden called “finding out.” It is an ideology that puts the emphasis on the processes of learning rather than on the content of knowledge that needs to be learnt. The American educational academic E.D. Hirsch traces this ideology back to the

Schools for the future / Reform 1920s, to Teachers College Columbia in New York and the influence of educationalists such as John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick and added to that ideology is the notion that there is so much knowledge in the world that it is impossible to teach it all and very difficult to discern what should be selected to be taught in our schools. So instead, the argument goes, children should be taught how to learn.You hear educationalists extolling the virtues of the teacher as learning manager who must equip young people with the basic skill of learnacy, or learning to learn, and it can be summed up about an argument between knowledge versus the skill of learning. I believe very strongly that education is about the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Knowledge is the basic building block for a successful life and without understanding the fundamental concepts of maths or science, it is impossible properly to comprehend huge areas of modern life. With little or no knowledge of our nation’s history, understanding the present is that much harder. Getting to grips with the basics of elements of metals, of halogens, of acids, of what happens when hydrogen and oxygen come together, of photosynthesis of cells, it is difficult but once learnt you have the ability, at least, to comprehend some of the great advances in genetics and physics and other scientific fields that are revolutionising our lives. Once these concepts are grasped, it opens up and develops the mind and takes you one step further to understanding the complex world in which we live. Each new concept facilitates deeper understanding and the ability to think more creatively and more independently about the way the world works and about society, so learning knowledge, acquiring knowledge and concept, that’s how you learn how to learn.Yet to more and more people Miss Haversham is a stranger and even the most basic history and geography are a mystery and these concepts must be taught and they must be taught to everyone and sadly this is not always the case. Professor Derek Matthews’ practice of quizzing his first year history undergraduates over a three year period shows depressing evidence of the state of teaching knowledge in history. Almost twice as many students thought that Nelson rather than Wellington was in charge at the Battle of Waterloo and nearly 90 per cent couldn’t name a single British Prime Minister from the 19th century – there were 20 including It is the duty of schools to Disraeli and Gladstone provide each child with and these were the knowledge and skills –students at a university requisite for academic where the entry requirement was an A progress, regardless of and two B’s at A-Level. home background Again, I don’t intend to criticise Professor Matthews students or indeed their teachers, these were bright young people who had worked hard and had achieved good exam results. What is to be criticised is an education system which has relegated the importance of knowledge in favour of ill defined learning skills. I want to spend the remaining few minutes just setting out the approach that the Coalition Government plans to take to put knowledge and subjects at the centre of curriculum. Professor David Conway in his fascinating paper Liberal Education and the National

Curriculum, quotes Matthew Arnold’s view of the world and the purpose of education as introducing children to the best that has been thought and said. That must be the case for all children and not the privileged few in an education system that has fairness at its core. Children who come from a knowledge and education rich background start school with an in-built advantage over those who do not. If a school then fails to make up the knowledge deficit, these divisions widen still further. Leon Feinstein’s research has shown that low ability children from wealthy backgrounds often overtake and outperform more able children from poorer backgrounds by the age of five and that division, that gap continues to widen as those children go through school. E.D. Hirsch writes brilliantly about the importance of knowledge gained early on. He says, “just as it takes money to make money, it takes knowledge to make knowledge” and he goes on to say that those children “who possess the intellectual capital when they first arrive at school have the mental scaffolding and Velcro to gain still more knowledge but those children who arrive at school lacking the basic experience and vocabulary, they see not, neither do they understand.” Which is why he believes, as I do, that it is the duty of schools to provide each child with the knowledge and skills requisite for academic progress, regardless of home background. So we will introduce a pupil premium which will direct resources to children from disadvantaged backgrounds who need it most. Head teachers will then have the freedom to decide how best to use that money, whether to reduce class sizes, provide extra tuition or recruit the best teachers. But we need to sharpen our focus on the core process of teaching at every level, starting with the basics and in particular reading. A quarter of adults still have literacy problems but even after the literacy strategy in primary schools introduced in the late 90s, we still have nearly one in five 11 year olds leaving primary schools still struggling with reading. Again the ideologically driven child-centred approach to education has led to the belief that the mere exposure to books and text and the repetition of high frequency words will lead to a child learning to read, as if by osmosis – another scientific concept. That “look-and-say” or whole language approach ignores the importance of teaching children the 44 sounds of the alphabetic code and how to blend those sounds into words. Although phonics does play a part in how reading is taught, as Ofsted reported in their last annual report, and I quote, “weaknesses in the teaching of literacy remain and inspectors continue to report a lack of focus on basic literacy for low attainers” so we are determined to focus on making sure that reading is taught effectively in primary schools and we’ll say more on this in the coming months. It is because of that necessary focus on the basics and our belief in giving teachers more flexibility that we have decided not to proceed with the primary curriculum as recommended by Sir Jim Rose. Instead we want to restore the National Curriculum to its intended purpose, a core national entitlement organised around subject disciplines. So we will slim down the National Curriculum to ensure that pupils have the knowledge they need at each stage of their education and restore parity between our curriculum and qualifications and the best the world has to offer, www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform whether that is Massachusetts, Singapore, Finland, Hong Kong, Alberta or wherever. We will reform league tables so that parents have the reassurance they need that their child is progressing and we must also restore confidence in our exam system. Pupils should be entered for qualifications that are in their best interests, not with a view to boosting schools performance in the league tables and we have opened up qualifications unfairly closed off to pupils in state maintained schools such as the IGCSE, to offer pupils greater choice and ensure that they are afforded the same opportunities as those who have the money to go to independent schools. Andrew, I have set out today an overview of how we intend to tackle some of the problems in our education system and how we intend to start to close the achievement gap between those from the richest and poorest in society and as you would expect from this Coalition Government, it is based on a conservative belief in a liberal education. E.D. Hirsch writes that “an early inequity in the distribution of intellectual capital may be the single most important source of avoidable injustice in a free society.” It is remedying that injustice that is the driving force behind this government’s educational reforms. Thank you very much Andrew. Andrew Haldenby: Thank you very much indeed. I am going to ask David Perks to repeat his point from earlier because I think it summed up so much and then let me just take a couple of questions. What you didn’t talk about, and what people have already raised, Minister, is free schools and I don’t know if people want to bring that up as well. David, if you just want to go. David Perks: David Perks, a teacher in South London. The point I was making earlier on was the idea that schools today are obsessed by their position in league tables. Which is driven by, if you like, the availability of qualifications on an equivalence basis so between GCSE and pseudo vocational qualifications and GCSEs of all different kinds. Therefore there is a massive pressure on schools to just get their place in league tables. The way this can be got rid of is to scrap the equivalencies between GCSEs and other qualifications that don’t really merit the same level of worth. Will that happen? Will you be able to do that because if you do there are two things about it. One, it will give a real incentive to schools to do what you have just said, which I wholly endorse, which is teach, educate young people to the best of our ability academically but there are a lot of schools which will suddenly collapse in their performance across the country because they have gone down the other route. Can you take that hit, that’s the question really? I really hope that you can stand up now and do that and that we can get an answer from you. Sarah Ebner: Hi, Sarah Ebner from The Times. Too many things for me to mention so I’m going to pick one. At the leadership debate originally with the three party leaders there was a student who asked a question and got lots of publicity for it, and said students are over examined and under taught. He was in the sixth form, because I’ve spoken to him since, and he was saying something that comes up a lot, that because of AS-levels, children, pupils and students, don’t have the time when they are 86

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doing their A-levels to really get into a subject, they don’t get deep subject knowledge. They have to go from one exam at GCSEs to AS-levels and they start university and it affects their expertise when they start there. No one seems to know why this change really happened, no one seems to be in favour of it and I think it would really make a difference to learning and to student experience at school if they went back to having one year without exams where they could really get into their three or four A-levels and enjoy that and then move on and have better expertise. John Holland: John Holland, I work for Tribal. I don’t know if we have to wait until day 75 but I’d be extremely interested to know what subjects you would define in the core curriculum. Would it include a modern foreign language for example? I think many people would recognise that vocational qualifications have a place as well in motivating and engaging young people and I wondered how you see the role of vocational qualifications, albeit not as a replacement in the way my colleague mentioned previously. Nick Gibb: All good questions. David Perks, can we take the hit? Well absolutely. I’m not interested in saying things have gone up by X per cent and Y per cent if the reality beneath that is that standards are not improving and I’m always very influenced by what Professor Tymms at Durham University and the research he has done over the last ten years or so about standards in schools. We want to have honesty in data and we want to have lots of data out there. One of the things we are committed to doing is getting on to the website all the data that is kept back at the Department, it should be available for people to look at, for parents in particular to see which school is the best for physics, so one school may be best for their child or another school may be best for physics, but in terms of equivalencies, that is something that we are going to reform – the league tables, absolutely. And we want to do in that reform process is to remove perverse incentives, to do things that are not in the interests of children. Children should not be entered for exams that are not in their interests, whether that is a vocational exam or an academic qualification, it should be what is in the pupil’s interests and never what’s in the interests of boosting the school in the league table. So we are going to look at league tables, again look for the outcome of that but we are certainly looking at that and the point you make is very well taken. In terms of the modular AS and A2 exams, again the answer is the same as that one. We are looking at qualifications – this is what happens when you ask questions on day 50 – but what we have said is that we want the qualifications to be on a par with the best that the world has to offer so we are going to look to see what the best qualifications are and when we look at the curriculum we are going to look at what children are learning and at what age in the best jurisdictions throughout the world, to make sure we are on a par with that. The issue of vocational qualifications, modern languages yes are very important and it is of concern that the numbers taking GCSEs in modern languages have fallen so dramatically just since 2004 and it is a very worrying sign.

Schools for the future / Reform In terms of vocational qualifications, yes, they are very important and many children benefit from those qualifications. We have to ensure they are of a high quality and again we need to ensure that the data is available so if a parent is choosing a school they need to know which schools get the best results in certain vocational qualifications, the ones they’re interested in and that’s why putting the data out there is so important.

Greg Rosen: Greg Rosen, consultant director at Reform. A quick how question.You said you were keen to reduce the burden of central direction on teachers and you outlined that. At the same time you said you were keen to encourage teachers to move away from what you called the Dewey inspired teaching methods on which you were less keen. I just wondered how you proposed to do the two things at the same time?

Robert Moreland: Robert Moreland, I am chairman of a boys’ secondary Church of England comprehensive just across the river by Kennington Oval called Archbishop Tennison’s and the question I want to ask which in a way comes from what Professor Holman said before is really what you intend to do about Ofsted and its criteria? My question is quite simply that I am very conscious in all the work we have had to do on the school evaluation form, that we are spending hours and hours on safeguarding community cohesion and indeed you don’t get your top mark if any of those go below it etc, etc, oh and down at the bottom, pupil progress. I wonder Isn’t there something that if, dare I say it, we do we need to do to up the all these things, we’re attention given to pupil desperately keen on progress safeguarding, we’re desperately keen on community cohesion and I’m spending my time visiting community groups but my real point is, isn’t there something that we need to do to up the attention given to pupil progress?

Andrew Haldenby: Very good, this is the last point and you have been very generous with your time but Camilla Cavendish wanted me to ask you about free schools and this is a slightly technical point but it is an interesting one, is it true that parent groups have to lead them? Anyway I’ll pass those on to you and then we’ll go for lunch.

Terry De Quincy: Hi, Terry de Quincy, head of a primary school in Southwark. I’d just like to ask at the bottom end of the spectrum to follow on from the gentleman who just spoke about Ofsted and their judgements in early years in particular. We are an outstanding school and it is quite alarming that very recently my staff were told that they are teaching five year olds too much and if you haven’t got an 80 per cent child free play 20 per cent direct teaching ratio then you are actually only satisfactory in that area of the school. Could you please look at that? Julian Stanley: Julian Stanley, I am chief executive of the Teacher Support Network and did have the opportunity to speak to Nick prior to the election but I am just interested in your plans and proposals for improving parent teacher relations really because there’s a triangle here between parents, teachers and pupils. It is an important dialogue between the three, so what are your thoughts are on how to improve those relations? There have been lots of different initiatives tried, I’m interested in that. Also the fact that sickness absence amongst teachers is one of the highest of all professions and so it is interesting to know that there is something like £248 million I think spent on sickness absence. What do you think could be done to improve health and well-being for teachers as we try and improve their status and shift perceptions particularly in the media of teachers? Thank you.

Nick Gibb: Okay, first on the Ofsted criteria, Robert Moreland’s question. We are going to reduce the number of criteria from eighteen to four so the four will be leadership, teaching, attainment, behaviour and safety and there will be no limiting judgements, so the whole concept of limiting judgements will go. However if a school is performing very badly attainment wise it would be difficult to become an outstanding school but that’s the key principle behind our reforms to Ofsted. On the issue about early years and Ofsted inspectors who require a play based approach, based on the EarlyYears Foundation Stage, we are going to look at these issues in more detail in due course. But this issue does highlight the necessity for a debate.What I am keen to do is for these issues to be debated in public, in the open. These debates about child- initiated, child-centred learning, that ideology, versus a practical evidence based approach which has been shown to work, I think we should have that debate in public and it should not be a debate that just takes place behind closed doors amongst educationalists who all share the same outlook. I am very keen to have that debate. Also at the end of the day we want choice in schools so there will be [inaudible word] in our choice agenda. There will be schools that undertake that ideology and if parents want that form of school they should be able to choose it and if they don’t, if they want a more traditional approach, well there should be schools available for them to take that view as well which partially answers one of the other questions. The issue about parent teacher relationships, it is important that schools do engage with parents and the community and even though we are moving towards Academy autonomy from local authorities, that does not mean we expect these schools to be islands unto themselves. They won’t flourish, the schools, unless they engage with the community and have an active dialogue with parents and I think that will increase as new schools enter the internal market and want to attract pupils. In terms of stress levels, first of all we want to raise the professional status of teachers, that’s one of our driving ambitions but also a lot of stress is driven by poor behaviour and so one of our key priorities is raising standards of behaviour in our schools and again I hope we will have something to say on that fairly soon. Reducing burdens, yes, I partially answered that question I think but again it is about a debate, it is not going to be the anti John Dewey act as our third piece of legislation, it’s not. There is a place for progressive if you www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform like, so called progressive education and more traditional education in our system but I think there should be a debate about it. Reducing burdens is a separate point, we are spending a lot of time at the moment going through and finding out what is necessary and what isn’t necessary and in terms of free schools, do they have to be led by parents? No, that’s just an example and an example of which there are many examples. There are parents out there who want to set up free schools but any group, parent groups, teacher groups, education foundations, philanthropic groups, can set up schools and I hope very much that they will. Andrew Haldenby: Thank you. I suspect we could go on and on but I am going to respect the Minister’s diary and end it there. Just to say, we will be transcribing this debate and … Nick Gibb: Oh now you say that! [Laughter] Andrew Haldenby: … we will send you all the proceedings of today so none of this will be lost. It was wonderful for us to get a sense of two things really. One is the priority that you are setting. This, just as you are beginning this journey and the debate you want to have and the fact that you have asked us to help with these debates which I am sure people will respond to. But also as David Perks said, what is also clear is your own personal commitment to education and to the value of education and for that reason, if nothing else, we wish you extremely well. Thank you.

Raising the bar Dale Bassett: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I hope you are all feeling suitably refreshed after lunch and fired up for some more vigorous debate this afternoon, of which I think we will have plenty for you. I am Dale Bassett, I’m a senior researcher, and I lead on the education policy work at Reform. I have a distinguished group of people with me who are going to discuss the subject of “Raising the Bar.” Quite useful I think having Nick Gibb’s speech immediately prior to this session. I think he has probably given us a lot of food for thought and a lot of what he talked about is going to feed directly into issues that we are going to discuss now. Just a couple of things that the Minister said. He talked about the importance of fairness, and described the lottery of educational provision that exists at the moment. He talked about the distinction between what to learn and how to learn, or the other way he put it was knowledge versus the skill of learning. He said you learn how to learn by acquiring knowledge and concept and said that the current system has, “relegated the importance of knowledge in favour of ill defined learning skills.” While I’m sure that is not the only ground that we are going to cover, I can imagine it is some of it. Let me briefly introduce the panel. Sitting immediately to my right is Amanda Spielman, who is Research and Development Director of ARK Schools, a charitable academies operator. She is also responsible 88

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for strategic, legal, governance and regulatory matters there, and since being there in the very early days of ARK it has grown from two to over a thousand employees. She is also a director of the New Schools Network, recently set up as we know to help groups of parents (and not just parents as we heard this morning); to set up new free schools. She was also a member of Sir Richard Sykes’ review into qualifications that was set up by the Conservatives before the election. To her right is Ros McMullen, who is principal of the David Young Community Academy in Seacroft in Leeds. She was a head teacher in Wigan prior to that, where she turned round a school that was the 15th worst performing in the country into one of the most improved. In 2005 she became principal of the David Young Community Academy, where she spent five terms preparing for the opening in September 2006. I’m not going to give you all the facts and figures of the results that they have achieved there. Suffice to say that they are impressive, and having been and seen the school myself, the school as a whole is impressive. I have to say that in the two years I have been doing this job, the day I spent at the David Young Community Academy is the single day that has had by far the biggest impact on me. Ros and her team have done some wonderful things there. To my left is Deborah Eyre, who is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. She is internationally recognised for her work on gifted education and school reform. Working internationally, she was Director of the government’s National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth and she as a consultant has clients including the King of Saudi Arabia and many other international clients. Finally, last but not least, to her left, Simon Lebus, who is the Group Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment, a position that he has held since 2002. He is a fellow of Emmanuel College and spent his career “operating in complex and competitive business environments and driving for excellence, quality, good teamwork and continuous improvement.” Prior to that, he worked in a variety of senior management roles. Over to the panel I think, and speaking first is Amanda. Amanda Spielman: I’d like to apologise for the horrible croak. I wouldn’t croak if I could help it! First of all, as Dale said, I work for ARK. We are Academy operators and we have a particularly aspirational academy model. Our aim is to have everybody who goes through one of our schools leave school equipped for higher education, and obviously by equipped we don’t just mean UCAS points – we mean the intellectual development, the aspiration, the interpersonal, the study, the other skills as well as the qualifications. Unsurprisingly I start with a clear preference for being as academic and as aspirational for as many pupils as possible. I’ll tell you a little story from one of our transition schools. Many of our academies are transition schools, and one of the things about taking on a school is that you spend your first two years teaching GCSE courses that have been chosen by pupils under the previous regime, and this really came home to me. I was interviewing some of the brightest pupils in a couple of our transition schools to be given scholarships to go on a wonderful summer programme at Phillips Exeter

Schools for the future / Reform Academy. First of all I was very surprised, because on the CVs of people who were saying they wanted to be doctors, study engineering at Oxford, things like that, all of them were doing at least one IT qualification, at least one business studies and usually three or four GCSEs worth was going in to quasi academic qualifications or vocational qualifications, and these were the very top pupils in the schools. I asked them about their choices and almost none of them had ever had it suggested to them that, as the most academic pupils in the school, they might consider doing two humanities or doing a GCSE in a language. It came as a surprise. One girl, when I asked her about this, said rather sadly “they told us it was worth four GCSEs and now I realise it wasn’t.” It brought it home – this poor girl was now wanting to embark on A-levels for medical school and with the thinnest base of academic GCSEs with which to try and get to A levels. And it’s not just us. Tristram Hunt and Anastasia De Waal are knocking academies right, left and centre at the moment, but actually it’s a problem in many schools that it is only a minority that are following an academic path and many, many children are being prematurely being steered towards vocational and quasi vocational qualifications. It is a particular problem in schools that have got a disproportionately low priority for entry. Anybody who wants to look at that only has to look at something like the London Challenge data set, which I think you can still get off the Department for Education website, which gives school entries for every subject. Does it matter? Some people argue it doesn’t matter, that there’s lots of motivation and engagement for children and it is all a good thing. We actually think it matters a lot, because the intellectual development is not the same in every qualification and most, not all but most vocational qualifications actually add very little to pupils’ intellectual development. They are limiting those individuals’ horizons unless they happen to be directly relevant to the career path that that individual Many, many children are wants to follow. So they being prematurely being are not a preparation steered towards vocational for further study in and quasi vocational most cases and in some instances they are not qualifications useful even for a particular career path. Alison Wolf’s work on GNVQs was very interesting on that front. So at ARK we see an extremely limited role for vocational qualifications for almost any pupils at age 14. It is important to understand in all this that first of all pupils are being rational. Most 13 year olds will default to what seems easiest in the absence of either some very strong intrinsic motivation that only a few of them have or parent pressure or school pressure. The girl I spoke to had strong intrinsic motivation, but the poor girl misguidedly thought that the more GCSEs the better, and therefore had made some very bad choices. Schools are also being rational. Accountability measures don’t work very well. CVA and average point score, which count for a lot, both do not differentiate between the intellectual demands of the qualifications that are included in them. A fascinating illustration for me of how much actually rides on CVA and average point score is the recently published SSAT value added work. They publish a non contextual value added indicator for all schools, and I looked at the very worst

schools, the schools where the proportion of schools with pupils getting five plus including English and maths was at least 15 per cent lower than you would predict off those pupils attainment at key stage two, and I found about half of them were on notice to improve or special measures or already closed or closing, but the other half really stuck out. They were actually very little different from the ones in special measures, except nearly all of them were brilliant to playing the equivalence game and, notwithstanding a miserable result on the five including English and maths, had managed to keep their CVA up in the normal range. I don’t think that’s a good place for schools to be in, to have a very strong incentive to steer pupils to what are essentially the cheapest qualifications, irrespective of whether they are really right for those pupils. We do what we can. We have some quite strong policies in our schools to try and establish academic paths as the default, and that students should be advised carefully before moving off them, and as much good information brought to bear before people make career limiting choices. But we only have a slice of the schools bandwidth – Ofsted has a very strong share of schools ear and in some respects what we say almost seems to disappear into the wind because schools are so tuned in to pleasing Ofsted. We think that for changes to truly to flow through, for users of qualifications, for employers and for universities to be much more open and honest about what they value, so that the qualifications that are really and truly less valuable wither and die. I recently gave our IT director a list of all the IT qualifications commonly entered for at school and said which did he think were important, which would they look at on a CV and value on a CV for somebody apply at 18 or 21 and there was only one that he thought was of any value, but nobody says that. So I am interested in transparency in education and honesty with pupils so that children get to make the choices that they ought to be making. Thank you. Ros McMullen: A little bit about the journey I think would probably be relevant, and then about the philosophy that I’ve used around qualifications and what I think about at the moment. I actually think that qualifications are fairly irrelevant to education to be honest with you, and I don’t care what hoops they give me. I’ll get through the hoops but that’s an irrelevancy. I’ll educate the kids at the same time because they will change the hoops, because the hoops unfortunately are determined by people who have some kind of political standpoint and want to decide on one thing or another, where I’m interested really in getting kids engaged and intelligent. I would like to say right at the beginning that I don’t believe that knowledge transfer is what education is about at all. I believe that interacting intelligently with that knowledge is what education is about and unfortunately if we think that just transferring of knowledge on to people, one generation transferring their knowledge on to the next generation, we are regarding the whole of humanity as nothing more than a rather complex computer system when actually the whole thing about us is that we are intelligent. It seems to me that people who are entrepreneurial and intelligent and wealth-makers are what our society, what our world needs. God knows we need our next www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform generation to be real problem solvers and I don’t actually think that making sure they know the entire canon of Dickens or the rivers of the world is going to assist us with that. However, well I’ll come on to other things and there is so much I want to say about this really. Let me tell you a little bit about my children and about my school. My predecessor school had a huge amount of intervention taking place with it. The larger of my two predecessor schools had 10 per cent of children achieving 5 A to C including English and Maths, 21 per cent without and had attendance of 83 per cent, which I’ll tell you was a great work of fiction, it was more like 60. By the way, my deprivation indices have worsened since the Academy started, not got better, 40 per cent of my students are in the bottom 3 per cent on the index of multiple deprivation, 60 per cent are in the bottom 5 per cent and 87 per cent are in the bottom 10 per cent. It is the most deprived school in Leeds and that’s going it some. So what are they doing now? Well 94 per cent will have 5 grade A to C this summer and I am hoping 40 per cent will have it including English and Maths which will be a huge amount with value added. More importantly, attendance is at 90 per cent and actually this academic year, because our academic year starts in June, this academic year it is actually running at 94 per cent. We have played a lot of the equivalence game in raising 5 A* to C from 20 per cent to 94 per cent – a huge amount – and I think the equivalence does need to be looked at, but actually we wouldn’t have got it from 10 per cent to 40 per cent without having played some of the equivalence game as a motivator for young people, and I think that’s important. I do think however, that the thing about curriculum and the thing about teaching is that those are the important thing, the qualifications aren’t, and what you do is you do what’s right for where your community is at that time and you keep it under constant review. And yes, you do have to jump through the hoops. Perhaps some of the softer indicators at my place is that all my children want to go to university and every year – I’ve only been there four years – my first sixth form had eight students in it, they all went to university, and they I don’t think the choice is were all the first people in their family to go to between academic and university. Now you vocational actually at all could be cynical and and I think what you do is you could say they got you educate the children to university on and you get your curriculum equivalence, they got BTEC Level 3 right and then you find equivalence but do you what hoop it is and know what, those qualification it is that most children would have been in jail, not suits it university. They were the first people in their family to ever go to university, and I’ll tell you about sixth form now – sixth form now has got 150 kids and they all want to go to university. But it was our first new intake parents evening this year when nobody came drunk or picked a fight with us, you know? It was our first options evening for prep year, which is what we call year eight and I’ll tell you about that in a minute, which was packed to the rafters with parents all of whom wanted their children to 90

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go to university. Now these things are important and it is how you get that aspiration that’s important. I don’t think the choice is between academic and vocational actually at all and I think what you do is you educate the children and you get your curriculum right and then you find what hoop it is and qualification it is that most suits it. We have really embraced Diplomas and we have embraced Diplomas because we want to get rid of BTech actually. We think teaching the kids is fine and it’s great to get them these BTECs and whatever, but actually we don’t think it really holds any value in itself. We have embraced Diplomas because actually when we are working with industry and with university admissions departments, we have discovered that some of these Diplomas are absolutely fantastic. So right at the start I absolutely refused to talk about Hair and Beauty, I refused to have Hair and Beauty BTEC anywhere near. What is the point of saying to any underclass girl, you’ll be interested in Hair and Beauty as an excuse not to educate them? To reinforce that sort of stuff just goes against the grain, we wouldn’t engage with Hair and Beauty Diplomas or any nonsense like that but with the engineering Diploma, construction and the built environment Diploma. I had seven students go on to study architecture at Lincoln this year as undergraduates, and we are working very hard with employers. Local authority collaboratives are a load of rubbish when it comes to Diplomas. What works with diplomas is working with local employers and university admissions departments, and picking the diplomas and getting the curriculum right for the young people. But we are also interested and have engaged in the International Baccalaureate next year. The reason why we have engaged in that is actually because the whole A level thing to me – what a joke. I am really feeling very strongly about this at the moment and, the way we arrange our curriculum perhaps would be helpful. Our academic year starts in June and it finishes in May. The reason why it starts in June is because we all know what happens in primary schools after Key Stage 2 SATS and until the summer holidays. It’s great and my children have really benefited from that and have loved it because my children spend the summer holidays in Florence with me around art galleries and all the rest of it and they get a lot of stimulation at home. But the children I teach, the children I serve do not get taken to Tuscany in the summer, they don’t have any books in their houses and actually all the enrichment activities that take place and all the lack of academic pushing after Key Stage 2 SATS to summer just serves to push them back further and they are one year behind by the time they’re three. I am not going to afford any more time. We don’t have a six week summer holiday, we have a four week summer holiday so by the time everybody else starts in Year 7, mine have already had a good ten weeks of secondary education. We also don’t mess about with all these bell changes and off you move to another lesson business. We have one lesson in the morning, we have another lesson in the afternoon, we don’t waste time. We get them involved in deep learning. We call them freshers when they start, they then move the following June to what we call the prep year and then the following year they move to senior education, senior one, senior two and senior three. At the end of senior two they jump through whatever hoops the government have put at us,

Schools for the future / Reform and then we start in senior three, which is the last year of compulsory education, we start teaching them – have I got time? Well I am going to finish with an anecdote. The senior three class, the most academic students – and when we are talking about the most academic students in my context we are talking about students whose prior attainment before they came to us is very, very low. We have nobody whose parents went in to higher education, we are talking about the deprivation issues I’ve told you about, but we have identified these kids. I think I’ve got 28 of them and I actually teach them on Monday afternoons and I’m teaching them politics, philosophy and economics and I thought a good start would be if I got hold of the A level syllabus around politics. What a load of rubbish! I was absolutely and utterly appalled and I thought right, I’m just going to have to teach these kids to think. Now these children may not have A* on their GCSEs, and I don’t actually care because those GCSE syllabuses, don’t think GCSEs are the Holy Grail when it comes to the academic. These kids have got to jump through that hoop, fine, let’s get them through it but actually if they get Bs at the end of senior two, great, we’ve got that, it’s in the bank, let’s educate you. They are doing Maths, they’re doing English, they’re doing politics, philosophy and economics with me but what I said to these children was okay, we had a really good lesson on Monday afternoon, and I said to them right, I want you to write me 500 words on why the coalition government is under stress and can you email it to me. I had emailed to me, they are interacting with knowledge. I gave them some knowledge about how we arrived at a coalition government, what it means, all of that kind of stuff, we did that discussion in class but actually these kids need to think, they need to be able to be directed down to the political commentators of our time, to interact with the knowledge they got from me and to think intelligently and I am getting in some stuff that’s great. These kids may only have a B at GCSE but I don’t care. I am preparing them to think, and when they go in to sixth form that is what the International Baccalaureate course will do with these children. My aim is I am going to get these kids from the worst estate in Leeds in to Oxbridge, and whatever hoops I have to jump through, I’ll do it, but don’t think that you can just think GCSEs are marvellous and A Levels are marvellous. Load of rubbish, they’re not. Dale Bassett: Ros, thank you very much and if at all possible in five minutes so we have time for questions, here’s Deborah Eyre. Deborah Eyre: Thank you. I suppose in the piece I am going to talk about in my five minutes, I guess I want to start by saying I am really interested in high performing education systems, so I am interested in high performing education systems as measured by high performing students. My starting position is I think a lot of people could be high performing students, and if after 150 years of education we are not any better at it now than we were when we started then there is something radically wrong. So the fact that is our education as good now as it was? I don’t think that’s the question.

Is our education moving slightly forward and improving? That’s not the question. We’ve been at it for a long time, if we don’t know how to teach and we don’t know how to help children learn better there is something very wrong with the system. So I was interested in going and having a closer look at some of the systems which seem to work and find out more about them, and also I am interested in working with countries that are keen to make high performance the focus of their educational work. So I guess what I want to start by saying is that there are certain characteristics about countries that seem to be doing well in all these league tables, the PIRLS and the TIMSS and all the others and it is quite interesting in the light of some of the discussions we have heard today. One is very much in line with what we have been talking about in terms of high expectations for all but it really means it. It doesn’t mean just a bit better than you did before. It doesn’t just mean going to university, it means going to a good university, a university that offers really high standards of qualifications, and I am going to come back to that. The second is that they avoid polarisation, they avoid the idea that this is right and this is wrong, phonics good, look and say wrong. Phonics works for some, look and say works for others, find the right way. What you want is the outcome. Try one method, if it doesn’t work try another. They learn from others, not just sharing best practice, which I’m not sure I understand what that is. They learn from others all over the place. Why am I working with them? Because they have reached out halfway across the world to someone who knows something about something they want to develop and they get them in. How often do we see that in this country, where we’re learning from other countries? We’re sending out people all over the world, we’re not really learning from others in that kind of way. They’re pragmatic, they realise that some things will work in some circumstances and not in others, and they focus relentlessly on getting high levels of performance for as many as possible. They don’t, for example, have a polarised debate about whether traditional subject knowledge is the key to the future or whether skills and processes are going to replace all knowledge, or indeed whether practical work related activity is going to be the panacea. They recognise – and it seems to me absolute common sense – that all three of those have a part to play in education, so the basis of having high aspirational academic qualifications is a good thing for all, but it would be ludicrous to suggest, as was suggested in my view earlier this morning, that creativity and collaboration was not a part of high academic performance. How do you get to high academic performance if you don’t have some creative ideas? Do you really do it in a shed at the bottom of the garden on your own? Not in this day and age. It’s a polarisation which is truly unhelpful. Why am I working in a place like Hong Kong at the moment which is scoring really highly on all these things? Because they have got brilliant subject knowledge, but their schools aren’t very good at helping know how to use it, use it practically in a work related environment. So they have identified the problem, they are trying to solve it. It’s a kind of pragmatic view. I think we are held back in this country in a number of different kinds of ways. We tend to focus on the detail. We focus on have we got the qualifications www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform right. Perhaps now but really it seems to me that one of the things that holds us back most is this question that only a small minority of people are capable of doing well. It is fundamentally embedded in our whole view, and we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to work out which people are going to go in which direction because ultimately we genuinely believe that only a few of them can be really successful, unlike many other countries where they start with the much more optimistic assumption which is to say that with this new generation of young children coming through, better fed, better educated, better supported than in many other generations, we should be able to do better. Now I am not being hopelessly idealistic here and suggesting that every child is better fed, better educated, better supported – it’s all relative. Some of my family come from Seacroft, I know it very well and I think in relative terms the people who live in Seacroft now are better off than the people who lived in Seacroft thirty years ago, fifty years ago. Ros McMullen: Is that right? Deborah Eyre: It certainly is. So the question of can we be more optimistic on behalf of our children is really part of the proposition that I want to look at. Why do we not really think that this is possible? I think we kind of take the view in this country that we can presume about a child’s educational destiny pretty much more or less determined at birth by looking at a combination of their genetics and their family background. I am going to put the proposition that that is a very early 20th century idea. Firstly, genetics. In the world of psychology it is no longer about finite ability – it is about predispositions.You inherit the capacity to maybe develop, but many of I think we kind of take the us may not develop all those predispositions, view in this country that but the idea that we are we can presume about a all born with a set of child’s educational destiny abilities and that is as much as you can do is pretty much more or less out. I was explaining to determined at birth by parents in Dubai very looking at a combination recently that I was 12th of their genetics and their in my class at school, and I thought I could family background only get to be 11th if somebody left. I tried to fathom it out in a bored moment, what would I have to do and somebody would have to leave. Somebody asked a question in the group and said well if you were 12th in your class, how did you get to where you are now? I said, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. And that is a serious view which is that it takes hard work. First of all, we know more people have the predisposition to achieve and we have got to get out of the idea of saying “these are the good ones and these are the bad ones, these ones will never make it.” We don’t know. We don’t know until we give them high quality opportunities and that’s what many of these case studies are doing. So with the family, the family is not in a steady state. A Chinese colleague of mine said “I don’t know 92

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why you think about families all the time when you are in the UK and education, you’re obsessed with it.” She said “I was brought up during the cultural revolution, my father was an academic, we got moved to the north west of China, he was We have got to get out of working down the coal mines, I had a very the idea of saying “these strange upbringing are the good ones and where there was no these are the bad ones, money but a lot of ideas these ones will never and after that I came back to Beijing and was make it.” We don’t know. in Tianenman Square We don’t know until we and then I thought give them high quality I might as well leave opportunities and that’s China and I went to Australia and then what many of these case I went to America and studies are doing now I’m in Hong Kong.” She said “what does that say about how my children are going to perform in school?” It’s a fast changing world, shift happens, Microsoft stuff. It is a fast changing world, so that means with our children, we shouldn’t be making all the judgements on what their families did. Finally self, the self person. We need to engender that self belief. If you are being told all the time that people who come from free school meals never go anywhere, if you are getting free school meals you think you don’t go there either. There are really serious issues about how children perceive themselves and think about themselves, so I’ll summarise by saying we need a change in thinking and a change of culture. Other countries don’t have a long tale of underachievement because they don’t expect it – they expect everybody is going to do well. We need to think about what that means so we can sell the benefits of education to children and parents, and that is exactly what Ros was talking about, it was mentioned this morning that there is no lack of private aspiration. We can pursue high performance relentlessly and focus on removing the barriers to achievement rather than thinking, “well I’m sorry, some people can’t do it.” Think about how to get over the barriers, don’t look back. We can learn from things that have happened before but it is a new world too and we can be more optimistic about what this generation can achieve. This morning on the way in I was reading The Times and I see that Terry Leahy of Tesco is telling Cameron today, forget village England, think global. If we don’t up the levels of achievement in our education system, believe me, the UK is falling further and further behind. Thank you. Simon Lebus: There has been a lot of knocking of qualifications today and I guess if I were to respond to all the particular allegations I would need rather more than five minutes. But Cambridge Assessment is part of the university, it owns the universities various exam boards which operate both in the UK as OCR supplying A Levels, GCSEs, diplomas among other qualifications and also internationally as Cambridge International Exams, we do IGCSEs, we do international A Levels and we also have a very large English language testing organisation so we do have a global perspective in approaching this, and I think one of the issues that’s

Schools for the future / Reform interesting in terms of how qualifications can actually operate to raise the bar, to try and drive educational improvements is actually being realistic about what the nature of qualifications is. I fully agree with Ros’s comment earlier that it is perfectly possible to be educated without taking a single qualification – indeed for much of human history that is precisely what happened – but nonetheless it is a case that qualifications have a role to play. They have a value and they can help drive improvements. Coming back to some of the things we were hearing from the Minister this morning. He talks about trusting the professionals, about reducing bureaucracy and extending choice, and I think that is sort of the manifesto we would like to see for qualifications. There has been a lot of discussion and debate about what qualifications ought to be available within the school sector: should IGCSEs be permitted in the maintained sector, how do you balance the different needs between A Levels and diplomas, what’s the role of the IB and we’ve introduced a new qualification, the Pre-U. There is a lot of discussion about whether it is going to lead to an apartheid of qualifications, is there a nuclear arms race between qualifications, but the central point I would want to make is that as all of our speakers have been suggesting in various different ways, we have a very diverse population. Humanity comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, pupils come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and trying to put them through a single door, trying to put them down a single track is not an appropriate thing to do. What we ought to be doing is offering a diverse range of different routes, a diverse range of different qualifications, and I think we need to create a system that encourages that. There has been a lot of talk today about the whole regime of equivalencies, and I would make the point that I believe equivalencies are quite damaging actually, do lead to perverse choices. I take Ros’s point that they can also create useful incentives, but I think perhaps what is not so well appreciated is that in order to create those equivalencies there is a whole regulatory apparatus to do with qualifications, criteria, volume of guided learning hours and so on and so forth. That creates real distortions in terms of the qualifications that we can put together, the sorts of learning experience that we can support with our qualifications, so I think that is something that needs to come under a very significant degree of scrutiny. I think part of that is also about thinking seriously about the regulatory regime we want. There was a lot of activity to set up Ofqual as an independent regulator, and I am thoroughly supportive of the concept of an independent regulator, but I think one’s got to say “what are we actually looking for?” Alison Wolf used the concept of a weights and measures type role. I think there is a place for a weights and measures type role for a qualifications regulator, but I think as soon as you start extending beyond that, as soon as you go from, if you like, being an inspectorate to being an agency, there’s all sorts of other stuff that happens, other drivers, all sorts of regulatory creep and that makes our ability to make qualifications, to respond to the sorts of educational needs that schools have, that colleges have, that employers have, that HE has, much more complex. I think taking some of the discussion there was about diplomas earlier on, they are a very good example of how some of the political involvement, the

bureaucratic environment can make it very difficult to create new qualifications. They took tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of pounds to create, the structure of delivery is thoroughly unwieldy, I don’t think personally all of them will survive.You mentioned two of them that are of very good quality, but I think some of the quality is variable and these are all very good examples of people saying “we’ve got some skills shortages in the economy, what are we going to do about it? Let’s create some qualifications because that’s an easy lever to give a yank to.” And it’s not – it’s really complex, it’s difficult, it’s expensive. I think stepping back and letting qualifications professionals get on with the job, removing some of the bureaucracy and allowing us to extend choice, because we are good at developing qualifications, we can respond to some of the educational needs on the ground. I think that is a very positive thing and we have got to focus on it. There was also some talk earlier on about modularity and the sort of discussion if you like about skills versus knowledge and I think whether one has got to question whether that’s a real dilemma. The reality is that neither of them exist in a vacuum. Skills feed on knowledge and knowledge feeds on skills but nonetheless there have been some challenges of people’s acceptance of the way the qualifications system is structured. There has been a drift to modularity, and I think that has occurred in an, again, peculiar way. I don’t think anybody sat down and said “let’s go for modularity,” I think what happened was a desire to come up with an administratively neat universe of qualifications in which qualifications were interchangeable, in which you could switch and swap routes in theory and of course it looks great on paper, you see the Qualifications and Credit Framework but as my colleague said, “it’s not a framework it’s just a diagram.” Unfortunately, I think that is the reality of how a lot of these centrally driven qualifications reforms have happened and we Qualifications are part of have to think really seriously about what it the solution rather than is it that we want from part of the problem a qualifications system. How can it do what we like to feel we’re about which is promoting educational excellence? So I hope in five minutes I’ve given you at least a sense that qualifications are part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Thank you. Dale Bassett: Thank you very much indeed. A plethora of views there and I think, despite the angles, quite a lot of common agreement. Amanda talked about the importance of aspiration. She warned that in many cases that vocational qualifications add little to intellectual development and can limit pupils’ horizons and warned of the dangers of playing the equivalence game. Ros said “qualifications are fairly irrelevant to education,” and that curriculum and teaching were the important things, talked about the importance of engaging parents and raising their aspiration as well as that of pupils. Deborah said that a lot of people could be high performing students, that at the moment it is almost determined at birth but other countries can be optimistic and instil pupils with self belief and a sense of expectation about what they can achieve, and Simon said that qualifications could be part of the www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform solution and warned that regulation means that we have worse qualifications than we otherwise might. We have got fifteen minutes so if I can ask both questions and answers to be as brief as possible and hopefully we can get through half a dozen or so. Let’s go one two three as a starting point. David Perks: David Perks, teacher in south London. The thing I was really interested in, because I’ve lived in Leeds and probably know a little bit about where you’re based and I taught in Harrogate in North Yorkshire, round the back of Harrogate and my experience of Leeds schools was get out fast. So if you have done something to turn that around all power to your elbow. The problem is, if you do believe in teaching academic knowledge on a subject basis, then you have to believe in examining it as well and making it something you can show to somebody else that it’s worthwhile and I am just a little bit nervous about how you explained what you are trying to do.You can get kids to get stuff out of your lessons, I’m absolutely sure you can do that, no problem at all, but the bottom line is to get them where you want them to be you’ve got to accept – and you may call it a hoop or whatever it is – you have got to get them to a qualification that makes sense to everybody else as well. That may be a tough ask but that’s really what you have got to do isn’t it? Richard Taylor: Richard Taylor. I had two questions, one is one of the things about what Ros described as hoops. When you look at the IB, isn’t one of the really interesting things about it that it is immune to political interference? It’s not based in a country, it’s based on an educational philosophy and not on exams, so that independence gives the user a whole lot more confidence, which we don’t really have because every time the hoops are moved it’s for political reasons rather than educational ones. Also for Professor Eyre, whether you have actually looked at things for example like the British military education system, in Germany Forces education run the equivalent of a small LEA. They get no more money, they have the same teachers, the same curriculum and yet they perform at a much higher level level than local authority in the UK. We’re all happy to rush off to Finland and Hong Kong and places like that whereas there are places in this country that could possibly be used by other schools and other educational authorities to look at what’s working here already. I think one of the other things I would promote to everyone who is here today is to buy this book which is called The Case of Working With Your Hands: Why office work is bad for you and fixing things is good, which is the number one education book in America at the moment and apparently amongst the Conservative education team. I have to say it debunks a lot of what you are talking about because in the future the knowledge economy and all our smart workers may actually have no jobs because you can’t outsource to China someone painting your house.You can certainly outsource your accounting and all your medical records and all those other things Gary Day: Gary Day from De Montfort University, which I think is probably not one of the best one according to one of the speakers on the panel. 94

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Deborah Eyre: I didn’t say that. Gary Day: No, but you did make a distinction about universities and I think, with respect, it is that sort of attitude. If people come from a very deprived background and it is the first time they go to university, that is a hell of a big achievement for them and I think that does need to be recognised, but that’s not my point. The wider culture acts a brake on the kinds of attitudes that they’re talking about. We’re living in a celebrity culture, kids want to be footballers, they want to be pop stars, they find schools boring and those pressures are there all the time, they are constant. I just wonder how far the wider culture with its dismissal of education, with terms like geeks and nerds and so on and so forth, impacts on the kinds of changes that you’re talking about, because if you went back into the past, and you said don’t look back to the past too much but the past is full of educational initiatives and changing things and so on a so forth and those things haven’t worked, we’ve still got the same problems. So maybe these problems are deeper and more structural and can’t be resolved simply by a change of attitude and with all due respect to what you are doing, which is absolutely marvellous but I think that’s partly due to your own charisma really and strength of character and not everybody is going to be able to do that. So it is about the wider culture really. Dale Bassett: So if we can start with Simon and work our way along. Simon Lebus: I’d just like to respond to a couple of points. The first is about the IB and the fact that it has been quite effective at maintaining its standard over a period of years and is not regarded as being a contentious qualification. I think in some ways it is a good illustration of the point I was trying to make. One of the problems we face as UK awarding bodies is we don’t actually own the curricula, we don’t own the standard. What has happened is that there has been a process in which the responsibility for the curriculum has gone to the government, the responsibility for the standard has got to regulation and the poor old awarding body is behind, trying to respond to a set of different constraints imposed from two different sets of agencies and institutions. I think without that you don’t have the same sort of ownership of the standard and it makes it much more difficult to interact with schools and constituencies. It does actually make this whole issue of maintaining standards much more difficult and that combined with a constant churn of qualifications because of the constant cycle of regulation, we have to change qualifications, get them re-accredited on a cycle of every three to five years. Naturally the body of knowledge in a particular subject doesn’t change every five years in performance with the regulatory timetable and I think these are real issues. The IB, because it stands outside that set of arrangements has managed to avoid some of those problems. I very much hope that the signals we are now picking up is that we will acquire more of those freedoms. The second point I’d like to make is the issue of the wider cultural context and I absolutely agree with

Schools for the future / Reform what you say. I think there are issues about how we educate people within the culture in which we live, but I also would just like to relate this specifically to the question of exams and qualifications, because one of the things I’ve been quite struck by is that we live and have lived for quite a long time in a culture with institutional assumptions about ever rising levels of achievement. We also live in a society where people are rather reluctant to submit themselves to judgement and yet of course exams are a form of judgement, and it is not surprising therefore that pupils are reluctant to submit themselves to a form of judgement. If we have rising expectations, people are far less ready to accept an exam system where 30 or 40 years ago coming out with a set of exam results that weren’t all As was a perfectly honourable thing to do and many of us, myself included, managed that and went on to live successful and happy lives. But in a sense it is a serious point because we have tried to introduce different qualifications, sometimes more challenging qualifications, and people are very ready to sign up for the educational challenge but perhaps less ready to accept the consequence that not everybody is going to get an A. I don’t know what the answer to that is but it is a serious issue and it needs some thought because unless we are ready to accept a wider level of differentiation, different results, different qualifications, we are not going to raise the bar. Deborah Eyre: Just to pick up on two or three things really. I guess like others the point that Simon was making about how regulation occurs in qualifications is a really important one because the IB, the way in which the IB is put together, it is a kind of values driven underpinning and that is very important to the way it works so being asked to accredit the qualifications where you have no say in the way in which the underpinning principles of the curriculum are scoped out is a strange artificial divide, interesting. The question of the Forces schools: it is not something anyone has ever commissioned me to look at particularly. My starting point – and I am very interested in what is being said – is that I think it is really good to learn from other people. When you have to earn your living, I tend to go wherever someone is paying me to find out. That is not to say that I don’t look at other places but I think we just need to look outside. We think we’ve looked a long way if we look in Scotland or Northern Ireland – and of course we all have to look at Finland because that’s what everybody is looking at apparently for some reason – but I think it is very important for us to look at ways that work successfully wherever they are, especially if they manage to work in a similar kind of way for less money. What could be better? I have to say I really feel quite passionately about this whole question of young people and their qualifications and what they’re offered in terms of fairness and actually I’ve been having this discussion over a period of time with various people with whom I’ve come into contact who tell me they were unsuccessful at school, people in their adult life who were unsuccessful at school and it is very interesting that other people told them they were no good and other people told them that they wouldn’t do things and now they are doing things because they are often self employed and therefore are running their own small

business, but they would have found it much easier if someone had helped them with those higher level skills earlier on. So they are painters and decorators, but painters and decorators on the whole are not just painting their own house, they are painting other people’s and that means they are invoicing for VAT and everything else that kind of goes along with that and I guess that links to the question of universities. I apologise if you think I was implying in some way that De Montfort was anything less than a really good university, but I do think it is part of the point that you were making about qualifications. Different universities offer different things, and students applying to go to them need to know what they are buying into and what will be the outcome in terms of what they’re doing. If you want to do animation, don’t go to Oxford, it will be no help to you, go to Bournemouth. That’s the kind of thing you need to know – you need to know where is the place. Finally, wider cultures. Big problem. I think wider cultures is hugely a big problem, but we’re not the only place that has them and what I am suggesting is other places, the ubiquitous McDonald’s is in every country in the world and so we’re grappling with that and other people are grappling with it too. I’m just saying, in a provocative way since we are in a seminar and it pays to generate some debate, that it’s easy to rationalise why these things are difficult, but we also need to get into business of looking at what we can do about it. Amanda Spielman: Building aspiration is a very important part of our model and we work on it from the first day of primary school down to blatant things like naming our classrooms after universities and our aim is by the time our children are making career limiting choices, i.e., at age 14, they should have a really clear idea of what life has to offer them, the directions they think they might want to go and what it would take to get there, so they make choices that leave them room to do the sorts of things that they should be aspiring to do. Parallel to that, we have very explicitly high expectations that we are communicating to teachers and pupils from the very beginning and apart from a tiny minority of pupils with really serious permanent learning difficulties, the minimum expectation at every stage in our school is the level that is good enough if you continue on the trajectory to achieve the five plus English and Maths and to go on and be able to study at A level or similar courses. That has to go all the way through our schools. The third piece is we have to do a lot of teaching of the behaviour and personal attributes. We don’t assume that anybody arrives at secondary school already understanding how to behave perfectly in class. We know that we will have to teach a large proportion of our pupils how to sit in class, how to ask a question, when to ask a question, how to move around a school without disruption. We put an immense amount of effort into routines and things on top of that which are the beginnings of self discipline, perseverance, interpersonal skills – all the things without which people will not succeed in adult life. We see all of those pieces as essential to making our children benefit from a spectacularly good education so a good curriculum and good teaching leads to education in the life they ought to have. www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Ros McMullen: I wasn’t arguing that we shouldn’t have qualifications. I totally appreciate the fact that we have got to have qualifications. I think what I was saying is that a lot of the rubbish that we’ve heard today about the false juxtaposition between academic and vocational, between do you teach people how to learn or do you give them knowledge, these are just completely … Because there is the political interference that actually creates false juxtaposition that is just nonsense. The qualifications are not what you base your curriculum on. What you do is that you do absolutely what is right for your children to raise their aspirations and for them to have the highest possible aspirations, the highest possible achievement and destinations and what you do is take the qualifications that fit that. Did that all make sense? I think it did. I think that’s why the level of personalisation at our academy is so strong. I don’t think you’ll find any two students that have the same curriculum really and it is why we have such a wide range of qualifications. The ones you would expect we would have like your Hair and Beauty, we haven’t got but we do have some BTECs and we do have obviously GCSEs and we do have Diplomas and we do IB and we are doing City and Guilds for exactly the reasons you were saying and actually it is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that because somebody is going to get A* at GCSE and is going to go on and do the International Baccalaureate in the sixth form, that they shouldn’t be allowed to do a City and Guilds qualification during their senior three year in furniture making if they want to do it. Because actually I wish to God I had some practical skills, they would have come in very handy at various times in my life, and students might want to do that and for some students that might be absolutely vital to them being economically active as well in the community. I think it is the best possible variation that you have to fit raising aspirations and to fit high achievement and to fit actually having a place in society. The argument I’m making is because of the political interference that goes on with the curriculum and the qualifications in this country, that actually – and I just think it is absolute and utter nonsense, some of the debates that we have about that – education is about leading out and the problem is when we teach to an exam syllabus whatever that is, whatever the qualification is, we are narrowing in we’re not leading out. In International Baccalaureate, the lack of political interference, yes, that’s one of the great things about it, and the other great thing that appeals to me about the IB is that I think it is about that leading out, and I think it is underpinned by the values. I also think that the international dimension for the generation that we’re educating now is really important, because I think the way that I jump on a train to come to London which would never have been thought of by the people who were training me years ago. It’s the same for our kids jumping on a plane going here, there and everywhere. Their interaction with the BRIC countries is going to be huge so I think they should be educated to an international dimension. The wider culture is very interesting. I refuse to pay attention to the wider culture being a problem because it’s there. I can tell you the ten common characteristics of a failing school straight away, and the first one is they will tell you about the culture within 96

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their community and they will tell you about our type of kid. It always strikes me as rather bizarre that they have got a different type of kid to everybody else’s type of kid, but that is a common characteristic of a failing school. Yes, the culture’s out there whether that culture is knife wielding gangs and drug dealers, or whether that culture is the emotional neglect and abuse that high aspirational families can impose on their children and the fact that those children need a lot more nurturing. Whatever it is, the culture’s out there. I actually think what’s important isn’t the wider culture out there. What is important is the culture that you have in your establishment. That’s what’s important, because we cannot change anything but what we have control of. There is that old saying, “give me the courage to change the things I can and the serenity to accept things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference”, and actually I can’t do anything about footballers bloody wives, but what I can do is if somebody tells me they want to grow up and marry a footballer I can look down my nose at them and say that girls that aspire to those sorts of things are the girls that [inaudible] and walk off.You can set a culture. Dale came to us and he was amazed because one of the things that we do is we have our own language. Because the kids do come from the most deprived area of Leeds and it is tough out there, what we do is when they come through the door they’re on stage and we all maintain our roles for the entire day and nobody shouts in our academy, nobody ever raises their voice and we have conversations with each other so if I pass another person in the corridor I’ll say ‘Are you having a nice day?’ and they say ‘I’m having a wonderful day, Mrs McMullen’ and the kids copy and it is really, really interesting and we have children. As I say I’ve been there four years now and it’s really embedded and the children will say ‘I’ve made a poor choice’ or ‘I didn’t press pause Miss, I hit him’. But they are actually using the language that we have given them and we are embedding the culture because it is all you can do, that is all you can do. Dale Bassett: Thank you very much indeed. I’m afraid we are going to have to leave it there because we are five minutes over time but thank you to the panel.

Education for less Andrew Haldenby: Look, the schools budget is going to come under pressure, all Government budgets are under pressure. This isn’t going to stop any time soon because not only does the deficit have to be paid off, which will take at least one Parliament, but also the national debt then has to be paid down, so it is a ten year thing not a one or two or three year thing at least. So the question is, is Reform, my organisation, are we right that it is possible to do more for less, it is possible that by doing things differently to achieve better outcomes at a lower cost or will these so-called cuts mean lower quality and that’s what we have to discuss in the next fifty minutes. Let me introduce our panel. Steve Beswick, Director of Education at Microsoft. He has been at Microsoft for sixteen years and he is now in education having worked previously on Microsoft’s work with other public sector clients, so perhaps you will be able to

Schools for the future / Reform give us a comparison, Steve, between education and the other sectors. Dale Bassett, of Reform, who you know. Shaun Fenton, the Headmaster of Pate’s Grammar School, which is a state grammar school in Cheltenham, and previously to that Shaun has worked in a number of schools from achieving in ones with failing measures to ones with outstanding achievement. And lastly, Chris Davies, the Education Director of Tribal, and also the Governor of a primary school in south London. I am going to give Dale a break and let’s ask Shaun Fenton to speak first and then we’ll have Dale and then we’ll have Chris and Steve and I should warn, I know there some head teachers in the audience like Jill and deputy heads like Mike who have yet to speak so I am going to draw you in to ask questions at the end. Right, so Shaun first. Shaun Fenton: Thank you very much and good afternoon. I come to the front and everyone leaves, it’s just like being at a staff meeting at school! There are other heads in the audience so there will be as many opinions on this as there are people in the room and particularly as there are heads in the room, as we are absolutely passionate and convinced we are right and spend a lot of our career proving that to other people. I am optimistic about the future, I have to say. There have been ten years where I have been pleased to be involved in education. This is now my second headship, previously in a comprehensive school and working for the local authority and now in a grammar school. I am also optimistic that there is a new way forward and I am going to convince myself and as many people as I can that we’ve seen all the benefits we can get from just putting more and more money in education and now we can take advantage of the opportunities to look at it in a different way. Of course it would be nice to keep getting more money but the reality is that we have got to believe we can do things better and differently because there won’t be. Education for me is about children, about building the school around every child, every day, a bespoke brand new construction, so that the children have a happy and successful school life. Qualifications will open doors for them but their personal character, their personal development, their framework of moral reference will mean when those doors open for them, they can do something with those opportunities, they can make the world a better place. So we need good schools for all our We’ve seen all the benefits children. The discussions we’ve been we can get from just having in our school putting more and more when we were money in education considering becoming an Academy, we are keen to become an Academy as soon as we can to engage in really authentic collaboration and partnership work and to also establish our identity as a state grammar school clearly and securely in another education system for the future – we have been having discussions in school and one of the strong themes is that we need to get rid of a system where there are schools where teachers wouldn’t want to send their children. We have got to have good enough schools for all children. So what are the opportunities for the future and in doing more for less? Well there is loads I would like to

talk about, the equivalence agenda, the influence of Ofsted – we had a really interesting discussion with parents where we agreed that Ofsted forces us to try to pretend everything is We need to get rid of a perfect rather than for us to make anything system where there are better. Maybe that is a schools where teachers bit of a paranoid way of wouldn’t want to send looking at it but the their children compliance agenda is a difficult one and I am looking forward to freedoms at a time when finances are drying up as well. I am hoping also at a time when a bit more freedom is coming in to education that we will be able to cling on to what we value rather than merely valuing what we can measure. There is a big gap there that has grown up over the compliance agenda. There are as many opinions as there are people in education but I would say that the national pay scales are a barrier to innovation and improvement in our schools. In the short term there could be a significant impact on goodwill in the teaching profession if we take that on, in the longer term it might even be that good teachers get paid better than less effective teachers and that might not be seen to be a crazy thing. The performance management processes that have been brought in most schools and mea culpa here, in most schools heads – and I am sure there cases where this is not the case but in many schools at least heads have let the performance management and pay progression be really that if you turn up for enough years, you get promoted and you get put up the pay scales purely by being barely competent rather than being excellent. As well as national pay scales, I would say freeing head teachers to do their job as leaders would be also excellent. I feel I have a presumption against me as head either by bureaucratic processes or union pressures or whatever, we all know who the good teachers are, we knew when we were at school, in any school community we know who the better and more effective teachers are and it is a diverse definition because you need to have, children need a key relationship with an adult in the school and you need a diverse group of adults, you need to have space in a staff room for mavericks and we don’t need to have a tick list approach to what makes a good teacher but what we do need is to give heads the power, well it’s not about hire and fire, that’s a bit emotive but to take decisions about staffing, that if you are appointed head of department at 28 it is not a job for life, there might come a time when you are [inaudible]. So free heads to do their job. Teaching and learning, those two things actually, pay scales and teachers doing their jobs might save some money because we might be able to run things more efficiently, focusing on teaching and learning and evidence based teaching and learning rather than government initiative teaching and learning would also be a good way forward. I can’t say how that’s going to save money but it might be more effective and technology, there may be some room for doing things more cheaply where we combine the issues of teaching and learning and technology. It might be that some of my best teachers in the school I’m in now could teach very effectively groups of thirty or forty or fifty supported video conferencing, supported by being recorded and put on the internet with resources there in our virtual learning environment and some seminars www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform there in smaller groups but maybe we need to challenge whether or not it is actually about an excellent teacher rather than a small class and that may be an area of saving money, so larger classes with excellent teachers rather than smaller classes with poor teachers. A couple of other points from me. A culture change – those were all things that could happen in my school, a couple of things, observations about the system. There is a danger in education that I perceive that where things need to be improved, the intervention to improve is measured more by the quantity of support that a school gets rather than the impact of that support. Certainly when I was working for the local education authority, the description of what we were doing to support schools – and it wasn’t in Gloucestershire by the way, it was in a previous life – the description of what we were doing to support schools was about how many advisers and advanced skills teachers and consultants had gone in rather than the impact on student experience and learning and actually, usually within a couple of days or less time, the advisors were whispering to each other the thing that wasn’t allowed to be said which was I can work for two years with this teacher and that will never be enough for these children but that wasn’t as important as showing evidence that we’d intervened. That investment in failure is a really interesting feature of the last ten years. The most expensive place to get an education in the state sector has been the schools that have been getting the lowest results because of all the extra support and money that has been thrown at them and I guess if it Per pupil spending, as was my child, I would want them not to be in a most of you will know, is school which is getting now double in real terms lots of investment the level that it was in thrown at it but in a 1997/98. Is the school school that was just system now twice as good really good. I’m in a school because of all the as it was in 1997/98? work that the staff do, the fact that we can recruit students that are able and it actually is an outstanding school, if you said that we would only be able to be outstanding if we also helped another school to be very successful, boy would it sharpen our mind and turn authentic partnership into a real impact based partnership rather than just sometimes a relationship that’s done because we feel we have to. The very last point is on local authorities and local authorities, really good stuff, they have done lots of good things, there is lots to be said for them but just to illustrate the point, we had a discussion the other day, a group of heads said if Academy status means that a school might get two or three hundred thousand pounds in addition to their budget in the first year, is that worth more than the support that they get from the local authority? No question that that money is out of all proportion worth far more than the support they get from the local authority and there could be significant savings there to the tune of hundreds and thousands of pounds for each school across the local education authority, some examples perhaps of where we could do more for less. Andrew Haldenby: You said all that in such a quiet and diplomatic way that it took me a minute to realise just how radical you were being! A very nice trick. Dale Bassett. 98

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Dale Bassett: Thank you. An increase in school spending every year, year on year, this year, next year and the year after were words spoken by Ed Balls in January this year. Now I suspect that had the election result been different that wouldn’t have happened, given the election result we’ve got it’s definitely not going to happen although we should bear in mind that the Coalition has committed to an as yet unspecified pupil premium to come from outside the schools budget to be added on top so they are basically still talking about spending more money. It is not going to happen and in fact it has already happened. Per pupil spending, as most of you will know, is now double in real terms the level that it was in 1997/98. Is the school system now twice as good as it was in 1997/98? No. What can we say about the school system today? Well for all the improvements and there have been many along with the problems of the last 13 years and indeed of the government before that, we are still in a situation now in the second decade of the 21st century where somehow more than half of all 16 year olds still leave school without five decent GCSEs including English and Maths. Something is going terribly wrong and doubling spending doesn’t appear to have fixed it. Why? Well there are a whole host of reasons, Shaun has just touched on a lot of them, I’m going to talk about two very briefly. The first is policy-makers’ obsession with visible spending. It is all about inputs, it has nothing whatever to do with outputs and the two big areas in which this is manifested is staff and buildings. Shaun touched on staff. Staff numbers and class sizes are an obsession of politicians, I think because they are an obsession of parents and as we’ve heard today, it is quality not quantity that makes the difference when it comes to teaching. This is where basically all the extra money has gone. We know that 78 per cent of the average school budget is spent on staff. Over the past ten years we’ve seen a 10 per cent increase in the number of teachers. We now have two and a half times as many teaching assistants as a decade ago and we also know, as per the Unison survey that came out last week, that two thirds of those are taking whole classes which they are not in any way qualified to do. We know that has a bad effect on education, particularly those who need the best education. Academic research has fairly consistently shown that class size has a negligible impact in the majority of cases. There are some exceptions to that, particularly reception and possibly Year 1, and there are certain other situations, obviously I’m excluding SEN from this area, but in the majority of cases, class sizes within sensible parameters doesn’t have a huge impact. What’s more, I think teachers know this and one indicator this recently by the Association of School and College Leaders found that two thirds of head teachers would reduce class sizes as a priority measure given a cut of just 2 per cent in their budget, which suggests that in fact heads think that class sizes can be bigger without affecting quality as well. The other big area of capital spending is buildings and capital expenditure. Building Schools for the Future was, and still is, a huge mistake. There are and in particular were a lot of schools that were falling down and in dire need of repair, we should have repaired those rather than focusing on rebuilding and refurbishing every single school in the country. It is a

Schools for the future / Reform colossal waste of money, there are also huge inefficiencies in the system and I know that Steve is going to talk about that so I’ll leave that there but what matters, as we’ve seen, is teacher quality and not buildings and staff. Just briefly, the other issue I want to touch on and again it has been talked about today, the purpose of education and mission creep, what are we actually trying to achieve? The amount of stuff that schools have responsibility for now I think is beyond most people’s comprehension.The beginning of the day, the end of the school day and what they are meant to do when they are there, what are we actually trying to focus on? I think if we ask ourselves that we will hopefully be able to get better value for money.Thank you. Steve Beswick: Thank you. Education for less and the question was does a reduction in spending mean a reduction in quality? I suppose my answer to that is not necessarily, but it does depend on how you spend your money. I am going to concentrate on three areas: the contribution schools can make, the contribution industry can make and the contribution that government can make and clearly I’ll have an IT theme around that given who I work for and the job that I do. Let’s look at the schools’ contribution first. I think with the situation that schools find themselves in today they have to look at themselves as a business as well as an educational establishment and businesses today invest in IT for two main reasons, one to improve productivity and two, to save costs. Now I think we have done a lot of work and we have been part of that over many years, how IT can contribute to teaching and learning and we will absolutely continue with that thing but there is very little work being done in schools around how IT can save costs in the same way that a business would and I think that’s something that has to be looked at. We’ve done some work in that area and spoken to a number of schools who have looked at this and just to give you some examples of cost saving ideas that they have come up with, first of all stop doing all the photocopying. The photocopying bill in a secondary school we’re told is actually bigger than the IT budget, so start viewing the information instead of photocopying it is one idea. Switch to virtualising some of the servers you’ve got in your school, you can save a ton of money on hardware by virtualisation and you can save a ton of electricity if you use new software that’s around today to reduce your electricity bill. So just three ideas. In total we have got 14 different ideas on how to save money, all the data has come from secondary schools independently of us in terms of the use of technology and when you add those up together, of which I have given you three examples, the total is £400,000 over three years cost saving. Actually you reduce your costs and actually end up with quite a good IT infrastructure as well because you have to invest in IT to save money elsewhere. The second point I want to make is industry contribution and first of all I want to talk about this in the context of industry trends and technology trends. There are going to be new ways, there are new ways today of delivering IT services and you hear a lot of jargon in the industry called cloud computing. Cloud computing is really a rich set of IT services that can be

delivered over the internet from large scale data centres and we, along with other organisations, are investing a lot in this area. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft is investing and we purchase 10,000 servers a month to put in our data centres around the world, so we are making a big investment and there is very cost effective ways of using IT, using the cloud. One service today that we offer is free email services. There are a lot of schools today with legacy systems paying for their email, we are offering a very, very rich email service free of charge so there is money saving that can happen there as well. As an industry we have got to help schools, and we take this very seriously, to understand the cloud and as to how the cost savings can be made. Another area where the industry has to, if you like, help the school system is around things like supporting quality teachers. We heard the theme today around CPD, then we as an industry have got to do much better work in terms of how do we embed the IT with the CPD, in terms of what that’s going to look like in the future. We do invest a lot of money today, we have many programmes, one of them is called “partners in learning” where we are investing in curriculum to help teachers understand how it is easier to embed technology into how they teach because that’s something that is going to get more and more in the future, so we think we have been listening in that but there is an industry contribution to make. The final one is the government contribution. We can talk a lot about the government contribution to cost saving, I just want to talk about one which is about building schools. BSF is a hot topic at the moment if you like but I just want to talk about one school we’re working with, it’s a trust school, Monkseaton High School in Newcastle, it was the first trust school I believe in the UK. They have gone through a new build, outside of PFI, outside of BSF, they’ve done an audit on their build, it is 9 per cent less than the average of the industry. It didn’t include any consulting costs associated with the programme itself and they went ahead outside the control if you like of the local authority to go and built what is a fantastic school and the costs being lower was no barrier to the innovation and quality of what they’ve got up there. Having been up there and seen it, there are lots of awards for the construction and certainly the way the IT is embedded is brilliant so three ideas for costs savings – schools contribution, lots of ideas and ways there; industry has got a point to make and obviously government have got a contribution to make as well. Andrew Haldenby: Steve, fantastic and lastly Chris Davies. Chris Davies: I aim to be similarly brief and will build I suspect on a lot of what has already been said. I was really encouraged when I saw the format of this discussion because I think schools resources hasn’t been a subject that has been particularly high on the priority list in terms of discussions around education and that is exactly the reason that Dale has described in terms of funding settlements, given that for the last 30 years it has been steadily increasing why worry about how schools are actually using their resources? I think what we’ve seen is an increase in [disengendering] and this increase in a culture amongst many schools that it is something that they don’t www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform particularly have to focus on and therefore haven’t devoted an awful lot of attention to looking at for the simple fact that by and large, in the majority of cases, most schools have had enough resources to do broadly what it is that they need to be doing. There are obviously exceptions but most schools are in a pretty much okay kind of position. Coupled with that then, and we have heard a lot about accountability today, we haven’t seen very much grit around financial accountability for schools. Ofsted makes a value for money judgement but that has got nothing to do with how effectively a school manages its budget and schools that run into deficit can go for really quite a long time trundling along at that kind of level before there is any serious intervention to deal with that problem and of course last time there was a great opportunity to put a bit of pressure on schools use of resources, back in 2003 when the NI contributions looked as if they were going to cause big pressure on the staffing budget, the government stepped in, intervened and bailed schools out of that. So this is not a subject that by and large many school leaders have had to focus on and that means the period that we are about to go into is going to be hugely challenging for an awful lot of school leaders. Most people weren’t there the last time we were dealing with a declining budget. The good news is that there are things that schools can do, some are easier than others and one thing that we see from a lot of the work that we do out in schools is heads saying how on earth can we make efficiencies when 80 per cent of my budget goes on staffing? Well yes, you can make efficiencies out of the 20 per cent that goes on pay spend but clearly dealing with workforce is going to be where you’re going to have to go if you are going to have to deal with the 10-15 per cent cuts that some people are suggesting are going to come out of the spending review. On procurement, I absolutely echo what Steve has talked about, photocopying is a fantastic example of where schools are hugely inefficient, not just in their use of it but in the contracts they enter into. The research that we’ve been doing shows that you could easily strip out probably across the school estate as a whole somewhere in the region of between three and five hundred million pounds simply from getting schools to manage demand and their contracts more effectively. They don’t have to change suppliers, just get their suppliers to do what they contracted them to do in the first place, if they contracted them which is a wholly separate issue. Around workforce and getting into the meat of how you get the most out of that, I think there are some big challenges here for school leaders. Teaching assistants I think we have already touched on, I think that is a hugely challenging area. Areas round making the best use of curriculum in order to drive changes in workforce structures is a great opportunity and linked to that is having a clear understanding of what works and if you like what doesn’t and we’ll come back to that in a second. I think there are also opportunities for changing the ways that management structures have developed over time and part of this links obviously into things around clusters and federations that are developing as a big policy theme but even with schools there are significant opportunities that we’ve found from many of the schools that we’ve worked with. Then of course 100

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there is performance management and it is absolutely right, we manage our teachers performance very poorly and I think that means we’re not getting best value out of many of them. Alongside all that there are a whole series of blockers. I think schools not knowing how to approach this is a big challenge, and that is nothing to do with the quality of leaders that we’ve got, I think it’s to do with the experiences and training that we’ve been given, we know there is very little decent training around management as opposed to all the other things that we expect head teachers and others to do. I think there are likely to be difficulties therefore around how schools can approach this from a strategic perspective and understanding exactly what are they there to do, what does that mean and the way in which they use their resources. I think the point you raised Shaun about how can you use learning from what works in order to drive efficiencies, I think that comes from having an understanding of how schools have added to their burdens by We manage our teachers’ taking on more and more without giving performance very poorly up some things that are and I think that means less effective and I we’re not getting best value think it was Dylan’s point earlier about out of many of them. leadership being about stopping people from doing good things in order that they can do better things, I think that is absolutely right and this notion of abandonment that is starting to develop within the sector of giving things up is something that we are going to start to see an awful lot more of. Lastly, I think one of the biggest challenges that is going to prevent schools from getting the best out of their resources is that increasingly they are going to be on their own and I buy into the suggestion that there is a lot of pent up talent in there but I also think we need to come back to a bit of reality that alongside all the inspirational heads, many of whom are here and many of whom have sat up at this table, there are a lot who will struggle with this sort of thing and as the Department withdraws into the centre and as local authorities start to wither on the vine, who’s going to help those schools deal with these things in a meaningful way so they don’t damage outcomes? Andrew Haldenby: Fantastic. So here we are – we are going to spend less on bureaucracy, we are going to have bigger class sizes, few staff, lower pay, we are going to grind our suppliers’ faces in it until they lower their costs and we’re going to cut deprivation spending in deprived areas. Is that right? That is obviously where the money is but is … oh sorry, we are also going to stop building so many schools – so is that the right territory and are we happy as a group that that can go hand in hand with genuine improvement? I did say I was going to pick on Gill Bal, who is a head teacher in North London and Michael Haldenby, my cousin indeed, who is a deputy headmaster in London and I shall also pick on Amanda Spielman as well, because these are people who know about school budgets and I would be interested in your thoughts about how you can cut 20 per cent out of your budgets in the next two or three years.

Schools for the future / Reform Gill Bal: Hi, I am Gill Bal, head of Wembley High. I think you have to be rational and logical about this. In my school about 80 per cent of the budget is spent on staffing so I have to look at staffing. I think the school pay and conditions document really does tie my hands up. The kind of situation has arisen where because of the school pay and conditions document I am not allowed to use teachers for cover so problems are created through that. We are looking, or my governors will be considering, whether we can become an Academy and we have expressed an interest in it so there may be some freedoms in all sorts of places. I think the government has got to stop throwing money at schools that are not doing so well, that philosophy and way of thinking has got to go and schools that perversely are not doing well are the schools they thought would be best served under BSF, so that’s even worse I think. I think what you have to do is trust school leaders to start working together, you have got to give them freedoms to manage their budgets, to look at how they can produce savings. They know how to run schools efficiently, mine’s an outstanding school, I know how to do it, I can work with others and help them and learn from them how to do this so I think let us work together, give us the job to do and we can do this job. Michael Haldenby: Thank you. Shaun, you made an interesting point, the one I’ll focus on is freeing up school leaders, giving them freedom which of course my ears pricked up at that because that’s what we’re after the whole time.When I analyse the work I do, in a nutshell it is making sure that we don’t get sued that is the number one job on my list every single day.That sounds flippant but we have got safeguarding now which means we are safeguarding training all summer so all the work on teaching and learning has gone out of the window.We’ve got the Every Child Matters agenda still there, you name it and we’re avoiding being sued all the time and that culture of litigation isn’t going to go away so in that context how would you like to be freed up as a head teacher is my question and is it at odds with what you can do in reality? Amanda Spielman: I think I’d like to add something rather than ask a question if that’s all right which is simply to say we’ve got eight schools, I think it would be wrong to regard schools as paragons of perfection. In general I think the closer decision making is to the pupils the better.We have got that through all our schools but the very rapid growth in school funding has led to a lot of inefficiency at school level. I would also like to say I feel very strongly that the quality of school spending would be enormously improved if there could be transparency and certainty from year to year about the level of funding rather than opaque formulas and endlessly shifting money coming from an endlessly shifting set of pots. Andrew Haldenby: Thank you, let’s take those and start with Shaun and then Chris and Dale and Steve. Shaun Fenton: The mission creep you talked of, unfortunately that’s just an inevitability now. If schools don’t also try to help children develop their own self esteem, the

capacity to work with others, to understand their role in society, everything from good manners to high aspirations, if we don’t do that then we are leaving a social problem that no one else is going to pick up. It would be great if we could say let’s just focus on getting the academic learning or something slightly broader than that but I fear that’s not what we need for our country. I would just say, photocopying in my school is £40,000. If we halve it it’s £20,000, 15 per cent of my budget is going to a million pounds, so we need to keep a sense of reality. There is a real danger that the private sector says, oh it’s all sloppy in the public sector and there is money sloshing around. Actually we do try to be rigorous although I do agree that the “throw more money at them every year” type of approach doesn’t encourage that. The comment I will just make on the freedoms, there is a real danger of careful what you ask for. I suspect the security of tenure for heads in the next ten years, especially if they become heads of academies and if there are more freedoms, security of tenure will reduce because there will be more autonomy but also more accountability and more of us getting pushed out because we’re not performing well enough, which as a turkey approaching the end of November, I’m feeling a bit awkward about but for our children’s sake – well if I say why should a head of department have a job for life, then why should a head have a job for life? I suppose if they’re doing a great job they’re fine, if they’re not they move on to a different job. It’s an awkward thing to say but it is probably an idea whose time has come. Andrew Haldenby: That’s true and fine, you’re going to be more accountable but the quid pro quo of that are greater freedoms and do you want those greater freedoms to be able to save money, that’s the question? Shaun Fenton: What heads have become very good at and in the last ten, fifteen years that I have been in and around them, is finding whatever they are supposed to be doing and then perverting it into a way that works for their own local context. If we didn’t have to do that ridiculous rewriting of instructions and could just say … In fact the profession has been beaten up. I said to some teachers the other day, never mind what you think you are supposed to do, just remember why you came in to education. Re-light the torch of those values that you came in for and what would be the right thing to do? They looked at me really suspiciously, how could that possibly be a question that anyone would genuinely ask! [Laughter] Chris Davies: If I can I will just pick up on your question actually to start with, I think I’d frame the question differently. It’s not that heads should be given greater freedom in order to save money, it’s that heads should be given greater freedom to deploy the resources that they’ve got in the best way in order to achieve the outcomes they want to achieve. I think that’s part of the problem with this subject, it becomes all about the [inaudible] complexities and the pupil premium and funding formulae when actually it is about how are you using the www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform resources in order to do the best for the kids that you have in the school at the time. I think that’s where Jill’s point becomes interesting about working together, and linking up with Shaun ’s point about there being greater instability and uncertainty for tenure. Certainly many of the heads that we’ve spoken to would be delighted to help other schools but why would they because what they are measured on and what they’re assessed on is the performance of their school and how they have done in relation to that. I think that is one of the big challenges, that we are not necessarily building a structure that will encourage schools to work together in a way that they are going to need to in order to achieve some of these things. It isn’t just taking 20 thousand quid off photocopiers, the reality is that it will be cutting in to workforce and that’s people’s jobs and that becomes much more difficult. Dale Bassett: Just briefly picking up on Amanda’s point on transparency and particularly certainty in funding. Chris said it is about heads using resources well and the kind of funding system makes it pretty much impossible for heads to actually do that, the It is about heads using resources well and the kind fact that you don’t what is going to of funding system makes it know happen year on year, pretty much impossible for particularly as far as heads to actually do that … capital budgets are You get the wrong spending concerned.You get the wrong spending at the at the wrong time, you wrong time, you spend spend the money because the money because you’ve got to, the Audit you’ve got to Commission tells you off for running a surplus, God forbid, and I think it is going to become an increasingly big issue. At the moment there is the minimum funding guarantee that gives you, whilst not certainty, at least some idea that the numbers are going to continue going in the right direction. That presumably is not going to last. The Government has, in my view commendably, said it is going to try and move towards a national per pupil funding formula. The complexity of the current system means whether it can ever achieve that is a question mark, but that would go a long way to helping solve that particular problem. Steve Beswick: Just a couple of comments on some of the questions. First of all the sharing of best practices and head teachers getting together. I think in the future technology has got a role to play now as well. Everybody is busy but how do we share best practice? We need that even more in a devolved system that’s going to happen than maybe we’ve had previously so we see good practice but very little way that systemic change can happen around the use of IT across the system so we think again that the industry, not just Microsoft, but the industry has a role to play in how we foster people getting together with very busy lives and how you get head teachers talking to head teachers, that’s the first point. The freeing up of school leaders, yes, when I look at it from a business point of view, as I say, if you are a business person running a business like I do, you 102

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have to be free from the shackles if you like to make the decisions in order to make the cost savings that I have to do every day so I agree, in terms of freeing up school leaders. The other thing around transparency and round year to year uncertainty, we’ve worked on projects where there has been some certainty and seen some fantastic results, where you are probably trying to get parents involved more in the school, you are using technology to link the parents to the school, not just around how the pupils are doing but lots of other areas as well and community interest as to how that school can work within that community, to the extent where in some areas of high deprivation where there was some money over many years spent, we had a situation where one parent who was long term unemployed found out that by using the parental engagement system that he was actually pretty good at IT and actually taught himself because he wanted to find out about his child’s progress, taught himself IT and got a job. I’ve just given that as an example because that is multi-year type work, multi-year type funding that has been available in the past but those are the kind of results you can get when you are looking at multi. Andrew Haldenby: If we can have Richard Taylor again and is that Tony Gardiner at the back and then Robert again. Richard Taylor: I’ll be terribly quick, Andrew. I think that we should be spending a lot less money on ICT, the rest of the world calls it IT. BSF was £16.75 per pupil, the latest figures from the Independent Schools Council showed that independent schools spend £150 per student per year so roughly they spend a third if you look at the grossed up figure. Oddly enough secondary government schools, according to the Publishers Association, spend around £2 per pupil on books, private schools spend about £100. So perhaps we have a bit of a cargo cult which unfortunately blinds us to things that might actually lead to some real improvements. We can also stop a hold of non evidenced based large education programmes from the centre, things like Teachers TV for If the government had given example or laptops for teachers where we that money to Reform to spent 20 million giving do something in schools away 200,000 laptops and given you 20 million, for absolutely no purpose. Now if the they wouldn’t have expected to you to spend government had given money to Reform to 15 million on the evaluation that do something in schools and five million on and given you 20 delivering the programme. million, they wouldn’t have expected to you to spend 15 million on the evaluation and five million on delivering the programme, so I think that is something we have to look at. Also I would disagree that free really means free and a good example is that Sydney University went to GMail. The problem they had was the huge information security and information sovereignty issue that the GMail service was based in America which meant that all of their intellectual property would have been

Schools for the future / Reform available to US authorities if it was requested by a court. So Sydney University’s GMail server is now based in Switzerland. And whether you use Bing or use Google to do a search, apparently according to the latest research, one search on Google is the equivalent energy use, because of all the servers in the background, of boiling two kettles. So actually it is not really free at all, it just means you have moved the cost base. Tony Gardiner: I don’t know if I’m alone in feeling we have got hijacked by the ‘less’ and lost sight of the ‘education’. I’d like to draw attention to and comment on two aspects where I think this title applies which again underlines the difference between the ethos difference between independent and state schools. One is professionalism and willingness to work out of hours and out of term time. Cover must be I don’t think schools have absolute curse for been in the habit of saying an an awful lot of heads, we need to do something somehow somebody extra therefore we should has to re-negotiate this stop doing something else. whole deal, as they have done with the GPs but we’ll leave that aside, so that people will behave professionally, will continue learning in the vocations and not expect to be paid extra but may get promotion as a result. I think you can do a lot more for less if you re-negotiate and get the job done on the cheap, where I am not sure you can do it for much less, you can abolish QCDA. The idea that you can go to universities and find experts who will advise you on how to do the curriculum is a complete joke because the JMB 30 years ago was dominated by Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and there were people in the universities who engaged with the curriculum. Now there aren’t. So by all means involve universities but there is a vacuum at the moment as to how we are going to rethink the curriculum. If you want to do the last session which was raising the bar, you cannot do it with Curriculum 2007, it is awful. So we have got to redo something and I’m not sure how we can do it for nothing. Jonathan Holland: Jonathan Holland, Tribal. Chris’s point that slipped out at the end about abandonment is I do think is very important. I don’t think schools have been in the habit of saying we need to do something extra therefore we should stop doing something else. I had a practical example recently of a school that provides online reporting to the parents suddenly realised why on earth were we providing annual reports as well and stopped doing it. That is a simple thing but it saved a lot of activity. The other point is taking your point about education. CPD is going to become increasingly important. We heard a lot this morning about freedom but I also heard a lot about things that were going to change which have a lot of CPD implications in it and it links really with Steve’s point. We do have the technology now to provide any time, anywhere learning, to be bespoke, to be accessed whenever teachers or staff want to use it, for them to self assess, for them to go for materials that they need to support

them. Tribal has an NCTM model that has some elements of this but the technology is there where you can actually improve CPD at less cost and we ought to be looking at things like that. Robert Moreland: Robert Moreland. I should also declare that I come from Cheltenham and I know that school and have a high regard for it, even if you have become mixed. I quite simply want to pick up what the lady over there said about money not being thrown at bad schools and certainly looking at the area around my school, a lot of money has been thrown under BSF to schools that are low academically and we’re actually in the next phase and I think one of the things that the government has to look out for is it actually may well be starving the schools that are gong to need the capital which we certainly do. My other question was quite simply, someone who hasn’t been mentioned which is the School Improvement Partners and I suspect this leads to a difference between governors and heads because I get the impression that heads like them, we as governors hate them because we regard them as local authority spies and indeed on the side of the head. Joe Garrod: Joe Garrod, Navigant. I was very interested to hear the panels’ comments on how the concept of free schools and how the associated costs of putting further surplus places into the system along with the capital revenue costs of establishing new smaller institutions can be reconciled with at the same time delivering education for less on a system wide basis. I’ve not heard a convincing answer in that respect and would interested if there any insights on the panel. Andrew Haldenby: There are quite a lot of points there, I might divide them up. Steve, do you want to take Richard Taylor’s point on the ICT and also the point from Tribal, a more positive point, on ICT. Shaun, Tony Goddard is absolutely right saying this is about more as well as less, is he right that we should be getting more out of teachers in the holidays? Chris and Dale, that’s a very important point on free schools, do they make the system less efficient? So let’s do those, Steve. Steve Beswick: First of all, Laptops for Teachers was quite some time ago but you cannot just throw IT out there and expect people to use it if they don’t know how to use it so you have got to have it with CPD so that’s why investment needs to be made by the industry to help. This idea of just taking money and buying kit is wrong. On the other point around free, I suppose when I say free I mean from a Microsoft standpoint there’s no licence, there’s a 10 gigabyte inbox that we don’t charge for and a 25 gigabyte space so is there a cost in setting that up by people? Yes. Will you save money because you don’t have to buy servers? Yes. The data resides in the EU, we’re not going to use it for advertising at all, we’re not going to use any of the data and we can guarantee that. It is an investment model by us. Okay, free might not be absolutely free but my point is that in the cloud data environment there are a lot of savings to be made. www.reform.co.uk

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Schools for the future / Reform Dale Bassett: Yes, free schools and surplus places. Well obviously the Government has a very neat answer to this, which is if you give every pupil the same amount of money then it doesn’t matter how many new schools you build, you are still only spending the same amount of money for the same number of pupils, the idea being to move the surplus places from the bad schools into the good schools. Well it is lovely in principle but how on earth is it going to work in practice? It probably isn’t. There are two parts to this, the first I think is on capital and the answer is it’s not going to be a case of building lovely shiny new schools like the first generation of academies, that just isn’t going to be what it is. It is going to be making do and mending with what you can, it is going to be renting, it is going to be innovative use of other spaces like office buildings and it is also going to be the Government hopefully trying to figure out some sort of way to provide a financial guarantee to schools so they can go out to the private sector, the financial sector and get capital expenditure up front that they can amortise over time. The thing about free schools is that they create an incentive. If you give every pupil a fixed amount of money and tell every parent they can take their child to which ever school they are going to go to, the parent by definition will, should anyway, seek out value for money. They are going to seek out the school that is going to deliver the most for that fixed amount of money so in actual fact that can be a mechanism for increasing efficiency rather than decreasing it, assuming that it is set up right, assuming that the information is there. Shaun Fenton: Just to add something on free schools. From a school leader’s perspective I think it might increase a healthy but sometimes uncomfortable dynamic where parents and other groups might engage more with the existing schools as part of their evaluation as to whether or not they are going to go off If you give every pupil a and their expectations fixed amount of money and of their ability to influence the way tell every parent they can schools are run might take their child to which be raised and parents ever school they are going may feel they are a more empowered to go to, the parent by stakeholder because if definition will, should you don’t make it work, anyway, seek out value we’ll go off and set up for money. another school. There will be loads of barriers to entry but there may still be a dynamic there that encourages that type of thinking. Should we get more from teachers? We heard an example, I can’t remember the exact figures but it was something like between forty and fifty times more was spent on books in an independent school than in a state school. Before we compare the outcomes of state school teachers with those from independent schools have to remember the resource in Cheltenham, the fees for the school that you probably attended are probably four times as much per head … over £20,000 a year compared to the few thousand we get in our schools. So if you reversed the funding model and state schools got four times the 104

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funding they get now and independent schools had to work on a quarter the funding they get now, it might not take too many generations before the problem with independent schools was of under-performing and not meeting parental expectations. So we need to just be careful about that, my teachers work tirelessly and endlessly. Can we do it, can we get more for our teachers? Well we have to. We’ll rethink, we’ll regroup, we’ll come together because actually teachers are still driven by vocation in many cases. Also we have got in our care wonderful young people, the future of our country, and for many teachers it is still a privilege to walk with them on that journey from childhood to young adulthood. So can we? We have to, we will, because they only get one chance at a main education and teachers will be committed enough to get it right despite the funding cuts. That’s the hope and optimism that I have, the positive education that teachers will see the problems and find a way of overcoming them. Chris Davies: I’ll just add to that briefly. I think that’s right, I think that’s where Gill’s point about greater freedoms around terms and conditions becomes important because then you can have meaningful performance management rather than the cargo cult version of performance management that operates in most schools at the moment. I thought Dale’s exposition about the concept behind free schools was excellent. I don’t know if it is a convincing answer about what’s going to happen. The bit that Dale didn’t touch on was the flip side of what happens then with market failure because there will be free schools that do go under and they will have a cost associated with them and even more worryingly there will be the state schools, the still in local authority schools that really start to struggle and how do you deal with those financial issues? I’m pretty sure the Department and Ministers at the moment have no idea how they are going to deal with that. Andrew Haldenby: Great. At the same time as closing the session I am going to close the conference. Let me just say thank you so much to people who have stayed in full attention which is wonderful for an event like this. As I said, what we are going to do is transcribe it and send it to everyone here and also send it in to the Department for Education and the Treasury as part of our submission to the Spending Review. I think what Nick Gibb will think when he reads the transcript is that there are a hell of a lot of people out there who he should keep in touch with, who will help him not just on if you like the curriculum side which is clearly his personal passion but also on the resourcing side which we have just got into today. It hasn’t been front and centre in the debate on how to save money in education but it has clearly been on people’s minds, the leaders here. So he can draw on all that. Equally I think there is a slight sense, well a big sense today of people wanting to get on with it and not have another set of political initiatives coming in and that might just be a bit of a challenge for him because he wants to come in and make his mark, but that’s all right because the key thing is he wants to

Schools for the future / Reform have a dialogue, he wants to stay in touch, he wants our help with thinking about these questions so what I would like to do is keep in touch with all of you going forward now, if I may, to keep inviting you to events like this, perhaps not always as big as this, often smaller than this and to be one of the centres of thinking in this crucial period about how we do improve the education system on more limited resources. So if Reform can do that it will be because people like you do want to give up your time to come so I am incredibly grateful. Thanks again to our sponsors, to PA Consulting, to Pearson, to Cambridge Assessment and of course to Microsoft because events like this do have a cost and they do take some resource to put on so you will find your commitment is essential but also you have been willing to come and engage and to help us understand these issues and you have knowledge which too often is ignored I think, so thank you so much for that. My last thank you must go I think to all of our speakers because we have had an incredible range, and all of them extremely strong presentations so thank you very much indeed.

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