Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727Wednesday 15 January 2014

Oral evidence, 15 January 2014.

Witnesses

Vic Goddard, Principal, Passmores Academy, Essex, John Stephens, Deputy Director, Teaching Schools, National College of Teaching and Leadership, Heath Monk, Chief Executive, Future Leaders Trust, and David Jones, Federation Head, Holybrook Primary School and Parkland Primary School, Bradford, gave evidence.

Chair

Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome to the Committee. It is men all the way today.

Ian Mearns

It is about boys.

Chair

It is not just about boys; it is about girls as well.

Pat Glass

It almost always is all men.

Chair

My colleague says it nearly is always men who are here. We will have to work harder at our witness diversity. Thank you for joining us today. Ofsted’s report was called “Unseen children”. Are these children invisible in your schools?

Vic Goddard

We are all going to say no, obviously. It is the obvious answer to that. There are lots reasons why; you can talk about moral purpose and why we are doing the job and, obviously, every child being important. However, accountability frameworks and such do sharpen the focus somewhat too.

Chair

At a current secondary school, a lot of children who are underperforming are highly unlikely to contribute to the five A to C GCSE count. At which point, is it true that you effectively use your best, most stimulating and inspiring teachers to get children up to that C grade, and you do not put them in the classes of the children who you think are unlikely to contribute?

David Jones

Speaking as a primary head, it touches on something that David said in the first panel. Sometimes, where white working class children find themselves in a small minority, that may be the case. Those children are our children, almost in their totality. Therefore, they are our raw material and that is what we work with. I think, perhaps, where there are successes, that is often because these children are the very children that must achieve to the national average standards. Therefore, perhaps children in those schools do better.

Vic Goddard

I always have to highlight that not achieving five A*s to Cs including English and maths does not mean that you have underachieved. It may be you have achieved fully to the level of which you are capable.

Chair

If you are a head teacher in a school with a difficult intake and you are struggling to meet the minimum requirement threshold, why would you put your most inspiring teachers into the classes of the children who are least likely to help you achieve your A to C percentage?

Heath Monk

I think because that is what the job is. It has to be both/and. There is a recognition, as with the head teachers that I work with at my organisation, that you have to do something to improve the school. That is about establishing your credibility and, in many cases, saving your job. There is a short term “I have to get the results up”, but if that is, year‑on‑year, the only thing that you are doing, you are not fulfilling what it is that you are there to do, which is about looking at the pathway of children, whether it is primary at year one or secondary at year seven, and say, “What does it take to get not just 40% to meet the national threshold, but 80%/90% to get to a standard where they have doors opened and life chances?”

Vic Goddard

The other issue is where a school is in its cycle of Ofsted inspections will have a massive impact on the bravery of the head teacher to do that, because we are pragmatic; we have to be pragmatic, but ideally pragmatic, I guess. If you have Ofsted due and you are around the floor target, and as a head you not only have to educate those children, but you have to protect people’s livelihoods etc, the pressure on you as a head to maybe flirt around the C/D borderline to get those students over that, and maybe ignore where the greater need is, is huge. You are responsible for people paying their mortgage. The moral purpose of educating children is always going to be at the forefront of what we do, but there is also a pragmatic element that I have to look my cleaner in the face when I have to make him redundant.

Chair

That is why it is so important for policymakers to ensure they create a framework that aligns the survival instinct and interest of the head with the interests of the children, not least the poorest children. John, do you have any reflections on that from the National College point of view?

Dr Stephens

Yes, first of all to say that, in policy terms, it is exactly as you said at the start, Chair. The focus that Ofsted has, as we heard in the previous panel, in terms of precisely looking at the offer that is made to those youngsters who most need it is actually in itself an incentive in the story that is told around that progress, not just the absolute outcomes. That is now enshrined in the accountability framework. There is also the change, of course, to things like the published performance tables, so that there is the spotlight shone on the achievements of those children, rightly so. They are clear additional incentives not to follow the behaviours that you have described.

Chair

Stepping back from the individual institution to the system as a whole, I do not what to mischaracterise what Chris from Ofsted told us, but he was slightly denying that—no, let’s not go there. How do we ensure that we have incentives in the system to make it more likely that talented teachers will stay and talented leaders will stay and be attracted to the most challenging schools? Is it true that we would like to have a system in which, if anything, the playing field was the other way: they were more incentivised to be in the tough school than they were to be in the leafy suburb with high prior achievement.

Dr Stephens

Just to say that teaching is a challenging job. It is a challenging job wherever you do it, so I would not like to unnecessarily characterise it as one or the other. I do recognise exactly what you were saying before in terms of your son’s experience. We all recognise that. There are a couple of things to say in policy terms. The panel may remember that in the autumn, the Deputy Prime Minister made an announcement about plans to look specifically at incentives to help incentivise the move of leaders precisely to the areas that were most needed. A good deal of work is being done by officials at the moment to try and progress that work. That is the first thing to say.

Pat Glass

Can I just ask if tuition fees are involved in those discussions? We heard earlier a suggestion that if you said, “We will reduce your tuition fee debt by whatever percentage each year that you spend in really challenging schools”, challenging schools will then get the pick of the best teachers. Is that in the thinking at all?

Dr Stephens

That has not yet been in the thinking—

Pat Glass

Should it be?

Dr Stephens

—although, of course, the whole business of moving to a much more school-led approach to ITT—for example, School Direct, which actually places, in partnership with a provider, the candidates very directly in schools—can bring them very much into the arena of experiencing some of these things. In some of the schools that provide that—I can think of a particular school in Greater Manchester, for example—all their trainees, as part of the school-led ITT offer, get an opportunity to work in a different set of contexts. For example, they can go and work in a specialist provision where behaviour is an issue, so they can experience that as part of their ITT. Through the partnership of schools that deliver this, they can go and work in a special school and see the particular challenges of that; they can work in a particularly urban setting or otherwise. Because of that school-led approach, there are some solutions to some of the things.

Chair

What about incentives? That sounds like an experiential thing—

Pat Glass

It is kind of a nudge.

Chair

—which is a good thing, but it might open up and someone might find that a tiny rural school, which otherwise might be struggling to get a good teacher, is their kind of environment. That is a good thing, but it does not change the incentives. In our system of football, Manchester United and Liverpool get to pick first, whereas in NFL whoever comes top last season has the last pick of this year’s recruits. They deliberately try to ensure that there is greater equality. We have a system that reinforces strength, does it not?

Dr Stephens

Just to go back to what I was saying, there is some work going on in policy terms to try to address that and look specifically at some of those incentives as we speak. The other thing to say in policy terms picks up the point you made earlier. What we are now seeing through, particularly, the expectation that our best schools that have converted to become academies also seek to sponsor other schools, is that some of those schools, set in—to use your phrase—the leafy suburbs, are actually taking responsibility for schools in much more challenging circumstances. They are taking direct executive responsibility, not that first stage of school-to-school support, but actually taking them on as part of their family. Again, that is a policy opportunity that means some of that great leadership gets spread.

Chair

When are we going to get some results? You have hinted at the work going on, but you have not really told us what any of these incentive changes might be, which is very politic of you. When might we be told what these are?

Dr Stephens

We are expecting an announcement very soon around that.

David Jones

I would make the point that my dear old mum used to say: “The finest folk are fashioned in the fiercest flames”. When I said to our staff at our schools, “What would incentivise teachers?” and “What would lead to the best teachers working in the most difficult schools”, someone said, “That presupposes they don’t already”. I would say that it’s been my experience that many of the best teachers do work in our schools. At one of the schools that I am at, there are six head teachers now serving in Bradford schools that came through our school. They see it as a proving ground. One of the essential ingredients in being a good teacher is to be an idealist and to look for a better tomorrow. The teachers and the colleagues that I work with in our schools I find are those people. I feel energised by them, even though I am presumably supposed to be their leader. I feel energised by them because of their commitment to the young people that they serve.

Heath Monk

In our experience at Future Leaders that is a really important point. The moral purpose is the thing that drives teachers. Financial incentives can get the wrong people to go. There is something about prestige—

Chair

Have you any evidence for that?

Heath Monk

No, I do not—

Chair

Nobody wants to denigrate those teachers and we are lucky because of the moral purpose we have so many in so many tough circumstances. None the less, the data is absolutely clear. That is that, if you have a PhD and you are a teacher, you are more likely to be in an independent school than you are in a state school. You are more likely to be in a leafy suburb state school than you are in another school. All the data all the way suggests that all the incentives have taken and do drive people, and as they get older, however idealistic they start, they have to pay a mortgage. It tempts them away from where they are most needed. It is dangerous, but you are here to give your opinion.

Heath Monk

What has done that is less money and more about career progression, support and development.

Chair

Would both not be helpful?

Heath Monk

Both would be helpful.

Chair

In what way would paying more money to people who go into a very tough school be unhelpful?

Heath Monk

I do not think it is unhelpful, but you have to think about what it is that is going to make somebody go to an area that is traditionally seen as very difficult. The key things, rather than money, are the support that they are offered, the prestige and the opportunities for career development. It is to see that as, “Actually, if I want to progress, if I want to be successful, then rather than going to the leafy suburb school where I am safe, it is better to go to the more difficult, challenging area”.

Chair

What would that look like? That is what we are trying to tease out. How do we change the system so it is nuanced? It is not a crude “We are just going to pay you to go there” because it ignores what they are really interested in, but how do we get the right balance of incentives so that it changes it?

Pat Glass

What about some breathing space? A good head with a good track record: “Yes, you are going into this challenging school and Ofsted will not come in in 18 months and give you a good kicking. We accept that you have this background and history, so we will give you some breathing space to make a difference”. What about that?

David Jones

The practical solution is what Chris from Ofsted was saying. I sometimes say now it is almost the rules of the football manager without the salary of the football manager that people are judged, know they will be judged and they will go home in a taxi that day. That is not helpful. Colleagues can find themselves in difficult situations without enough time to get the school beyond that. There is no doubt that that impacts. Teachers in difficult schools are not asking to be cut so much slack that they can be not effective, but we must take into account the context of the school or we will end up not being able to recruit good teachers and good leaders in schools that are in jeopardy.

Mr Ward

As you raised football, they always used to say back in the 1960s and 1970s that Burnley could never really stay at the top, because it used to breed really good players who then left and went elsewhere. You have six there who have then gone on. The big question is: what keeps those six in that sort of school that you are responsible for, as opposed to going off to Burley, Menston, Addingham or wherever it may be, because it is just easier?

David Jones

They have not. They have gone to schools similar to ours in many cases. I would rather have a committed teacher working four or five years and then have the opportunity to freshen the team again, to use that football analogy. We do not get large numbers of applicants for jobs, but we get some really good quality. If our recruitment and selection process is effective, then we actually freshen it up with those very idealistic teachers who hopefully in five years will be the heads of the future.

Vic Goddard

I have to speak up on behalf of my colleagues in the leafy suburbs. There are also challenges in those schools. Having worked in the independent sector, when you give a child an A and their parent complains it is not an A*, that is pressure too. I just think that needs to be raised.

Pat Glass

It is not likely to get you sacked, though.

Vic Goddard

It is a very different type of pressure, but it is still pressure nevertheless, which some teachers like and some teachers do not. On the incentivising of people to work in the environments we are talking about, the current system or the system that has changed with Schools Direct has not worked for us. I look at the old system of the graduate trainee programme, which obviously was around pre-tuition fees being an issue, but Schools Direct is focused at shortage subjects. There is a shortage because there are not many teachers who wish to teach them, and then just saying you are going to get training in school does not make them want to teach them. I will be honest: we have gone from having four or five trainees in my school—and I look at my middle leaders and senior middle leaders: they are all home‑grown; they have all started with us as NQTs—and we are not getting the applicants. We had 26 places across our region and we filled 10 last year. It is very much linked to the tuition fee issue. There is an issue around that, and that de-incentivises people to even go into the profession. When you are an ICT professional who can go and earn much more in the City, why would you wish to pay to train in the first place when you have a degree behind you? The issue we are not looking at is the wider societal view of working class children and working class environments. We would not accept the derogatory comments around ethnicity or gender that we accept around class. That absolutely boils me. When you see on the front of certain national newspapers “the hoodie generation” or whatever it may be, that is very much linked to class. It negatively affects the children I serve, because they are white and they are working class. When they are given a carte blanche “you are worthless” or there is over-emphasis on how many students go to university, not how many people are employed, and good citizens in the community, that does not help any of us. It is actually not just about education; it is about all of us not accepting the type of coverage that working class families and people get. I am a free-school-meals child. It did not limit my aspirations, because I had a family that supported that, but it did affect my view on life when I had to stand in the other line with the poor children who had free school meals while the ones who did not have free school meals got a different line. Schools have moved such a long way away from that in the last 20 years, but there is a wider societal issue about the over-emphasis on academic success rather than worthwhile academic success—not just the normal, “How many of you can get to university?” We are not going to tackle the wider, long-term issues unless we accept the fact that we have to also tackle the biased view of working class children that we ignore on a daily basis. The fact that certain newspapers have the circulation they have means that lots of people buy into that too. We are never going to change the self-worth of our children unless we tackle that too.

Ian Mearns

In terms of the self-worth, though, Vic, do we not have to get into the game for some of the youngsters at the very hard end, but we are trying to adapt things so that they get success in something? Success in something is better than failure in everything, isn’t it?

Vic Goddard

Absolutely. That is where you go back to the accountability framework and the assessment framework, what counts in the league table and does not count in the league table. If you look at what has been removed from league table measures, who is it most affecting? Which class of society is it most affecting? Which type of child is it most affecting? The message coming out from central Government about that is very clear and is very damning to the students that I serve.

Mr Raab

Just to David and Vic specifically, I wanted to probe based on your personal experience as head teachers. We have this inquiry on whether there is a scale of a problem with white working class children underachieving in education. Do you think there is this problem? Do you think we are targeting a specific issue that your personal experience bears out?

Vic Goddard

You can look at raw data and that often can tell lies, but actually in this instance it is a very stark truth. It does come back to what we value in their education and what we do not. I know Kevan and a few of the others were speaking before about the more holistic value that we give to education rather than a very narrow one. My children are empathetic, good citizens when they leave us and that is important to me, but nobody thanks us for that apart from the community that they go and live in for the rest of their lives. That is something that is not measured in those league tables. Certainly, for all but my little stint in the independent sector, having worked in this environment, there is a lack of aspiration sometimes that is not necessarily matched by the children, but is in their parents. That is the biggest issue for me, going back to the wider societal issue. Rather than keeping throwing money at the child, are we actually tackling the parenting that is going on the future?

David Jones

The link between aspiration and teacher expectation is massively enormous. We tend to have mantras around school. When you walk down the corridor it says above our corridor, “Down this corridor walked the future leaders of our world” and we believe it. If we act shabbily and we have less than high expectations of our children when we make grandiose statements like that, then that is rank hypocrisy. Our staff do actually believe that they can make a difference to those children, and it is that which affects their aspiration. I know that every person in this room could name a teacher who first convinced them that they could do it, because I could. That person made a massive difference to my life, as well as having parents who, as traditional working class parents from a mining and textile background, had high expectations for us kids because it was our way out. Vic touched on what we are sometimes talking about with this view of yob Britain, Jeremy Kyle writ large, Benefits Street, which has been on over the last couple of weeks, depicting the white working class in a way that, if other groups were depicted in that way, people would probably find themselves in a court of law. It is important that communicating high expectations to our children is what works. Then when they see that they can achieve, that is when you begin to get the multiplier effect. I think you are right when you say that success in some things brings success in other things. When our school opened 12 years ago, we began by being good at sport because we knew that it would take a long time for certain things like English and maths to play through, but we could be good at sport. We have a full trophy cabinet. More importantly, we have children who enjoy representing their school and showing it in a positive light in their community.

Mr Raab

Can I just stop you there? On the specific issue of low expectations, Sir Michael Wilshaw said that he thought that poor white children risked being written off by a culture of low expectations. We took evidence from the previous group and there was some scepticism about whether there was causation as opposed to just a correlation about this. I wondered what your view was on it. You both have made very strong comments about it. To what extent does this low expectation, which you are both nodding and seem to be agreeing with, come from underperforming schools and to what extent does it come from parental attitudes and extra-curricular attitudes? You made your point about the media, but I am thinking closer to home.

Vic Goddard

It is a combination of both. I remember as clear as anything my very first day at my current school. I started as assistant head, in charge of data and target‑setting, and I stood in front of the staff and said, “Right, national expectation targets. This is what we are doing.” “These children come from Harlow; we can’t expect them to perform at that level.” That is the first and last time I ever had that said to me in my school. They may say it when I cannot hear, but I hope they do not—

Siobhain McDonagh

You ought to come to Mitcham; they say it all the time.

Vic Goddard

There is an expectation of staff to say that, no matter which background they come from—there is a phrase called “unconditional positive regard”—every young person can be a success if you give them the right environment. Failure is part of that success on the way, but you have to accept that.

Mr Raab

You have given an example from inside a school. Obviously, the way you have expressed it is very honest. Do you think that you are seeing quite a lot of this in schools? I am just trying to get a sense of the balance between schools and parental responsibility for it.

David Jones

I do not think the lack of expectation comes from schools. Sir Alec Clegg, who was a great educationist in Yorkshire in the 1970s, was asked by a teacher, “What can you expect from children like this?” and he answered, “The moon and the stars”. When I tell that story to our staff, they do nod and they do buy into that, so I do not think the low expectation comes from schools.

Mr Raab

Maybe not yours, but there are clearly examples from Vic where it is happening.

Vic Goddard

Again, you will come back to where that school is in its journey and the strength of that leadership around that to say that is not there. I am talking 12 years ago, and I think the schools or the staff with that attitude have shifted hugely in that time. Students spend 18% to 19% of their adolescence in schools. If you want to ask where the biggest influence can come on their aspirations and their expectations in life, that is the answer. They spend four times as a long at home or outside of school as they do in school. From that point of view, where are you going to make the biggest impact quickest? It is great if you could tackle parenting quicker, but obviously that is not an easy fix, whereas throwing money at schools and making me responsible for it is.

Mr Raab

Your empirical experience, based on real life, is that parental expectation is hugely important.

David Jones

Yes, absolutely.

Mr Raab

Expectation is distinct from engagement. We know engagement is important, but just the attitude.

David Jones

It is a positive belief that, if it is not borne out in experience, which for some of our parents it has not been, then it is re-engaging them that it can be different for their children.

Heath Monk

I heard the last session talking about aspiration on the one hand, and parents have high aspirations on the whole. Then there is the day-to-day reality of fulfilling those aspirations, which is about what David said about consistent staff values that are upheld all of the time, not just most of the time and not just mouthed, but genuinely believed by staff. That parental engagement is a long-term project, because it takes very little, if children have a low academic self-concept and self-worth, for that to be damaged significantly. It is not that parents and children lack aspiration. They do not know the means to get there, and they need a huge amount of support, from schools that have very consistent ways of thinking, to do that.

Mr Raab

Just on this issue of diagnosing the problem, there seems to be agreement there is an issue around poor white children. Do you think there is a gender-specific issue around boys in that group?

Vic Goddard

I have to say, in my school, there is a difference between boys’ and girls’ achievement, but I would not say it is stark because of their gender as much as it is their socialisation within what is acceptable for a girl and the perceptions of them in the school, and what it is for the boys. There is a societal thing around that. When you go back to parents, you have to look at when the current generation of parents were in school and what experience they had. We are talking 1980s parents; we are talking about people who were in school in the 1980s. Personally, I know I had a very good experience at school and I was very fortunate. My dad was the chair of governors and that might have helped. I look at others who did not have the sort of experience I had at school who are now parents who do not engage and, therefore, even though they say, “I want my child to be the best they can be”, they probably do not have the skills educationally to support that. We send children home with homework every day that is socially divisive. Some of my students go home to homes that have internet access, parents that have a level of literacy and numeracy that means they can support, and others that have not. I set students up to fail on a daily basis when I send them home with homework, where somebody is going to be more supported than another. Artificially separating them is almost impossible.

Mr Raab

On the gender-specific issue, is white working class boys a bespoke problem as distinct from white working class kids generally?

Heath Monk

White working class boys are the lowest achieving group, but white working class girls are not doing well. They are not far behind.

Vic Goddard

They are both underachieving. It is like saying “how bottom is bottom?” That is where it is. They are both underachieving.

Mr Raab

Just in terms of this phenomenon that we are talking about, there have obviously been changes in recent years. Has this problem got worse? Has it always been there? Has it got worse relative to other groups or has it got worse subjectively? What has happened in recent years that suddenly it has become so salient and such an issue that we are looking at it in the way that we are?

David Jones

It has always been. Tawney in 1912 was talking about it in the House. I was talking to staff the other day about 1964 and JWB Douglas’ The Home and the School, and I was made to read this huge tome as a student. It is not a new phenomenon.

Mr Raab

Do you think it has been accentuated or magnified because, with the changing demography in this country, you have quite positive examples of ethnic minority groups that are working class but actually doing rather well?

Vic Goddard

Yes. Simplistically, there is also data now available that were not ever available in the past. I never spoke about it. In the first 10 years of my teaching career, I did not speak about data. I did not speak about data at all. Now, I know everything I possibly can about every child and I expect all my staff to know the same. Therefore, that data are readily available, so the difference is very stark now. We are able to analyse that, thank goodness, and to see where the underachievement is and focus our attentions on it.

David Jones

The impact of educational failure was probably that you were condemned to a life of mass employment in whatever regional industry there was. Within that, you could be a fine, upstanding citizen and probably enjoy some of the cultural benefits of being in a brass band, working in textiles and all the other positive things that that working class life brought with it. Now, sometimes, it is to be condemned to the forgotten pile, and to have a life that has multiple deprivation and turbulence. Perhaps that is why we concentrate on it.

Heath Monk

It was a couple of years ago when the performance of EAL students outstripped the performance of native British.

Mr Raab

Sorry, did you say EAL?

Heath Monk

English as an additional language. Kids for whom English is their second language do better. That was a big shift. Five years ago, heads would talk about the number of nationalities and the number of languages spoken as a problem, whereas now it is probably seen as a benefit.

Mr Raab

Do schools routinely examine the data and, in particular, the combination of data on ethnicity and disadvantage to try to tailor and assess their priorities in terms of decision making, policy, funding and the like?

Vic Goddard

It feels like all we do sometimes. You cannot be a successful school leader at a senior level without having the ability to understand and analyse that. That is a shoo-in, and we are now under so much pressure for every teacher in every classroom to have that information at their fingertips, and quite rightly so, so that they can meet the need. That is a ship that has very well sailed, and everybody is on board with that.

Mr Raab

The final question from me before we move on is, again, to Vic and David. Sorry for neglecting the other two, but it is based on concrete things in schools. We have discussed with the earlier panel the nature of parental engagement that is effective, and you have both touched on this. Can you give me any tangible, concrete examples of parental engagement that you think have added disproportionate value to this group that we are talking about, the white working class underachieving boys?

David Jones

Sometimes it is knowing the ways in which you can advantage your child. I went to a very illuminating lecture by Professor Charles Desforges and he said that, basically, having analysed all available research, the way in which homes advantage their children is by speaking to them. That is what it is about.

Mr Raab

What do you do?

David Jones

What do we do to do that? For example, a very practical example is we found that, when we asked parents to come in to examine how they could help their children with reading, perhaps by showing them the type of phonics approaches that we use, we got a reasonable turnout. When we asked them to come and engage in a creative arts activity with their children, they all came. We invested some money in making little art packs, the sort of thing your mum would have in her top drawer if you were brought up in a positive household. We call them TTT packs, and we said, “It’s time to talk”. The important thing is that you sit face-to-face with your children and do these things, and that you speak with them. We found that that engaged the parents and that they then came to the phonics classes. It was a very small step, but a practical approach, and we found that it paid some dividends.

Vic Goddard

Certainly, from our point of view, we moved away from a year group‑focused school into a house-focused school. All our tutor groups are mixed-age, so if you can imagine five students from year 7, five from year 8, five from year 9, five from year 10 and five from year 11, they have different pressure points at different times of the year. The member of staff who is their pastoral care can focus on particular year groups at particular times when the pressure is on—options for year nine, for instance, in the next few weeks. Alongside that, we are moving away from traditional open parents evenings where, if I were the parent of a young person who was doing well at school, I would go and sit and listen to 13 other adults tell me how good a parent I was because my child is doing very well. If I were the parent of a young person who maybe was challenging the school, I would sit and listen to 13 adults tell me that I am a bad parent because my child does not do well at school. Guess what happened to those parents by years 7 and 8? They do not come. We had 52% turnout at parents evenings. Now, we have moved away from that, and they just meet the tutor. They meet the tutor for an hour, and they have an in-depth conversation about how well that child is doing holistically. If there are specific, subject-based questions that are there, then we would make sure that the subject teacher contacts the parents at their convenience. We now have a 99% turnout at those meetings, which means we actually have an active dialogue with parents around learning.

Mr Raab

Without soft-soaping.

Vic Goddard

Without soft-soaping. That small change, for us, was very helpful. However, again, we can afford to route that system and say to a parent, “Tell us when you’ll come, and we’ll cover that lesson if you can only come in at 10.00 in the morning”, because of how we have been funded and the freedoms we have as an academy. All those sorts of things have helped us along the way. We take whatever is offered. They were talking about sponsorship earlier. We are an academy, and an academy sponsor of two of our failing primary schools in the town. Do I have capacity to do that on a daily basis? Sometimes no, but we have to take responsibility holistically. Engaging parents from the age of five all the way through in my school will mean that hopefully they come on the journey. It is just shifting little things where a parent’s experience of a conversation with a teacher can be positive rather than negative. Positive contact weeks: once every six weeks we phone every young person in a year group. A member of staff will phone up and say something positive about that child to that parent. For most of our parents, they see “School” in their little display on their phone and they go, “Ugh”. We try to break that cycle of contact from school being a negative. It is chipping away. There is no magic bullet, otherwise we would all be doing it. It is the small things that match your context that can get you closer to where you want to be.

Pat Glass

Can I just very quickly go back to the issue about gender? Although white working class girls are doing slightly better than boys, that is right across the piece. Chinese girls do better than Chinese boys; Sikh girls do better than Sikh boys. Is it to do with what is acceptable for how girls behave and learn, or is it to do with the way in which we teach? Are girls better at sitting in classrooms being lectured to?

Vic Goddard

I would love our staff to be the most influential people in these young people’s lives, but unfortunately for lots of them it is their friends. There is a peer pressure on what is cool, to be good at school or not. I look at my son, who is only 10, and there are certain aspects of engaging in certain subjects at school where he would say, “You know, it’s not right, Dad, is it, you know?” There are pressures, but I do not think those pressures are any different to what they were before.

Pat Glass

Are those pressures not on girls?

Vic Goddard

There is an acceptance that girls can be good at things.

Pat Glass

I remember friends saying to me, “Are you revising?” and me saying, “No, I’m not”; I had been revising for six months. Are there not just the same pressures on girls?

Vic Goddard

There are people who have a natural personality that they need to achieve. What they do is they accept failure as part of that journey of success. Paula Radcliffe is the obvious case of that if you look at a public figure: fourth, fourth, fourth, best in the world, but she persevered through that journey. I am certain that, if you looked at the personalities that are nurtured in our society, boys need to avoid failure much more than girls do. The quickest way to avoid failure is by not trying. I do a role-play in front of my year 11s with their mock results every year, because we make them collect their mock results in a formal way. They get the brown envelope like they would in the summer, and I do a role-play where I go, “Oh no, I did really badly. I did no revision. It’s easy, isn’t it?” because actually you build in your excuse for failure. I think there is an acceptance about that with boys more than there is with girls. I do not know how we change it either. I try really hard every day to do that, but I do not know how we change it. Probably having some more male role models in schools would help.

Pat Glass

Given the huge impact on children’s learning from outside rather than in school—and I am guessing that you would not be here if you were not optimistic about the difference that the school can make—we are about recommendations, so what could we recommend on changing education policy to help tackle the issue of attainment of white working class children? What is it that could make a real difference?

David Jones

I would say that the pupil premium is doing a lot of good and it is very much to be applauded. Like my old English teacher used to write on my work, though, “David, strawberries, strawberries” and he meant strawberries are very good, but you could always use more of them. If we target resources more to where they are needed and we target the most needed schools, there is a good deal of work that we could do with pupil premium. We use pupil premium for a variety of things. One of the things that we do is to use it to enrich the experiences of our young people. It hit me like a sledgehammer one year when I saw a question on the SATs English paper that said, “Design an advertising leaflet for a sea-life centre”. I knew that my pupils would immediately be disadvantaged because of the experiences that they had never had—

Pat Glass

They are in-land.

David Jones

—going to a sea-life centre. Rather than cursing that particular curricular darkness, we decided to light a few candles. We use the pupil premium to enrich the lives of our children so that they get some of these experiences. Once we did that, we found that the engagement of the children increased enormously and our SATs results went up enormously, particularly in writing, which had plateaued out for a long time and we had hit it with everything we had with not a lot of success, but we have now. We invested in a couple of minibuses, so we do not have those transport costs and we can be fairly spontaneous in going out and learning outside the classroom. We built an outside classroom, because our children are practical and creative, and they can access that. All these things have impacted positively and enabled us to do them. What we could do with, since we are here, is, if we targeted the money more carefully, what we find we need is more bespoke help for those children who suffer from multiple turbulence. For instance, quick access—

Pat Glass

Does that not come through your school budget, though?

David Jones

It does, but more of it—strawberries, strawberries.

Chair

Is this a complex way of asking for more money?

David Jones

It is, really, because we do not often get a chance.

Pat Glass

Is it about more money or more money within the school budget targeted on turbulence?

David Jones

More money targeted within the school budget on turbulence.

Pat Glass

That would not make a difference in the north-east. We have the most stable populations, yet we have turbulence in the system. It would not make a difference to our white working class kids.

David Jones

We are in danger of presuming that the working class are a homogenous group, and they are not. The Victorians used to talk about the working classes, and perhaps, in that respect, they were a bit nearer to it. The point is that, for our most disfranchised youngsters, they are routing to the kind of services that they need. I think of a young man last year who was bereaved in very tragic circumstances, and it took us months to get any bereavement counselling, not because of lack of resources, but because of lack of availability. That was just one example that springs to mind. At one point across our federation, we were able to employ a speech therapist, and we found that that had enormous benefits because the process to be referred to those services is a fairly protracted one. It is those things that we can immediately impact. Also, we have a behaviour support centre for young people who sometimes, because of some trigger outside of our control, spiral into a little bit of behavioural issues. If there can be quick intervention to address what those issues are about, and sometimes work with the home, we can get them back on track more quickly.

Pat Glass

Can I just check? Is it about the money, or is it also about the fact that a spotlight is on these kids and Ofsted are now looking at these kids? Is it a combination of the two?

David Jones

Yes, probably so, but it is mainly that these children, until they have those needs met, will lie fallow for a while. What we have learnt is that our children just about get there. If we have a period within their education that we can track of a few months where they were not being catered for, that is when our children struggle and fall below that bar.

Ian Mearns

Just quickly, David and Vic, it is all very well having money through the pupil premium, but if there are not enough ed psychs, if there are not enough speech and language therapists or if there are not enough education and social workers and those things are rationed, the impact you can have on those kids is delayed.

Chair

Discuss.

Vic Goddard

Certainly, an ed psych is absolute gold dust. When certain ways of accessing support for young people through statements of special educational needs rely on having an ed psych referral that is successful and done, and you cannot get an ed psych—we get maybe one day a half term—all of a sudden we are crowbarring children in 20 minute shifts through this professional. It is unfair on them to make an assessment, but without that assessment we cannot unlock further support for that young person. That will obviously come about with the lessening of the local authority and its role, which is going to have an impact on how many more—

Chair

Will the pupil premium money help engender greater availability? If the money is there to pay them, there will be more ed psychs.

Vic Goddard

Not if they do not exist in the first place.

Pat Glass

You will just end up paying more for the same thing.

David Jones

I do not think we can affect the supply side, but for instance, one of the things we look at is the provision for school nurses. Many of our families do not enjoy the rudest of rude health, for a variety of reasons, and we share school nurses. A dedicated school nurse attached to the school would be a huge benefit.

Vic Goddard

From a secondary point of view, there are differences around what you can do. I am not asking for more money, which I am sure my colleagues will raise their eyebrows at. For me, it is about lessening the competition for those students. That will help allow us to be successful in the league tables or accountability structure. You have to stop tinkering with the assessment framework, stop disfranchising certain students who want to go down certain vocational routes. That needs to just stop. Let them settle. Let schools understand how to be a success. We are put in league tables around certain thresholds. I know for a fact, as a young head teacher, I stood up at parents evening when year 6 parents were choosing their school and I spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about my able, gifted and talented programme. Why did I do that? Because the more of those students I got, the more likely I was to be further up the league table, etc. Unfortunately, we are encouraged to behave like that by the accountability framework that is currently in place. Unless you remove that arbitrary “A* to C is all that matters”—

Chair

We are.

Vic Goddard

—and start to talk about how many students meet their potential, then it will be different. Actually, the changes coming in 2015 potentially could do that. Obviously, the proof is in the pudding, etc.

Alex Cunningham

Assuming that the services are there for you to buy, the money is very important. My own experience is that some of the schools in my area are losing out on pupil premium because there are working class people who do not register for free school meals. I wondered what your experience was to try and encourage them. I am sure there are schools that are missing out on tens of thousands of pounds, simply because they cannot persuade parents to register for what they are entitled to, and prefer to send probably an expensive, poor packed lunch instead.

Vic Goddard

This is working class students’ underachievement. “Working class” is in the title of the focus of this, and working class means “working” as well. It does not necessarily mean they get access to free school meals or pupil premium funding. Actually, if we could somehow separate, using IDACI deprivation measures or whatever, those who are just above getting that funding and how they achieve compared with those that do get the funding, I would say there is actually your lowest achieving group in the country. It is not the ones receiving it.

Alex Cunningham

You have to draw a line somewhere in funding.

Vic Goddard

Of course you have. The funding is not the issue for me.

Alex Cunningham

Funding is available if people would fill in the necessary bit of paper.

Vic Goddard

Without a shadow of a doubt.

Alex Cunningham

I wanted to know: what is your experience of trying to persuade people to help you to support their children?

Vic Goddard

Ever 6 has helped. Certainly, the change about how funding is done has helped quite significantly across lots of schools in our environment. You have already done an element towards that, but it is still an issue for us and always will be because of working class snobbery: I am a working class lad; I ask for nothing. If you send me to a souk to haggle, I am the worst person in the world because I do not need your charity. I think there is an element of that still across proud working class families who do not want a state handout.

Mr Ward

I would like your views on where, in terms of the subject we are looking at as opposed to other things, free schools and academies may or may not make a positive or negative contribution. Do you have any views on that?

Dr Stephens

Certainly, the data suggest that those sponsored academies that have been running for some time are making a greater difference in terms of closing the gap. There is a whole host of reasons, potentially, why that might be the case. I also draw attention to the answer I gave before, and which Vic gave from his own experience, of where we now have converter academies—some great schools that have converted to become academies—that are using the freedoms and flexibilities within that policy to then work with other schools. I have to say, in a number of examples, they are working with those schools most in need. To the point that was put before about this idea of schools, for example in leafy suburbs, pulling up the drawbridge and sitting back and enjoying it, some of them are deliberately going out and seeking opportunities to work with those very challenging schools and are having an impact. That policy is having a positive impact, in terms both of the data that we see, particularly from those early-sponsored academies, so there is a time factor there, and also the freedom and flexibility that the policy area allows, and the expectation of sponsorship.

Heath Monk

Certainly, where you get groups of academies working together, there are flexibilities in terms of how staff can be moved around and are encouraged to move around and developed. The idea of people being able to go to a more challenging area, but with the support of the group rather than just the individual school, can mitigate some of those risks around career suicide that we spoke about earlier.

David Jones

Within local authority schools, there are examples of collaboration as well. We are a federation of two local authority schools from two similar communities. Where I wonder how effective things can be is that our schools are very similar and they serve very similar communities. I wonder about the more leafy-lane schools’ experience befitting them to come in and support a school like ours. I suppose that is where my question around that would be. In terms of free schools, I feel there is something of a diversionary debate going on. Certainly, in our city of Bradford, there have been a couple of interesting examples of free schools very recently. Sometimes, at the chalk face, it just feels like a little bit of a diversion away from the real business of providing a good education for the children of our city.

Mr Ward

Some of the freedom is curricular or to admissions. In the first session, we were talking about a more balanced intake. There are some suggestions that academies and free schools are using it to manipulate the intake, but earlier we were talking about manipulating it in a positive way to those from a white working class background. Do they offer opportunities?

Vic Goddard

The curricular freedom is a bit of a fallacy when you have a league table that focuses on certain subjects. There is a massive overplaying of that amongst people maybe not at the chalk face, and certainly not head teachers who are having to make curricular decisions. I very much enjoyed being head of an academy. It shifted my mindset. However, I could have had that mindset when I was at a local authority school, but I did not have it. That is the frustration. I sit next to colleagues like David, who are doing that within the system, and I wish I had been brave enough or even had the foresight to do that in the first place. Certainly, from my experience locally, the lack of control over where free schools are going is working contrary to some of the schools that are trying to serve the populations that we are serving. On the edges of maybe white working class areas and towns, free schools are going up because on the edge of that there is a leafier suburb or maybe a housing development. Therefore, there is a drive from parents that then draws the students that maybe are more able within that working class environment away from the schools that are trying very hard to do that. You do end up with a sort of selective process, whether you mean to have that or not. My fear is, unless free schools are planned where they are going, and not just taken on public will, you could end up with a worsened situation in certain towns rather than better. Certainly, from an academy point of view, I could have behaved like an academy head when I was not an academy head. I did not, but now it has empowered me to do that and I think it will empower other heads around the country as well. I have to say, it is a positive for me, rather than a negative.

Heath Monk

On balanced intake, it is important that the accountability lines up with that. The evidence is that the worst place to be a free-school-meal boy is in a school that has a minority of poor children. Where you have accountability that measures the threshold at school-level, that is where those children have been most forgotten. I think the Ofsted report said that, if you are FSM in West Berkshire, those are the lowest performing free-school-meal children in the country. Maybe it is a myth that balance is going to improve the lot of those children, unless there is also a spotlight on their performance as individuals.

Dr Stephens

I was going to make a very similar point. It kind of picked up David’s point about targeting. One of the reasons that the pupil premium is, if I can use this rather loose phrase, a universal offer is precisely because of the issue of those children that potentially can go unseen. As Sir Michael Wilshaw says in the report, they are everywhere, and he lists some of those things. Chair, you made the point about the coastal and rural environment where you have that mix. The risk, therefore, is that they are missed unless there is that focus. The pupil premium brings both that resource, but importantly also that absolute focus.

Pat Glass

I was interested in Vic’s comments earlier about the way in which we do not value working-classness. We almost put working class children through middle class schools with middle class teachers and try to turn them into middle class children. How are programmes like the national leaders programme and the local leaders programme trying to tackle that issue? What are you doing in school to try and get teachers to value the working-classness of working class children?

Dr Stephens

We had a piece of research that was conducted in April 2013 and one of the people leading that research was John Dunford, who of course is the pupil premium champion. One of the things that was highlighted in terms of the success of that school to do with support, and colleagues here will be engaged in it, was about not making assumptions and understanding context. For example, it is not making the assumption that you are going into a deficit and that somehow this is going to be something where there is something wrong that needs to be fixed. Instead, it is saying, “What is already there that can be built upon?” You made the point earlier about what your son did in working with existing staff. That is also a lesson learnt from the London Challenge about investing heavily in what is there. Only by doing that and taking that asset model—what does this community bring and what can we do more with it, and sharpen it?—is the necessary trust built up that enables the NLE and LLE relationship in school-to-school support actually to work effectively. That is very clearly documented in that piece of research.

Vic Goddard

The best thing I did to make my staff realise how lucky they are to work for the community we work with was to become an NLE myself. Then we became a national support school and my staff do go out into other settings that are more affluent than ours and less affluent that ours. They value the type of children. Our local MP said, “What I love about your school, Vic, is the quality of the character of the children in it”. That is really important and our staff value that. By being outward-looking and engaging with other schools, my staff value the environment they work in more—the supportive nature of it, the absolute connection they have with the children we serve. It is all that sort of thing, so actually not being inward-looking and being more outward-looking is probably the best piece of advice I could give for any head in my sort of school: go out and learn from the best. There is not one idea in my school that I have not stolen from somebody who had it much earlier than I ever had it. That is going to be the way to keep staff in my school. It is to allow them to experience other schools while being with me.

David Jones

I would also say that our parents whiff insincerity a mile away. If we do not respect our community, then they know that. We work with our community and we use figures from the working class and we talk about what it is, and those values that we sometimes underestimate. Recently, with it being 100 years since the First World War, and Mr Gove has been talking about how it might be taught and through which prisms it may be filtered, we looked at William Hackett, who was a miner in the First World War, a tunneller out in the Somme, and was given the VC for staying with a colleague for three days and eventually dying alongside that colleague. We talk to children about that type of experience because it is not about a white underclass; it is about proud working class traditions. If we believe that in our hearts, then we will show genuinely that we actually want to work with our communities.

Heath Monk

Talking to some of our participants at Future Leaders in relation to this inquiry, we asked them about what they do. On their first day we give them a big presentation with lots of data about underperformance of working class children and about the impact of that. I was really surprised how many of them had used that presentation and used that data with parents to say, “This is the importance of education. You may not have those same middle class aspirations about university, but here is actually what the situation looks like on a national picture”. They said that that has started dialogue with parents and between parents and children about what it is they do want to do, and not to not value, as Vic said, those people who just want a job and want to be a positive part of their community. It is for that to be a process of debate and dialogue between the school and the parents, and parents and children.

Chair

Thank you all very much indeed for giving evidence to us today. If, reflecting on today, you have any further thoughts, particularly around recommendations—they might be fairly small touches on the tiller—or ways, David, of tricking more money out of the system to spend in appropriate ways, or whatever it is, then please do be in touch and let us know. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727 6