ATL

ATL Conference 2007

ATL president Stuart Herdson's address to Conference 2007

Being president of ATL is a great honour. Part of the role is to represent ATL at functions and conferences far and wide, and be seen to make a contribution to both the field of education and to the wider social scene.

But you can't do the job alone. There is a whole team of people that help you through the year so that you are able to give your best on behalf of ATL.

I'd like first of all to pay tribute to my wife Gill, to whom a good number of you may have spoken to but not yet met. She has acted as unpaid, overworked and unofficial PA to me for a number of years. If anyone can sort me out, she can.

I'll stick on the theme of teamwork. I've always been a team player. There are strengths in being a team player. You act as part of a unit to overcome a challenge. You support the weakest link. You are led and inspired by a good captain who passes on wisdom and experience. You can, and do, show innovation and creativity as a team member to the benefit of all the team. In the past I've benefited from operating alongside good team colleagues such as my guests here today.

Also with John Cole, with whom I worked as a teaching colleague for 25 years. How good it is to have solid reliable friends in the workplace to whom you can turn. John Eastwood, my former regional official, who always had time to offer sound advice to me in the role of branch secretary when the individual cases were tough ones to handle, and yet he let me, and encouraged me, to take them on.

You need a good team around you to operate at your best, and I've been very fortunate in having a great bunch of colleagues in the Bradford branch since I started as a branch official. And finally, all the colleagues at ATL. ATL acts as a unit, as a team to overcome challenges. Be it the school rep facing the school management or the general secretary facing the government.

ATL supports its most vulnerable members in times of crisis, when they most need support - times of job losses, personal injury, bullying or illness. ATL is led and inspired by the captain of the team, as we heard last night in that dynamic speech. And she leads from the front.

The question is, are we alone in the serious game of education? Are we just another player, or are we part of a team? If we are part of a team, who are we playing against, and who do we want on our side? It's not always obvious - in fact it's unclear.

The social partnership in England and Wales has brought a good few players together - the government, when they want to play, as long as they can bat first; the employers, when they want to play, as long as it's their ball; and the unions, well most of them, if they agree to the rules of the game.

In Northern Ireland, as unions, we are not united as players, and are somewhat fragmented at the moment. In Scotland the STUC won't even let us join in the game! Relegated to the role of spectator. But for how long can they keep us watching? There are others who play their own game and like to make their own rules.

There are governors and managers of some independent schools with whom we have so much case work, because they don't follow the rules of employment. There are the government and local authorities creating Academies - whose very existence is not about being a member of a team, but being apart from the team.

There are academy sponsors who wish to see a particular brand of curriculum in their schools for a pittance of capital input. These groups often operate as individuals with no team or group identity. They subscribe to elitism and superiority.

Who else would be a team player, and would we want them on our side? The government, our social partners when they choose to be our colleagues? But what of some government agencies? QCA? TDA? Ofsted for instance. Do they inspire or lead?

Are they actually a team player? A brief visit every three or four years from Ofsted can cause no end of damage to a school. I ask, is this the best way of monitoring a school's progress and effectiveness? Ofsted are like the man in a tracksuit who runs on to the field of play with a wet sponge, numbs the pain through shock, and leaves the damage behind when he runs off in double quick time.

Things haven't changed much - the picture reminds us of the good old days in the late 19th century when an inspector called to assess the capability of the teacher by testing the pupils. It's not that different today, when inspectors spend so much time looking at the data produced by schools.

Soon we'll have the virtual visit, where the school is assessed from afar, and the inspectors are unaware of the conditions we teach under. Things have not changed. The new classroom of the future may well have 60 or more children sitting behind monitors, with just one teacher at the front. In fact it's already happening in some schools.

At a recent conference I went to, Christine Gilbert, HMCI, stated that 92 per cent of schools were judged as satisfactory or better, 8 per cent were inadequate - of which 3 per cent were classed in special measures. That may be so, depending on the criteria for measurement. I wonder if anyone has done a correlation between those schools that are, or have been, in special measures and the levels of deprivation from which they draw their pupils.

I see The Ridings School in Halifax has failed its Ofsted again, and has again been placed in special measures. Even the head of the school says the criteria used to make the judgement are unsound, and he is an experienced head brought in to turn around a very difficult school.

What is seen as success by the school, dealing with the population of students it has, is not seen as success by Ofsted. Ofsted use a one-size-fits-all measure with the cold heart of a government statistician.What is success for one is not seen as success for the other.

My judgement, having seen the schools which have been deemed failures by Ofsted in West Yorkshire (and can I say that those environments will be not so different to other urban areas throughout Britain, France, Germany or the USA) is that an Ofsted report is really a measure of the socio-economic background of the school and its pupils.

The measures and criteria used are not there to support the weakest link in the chain, or the weakest in the team, but are there to vilify them, publicly. It is like asking the small boy or girl to compete in the high jump with the lithe, tall athlete. Schools are different, with different cultures, backgrounds and incomes, but Ofsted, and therefore the government, fail to recognise this when they look only at statistics.

In February I was at a conference in Vancouver, Canada, which was looking at the relative performance of the OECD countries. The Pisa scores for maths and language showed that countries such as Iceland and Finland, Japan and South Korea, scored very well, whilst countries like the USA and the UK did not do as well. So it is not just a question of wealth, but more a question of attitude to education, by all the players and not just some.

In South Korea there are often four to five hours of homework per night, and in Finland hardly any, yet Finland produces better scores. Finland has 2,000 fewer hours of teaching between the ages of seven and 14 than France, but gets better results. Academic competition between students in South Korea is keen, but that is not always the case in many schools in the USA or the UK.

None of these successful countries have league tables. In England we persist with them. Why? The Welsh, dropped them and have never looked back. The Scots and Irish never had them in the first place. The Isle of Man, what's the point! (of league tables). Actually you could rank all 29 primary schools on the island if you wanted to, but the Manx government sees it as more important to invest locally rather than have parents driving all over the place forever chasing what is supposed to be education utopia. Far calmer, less pressure, better output. More community spirit.

In Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, heads can concentrate on the broader issues of education, and not just on performances that will take them another place up a meaningless league table. Just what are we doing to our students?

Sometimes they realise just what. Take this from The Independent on the 1st March. "The past four years of my life have revolved around exams - learning the material, revising it, learning the technique and finally, taking the exam.

"It feels like as I start to engage with a subject, the exam is upon me. There's no time for, say, learning for its own sake, exploring beyond the curriculum, gaining life skills, or any of the other things that education is meant to provide." (Joshua Stamp-Simpson, aged 17, Latymer School, Edmonton, north London).

So the curriculum is now league table-driven. So too is the ethos of the school. At one time you could tell just how good a school was by the quality and range of its extra-curricular activities. Thanks to my teachers I experienced the emotions of winning and losing, 66 to 0 to Normanton GS, the fright of the stage and applause. Country dancing, the sheer joy of singing in tune Pirates of Penzance.

What I did gain was confidence and the experience to face the world that no written test can ever give you. I was in a secondary school recently in Bradford where the head told me that they had never run a school trip abroad. Yet many of the pupils are dual language students who have frequent visits abroad. To the parents of the pupils of that school a second European language is not seen as a priority, yet a qualification in an Asiatic or Arabic language is.

We now have to think outside the box about the needs of our country in 20 years time, and not what it required 20 years ago when the national curriculum came in.

The curriculum is the biggest issue in our schools today. If it does not engage students then it is not fit for purpose. And many of our students are not engaged. Behaviour of pupils in schools is still the main problem indicated in a recent survey of 196 schools by Kirkland-Rowell reported in the TES, on the 2nd March "Not all our students are academic yet we persist with an academic curriculum in many secondary schools and a primary curriculum that is dominated by teaching to assessment". No wonder then, that there are behaviour problems. Don't just blame the parents.

So are parents part of the educational team? Well, they should be. The vast majority really do help their children and prepare them for school well. There will be, and always has been, a minority who wish to take on the authorities be it in the form of a polite letter or physical or verbal abuse. However, lots of parents put in hours of help to the school as governors or as just plain volunteers.

So yes, they should be in the team. Outside school they are the major influence on children's lives. It's all a matter of parenting. Some are good at it and others not as good, but expect the schools to make up for their own shortcomings.

Employers want literate, numerate, well rounded, well-turned out, articulate young people who they can mould into their own brand of employee. They are the consumers of the education system as much as the students are. But are they part of the team? Not really. They are just the crowd at the match, showing support when things are going well, and jeering from the sides when things are not.

They are free to choose and reject what comes before them - unlike schools and colleges- unlike teachers, lecturers and support staff. Even in selective schools.

We have to do the best with what comes before us, and sometimes that is very difficult when the criteria for 'success' as determined by Ofsted, are not easily obtainable due to a whole host of reasons outside the control of the college, school or staff.

We all want our students to succeed, but what is success? That's easy. Ofsted would measure it as the percentage of Key Stage 2 pupils who achieve level 4 across the board in a limited range of the curriculum, or a percentage of Key Stage 4 pupils who gain five or more A* -C passes at GCSE. So would the government, because that's how they measure their success in education in schools and colleges.

If you're not at level 4 by the end of Key Stage 2 then you are 'working towards it', and probably have been for years and will be in the future for Key Stage 3. You can be a problem because you don't do the school any good, you put them down the league table. Children soon know how they are perceived. And rejected.

There is now tremendous pressure on those children who are borderline at any key stage to achieve the next level, yet those with less chance of getting there are not put under the same pressure. Catch-up lessons and target groups are now common place.

If you get four A*s and six Ds at GCSE, you're a negative and not a positive. It's the wrong statistic, Grommit! You're not what the school or college wants. If you leave school at 16 you're the wrong statistic. You're a negative. Children have become statistics. They are no longer pupils who demand an education, but have become tools of government to self perpetuate government policies.

If you are an artist, actor, musician and sports person you don't count. Unless, of course, you can show a piece of paper that says you've passed a test to say you are one. I'm a qualified water polo referee. I don't even know the rules now, but a piece of paper says I'm qualified.

So today in school you have to be a mathematician, scientist or linguist. That's what really counts. Because they are measured and they count. So other parts of education are squeezed out. They don't count. As I said earlier, at one time you could tell a good school by the range of its extra-curricular activities.

Too many teachers are still jumping through hoops of bureaucracy and have too little time and energy to give to the extracurricular activities. I used to put in hours of time for my pupils - weeks away in the Lake District, Saturday morning matches and Sunday tournaments, evening cricket games that meant getting home after a young family had gone to bed.

I did this willingly to produce the range of emotions that a classroom cannot. Too many teachers now are still jumping through the hoops of bureaucracy, and have too little time and energy to give the extracurricular activities - again I refer to the Kirkland-Rowell survey reported in the TES.

Workload is still a major issue. Although PPA time has helped a great deal, you still have experienced teachers, even 'Teachers of the Year', having to effectively write-up lesson plans for management just in case an 'Inspector calls'. That's poor management, but it goes on too often.

Effective surgeons do not do an operation plan for every routine operation, and they will tell you that every patient is different. But they are trusted as professionals to know what they are doing (hopefully!). But why are we the most scrutinized profession of all?

Obviously, because as the right-wing press will tell us week after week, we are thought to be constantly failing our pupils. But that is not the case. We, it would seem, are as a profession not to be trusted.

Yet, at the same time the government will tell you what a success they are making of education. You only have to look at the results. That's because they use raw statistics of measurement as their guide - league tables, pass rates and Ofsted reports.

These more than ever are the results of external assessment on a limited range of activities within the school. That's not the full picture - that's not education.

There is also a concentration on failure and not success. The more we succeed in raising the pass rates at whatever level, the higher the bar is set. It's now not good enough to be satisfactory.

A good analogy, the high jump, together with the pole vault, the only events which end in failure. As we all know, students have differing abilities and talents, and we have to educate them to fit into a society which may be 30 or 40 years from now when they are at their peak. One style of education may not serve that purpose at all well.

We now live in a technology-rich society as well as a knowledge-led society. We are told there is hardly a place for the unskilled manual role that was such a feature of the working class until the 1970s and beyond. But the unskilled jobs and semi-skilled jobs are still there, in their millions and will exist in the future.

Not all can achieve, or even wish to achieve, the educational academic five-bar-gate jump of five A*-C GCSEs set by the government as the standard for success. But all children need to be educated so that they can survive in the society they live in. Why should a significant minority of students have to follow a curriculum to which they are totally unsuited?

Why not let them choose at 14 the route they wish to go, either academic or vocational, as they do in Finland? Effectively leave school and go into training. I was at North Tyneside College last year. I met a group of 60 students aged 16- 7 who had hardly a GCSE between them. They were totally absorbed and involved in the vocational courses they were doing. They then saw a purpose to the education being offered to them. They then saw opportunity in their future. Yet they had been written off as failures, as negatives.

And still, the government relentlessly sticks to overall testing at 16, so that it can compare this year against last year, say results have gone up and thus give the impression that it must be doing a good job.

Results have gone up for the last 21 years! The government, of whichever party, always takes the credit for the hard work of the students and staff of schools and colleges, not to mention parents. In their mind it shows their education policy is right. Is it?

When you compare the UK education performance against other countries either we are not doing as well as we used to, or are they doing a lot better. Could it be that the systems of education that they employ are a lot better than ours?

Teaching smaller groups, Finland has 16-20 per class, and more support for children with special needs - these are two ways that Finland gains over the UK. But they tax their people a lot more, as does Sweden, which means they have more to spend on education in the first place, so again we are not competing on a level field.

To compete effectively in any game you must have a good team around you, and you must not be mismatched. That is what is wrong with league tables. Schools do not compete on equal terms. Not long ago the government stated that specialist schools were doing better than non-specialist schools. Well, they would wouldn't they. They get more money.

The fact is there are hardly any non specialist schools left. Those that are in special measures or have serious weaknesses can't apply for specialist status anyway and form part of the rump, so the statement is meaningless. It's like asking an inner city primary school with no playing fields why they have not got excellent football or cricket teams. It helps if you have the resources.

I ask how and why today, we have the most fragmented of any educational system in the OECD countries. There is no clear educational pathway for the future, and successive governments have engineered this to happen.

More Academies and more Trust schools will only add to this fragmentation. They are not solutions, only further problems. If you're rich enough you can opt out of the state system and put your children through private education, which some government ministers are prone to do. That's fine for those who can.

If you are clever enough and rich enough as well, you can buy a house in a good catchment area and ensure that your child goes to one of the 'best' schools in the area, though now not in Brighton, and say you support state education.

If you are still in an area where there is one or more of the 164 remaining grammar schools in England you can be selected for a different type of education, which ceased in 1986 with the advent of the national curriculum, but you still support state education. In effect there is still a class division in these areas, with only one per cent of children on free school meals gaining a place in selected schools from the 17 per cent of all children who receive free school meals.

That's one reason why in Northern Ireland they have taken the bold step to stop selection.

However, if you come from a poor home background, living in a deprived area of the city or country with no real option than to go to the local 'comprehensive', then you are stuck. It's not a true comprehensive school anyway as it does not have a mixed intake of the population, more likely a population with more social problems.

Unless of course some sugar daddy comes along and turns it into an academy, which then moves all the problems down the road to the neighbouring school. Then the school down the road does not compete on equal terms, thus turning what may have been a good school into a struggling or failing school.

So what's the answer? Six things to start with.

End league tables. They serve no purpose apart from pushing up house prices in certain areas and deflating them in others. It is so wrong to crudely measure schools and colleges against one another when they are so diverse in intake and funding. It's like asking AFC Bournemouth to play Chelsea every week, year in year out on the same levels of funding they have now. The results would be predictable.

Send Ofsted packing. They, together with league tables, have forced a style of teaching that's alien to most and is results-driven rather than education-driven. It comes back to asking what is a good education. Ofsted's purpose, we are told by the HMCI, is firstly to inform the government and secretary of state what is happening, secondly to inform the parents, and lastly to promote improvement -leaving the school to sort it out themselves.

That seems the wrong way round to me. Inspectors see problems, but offer no solutions. The teacher who is the lead professional in the key stage or subject has few people to turn to these days in the authority for advice and support.

Heads, however, seem to get a lot of support on how to run their school. Teaching skills matter. Teachers have to be accountable, but anyone working in a challenging school with lots of social problems, in a deprived area where education may not be valued, knows they are in a tough job.

Pay staff more to work in these schools. There is nothing new in this, it has been done before. It is not the same job as working in schools which have far fewer problems. There is a constant turnover of young, inexperienced staff in these schools, some who leave the profession forever or return to South Africa or Australia after a year or sooner, having been misled by the agencies that employed them. There is a constant problem of attracting good leadership and good staff into these schools, the reason being it's harder to teach in these schools, and it takes more out of you. You burn out much more quickly.

Direct more resources into schools that are failing or struggling. One new Academy does not solve the problem of all the struggling schools in the neighbourhood, but £30-£40 million of capital costs might just improve a whole lot of primary schools in the neighbourhood and make an Academy totally unnecessary.

Give teachers and support staff professional autonomy. We may still have to have some external tests at 16 and 18. Let us teach to educate, rather than teach to test.

End SATs and bring England into line with the rest of the UK and its European neighbours. Our pupils are over-tested, which is harming their education and learning. There is a place for external assessment, but there is no reason to start labelling children as failures as young as seven, and no reason to have tests at 14 when no one takes any notice of them other than those who think education can be measured by statistics. Give children an education not a test.

The aim of the education team is to educate a nation of young people to take their place in society in the years to come. Too many are falling outside society to an underclass that survives on its wits. It has to be an education for the first half of the 21st century and not the latter quarter of the 20th century.

At the moment there are many strong players in the field of education, but not all are working for the team, rather more for themselves and their own self interest.

Some need to be left out, dropped and sidelined. Others need to be brought on and developed, given more of a chance to compete. The question is who to sell on and who to give a free transfer to?

I've given a few suggestions, but will Mr Johnson, the current short-term manager, take them up? The point is that if we can get it right, there should be no losers in the system of education that we operate. All should have a chance to compete on a more equal basis. At the moment the system is distinctly warped, and is becoming even more polarised. It is time for a change to make it much fairer than it is at present.