ATL

Alan Johnson at ATL Conference 2007

Former postman Alan Johnson tells of his respect for the teaching profession and of what he considers to be the best job in Whitehall.

I'm delighted to be here for the ATL's annual conference. It was here in Bournemouth, in the Winter Gardens, that I attended my first trade union conference as a delegate 30 years ago.

I was a postman not a teacher, but I had then and I have now a huge respect for your profession. Teachers link our past with our future; equipping all of us for the sometimes perilous journey between what we are and what we want to be.

So, for a government committed to social justice, education was bound to be a priority. Ten years on, and with due recognition that all is not perfect, I hope we can commemorate the fact that, thanks to you, we've delivered more than we promised.

The only education commitment on our 1997 pledge card was to cut class sizes for 5, 6 and 7 year olds to fewer than 30. A decade later, education spending has more than doubled from £30 billion a year to £64 billion and the budget set out a further increase of £11 billion over the next three years.

Capital funding has increased eightfold. Every secondary school in the country and a half of all primaries are being rebuilt or refurbished. Classrooms are full of the new books, computers, technology and equipment they need.

There are 36,000 more teachers and 150,000 more support staff and this combination of overdue investment and excellent teaching is producing improved results at every key stage in every part of the country.

Almost a hundred thousand extra children now leave primary school with proper literacy skills every year. Incredibly, this is the first significant improvement in primary school results since the Second World War.

85,000 more pupils are achieving five good GCSEs. A level attainment is at record levels. 75,000 more pupils stay on after the age of 16. There are now 400,000 more people at university than in 1997 and Further Education is now getting the recognition it deserves with a 48 per cent increase in funding.

Nobody who recalls the era of overcrowded classes sharing tatty textbooks in crumbling classrooms, taught by under-valued teachers can deny the transformation.

Low attainment was particularly entrenched in London. In 1997, barely a third of London pupils achieved five good GCSEs, which is why we engaged in a determined effort to defeat educational failure in the capital. Through London Challenge, school leadership teams have been strengthened, more teachers recruited and the most deprived schools and boroughs specifically targeted.

Today, more than half of London's pupils get five good GCSEs. London schools have out performed the rest of the country for three years running and improvements have been seen in every London borough.

This didn't happen by accident: and we must now build on this success by extending the project beyond the city's limits.
Following our CSR settlement, I am delighted to announce two things. First: that we will continue London Challenge for at least a further three years. Second, that we will identify two other parts of the country afflicted with the same problems which once blighted the capital, and develop similar schemes to resolve them.

I recognise that by rejecting the complacency of the past and mounting a concerted effort to lift educational attainment, we've made life more difficult for everyone involved in education, including ourselves.

The soft option for government and unions - is to indulge in a constant state of conflict - each of us playing to our particular galleries - neither side recognising the concerns of the other.

Social partnership is the difficult but responsible option - ensuring that we work together: resolving problems in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect.

I pay tribute to the ATL for your constructive approach. I know how hard it's been for you to make this work. But work it does. Mary and her colleagues ensure that classroom realities are to the forefront in all of our policy deliberations. We understand much better the realities of school life by listening to and learning from the expertise which ATL brings to the partnership.

We are striving to find practical, classroom-based solutions to two particularly difficult problems that we face.

The first is how to further close the social class gap - breaking the pernicious link between someone's social background and their academic achievement at school.

Attainment in schools in deprived areas has improved further than those in more prosperous locations in recent years, but children on free school meals remain half as likely to achieve five good GCSEs. Children in care represent half a per cent of children, but a quarter of the prison population. There are also particular problems amongst working class boys.

But these concerns will become more pronounced because of the second challenge: the onward march of globalisation.

Rapid growth in Asia combined with technological advances means that unskilled jobs are rapidly being wiped out, so the old options are fast disappearing.

As one teacher in my patch put it to me, in the past, a working class boy without qualifications would leave schools facing clear choices. Turn left and he would be working in the coalmine. Turn right and he would be working in the shipyard. Go straight ahead, he could go to sea.

Such choices don't exist today. As Lord Leitch pointed out, by 2020, the number of unskilled people in work will have shrunk from 3.6 million to 600,000. Forty per cent of jobs will require graduate qualifications and we'll need a further 4.6 million people with high level skills.

In the past education was predominantly a matter of social progress with an economic dimension. Now, it is primarily an issue of economic stability with a very important social dimension. We must combine economic efficiency with social justice by ensuring that every child reaches their potential and that no talent is left untapped.

This means continuing to raise standards for all whilst simultaneously attacking the social class gap.

As we move from a 75 per cent employment rate, the highest in the G7, to our goal of 80 per cent - a level only reached by Iceland (the country, not the retail chain) - we must prepare all of our young people for fulfilling lives in work and make a reality of lifelong learning.

There are three principal ways we will achieve this.

First, we must be increasingly bold in our help and support for families and children. Early promise can be extinguished at a startlingly young age in deprived homes.

Jim Trelease, in the "Read Aloud Handbook", quotes the U.S research by Hart and Risley. A child from a professional family is likely to have heard 45 million words by their fourth birthday. A child from a deprived background will have heard 13 million. What starts as a lack of vocabulary at 4, turns to a reading problem at age 10, leading to poor English at age 14 and poorer opportunities throughout the rest of their lives.

Trelease says that the message from this kind of research is unambiguous. It's not the toys in the house that make the difference in children's lives; it's the words in their heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the most valuable: words.

This is why our trepidatious and I hope delicate first steps into the area of parenting are so important.

We know that two years of good early education can boost development by up to six months at age five - which is why we have given every three and four year-old an entitlement to twelve and a half hours free early learning every week, which 96 per cent of children have taken up.

We will extend this to 15 hours by 2010.

Sure Start Children's Centre's are designed to ensure that every child gets the support they need. Many of these centres will be co-located with primary schools, providing parents with an easily accessible service; whilst also enabling schools to provide extended services.

By 2010, there will be a Sure Start Children's Centre in every community - 3,500 of them. And, by the same year, every school will be an extended school.

This means all children will be able to access the kinds of extracurricular activities which were once largely the preserve of those in the independent sector - sports, music, dance and drama, together with languages and other more academic pursuits.

All of the evidence is that these play an enormous role in helping people achieve their potential in life: providing vital social and cultural skills, at the same time as helping pupils to improve their results.

Schools offering extended services are improving at twice the national average whilst simultaneously reducing the rate of exclusions.

This re-emphasises the point that, far from there being any conflict between Every Child Matters and raising attainment, the two are inextricably interlinked. A good home or a good school alone can not guarantee success. Children need a stable home and a successful school.

All of you will have experienced the frustration of knowing that your good work through the day can be dissipated by squalor, neglect, poor parenting and even abuse outside of the school gate.

Every Child Matters better coordinates and targets the considerable assistance of the state in the interests of society's most vulnerable children.

Every Child Matters and Extended Services are central issues for the Social Partnership and Mary has powerfully argued that any extension of services must be negotiated with the relevant unions. We are committed to this, and to ensuring that the extension of services in schools is not achieved at the expense of a teacher's working conditions.

So, support for families and children is important, as is my second imperative, ensuring that schools are able to unleash the potential of every child.

We reject the view that some children are inescapably destined to fail, because of their backgrounds. Teachers work wonders, day in day out, using inspiring, innovative and above all personalised techniques on children from deprived homes. Christine Gilbert's review captured many of these techniques, providing a compelling vision for the future.

We're investing a billion pounds supporting personalised learning this year alone, with much more to come following the budget settlement.

Part of this is to provide intensive one-to-one tuition for children who have fallen behind in english and maths, so that extra help is tied to educational need, and is not just the preserve of the prosperous. The budget settlement means that we will be able to provide 600,000 children a year with that support by 2010.

The Key Stage 3 review will also enable us to move forward with Christine Gilbert's recommendations, allowing more scope for teachers to apply individual approaches.

We will also extend our support for those with exceptional potential.

But, to really engrain personalised learning, we must turn around the whole basis on which schools are judged. By shifting the focus of accountability on to how far each individual child progresses, we are seeking to make a practical reality of our educational mantra: ensuring that every child does indeed matter.

If someone with the potential for eight "A" grade GCSEs only achieves five moderate passes, then that is not a success. But if someone expected to achieve nothing gets their English and Maths GCSE, we should recognise that achievement by the individual and the school.

You have rightly called for a renewed focus on progression - enabling teachers to focus on all of their pupils, not just the attentive and advanced; allowing the teacher to be the judge of when a child should move on to the next level - as with music exams. The passage of time should not be the sole determinant of a child's progress.

With new technologies, it is easier to judge when a child is being held back and when they need additional support. Exploiting these new methods will help ensure every child can reach their potential; avoiding the risk of the gifted, the struggling or the stuck falling into a well of apathy and poor motivation.

It is clear from the recent consultation on progression that you share our appetite to look afresh at performance assessments. Teachers deserve more credit when they have helped a child to make significant progress, irrespective of how they fare in the threshold exams.

We shall be looking at these ideas further in the imminent Making Good Progress pilots. We want to examine how your internal judgements are better interwoven with external tests, helping you to track and support each child's progress, but with minimal extra burdens.

We cannot afford to get this wrong. We are planning the implementation of the pilot, including the evaluation, very carefully, and will continue to work closely with Mary and the Workforce Agreement Monitoring Group as part of our cautious and measured approach.

The third thing we must do is ensure that our education system offers a wider range of opportunities.

Fourteen has long been the age when many children become de-motivated and disengaged: mentally dropping out then, before physically leaving school two years later.

We need a rich and diverse curriculum which instils in all young people a love of learning and the skills they need for a fulfilling life.

Apprenticeships will be one choice. The number of apprenticeships has already trebled since 1997. In the future, any young qualified person who wants an apprenticeship should have a guaranteed place.

That means an additional 90,000 apprenticeships just for 16 to 18 year olds over the next six years and 500,000 by 2020, in accordance with Lord Leitch's recommendations.

Diplomas also provide an exciting new dimension, creating the mix of theoretic and practical qualifications which we've lacked for so long in this country.

These represent the most radical educational development taking place anywhere in the world and I was delighted with the high quality of the applications for the Gateway Process and the successful consortia that will provide the first five diplomas next year.

GCSEs, A levels, greater access to the International Baccalaureate will all add to the range of choices, with all of these qualifications providing an opportunity for young people to lift their sights, whilst also providing essential grounding in English, Maths and ICT.

When all of this rich variety is in place, we will ensure that students remain in education or training, full or part-time, at school or college or in the workplace, to age 18. I recently published a green paper setting out ways in which we might achieve this historic quest, a century in the making, and we are now in the process of consultation.

This will also marry up economic imperative with social progress. In the Knowledge Economy of the 21st Century a 16 year-old in work without qualifications or training should be as unacceptable as sending 14 year olds out to work has now become.

As I have repeatedly emphasised, this is not about chaining children to their desks studying the fundamental theories of calculus, tempting though this might be. It is about unleashing each pupil's potential in a direction that suits them - whether that is studying applied maths or tourism; engineering or philosophy.

Young people at 16 and 17 may well opt to work, and all will have the chance to experience the workplace as part of our 14 to 19 reforms. But post 16 we will ensure that their job is combined with in house or day release accredited training so that, as well as earning a wage, they are investing in their future.

Although the media focused on what sanctions might be applied to those who do not stay on, this is not at the heart of our reforms. We want to inspire and enthuse, before we need to cajole and compel.

I have also heard the argument that this will deter the Richard Bransons or Alan Sugars of the future.

The first point to make is that if all of our youngsters were leaving school to start businesses we wouldn't have a problem. But they are not - and we need to create the skilled workforce which Branson, Sugar and other major employers need to operate in business successfully.

It's not all about the Alan Sugars. As the well known TV series says, it's also about the apprentices.

But there is a more important point. Diplomas actually provide a perfect route for the entrepreneurs of the future. In his autobiography, Richard Branson lamented how he was "sidelined" at school because he was "unable to cope with academic work". He tells of his ingenious headteacher, impressed by his evident promise, giving him the freedom to start up a national magazine for schoolboys.

As the magazine took off, the young Branson dropped almost all of his subjects. He successfully forged his own way, outside of the curriculum, creating what he may well have seen as his own diploma, but not everyone will have that luck, support or determination.

Richard Branson's headteacher predicted that he would either go on to be a millionaire or wind up in prison. In his case, it was the former. The sad truth is that leaving school at sixteen does increase the likelihood of young men falling into drug use and a life of crime.

By improving the choices available for every young student, we will be able to inspire more people to stay in education or training, improving their prospects and reducing the risk of falling into a cycle of unemployment and despair.

These then are the three principle areas of educational reform that we will pursue.

Delivery will require two things.

For government, it requires that we continue to listen, discuss and be prepared to amend our approach within our increasingly robust social partnership.

From your point of view, delivering these reforms calls for greater collaboration between schools and external partners. No single school will be capable of delivering diplomas or extended services alone.

Many of you will already have networks with external partners; some of you may use the Trust School model to formalise and stabilise these relationships. Collaboration brings improved results as Excellence in Cities has shown: with attainment and attendance up; truancy and exclusions down.

We're both committed to working together, taking the tough decisions, avoiding the easy options. We may not always agree, but we will always remain committed to resolving our disagreements, because we share the same noble quest to make our education system the best in the world, giving every child the best possible start in life.

My contribution can never be as great as yours. Individually and collectively you are a credit to your profession. It's my privilege to work with you and to serve in the most rewarding job in Whitehall.