Education Committee
Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727
Wednesday 29 January 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 29 January 2014.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair); Neil Carmichael; Alex Cunningham; Pat Glass; Siobhain McDonagh; Ian Mearns; Mr David Ward
Questions 185-300
Witnesses: Charles Parker, Chief Executive, The Baker Dearing Educational Trust, Conor Ryan, Director of Research and Communications, The Sutton Trust, Keith Smith, Executive Director, Funding and Programmes, Skills Funding Agency, and Professor Alison Wolf CBE, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, King’s College London, gave evidence.
Q185 Chair: Good morning. Welcome to this session of the Education Committee. Thank you very much for coming here today. In the light of the criticism of the limited number of female witnesses who come to Select Committees, it is a pleasure and a relief, even more than usual, to have you with us, Alison. Thank you for being here today. Michele Sutton, the President of the Association of Colleges, has said that the quality of careers guidance available in schools is “nothing less than appalling”. How does a lack of good careers advice and guidance contribute to white working class underachievement in this country?
Professor Wolf: I have to say first of all that I am not an expert on white working class underachievement specifically, so I cannot answer that question, but in a way you are giving me a chance to say the thing that I most wanted to say, Chairman. We do need to recognise that a lot of the low achievement that is concentrated among white working class children is also related to where they live and, in many cases, to the fact that there are large parts of this country—it is the contrast between London and the south-east—where you have got an economy that is still bearing the scars of the end of manufacturing and industrial employment. I really hope that the Committee is going to take this into account, because simply looking at one group rather than another and not taking into account what the career opportunities are for people in different groups means perhaps, in a sense—not deliberately but by implication—blaming families for something that is not to do with them. The answer is we do not know, but we do know that a lot of the careers and jobs that were the bedrock of white working class family life for many decades and generations have vanished and have not been well replaced. On the careers guidance thing, this runs and runs. It is very difficult for a school to give really good careers guidance, because you are asking two things. You are asking individual teachers to be experts on a huge range of things, which is something that is almost impossible. Again, anybody who has been involved in education for many years knows that worries about careers guidance have been a running thread. An additional problem—and I do think this is a problem—is that schools are also in a bind, because they want to keep their pupils, and they—
Chair: Thank you. We have got less than an hour, so I am going to have to ask for short, sharp answers.
Professor Wolf: The answer is we are asking too much of schools; we need to look at non‑traditional ways of doing careers guidance.
Conor Ryan: I would agree with Alison on that. One of the things that the Boston Consulting Group showed in the research that they did for us was that something like 31% of young people embarking on A-levels dropped out early, which suggests that they are going through the first year in sixth form, and maybe or maybe not getting an AS-level, but it would be more appropriate for them to be going on other routes, which may be about having the right vocational route.
Q186 Chair: So obsessing with A-levels and university and just those children that get into university from working class backgrounds is a mistake, is it, Conor? Is this a mea culpa by the Sutton Trust?
Conor Ryan: The Sutton Trust believes that it is important that working class children get increased opportunities to go to university, and we certainly welcome the increase that there has been overall in university admissions, and clearly we have a particular interest in the leading universities on this. But we also recognise that there are half of the population who are not going to go to university, and it is important they have the right opportunities. It is important they have the right advice too.
Q187 Chair: Is this recent insight by the Sutton Trust?
Conor Ryan: It is something that we have looked at over the last year particularly, since we commissioned the Boston Consulting Group to look at the whole issue of apprenticeships. It is something that we feel is an important gap. We also have the Education Endowment Foundation—and I know you had Kevan before the Committee recently on this, Chairman—who are looking specifically at standards for the 20% of young people who are in receipt of the pupil premium and looking at how you can raise standards there. We have an interest across the board, and this is something that we are increasingly concerned about. On the career guidance issue specifically, we have commissioned Dr Tristram Hooley at the University of Derby to do some work on this for us, looking at the quantitative evidence on the effect of career guidance, and part of it will certainly be looking at the impact by social class.
Q188 Chair: Charles, would you like to answer my first question?
Charles Parker: I do not think that from the perspective of where university technical colleges are we can do more than describe an assertion and an aspiration. What we are doing with UTCs is essentially to bring back a technical education pathway that has not been there since the 60s, when there were 330‑odd technical schools. Essentially, what we are doing is updating those and, with the support of the employers and the universities who back them, bringing them in very often to areas that Alison describes as having suffered from a massive de-industrialisation.
Q189 Chair: If I may press you specifically on the careers issue, UTCs, like other non-school institutions, sometimes struggle to access people at the point of decision in order to inform them about the additional choice that may be on offer to them. To what extent is that an issue for UTCs?
Charles Parker: The recruitment for UTCs is perhaps different from your point about careers guidance. Young people come to UTCs because they are pretty confident there is going to be a good-quality job for them at the end of their time there. You rightly say that recruitment has been tricky, because we are a very young programme and not yet well known.
Q190 Chair: I am using “careers guidance” as a summary term to encompass all information, advice and guidance, both within the education system and without, despite the name; perhaps that is a misnomer. You are a new entrant into the system and therefore I can imagine particular resistance, and also you do not fit with the transition times of the existing system, so you are rather a peculiar beast. I wondered whether you had found difficulties in sharing your offer with young people at the appropriate time and whether that might give us an insight into the weaknesses of careers guidance and thus the options available to young people.
Charles Parker: There are 17 UTCs open, of which 12 only opened in September of last year, so we are talking about a very small data set.
Chair: Too early to say. Fair enough.
Q191 Mr Ward: We started with a quote from Michele Sutton, who is the boss at Bradford. When we visited Bradford on the careers guidance investigation, we went to Bradford College and they said they found it very difficult to get their foot inside the door of any secondary schools—we have no sixth-form colleges. Is that a problem you identify in terms of options available to all young people, whatever their background, whether it is studio schools or UTCs or, indeed, colleges?
Professor Wolf: Perhaps I can speak from personal experience as well as a general view. It is a problem. It is a problem that is inherent in the system and it will not go away, which is why I said to the Chairman that we needed to look at alternative ways. We have just had this experience ourselves. We are opening a very different sort of institution; we are opening a 16‑to‑19 school for specialist young mathematicians who are in schools that do not have fantastic maths sixth forms. We are interviewing the first applicants at the moment. It is very clear that for many of them, the minute they tell their school, their school works incredibly hard to persuade them that they should not come anywhere near us. Whenever you talk to people who are running apprenticeship schemes, they will say the same. I do not want to overdo the effects, because apprenticeships are wildly oversubscribed whenever there is a decent apprenticeship on offer, so it is already not the only way that young people are getting information, but I do think it is inherent in the system, and it is why we have to think of ways other than relying on teachers in schools to get information and advice out to young people.
Q192 Chair: You mentioned maths. The last question from me is: the new GCSE is going to be “big fat maths”. It is deliberately being bulked up, in order to address our underperformance in maths shown up in PISA and other things. Surely that qualification is going to be even less appropriate for those who are doing an apprenticeship, for instance, post-16. Have we thought through properly what maths we are going to ask to be embedded in apprenticeships after big fat maths comes in?
Professor Wolf: We have only started to. I do know that this is something that the apprenticeship people are concerned about, but belatedly, we are in the middle of a transition on maths. We are finally beginning to think of maths as something that you do until you are 18 in some form or another. At the moment, we have a qualification system that is lagging decades behind. It is always difficult to know where you start, but I personally think that thinking about mathematics for apprenticeships is something that we need to do sooner rather than later. Yes.
Q193 Chair: Keith. Maths.
Keith Smith: Absolutely. As you will be aware, the work we are doing is to try to reform the ownership of apprenticeship content so it moves away from sector-representative bodies more to employers themselves. The debate, which Alison has alluded to, is very much live. We are into a first stage of trailblazers with new sets of employers who are developing new standards.
Q194 Chair: I sometimes get confused as to where the need for a GCSE ends and functional skills begins and who has to do what. You might be able to help me out. Do we have clarity yet that employers can come up with probably a more applied form of functional maths that they can embed in their apprenticeship and that they will not have to teach big fat maths GCSE and insist every child gets that or they will lose their funding?
Keith Smith: What we currently insist on—and it is a principle that we are guiding for the future—is that there is some level of academic rigour within the apprenticeship standards. English and maths, and being able to be functional at English and maths, are critically important.
Q195 Chair: Do they have to do the GCSE or do they not?
Keith Smith: At the moment, they have to do either the GCSE or functional skills. The assessment for that is made very much by the assessment of the individual in terms of what is the appropriate path for that. We would see the GCSE as the gold standard in terms of where we would expect young people to end up, but we recognise many young people will benefit from doing the functional skill as a pathway to the GCSE, or indeed some may actually end at the functional skill itself. It is a question we are currently posing to employers as part of the new standard development, to see exactly how, when we have got the new content for GCSEs, they can be best applied, and in what way, to how the apprenticeship might be offered in the future.
Q196 Chair: Can you spell out for me where we are at right now in terms of the requirement on maths in apprenticeships? What is the proposal at the moment of what you should have to do in future, so we are clear?
Keith Smith: The requirement at the moment is you must do either the GCSE or functional skills.
Q197 Pat Glass: Professor Wolf has told this Committee in the past that vocational education should not be about social inclusion and disengagement and a blanket solution for young people who are disaffected, but is there a role for vocational education in tackling underachievement of white working class children?
Professor Wolf: There is a role for vocational education in tackling disengagement and raising skills for large parts of the population. As I also bored people by saying, the most important vocational skills are maths and English, yes, of course there is. What I have always been concerned about is this idea that you said, “Oh, well, if they cannot hack it, you can put them in a vocational course”. This is, firstly, not true, because many vocational courses are really highly demanding—and so they should be. They are not the same skills as being a classicist or a history expert, but they are very demanding. Secondly, I cannot think of any better way of devaluing the qualifications than to make them seem this way. The point is that good teaching is motivating. If you can have vocational courses that are demanding and, above all, are taught by specialists, they can be the most motivating ways of learning on this planet. The problem is doing that in large quantities. The other thing that I have also always felt very strongly about is that you should not cut kids’ choices off too early. This is why having a good academic core right the way through is so important, and why I was so horrified to discover that in many cases young people were being steered on to courses that were neither good academically nor good vocationally, because that was getting them nowhere. In a world where everybody is probably going to work until at least 70, people need a broad education.
Q198 Pat Glass: Does anyone else have a view about vocational as a route for tackling underachievement of white working class children?
Conor Ryan: We would argue that one of the problems has been that vocational education has been seen as simply being about dealing with social exclusion and therefore it has not had the respect that, for example, it has in Germany and Switzerland, which we visited as part of the work we did with BCG on this. If we are going to have a really strong, credible apprenticeships and vocational education system, it is important that it is respected by middle class parents and seen as a genuine option for them, as well as for working class youngsters and those who may be socially excluded. It does no good to those who are socially excluded to be put on second-rate courses that do not lead to jobs. We would argue that it is quite important that you have courses that are going to be valued by employers, that are going to lead to genuine jobs, and that include a substantial work-based element, as well as the academic element that Alison talks about, within them.
Q199 Pat Glass: You are right that our vocational education has been used in tackling things like social exclusion, but it has also been used by head teachers as a way of getting five A to Cs. That is probably why so many vocational courses existed, and why so many children were pushed down that route. Whatever we replace it with, will clever, savvy head teachers not simply find a way of doing that?
Charles Parker: I might be able to help you there. University technical colleges exist because they are needed in the area. In Scunthorpe, there is a steelworks that used to employ 26,500 people; it now employs 4,000 people. You can imagine what that has done for the community. There is going to be a UTC in there—it will not open for a couple of years—because the local employers have got such a shortage of skills to supply the new industries in that area, which are very largely to do with wind farms and what have you because of the Humber deep port. The curriculum and the governance of the school will be controlled by a combination of the employers and Hull University, which is backing this particular project, and it repeats itself elsewhere. This ought to incline the governors and the head teacher to operate the school in the interests of the children.
Q200 Ian Mearns: I do not know how many secondary schools I have been in over a number of years where this concept of “finding the fifth” was being used all too often. It was because some youngsters were being put into courses where they would get a four‑GCSE-equivalent GNVQ and had to “find the fifth”—any other subject they could get an A to C in. The problem with that was there was a perverse incentive in the system, because it was about getting the required number of youngsters with five A‑to‑C equivalents for the league tables. I really do question, over the long term, how valuable that was for the educational prospects and the employment prospects of the individual youngsters concerned. For many, it may well have been, but I would love to see some evidence about that.
Professor Wolf: The answer is that, in a sense, your suspicion is right; those qualifications did not have very much value, because, above all, employers are quite explicit about this. They have given up trying to keep up with reforms and there are a limited number of things that they deal with. Who can blame them? I am modestly optimistic, but it will take some years. The Department is now coming in and identifying a shortlist of qualifications that it thinks are vocational and good, and one of the criteria for this is clear employer involvement in creating the syllabus and the standards. It will take a while, and the worst thing that could happen is to tear it all up and start again. If they do continue with that—if they have this list of qualifications that are not GCSEs but that are really clearly recognised as demanding, as having prospects for progression and as being linked into the labour market— perhaps we can finally recreate some vocational options that are a real asset to somebody’s CV and that employers recognise, the way they used to recognise a City & Guilds.
Keith Smith: I will just add a couple of other reflections. Clearly, vocational education has got a critical part to play if we are looking at how we raise attainment levels of young people and adults. From the apprenticeship point of view, currently, around three out of four people who are doing an apprenticeship achieve the apprenticeship, but we know that if you look at particular types of sectors, as many as one in three in those sectors do not have a level two qualification. Clearly, apprenticeships is punching its weight in engaging with young people that potentially do not leave school at the age of 16 with four or five GCSEs at A* to C, but we still have a good success in how we get them into the apprenticeship programme and get them at the end of that so they can achieve. That is having success. The question that we are posing is: how do we improve the standards and the quality of what goes in that apprenticeship offer so we get better employer ownership—so apprenticeships become more valued and owned by employers? We think that is the single biggest factor in getting more employers to want to create apprenticeship opportunities for young people.
Q201 Pat Glass: Your reforms, Professor, which the Government is now putting in place, the Department for Education tell us are most likely to impact on white working class children, because they are the children who previously were taking the large volumes of vocational education. I have two questions, really. How do we adapt the curriculum to make it relevant for white working class children? Secondly, can we expect as a result of this that the performance of white working class children will get worse before it gets better?
Professor Wolf: It depends what you mean by “worse”. I looked at the evidence, because the Committee said to me that this would be in, and in a sense what it said is what we always suspected and what Mr Mearns has already referred to, which is that white working class children seem to have been disproportionately in the sort of schools that were gaming. When they say it will impact on them, what they are actually saying is that this was the group that was most likely to do the sorts of qualifications that we feel were not worth doing. The answer is hopefully it is going to make it much better for them, because there will not be that opportunity, or there will not be such strong perverse incentives, to put people in for qualifications that employers do not, in practice, value. So, having looked at those figures—having gone, “Oh my goodness”, then looked—it is, in a sense, exactly what we thought. One of the things that was most depressing in my research was discovering that the schools that had the lowest value-added in terms of English and maths were also the ones that were making most use of these qualifications.
I do agree with you; good vocational lessons can be fantastic in motivating. The most important thing is going to be, clearly, employment opportunities. There is nothing you can do about that as a school directly, but the more you can get really experienced people into the schools—I mean people who will teach a vocational course who are experts in that occupation themselves—and the more we can do to promote that in our school system, the more motivating it will be, because then it shows people directly from somebody they know and trust that this is something that has prospects.
Q202 Chair: Is there a risk that if the Labour proposal to ban non‑QTS teachers from teaching is put in place, this could lead to a loss of exactly the people that you are most talking about?
Professor Wolf: If it is done without finesse, I have to say it does worry me that that might happen. I would hope that it would be done in a rather different way and that they say, “If you do make a career of teaching, then you have to get a qualification”.
Q203 Chair: Someone who is doing it two days a week, perhaps very usefully, and for three days is doing a vocational thing, may be exactly the sort of person who will not go through the—
Professor Wolf: Exactly. I would be desperately sorry if the result of this well-intentioned move was to make it harder, or indeed impossible, to get vocational experts into the classrooms to teach their own subject and show their own expertise, because they are the ones who motivate. Fantastic vocational teaching is done by people who have worked in the area and can talk to the kids, know what is going to happen and know where it is taking them.
Q204 Chair: Do you think it is essential before any such move was made that at least some kind of survey or effort was made to find out about the quality of non‑QTS teachers in our schools? If they are fundamentally weak—if they are being used to warehouse the weakest kids and let them down, or to save money for the sake of it—they should be removed. That would be entirely right.
Professor Wolf: Absolutely.
Chair: But without the evidence base, would it be irresponsible to go ahead without checking first that there is an evidential reason for doing it?
Professor Wolf: Yes, it is important to do that, and particularly with respect to vocational courses. I remember in Texas they did something similar, and the main people who got sacked were what they call shop teachers. It is really important that this is a policy that is done carefully, with finesse, looking at who is there, looking at who would be affected, and particularly, please, with respect to vocational skills.
Q205 Neil Carmichael: One of the changes that you recommended, Alison, was that 14‑to‑16‑year‑olds should be enrolled into FE colleges. Are you satisfied with the progress thus far?
Professor Wolf: I do not know how many there are, but I went to one fantastic such place in Hull, because they invited me, for the first time in my life, to pull the curtains, as you guys do.
Neil Carmichael: Congratulations.
Professor Wolf: I did recommend it, partly because it seemed to me that the UTCs have a very specific, clear mission. Each of them has a very particular area they are concentrating on, which is related to the particular skill needs of the area. What also struck me is that for a lot of 14‑to‑16‑year‑olds, vocational courses are highly motivating but they do not yet know what they want and are going to be better off with a variety. It certainly was not something where I felt it should be a blanket recommendation that every college should do it, but in cases where the college has the motivation, has the capacity and is interested in doing it, it is a wonderful and quite cheap way of creating options for young people to try out a number of vocational options with expert teaching, because they are in an FE college where there are specialised faculties. I never saw it as a huge every-college-has-one thing, but I thought—and I still think, and on the basis of the one or two that I know anything about, I am very impressed—that it is a really good and much simpler way, in a sense, for certain students who know that they probably do not just want to do three academic A-levels but do not quite know what they do want and many of whom, again judging by Hull, will be academically quite good. That is simpler than constantly trying to get young people into every school. The kids I saw were definitely highly motivated and very many of them were, indeed, white working class. Nothing is a single solution. I still think that is part of one’s arsenal.
Q206 Neil Carmichael: When you first conceived of this plan, did you think in terms of social mobility and white working class children, or were you thinking more about our vocational training requirement as a nation?
Professor Wolf: I was certainly thinking about working class children. I cannot say I was thinking specifically about white working class children. I have only become aware since of how much of a specific problem this is. London is very different. In London, our schools have been doing pretty well. This is why the job environment is so important. It is very easy to be motivated in a London school, because the job opportunities are obvious and the whole environment is very different. I was definitely thinking about social mobility, because I was appalled; it seemed to me that what was happening was pretending to be about social mobility and getting people qualifications, and was actually having the opposite effect. Yes, I was thinking about it very strongly and that was what made me very angry.
Q207 Neil Carmichael: The real problem we have got is that the problem itself starts much earlier. How is it that we can address that in the sense of connecting such colleges to schools and involving the employers rather more? Is that something you have been thinking about?
Professor Wolf: It is hard. This comes back to the area where I do not have any answers, but where I think we need to use modern media and not think in terms of the old career teacher. I do think it is a problem. It is something that, as I said, does not have any very simple solutions, because ultimately it depends on close links between business and schools, and those are hard to create. At the top end there are things you can do, and I have made recommendations. In terms of giving young people more access to the world around them, particularly if they come from environments that are in themselves quite constrained, I do not think there is a single simple answer. One just has to, unfortunately, keep doing lots of things. I wish I could say a bit more than that. Maybe the others can.
Q208 Chair: What incentives and methodologies can we create to allow this interaction? It feels to me as if the school plug and the employer plug are mismatched; they have different pins, and therefore most of the time they struggle to engage, although both sides would probably like to. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Charles Parker: That is quite a good image, Chairman. The two systems, or the two worlds, are at the present moment, and have been for some time, quite disconnected. We find with the UTC programme that quite a lot of people meet each other for the very first time and their own systems are completely contrary one to the other. What we have said to employers is, “There is an education system here and you have to get happy with that. Therefore, you need your schools to get GCSEs; that is the way it is.” But once you are there with students in project-based learning where qualified individuals—they may not be qualified teachers—come in from the companies to run project-based courses two days a week and, as in Austria, go back to their business three days a week—
Q209 Chair: Could you comment, then, specifically on this QTS issue? We are visiting the debate again this afternoon, for the second time in three months, and I want to bottom out what is at risk here.
Charles Parker: As has been said by others, the idea that you have hopeless people in your schools is completely ridiculous, but it does not mean to say that good teachers are by definition qualified as teachers. We have a number of individuals who might be PhDs working in the UTCs that have started already. These are amazing people. They are highly professional; they may not be highly professional in the sense of being qualified teachers.
Q210 Chair: Just to push you on that, why not just get them to qualify? The Labour Party proposal is that within two years, they should go through and become qualified teachers. Is there any reason why that would be damaging?
Charles Parker: The word that Alison used was “finesse”, and that is what is needed. The parents and the community will need to find a way of reassuring themselves that the teachers are appropriately qualified. To refuse people from starting simply because they are not as they arrive qualified is a bad idea.
Q211 Chair: I do not think that is the proposal; the proposal was within two years they should be expected to get this particular qualification.
Charles Parker: We would like to see that when the small print comes out.
Q212 Neil Carmichael: I have got a question for both Charles and Keith. Charles, you have already referred to it in answer to one of Graham’s questions. How are we going to get business to interface fully and properly with education? There are different ways of doing that. I, for one, think governors and governance is one route, but it is not by any means the only route. We do seem to have a complete disconnect between the type of teaching—courses and so on—and what is needed out there in the workplace. How do we solve that?
Charles Parker: The answer is little by little. This will take a long time. My trustees are, candidly, delighted that we have been able to get 50 of these university technical colleges already approved, but it will be some time before it becomes part of the thinking in the boardroom that, “We have to spend some of our real money—not some of our corporate social responsibility budgets—on dealing with the problem, which is that we cannot get enough employable people in our areas”. It will be a question of the results. We think that over the next few years that is the evidence that will persuade people, through the local enterprise partnerships and through the other employment groups, to get much closer to the head teachers in their area. We will find these networks establishing themselves locally.
Keith Smith: I totally agree with the point that it is critical that businesses—particularly small businesses—can find a way to interact with what is happening locally. What is also important is, beyond the reforms we are making on the apprenticeships about the ownership of the programme from the employer point of view, that we develop those links through things like traineeships. The idea of traineeships is that you can take a vocational offer into the academic setting, and the key to that is a high-quality work experience, so that young people are able to progress on their educational pathway but, at the same time, have access to a high-quality work experience opportunity. We have got to drive really hard to get more businesses and more employers to want to create those opportunities to enable those placements to happen, but we do see that as important as a feeding ground into what new high-quality apprenticeships are going to be able to offer. There are mechanisms that we can create that can enable employers to engage in the educational system. It is about, as Alison says, trying different ways of creating that, rather than one structure that is going to be the magic bullet.
Q213 Neil Carmichael: Can I just turn the telescope around a bit? The big problem we have got is that the productivity gap we have with, say, Germany or France is wide; it is as wide as 29% with Germany. We are wasting an awful lot of human resources here. It seems to me that one way we really need to address this is by pointing out that if you get training, you will contribute, first of all, to the productivity issue but, by doing so, you are going to increase your salary opportunities and life opportunities. We need to start selling this idea that, “By contributing to this productivity question you are going to be benefiting yourselves”. It is a difficult concept to get across, but have you got any thoughts on that?
Conor Ryan: One of the things that the Boston Consulting Group did when they did the analysis was they looked at Germany, they looked at Switzerland and they looked at other countries. Two figures are quite stark on this. The first is that the number of employers who are offering apprenticeships in Germany is something like 50%, and when it gets to the mittelstand and the larger employers it gets much greater. In this country it is about 20%. There is a big gap there. We visited a company near Munich, and the attitude towards apprenticeships, the attitude towards the education system, the engagement with the education system and the engagement with the local college was much stronger than you would get in a lot of companies in this country. They said that they had a commitment across Germany that 7% of their employees at any one time were going to be apprentices. That is something that they saw not just as a social good, but they said, “It helps our bottom line, because we get 95% of our recruits through that route”. If they thought it was appropriate, they would ensure that those young people went through university so that they could go to management positions as well. There is a cultural difference there, and that seems to us to be one of the big things we need to address. It is one of the reasons why the Boston Consulting Group, for example, proposed that there should be some degree of wage subsidies—more than the current apprenticeship grant—to try to encourage employers to engage apprentices over an initial period while you try to expand them significantly.
Q214 Chair: Do they have such a thing in Germany?
Conor Ryan: The model that they took was an Austrian one, where they use wage subsidies to engage them. In Germany, it is just so much part of the culture now, as well as being a legal expectation.
Q215 Neil Carmichael: You all seem to agree with that point, in one way or another. Would it be fair to say that we do need that cultural change to be brought about?
Professor Wolf: I just want to say we had it. We lost it. We should realise that if you go back to 1950s and 1960s England, it was not so different. Therefore, what it is about is getting people back in. Yes, of course the cultural change has to be there, but I do really think it is about reversing and going back; it is not something that is about introducing a thing that never existed in this country. This country was a country of apprentices once.
Ian Mearns: Yes. We used to have big companies that did heavy engineering, and then they all got shut down.
Neil Carmichael: They were not shut down. Labour’s economic policies did not help.
Ian Mearns: The restructuring of our economy happened some time before that.
Q216 Mr Ward: A bloke came in to our office and he said when he started work 40 or 50 years ago, he went to the business where his father worked and the foreman said, “Can you spell ‘apprentice’?” and he said, “Yes”. He said, “You start on Monday”. That was just the way it was 30 or 40 years ago. We are talking about the white working class. Where I came from, I cannot remember in my early years anybody in my surrounding community who did not have what they called a paper round or a Saturday job, or go to work with their mother or their father because there was not child care. We all had experiences of work. Has that changed in any way? In the BME community, nearly all of the young people have work experience, because they are working in family businesses and so on. Is that something to do with it?
Professor Wolf: It probably is. You are completely right. One of my current party tricks is to ask people, “Who had a Saturday job?” There is this age cut-off thing. Anybody my age automatically had a Saturday job, and then there is this point at which they just start to disappear. You are probably also right that if you look at BME families, they are more likely to have small family businesses in which you do work informally. It is partly the changes in industry, but it is also partly that employers have become slightly phobic about employing young people. They would automatically in the past have taken you on at 15 or even 14 and now you talk to them and they do not want to touch anybody who is not at least 18. In terms of motivation and of getting experience and understanding work and having somebody to speak for you, yes, traineeships are fine, but if there is anything that one could do to help to bring back the Saturday job —
Q217 Chair: Are they fine?
Professor Wolf: Well, the idea is fine. Keith will tell me how well they are working.
Q218 Chair: There is a long history of programmes like traineeships, which are announced and sound quite good and everyone hangs on them all their hopes and aspirations for an improved system, and they often turn out to be a bit second rate. Can you give us any insight into whether they have got the right foundations on that, Alison?
Professor Wolf: The theory seems to me correct, in that it is about a chunk of work experience, so there is really an employer there. The answer is I do not know. Keith will know far more about what the early data are showing. I do know they are not a substitute for the Saturday job.
Q219 Siobhain McDonagh: I run a work experience scheme in my constituency where I get all the businesses together and I get them to offer work experience to somebody not in work or training. We do it annually. I did it this time and I said to the Jobcentre, “Would it be okay if we got them 12 weeks? That could really make a difference.” They said, “No, not really, because you would have to call it a traineeship then and we would have to stop their JSA”.
Keith Smith: I will just come back to the traineeship question, and then I will come back to that question as well. Traineeships are very different from previous schemes we have had in that they are centred on the work placement. Previous schemes have been doing programmes of study—whatever programme that was—with a token gesture of work placement that goes alongside that. The founding principle of the traineeship offer is that it is embedded around what the employer is prepared to offer and to throw in in terms of the work placement. That does mean we have got to get really big and really good employers who are going to back this and come forward. There is early evidence to suggest that is happening. It is too early to be able to quote numbers and the scale of that, because it is only just in its first few months of operation, but we are fairly ambitious and quite positive about what certainly employers are saying about that.
Conor Ryan: One of the concerns that BCG raised about the difference between the traineeships and level two and level three and so on is the lack of progression that quite often there is as a result of this. One of the proposals they make is that you move towards a three-year apprenticeship standard model, where you conclude with a level three, and it does not matter if you start below level two; you do it within that three-year apprenticeship, so that you have got a serious qualification at the end of it. The second thing that they said and felt was absolutely crucial is that these are work-based rather than work-experience apprenticeships. In other words, you have a work-based apprenticeship where you are learning different aspects of the company that you are involved in, and you have college day release, which is proper day release; one of the interesting things we found visiting some colleges in this country was that quite often the day release was taken in addition to the normal 35-hour or 40‑hour working week that the young people were doing. You have that sort of model and you see that as being the gold standard you aim for. At the moment, there are something like 100,000 young people under 24 who are on level-three apprenticeships; there are nearly 200,000 who are on level-two apprenticeship. We think if you could get many of those 200,000 with the 100,000 doing level threes, you would have a much stronger system and much stronger qualifications, and if you were able to get employers engaged in that, leading on providing those qualifications—and hopefully the trailblazers that Keith talks about will help to do that—that would make a fundamental difference to the skills and the quality of apprenticeships in this country.
Keith Smith: Coming back to the question about the productivity, it is absolutely true that in recent times employers have not owned the apprenticeship system as much as we would like. The content of what has been in the apprenticeship has been indirectly about what employers have been saying. Through the trailblazers and through how we will roll that out to the new offer, in future, ever single apprenticeship will only be an apprenticeship if it has been designed by an employer and if it has got the things in there that employers are saying they want.
Q220 Chair: On Conor’s point about the 200,000 under 24 doing level two and 100,000 doing level three, what are you going to do? Conor is saying, “Get those 200,000 all on to level three as well and you are going to have a really positive effect”. What are you doing on that front?
Keith Smith: That is a case that demonstrates how many young people come into the apprenticeship programme without the level two qualifications to start with, but it is also the cause, because we are creating a system that is about level two and level three. That is what we are trying to almost throw away and say to the employer, “What is the competence required to be functional in that job?” and describe what it is that that person should be able to do. That will be the journey that young people will then go on in future in order to achieve that.
Q221 Chair: 40% of apprentices in Germany, if I recall, do not go on to work on the thing that they did their apprenticeship in. Though we want employers to have more ownership, we also, from the outside, want to be insisting that the framework gives sufficient generally applicable skills that the potentially 40% or 50% who do not end up working there have skills that others value. What are you doing about that? Is that not one reason for fulfilling Conor’s—or BCG’s—vision of moving more from level two to level three?
Keith Smith: Absolutely. That is why I mentioned before we think it is important to have some academic rigour in that. English and maths has to be a core component of what the apprenticeship standards are in the future. Those are key transferrable skills that stay with people regardless of what job they do. One of the things we are learning—and trying to learn—at the moment from those trailblazers and how employers are putting those standards together is how that mobility can be achieved either into higher education—
Q222 Chair: Is the level two/level three divide a false one? You have said you are much more interested in just making it owned by the employer. Is that something we should just forget, or does Conor have a point that we should be looking to get more of the level twos up to level three than happens now?
Keith Smith: We should absolutely be looking at trying to get people to an advanced level, described in our current terms as “level three”. What we are saying is that is not the driving issue behind the reforms we are trying to make. What we are trying to say is employers describe what it is that is required to do the job.
Q223 Ian Mearns: Taking you back a little to the previous point, about engagement with employers in the educational process in general, do you see that there could be potentially a problem because of the different nature of the employment and company structure—market—in different parts of the country? For instance, in the north-east of England, okay, you have big companies like Nissan, with 6,000 or 7,000 employees and 25,000 in the supply chain, but they are not typical of the whole region’s economy. While in my constituency I have got big centres of employment—there is the Team Valley Trading Estate, which is a very large industrial estate, and Metrocentre in the constituency next door—there are not many large employers there. The problem with the lack of large employers is the capacity to engage with educational establishments. A lot of the SMEs, who are very typical of the economy in the area, see themselves as not having the capacity to carry forward that engagement. How do we get over that? We have got a picture for the whole nation here, but we have got deliver it across the whole nation.
Professor Wolf: I completely and totally agree with you. The apprenticeship reform will in the end succeed or disappoint our hopes to the extent that it manages to bring SMEs back into the system, which they are a huge part of in Germany. I was up in the north-east not that long ago and talking to a couple of small employers there who were very committed to apprenticeships and found it very difficult to do under the current structures, because they had no problems with sending a kid on day release, but the college could not get the numbers to make it viable.
Ian Mearns: It is the critical mass, yes.
Professor Wolf: There are some major challenges there. It is also about the whole issue of getting small employers to take kids on for part-time work and to have closer links with the education system in a way that does not make it impossible for them to run their businesses, but, above all, making it really attractive to them to take on an apprentice. Many of these people were apprentices themselves. They are not emotionally opposed to the idea. I do not think it is a cultural issue; I think it is a structural issue.
Charles Parker: It will be difficult to fashion a single solution for the whole of the nation’s problems. We are now able, are we not, to do things that apply much more particularly to the region in which they are needed? What we have discovered is that a company like Siemens, which is not far from where you are based, which has no problem getting its own apprentices and trainees, or whatever, is investing in our particular programme—and there are lots of others—because it knows that it is sucking the supply chain dry. This is self-interest; this is not altruism. These large companies depend on the supply chains; they depend on the SMEs. They know that what you have just said is true, which is that the SMEs do not have the time to deal with the problem. What are emerging—and I can only, as I say, speak for UTCs—are very interesting partnerships between the large companies and the small companies in an area, who, on this occasion, are not competing; they are all working together to grow the market.
Q224 Ian Mearns: It goes back to Alison’s problem, though, about getting a critical mass of students in a particular skill set. Are there a number of sectors, or organisations, out there that we are trying to provide with incentives so that they get together? For instance, could we not be working with employers’ organisations, like the Federation of Small Businesses or chambers of commerce, on a regional basis to try to pull together—or even we used to have Sector Skills Councils.
Professor Wolf: That is going to be critical. It is not something I have been doing something more than worry about a bit, like on the train to and from Newcastle, but you have got to get those institutions in place. The reason I keep harking back to the fact that we did it in the 50s and 60s and day release was big is that it cannot be impossible, any more than it is impossible in Germany and Austria, where the chambers are so important. It is not something you do overnight, but building up institutions—not just schools and colleges, but employer institutions—in a way that they can facilitate this is going to be hugely important, and it does need to be the small employers. The supply chain thing is great for the stuff that is leading up to Siemens, but lots of small employers are not part of a big company’s supply chain; they are just small. They might even be exporting all over the world and still be just small.
Conor Ryan: The one recommendation that BCG made on this particular issue was that you have some sort of apprentice-training agency at a local level that would bring together small employers and maybe the local college and other big training providers in the area, and that that agency could manage the bureaucracy, such as it is, around the apprenticeships. There is clearly an issue, if you have got a very small employer, of concern about the costs—
Q225 Chair: Did they recommend who should own that? Should it be the LEP? Should it be the chamber? Should it be another arm of the state?
Conor Ryan: The recommendation was that it might be led by the local college, for example. That would seem to be a good body to do so.
Keith Smith: I would go further than that. The experience of our current apprenticeship training agencies is that they are run by employers. When they are the strongest is when a group of SMEs comes together and takes the lead together or one of them agrees to take a lead. They can be supported by external partners, but it is the employers themselves that create and own that training agency. If you exported purely to a training provider, then you would take the risk that it just becomes another version of the training system we have already got. It must, again, be the SME ownership that drives that.
Chair: Professor Wolf is nodding vigorously, for the record.
Q226 Ian Mearns: This is the section that I should have been asking questions about now. We talked before about perverse incentives within the system. Given the growing diversity of our school estate and the growing independence of secondary schools, is there not a danger that, having 14‑to‑16 youngsters placed in college, we could end up having a lot of secondary schools casting off their youngsters into colleges? We are seeing some evidence that some of our more independent institutions are becoming slightly less inclusive.
Professor Wolf: My experience of schools so far is that their main concern is to hold on to their students, not get rid of them. There is a risk. Everything has risks associated. One has to see how it goes. Also, I suspect only a very limited number of colleges will ever want to do this. I was slightly worried that the couple that I have had any contact with would end up with just the kids who were pushed by the schools. It did not seem to be like that. I am really impressed by most 14 and 15-year-olds. This is why I also think that so much of the underachievement is about feeling it is pointless, rather than not realising that education is good for you.
Ian Mearns: Do not get me wrong, Alison; I am impressed by 14 and 15-year-olds. I am not always impressed by all of our head teachers. There are some brilliant people out there, but some of them, frankly, are thinking about the interests of the institution before the interests of the individual youngster.
Chair: Charles.
Charles Parker: The system may have got behind the curve a bit. A lot of children, by the time they are 13-ish, have an idea where their interests lie. If they are obliged to stay where they are, there is a high risk of disaffection. We have seen this. If it is possible to provide them with an education that does not close any doors but that works better for the people who like to work with their hands and their mind at the same time, we think this is quite a positive development.
Q227 Chair: Even if schools use this 14-year-old direct entry as a dumping ground in a way, actually, it could be that those children have more opportunities and do better, even if that is an element in the system. There are incentives to get rid of children for whom you are not going to get an added-value score, even in the new accountability system we are going to have in a couple of years.
Charles Parker: It is a very big issue. The Ofsted Deputy Chief Executive worries about this at 14. He told us that he is concerned about the dumping point that you have just made, Chairman. What we have seen, to our surprise, is that a very large number of the children who have come in at the early stage of our programme respond extremely well to a sort of education that they were not getting elsewhere.
Q228 Chair: Could it be that while we could be putting measures in to stop the dumping, if children are being dumped because they are not doing very well in school and therefore are not going to make the institution look good, they may well be better somewhere else? They need a new chance. It could be that the school needs to be challenged to improve its offer to those children, true, but, on the other hand, if they are failing with them, the dumping may not necessarily be a negative thing. Is that a fair point or not?
Conor Ryan: Chair, I just have one additional point on that issue. Speaking as a school governor in the Bath area, the converter academies in Bath have essentially come together and are establishing two studio schools for 14‑to‑19‑year‑olds. One of them will be based on the site of the school where I happen to be a governor, and Sir James Dyson is one of the sponsors and there are other leading firms involved. There is going to be a genuine offer there, but the point about it is that because it is being done through a multi‑academy trust, there will very clearly be accountability for those schools in ensuring that those young people get a good education. That is the purpose of doing it.
Q229 Siobhain McDonagh: Written evidence to the inquiry includes a suggestion that the central admissions portal for apprenticeships, modelled on UCAS for higher education, could make it easier for young people to find out about and enrol for apprenticeships. Do you agree? Would this be particularly helpful for working class students who may not have the same social capital as their middle class peers applying for degrees?
Conor Ryan: Anything that makes the system more navigable and easier for students and for teachers to see what is available in terms of apprenticeships would be a good thing.
Keith Smith: It would be a mistake to not recognise there is already a national apprenticeship vacancy system, where pretty much every apprenticeship vacancy that is offered is advertised. Young people and adults alike can download an iPhone app where you can search on your smartphone the apprenticeship vacancies by sector, job, location, etc.
Q230 Chair: Is there an Android app as well?
Keith Smith: There is an app, yes. You can get it. I should have said “smartphone” rather than the other. There is a smartphone app.
Q231 Siobhain McDonagh: Do their parents, their teachers and the people who give careers advice know that all this exists?
Keith Smith: I think they do. As I said before, we do not have a shortage of young people applying for apprenticeship vacancies. They know they are there. They know where to access them. The issue is we do not have enough apprenticeship opportunities, and that is what we are trying to work with the employers to create. The other point I would make, and what is different from higher education, is that apprenticeships is about a job, and so any central admissions system is going to take the employer out of that ownership. What we need is employers taking these apprentices, because it is about a real job in a real work context.
Q232 Mr Ward: We have already talked in passing about the German system, which is held up as being a good example, and you said we maybe had that at one time. In terms of recommendations to us about the structure that we have, is there anything we can learn from Germany that we should be doing structurally to bring about changes in our own system?
Conor Ryan: The one most significant point—and it may well be that we are moving in that direction, if what Keith describes is right—is not to have the bite-size elements of level two and level three, but to have a coherent whole. Have a proper three-year apprenticeship structure for most young people that is owned by employers, that is delivered by employers, where there is proper college release linked to it, where there are proper qualifications built into it. That would be the transformational thing you could do with the system.
Q233 Pat Glass: Can I ask you about UTCs particularly? Are they serving the white working class communities in which they are established? Have you done any work on the backgrounds of the children who are coming to UTCs? Are they working class children, or are the sharp-elbowed middle class pushing them out?
Charles Parker: We have not done any work, to answer your question. The schools are not over-subscribed at the moment in most cases, and so therefore their intake is entirely comprehensive. As I think I mentioned earlier, many of them, as it happens, are being established in areas that have been suffering terribly from a de-industrialisation and the communities have not moved very much. Our position has been to deal with the skills gap in an area; it has not been focused on any particular ethnic group.
Q234 Pat Glass: I can remember having a conversation with your boss some time ago, and he told me that UTCs would definitely not have an impact on local schools. I can remember saying to him, “Look, if this is a new school opening up in my area and it is going to be bright and shiny and it is going to be regarded as something special, even if it is a UTC in snake charming, I will get my child snake charming lessons to make sure they get in”.
Charles Parker: It is unlikely to be a UTC in snake charming, because there are not any employers who—
Pat Glass: I am confused as to why you would not do any work to see whether there was an impact on other schools.
Charles Parker: That is a different question. We have established these schools quite deliberately to be regional, because we do not want them to have a particularly strong and negative impact on the nearest school to them. We organise our admissions policy in terms of either nodal points or concentric bands, and indeed we know that these will only appeal to a minority of youngsters. We are anxious to make sure that we are part of the community and we are not seen as pillaging one particular school’s children.
Q235 Pat Glass: If you have not done any work on the background of your admissions, then you will not be able to tell the Committee whether you have had an impact on white working class performance as yet.
Charles Parker: That is correct.
Q236 Pat Glass: The Sutton Trust has said that UTCs should be limited to 100 so that they remain something that is special and different. Do you agree that they should be limited to 100, particularly if you are looking at something that is regionalised?
Charles Parker: I would be uncomfortable with limits, but equally, I would not want to push them where they were not wanted. If it turns out that the employers and, frankly, the communities in regions can make a good case for this particular technical education pathway, we should listen to them. There were 335 technical schools in the 60s, when they were at their peak.
Q237 Chair: Can you define a region for us, in your terms?
Charles Parker: Yes. It is a geography where it takes you hopefully no more than an hour to get to school.
Ian Mearns: So a sub-region.
Charles Parker: Yes.
Q238 Pat Glass: When the Secretary of State came to see us last, he said that he was concerned about UTCs and the cost and the numbers of students enrolled. He told us at the time that you have to look at each individual one, and he particularly mentioned the JCB UTC, which he said was “over-subscribed and hugely successful”, but we now know that he was incorrect, in that it is not over-subscribed. It is only the Reading school that is over-subscribed. Given that, is the current expansion justified?
Charles Parker: I think that it is, because we are at a very—I keep saying this—early stage. What is interesting is that the recruitment, although it is not easy at a non-standard age, for September 2014 is looking much more encouraging at this time—in other words, in January—than it was in January 2013 for the children who joined us last September. There is a bit of momentum picking up here.
Q239 Pat Glass: These are new and they are costly, and we are very interested to see what the impact of this is, so, although you are not doing that kind of research now, it would be really useful if you could do that.
Charles Parker: I note that.
Q240 Ian Mearns: The National Audit Office in 2008 found that “a higher proportion of white young people are” not in employment, education or training “than is seen among most ethnic minority groups”. What impact do UTCs have on NEETs in local areas? Should the placement of UTCs be guided by the prevalence of NEETs or by educational underachievement?
Charles Parker: You have asked two questions, about the impact and the presumption. There have only been two UTCs that have had public results—last August—and we say that there have been no NEETs at all from either of those. One of them is based in a difficult area of Walsall in the West Midlands, and the other is up in Uttoxeter. I thought this might come up. I can confirm that there are one or two children we are not quite sure about, but it has been quite remarkable. Given that we put these schools into places where there is a skills shortage, I do not think, in a way, we should mind being judged by this. Although it is not a league table driver yet, we say very strongly to our governing bodies, “This is what you are in business to do: to make sure that your students have worthwhile pathways after they leave you”. It is early days, but it is very encouraging. In truth, these were white working class areas.
Q241 Chair: We are forever wrestling with accountability, and the Committee has played a significant role in changing the accountability in secondary schools around GCSE, but it is still around GCSE primarily. Do you have any insights as to how we get the long-term outcomes—whether or not children become NEET—better into the accountability system so it really does have traction with heads and the way they deploy resources?
Charles Parker: You may think this is rather feeble of me, but we take the system as we find it, and then, because we have a long school day, we do more.
Professor Wolf: Destinations information is incredibly important. I am not an expert on what the DfE is planning to do.
Chair: I was going to ask you whether you were.
Professor Wolf: No. For all I know, I may be recommending something that then the Secretary of State will come in and say, “How could she not know we are already doing it?” Destinations information is unbelievably important. It is also a pain to collect, because we have to do it in universities, but you have to do it. The more visible it is, the more parents know that it is there and the easier it is for them to access it, the more traction it will have and the more schools will really worry and concentrate on not just how many of their students are going to top Russell Group universities but also how many of their less academic students have got a secure future path. It is tough on schools that are in high-unemployment areas—that is the only thing one has to say—but everything is tough on schools that are in high‑unemployment areas. It is really important information.
Ian Mearns: There has been an interesting debate about the quality of careers advice provided by careers advisers when we had careers services and Connexions services, but I have to say the tracking of young people on a local basis was quite effectively done by careers and Connexions services. That was something that they did do quite effectively.
Q242 Chair: Keith, do you have any insight into this destinations issue, or is that not under your remit?
Keith Smith: It is not directly under my area, but, as Alison says, there is a move across both Departments—DfE and BIS—to look at destination data to drive all of the education and skills system. From the adult apprenticeship side, we are doing some work to look at how we can introduce a destination measure that will sit alongside other traditional measures, such as success rates and achievement rates. That is very much in the thinking about where we have got to go.
Q243 Mr Ward: The destinations statistics for a school in Ilkley are considerably different from the stats for a school in BD3. If they are used to assess those schools, there must be dangers there.
Professor Wolf: The danger is it becomes a mechanistic accountability measure, but, as I said, it is also tough comparing those two on GCSE results, in terms of sub-dividing them into lesser or lower achievement. What is really important is it is available to parents and young people in an easily accessible form. There is always the problem that if something becomes a mechanistic accountability measure, you game it, and so I have very split feelings about that. It does not seem to me to be beyond the powers of the inspectorate to look very clearly at whether this information is timely, complete, easily accessible to parents and easily accessible to applicants in a way that is easy to understand. Ultimately, you rely on the intelligence of parents and students, which is considerable, to use it in an intelligent way. One of the things that has really surprised me is how difficult it can be to find out that sort of information about a school. They do not make a habit of putting it up on the front page.
Chair: Can I thank all four of you very much indeed for giving evidence to us this morning? When we write our reports, we make recommendations to Government. They are obliged to respond within two months. If you have any thoughts, anything you did not say today or any specific bullet-point recommendations you think ought to be in our report, please do be in contact with us. Thank you very much indeed for being here.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Alex Burghart, Director of Policy, Centre for Social Justice, Owen Jones, Author, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, Professor Denis Mongon, Visiting Professorial Fellow, Institute of Education, University of London, and Chris Wellings, Head of Programme Policy, Save the Children, gave evidence.
Q244 Chair: Good morning. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us this morning to discuss the underachievement in education of white working class children. We have think-tankers, authors, provocateurs—and that is just a description of Professor Mongon. It is a pleasure to have you all here today. Research released by Demos, the think tank, yesterday suggests that the gap between the attainment of children on free school meals and others widened in almost half of local authorities in England last year, and that in 66 areas the gap is now wider than when the pupil premium was introduced. It is possible effectively to tackle educational inequality through education policy?
Professor Mongon: It is in part. The variance across the country and across local authorities demonstrates that schools can make a significant difference, but there is a glass ceiling against which they will hit their heads. That was explored extensively by your previous panel in terms of the work expectation and the opportunities for jobs, and there are other issues I am sure you will explore with us in the next hour.
Q245 Chair: We had quite a focus on vocational education in the last panel. Is it true that successive Governments obsess about the lives that the members of those Governments typically have had, of an O-level, GCSE, A-level, university route, and that insufficient attention is paid to vocational and other pathways? There is an obsession with academic achievement, and that leads to both a demonisation of those who follow other routes and also a failure to ensure that they are as high quality and valuable as they can be. Do you have any thoughts on that or my first question, Alex?
Alex Burghart: Gosh, what a question. I am not really best placed to tell you what Governments too far before this one and its predecessor have got up to. There is certainly a sense in some areas and in some schools that vocational education is not well presented enough and is not able to deliver the results that it can in other countries. There is certainly a risk that we condemn everyone who tries to follow vocational paths to poor teaching and poor outcomes. There are a huge number of improvements that are being attempted in this area at the moment, and your previous session covered a good deal of them.
Q246 Chair: The Demos report suggested it might not be taking us in the right direction. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Chris Wellings: You can link the two questions and say there is not one answer to educational underachievement; there are different answers. Different children need different things spanning the vocational/academic divide; there is not one silver bullet here. We have done lots of work on literacy and in-school interventions and making sure every child is a strong reader by the time they leave primary school, but we also know that you need a whole framework of support, because children’s educational pathways are shaped by a whole range of things. We need a multi-dimensional approach to really get on top of this issue.
Owen Jones: One of the key points in terms of the specific question you asked there is the disappearance of some of the traditional non-academic routes to secure, stable, relatively well respected jobs. That is because of this hourglass economy effect, where we have the growth in middle-class professional jobs at the top and then low-paid, often very insecure service-sector jobs at the bottom. That means, if you are a school leaver where you could have got, as a boy, an apprenticeship as a route, therefore, to a skilled job, that does not exist so much. There is a growing need to academically prosper. The problem is successive Governments have focused on structure rather than looking at some of the underlying factors behind educational inequality. Inequality begins in the womb, because the birth weight of poorer children is lower than that of children from affluent backgrounds. There was a fascinating study by Growing Up in Scotland in 2011, and it found that the gap in vocabulary by the age of five years old between a child of affluent degree-educated parents and a child from a poorer background was 18 months. What you are seeing is a huge gap, which widens at the earliest possible age. The problem is often education gets scapegoated for those wider inequalities, when there needs to be far more focus on earlier years to stop that gap widening when it is too late, effectively, for it to be narrowed by education.
Q247 Chair: Successive Governments have tried to focus on that. We have had the growth of the children’s centres. The evidence of the efficacy of those interventions is light at best.
Owen Jones: If you are going to narrow the vocabulary gap, that needs an emphasis on things like nursery education. It is cultural capital, as it is called. A middle class child will be exposed to broader vocabulary from the earliest age, will be surrounded by books, and is more likely to be read to by parents.
Q248 Chair: We know that, but what do we do? The question is: what interventions will be most likely to succeed in improving the early vocabulary of a child? If they then have a weakened vocabulary in the early years, they are, we know, statistically likely to remain behind and even, in fact, to fall further behind as they go through schooling. Do you have any thoughts on that, Professor Mongon?
Professor Mongon: What you are pointing us towards here is the question of parental involvement. We need to separate induced from spontaneous parental involvement. People like us have spontaneous parental involvement. We are there and active from the start; we are active through the school years. What the evidence shows us is that inducing parental involvement does not appear to be very efficacious. I think that is in part because it is always coming from outside; it is always some national centralised strategy driving down into local communities. What we are not very good at is doing what in the jargon would be called the local ethnographic work: finding out who are the people in these communities—and every community has them—who can help us to build it up from the ground upwards in locally architectured forms. Those things from outside where you come along and say, “This is what we are going to do for your community” are far less likely to work.
Q249 Chair: What evidence do we have around those grassroots-upwards movements? If you think of the past, you think of the union movement, education libraries, the Fabian Society—the traditional left-wing institutions, if you like, were grounded in education in a way that seems to have been lost. Is there any truth in that?
Professor Mongon: The whole of our education system is built on that 19th century local community approach. That is where we started from. It was working very well before we nationalised the system in the 1880s. I would not go back to that evidence, but we have got pockets of work that organisations that I, for example, work with, like the Innovation Unit—and I will reference it for your team in more detail later—are beginning to do with local communities that is beginning to pay a dividend. What we have got to be very canny about is tracking what the impact on the youngsters is. The evidence shows us that when we do this kind of work, the professionals enjoy it, the parents enjoy it, and the kids—well, maybe it makes some difference or not, but we are not quite certain. We have got to be more sophisticated.
Chris Wellings: This is about deeper local change—driving changes in the home learning environment and changes in child-parent interactions—and that is sometimes different from the mechanistic change that you try to have around school reform or pre-school reform. It is recognising that that deeper community change is difficult and has hit problems, perhaps, in the past, but that does not mean that we give up on the idea of trying to change children’s whole environments. It is deep change, and it is difficult.
Q250 Chair: The idea is all very well, but we are trying to work out what we do about it. Professor Mongon has suggested the top-down centralised approach is not working and we need to rediscover, if you like, a more community-driven self-help approach. Do you have anything to add?
Chris Wellings: Yes. We have put out two reports on what we are now calling children’s communities. It is Save the Children’s proposal for that locally driven approach where you work across a coherent community; you try to understand what the strengths of that community are, so you get under the skin of the problem, and also what is going wrong in that community; and you strategically map support from cradle to career across children’s family, school and community lives, all with a very robust evaluation. The aim is not just to improve schools, but to support children’s whole environment—the environment in which they learn and develop.
Q251 Chair: What does that mean, Chris? I do not understand what that means. They are nice words.
Chris Wellings: It means a local partnership coming together in a community.
Q252 Chair: Who is this partnership? Is this led by the local authority? Is it led by Save the Children? Who is doing this?
Chris Wellings: We are scoping in three areas now. One example would be Wallsend, where you have a whole range of schools working together as part of a federation. Schools are coming together.
Q253 Pat Glass: My son is a head there.
Q254 Chris Wellings: David Baldwin. Primary schools and secondary schools are sharing staff, but they are also working with local GPs, the local police and the local authority. They are coming together and trying to build a really deep understanding of their community—of the strengths of their community and what might be going wrong in their community—to map that support.
Alex Burghart: I just wanted to go back to the point that Denis started, which is that often the best people to find the solutions are people who work in schools. We know that one in seven schools manages to buck the national trend for performance of children on free school meals. That is to say the children at those schools on average do as well or better than the national average for all pupils. Those schools that are clearly doing something right have clearly developed interesting means of working with their pupils and their parents. At the moment, I do not think that we have the mechanisms available to help share the learning that those schools have already developed with other schools that would benefit from it. We should probably start with what is already succeeding in the system.
Q255 Mr Ward: Can I just return to this issue of whether we are trying to find solutions to the wrong problem? One of the reasons I oppose the 11‑plus is that at too early an age it is, “You go that way; you go that way”, but it actually was not too bad because the ones who went that way left school on a Friday and started work on the Monday. That just does not exist now for many young people. Whether it is in terms of vocational UTCs or whether it is in terms of improving their educational attainment, there is nothing there for far too many young people to do. There is no end point for them at all. This is an international change in labour markets, and unless we do something to change that, with all these other things we are trying to alleviate a problem rather than solve it.
Chair: Back to Owen’s hourglass. Do you want to come back on that, Owen?
Owen Jones: I will just go back to the point I was making before, which is the problem with an hourglass economy where you have a lack of what were the middle-income secure skilled jobs that existed, which gave a dignified route, without needing an emphasis on prospering academically at school.
Q256 Chair: Are there not the working class jobs anymore? Is the biggest thing we need to do to say, “Stop being working class; become middle class, because there is no other route to success and prosperity”?
Owen Jones: I would argue—and it is broadening it out a bit—there needs to be some sort of industrial strategy to replace the lost middle-income jobs. If you look at Germany, where academic and vocational qualifications have more parity of esteem, they have a far bigger and more modern industrial sector than us to support that. We do not have that here. But the wider points are things like housing, which I do not know if you are discussing or addressing. Shelter have looked into this. Poor housing conditions increase the risk of ill health amongst children by 25%; they make them more likely to suffer slow growth, asthma and mental health problems. There are problems with things like the private rented sector; in the five years after 2007, the number of families in the private rented sector doubled. That often causes insecurities in a child’s development, because they have to shift from school to school, which is disruptive. This is the problem. Often it is not looking at these wider issues—things like housing or the lack of secure jobs—when we are discussing these things.
Q257 Chair: You will be delighted to know that there is the largest affordable housing build in 20 years going on right now, then, I am sure, Mr Jones. Professor Mongon.
Professor Mongon: David Ward is right that this will not come right until there are sufficient jobs in the economy, but that is not primarily the business of this Committee. The business of this Committee, I would have thought—it is not my job to tell you what it is—is to say, “In the meantime, what do this range of public services, but primarily the education service, do, acknowledging that problem?” The qualifications issue is a key one, which David makes. Let me just try to give a quick example. I noticed last week in the statistics the number of youngsters in the bottom 20% of the socio-economic groups getting one A-level has increased considerably, but what you can get for one A-level has decreased considerably, because the kinds of jobs that you could once upon a time get with A‑level you now need a degree or a masters degree for. My third and final point is your point about abandoning it being working class is an interesting cultural point. We are not perfect at it, but in broad terms we have got to the point in our system where, if you are from an ethnic minority and successful, you can still remain proud of being from that ethnic minority. If you are a woman and successful, you can still be proud of being a woman and feminine. If you are working class and successful, you have got to abandon your mates and your community, because our system requires you to move on and be different. It is a big cultural ask for some youngsters at that very tense teenage point.
Q258 Neil Carmichael: Owen has really already asked this question, but the ASCL has pointed out that by interfering with the schools, we are trying to fix a problem that was really well established long before we start. That is a point that you have made, and presumably the three of you would concur with that.
I am going to make three general points and I want you to comment on them. The first is this. We now have 30 million people employed. That is an issue with Owen’s hourglass question as well, because some of those jobs are not where you would have expected them to be, let us say, in the 50s and 60s, which we were discussing before with Professor Alison Wolf, who noted that we had an apprenticeship time in the 50s and 60s. We also had a situation where your career would be the same career from start to finish; it would be in the same factory, or in the same place. That is not the case now. We have got more people at work, but it is a more mobile workforce. That is the first point I want to make.
The second one is this productivity question and the fact that we have the inability to suck out the right skills from all over the place. How can we deal with that and create a culture where everybody feels part of that new economy? That is something I would like to talk about.
The third question is about the north/south divide. The assumption most of you have been making is that it applies everywhere. It does not. We have greater problems in the north with this issue about white working class children than we perhaps do in parts of the south, though not necessarily all over London. I would just really like to draw those three things together. Do you think the real problem is the way in which our structure of society and economics has changed? Is that causing this problem?
Alex Burghart: Society has changed and the economy has changed, but it is up to education to evolve likewise. I certainly agree with your first two points, that we have quite a lot of employment in the economy at the moment—some people would contest whether it is the right type of employment—but we also have a great deal of workforce mobility. If that is going to remain the norm for the next 20, 30 or 40 years, then we need to ensure that people leaving school have basic core skills—let us start with English and maths—and yet a very high proportion of pupils, particularly pupils on free school meals, leave without those basic qualifications. The work that we have done and the work that a lot of other people have done has shown that that might not necessarily be a bar to your first job, but it will certainly be a bar to your second. Your chances of progression in employment are substantially reduced if you do not have core skills. The evolving economy is a weird, monstrous and beautiful thing, but the only way we can prepare our pupils for it is by making sure that they have simple transferable skills.
Q259 Chair: I always wonder whether there is this aspect that, “I left school at 15. I do not have any qualifications. I did alright. You will do alright as well, son.” To what extent is it about understanding that the first rung of the ladder—or, as you rightly put it, perhaps the second rung of the ladder—has risen up and if you have not got these qualifications, however dull they may be to attain for some people, you are going to be disadvantaged in the long term?
Alex Burghart: There are a lot of people in the system who do not understand that and who have never had it explained to them. I have spoken to people who work in further education who teach children who are doing media studies courses and who want to be journalists but have not passed English GCSE, and nobody has explained to them that that will make life very difficult for them. That is tragic.
On your third point, Neil, about the north/south divide, there is a north/south divide of sorts, but when you look at some of the poorest educational communities in the country, they are in towns like Margate and Great Yarmouth—seaside towns—where you have a very high proportion of long-term unemployment, a very low skills base in the population, and also a very high proportion of white children on free school meals. It is not just the areas of the de‑industrialised north that require attention; it is also parts of the south.
Owen Jones: Even amassing qualifications is no guarantee of climbing those rungs, because now, a third of new graduates are doing non-graduate work.
Q260 Chair: Though is it necessary, if not sufficient. Has there been a change in the labour market?
Owen Jones: This is why I am saying it is a shift. Believe it or not, I finished my A‑levels in 2002, though you probably think it was last week or something. Back then only a quarter of new graduates were doing non-graduate work. This is all to do, as you say, with that general shift in the economy. I find it fascinating when people talk about aspiration, because I am not quite sure what people are asking people to aspire to. I do not want to glamorise a world that was disintegrating before I was born, not least because—
Chair: But you will anyway.
Owen Jones: No, no, these are my caveats. It was very male, dirty, back-breaking jobs and all the rest of it, but there was a sense of dignity, if you like, attached to those sorts of skilled work rather than new jobs that have replaced them. Now there are a million people working in call centres, which is as many as worked down the mines at the peak of the mining industry. The second biggest employer is retail.
Q261 Ian Mearns: Owen, I have been a school governor in Gateshead for 30 years almost, and I have come across far too many youngsters, particularly—it drives me up the wall—bright girls. You ask them, “What do you want to do?” and they say, “I want to be a hairdresser”. Hairdressing is a great profession; some people get paid 90 quid for cutting the Prime Minister’s hair and get a gong for it, but that does not happen to every hairdresser. With the best will in the world, places like Gateshead do not need 500 new hairdressers every year. There is a problem about aspirations amongst white working class kids.
Owen Jones: Yes, if you take hairdressing, the average salary is about £12,000; it is a terribly low-paid sector. Although hairdressing has massively expanded in the last 15 or 20 years, there needs to be far more work looking at the sorts of skilled middle income jobs, which have disappeared, that people can aspire to. You are right; you do not necessarily want everybody to aspire to be a hairdresser. The question I would pose is: what is the alternative? Generally it will be working in a supermarket or call centre for millions of people.
Q262 Chair: But there is a great skill shortage in this country. There are lots and lots of jobs that are going wanting and they cannot fill the places. They are well paid and people are simply not being prepared for them. The idea that there is this complete hourglass that means there are no jobs that people can aspire to and get is not true. They simply are not being prepared properly in order to get them, and they are not aware that they are there or what they need to do in order to get there.
Owen Jones: Engineering is a classic example of that; there is a lack of skilled engineers in this country. In a broader sense, though, there are obviously less middle income skilled jobs in the economy than there were 30 years ago; of course there are.
Q263 Chair: There was some research last year asking 15-year-olds what they wanted to do in life, and then comparing that with where the jobs are expected to be. 20% of jobs are expected to be in financial services, and only 4% of people aspired to go into it. One reason for getting your GCSEs.
Professor Mongon: Far from giving the impression that this is a homogenous problem, and far from thinking of it as a north/south problem because we could look at the south-west as well. What Chris and I are saying, and Alex’s writing says, is that actually working class communities are highly differentiated around the country, and highly localised. That is the first thing.
The second thing is you asked a very specific question earlier in the morning about the early years. One of the things we need to recognise is that all the research shows us that the ambitions of the parents and children from white working class backgrounds are virtually indistinguishable from those of middle class backgrounds until the age of about 13 or 14. At that point their ambition—which you can separate into aspiration and expectation because they are different things—and comparative attainment haemorrhages; it collapses. A gap that has been steadily increasing through the years just goes wide. That draws us exactly into what the Chair was asking about, which is this connection between the secondary curriculum and vocation and community, and how you manage, as Ian Mearns asked earlier, to give high status to that alternative pathway.
Q264 Neil Carmichael: I certainly agree about the high status of the alternate pathway. Thank you for drawing the point out that I made earlier, but I have got two questions remaining. One of them arises from Sir Michael Wilshaw’s points last week when we were talking about social services. He was frequently referring to the difficulties of broken families, family life and so forth. He was really highlighting the area that we are now talking about in this particular session. My question to all of you, specifically to Alex and Dennis, is whether this is really one of the causes of white working class underachievement—it is not the only cause; I buy that—and if so, what sort of policy mechanisms should we be looking at?
Alex Burghart: There is undoubtedly a relationship between poor educational attainment and family breakdown; it is well established. Obviously it is not the only factor at play that we have seen. Famously, black boys on free school meals have started to close their attainment gap, whereas white boys on free school meals have not. I think you see similar levels of family breakdown in both communities, so it cannot be described as the only feature, but it is none the less an important one. There is stuff you can do about it through school. That is to say, you have to create role models and stability within school, but there is probably more that you can do in the wider community to try to help families, where possible, stay together. Family relationship support is pretty miserable in this country. It is one of the things we will be looking at over the next six months.
Professor Mongon: There is a correlation, but it is not a direct correlation, so we have got to be very careful not to demonise one-parent families. One of the key issues is the extent to which we can help the parent who is moving away to maintain a strong relationship; that goes back to the support we are giving. The truth of the matter is that that is much easier to do for people who have some wealth and good income. It is much easier to run two homes and maintain those relationships than if you have got very little income. Poverty, which is an underlying context of our whole conversation, is a factor. Being poor affects your health. One in six families, at some point, have difficulty in maintaining their gas and electricity, never mind having a laptop.
Q265 Neil Carmichael: One thing that worries me is the tendency of people, if they are going to be successful, to think that the best thing to do is leave the regions and get to London, in broad terms. I think that leads to the hollowing out of some of our cities and communities from the people who need to be there. It works in the other direction as well. People do not necessarily want to go back to do the job. We have seen that through the movement of teachers, for example. We have touched upon that in this Committee. You have one-way traffic going away from the very places that actually need the high achievers.
Chris Wellings: That is why educational disadvantage and response needs to work on lots of levels. One level needs to be in school, one level needs to be out of school, and one level needs to be parents’ education themselves, not just what they can do for their children. Another level needs to be longer-term economic prospects in the area. What Denis and I are saying is that areas are very different, so responses need to be tailored, deep and understand the local area. That might start to challenge some of the ideas about family breakdown. We found that in working class communities you could have very, very strong family networks, arguably stronger than you would often have with more middle class families now, where you have got people moving to London so there is huge distance between them.
It is about getting an understanding that your low expectation—the hairdresser point—is perhaps a presenting symptom. What is causing that over a number of years? How can we actually get to the core of that rather than just say, “That is your presenting problem; let’s bring in a programme that tries to tackle that”? Let’s look to the causes of it, and the causes of it, and the causes of it.
Owen Jones: Just to go back to family breakdown quickly, the Children’s Society have looked into this in great detail, and their findings were that conflict within families has 10 times more of an impact on a child’s development than the family structure. The point you have made about the underlying issue being poverty—single parents are far more likely to live in poverty, and that is something that you cannot separate. All the evidence shows, for example, middle class students do well whatever school they go to. There was one study in 2008 that found that middle class kids at inner-city schools did excellently well, and 15% of them ended up going to Oxbridge, of the ones they studied. So there has to be this constant focus, not on things like family breakdown that in some senses are constantly emphasised wrongly; at all structures of schools, it is to do with class and income.
Alex Burghart: I am going to bring it back to family breakdown, because it seems that we are in danger of saying, “Let’s allow family breakdown to happen because we think we can clear up the mess afterwards”. What we would propose is that you should try and reduce conflict within families and help families stay together and work, because we know that—
Q266 Chair: What evidence is there that the intervention works?
Alex Burghart: If you can find interventions that work, and there are—
Q267 Chair: That is the question: can you?
Alex Burghart: There are relationship interventions that work. They are not 100% effective, but they are more effective than doing nothing. If you work with families then you are more likely to improve outcomes for children today and tomorrow and so on. You are also not going to allow families to suffer loss of income stability they would have if they split up.
Q268 Chair: What should we be recommending in our report on this particular front, in your view, Alex?
Alex Burghart: There should be much better relationship support services for families that are in difficulty.
Q269 Chair: Can you be more specific? I am just seeing the report now and it says, “We call upon the Government to bring much better relationship support than we have now.”
Alex Burghart: I would be very happy to supply the Committee with a list of interventions that are known to be effective. My colleague, Dr Samantha Callan, is an expert in this.
Owen Jones: This point about conflict and family breakdown—when we talk about conflict and how damaging it can be, it is estimated by the Government that 1 million women face domestic violence each year. When you have violence within a household between two partners, this idea that that is somehow better than a single, loving lone parent is grossly misleading.
Alex Burghart: What would be better would be to not have the violence in the family, would it not?
Owen Jones: Obviously, but often the best way of remedying that is separation.
Alex Burghart: It is important to look at that in the first instance rather than to—
Owen Jones: Is your view that—
Chair: We will ask the questions.
Q270 Alex Cunningham: The Government had their big programme to intervene with the 50,000 most problem families in the country. To their credit, that has had some positive outcomes, but it is hugely resource-intensive. I used to be an optimist on these things, but I am now very much a pessimist because I do not know where the resources are coming from in order to make this happen. Sure Start Centres achieved some good things. Pupil Premium is successful in part. What is the answer? Is it about resource with families? What is it?
Professor Mongon: I know you had earlier evidence on this, but the funding issue is not about the quantum; it is about how well you spend those funds. Particularly on some of those interventions, if you are paying professionals to intervene then it becomes very, very cost-inefficient. If you are paying people to begin to build up the kind of community capacity and social capital, in the jargon that Chris is talking about, then in the longer term that is an investment that pays off because you do not end up with the professionals being paid to do stuff. You get the local community to behave differently.
Q271 Alex Cunningham: We need professional leadership in order to do that. All the support services we hear about do not seem to exist anymore.
Professor Mongon: It needs a professional catalyst, I would argue, but sometimes that catalyst needs to make a space for the voluntary and other community sectors. While I have got the floor, Chair, can I say, on the question of distribution and movement, we have no strategic capacity to direct our best and most effective leaders into our most needy areas. The description of the education system as a system at the moment is misleading. If John Lewis or Marks & Spencer had a failing store in Gateshead, and we think they would allow half a dozen local customers or the chief executive of a local franchise to decide who would take it over, then we are misleading ourselves. They would know who was their best north-east troubleshooting manager and they would send them there.
Q272 Mr Ward: Just two areas: back to aspiration, and then media portrayal of the working class. First of all, we have all seen the experiment with the fleas in the glass, you put the lid on and eventually they stop jumping when you take the lid off. I think you said, “Aspiration to what?” Is it that they are just battered down, there is nothing there, and that there are unlikely to be opportunities for them? How much does that affect the aspirations of people from the working class?
Alex Burghart: During the course of our research, I talked to a guy called Phil Beadle, who was the Secondary School Teacher of the Year a few years back. He is a white working class guy himself, and he said, “Name 10 white working class role models for kids that are not sportsmen or women”.
Mr Ward: Or in the Cabinet.
Alex Burghart: I think that is something some schools find difficult, and something that people in those communities can find difficult.
Chris Wellings: Although it is much more hopeful than that. We are talking about average achievement being low amongst white working class pupils. That is not to say that there are not lots of examples of white working class pupils who do very well. We examine what that is, and it could be because they have got a parent who was particularly supportive, or they met an inspirational youth leader. The encouraging thing is we know that there are things you can do that can buck that average trend.
Owen Jones: When we talk about role models, often what we are saying is there is a lack of representation of working class voices generally, particularly in the public domain. There is a wide range of reasons for that. If you look at the media, for example, the Sutton Trust looked at the top 100 journalists, and they found over half of them were privately educated. Only just over one in 10 went to a comprehensive school. Driving that are things like the proliferation of unpaid internships, which force people to work for free, and only those who can live off their mum and dad can afford to do so; the disappearance of local newspapers, which were a foot in the door; and the emphasis on ever more expensive qualifications, like having to go to City University. That has pushed out working class voices from the media, which has an impact on portrayal. If you have fewer working class voices that are actually writing stories and running the media, you will have less of a platform for working class voices. That is one of the key issues in terms of what you are talking about.
Professor Mongon: It is worth separating ambition into aspiration and expectation. Aspiration is what you hope for, and that remains extraordinarily high for most people in the groups we are talking about well into their teenage years. Expectation is what you really think might happen. For a long time I believed in Father Christmas, and my aspirations and expectations were fulfilled. But actually when I got to my teenage years, I became disappointed, and I think that is what begins to happen for lots of teenagers in this category. Their aspirations remain high, but it begins to dawn on them that those kids that are four or five years older, that you adored when you were 11 and they were 16, because they were the bees knees in your school, you move on two or three years and where are they? They are on the street corner in some cases, and you think, “Well, so what was all that about? My nan and my granddad are still on this estate, and my dad and my mum, and it did not work for them.” So expectation begins to haemorrhage in those years.
That comes back to your earlier point about vocation and curriculum. How do we begin to experiment in a system that is tightly bound by its accountability measures? You talked earlier about savvy head teachers. You want savvy head teachers; of course they will manipulate the system. Any savvy professional does. We have got to begin to look at that accountability system. The Secretary of State has a power to innovate and set aside any regulation that applies only to schools if there is a good reason to believe that an experiment in that area will work. It has been used in a handful of occasions in the past dozen years because schools are too reluctant; they do not have that sense in the profession of taking a risk and inquiring because the consequences are too dire. The Secretary of State has not done a lot of innovation in that experimental local way. It has hardly been used. Why are we not using that to look at one or two areas and try something? What we have now is not working.
Q273 Chair: Quite rightly you talk about aspiration and expectation. Has work been done on the work rate among children of different social classes, in terms of likelihood to do their homework? There are issues around housing and the support for that, but to what extent does the high aspiration lead to low expectations in the end because people are not doing the work they need to do? Do we have anything quantified on how hard—insofar as we can measure—children work from different backgrounds?
Professor Mongon: I do not know of that evidence, but what I do know is the evidence shows us that it is much harder for those youngsters we are talking about to do their homework, as my youngsters were able to do, in a room where nobody was eating, watching television or doing anything except their homework. I know it is harder for those youngsters to join clubs, however well schools create clubs, and some of them do it brilliantly well. If you are in a rural area—we have talked about that—and the school bus leaves at four o’clock, it is hard to stay for a homework club that is on till five. All of those things mount up. I do not think there is any intuitive natural disposition to not do the work. Lots of youngsters from this background get their five A* to Cs. It is this incremental, corrosive, drip, drip, drip of poverty and experience. You talked earlier about the quality of schools in some areas.
Q274 Chair: We know this. We have got this race issue in here; there are some immigrant communities in dire housing and dire poverty whose children do well at school because they work harder. They put more hours in and they get the results. They turn up at school. There is quite a lot around making sure you are in school; make sure you do the work you are supposed to do at and beyond school. Then funnily enough you might just get your C, which means you can get the apprenticeship; if you have not got it, you do not. To what extent is that an issue? The danger is we purely talk about the outside issues and we do not focus in on the behaviours that could help people escape from poverty and educational underachievement.
Owen Jones: When we talk about odds being stacked against people, if it is 10 to one, then obviously 10% of people will overcome that particular obstacle. When we are looking at housing, overcrowding simply means lack of places for people to study. Some people get around that; it just means you have a far greater obstacle to overcome. The wider point about homework again comes back to cultural capital. If you have parents who themselves are professional middle class university-educated people, then they are in a far better position to be able to help with homework.
Q275 Chair: Are they in a far better position to be able to suggest the television is switched off?
Owen Jones: That is one particular issue.
Q276 Chair: If the television is permanently on in a limited space then it is going to interrupt, is it not?
Owen Jones: I do not know what the evidence base is for how much people leave televisions on, to be perfectly honest with you. But we do know that there is an evidence base when it comes to cultural capital and the link that has in terms of how well children do. If I think of my own primary school, it was in the bottom 5% by results. I was the only boy to go to university or sixth form. In fact more went to prison. That was not because I was brightest, but because I had odds stacked in my favour. Some of the parents of the people I grew up with had learning difficulties, for example. It was just far more difficult for them to get the sort of support that others from middle class professional backgrounds are privileged enough to benefit from.
Q277 Chair: I am just trying to get at the behaviours and whether there are different behaviours, and whether we can identify that, and, if so, do anything about it.
Professor Mongon: There are two things happening there. One is that immigrant communities do not have the historical narrative of “education has not worked for us”. It did not matter that education did not work for us in the 1950s and 1960s. There might have been an ethical problem, but it was not a practical problem because there were jobs to go into. Where I come from, on Humberside, if you are living on the edge of a council estate—
Chair: There is no Humberside.
Professor Mongon: There is no Humberside; Yorkshire and Humberside.
Chair: East Yorkshire or North Lincolnshire, whichever one it was.
Professor Mongon: Okay, I was born and brought up in Goole, and went to secondary school in Hull. If you are living in some of those areas, there is now a historical narrative that education does not work. More importantly, whatever our national narrative about immigration is, the fact of the matter is if you get you and your kids into this country, if you have hiked your way across Somalia to get here, if you have hiked your way across Europe to get here, you are not a typical family. You have got some bite about you.
Q278 Chair: I was just trying to unpick the behaviours, because we need a balance of Owen’s points about housing and poverty and the issues of good behaviours; if we get those both right—
Professor Mongon: I think that gives you the drive to try to understand those behaviours; you get on your kids’ backs in a different kind of way.
Alex Burghart: I would certainly agree with what Denis has just said. What we are talking about is parental engagement in education. That often comes from one’s own experience of education and the workplace, and whether you have faith in the power of education to be transformative. A challenge for a lot of schools is obviously reaching out to those parents who had negative experiences both of education and employment, and persuading them that things can work this time round. There are some schools that do this well. There are means of both showing children that school is worthwhile, and showing parents that it is worthwhile. Some schools are achieving great things by going about things this way.
Q279 Ian Mearns: Just over 20 years ago, in Gateshead, less than a third of the kids were achieving five good A* to Cs. That means that 70% of the kids did not. Those 70% are part of a population who are now in their mid-30s, and they have quite often got kids of their own who are coming up to their own GCSEs. The trouble is all too often I come across parents who see no value in education, having failed in the system themselves. Of course, those same parents, because of their own lack of educational achievement, have got far less capability of supporting their own children through the homework process. Is that not a big factor for an awful lot of these communities?
Alex Burghart: Of course it is. It is a huge factor, but you have to take it in stages. If you persuade parents that homework is worthwhile doing, even if they do not feel they can help with the quadratic equations, they can still help to try to create an environment and a structure in which the homework will be done.
Chair: Turn the telly off.
Alex Burghart: And explaining that it is important to do it. That is the first thing that schools can do, but obviously some parents will be able to give their children additional help by helping with the homework itself.
Q280 Ian Mearns: Additionally, we have now got a situation in the north-east of England where we are approaching 25% youth unemployment, for 16-to-25-year-olds. For youngsters who are struggling in schools and have got this kind of family background, that hope and expectation thing becomes even more difficult given the local economic situation as well.
Alex Burghart: Absolutely.
Chris Wellings: It is not always about highly intensive support. We have a programme called Families and Schools Together, and we know what parents want. There might be a “how do we do it?” gap, but they want the best for their children. That programme again comes back to this building cultural capacity. It is not about targeting particular families; it is about whole-year groups coming along—families, schools, communities, managers of local football teams, vicars—coming together at the start of primary school and spending time with their children in the school environment to try to knock down those barriers. We have a graduation session after eight weeks; the parents come along and they make graduation—caps and gowns. The parents are hugely proud, so what you have got there are parents with a real burning ambition for their children to do well. It is not about a big intensive programme; it is about building that capacity in the community.
Q281 Mr Ward: David Jones was before us, who is a head teacher in Bradford. In 1980 I was a councillor for that ward, and in the 1980s there was no male unemployment. In 1985 there was 70% male unemployment as the local factories closed down. That is the area that Dave represents. He made a comment about it not just being about education, but about all of us not accepting the type of coverage that the working class families and people get. I just wonder to what extent you think that is true. I know you have written extensively on it, but what impact do you think this portrayal of the working class has on them, and also the people they come into contact with when they are going for an interview or applying for university?
Owen Jones: Do not, as a Committee, take this as a criticism, but even the terminology you are using here is problematic: “white working class”. Firstly, I do not like the term. For a long time there was this idea that the working class no longer exists, and that we are all middle class now. Then it re-emerged in a racial form, and it was this idea that in a multicultural society, the white working class is a besieged ethnic minority competing with other minorities. According to the last British Social Attitudes survey, six out of 10 people think they are working class. What you are talking about here are pupils who are white who are on free school meals. You are talking about poorer kids.
The reason it is also problematic is we have some of the highest levels of interethnic relationships in the world, and those tend to happen in working class communities more often than middle class communities. Suburbs are more likely to be white than inner-city working class areas, but no one ever talks about the white middle class. I just find the whole terminology problematic. The problem we have is the airbrushing out of existence of the reality of the modern working class. It is very rarely shown on television, and when you do get either positive portrayals of middle class families or often grotesque extreme caricatures on the other end, the extent to which people internalise that is something that needs to be looked at.
I speak at a lot of schools, and it seems to me anecdotally that does have an impact. Barnardo’s have looked at how young people are portrayed. Generally when working class young people are portrayed, it is as social problems to be contained, as threats, antisocial behaviour, feral youths and all that sort of thing. That does genuinely have an impact on people’s esteem. That is something that has to be looked at. What is more problematic is that the reality is airbrushed and therefore the actual issues are not properly addressed because we have such a misleading picture in the mainstream.
Q282 Mr Ward: Coronation Street is highly moralistic and—
Owen Jones: Coronation Street I do not think is—again, EastEnders is fascinating, really. There are quite a lot of interesting pieces about it.
Q283 Chair: Owen, not that this is not fascinating, but this is not an academic seminar, notwithstanding some of my own contributions and questions in it. We always have to remind ourselves that the business end of what we do is recommendations to Government, so not exploring this other stuff. We have to keep coming back to what we can do, even in a small way, creating an improvement, and make things better.
Q284 Ian Mearns: Can I take issue with something Owen said, though? He said what we are talking about here is kids who are on free school meals. No, we are not. Where you have concentrations of youngsters who are entitled to free school meals, you have living and working with them, cheek by jowl, lots of kids who are not entitled to free school meals but whose family income is not far above the threshold. Therefore we are talking about those kids as well.
Owen Jones: Okay, fair enough. Just in terms of the recommendations, what we need is to change the debate in terms of the way we get the representation of working class people. It comes back to actually having those voices in the mainstream media, and that means taking on things like unpaid internships and other barriers which turn those sorts of sectors into closed shops.
Q285 Chair: Are you certain that is the right answer? A tiny minority, but unpaid internships in the last Parliament included someone who would work flat out for two years from a working class background in the north-east, who then saved up in order to come and intern with me. Now you watch the doors closing, and the only people who will get in here are either the small number who get paid or the people who come in, friends of friends, and ask if they can have a couple of weeks. At that point, it could be that the anti-unpaid intern creates a filter that blocks access.
Alex Cunningham: We should certainly have bigger budgets in order to be able to pay interns.
Chair: That is true. I recognise the tensions.
Owen Jones: You might get minorities who can afford to do that, but it is very difficult.
Q286 Siobhain McDonagh: The issue might not be paid and unpaid internships; it is the fact that some kids do not even realise that there is such a thing as internships, and how they assist. So it has not even got to the stage of—
Owen Jones: In the media, people have to work for free often for months without even getting a job at the end of it. On top of that you have the decline of local newspapers, which were apprenticeships effectively for aspiring journalists, and the emphasis on expensive postgraduate qualifications from the likes of City University. It is very difficult for an aspiring journalist from a non-privileged background—I am not even talking about working class backgrounds—to get in, and that distorts media coverage; of course it does.
Q287 Alex Cunningham: What are we going to do about the 14-year-old who has been disconnected, losing hope, losing aspirations, the stuff that Denis spoke about? What are your recommendations that we should be doing? It is all very well saying the Government can allow areas to experiment, but what should we actually recommend the Government to do to help those 14-year-olds and turn them back on to education or prevent them from turning off?
Professor Mongon: That is a question about what is the nature of the experiment, though; that would vary from area to area. There are now a number of experiments going on. There is one that is being very considerably funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, looking at project-based learning, which is rooted in the local community activity. That experiment has struggled to recruit sufficient schools because the schools are nervous about what will happen if our accountability slips, because we might not do so well in our five A* to C, but we might be better in other ways.
Q288 Alex Cunningham: Denis, we have experimented for donkeys’ years trying different things under different Governments, different leadership models and all manner of things. There must be something out there that is working for young people that we could recommend.
Professor Mongon: I think in previous sessions you have covered that ground. One is that we need to do intervention, and we know what kind of interventions work in the early years. We need to provide the teaching profession with a set of skills, which we have not yet provided them with. We need to focus on their professional development, and I think Kevan Collins spoke at length about that requirement. We need to help teachers to work with these youngsters so the gap does not expand. We need to look very carefully at how we organise primary and secondary transfer, because some places do that very well. We need to think about how we deploy our most effective leaders. The evidence for how schools are single units or groups of units can make a difference. It is there; it just needs applying. What you then get up against is the glass ceiling of the economy, poverty and other factors that we have begun to talk about that you need to connect with. But the evidence for what you need to do is there. If you need a note, I will write you a note.
Q289 Pat Glass: I agree with you. We know the things that make a difference: good teaching and good leadership. When this Committee went to Singapore, we saw the system there, which we were always told we should learn from. Head teachers there do not apply for jobs; they are allocated. They are like your John Lewis; the Government decides, “We need this kind of head teacher here; that is where you are going after your next three years are up.” Would you be saying to this Committee that we need to have something in place to direct the best teachers and the best leaders to the most challenging areas?
Professor Mongon: You need something in place that is not operated by national Government that works at some more local and perhaps regional level.
Q290 Pat Glass: Paying off their tuition fees: ‘We need you to go there so we will pay off your tuition fees”.
Professor Mongon: I avoided the word “direct” because I do not think that culturally we can get anywhere near that point very quickly.
Q291 Chair: Teach First does it. If you sign up to Teach First you undertake to go to any region that they say.
Professor Mongon: But you have to sign up to do that. The next two generations of head teachers and school leaders did not sign up to a profession in which they would be directed to where they would go. It would be a massive, massive difference.
Chair: Singapore is a small island.
Q292 Pat Glass: I am not talking about direction. The levers are not in place at the moment to make it available.
Professor Mongon: Absolutely, there needs to be levers, and some of those levers would be inducement. I remember being in Australia for a short while, and you could not make career progress in Sydney unless you had spent a time in an outback school, because they needed people to do that training. Why should that not be part of our cultural expectation? We need to look at how you do it, and we might move towards more direction, but I think inducement would get better people there.
Q293 Pat Glass: Yes. So looking at inducements to get the best people into the jobs. We would be interested in any inducements that you want to let us have, so if you want to write to us and let us know what the inducements should be.
Professor Mongon: It is not always cash. The idea that any Secretary of State would know what was the best head teacher for any school is not one we would want to entertain.
Q294 Pat Glass: That is one part of the equation, but I was interested in what you had to say: that for a working class kid to do well they have got to leave their communities and their friends behind. We had a discussion at the last hearing about “working classness”, and the way in which our schools are full of middle class teachers trying to rescue working class children, and the lack of respect for that “working classness”. How much of the culture and ethos within our schools that does not respect working class children has an impact on this, and what can we do to change it?
Professor Mongon: There is a thread of research that shows that there is a seam of low expectation in the profession, but again, it is not universal so we have to avoid tarnishing the whole profession. This is about the professional development of teachers. We have to say, “If we offer you these skills, the evidence is that these skills in other places have dealt with this issue”. We have got to raise that skill and expectation base. You do not train a dog well by banging it on the nose with a stick; you train it well by giving it rewards and inducements. I do not want to make a direct comparison—I have suddenly realised I am in a hole and digging—but beating people up is not going to work in the end.
Q295 Chair: We have got four minutes and we have got four of you—about a minute each—so just final thoughts.
Alex Burghart: More working class teachers. Teach First is very good at taking graduates out and spreading them round the country. Why do we not have more projects that are home-grown, local talent and keeping them in the area, deploying them in our schools?
Chris Wellings: How children do educationally is shaped by their family, school and community at all different stages of their childhood. We need a holistic response that gives children the support services, the opportunities, the support networks and the enrichment they need in a comprehensive way. It needs to be localised and tailored, and we should be trying to do that in some specific communities.
Professor Mongon: The function of central Government above all should be to do no harm, and it often does. It should set a very strong, clear, purposeful, strategic direction and a set of expectations, and then it should avoid tinkering in the detail of curriculum pedagogy or local governance arrangements.
Owen Jones: Far more resources for early-years and nursery education, particularly to narrow the vocabulary gap. In terms of a holistic approach, it has to deal with housing, diet, and the stresses that poverty can put on some people’s lives—obviously that differs—instead of the constant focus on school structure, which I think successive Governments have done. You have to look at the broader factors if we are going to address the educational inequalities that just reflect the social inequalities.
Q296 Chair: One word that has not been used in the whole of today is “parenting”—parenting classes, preparation of parents better able to support their children, giving them an understanding of what it is they need to do and how they do it. Any thoughts on that?
Owen Jones: Again, what you are getting at is that one of the big problems is parents leaving televisions on too much and that sort of thing. When we have an increase in overcrowding, which is going on at the moment, hundreds of thousands of children are living in overcrowded homes. There is nowhere for them to study. Things like that are the issues that are helping to drive educational inequality. When we have a society where even the birth weight of children differs according to how rich their parents are, that just shows how entrenched inequality is in this society. Educational inequality reflects that.
Q297 Chair: Children on free school meals who are Chinese do better at maths than rich white children. That is not to say that you do not have a substantive and valid point. It is just that if we only bemoan the fact that the poor are with us, and we do not provide them with the tools to understand that they can do more than they realise—it is self-empowerment we need to provide, and we need to do that in a way that is not patronising and that is ground-up. How do we do that? That is what I am trying to get at. I am not trying to demonise people who leave the telly on. If they do not know how damaging it is because no one tells them, and they do not know how important two hours’ extra homework every fortnight is, and would in fact make it 40% more likely that your kid will get a pass in the GCSEs, or whatever the facts may be, if we do not challenge that then we are not serving those communities very well.
Owen Jones: It does go back to cultural capital again. Obviously poorer Chinese children are likely to do worse than a middle class Chinese British student, for example. So class always comes in, regardless of which group you are looking at. If you come from, for example, an immigrant family background, where they may, as Professor Mongon talked about, have travelled huge, vast areas of land, or may themselves come from a relatively middle class background. Cultural capital is a huge factor, and that is one of the things I have talked about. Of course, that can be a factor when you are looking at particular ethnic groups, even if their children are poor.
Q298 Pat Glass: Can I just say, Chair, that ethnicity can be very misleading. I worked in an authority that was a gateway authority. We took immigrants, assessed them, and then moved them out. Those kids were raising our SATs results. The first people out of any conflict are the able and the skilled, so it is wrong to assume that—
Q299 Chair: The point is they are in the same circumstances as the white working class indigenous population, but their behaviours mean that, despite all the issues that do afflict them, just as they afflict others, they manage through behaviours to support their children to do better.
Owen Jones: With more cultural capital. As we say, it is the more able and skilled who end up coming here. They have more cultural capital—I know it is an annoying phrase—but they are able to transmit to their kids in a way which other people are not, even if they are superficially in the same economic background in this country.
Q300 Chair: The final word, Denis.
Professor Mongon: I will reference an early-years project that was sponsored by Reading Borough Council and the Innovation Unit, which is in exactly the territory that you are in. My final word is that Sir Michael Marmot’s health inequalities review made two really important points in its conclusions that are relevant to this Committee. One is you will not close this gap entirely, but it does not need to be as big as it is. The second is that the things that will have the highest leverage will not be things that only improve the attainment of the lowest attaining groups; they will be things that will improve the entire system.
Chair: An excellent note on which to end. Thank you all very much. If you have any further thoughts, particularly around recommendations, please do send us an email, however short, to prompt us. Thank you.
Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727 2