Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
Oral evidence: The social impact of participation in culture and sport, HC 734
Wednesday 14 November 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 14 November 2018.
Members present: Damian Collins (Chair); Clive Efford; Julie Elliott; Paul Farrelly; Giles Watling.
Questions 228 - 270
Witnesses
I: Naveed Idrees, Headteacher, Feversham Primary Academy, Debbie Lye, Chief Executive, Spirit of 2012 Trust, and Helen O'Donnell, Chief Executive, Children's University.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Naveed Idrees, Debbie Lye and Helen O'Donnell.
Q228 Chair: Good afternoon. I call to order this meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee as part of our inquiry into the social impact of culture and sport. I would like to thank the witnesses for giving up their time to come and give evidence to us today. My apologies for the slightly late start. Unfortunately, we had a certain amount of private business for the Committee to settle first.
When we initiated this inquiry, we were interested to learn more about the positive examples of people creating interventions through culture and sport to change lives. We have looked at examples of that with regards to health and the justice system, and we are today principally interested in looking at positive interventions in the world of education. If I could start with Naveed Idrees to ask about your experience with your school. Can you tell us why you decided to make this big intervention through music, not only the opportunities for young people to engage with music directly but also in making music part of the curriculum more broadly within the school?
Naveed Idrees: I will give a bit of background about the school and why we did what we did. The school had been in a category for over 20 years, so for 20 years whatever we were trying was not working. The children were disengaged, the teachers were miserable and the community was aloof, so trying the same thing again and again did not make any sense at all. We decided to turn the curriculum on its head. Basically we said what children need is life experiences and that needs to be built around something they enjoy, something they can engage with.
If you formally focus on just English and maths the children might be able to write in a mechanical fashion or do mathematical sums in a mechanical way but they will not have a deep understanding. The idea was that English and maths are tools and the content is the arts, music, drama and the humanities. We decided to change the way we look at the curriculum and we said there is no such thing as core subjects and foundation subjects. It is all learning and the core subjects, English and maths, need to be taught through an interesting way.
Children come to our school with very little life experience, with little or no English, from deprived areas of housing and health. There is only 6% of tertiary education, so the differentiation is quite high.
We started with the question: what do these children need? What they needed was to be engaged and music was the vehicle we used because music allows children to see pattern and rhythm. It allows them to engage at a deeper level. We wanted the children to access something beyond the physical. Music is something that allows people to connect on a deeper level. If you are delivering a curriculum that is purely based on English and maths as the core subjects, without any other enrichment, children will hate learning. They might pass their SATs but they will hate learning and there is no joy of learning there.
We asked ourselves two fundamental questions. The first one was: what does it mean to be a child; is the child just a body and brain or does a child have a soul and a spirt as well? The second question was: what is the point of education; is the point just for them to pass the SATs or is it to prepare them for life?
We have gone back to the spirit of the national curriculum. When the national curriculum started the aim was to have a broad and balanced curriculum that caters for the social, moral, cultural, spiritual and mental development of children. That has not changed. That is the core purpose even in the new curriculum that came out in 2013. That was enshrined in the Education Act 2002 where in section 79 the Secretary of State has a duty to make sure that those elements that I have just outlined are implemented.
The system, the regulatory framework, measures only two subjects in the primary curriculum. There are 11 subjects in the primary curriculum and we only measure two. That sends the wrong message out to schools, to leaders, and that means what is important is what is measured. There are others subjects that are important. They are not measured in SATs but they are absolutely important.
It is important to go back to the spirit of the national curriculum and to enshrine it. I will say more later about what the barriers are to schools implementing a rich, broader, balanced curriculum and the links that it has with pupil’s mental wellbeing and also the implications that arise for the way we are teaching for the age of artificial intelligence, which is fast growing upon us.
Q229 Chair: You said that the approach was about educating the whole child and not focusing just on the results, but in taking that approach you also dramatically improved the results.
Naveed Idrees: Yes. We have gone from being in the bottom of the league table to being in the top 1%. We say to our staff that if you have a rich and connected curriculum the results will take care of themselves. That is a risk to take.
Q230 Chair: Looking at the school now compared with the school as it was, if someone asked you what has changed, would you say the change has been the focus on music through the curriculum?
Naveed Idrees: Yes. What has changed is basically we are providing a curriculum that meets the needs of the children and sees them as human beings and not just numbers in a statistical game. We enriched our teachers as well, so the focus is—when children come at age two and three into our school it is very heavy in music. Music lays the foundations of the learning skills. In our school, children can sit in an hour-and-a-half assembly, music related, with complete focus and concentration. Yet these children have such a small attention span as the digital generation, in terms of speed, so it was not just music. There was the wider curriculum. We have employed specialists—a drama specialist, dance specialist, music specialist, DT specialist—who work on only a part-time basis but they add value to the curriculum.
This raises an issue of funding as well. How do you finance all this? In my experience, it is possible within existing constraints to provide an enriched curriculum but it is how you stack your staffing, your curriculum and your budget.
Q231 Chair: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the decisions you have had to make about funding? My understanding is that in making this change you have done it within the budget that the school had.
Naveed Idrees: Yes. For example, we have a very small leadership team and we focused more on developing middle leaders. We have a very small leadership team and you can make massive savings there. If you develop your middle leaders, if you make a saving of one assistant head—a lot of schools our size have two assistant heads or three assistant heads. We just have one assistant head. We have distributed all the other functions to young teachers, new teachers, so they get experience in the leadership area. That is one aspect where you can save money, where you can redistribute it.
Another area is teaching assistants. Rather than having lots and lots of teaching assistants, I would rather employ a part-time specialist, which equates roughly to the same amount and that adds value. A lot of schools have been over-reliant on teaching assistants and there is a lot of debate now about the impact of having additional adults. Are they there for the teachers or are they there for the children? One of the things is we have reduced our teaching assistants but we have replaced them with specialists. It is cost-neutral but has a massive impact on teachers.
The thing you have to remember is that when primary school teachers are being trained, they will spend 90% of their time on English, maths and science. They will get half an hour for music and that is it, they are ready to teach music. They will get half an hour for the other specialist subjects. That is part of the problem.
You cannot expect to have an enriched curriculum if our initial teacher training programmes do not train the teachers to deliver that. We have overcome that by employing specialists who support teachers on a weekly basis with a plan. They will look at the curriculum and say, “How can we bring in music? How can we bring in drama? How can we bring in dance into the curriculum?” We plan as a whole school in one sitting. The specialists have to be there and they add value. Teachers get weekly CPD in the specialist areas that otherwise they would never get in a primary school.
Q232 Chair: Are they specialist music teachers or are they teachers with more—
Naveed Idrees: No, they are not teachers. They do not have class responsibility. Their sole role is to enrich the curriculum by supporting the teachers and coming up with creative ways of delivering English and maths through a content or theme of a specialist subject.
Q233 Chair: So they may be musicians themselves?
Naveed Idrees: They are. To give an example, my music teacher was an A-level music teacher. Sadly, most of the people I have recruited have all been secondary because it is rare to find specialists in primary. That again goes back to the way the initial teacher training programme is set up. Even many universities do not offer the specialisms anymore for primary teachers. They do not exist. On a side note, in the secondary it is also dwindling. I recently appointed a drama teacher because she was made redundant from a secondary school. I have recruited her because she can add great value to our curriculum.
Q234 Chair: Helen O’Donnell, what do you make of the approach that has been set out?
Helen O'Donnell: I am very interested in what Naveed said because a couple of things absolutely resonate with Children’s University and why Children’s University was established, which is about adding that value to what happens in school.
Children’s University had similar beginnings, in that it was very much centred on a community. It grew out of Handsworth in Birmingham and it was very much centred around issues in that community pertaining to low attainment, low aspiration for the future, low community aspirations and familial aspirations for young people, and a lot of disengagement of young people at primary school from their formal education.
It grew out of recognising that children spend a very small percentage of their life learning in a classroom and everything they do outside has learning opportunities in it and opportunity for the development of skills. That can add value to what formally happens in a classroom.
Added to that is also what Naveed said about the joy of learning and Children’s University was established in an attempt to make learning fun again. We talk a lot in terms of the work that we do about learning by stealth, so encouraging young people. We work with very young people from the age of five to 14, encouraging them to go out, try new things, open their eyes to new things, broaden their minds, get them doing a variety of things. We talk about being thematically agnostic because we want to place equal value on lots of activities and get children doing that because we know that that goes on and has a knock-on impact on their attainment and their aspiration for the future.
It was established very much as a social mobility tool in a particular local community and then it got taken as a model to similar communities around the country—places like Doncaster, Sefton, Hull—and it has grown from there. But it is very much as Naveed said, coming from the same sort of place and the same sort of drive.
Q235 Chair: Debbie Lye, you heard the case that Naveed has set out. Do you see similar positive case studies, using either cultural or sporting programmes, that have been successfully introduced into schools and have had a material outcome in improving not just the wellbeing of the children but their attainment as well?
Debbie Lye: The first thing I would like to say is that Naveed’s school is absolutely inspirational as a case study, brilliant. One of the charitable objects of Spirit of 2012, and when we started in 2013 it was in our trust deed, is the education and development of young people through, but not exclusively in, culture and the arts and sport, including their leadership development. What we then wanted to do was put some flesh on the bones of that. We did quite an extensive consultation exercise with our board and about 36 stakeholder organisations, including representatives of some of the Government Departments. We invited the Department for Education but they did not send anyone to the conversation.
In theory, that is what we do. We have funded a few initiatives that happened within schools, but by and large we have steered clear of that. That is partly a result of what we heard in the consultation, that it is increasingly difficult for charities and third-sector organisations to work in schools and influence schools because the schools that are most in need of enriching their curricula often do not have an inspirational headteacher like Naveed. They do not have the head space to think, “How do we take on board this new organisation coming in? We have to think about safeguarding and protection. We have to think about making space in the school day, and what about our test results?” It is difficult to get in from the outside.
I was formerly a civil servant and I worked in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the formulation of the school sport strategy during the era when there were specialist sports colleges. I do know that within those networks—in sport and the arts—that results did improve considerably. Obviously we are in a different world now. We do not have that underpinning network and so we have to do what we can.
In the projects where we have been able to get into schools we are seeing some positive change around perceptions of disability. We have done projects with the British Paralympic Association where they did a torch relay event in 2016, the year of Rio. They got sneak previews of the Paralympic torch that nobody had seen, and they took them to 97 schools around England, Scotland and Wales and combined that with a workshop on the Paralympic movement. They asked children what they expected in certain areas and they did make them think. Then they did torch relays around their own school neighbourhoods and grounds. That was a one-off intervention but it did have a significant impact on people’s perceptions of disabled people and what they could achieve.
We also have a project called Emerge that we are currently running in 12 towns—quite small towns in the east and west midlands—with a delivery partner called the Mighty Creatives, which is the east midlands arts bridge organisation. They work in places like Walsall and Sandwell in Wolverhampton. We do not have a final report yet but there is good anecdotal evidence coming in about the impact on children and young people who felt isolated or friendless. There was one boy who was home-schooled because he was ill but the sessions were on school premises after school time, so they managed to get him to go to that.
These children are engaging with Shakespeare. This was the sort of project that was designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The idea was that artists in residence would go into schools and get young people to engage in themes within Shakespeare plays that are relevant to their times and then put on a festival in April each year. One of the teachers from Walsall said to us that his students would never, ever have met someone who works in a creative career if they had not had that writer in their school, let alone doing the festivals and the pride they get from that. It is that sense of empowerment and doing something different that they never imagined before. I am sorry that there is less room for that in the curriculum but it is quite hard to do it as an outsider looking in.
Q236 Giles Watling: It fascinates me. It is a positive story, Naveed, that is coming out. Working within the school funding formula you seem to have had some creative thinking, thinking outside the box, and you have got children to engage in music, culture, the arts. What I want to drill down to is: how do you think that works with the kids themselves? What is it that makes their performance in the more classic academic subjects improve as a result of that engagement with the arts?
Naveed Idrees: There are a number of studies now that show that there is the transferability effect. Children learn through art, music and drama, and those can be transferred. To give you a couple of examples, in phonics or learning language, children pick up that awareness in music very early on and they can follow the beats and the rhythm, they can see patterns, and that lays a foundation for music as well. That also lays another aspect, which is intuitive learning. If you drill down only on formal English and maths you destroy the ability for children to think intuitively. We have a resident drama teacher who also focuses on Shakespeare and so on, and that allows children to open up the deep aspects of themselves. They have a deeper understanding of concept.
What can happen in a formal system is they have surface level understanding. I will give an example. If you have never had an experience of a particular topic and I stand up and start teaching that, if you cannot link it with any reference point in your experience it is just surface level learning. What we try to do is 70% of our curriculum is taught through context, through a topic, through themes, and 30% is discrete. We moved away from this idea where you focus on learning objectives, itemise learning objectives. We are focusing on skill. We are not teaching children to write adverbs; we are teaching them to become writers.
Part of the issue is that national strategies deskilled our teachers. Teachers became accustomed to being given plans and delivering. They became postmen and just delivered the curriculum. They cannot create the curriculum. They cannot get a unit and work in sequences and put it together. That was one of the biggest challenges that we had when we moved towards this. Our teachers had the biggest panic, “How are we going to do this? We need to be told what to do.” That is a legacy of the—
Q237 Giles Watling: Was this something you had predicted and you knew was going to happen or it is a by-product?
Naveed Idrees: No, it happened by chance. It unfolded organically. We knew that what we were doing where we had boosters before breakfast, boosters at lunchtime, boosters after school—the kids were boosted out of their heads and it was not working. They hated it. Primary school should be the best time of your life and it was not.
I do not want to see children hate learning. Effectively, what has happened is if you talk to any headteacher they want to take a corrective approach but there are barriers within their infrastructure. To pick up Debbie’s point, arts organisations and news organisations find it very difficult to get a foot in the door in schools because they are at the mercy of the headteachers. That should not be the case.
Q238 Giles Watling: Here is the important question that I wanted to come to on this. Your example clearly is working. How do we now promote that to other schools? How do we now sell that idea and move it on?
Naveed Idrees: There are different levels. One is at the level of school headteachers and, more importantly, it is at the level of the regulatory framework. At this moment, the regulatory framework is balanced towards testing. We measure only two subjects in the primary curriculum and that suggests that that is what is important.
Ofsted—Amanda Spielman and Sean Harford—have moved in the right direction recently. When they inspect schools now they will be looking at the wider curriculum, which is absolutely fantastic. However, there is a bigger systemic barrier here, which is that if you are only reporting on SATs you are sending a message out that other subjects are not important. You are also steeling leadership teams to make decisions because it is such a high stakes system. If your test results are poor, the entire force of the system descends upon you completely.
We need to encourage schools and reward schools that have enriched curriculums. The best way to do that would be to introduce a measure of the wider curriculum. For a school to be great and awesome and outstanding, they would have to have great standards in the league tables and test results, but equally they would have to have a great curriculum score as well.
I am not advocating that we assess every single subject but what I am suggesting is that we look at the indicators. You walk into a school and you can tell whether they have enriched curriculum or not. You can see how much time they spend outside the classroom, whether they are going on residentials, getting involved in charities, getting involved in performances.
Giles Watling: Like the university coming out—
Naveed Idrees: You can tell. It is about looking at the indicators of an enriched curriculum. Indicators are separate. They are different from a measure. Clouds are an indicator. They do not mean it is going to rain but they are an indicator. Similarly, if you identify indicators and you quantify them into a score, on a systemic level that would empower organisations, like yourselves. If your curriculum score is low, then the headteacher will buy you in to come and—
Q239 Giles Watling: I get that. I do not want to ask a leading question but are there other benefits? For instance, we worry about children getting involved at very young ages in gangs.
Naveed Idrees: Absolutely.
Giles Watling: Bullying. I know that by getting involved in drama children are interacting with each other on a completely other level. Are there other benefits that you can identify?
Naveed Idrees: Massive. For example, music and drama are social activities so they increase this awareness among children of how to respect each other, how to have empathy. We were in special measures and our behaviour was just atrocious. We are in a very crime-heavy area and children have siblings who are in and out of prison and so on, and yet if you came into our school now you would not even notice. That is because the children get involved at a deeper level and engage more. It is not something that is just at surface level.
This links with the wider point. If you look at mental wellbeing, if you are not fulfilled and all you are doing is just formal learning, you are not fulfilled. That will lead to those connected behaviours that you are indicating.
Q240 Giles Watling: Has it had an effect on attendance?
Naveed Idrees: Our attendance used to be about 92% and now it is 98%, consistent for the last three, four years. That is one measure that I look at when I go into different schools. You can tell how good a school is by looking at just one figure, the attendance figure—do children enjoy coming into school—and that is the important figure.
If I could add a bit on the mental wellbeing aspect, there should be a study to look at schools that are providing such a dry curriculum, a narrow curriculum, and impact on pupil wellbeing. If you look at the figures that are coming out, one in 10 children are suffering from some kind of mental illness, clinically diagnosable illness, and that number is rising and rising and rising. I would suggest that that is because those children are not fulfilled. They are not connecting at a deeper level to the high aspects of the human soul, which is arts and drama, and what those aspects allow you.
I will go back to that the first word in the national curriculum is the spiritual aspects of education. We have completely ignored that. It is not because headteachers in schools do not do it. It is because the system is leaning on its side at the moment and everybody is dragged down to the side of testing. On the enriched curriculum, what Ofsted is doing now is commendable but every four years, and for outstanding schools every six years, is not enough. There has to be an annual reporting of the curriculum. There should be a survey that is done at the end of year 6 or every key stage to look at pupil engagement.
There is one group that is missing from our assessment framework, our regulatory framework, and that is the pupils. There is no pupil voice in our regulatory framework. There should be a survey: what is your experience as a child of your curriculum?
Q241 Giles Watling: But you would agree there would have to be tests somewhere along the line?
Naveed Idrees: Of course. This is the thing. I am a realist. There is no political will to get rid of SATs. Keep them. Absolutely fine; you need a measure. What I am saying is that the quality measure of SATs alone is very crude to look at the impact and work of a school. It is a very small aspect. At the moment, it is skewing what should be happening in the national curriculum offer and the spirit of the national curriculum.
Q242 Julie Elliott: I am very interested in funding of education. Helen, how much of your work with schools is funded by the sport and PE premium?
Helen O'Donnell: Some of it. It is quite difficult. For me it is who you trust to know exactly how that funding is funded, because we work through partner organisations nationally and they work directly with the school. But we do have evidence that elements of it are funded through pupil premium and the sports premium as well.
Q243 Julie Elliott: Do you think that is reaching the children that need that funding most?
Helen O'Donnell: No.
Q244 Julie Elliott: What would you do differently?
Helen O'Donnell: There is a real issue here, particularly with the Children’s University, of schools either being able to resource it or seeing the value in resourcing it. The thing that we come up against constantly is the budget pressures that schools are under. It is a cost pressure. Quite often it is seen as a nice extra thing to do, but it is not a core thing that we need to fund. There is a cost pressure. There is a resource pressure because with any intervention, like Children’s University, it requires some staffing and some admin support to motivate the children to do it, to get the momentum, to be encouraging them, to be creating after-school extracurricular provision in and around school, to be finding things in the local community that children can do. There is a resource capacity for that.
What tends to happen is that the schools generally that see a value in doing that are probably good or outstanding, so they have the freedom to say, “We see the value and we can understand that, and we can commit resource to it”. We strive to work as much as possible to get to children who face barriers to accessing these opportunities, whether that be geographic disadvantage, economic disadvantage, whether they are looked-after children or whether they are in a rural area and do not have access to a lot of cultural or sporting things around them. How do you get them to those things?
If schools are struggling, are under pressure, are in special measures or they require improvement, their budget constraints and resource constraints are such that they cannot imagine taking it on. It is too big a thing for something that potentially is going to have an impact on attainment. We have had that evidence through the Education Endowment Foundation evaluation that was done over two years across Children’s University, and was done in disadvantaged areas. That was done in Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Lancashire, Blackburn and Derby. That gave us the evidence that said that this does have an impact on attainment. After two years those pupils improved in maths and reading by at least two months, and children on free school meals have improved a further month in maths. They were closing that gap by around three months.
But if you are under so much pressure and so much budget constraint and you do not have the resource to give to it, you are not going to stand up and do it because you are under pressure. Naveed and I were talking outside and Naveed said, “We, as a school, did Children’s University for a year but then we could not carry on with it”.
Q245 Julie Elliott: Naveed, your school sounds fascinating, the changes you have made, but do you think an arts equivalent to the ring-fence funding of the sport and PE premium would be a good idea?
Naveed Idrees: There is a wide issue that includes the sports fund premium, the pupil premium and also the music hub money that came in. They are all premised on a model that cannot work. The model is that they are add-ons into school. If the infrastructure in schools is not there, it does not matter how many people come in, how much money you throw at it, it will not continue. The model that should be there is that you should be building capacity within schools. For example, the music hubs have had millions since 2010. We benefited marginally from them but what we did instead is we appointed a part-time music specialist, which was much cheaper. If, for instance, they had said, “Okay, we are just going to give one part-time music specialist to every primary school in the country”, that would have been cheaper and more effective because what that teacher is then doing is creating the infrastructure and creating the capacity within the school to do that.
Q246 Julie Elliott: But are there enough music teachers to be able to do that?
Naveed Idrees: There might not be but maybe that is an issue to look at in terms of what I mentioned earlier about initial teacher training. That is an issue of trying to find musicians. There are musicians who are great at their job but they cannot work with children. We have had that experience as well. Most of the people that I am recruiting are from secondary because they have specialisms.
This goes back to your question about how effective. It is not just about giving money to schools. It is about creating the need and the accountability in schools to promote the arts. If all that is being measured is your English and maths, where is the will going to come from leadership teams to do that?
Secondly, I know schools where they have a good music teacher that they are just mad on. In our school my music teacher has clout and he can tell the kids what to do because I have given him permission to do that, and I will support him, back him on that. But if you have a system where the headteacher does not support that it does not matter how great the music teacher is, it does not matter. The analogy I give is if the bus is heading in the wrong direction it does not matter how many talented people you get on to that bus it is not going to make a change. You need to change direction.
There is a real issue here that policymakers will create a measure that measures a wider curriculum and that will create a need in leadership teams to say, “We need to improve our curriculum score and therefore we need to do that” and then create infrastructure. If the infrastructure in schools does not exist, you are throwing money down the hole because as soon as that money goes it disappears. Also you are creating a dependency culture. You are saying somebody is going to come in and do this for you rather than building your own capacity internally.
Q247 Julie Elliott: You have said in a media interview that you use pupil premium money to fund a full-time music teacher. What made you decide to use the finding in that way, because that is quite unusual?
Naveed Idrees: Yes. It is part of pupil premium money, not entirely. The reason for that is that the value the music teacher is adding to my school is amazing in terms of SEN children. We have just finished a study with Edinburgh University on dyslexia and music, how music helps children with dyslexia. The behaviour, the enrichment and music brings communities together. We have over 32 languages being spoken and we have great communication in our school, and that is partly down to music, where music brings people together. I can demonstrate the impact on school life because of music, because of drama, therefore I invest in those areas and my budget indicates that.
Q248 Julie Elliott: You said earlier that you choose to spend the money on these specialist teachers rather than teaching assistants and other things. Has that had any impact on your class sizes? What is your average class size? Do you have any mixed-age-range classes or are they all single academic year classes?
Naveed Idrees: They are single academic year classes and at the moment we have classes of between 28 and 34. But in my experience class size does not matter. What matters is what provisions are there for the children.
In our classes we do not do whole-class input anymore. We do differentiating input so the more able children do not have to sit through half an hour of the teacher talking at a level that they are beyond. We have differentiating input where children immediately go into their own groups, they are split within each class and those activities. Then the specialist will come and support that and the additional TAs will come and support that mechanism.
Q249 Julie Elliott: Is that done on all subjects or is that done by a subject-by-subject basis?
Naveed Idrees: In English and maths it is in those subjects, but in the rest of the curriculum we are moving away from demarcation of subjects. We are moving towards the idea where English and maths and IT are tools that should be delivered to every subject. They should be embedded and permeate every aspect of school life. “Today we are going to be doing English”, and then children cannot use those skills, they do not use history or geography. All they do is because they take English, they want to do an English lesson.
Q250 Clive Efford: On the sport premium, would it help you if it were not called a sport premium but rather a physical activity premium? Do you use cultural activities like dance as physical activity? I will address that to you as a teacher in charge of a school.
Naveed Idrees: Obviously there are constraints on where the sports premium can be spent. There is something to be said about renaming it where you can use it more for cultural activity, not just purely sport but physical activity. We have used the sports premium for dance. I have appointed a dance specialist part-time, but that is not through the sports premium but a wider budget, and that has an impact on that.
I will go back to my central point. Unless the infrastructure within schools and within the wider regulatory framework is changed, just allocating money is hit and miss. Some schools will do it well and some schools will not. You need to create infrastructure that will allow that money to be spent and will empower teachers to do that.
Q251 Clive Efford: There is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that the curriculum is squeezing out culture and sport. Therefore, unless you are prescriptive in the way that you fund, and headteachers will not be like you and creative like you, they will just go for the core curriculum and culture and sport will be squeezed out. How do you suggest we deal with headteachers who are behaving that way?
Naveed Idrees: I agree with that. It is important to name it. I just want to complement the point you are making that if the infrastructure was there within the curriculum framework—the national curriculum in its current permutation gives great freedom to schools to design a curriculum. I love the national curriculum in its present form because it focuses on skills and allows schools to design their own curriculum.
The question is: why aren’t schools doing that? Why aren’t they taking the opportunity to design that curriculum? Why are they narrowing the curriculum? I will go back to there are systemic barriers that are encouraging schools to do that. One of them is that we do not measure the wider curriculum. The other part is that our initial teacher training programmes are not fit enough to deliver that once they are there. Thirdly, this idea of having curriculum subjects, core subjects and foundation subjects, creates an idea in the minds of headteachers that these are just drama and arts. They are like reward subjects: “We will do it as a fun thing, as a reward”. But what we are saying is they are the bedrock of education success and need a paradigm shift to happen where we emphasise that.
I take your point that the fact that you ring-fence it is forcing teachers to spend it. But the aspect I am highlighting is that if the infrastructure is not there it is an add-on, it is not core to the work of the school. You have the wider school plan, development plan, and the sports premium is just an add-on. It is being spent on sports but it just an add-on. What I would like to see is that we have a connected curriculum with other things there and it is promoting a holistic approach rather than having an add-on for sport or for drama or for dance or for music.
Q252 Clive Efford: We have had submissions to our inquiry that recent comments from Ofsted suggest that there are not the right incentives for providing a balanced curriculum. Would you say that that is accurate?
Naveed Idrees: Yes, I think that is correct.
Q253 Clive Efford: Would you say that there is a role for Ofsted in creating the environment that you are talking about?
Naveed Idrees: What Ofsted has done is a step in the right direction. The framework will be changing in 2019 and it will focus on the wider curriculum. But like I said earlier, coming and checking every four years or every six years is not sufficient. What we need is an annual check and measure to indicate whether the creative curriculum is happening or not.
Ofsted has not changed the goalposts. All it said to schools now is, “We are going to look at your test results and we are going to look at your wider curriculum but we are not changing the goalposts”. The goalposts are still everything hangs on the league tables. What I am saying is that we need to counterbalance the league tables with a curriculum measure. For a school to be great you have to have both great results. At the moment you can have an outstanding school but it is impossible to differentiate whether it has achieved great results because it drilled the children for the test or because they have an enriched curriculum. It is impossible to tell. If a school had great standards but a very low curriculum measure you would know they are drilling the kids. On the other hand, if they have a great curriculum score but minimal results, they are not mapping the skills carefully enough.
Q254 Clive Efford: Our inquiry is about the social impact of culture and sport. What would you suggest we recommend in our report that would measure the social impact of what you are doing in your school further down the road when these pupils go into secondary school and go on to become adults?
Naveed Idrees: What should be measured is we look at the indicators of an enriched curriculum, and there are several things that you can look at. This is not an exhaustive list. For example, what is the balance between teaching discrete subjects and teaching through a topic or a theme or an event? What opportunities do pupils have of learning outside the classroom: forest schools, residentials, working allotments? What opportunities do pupils have to work with specialists? These are indicators. If you find none of these indicators in a school, you can tell that the curriculum is very narrow. If the school had to do a curriculum survey, a curriculum return, it would be getting extra information from schools. If they did a curriculum return on an annual basis where they looked at some of these indicators—and there are many more indicators; I have listed about 10 indicators that would suggest an enriched curriculum—and that was reported, you would see a massive shift in thinking. That would allow a foothold for organisations to ask some musicians to come in because schools would feel obliged to improve their curriculum score.
Q255 Clive Efford: I will open it up to our other two guests. How do we evaluate the success of what you are involved with? How do we satisfy ourselves that, by allocating money to Spirit of 2012 or the Children’s University, down the road that has been a good investment because it has created these individuals who had lifestyles or professions that they would not have otherwise experienced? How do we measure that?
Debbie Lye: We have not had time yet to look at people’s journeys.
Q256 Clive Efford: You have been going since 2012?
Debbie Lye: The end of 2013. It took a long time to set us up. We do measure wellbeing particularly. As has been said by Naveed and Helen, people’s individual wellbeing is a really good indicator of whether they are going to do well in life, whether they are going to form successful relationships, whether or not they are going to be involved in the criminal justice system, whether they are going to be lonely and we know now that lonely people on average have 17 less years of healthy life than people who are not generally lonely. Those things are important and we are measuring wellbeing. We are measuring the impact of different projects that we have funded, different approaches that our project partners take. Last week we had an event where we brought 30 different grantees together to talk about their different experiences of trying to improve the wellbeing of their participants of all ages, from very young children up to elderly people living with dementia and their carers.
We are beginning to understand better how to do this, and part of it is about being participatory; deciding what a project is going to look like has to be the business of the people that you are targeting. “Targeting” is quite a crude term in a way. It is a good idea to focus on the people that would benefit most from an intervention but ultimately you have to empower those people.
One of the projects that we funded was in Islay and Jura in Argyll and it was part of a wider project called Fourteen, which was a legacy thing from the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. We allocated £250,000 to 14 communities across the UK over three years. In Islay and Jura, it was really difficult to get them going, because this was run by Foundation Scotland for us. They said, “We wanted to do it in both islands but they do not get on very well”. We thought, “That’s not a great start” but we did persuade them and Foundation Scotland did a brilliant job of getting a panel of people from both islands to get together and think about what they most wanted to do to benefit their community. They identified children. They said there was very little for children to do in their island, so a lot of their children are very isolated. There is nothing for them to play with.
Ultimately that project became a youth-led project and they brought in an organisation from Scotland who came to talk to the young people. The community leaders could not do it because they all had a bias and their own ideas about what the young people should be doing, but these kids talked to I think they were called Space something—I can’t remember. They came in and had the conversation and the children and young people said that what they wanted was play equipment that could be transported from location to location, so that they would all get a go at playing with it through the month. They wanted football clubs for boys and girls and, really interestingly, they wanted to help and relate to older people on the islands. Lots of older people live on the islands but they felt they did not really have relationships with them. They opted to learn British Sign Language and a whole group of these children are now both using it in volunteering to communicate with older people with hearing impairments and also training their peers in BSL. You would never have predicted that those children would have wanted to do that, but all that is enriching them not just from a physical activity perspective but as human beings with empathy who are going to be good citizens.
Q257 Clive Efford: That is just one example. What I am after is there is the £47 million invested in your organisation. How do we assess what social impact that investment has had across the board? Are you worth the money?
Debbie Lye: We were absolutely working on that from day one, because we knew we had such a broad remit: we are to fund volunteering, youth leadership and development, arts, sport. How can we tell one story very simply that says a difference we made? I came from UK Sport. The story of UK Sport is, “We won so many gold medals”. Easy peasy, you know they have done their job. With us it was much more difficult. I had been working in international development through UK Sport at that time. In international development a lot of organisations use a thing called “theory of change”, which is now increasingly used here but when we started in 2013 not many people were using it. That is a monitoring and evaluation framework that chooses some indicators that we can use with all of our projects, and wellbeing is one of them.
We use the ONS for individual wellbeing questions across all of our projects. That means we can map the benefit of individual wellbeing across everything we have funded. It is a common currency and is used widely by Government Departments such as DCMS, the Department of Health, the MoD and DWP. It is used by other trusts and foundations. It is a good measure. What we can do by saying people have better wellbeing is go back to those things about the kind of outcomes and by the end of our life we will be able to say, “These people were involved in our projects 10 years ago and this is what has happened to them now as against people who were not involved in those things”.
Q258 Clive Efford: Helen, if you were at Mr Idrees’s school, what would you bring to his school that he is not doing already?
Helen O'Donnell: Oh gosh, that is a really good question. I do not know all the things that they are doing in their school—
Clive Efford: He gave us a pretty good list.
Helen O'Donnell: In evaluating the social impact one of the things that I was going to pick up on in your original question was about let’s ask the people that we want to be at the positive receiving end of that social impact. Let’s ask the children, the parents, the businesses, the communities, the cities and regions that we want this to impact on. We were talking outside before we came in about actionable data and what information, something like Children’s University, can we collect from the school that can then be used to have an impact on those children or those families. At the moment we are going through a digital transformation that is going to lead and shape the organisation for the future. That is about providing schools like Naveed’s with dashboards of information telling them what children are doing what sort of activities and what children are not doing what sort of activities, what categories they are doing: are children doing lots of sporting activities but not doing lots of arts or cultural activities and, therefore, what can we be encouraging them to do?
As a charity, as an organisation, what links into national learning opportunities and national learning organisations can we provide for schools like Naveed’s? We are at the moment talking, for example, to the London Institute of Banking and Finance about their financial education programmes and can we validate those as Children’s University activities for primary age children. If you think as well that we work primarily with children from more disadvantaged groups, can we give them access to that as a learning opportunity that is going to have an impact on not just the child but the family and that is going to have an impact on the community? We are talking to organisations like UK STEM, different organisations that we can bring to schools like Naveed’s that are not just about the normal after-school clubs or normal extracurricular activities that happen or the normal things that might happen in the local community.
How can we measure the impact of those activities? For example, we graduate our young people when they reach certain levels of awards with Children’s University and the reason we do that is we want our young people to think about their learning journey as not ending when they leave school. We want to encourage them to enjoy learning, to see it as a joyful, fun thing in a way that encourages them to think about lifelong learning. We graduate them in further education settings or higher education institutions in full cap and gown graduations, which has a huge impact on the families because it is mainly families who do not think that environment is for them, who have never set foot in that sort of environment and see it as something that is absolutely what the posh and the elite do. It is not something that they do but we do not currently measure that as engagement with further or higher education and we should.
When we take children out to, for example, global tech companies here in London for them to experience that environment and for them to go out and do coding and artificial intelligence stuff in that environment, we do not currently measure that as an encounter with an employer. We all know that on average four encounters with employers makes a difference in attainment and aspiration and what young people are thinking about for their profession for the future. We are making that shift by introducing a digital tool that could provide schools, local authorities, and universities with the information that equates. It places equal value on sporting activities, cultural activities, STEM activities, all that range, that multiplicity of opportunities that is out there, but also attaches skills to that, what skills are children developing by doing those activities and also looking at who is not doing those activities. Within a school it is who is not doing those activities or who might be only doing sports activities who would benefit hugely from doing arts and cultural activities.
At a regional level through our partner Children’s Universities, which cities, which towns, are the young people in those towns or their families engaging in those sorts of activities? Are they managing to engage local businesses, other people in those communities, in the rounded education of that child and the life skills development of that child? Then at a national level can we look at are there certain parts, cold spots around the country, where there are young people and families not engaging in any of these types of activities? Therefore, can that influence policy for what needs to happen where and what sort of funding needs to be put into certain geographies?
Q259 Clive Efford: Mr Idrees, would you say that pupil premium, sport premium and music box money has allowed you to invest in things that have a social impact, a benefit, on your children?
Naveed Idrees: Yes.
Q260 Clive Efford: Has universal credit affected the amount of pupil premium money you receive?
Naveed Idrees: Yes, we have seen a drop in the number of families taking up free school meals and therefore the pupil premium. Since the introduction of universal credit, families have recalibrated, they have different set-ups now, and so we have seen a reduction. We used to have about 120 pupil premium pupils and that has gone down to about 60. That does not mean the deprivation area has disappeared overnight. What it means is that because of the way universal credit is being accessed, it has hit us because the pupil premium based upon free school meals and looked-after children is a very crude way of looking at deprivation. I would say moving forward it is hitting schools like ours because of universal credit. We have lost half of our pupil premium funding as a result of the numbers dropping. That is the effect of universal credit on our schools. Of course, pupil premium money and the sports grant is beneficial and advantageous for us.
Q261 Paul Farrelly: I want to come on to the EBacc and what you might call the Gove effect. It is not a political point. I am a Labour MP. It is about the entirely foreseeable consequences of a policy, however well-intentioned, and what you do in the light of the evidence. Years ago a very lovely, fantastic Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Estelle Morris in the Labour Government, on the one hand wanted to encourage more teaching of language in primary schools but then made languages non-compulsory at secondary school and found there were not the people going through the universities coming out able to teach language in the primary schools. We have had a predictable effect on the take-up of languages since.
This morning we were with our former colleague, Tristram Hunt, at the V&A and he made a plea for us about EBacc and the effects on design and technology. We have taken lots of evidence and studies from the University of Sussex on the effect on music. Personally I am surprised that at my children’s school now once you get to year 10 and you take your GCSEs, PE is no longer a part of the curriculum and you do sport if you want to. I wonder whether I can take you in reverse order. Helen, how do you see the effects more generally across the curriculum of how the EBacc is working out and incentives?
Helen O'Donnell: We do see it, but we see it, as a charity, in terms of what I have already talked about, that sort of pressure on results. We see it from the university side of things also, because we work with a number of partner universities—I am not saying that any of them do this but I am also very conscious of it because my middle daughter has just started at university—and this sort of idea of facilitating subjects as well. As a charity, we do not necessarily see direct impacts of the EBacc but we are aware of it and aware of the pressure to focus on those core subjects. Also there is the idea of the higher education institutions that talk quite a lot about facilitating subjects. What I mean by that is that is the idea of, “Keep your options open. If you do certain subjects, then there will be an awful lot of university places open to you to study different courses and there will be a lot of career options open to you”.
What we tend to see more is the knock-on effect of parental encouragement and familial encouragement for doing the extra things, the extracurricular things, the things that are seen as the added value stuff. We see that from lots of messages in the media about EBacc and university. There is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there that is passed on to the children. It is that familial understanding of what they see as a good subject to do or not a great subject to do.
It is very interesting, I had dinner last night with my board at Aston University, which is where my middle daughter happens to be at university, and we invited four students to come and join us for dinner. I was talking to the young man who was sitting next to me, who comes from a relatively disadvantaged background, who is only there because of the funding he is getting and would not be able to live if he was not getting that funding. He was very conscious of the message that he was giving, which was that he had chosen that university and had chosen to do the subjects that he was doing because he knew that Aston has an extremely good record of graduate employability. He knows that he is lining himself up, probably, to have a really good chance of getting a good job post his degree, compared with some of the students in some of the universities. He also knows that Aston has a really good record in graduate salaries a couple of years after people have graduated. Doing what I do at Children’s University, I am listening to this thinking, “Yes, I absolutely understand all that, but what a shame, what a real shame, that you are not able to think, ‘I want to study that subject because I love that subject’.”
When I went to university I studied a subject that I just wanted to study. I wanted to delve deeper into it. I did modern languages. I wanted to delve deeper into it, I wanted to know more about it and I did it for the love of doing it, whereas now you have this whole generation of young people who know that they can only go to university if they are going to do a subject that facilitates them to get a decent job, to do a decent profession and they are going to be employable and they are going to earn a reasonable salary at the end of it. I think what we experience as a charity trying to encourage families—because we are trying to encourage families to encourage their children to do this and to encourage schools to encourage their children to do this—if those messages are out there that has a real impact on families, schools and communities in what they consider to be important in education.
Q262 Paul Farrelly: One of the highest-performing local schools is a specialist in languages and I have a local university, Keele, that does not offer languages.
Helen O'Donnell: The university I graduated from with a degree in French, Spanish and Catalan does not do languages anymore.
Q263 Paul Farrelly: Debbie, have you seen an impact on sport in schools?
Debbie Lye: Yes. As someone who worked with Baroness Campbell, who is the architect of that project, I do think it is sad. I am not a sporty person by nature or upbringing. In fact, I was an English teacher for many years and the arts were very important to me. I used to run poetry and things in the places where I worked. I came into the sport policy area slightly cynical and saw the sports college network and the partnerships and the ability that Naveed has talked about to employ part-time specialists so that you could have a whole host of activities, every sport and activity under the sun for every ability or disability under the sun. I think that was a fantastic thing.
There was evidence that academic results were improving in those schools that specialise in that area, and it was an infrastructure that is not there anymore. As I say, we do not really work in schools. I know that it has gone. One of the reasons we do not work in schools is that the kind of organisations we work with that do want to make a lasting difference find it hard to get in. It is so heartening to learn that there are schools like Naveed’s and that organisations like Children’s University are working with partners that can go into schools.
Q264 Paul Farrelly: Naveed, you clearly cannot track every one of your 500-plus pupils in the future through secondary schools.
Naveed Idrees: We have an idea what happens in secondary.
Q265 Paul Farrelly: You mentioned that you can see one issue. You are picking up a specialist who has been made redundant at a secondary school. I cannot speak for all my secondary schools in Staffordshire, because I have not gathered the evidence, but I can see the effects. Apart from one school, all the children in the sixth form go to the local college and the local college is experiencing a reduction in demand for music subjects and, therefore, will struggle to maintain its offering.
Naveed Idrees: It has implications all the way up to tertiary. If they are not offering it at secondary or it is reduced, then the uptake at university is going to be limited and you will have university departments closing.
I wanted to pick up some of the assumptions about EBacc. EBacc is premised upon the STEM subjects—English, maths, engineering, science and so on—and it goes back to that mindset that for children to succeed in the marketplace these are the skills they need. I would challenge that. I think the economic argument does not stack up. In the world that we are fast moving into, in the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the skill set that is required now is not methodical skills, algorithmic skills, but the skills of creativity and the human touch, and those are the skills that are not being promoted by the EBacc or by a narrow curriculum in primary.
There is an argument to be made that we should be focusing on the skills that children will need. Children who are at my school now, who have just joined, will be 30 years old in 2048 and the world will be a very different place in 2050 in terms of artificial intelligence. A lot of the jobs that just require algorithmic functions will not exist and there is an estimate that around 40% of those kinds of jobs will disappear. We are not preparing at the moment. Our mindset for policy change is still linked with these subjects of algorithmic thinking or reasoning rather than creativity.
On a side note, the OECD with their programme of international school student assessment, PISA, every three years assesses the standard of 15-year-olds in English, maths and science. From 2021 they will be introducing a creativity measure. They will be measuring creativity and we are going to be caught out by that, because the focus in our system is still very much towards EBacc, STEM subjects, English and maths and not creativity. One of the questions I was asked earlier was what is the value of the arts. They encourage problem solving and creativity. Those are the kinds of skills and we are not preparing.
In our education system at the moment, because it is skewed so much towards seeing English, maths and science as subjects in their own right rather than tools to deliver or content of expression, we are not preparing children for the future. They will not have the skills. When those children are in their 30s they will not be able to get jobs and they will have a greater propensity to mental illness because they will not know how to engage themselves and what to do with all that spare time because they have not engaged with arts, music or drama. The only thing they will have engaged with is the electrical or digital world, and that will lead to even further issues.
Q266 Paul Farrelly: Before I move on to my next question, I do not want to create local enemies or single out Bradford in particular, but you said you had a good idea of what is happening with music in the secondary schools. Can you briefly describe it?
Naveed Idrees: We know that many of the secondary schools in our area are starting their GCSEs after year 8, so the GCSEs are beginning a year earlier. What that does is the broad and balanced curriculum that should be offered exists only in year 7 and year 8. Also we know that music is disappearing or we have to pay for it, and if you are in a disadvantaged area that is pricing you out of those experiences. The schools are feeling pressure to do this because of the EBacc and the Progress 8 scores. This is the point I was making, that as policymakers I think there is the will there now. Everybody is saying the same thing: “We should have a rich curriculum so that we are prepared for the next generation of artificial intelligence. We should be ready for that”. I think there is a big demand to be made from policymakers to say, “How can we rebalance the emphasis on the STEM subjects for the wider curriculum by introducing something at the regulatory framework level that will encourage schools and policymakers to do that?”
Debbie Lye: I think it is very ironic that if you open any prospectus of our public schools, our very expensive schools, which are globally admired, it will highlight their playing fields, their art, their theatre, their drama. They know, and they have known for centuries, that these things are at the heart of the best education.
Q267 Paul Farrelly: Yes, and that gets into the whole realm of private and state schools. I have two areas to cover quickly. I can guarantee that when we produce our report and cite the evidence, the Government will come back and say, “We are investing record amounts in schools and we have invested this in music hubs”. Then there is the question forcefully put by a previous panel of musicians that nobody knows where provision is good and where it is not so good and where it is awful, because nobody is evaluating what this hub does or where music is disappearing and particularly where we should act on disparities. Can I ask you all: should there be an evaluation, not just of music but of sport, and who should carry out that evaluation? We are reporting to a Department that is not responsible, really, because it is the Department for Education.
Helen O'Donnell: At Children’s University we validate things, so we validate provision but we validate the structured learning element of provision. To give you an idea of what that means, that is the difference between somebody going to an after-school club, where it is effectively child care and it is maybe having a crumpet and watching a video and running around the playground, and going to an after-school club that is led by an education professional and there is a real element of structured learning in that.
Yes, I do think there should be an evaluation of this. Who does that, I do not know.
Paul Farrelly: Schools approach Ofsted with—
Debbie Lye: I think you have to develop a specification of that evaluation, so what does “good” look like in, say, the sport premium? That is not necessarily just education outcomes, because they might come later down the line, but I think there has to be some sort of indication without having a rigid, prescriptive framework, for saying what is good practice and what is not. I did hear of a school that spent all their sport premium on a one-off experience of everybody going horse riding, which is great but what is going to happen for the rest of the year and what is the ongoing health and fitness and so on benefits?
Naveed Idrees: This goes back to the key point I have been making all along that because we do not measure these things people think they are not important or nobody has a focus on them. I have done a proposal that is cost neutral on what should happen in introducing a wider curriculum measure. That would consist of two things. One is we would ask schools to complete a curriculum return every year, which would just look at all the indicators. It would take about half an hour for the senior leadership team to complete and it would give us some of the indicators you are talking about. It would give us a flavour of that school. The second thing would be a pupil survey questionnaire that would look at the experiences of the pupils who are leaving that school now in terms of whether they have engaged the wellbeing element and been part of that. Schools could put whatever they wanted into those, but then who would do the checking?
I think that the arts organisations, the bridge foundations, the music hubs—the money, the infrastructure, is already there. They should be doing an annual visit to schools looking at the survey and the questionnaire to see whether it triangulates with what is happening in schools. That would give you an annual feedback that would then feed into a standardised score that could be shared across with everybody. It would value the enrichment aspect of schools and for schools that are doing a lot of enrichment it would allow them to celebrate that, because it is being measured. Otherwise, at the moment, apart from Ofsted coming every four years telling you that you are doing well in your wider curriculum, under the new framework nobody will know about your curriculum and there is no incentive to do that.
Helen O'Donnell: One of the best ways to establish whether these things are having the impact that they should on the children is to ask the children. We did a study at the end of 2017 with about 20 children in schools in very disadvantaged areas of Birmingham. They had been doing Children’s University for two years. We worked with another organisation, the University of the First Age, and we trained those children in research and evaluation techniques. It was absolutely phenomenal. It is a secondary programme that we brought down to primary level with the UFA. These were 20 year 5 and year 6 pupils who were trained in quantitative data, qualitative data, and it was phenomenal. I wish I had had that when I was at primary school.
Then they went back into their schools for the best part of three weeks armed with some research questions that we had set them, which were about, “What do you think the impact of doing these activities through Children’s University has on you? What sort of impact do you think it has on your learning when you are back in the classroom?” and then, of course, we asked them, “How could we improve things?” They went off and devised their own mechanisms for how they were going to research that and evaluate it. They came up with surveys; they did assemblies in school; they did all sorts of emoji charts for people to tick. They came back three weeks later and presented all this information to us, in both written form and oral form, to a panel not dissimilar to this one. That was an incredible experience for them, but they came back and about 70% of them said, “This has had a huge impact on me. I feel happier at school, I feel more relaxed at school, I am less stressed. It is having an impact on me when I go back into the classroom”. They did not term it like this but, back to what Naveed was saying earlier, they recognised that some of those activities were giving them transferable skills that they could then take back into the classroom.
A really good way would be to build a mechanism into all of this that asks the people that we are trying to have a social impact on whether we are having the right impact on them.
Q268 Chair: If I can ask a final question, Naveed, have you had other schools coming to see you to see if they can learn from what you have done?
Naveed Idrees: Yes, we have had a massive influx of schools. What is interesting is that we have had a great interest from Wales, and I could not understand why we were getting people from Wales coming to look at our school in inner-city Bradford. When I dug into this it is the Donaldson review in Wales where they have suggested that English and maths should be tools and the rest of the curriculum should be taught through them, so English and maths are not separate subjects. In effect we have implemented that model of the Donaldson review without realising it in inner-city Bradford and therefore we are very popular. We had a busload of headteachers come last month and we have another 20 coming in January and so that was quite interesting.
Q269 Chair: I understand that the City of Birmingham symphony orchestra is putting in a bid to partner a new free school in Sandwell and I believe the Hallé Orchestra is looking to do something in Manchester. From how they described it to me, the approach sounds similar, not just to focus on music teaching but also music as part of the whole curriculum. Have they been in touch with you, because it sounds like they are building on what you have done?
Naveed Idrees: We have been doing a lot of advocacy work, myself and my music co-ordinators. We have been invited to a lot of arts councils. We were invited to Music in Society at the House of Lords. They have a similar Select Committee and we were invited to that as well. I think your point is that it is really crucial; there are two aspects of music. There is specialist music and music across the curriculum, and we have both. We have a music specialist but also we have integrated music into everything that we do. Maths and music go together, and music and PE. There are a lot of cross-curricular links that we have forged and that is music across the curriculum, but there is also a place for specialists. We have funded over 80 children with instruments from our area. We have had the first group of children from our area being selected for the music specialist school and that was for the first Muslim girl ever in Bradford being selected because of the music input that we have given to them.
I think this area requires a lot of joined-up thinking. It is not just what schools are doing or arts organisations are doing or policymakers are doing. It requires a lot of joined-up thinking and if we can make that infrastructural change, that would encourage people. At the moment it is just panic where people are trying to get their tests and their league tables and we have forgotten that the point of education is not tests. It is to benefit the children, and because of the nature of the system even well-meaning headteachers are forced to do that because the system is skewed in such a manner.
Q270 Chair: As you put it earlier on, if you had just continued doing things the old way, if you could have invested even more in doing it that way, you probably would not have made the progress you have made by doing it differently.
One final thing to Debbie Lye, picking up on some of the things you talked about earlier, resources and particularly around sport, do you think there needs to be clearer guidance to some schools on that? There might be a range of activities that schools might engage in in particular. Some things are more expensive than others and doing something like the Daily Mile is a pretty cheap intervention.
Debbie Lye: That started in Scotland and is an excellent initiative. In fact, we have done quite a lot of work with the Scottish Government. They commissioned us to do work with inactive segments of the population, including young girls in particular, because they think our approach is more interesting. We do have more emphasis on social impact than their Sports Council does. That has been good for us and we are now working jointly with their Sports Council on a new set of projects. Yes, I do think that would help.
It is difficult with sport, because one of the things about sport is that if you are going to progress within a sport it is a systemic thing. It is quite good to have a cluster of schools within a partnership that can offer that opportunity if you are going to play at all competitively. I am not talking about elite sport, but to have other schools that you know will play that sport that you can share that activity with. It is good for social cohesion because you can go to a school where the makeup of the intake is completely different culturally and socially from yours and begin to foster relationships.
I think that we lost an infrastructure, and I know you do not want to be too prescriptive. I totally respect that heads should have freedom and Naveed has done a great job with that freedom, but I think you need a halfway house between, “Here, let’s dole out some money, do what you want with it” and the system that we lost that was perhaps too rigid for some people.
Chair: Thank you all very much on behalf of the Committee for your evidence. It has been a really fascinating session.