PROGRESS: Labour pledged in 1997 to increase the share of national wealth spent on education. What difference has this made on the ground and what should we be pledging in the second term?
Dela Smith: Special educational needs has been very much a national focus and we’ve never had as much money as we’ve had over the last two years. I think it’s made for quite a substantial increase in our budget; we’ve certainly felt it at school level. Plus, in special schools in particular, we’ve had opportunities that we didn’t have before, for example, technology college status. We were able to apply for that, and that’s giving us an enormous injection of cash, enabling us to refurbish large areas of the school. Once you start working in that way you raise your standards to such a degree that you somehow continue to attract further funding and make further progress.
Maureen Horton: I’ve seen it from two sides of the fence, being chair at a primary school and a governor at a secondary school. I would say, on the whole, that the pluses have by far outweighed the minuses. But there are some minuses, especially in the secondary field where support for the curriculum has not been as strong as it needed to be. At primary level, because of the implementation of the literacy hour and the numeracy hour, there’s been wonderful support, wonderful training offered. But in the secondary field, the support in different subjects has just been practically non-existent. I want the Government to do more to support secondary education, especially schools that will always give concern.
Eleanor Lister: I think Darlington misses out because we’re such a small authority and we have little pockets of deprivation. When there’s targeted funds for areas of deprivation or inner city schools, we never qualify, we always seem to miss out. I appreciate that there are far worse places than Darlington, with much more difficult schools, but I find the Department for Education and Employment a bit of a straitjacket. I get the impression civil servants are still working to very rigid Tory guidelines, no matter what’s going on above them.
Jenny Swift: I’ve come into contact with most of the schools in Darlington in some way or another and it does seem that the money that’s been going in has been acknowledged and is going well. There’ll never, ever be enough, but what’s happened so far is recognised and that’s very good. The problems that get raised with Alan’s constituency office tend to be post-16, university education, but even with sixth form colleges, there seems to be a problem with pupils from certain financial backgrounds not being able to take advantage of them as well as they might.
Tony Chapman: From the university side, the most concern is about widening participation. In terms of funding, we’ve done well in terms of capital through lots of schemes. But we’re always chasing bodies these days. We want to widen participation, but the competition is intense. From our point of view almost any funding that goes into widening participation is essential because the target of 50 percent of young adults having a university degree is not really possible with the current funding regime.
PROGRESS: The Government has increasingly been bypassing LEAs and offering money directly to schools. What do you feel about this?
DS: There are huge issues here around accountability and monitoring. There is already national evidence that schools are not using their money for special educational needs [SEN] for the purposes for which it was provided. There needs to be a very secure monitoring process – which can only be the LEA at the minute – to make sure the money is going where it is intended to. And I’m very concerned about the process because it’s often misused and abused.
John Williams: There’s a big competency issue here. A lot of head teachers are very competent managers as well as being educationalists. But I have direct experience of heads who are excellent educationalists and have been promoted on that basis to a managerial role which they, quite frankly, struggle with. If you are going to fund schools directly, can they manage the budgets effectively? Many heads will be able to do that but I know that there are heads who won’t be able to. The Government needs to think very carefully before they go down that path. I have no ideological hang-ups about it. I’m being very pragmatic here.
MH: Talking with my chair’s hat on, it worries me because I chair a governing body from which there are only a few of us who get stuck in and do most of the work. And if you’ve got a body like that which has got to make really significant decisions about finance, I would be really, really worried about the responsibility that would be on my shoulders because you need a good, astute head. Direct funding would be wonderful as long as you had the people there to cope with it.
ES: From our point of view as an LEA, I’ve had lots of comments from the staff who I rate quite highly in Darlington, saying: ‘I have to pay my mortgage, are we going to be here in two or three years?’ There’s a morale issue there, particularly with some of our senior people. If they look at the salaries that we can afford to pay and they look at some of the salaries heads are getting, that’s an issue for them really. And the more the Government says ‘money’s going direct to schools’, the implication to us, as an LEA, is they believe we would waste it.
JS: There’s a very popular thing about taking away layers of bureaucracy, but what you lose is a local overview of what’s going on, especially in somewhere like Darlington where you do have very different circumstances in different areas. To strip LEAs down and make them just responsible for transport, that would be a loss.
DS: There’s a case for looking at funding as a community issue – schools and services working together with some joint ownership over a budget.
MH: There are pockets of real excellence of cooperation between bodies. Take Sure Start – we’ve been invited to bid this time round and there’s been marvellous cooperation between the primary care group, the education department and social services and they’ve really worked together on their bid.
JW: On a pragmatic point, if direct funding is taken to its logical conclusion and is universal and complete, what happens to schools when things go wrong? Who do they get help and advice and assistance from?
PROGRESS: What balance needs to be struck between local flexibility and national targets?
DS: There needs to be a choice for schools. There are some superb head teachers who, having had greater delegation, have been incredibly creative and made a difference, but you generally find that they also have a good relationship with their LEA because it’s a partnership.
PROGRESS: What should we do in the second term about the whole selection agenda and things like parents’ ballots on grammar schools?
DS: We don’t have a full range of specialist schools within the town. If we did, we could perhaps look at a system where a youngster with an arts aptitude could go one way and a child with a different inclination go another. It would perhaps be near impossible without having lots of tribunals. However, selection is a kiss of death for youngsters with special educational needs because nobody will want such children because their aptitudes don’t tend to be within discrete specialist areas. They’re not the most attractive youngsters to take on when looking at your league tables and SATS results. Selection, league tables and the inclusion agenda run counter to one another. So, I would like to see selection scrapped. We should be raising the standards of all our schools to accommodate all our pupils.
JW: It is not an issue in Darlington. The Tories aren’t even saying we should have a grammar school in Darlington. I think we should get rid of that option. It was politically expedient at the time of the last election, when we were, quite rightly, covering our backs from every possible attack. I think the ballot process should be simplified and clearer. It is labyrinthine.
EL: I’m opposed to selection because I’m a product of it. I went to a girls’ grammar school and it was such a narrow education. But the problem is everything’s always in turmoil. Systems are always changing and everybody’s craving a period of stability. My belief is to try and get kids to go to their neighbourhood school. What happens now is that I get phone calls from weeping parents because their kids haven’t got into a particular school, which is perceived as ‘the’ school to go to. I keep saying: ‘All our schools are good schools, all our schools have excellent teachers.’ Maybe the league tables don’t reflect that but they don’t reflect the work that goes on in the schools, how the kids started out and what they’ve achieved in their time there.
JS: Having no more grammar schools is the right way to go, but the problem is what to do with the ones that you have got. There has to be some sort of mechanism for local consultation. Certainly, we want no more selective schools and we need to try our best to find ways to get rid of the ones that are there.
TC: We already have selection of a sort. One of the schools is like a grammar school of a sort. People with the wherewithal can move into the area to get there and do so. I disagree with selection but I made sure my children went to that school. There is a sense in which some schools have to run faster than others anyway. The selection’s already operating. We need to take the bull by the horns and challenge this eugenicist account, which says let’s go back to testing. I’ve yet to see a test which tests intelligence effectively, but I have a very good idea of a test which selects middle-class kids effectively.
PROGRESS: Standards, testing and targets have become the big education issues. Do we extend them and what do we do about Ofsted and inspections?
DS: We need to focus on balancing the standards agenda with inclusion, but it can’t be done while we have a culture that we’ve currently got. For example, the league tables are a real barrier to stopping inclusion happening. I’m not against setting targets. We’ve set targets in special education for years. I’m not against measuring performance or potential. What I am against is the current culture. There are a whole host of other things for which we can set targets, which are equally important. The Government are adamant that they are sticking to that agenda – the publishing of league tables – and I know there is a real attempt to broaden out the tables for achievement and look at other things. But the culture is now so deep within the schools that they’re not really prepared to set wider targets for themselves because they’re concentrating on the literacy and numeracy, which is where the money is going.
JW: The quality agenda is the right one. We have to meet parental expectations of quality. Parents want benchmarks to judge success by and that’s absolutely right. But as far as the next term is concerned I would say: no more. The danger is that, compared with before the last election, things are not as friendly towards the Labour Party in schools as far as teachers are concerned and teachers are opinion formers. So, yes, let’s satisfy parental aspirations by having proper standards and benchmarks. If it’s possible to simplify those standards and benchmarks to help teachers, then let’s do that. But certainly no more targets, benchmarks, inspections and all the rest of it.
MH: I feel we’ve been forced to dance to the Tory tune. I don’t think in the next term there should be any more of this because it’s against everything I’ve believed in during my teaching career. Set targets but don’t have all these benchmarks that are going to cut the ground from under our feet when we’re trying to take on major inclusion projects.
EL: I’d like Ofsted to be a critical friend rather than set up barriers. I’m interested in the kids who are dropping out, who are leaving school without anything. Having a child go through twelve years of education and come out with nothing is unforgivable. If you’re going to produce tables, all the things should be in there – GNVQ, etc. They should not just concentrate on the five GCSE A-C grades. What you get at the moment with league tables is a sense of failure, not of achievement.
JS: At the moment, what you’re doing is ranking and saying: ‘This school is better than another.’ That can’t be the whole story. We need to think about what we measure. We need also to get the message across that teachers are valued and important, the most important asset of the education system in this country.
TC: The whole culture has become so aspiration-, so success-oriented that it makes, particularly, the last year of primary education a misery for children. I don’t blame the head teachers and schools for becoming competitive, but we could take the heat out of the system a great deal by having a decent, sensitive value-added type test, which shows all schools to be successful, except for the ones that genuinely are failing. Some middle-class schools actually do fail, but it doesn’t show up because the kids do well anyway.
PROGRESS: The Government is bringing in performance-related pay for teachers. Is this a good idea?
DS: I’ve got mixed views about performance-related pay. I agree with the philosophy of good teachers being paid for good teaching. The implementation has been far too quick. I believe in assessing performance, that it should be linked to your progression. But I think it becomes very, very complicated within schools and I think there hasn’t been the time to pick out where the difficulties will be. Some people are very happy to stay at a certain level, doing a good job and remaining there. It doesn’t mean they haven’t met their targets or that they’re not excellent teachers. It just means they’re happy doing what they are doing.
MH: I think it’s very divisive. It has all been too rushed. We’re doing the same as what the Tories did when they walloped through their changes too quickly without thinking them through.
EL: According to ministers all nurses are ‘angels’. Teachers do not get those comments. Why can’t they have the same image as nurses? They always seem to be hammered all the time for not doing their jobs properly. There’s a huge morale issue. Perhaps pay wouldn’t be such a huge issue if people felt that they were appreciated.
JS: I think teachers are paid alright really. As a graduate job at the moment, with all the ‘golden hellos’, it’s quite an attractive option in the right subjects. You can’t just have blanket increases without performance because I don’t think the electorate would wear that really because teachers have this bad image.
TC: I think it’s a huge problem because you can never find a methodology which is foolproof. You couldn’t even find one that would be fair.