Educating Sir Tom BBC Scotland Investigates

Vroom, vroom!

In our schools there's a sad truth.

Not every child gets a fair start.

We know that the gap starts young.

-How young do you think?

-Well, it starts before birth, really.

-Before birth?

-Before birth.

Now, Scotland's first home-grown billionaire is taking time out

from the glamorous world of international business

to go back to school...

Hello!

..and study how we can create a world-class education system.

We have the ability to go and find out what's best

and shine a light on best practice

and therefore make it available throughout the whole of Scotland.

Why would you not do that?

-I've got my wee girl back.

-You've got your wee girl back?

With a great teacher, they're working hard.

This is what our school is all about.

Wow! That's a blueprint for Scottish education right there!

Sir Tom will learn from the people who know best.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-And when he's heard what they have to say,

he'll take the lessons to the very top.

Making sure that our young folk get the best education

is the only thing that matters to me

and if something can be shown to work in doing that or if something's

worth trying to do that, then I'll certainly be in the market for it.

New Cumnock. Like poorer communities across Scotland,

exam pass rates are lower than wealthy neighbourhoods.

This is where Sir Tom Hunter grew up. Today he's back.

So, Audrey, here we are, back where

my educational journey started and I cannae believe it.

It's... Wow! It's a bit different.

When do people begin to divert and you can begin to see those

that may be more challenged or those who are going to actually make it?

I think the difference comes very early on, as young as two.

-As young as two?

-As young as two.

-Wow.

Language development tells us at that stage that

that can predict how prepared children are for Primary 1.

There!

To try and close that gap, the staff here focus their efforts

on children's families, as well as the child themselves.

Well done.

For some parents, if they have a difficulty with literacy,

then how are they then meant to get the full potential

out of their children if they've got an issue with reading?

So one of the things that we do is

we provide adult literacy classes in here on a confidential basis.

-Right.

-So, for example, if some of our parents are not very confident

about going into the centre, we go out and see them in their home.

-Do you?

-Yes, we do.

-Right, wow.

So if you like, what we're doing, we're also nurturing the parent.

I was amazed speaking to teachers here about

what we're actually asking teachers to do.

In my simple world, teachers taught the weans.

But the teachers here were talking about looking at family,

looking at helping the parents or the grandparents or the carers.

There's a whole level of complexity there

and I guess I just took it for granted that some of the things that

a family would do, we're actually asking the teachers to do

and it's... My goodness, it's sad and it's worrying and, you know,

I'm really scratching my head.

Today, Sir Tom mixes with the influential and famous

while running a global charitable foundation.

It's a long way from his origins selling trainers out of a van.

I kind of fell into this great opportunity

called trainers and shell suits.

You know, for 14 years we worked at it very hard but we were very lucky

and at the tender age of 37,

I had a big cheque in the bank but nothing to do.

He now runs his businesses and foundation

from this former factory in Ayrshire.

And next on his agenda is getting some expert help on why

poorer kids do worse at school.

It's really complex and we know

that the gap starts young. We can see it...

-How young do you think?

-Well, it starts before birth, really.

-Before birth?

-Before birth in terms of foetal development

but we can see the gap in health checks at age five,

so for example, at age five,

a five-year-old child from the most deprived background is likely to

be 13 months behind in terms of their vocabulary development,

ten months behind in terms of their ability to problem-solve.

-Wow!

-And that makes a really big difference

when you're only five years old.

That seems a big problem.

And the gap widens as children move through primary school

and continues to widen in secondary school.

I'm looking for some answers here.

I am actually looking for the silver bullets...

SHE LAUGHS

-Don't!

-Because I'm a dreamer and I'm an optimist

and I think, you know,

with enough focus and the best people, we can solve anything.

We need sophisticated solutions.

We don't look for that silver bullet you were looking for there.

I think if it was there, we'd have done it already. Let's be honest.

I think we need to acknowledge the complexity but not shirk it.

-We have the talent in Scotland to address complex solutions.

-Yeah.

We just need the will to do it and maybe the resource to support it.

Edinburgh's Castleview Primary serves a community

affected by real poverty.

But it's also a place where a lot is expected from the pupils.

So, Lindsay,

-great fun here today...

-Yes!

..but there's a serious side to what you're actually doing here,

so what's actually happening?

Well, what's happening is our Primary 7 pupils are

serving Christmas lunch to all the other pupils in the school,

so we've got two sittings for lunch today, but they also help

throughout the year as well and it's about that community...

-Why is that important?

-Because we're a school family here

and we need to be all sharing food together.

That's a wonderful thing.

And some of that's kind of, you know, passed now

and people don't often sit down at a table

and actually share food together, break bread together.

That's what this is about.

And this is about their service to their community

and it's a real, you know,

wonderful occasion where everybody's really enjoying themselves.

Hello! How are you?

This school has recently scored highly on its inspection.

But it wasn't always that way.

When Lindsay arrived in 2005 from a school in a well-off area,

she came to a place with problems.

When I first arrived here, we did have a lot of exclusions

for poor behaviour and the curriculum was not well developed,

so it was a real concentration on developing inspirational teaching

and learning and really being very firm about what we were going

to accept in terms of behaviour and also about attendance as well.

You had to come to school

so all of those things were really important and it was hard

and I'm not going to lie to you and I've said this really openly,

you know, sometimes on the way home from school

I used to have a little stop in a lay-by

and I used to have a wee kind of bubble

and then I'd put my make-up on and then I'd get on with it.

Other headteachers will tell you exactly the same story,

that sometimes our job is very, very difficult.

STAFF BANGS ON GROUND

And who do we have here?

Quick, call the constable in case they mean me harm.

I am a friend to the presence of Craigmillar.

Our Primary 7 children take children from all over Scotland

on tours of Craigmillar Castle

and it really builds on their learning through literacy

and through talking and listing,

and so they are able to build up in their confidence by delivering

a script which tells you all about the story of Craigmillar Castle,

and so children are really learning from each other.

Finding ways to engage with parents

has been a big part of Castleview's success.

One way has been to start a community allotment -

the children learn about food

and the parents have a chance to get to know each other

and be part of a school community.

We've got a pond and a dead hedge...

TOM LAUGHS

..and ten families which are here on at least a weekly basis.

Right, and what's the main kind of thing that you're proud of

that's happening here?

The whole fact that everybody comes out

and are working together as families

and growing and learning new skills about eating and things.

I think it's more kind of community spirit, fresh air, bit of exercise

and it's all free.

-So it's truly the community taking care of itself?

-Yeah, that's it

and it's nice to teach them new skills

that they'll eventually grow up and hopefully they'll keep it going.

Hello!

If I could give you the magic wand

and you're now the fairy godmother at the top of the tree,

what's a couple of things you would maybe tell us so that we can go

and help make it happen elsewhere?

It's quite simple. It's all about the leadership.

And it's not just about having a head teacher at the top.

It's about really developing the leadership of the whole team

and developing the leadership of the children as well,

and their understanding of the role that they play

and what's their service to their school and their community.

That's what it's about. I'm talking here to you today

and out there we're feeding 300 children Christmas lunch.

It's happening. It doesn't need me to do that.

Yeah. Well, it certainly needed you in the beginning

to set the tone and the culture,

-and I'm just really glad you did, so thank you.

-Thank you. OK.

Secondary school is where results really count.

And poverty still has an impact.

At this Glasgow school,

only a quarter of children get five Highers.

In schools in richer areas, it can be three-quarters.

To give you, I suppose, a statistical breakdown in the school,

67.6% of our young people

-lived in the 15% most deprived areas of Scotland.

-Right.

And that gives you an understanding of some of the issues

in terms of poverty and deprivation

that make up the school community.

Despite those statistics, increasing numbers of children from here

are getting into university, and its exam results

are above average for a community with these levels of poverty.

I'm so keen that we find out what's going on here,

so that we close this attainment gap, so, I mean, what do you think?

I think it comes directly from our head teacher

so if someone's struggling in our school, just like I was

in Higher Maths last year, he'll directly set up a meeting

and he'll talk to you about how you felt during the subject

and how he thinks he can help us,

so he set up after-school classes on a Monday.

We had supported study on Monday, Wednesday,

-we came in on a Saturday morning.

-Wow. And the teachers were willing

-to give up their time?

-And they all gave up their free time

Saturday morning, 9 till 12,

-for six weeks.

-See, that's a story that's not really told.

That's brilliant.

-And I passed, so...

-Brilliant.

We don't settle for second best.

He always says that we are the best and we need to prove that we are.

He has such high expectations and ambitions for us and I think

that stirs us on individually

because you want to do the best, you want to prove like,

"Yeah, it's good that you had the faith in me because I can"

and it drives the teachers as well because they know their targets

-and goals that they want us to achieve as well.

-Wow!

That's, that's a blueprint for Scottish education right there!

The school also has a vocational programme

for children aiming for a job rather than university.

But the debate around how good a school is

often focuses solely on Highers and university entrance.

It seems to me, Gerry,

that you're being asked to do something impossible.

HE CHUCKLES

It seems to me that this attainment gap is measured on exam results

and of course there's going to be differences

between areas in Scotland, it's common sense. What do you think?

I don't focus on it.

I focus on doing the best for my young people.

There are schools in other areas, and I won't mention them,

who are getting better results than us, who are coasting schools,

who in my view are underperforming schools because they're not

adding value to the young people that come into their school.

We add value to every young person

and because their starting point might be different

and because some of the challenges they face might be different,

that's not recognised as much as a school

where things are already established because of the communities

and because of their parents

and because of some of the kind of societal issues, but coast.

So do you think, then, by focusing and having all this political

rhetoric about the attainment gap, we're really missing the point

and we're doing our young people a disservice?

For me it's about...

Let's not look at the gap, let's look at the threshold.

Let's raise the threshold for every young person in Scotland

and get it higher and higher and higher, so the bar goes up

and up and up, and everybody works to get over the bar.

If some people are going higher and have always gone higher, fine.

But if the bar's getting higher - in St Andrew's it's got higher,

25% of my young people now leave with five Highers.

Three years ago that figure was 16%, so we are doing all of that.

So we're improving. While we're doing that, the threshold's gone up.

That's where we should be focusing,

raising the threshold for every single young person in Scotland.

Sounds good to me, Gerry.

WHISTLE BLOWS

I mean, I think the attainment gap has become

this almost political football that gets kicked about.

I think it misses the point.

I think it's a very narrow measure

of what education is and should be delivering.

Now, whether that's to get four Highers and go to university,

that's one measure,

but whether it's to get an apprenticeship,

equally valuable.

And that's why I think we need to broaden out the measure

of what our education is delivering

for the young people of Scotland.

-Thank you and welcome Sir Tom Hunter.

-Thank you.

APPLAUSE

One of Sir Tom's day jobs is acting as a mentor to young companies.

From not knowing what a shell suit was,

we became Europe's biggest seller of shell suits.

Today, he's talking to BrewDog,

a recent start-up that now employs 600 people

and their experience confirms his view that paper qualifications

are only a small part of the picture.

So, James, when you're recruiting young people,

is the bits of paper that they've got, is that a prerequisite?

What do you value the most?

We're looking for so much more than the bits of paper.

The bits of paper maybe count for about 10 or 20% of our valuation.

We're looking for attitude, we're looking for commitment,

we're looking for passion, we're looking for belief,

we're looking for personality.

So we like to get people in, we like to set them challenges,

we like to ask them unusual questions,

we like to give them unusual tasks,

we like to see how they cope under pressure,

how they cope with challenges

and that gives us a much better indication of how someone's going

to get on in our company than interview questions

and what's on their CV.

The area around the Church Street estate in London

is one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods.

But its school is achieving remarkable things.

This is an academy, a state school run by a company,

not a local authority.

One in five publicly-funded English secondary schools

is an academy or free school.

Scotland has none.

This one aims to bring private sector thinking to public education.

When the school was founded in 2007,

the people who were behind the school were very ambitious people,

very successful in business,

and they wanted to kind of make something happen for this community

and in education and then that led to a level of ambition

and that doesn't necessarily mean

just replicating what has happened before,

it means doing things differently.

This school now has the best GCSE results

of any non-selective school in England.

Innovation is everywhere.

A longer school day, extra time for teachers to plan lessons.

Students are encouraged to single each other out for praise,

expressed through clicks and shout-outs.

I want to give a shout-out to Sada because...

With a great teacher, everybody working hard,

this is what our school's all about.

When I came for my interview day,

the first thing I came into was a Year 7 classroom

and they were chanting, "Read, people, read!"

which is what we do when we're excited about reading our books

and, the moment I heard that,

-I knew that this school was something really special.

-OK.

So, before we go, can I have a shout-out for Ms Povey?

Because I think she's fantastic.

So one, two, three, two claps.

-Bye-bye.

-Thanks very much.

The school often recruits through Teach First,

a programme that brings graduates from top universities

straight to English and Welsh classrooms

without a teaching training degree.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

All children learn a musical instrument.

The year groups are small, just 60 children.

It's a school that prides itself on finding its own way of working

and on trying to give poorer pupils

the advantages wealthier ones take for granted.

Where would you like to end up?

-I'm aiming for Imperial College.

-Wow.

To do a mechanical engineering degree,

which I never even thought about a couple of years ago

and now it's like my dream to become an engineer.

Tell me a bit about your background and how you ended up here.

I'm the first in my family to think of going to university.

None of my parents have actually gone.

They've immigrated here from Lebanon 18 years ago.

And, at the beginning, before I entered the school,

I didn't even know how to enter university,

I didn't know any names of any universities.

The first day you come here,

you immediately know about five universities.

Each class here is named after the university the teachers went to.

-Ah.

-Mine is named after Sussex University so...

-OK.

The school would say that's the kind of small innovation

that's raised aspiration amongst pupils.

They also visit college campuses and shadow professionals

like lawyers and those working in the City.

So you're allowed to innovate within your school

-for the benefit of these young people.

-Absolutely.

So I think, if we look at the data,

historically, pupils from poorer backgrounds

don't have the same life opportunity.

There's a big attainment gap in terms of what happens to pupils

in their lives and, when we started our school,

we said, "We're going to eradicate that gap.

"We're going to make it happen that, for our pupils,

"they're going to be able to achieve everything

"that anyone who was born into privilege can achieve."

And that's what, every day, we're working really hard to make happen.

Fantastic.

The ambition of the leadership comes through in spades

and then he is being allowed to innovate within certain boundaries.

I think that's something that Scotland

can really, really learn from.

Here at a training firm in Glasgow,

there's evidence that new things are being tried in Scotland.

What we need to do is get a plain sheet of metal...

These pupils are from Newlands Junior College.

They're studying to be car mechanics.

The guarantee for every child at the college is they will leave to a job,

apprenticeship or high-quality college course.

That's music to Sir Tom's ears.

I can't help coming back to some of the inequalities

that I see in Scotland today.

The best social policy to solve them

is a decent, well-paid job.

The college's campus is on Glasgow's Southside.

It takes pupils from surrounding state schools

when they're in danger of leaving with no qualifications.

It's an independent school.

Fees are covered by the local authority,

Scottish government and the college itself.

For children like Megan, who was often in trouble at her old school,

the quiet, informal atmosphere here has worked wonders.

I used to be this wee angry, wee cheeky wee lassie

and now I'm confident, I can talk to people...

-You can.

-..whenever, like anywhere, anybody.

I can keep my anger in.

-So, Lee-Anne, you're Megan's mum.

-Yep.

I'm just keen to understand what's been the differences

-that you've maybe saw?

-I've got my wee girl back.

-You've got your wee girl back.

-Yep.

-Goodness me.

And its not just a wee girl. Do you know what?

She's bright, she's intelligent and she's confident.

And, when you and her sit and chat now, what do you think?

-Because I can see something special in Megan.

-Megan is special.

And I think maybe she's just beginning to believe in herself.

Megan believes in herself now. She didn't then.

But do you know what? It's taken here to make her believe in herself.

And do you know what? She will go somewhere with her life.

It'll be all thanks to Newlands Junior College. Definitely.

The school has only operated for two years.

It's still to prove itself

and there's been opposition.

We are drawing from 11 schools here.

Now, unfortunately, not all of the schools will engage with us.

-Most of them will.

-Some schools say no?

It's because they've got some sort of philosophical reason

not to do it. But, anyway, that's fine.

We'll deal with the ones that deal with us

and we've got really good engagement with some of the schools.

And they're putting forward these young people

as people who they think are likely to get few or no qualifications.

-But have the talent.

-But have the talent.

Newlands, outside of council control,

but largely publicly funded, is unusual in Scotland.

The EIS, which represents most Scottish teachers,

is opposed to reforms like Teach First and academies.

They want fully qualified teachers and council control of schools.

To Sir Tom, that sounds like it might be

a one-size-fits-all approach.

Well, I think, if you visited schools, you would actually find

much more diversity than people sometimes see from the outside.

I think there's potentially more scope for a bit more freedom.

That was one of the big ambitions of Curriculum for Excellence,

was to actually create this space to allow for schools to do things

slightly differently and customise what we're delivering

to young people to the needs of the young people.

We probably haven't gone as far down that road as we'd hope for.

I think we have got to take on some of the lessons

from all round the world, and indeed even England,

where perhaps we can learn from.

So we've got to be open to these innovations

so that we can build a world-class education system in Scotland.

I don't think we're quite there yet.

The future of Scottish education

will be determined here at the Scottish Parliament.

Hello, First Minister. How are you? Nice to see you.

Sir Tom is ending his journey by sitting down

with the woman at the top to share what he's heard.

One of the very innovative things that we saw was down in London,

an academy school,

and it seems to me there are innovations there

which we don't have in Scotland

and I just wonder why we wouldn't give our kids in Scotland

a chance to have this.

You know, I'm not closed-minded to anything that is proven to work

and I went to London to look at some of the experience

of the London Challenge. I went to a school in Tower Hamlets

and they were pointing to many of the different aspects

of what had worked in the London Challenge, not just Teach First.

I also went to New York to see some of the innovative practices

they're doing there so I'm not ideological about this

and I'm absolutely clear, if something can be proven to work,

we should try it. In fact, we should be prepared to try things

to see if they work rather than sitting back passively

and waiting to see if other people can do it

so there's no ideological closing of doors.

Making sure that our young folk get the best education

is the only thing that matters to me

and, if something can be shown to work in doing that

or if something's worth trying to do that,

then I'll certainly be in the market for it.

I just wonder about measures of success

because, when we went to St Andrew's in Carntyne,

the headmaster there was terrific,

and he said it wasn't so much about an attainment gap,

he was trying to make sure that every pupil in his school

reached the potential they had.

I mean, what do you think about these measures of success?

I agree with that but I guess,

you know, what I want to see is that,

when we talk about a young person fulfilling the potential they have,

it's got to mean the potential they innately have,

not the potential once you factor in their background

and their circumstances and, you know, the degree of poverty

or otherwise that they live in.

Now, that involves much more than education.

That's about how we tackle poverty and disadvantage and deprivation

but we've got to see schools as part of how we overcome the disadvantage

that some of our young people have.

-First Minister, thank you very much.

-Thank you.

I think the key things that have struck me is one -

one size doesn't fit all.

Leadership, surprise, surprise,

when we went into the schools, it comes from the top.

And I suppose I'm someone who always likes to know

whether we're making any difference or not.

Is that a piece of paper?

Is that a positive destination?

And the most positive destination a young person can get to

is a well-paid job.

Are we measuring the right things

and are we adjusting our education system when it's not working

or are we afraid to take these steps?

I would say we'd be doing Scotland's children a disservice

if we were afraid.