23/05/2013 Newsnight Scotland

Government programmes and rejection of this nihilism, the problem

In Newsnight Scotland: Schools in London have improved so rapidly over

the past decade that it is claimed that a child in the pristine area of

the city can expect to do better than the average child elsewhere in

England. Can Scotland learn from the extraordinary success of the

so-called London Challenge? Good evening.

It is pretty well universally accepted that a good school

education system is the key to most other sorts of success. Is it

possible some of Scotland's more troubled educational establishments

could learn from an experiment which seems to have succeeded in turning

some of London's worst schools into some of the best in England? Ian

Hamilton headed south to that there has been an economic

downturn. But London is a city of extreme contrast. In some of the

richest in the country to some of the poorest. In the last 13 years,

there have been radical changes in the education system in England, no

more so than here. This area has gone to having some of the worst

schools in the country to some of the best. So what on earth are they

early start, and 15 a.m.. All of the pupils have breakfast. More than 80%

of the pupils come from an ethnic minority background. The school is

located in one of the poorest parts of the capital. But the claim here

at that they have turned around the fortune of these children and have

become an academy school. They are one of 33 in London and one of just

33,000 in England as a whole. have learnt is that good education

is essential. This is the principal. He is taking me for a tour of his

new school. Can you summarise what is academy school is -- what an

academy school is? It is an organisation set up to run

independently and it is run by a trust. In our situation, we are

helped by the dioceses, we are answerable to the governors of

school. St Paul's Academy draws all its pupils from the local community.

But the only criteria is that 75% of them must be Catholic. This is

Oxford. It is one of the centres in the heart of academia. There is an

intense debate happening here about the future of education in England.

This professor believes that changes should have been carefully

considered and sated Scotland as an example. If you take curriculum for

excellence, the document produced in Scotland, it has taken place over a

long period of time, there has been thorough deliberation with all sorts

of interested parties, there has been an enormous amount of

deliberation before they finally produce that report. This used to

happen in England, there was a tradition of the Royal commission on

the central advisory Council which was spent to three years

deliberating before finally producing the report which would

base itself as it the base of legislation. That is not happening

now in our country. -- that would form the base of legislation. That

is the massive difference between what is happening in England and

what is happening in Scotland. use in Scotland they had a specific

problem of schools underperforming. Over a decade ago the then Labour

Government created something called a London Challenge. According to

education experts it was that and not the expansion of academy schools

that improved standards. They did this by improving salaries to

attract better teachers. They improved their opportunity for

promotion and retention. They also set aside affordable housing for

teachers and the targeted schools that were feeling the most. -- the

targeted schools. Overall attainment in inner London was the worst in all

the regions in England, it is now the second best, second only to

enter in London. That is a massive change in end -- in attainment. In

particular, attainment for the most disadvantaged children, those

eligible for free school meals, has gone up massively, it is now

something like 12 percentage points above the attainment of that group

across the country as a whole. is at least ten different kinds of

secondary school in England. There are six broad categories. Two of

those are different flavours of academy school, one is free schools

and the others are conversion academies like the polls which were

once run by local authorities. -- the polls Academy. They have a say

in how they teach the children. I have come here to find out about

what the main teachers union thinks about all the changes south of the

border, and Hermes of them to name the building after me. The union

says that it is not against radical ideas but it should get academic

evidence. But Google says that academies lead to better results,

but there is no substantial evidence base to say that point It is an

untried experiment. No other during extraction in the developed world

has done this change -- jurisdiction. Can Scotland learn

anything at all. English and might I am joined now from London by

Professor David Woods, who was chief adviser to the London Challenge.

Here in Glasgow, council education convener Stephen Curran, and Dr. Sue

Ellis from Strathclyde University, who researches how policy affects

literacy skills, especially in disadvantaged areas. And in

Edinburgh councillor Dave Berry, who promoted some radical education

reform ideas in East Lothian when he led the council there.

In all this has complicated so I just want to pick out some themes.

One of the things crucial to the London Challenge as with some of the

other reforms in England is intervention. That if you are a

school that is performing below par, you simply were not any longer going

to be allowed to get away with it, is that right? Yes, it is right, but

it is hearts and minds, it is intervention done with the schools,

not done too. There is no appointments -- in seeing that 20%

of the underperforming schools in London need to be radically dealt

with, the issue is, how can we help them get better? So there was a raft

of measures. The expert advisers. There are funded programmes, better

teaching, better leadership. That is the intervention. They do not want

to give the impression that the intervention was harsh and

externally imposed, it was done with them. Of course we expected the

schools to respond to the extra resource. And in the vast majority

of cases be altered. That might be altered. What was happening before?

Everything is just allowed to chug along as they had always done?

think that is the case. We have some good and some not so good in London.

People just moved along. Once we got the accountability measures in with

four targets, and like Scotland we have an inspection system, once you

have a group of schools that are feeling the inspection or reforming

below and expected standard, then it was just accepted at that time left

to the local authorities to do something about it. This was a

special central Government programme. Accountability was huge.

But from having a minister from London Challenge and accountability.

We will come unto details later, Dr Sue Ellis, this is a theme that

interests you, intervention? Yes, one of the things that distinguished

the London Challenge was that the schools who needed intervention but

very expert advice from people who actually knew what was going to work

in those particular circumstances. It was very tailored advice, it was

not general advice. But presumably, if we were to emulate something like

that up here, you have to have that specific advice. You have to get

much more serious. Yes.They had schools training teachers who

trained teachers. What they had was that they drew very heavily on the

advice from researchers at the Institute of education who were able

to say that for the particular school, it is very data driven,

these are the issues, these are the sort of thing that will get the

biggest payoff, and if there are two ways to go about it, for your type

of catchment area, this is the way that is going to work. It was very

highly tailored advice. That advice both meant that it worked, but it

also encouraged the staff to take the ideas on board and that is

really important in any sort of intervention if you wanted to work.

Stephen Curran, in Glasgow you have a problem when you look at the

league tables because you have got many socially disadvantaged

children. But presumably you must look at this with some interest

because one of the most extraordinary things about the

London Challenge is that it is disadvantaged children who seem to

benefit most. It is a fantastic report we saw earlier and also it is

not about blame and shame in terms of the schools and staff, it is

about supporting the challenge. The things we have been doing in

Glasgow... Will it have the same effect on education in Glasgow as it

had in London? We are certainly looking at this, the OECD has done

similar research in terms of learning and teaching in the

classroom and making sure that the kids are in the classroom, we have

got exclusions down, substantially more young people doing this.

the things they do in London, the school that Ian was at, some of the

schoolchildren come in and have breakfast at 8:15 in the morning, is

it part of the issue about safety? Some children stay there for 12

hours a day. Is that something you are trying to emulate? A bespoke

solution that has been spoken of already, and that is important. The

school may have been open earlier or open on Saturday, the safety issue

around the challenge and the support of the police and other services,

the way that young people feel about going to school and that is making a

difference. If you feel safer, you perform better. Right macro Dave

Berry, to dig another strand from this, one of the other things that

seems to distinguish this from what they have done in London and other

areas of England, a sort of radical agnosticism about who does the

running of schools. Some of them are modelled on local authorities, or

run by an independent trust, like an academy. You floated some ideas in

East Lothian... I think the issue is to allow the school itself to have a

say in what goes on. What macro you tried to do some stuff in East

Lothian, I am curious -- you tried to do some stuff in East Lothian.

The first thing was to try to devolve control to the school were

it had a lot more financial say in how it was run. The key thing for

that was to have the parents involved. We offer not talking about

the same thing. The teaching staff and management but also the

involvement of the parents. In my opinion, that is the involvement of

the community. And that means you try to get the community involved

and not just the academics running it. But it was also involving the

younger kids. You had talked about how schools can pretty much be free

of local authority control. Did that happen in East Lothian? No, but it

was never an aim to achieve that radical solution. But to have that

as a possibility meant that the intermediate stages seemed that much

more reasonable and had it meant that the community was much more

keen on making it work and being under their control, then it was an

excluded from the beginning. There is this act notices in the London

project. You could perhaps make clear for us, because we may not

know how the English system works. While some academies are involved in

the London Challenge, the whole Michael Gove Project is a different

issue, the London Challenge was not just about academies? When it

started in 2003, we did not have academies. I don't particularly care

if the school is what Assistant -- is Protestant, Catholic, faith

school or not, and that is not the point, it was about how well they

are doing and some might argue that it is better to have an academy or a

community or whatever. The issue is, as one of your professors spoke

about, is what is the best bespoke intervention for each particular

school? In England, we have failing academy schools and failing

community schools and lots of great schools so that was the whole point.

They put aside their differences and even today, the legacy of the London

Challenge... And the thing we must not forget about it is that schools

work with schools. You anticipated my next question, but there is this

extraordinary thing that you seem to have got both the schools as

institutions and teachers within the schools in London to think of all

the children in London as their responsibility, not just the

children in their school. How did you do that? By a cliche, moral

purpose. We make them feel special. They were London teachers so we

introduced a London chartered teachers scheme. They were London

Headteachers and teachers. Of course their first loyalty was to the

school they were teaching in so they got the sense of collective pride,

collective endeavour. Helped by London business and other things.

That meant you could send teachers from one school but was doing very

well to other schools that were not doing very well. Based on the model

of teaching hospitals, Hobbs with extra capacity teachers who could

come across, work alongside other teachers and heads of department and

not permanently but the expression are used to use about schools that

were struggling a bit will give you a school -- we will give you a

school and more the school alongside you. You have got greater capacity

to work alongside and that, two years on from the end of the London

Challenge is still part of the DNA of London. Schools work with schools

irrespective of what title they have. Stephen Curran, do we have

anything like that? Do you have to choose schools in Glasgow? We have

teachers of best practice and we work across council boundaries.

is more than sharing, they would actually send teachers from the

teaching schools to, not to take over, it was not that

confrontational but there was a bottom line. One of the interesting

things about the London Challenge is the type of intervention that worked

in different schools depended on where that school was in terms of

its developmental spectrum. Some schools benefited from having very

expert input about the school improvement, literacy, numerous E,

teaching that was very focused on the school and built it. Schools

that were coasting with the schools that benefited from being paired

with other schools and visited each other. Schools that were good

benefited from staff being sent out to conferences and staff going to

watch each other teacher. -- teach. In more detail, what do you mean

about the lowest performing schools? The lowest performing

schools seem to be the ones that benefited most from getting very

accurate, expert advice about what was going to give the biggest

learning payoff in terms of literacy and numeracy learning mix, the sorts

of things that needed to take place for that particular school so it was

tailored and expert advice. In Scotland, we do not actually have

that level of expert advice in our national system. We have got a

national literacy commission which does not have a single literacy

research on it. It is like having... It is there to provide

advice but can you imagine a health board or committee there to give

school advice where the people sitting on it are patient

representatives of hospital managers and not single person knows about

which drugs work and don't work? With do have teams though. We do not

have the right people in the right places. People are having to seek

out their own advice because the national advice they are getting is

either not accurate or not sufficiently specific to help the

schools improved. Presumably they could do this on a Glasgow base,

Stephen Curran? Glasgow worked closely with Strathclyde

University, yes. I want to hear the thoughts on Dave Berry on what you

have had. When you're running schools in East Lothian, do you

think that you could have tried this and that? There is a system whereby

you can help underperforming schools but that to me is the skin on the

top. The real driving force behind this is the empowerment and ink

agent of teachers and the ones who run the schools are the teachers. --

empowerment and engagement. Having this attention paid to them, they

also feel more valued. It is an example of what the Finnish people

have been doing, that you make the teachers socially one of the key

members of the community, you report them but you don't just reward them

with money, you reward them with status and they have the

professional drive. But they must be willing to accept quite radical

change, don't they? Yes, but I think in London and Finland, there are

examples where they think outside the box. Examples of ideas coming in

that they must be prepared to accept and they benefit all of the pupils

but also the ones that are most disadvantaged. The final strand, we

are running out of time, David Woods, what struck me was formally

the London Challenge has finished. The funding was cut a couple of

years ago but it seems to continue but I don't know what level of

formality it operates on. But one of the things emerging, they do not

formally need to do it, you affected a change in the whole culture of

schooling. Yes, the landscape of London, many schools are in what we

called teaching school alliances. There were programmes for everybody.

The good schools give support to the week schools but we have a good to

great school, why are you not an outstanding school? That is what we

would ask them. The outstanding schools in London are beyond

outstanding programmes. There is something for everybody. You give

and receive that most of all, you collaborate and share best practice

and of course, you drive each other on to even better standards and the

great strapline is that... I want to bring Stephen Curran in again. You

have heard a lot of ideas from Sue Ellis and David Woods. What do you

take away from this? We must lift expectations, we have got a great

opportunity. Parents must expect more of young people. Not just in

Glasgow, it can apply everywhere. Yes, closing the gap, it makes a big

difference to the Scottish figures. It is an exciting time for Scottish

education. Thank you very much indeed. A quick look at the pages.

Most of them at pictures Drummer Lee Rigby killed in the attack in London

in Woolwich. A hero father. A loving father who survived war in

Afghanistan only to be murdered on a UK street in the Scotsman. In the

daily Telegraph, why was he free to kill is the headline and the

off-duty soldier knifed to death in the i. That is all we have got time

chilly, wet and windy weather on the way for England and Wales to bring

this weekend to a close. Scotland and Northern Ireland, a slightly

quieter day with lighter winds and a story and warmer in the sunshine. A

big contrast between the north and the south. The south-western England

and Wales, some brighter spells through the afternoon but it will

feel cold because of the lower temperatures and the strong and

gusty winds. Across central and eastern areas of England, highs of

nine Celsius which will be compromised by the rain and wind. It

will feel cold here. For Scotland and Northern Ireland in the sunshine

and light breeze, highs of 16 Celsius, it will feel pleasant. For

the start of the weekend, an improvement where we lose that wet

and windy weather. And for the majority of the UK, we are looking

for a fine start to the bank holiday weekend. A chance of some rain

pushing into the Northwest but warmer thanks to lighter winds and

highs of 17 Celsius. Sunday feeling warmer as well but the chance of