................................................................................
ON THE RECORD
DAVID BLUNKETT INTERVIEW
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE: 14.4.96
................................................................................
JOHN HUMPHRYS: David Blunkett we'll come to selection
in a few minutes if I may. But let's look first at some of the things that
you've said you would do to raise standards. Now you've spent a large part of
the Easter holidays telling teachers what you'd do to get rid of nasty pupils,
bad pupils and all that. You haven't said so much about bad teachers. Do you
agree that there is a serious problem with bad teachers?
DAVID BLUNKETT MP: Well I think over the last eighteen
months I've faced what everybody knows to be the reality. That albeit a small
number, there are people in the Education Service who themselves know that they
shouldn't be there and whose colleagues know they shouldn't be there and I
spelt that out on Thursday at the Schoolmasters and Women Teachers Conference
when I laid out a ten point compact or accord. Many of those issues were about
lifting professionalism, about getting experience from industry and commerce
and giving teachers experience in industry and commerce. Lower class sizes,
General Teaching Council. One of those was addressing that very issue and
saying we need to help people out of a situation that they're unhappy with and
clearly we as parents would be grossly unhappy with in terms of a job.
HUMPHRYS: Chris Woodhead, the Director of
OFSTED says fifteen thousand teachers ought to be got rid of. Do you
agree with that?
BLUNKETT: Well we don't know the exact numerical
size of the problem. We simply want to be clear that no-one, no parent, no
teacher in my view and I'm both a parent and a former teacher, would want
someone in the classroom who is not capable of doing the job and it's as simple
as that. I find it extraordinary that anyone should find it exceptional for me
to be saying that.
HUMPHRYS: Well indeed but the question is not so
much that you acknowledge that there is a problem, it's a question of how you
would deal with it. Would you get rid of those teachers. I mean we know what
the Conservative Government would do. It's told us that it is going to have
a scale system of one to seven, if a teacher scores seven points he or she is
out. Now what are you going to do?
BLUNKETT: Yes well I think the one to seven is
bizarre but I think actually being able to ascertain whether a teacher is doing
the job is: (a) part of the leadership and management skills of good heads and
we want to give all heads and deputies qualifications, they must have
qualifications before they take on the job in leadership, in management.
Secondly, the inspection system should identify where there's a problem but it
should be on a fair and reasonable basis. You can't have a situation where on
one inspection somebody's graded one to seven, you must work with the head and
the management in the school to do something about it and when you have
identified it, get on with the job and ensure that that person's helped into a
job that they can do.
HUMPHRYS: But effectively you're saying you'd
leave it to the headteacher at the end of it all and that's what's happened and
that's why we...some people would say we've now got fifteen thousand bad
teachers.
BLUNKETT: I didn't say I'd leave it to the
headteacher, I said it was a combination between both the inspectorate's
activities, the head identifying the problem, the knowledge that will come with
our change in the inspectorate system so that there will be advice and support
between inspections. There's no point in having four years or six yearly
inspections and then leaving a school to it. We need advice and inspection on
an on-going basis, particularly where there's a problem.
HUMPHRYS: I can't see how that is different and
many people many fail to see how that is different or tougher than the position
that existed before this new suggestion, this new OFSTED suggestion.
BLUNKETT: Well there's not doing it. I mean the
problem we've got after seventeen years of the Conservative Government is that
they've suddenly started to adopt policies every time I announce them. So
whether it was headteacher training, whether it was advance skill teachers,
whether it was base line assessment, you name it, they've adopted it.
HUMPHRYS: Not in this case. I mean this is
something that came from..came from..with OFSTED's approval, with Chris
Woodhead's approval.
BLUNKETT: After I'd announced that we were going
to get tough on failing schools and failing standards.
HUMPHRYS: But you're now saying you would not do
this. I mean this is something people can understand...
BLUNKETT: I didn't..I said I didn't think that the
one to seven ticking a box was necessarily the best way of achieving it.
HUMPHRYS: Alright but you'd do something similar,
you will have a scale of some sort and if teachers fail to hit the right
target, whatever that target may be, you will get rid of them.
BLUNKETT: Yes, whether it's through appraisal,
on-going appraisal, whether it's support and advice, on-going at local level
rather than the four-yearly inspections, whether it's ensuring that heads are
held responsible for the job that they must do in managing and leading the
service and for Local Education Authorities. Because we made it clear that
there must be development plans and targets within schools, there must be
development plans for the authority, the authority must become the voice of
the parents speaking out against imcompetence and lack of expectations and in
favour of high standards and new priorities.
HUMPHRYS: Are you saying you'd be just as tough
but the method would be different.
BLUNKETT: I spent the last eighteen months making
it absolutely clear that we want to work with the best in the profession and we
want to root out what is not succeeding and I said to the Teachers Conference
on Thursday don't put your hand up as a teacher every time we say we're going
to root out failure. We're not talking about the vast majority of the half
million people doing a good job but we are talking about realising there is a
problem, we know there's a problem in comparison with the best in this country
and the worst, and between this country and other developed nations. Let's get
on and do something about it.
HUMPHRYS: Part of the problem you see may be that
you're sending a bit of a mixed message. I mean you talk about getting tough
on teachers but you also talk about giving teachers who've had fifteen years
service a year's holiday paid for by the taxpayer.
BLUNKETT: You're a very mischievous man this
afternoon John - a year's holiday. What I talked about was offering a term,
perhaps longer in some instances..
HUMPHRYS: Up to a year you said.
BLUNKETT: Yes it could be up to a year, there are
headteachers who at the moment take advantage of headteachers in industry.
We're talking about a situation where there are lots of teachers who after
fifteen years would welcome the opportunity of a placement in industry and
commerce, in in-service training to refresh and update their skills, we
believe, and we know, that industry welcome as part of the business
partnership, joining us in helping to fund that arrangement.
HUMPHRYS: The fact is they would have a year off
and they would have to be replaced and that would cost the taxpayer. So it may
be marginally mischievous to describe it as a holiday but some people would see
it like that and some people would say they're doing a job that they're paid
to and why after fifteen years should they, anymore than you or me, or anybody
else have the time off.
BLUNKETT: Well, I think that anyone who doesn't
believe that in-service training, that experience in industry and commerce,
that actually ensuring that the person is updating their skills is necessary
really can't be serious about ensuring that we lift those standards. I believe
after fifteen years it's crucial that people have their skills refreshed. It
will be a combination of private and public funding. We currently spend four
hundred million pounds on what's called Education Support and Training, and I
think that we need to redirect that to ensure that we're enabling people to
learn those new skills.
HUMPHRYS: Alright.
BLUNKETT: For instance, information technology,
crucial to the the twenty-first century, not only to equip the children but to
ensure that the available resources are used in technology to improve teaching
methods.
HUMPHRYS: And a-
BLUNKETT: Both of those can be achieved by placing
people, by encouraging industry to help the education profession to understand
the world that's changing around them.
HUMPHRYS: And that would be available to all
teachers whether they're good, bad or indifferent?
BLUNKETT: Well, obviously, if you've got an
indifferent teacher, we're going to do something about it. I've explained that
on this programme, and I've explained it over the last eighteen months very
clearly. You heard at least one of my colleagues quite worried about it on the
grounds that he thought that any questioning of teachers' competence was
somehow betraying my Socialist principles. I think quite the opposite. I
think getting to grips with it.
HUMPHRYS: Right.
BLUNKETT: The education service and lifting the
quality, and expecting a great deal more, and giving in return is crucial to
carrying out our programme.
HUMPHRYS: So it'll be performance-related then?
BLUNKETT: Well, of course, in the sense that
you're not going to send people on a course that they're not capable of taking.
HUMPHRYS: Right.
BLUNKETT: But, you can help people who have never,
ever, had experience outside the education service to be a better teacher by
giving them that experience.
HUMPHRYS: Now, you said, partly paid for by the
public. We do at least now presumably know where the money is going to come
from, because we heard Clare Short saying earlier this morning that people
paying - earning more than an MP which is what? - thirty-four thousand pounds,
- as much as an MP, should have to pay more tax.
BLUNKETT: Yes, I thought it was very interesting
that this has been picked up on, as though Clare was saying something
exceptional. Twenty-two different tax increases have been brought in-
HUMPHRYS: I mean, that's policy, is it?
BLUNKETT: - by the Tories. They've actually
inflicted seven hundred - six-hundred and forty pounds extra on average on each
family, seven p on Income Tax or one p on Income Tax, or a plus of 6p on Income
Tax. How dare they question someone actually saying what I consider to be
totally unexceptional?
HUMPHRYS: Oh, so, this is policy?
BLUNKETT: That there are people in this country
who would pay a little bit more if they had the chance. Of course it's not
policy.
HUMPHRYS: Well.
BLUNKETT: Our policy is to protect those who have
had their taxes jacked up over the last four years in a way that the Tories
supposed we were going to do. In other words they've jacked up taxes, and now
they're trying to suggest that a few words from Clare Short in a perfectly
reasonable interview constitutes a change of policy.
HUMPHRYS: So-So, only those who want to pay this
extra tax will have to do so. That's what you're saying.
BLUNKETT Well I'm saying that we all know from
1992 that the British people do not like high tax policies. They've discovered
since 1992 just what the Tories meant by being a low tax party. Twenty-two
different new impositions in the last four years, and of course they gave their
verdict in South-east Staffordshire on Thursday.
HUMPHRYS: Right. Let's return to the education
question specifically then, and the question of how you measure standards. You
can't improve standards obviously unless you know where they are at the
moment. There is a system for testing seven, eleven, and fourteen-year-old
children - tells you how the schools are performing. Are you going to keep
that system in place?
BLUNKETT: We believe that the balance between
testing and assessment is crucial. We believe it should be based on the
assessment of a child at the moment they enter full time schooling, at the age
of five, so that you can then assess how your targets and your development
plans are working; whether the school's performance is up to scratch, how that
individual child's improvement is working; and we put that forward. The
Government now accept it, that both base-line assessment and target-setting is
something that would be valuable. It all needs to be based on a foundation,
not merely of providing universal nursery education instead of a voucher
system, but also in terms of working with parents, because this is a
partnership between what happens in the classroom and what happens at home, and
the combination of the school and the family, the school and the Education
Authority will be crucial to our success.
HUMPHRYS: I'm-I'm still not clear as to whether
you would keep the SAS - the Standard Assessment Tests.
BLUNKETT: Well, we've made it clear that we will
not be abolishing the tests. There are very considerable question marks over
the way that they've been conducted, and I hope that we can get that right with
the assessment and curriculum authority being able to take a look at what's
gone wrong.
HUMPHRYS: Alright. Let's turn to selection.
Another of your proposals is - to improve standards - is to allow schools to
specialise, different schools would specialise in different subjects. That is
in reality a form of selection isn't it?
BLUNKETT: No, it isn't. And in the lecture I gave
at the end of February I described two forms of specialism - specialism within
the school itself and specialism between schools. I have to say that the film
misunderstood or mistook the difference between city technology colleges and
specialisms in the schools that have been given special support and help with
the development of science and technology, and in particular the comments of
the head in Derby related to a system that creamed children away.
HUMPHRYS: Yeah, maybe it was there, but the impact
on other schools is exactly the same. You take away the best pupils, you
impoverish the other schools that don't get them.
BLUNKETT: No, I'm sorry. Selection is about
providing a test which selects the children with the broad academic ability or
attainment at that particular age. Creaming them off and putting them in
schools that provide excellence that's the theory. Now what you do in that
case, you give excellence to a very small minority, and you write off the
rest. And I'm not talking about doing that. I'm not talking about a handful
of schools specialising and creaming off pupils. I'm talking about all schools
developing their strengths, providing a broad curriculum, and being able to
encourage children to play to their strengths. Technology-
HUMPHRYS: So, every school could be a specialist
school?
BLUNKETT: Well, they could specialise in different
areas, and share them. In our document I talked about the family of schools -
not individual schools competing with each other, not a market knocking each
other out, but - schools actually collaborating. And, where that's working in
the family of schools, for instance in Leeds, you have co-operation where
schools share the resources, they share the teaching, they use technology to
the full, so that they can actually draw on what's available in one school and
share with another. We need new imagination, we need to think about a new
centre. Instead, of people constantly looking over their shoulder and as with
the Government wanting to go back to the Nineteen-Fifties rather than forward
to the twenty-first century.
HUMPHRYS: This is an interesting concept, that
every school might become a specialist school.
BLUNKETT: Yes, they may specialise in music, in
drama. They may specialise in technology but they will offer and share that
expertise and specialism. Take in my own city. There's one school that
teaches Russian. All schools in Sheffield can't teach Russian but they can
organise to support and help pupils who want to develop that particular
specialism and expertise. Why not? It just seems to me that there's been a
gross lack of imagination and every time you come up with a new idea, a new way
of thinking, people freeze as though you've suggested going backwards.
HUMPHRYS: Well, no, no because people look at it
with some interest. I mean, let's take that example of the school that does
Russian in Leeds. Now, every kid who wants to learn Russian or every parent
who wants their kid to learn Russian will want to send her to that school -
obviously. Now, if that isn't the kind of selection, Heaven knows what it is.
What it certainly is is the end of true comprehensive education.
BLUNKETT: No, no. True comprehensive education as
envisaged by the pioneers offered real diversity. It didn't offer a sameness.
It offered opportunity.
HUMPHRYS: Within each school?
BLUNKETT: Not precluded within and between schools
and we have a bigger opportunity now, as we approach the Twenty-First Century
to share resources than we've ever had before.
Strathclyde, for instance, before it
was abolished as a region last week, actually was able to provide for the
schools on the islands, the expertise that existed in Glasgow. Now, that is
imaginative thinking. That's not betraying the comprehensive principle. I
want comprehensive schools that work and I want them to work in the interest of
every child in every community in Britain.
HUMPHRYS: OK. So, we have these comprehensive
schools - let's call them that for the moment. Some people might decide the
name ought to be changed. But, we have these schools that specialise in
different things. You mentioned Russian. It might be a particular type of
science, it might be other languages, or whatever and every school might go
down this route.
BLUNKETT: Well, in theory, they could. In
practice, I doubt whether schools right across the country would suddenly jump
on a particular expertise, but why not? Let's open up the vistas. Let's...
HUMPHRYS: Because you then have to select. You
ask me why not. The answer to the why not question is because, then, every
school would have to impose a kind of selection because what would be the point
of taking say, let us say, a youngster who has absolutely no aptitude for
Russian, or any other language, or whatever it may be, without some kind of
test. You'd have to have some kind of test.
BLUNKETT: They may have an aptitude and assessed
academic ability in maths, English and science - which is really what you're
talking about with an Eleven-Plus examination. Is not what I'm addressing and
you know it, John.
HUMPHRYS: No, no. I'm genuinely interested in
this.
BLUNKETT: And, a child expressing and developing
an aptitude either within a school, or in terms of finding a school that has
that particular expertise actually makes it possible for youngsters, for
instance, who have a particular skill, particular aptitude in, say, music or
drama, not to have to leave the public sector to develop that expertise. And,
very often, the public sector has, actually, paid for them to go into a
specialist school.
HUMPHRYS: Right. So, we get to the situation
where children have to show clearly some sort of aptitude for whatever subject
it is, whatever specialisation it is, speciality, that they want to get
involved with. So, therefore, you've got to have some kind of aptitude or
ability test. What Michael Barber, Professor Barber, said on that film was
that, maybe, primary school heads could recommend children, or Local Education
Authorities could determine a particular admission policy. You'd be happy
with that?
BLUNKETT: Well, I'm in favour of an admissions
policy that is open, transparent, that's agreed by the local authority
under criteria laid down by the new Secretary of State - very clear about
that. The admissions policy would primarily be based on the way the particular
neighbourhood in which the youngster lived. It could be directed through
feeder schools - that's the primary school that the children go to. I'm not in
favour and I've made it abundantly clear of selection by prior attainment at
the age of eleven. I am not ruling out, as we've discussed for the last ten
minutes, the issue of using aptitude, where that exists. But, it's not about
selecting a child and saying: look, there's a quality education for a small
minority, be it twenty or twenty-five per cent and the Devil take the hindmost.
I'm saying quite the opposite. I'm not
saying what John Major's saying, which is we'll spend as a nation two - two and
a half billion pounds setting a grammar school up in, perhaps, three hundred
towns across Britain, so that only five per cent of the population can get an
education of high quality. I've talking about quality education in every
single neighbourhood school.
HUMPHRYS: Right. The Government has also said that
schools should be able to select. By next year, schools should be able to
select fifteen per cent of their pupils.
BLUNKETT: Yeah.
HUMPHRYS: Would you reverse that?
BLUNKETT: Well, only forty-three have taken up the
offer of the ten per cent.
HUMPHRYS: So far. But, would you...
BLUNKETT: Forty-three out of six thousand
secondary schools. I would examine changing it because I think that selection
by prior attainment at eleven is not healthy and I've made that very clear,
indeed. I think, it precludes rather than including children. Everything I
intend to do will be inclusive. My own children in an Inner City comprehensive
school, they deserve the best and, therefore, so do every other parent and
every other child in this country.
HUMPHRYS: David Blunkett, thank you very much,
indeed.
BLUNKETT: Thank you.
...oooOooo...
|