Transcript of a speech given by the Prime Minister on education for the new global age 5 May 2009.
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Prime Minister
Can I say, first of all, what a privilege it is to come with our Schools Minister, Jim Knight, to this great school that has achieved so much, to be part of a great audience of people who are delivering so much to education and to be able to speak about the greatest and most important subject for our future of all and that is education.
All of you here, Majors, Councillors, Headteachers, Teachers and indeed pupils are contributing to the great transformation of the education system in our country and I want to sketch out how Jim Knight and I and others wish to help you move this forward in the next few months.
I start with the obvious. Everybody remembers their teachers. I remember almost every one of my teachers in primary and secondary school. When my wife, Sarah, was writing a book for charity, and asked people around the country who apart from their parents had inspired them most, the answer was invariably the same, whether it was from David Frost or Andrew Motion or Alex Ferguson or Bill Morris or many people, others who are celebrities, people who are well known only in their local communities, their inspirational heroes were their teachers and often their Headteachers. And that is a tribute to everything that you do.
Nobody ever forgets their teachers. You nurture minds, you develop characters, you instil ambition, you offer friendship, you build confidence. In short, you change lives and we should be very proud of what you do and what you achieve.
And I’m proud, therefore, also to be today at a school which is one of the great success stones of our country’s education system. As you have just heard, a tribute to great teaching, and great leadership, not just providing outstanding opportunities for pupils with a specialist status in languages and music, but through the federation and the partnership arrangements within Lewisham, working with the local authority to drive up standards in schools right across this area.
And of course, Prendergast School is a direct result, and its successes, of the tireless dedication and commitment of everyone involved in running it, but especially, and I want to thank her personally, its Executive Headteacher Erica, whose outstanding vision and drive exemplifies the power of great school leadership, something I know Steve and all those at the National College for School Leadership have been working to develop and extend right across our education system. I think, Erica, we all owe you a great debt of gratitude.
And Erica is in very good company today. The National Council for School Leaders has brought together this afternoon some of our finest teachers and finest Headteachers, and many others who dedicate their lives to making our schools the best that they can be. And not just Headteachers, but system leaders, people who have given outstanding leadership, not only to our schools, but to our education service at every level across Britain. So let me pay a tribute to each of you also today.
And I will suggest in my remarks that a good teacher matters more than ever, that leadership matters more than ever and the pursuit of excellence is going to matter more than ever.
And this afternoon, I want to discuss with you how we can build on the Children’s Plan, and what you are already achieving and take the next steps in a new world of global competition to realising our shared ambitions to raise school standards for everyone and to guarantee a place at a good school for every child in our country.
Now, historians will look back and see the last few months, the first global financial crisis and the forces of change that lie behind that, the rise of Asia, climate change, pressures on energy, as defining a new global age that is different from what has come before.
And today people are understandably worried about their jobs now and worried about the jobs of the future. And some things that people took for granted a few years ago, even a year ago, they fear they cannot take for granted any more. And we’ve all begun to realise that this new global age creates risks as well as creates opportunities. And we are going to have to respond flexibly, more rapidly and more creatively to the changes that are happening around us than ever before.
Of course the first step in the financial crisis was to step in to save the banking system. That had to be done immediately. If we had not backed it, we would have lost and seen the collapse of hundreds of banks, but also the loss of half a million or so more jobs than are at risk at the moment.
But while we are taking action to deal with this global downturn, we must also build a better Britain for the future. And the key to that future is in education. We will start building for the new world, not by what happens in our financial system, but by what happens in our education, not in our banks, but in our schools and classrooms.
You know, last year through what’s called the New Global Fellowship Scheme, we sent 100 enterprising 18 and 19 year olds from diverse backgrounds and from all over the country to get first-hand experience of what was happening in all the big countries that are driving the new global economy. So young people went to China, to India and Brazil, and many more will go this year and maybe some of the pupils here will apply to go in future years. And they came back from their visits to all these countries with clear messages with the directness that comes from young people seeing something for the first time. They said: “We’ve just met young people who want our jobs and they are studying to get them. But in Britain we’re not producing much now really, other than our people. We shouldn’t be afraid of global competition, because we’ve got the most important thing to offer, our talent.”
So these were young people who went abroad, saw that competition was growing, saw that we had to get into new products and services, but at the same time saw that what we have in Britain, what we have got to nurture and why schools are so important, is the talent of every young person.
If Britain is second in education and skills, we will never be first in business. And if we come second in business, our young people will not have the opportunities and chances in life we wish for them.
So the countries that will succeed in this increasingly skilled global economy are those that are investing heavily, as we are, in education and training, developing support for all important early years of a child’s life, and ensuring that more of the young people take up the opportunities that further and higher education offers.
America is realising this, and last month Barack Obama set out his plans for investment in and reforming American schools. And as he said, education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it’s a prerequisite for success. And President Obama is not alone. Prime Minister Rudd in Australia is trying to raise education standards. India and China, great nations that are already transforming the world we live in, today produce more graduates than America and Japan.
And it is not enough simply for us to learn from the best practice of other countries or to build on our own successes in recent years. The upheavals of the last few years are meaning that every country is having to re-chart their approach to education.
So put it this way. Once, developing a skill was something ambitious people did to get on. But now, skills are essential for all of us just to get by. And the skills people need are changing fast and will change faster again. Today’s teenagers aspire to jobs, such as in software engineering and graphic design that our parents’ generation hadn’t even heard of.
So a good education for every child is no longer just desirable, it is indispensable. Everyone needs to develop a skill. Everything we do in government must be directed to equipping people for these jobs of tomorrow. Put simply, if we don’t invest in the future, we have no future.
I think until last year and the financial recession, lots of people assumed that their children would automatically have a better life than they did. But the traumatic events around the world have shaken that assumption as never before. Some are so pessimistic about Britain’s prospects that they talk of the next generation or the next decade only in the terms of the politics of austerity and defeatism. And if the message is one of cutting back on our investment in the future, particularly in education, of course people will feel our prospects will get worse.
But if we invest in people and if we modernise education for that investment, the prospects for the next generation can be much better than for the last. Over the next 20 years, the world economy will double its size. Asians, who are now producers of their goods, will want to become consumers of our goods. And that means a doubling up of opportunities for business, more jobs, more opportunities, that could come Britain’s way. And that is the foundation for a decade of growth and opportunity for our country.
But we will only take advantage of these opportunities if we invest in the skills, the technologies and the industries of the future. So we must build on Britain’s many strengths: hi-tech manufacturing, the creative industries, a thriving low-carbon sector, the knowledge industries. For there are thousands of new jobs to be found for the future in green technology, information technology, the digital technologies, advanced manufacturing and a range of services from teaching to social care.
The onus therefore is on us to open up the new horizons for all who can benefit, not just for some, but for all, and giving anyone who can benefit the qualifications for these jobs that can become available both now and in the future.
So let’s be clear. This is a banking recession that needs banking action. You cannot cut your way out of the recession that bad banking has caused. We can not allow the failure of the financial system to leave us ill-equipped for the economic and educational future that is so important to all of us.
So we invest and grow our way out, because high skills and good quality education are indeed the key to succeeding in the 21st century. The downturn is not the time to slow down our investment in education, but rather to build more vigorously for the future. So, education will not become a victim of this recession, but rather the focus of our path to recovery and long-term growth, which is also the key to sustainable public finances. So now is the time to build on our record investment in education, to invest in raising school standards for all our children, so that every child in Britain has the opportunity, indeed the entitlement, in this new global age to make the most of their talents.
Now we have made already one of the first big decisions for a global age with education to 18. This will cost money, but it is the right thing to do and by making educational allowances available, more will be able to stay on at school or go to college in these age groups. This autumn, the first 11 year olds will go right through from 16 to 18 and they will be entering secondary school in a few weeks time.
Investment for the global age also means we are stepping up our investment, including creating an additional 35,000 apprenticeships with a further £1 billion for apprenticeships in the years to come, an entitlement to an apprenticeship place for anybody who is suitably qualified for it.
And we are fully funding our September guarantee so that 16 and 17 year olds, who want it, can have a place after the official school leaving age in education or training.
Investment for the global age also means expanding second chance education, including with nearly a million people now being helped by Train to Gain. But that’s also why we have made the next big decision of the global age to make our core aim the realisation of every child’s potential. And we must now take the next steps to realise that aim and support the children of the new global age who have new needs, new opportunities to seize and new risks to confront.
In short, we must adopt the politics of opportunity and growth at the heart of our educational system and reject the politics of austerity and defeatism.
My guiding belief is this: that the countries that will succeed, the ones that will shape the destiny of humanity in the next century will be those that put power into the hands of their citizens, that liberate the talents, creativity, enterprise and ingenuity of their people, and forge a common national purpose from the values, beliefs, aspirations and ambitions of our people. It arises from a simple but profound point, that the defining question of the 20th century will not be whether power is held by the state or by the market, but whether power is in the hands of the many and not the few.
So the defining test will not be whether we can take power, but whether we can give it away. And what that means for education, I believe is this. My argument is that neither a free market, voucher-style reform of education, where some are helped while others are left to fall behind, nor top-down centralised control, can provide the innovation and leadership needed to take the next steps on the road to world class schools for our children.
We must always be restless in our ambition and relentless in our determination to improve. But instead of the free market or a heavy handed state, we should put our trust in you and look to great schools and great Headteachers, working with local parents, to lead the next stage of reform.
It will mean the best heads moving into the positions of system leadership, as Erica has done here, becoming Executive Heads, working with a group of schools. It will mean more devolution and freedom to innovate in all our schools, and it will mean giving parents new rights and responsibilities.
As Ed Balls will set out in his White Paper on schools in the next month, the drive for world class schools in Britain will require a more strategic role for government, intervening when schools persistently underperform, but standing back and allowing teachers and school leaders greater freedom to innovate.
It will mean more freedom for the professionals working in our schools, with those professionals taking greater responsibility for consistently improving classroom practice and demonstrating their success to parents and to the public.
It will mean more involvement for parents in their children’s education, with the responsibilities that brings for parents too, and also the need to ensure that our system responds to parental views on the quality of education and the availability of good places.
Above all, it will mean investment in excellence in resourcing a system that can unleash the talent and potential of every child. It is not elitist to strive for excellence; quite the opposite. I believe that there is limitless potential in every child: each is precious and unique; each endowed with a contribution that only they can make. So, schools must promote a culture of innovation and excellence, supporting the unique abilities of children to reach their potential, and defending not just the right of the struggling to catch up with support, but also the right of the very able to travel as far and as fast as their talents will take them. And by talents, I do not just mean academic talents, the core skills, essential as they are to the education of every child. Talent takes many forms: practical, creative, communicative, enterprising abilities, as well as analytical intelligence. We must step up our commitment to recognise and discover where they are in all our children and young people.
We must build resilience, determination and grit, the strengths of character and of mind, the ability to plan, to think ahead, to work with others, and stay the course – the invaluable skills which apply whatever you do, and increasingly determine how well we do in life.
Two teenage boys from a special school summed it up for me; let me read for you what they said. They said, ‘all students have some talent, which may be hard to find or encourage. In my school, we have students who cannot walk anymore, and now manage in wheelchairs. That is talent. Many of my friends find reading really hard and feel really good when they read a little bit and someone notices. Please notice all achievements.’ His friend said: ‘I have heard lots about students getting A* to C grades; in my school, nobody will get any of these grades. But does that mean that none of us have any talent? Please look hard for talent; we love it when you spot it.’ And that is what the children themselves were saying.
These words challenge us all, and I believe they should inspire us, too. Indeed, for many teachers, it is the reason why you went into the profession. That is why you commit to supporting the unique abilities of every child, and there can be no ceiling on the aspiration for our children; there can be no child that we overlook.
Now, when it works, the power of education is really inspiring. Last week, I hosted a reception for the Every Child a Reader programme and I met some of the pupils who had improved their reading the fastest. I met a young boy, who had just written his first letter and decided that when he grew up, he wanted to write books for others to read. And then he wanted to be Prime Minister. And I met two boys who both had parents in prison and who had never before left their council estate, far less come to London, but who felt that day, standing in Downing Street – and I got a letter from them afterwards – that learning to read really had opened a whole new world for them.
The opportunity for every child to succeed and to have the chance to develop their talents is, and must always be, a right for all and not a privilege for the few. Yes, it is economic, because the future of our economy and the prosperity of our nation will be determined by this more than anything else, the skills and contributions of our young people. But it is more than economic it is personal.
This is a very personal mission for me. I grew up in an ordinary industrial town and went to the local school. I saw at first hand the power of opportunity to change lives, but I also saw how the devastating denial of that opportunity can crush people’s potential. I benefited from great and dedicated teachers; I was fortunate enough to get to university. But as a teenager, I saw how so many close friends of mine who might have gone to college or become an apprentice or studied at university, but they never did. University or college was, they thought, or their parents thought, was for people not like them.
Often, invisible barriers the background they came from, the assumptions they made, the encouragement they never had held them back to their permanent disadvantage.
So, I do not just celebrate the potential of education because I understand it in some abstract sense. No; it is a commitment is greater than that. It is the frustration and the anger that such opportunities were not there for my friends when I was growing up that drives me to say that we have to find a way to give every child in Britain the opportunity to develop and discover their own talents, fulfil their potential and improve their chances in life.
Let me sum up where I think we can advance. I believe the next phase of innovation and reform in our schools will be crucial. For me, it must begin, as with all our public services reforms, with three fundamental propositions.
We should extend, first of all, the reach of the leaders within our public services, allowing government to play a more strategic role, focussed on clear priorities, not hundreds of initiatives. We must be unapologetically hard-edged to intervene when schools consistently underperform, but not afraid to stand back and allow greater freedom to innovate where there is success.
Second, public services are only ever as good as the professionals who deliver them. So, we must invest, and build trust, in our public service professionals.
And third, modern public services must be accountable and responsive to the people who use them. Every parent, just as every patient in the NHS, and indeed everyone who uses our public services, must have the ability to influence and shape these services, for we will only achieve true excellence when we have not only universal services, but also services that people feel are personal to their needs.
So, the strategic leadership of the school system, first of all: a decade ago, so many of Britain’s public services were of such poor quality that it was right for central government to act as a proxy for the interests of users, challenging providers on their behalf and demanding improvement. This approach, as you know, has led to major improvements in standards and proved particularly successful in tackling failure, including in our schools.
But it has not led to consistently world-class provision in every school and in every classroom. And although individual school autonomy has increased, it has also led to an increasingly large role for central government. Now, there are some who argue that we should tackle school failure by relying on market forces, that we should allow the market to develop in education, with voucher-style approaches for parents to buy school places for their children.
What would this achieve? Consider the implications of new schools and surplus places springing up unplanned whenever a group of parents or sponsors came forward. Realistically, these new schools would not be targeted at the areas of greatest need. Instead, they might pick off the children with the most educated and aspirational parents from existing schools at the expense of the majority, who would be left behind. And they would not raise standards for all; instead, they would divert some of the £4.5 billion capital spending from the refurbishment and improvement of around 360 existing schools like this across the country.
And unlike our academies, these schools would not replace existing ones or at least not until the education of a generation of children may have been damaged. A market free-for-all would fail because as some schools go under slowly, as competitors overtake them, children in these weaker schools would be left behind. That would mean a whole generation failed, waiting for the market to work.
That would be power for a few parents, not for the many; opportunity for some children, and not excellence for all. So, I reject this approach.
An alternative approach would be a significantly increased top-down role for government in the education system, local authorities running every school to meet centrally-set targets and regulations. I reject this approach. It would stifle innovation, deny teachers and school leaders the freedom they need to drive change. It would cut parents out of any role in improving education standards.
Instead, our approach must be to look at great schools and great heads to lead the next stage of reform, with parents given new powers and government, both local and national, exercising not a directive role, but a strategic role. I believe all of you in this hall today, your talents and your expertise are the vital ingredients of success in taking our education system to this next level.
Outstanding Headteachers are showing what can be achieved by extending their sphere of leadership. As well as the federation here in Lewisham, there are now many notable examples of federations: the Ark chain of schools is raising standards across London; Outwood Grange, in federation with North Doncaster Technical College and Harrogate High and led by Michael Wilkins, is demonstrating what can happen when a high performing school federates with schools that are in need of support.
We must make this the norm rather than the exception. So, we will bring forward proposals in our White Paper for a radical extension of the role of federations, chains and executive heads in our school system. And as local professional leadership of the system strengthens, government must and can play a more strategic role, overcoming its temptation to try to control too much. This means local government being a commissioner of services, for example, for children with additional needs, and being responsible for the provision of sufficient good places at school.
And it means central government being clearer about its priorities. It should focus on setting overall direction and the most important objectives. So, the new school report card will set out with great clarity, greater than ever before, what we expect of schools: a single point of focus in the place of a multiplicity of targets. And where the school is successful, we will back that leadership.
Of course, central government must continue to intervene to enforce minimum standards, both where schools are consistently underperforming or where they are simply coasting along. I make no apology for doing so.
National Challenge has raised the bar: backed by £400 million of extra resources, it will make a real difference in hundreds of secondary schools. In the forthcoming schools White Paper, we will set out how we will make more use of the best leadership to drive improvement across the whole schools system in the coming years.
In the primary school arena, for example, for too long, persistently poor schools have been allowed to continue. So, before the summer, a primary school improvement strategy will set out how, starting in the New Year and, true to our approach of building on the professionalism in the system, we will ensure that the best leadership in primary schools is also engaged to drive up standards across the board.
But government also needs to know where to step back. Academies and Trusts have additional freedoms, but we must look harder at how we can rationalise the statutory duties, correspondence and guidance that schools receive. Learning the lessons from our recent progress with other services like the NHS, the White Paper will come forward with proposals to reduce that burden on schools.
And so, in doing so, we will free up schools to push forward the frontier of innovation, like the Leigh Academy, which is organised into a series of small schools within the school, so that every pupil knows and is known by every teacher within their small school, with vertical tutoring of groups of students with ages ranging from year 7 to sixth form, or the Young Foundation, which is currently developing studio schools with seven local authorities, engaging young people by offering a range of qualifications through an enterprise-based curriculum and working in partnership with local businesses to help pupils develop employability skills.
So, as government steps back and offer greater freedoms, we must support the leadership of our schools to step forward.
Now, the second belief I set out is that public services are only ever as good as the professionals who deliver them. Today, teaching is becoming a profession of choice for the best graduates: in fact, the number one career choice for this year’s graduates. The success of Teach First means it is now one of the top recruiters of Oxford and Cambridge graduates as well. In this economic downturn, we are also investing to attract more graduates and more talented career-changers into teaching. We are transforming the training of teachers through the introduction of a new Masters qualification and, from this September, schools in the most challenging circumstances will be able to offer a £10,000 incentive to attract the best teachers.
What is being demonstrated again and again in our programme of public service reform, and what excites me about the potential we have to go for, is that real excellence depends upon liberating the imagination, the creativity and the commitment of all the workforce in our public services. This does not mean giving up on reform, as some would encourage us to do, but instead requires us to create new opportunities for professionals to control the process of change, with less top-down control and a greater say for front-line staff.
We have already acted to free up the curriculum in secondary education. The Rose review will do the same for primary schools. We must make the leap to a ‘high trust’ approach to reform, not one where driving up standards is always seen as something which government does to schools. That is why in next month’s White Paper, we will set out plans to increasingly move towards a system in which schools decide for themselves their priorities for improvement and buy in the tailored support they need to meet their needs, including, sometimes, from other schools.
We already have over 200 training schools, leading on the delivery of high quality continued professional development. And the Teachers Development Agency and the National College of School Leadership are working together to ensure that it will become the norm for groups of schools to drive improvements in practice: teachers learning from other teachers in local clusters.
We must build on these partnerships. Already, as part of our Academies programme, schools are partnering with universities.
And I know that many of you here today share the desire to make the most of these links. For example, where schools partner with our best teacher-training providers, they could become leading innovators in teacher training and classroom practice.
And we will take forward with our school partners the idea of a guaranteed entitlement to professional development for all teachers, a guarantee which for many teachers will mean more ongoing investment in their skills and their own professionalism.
So, our approach to professionalism is clear. We know that it is increasingly professionals themselves who are the engines of innovation and improvement in our schools, and we know that it is only be empowering you, the leaders, that we will achieve our shared goal of truly world-class standards.
Now, finally, we all know that the greatest influence on a child’s life is the parents. The evidence is clear that the most important role for parents in their children’s education is talking to them, reading with them, taking an interest in their progress. So, most critically of all in our approach to extending opportunity in education, we want to maximise parent power and improve services for parents that involve them in their children’s education in the years ahead.
Fundamentally, of course, public accountability has to be based on clear information about performance, in schools as well as in other public services. That is why we make no apology for continuing external assessment of pupil attainment at the end of primary school, as there is in secondary education. And that’s why we are looking to introduce the new school-report card, which could give comprehensive but clear information for parents on the performance of the school that their child attends.
But we need more than intelligent public accountability for schools to be more responsive. In the last few years, education has become increasingly personalised to the specific needs, the aptitudes and the aspirations of individual children. This personalisation has been driven by powerful new forms of teaching, learning and assessment in our schools. We have seen greater use of information technologies to enhance learning and track pupil progress, access to wider parent services that parents need to support them – for example, when their child has a disability – new methods of organising the curriculum, innovative classroom teaching practice, positive changes led by innovators in our education system. And personalising education for every child must lead us on to find new ways of involving parents in the education of their children.
Parents have important responsibilities, whether it is simply ensuring that children arrive at school ready to learn, or helping teachers address persistent behavioural problems. Good parenting is crucial for children’s success, but to match these responsibilities we need to do more to make sure that our education system responds to parental views on the quality of education and the availability of good school places. Just as we put more trust in our frontline professionals, we need to do more to empower parents.
So, for parents to influence the education of their children, they need rich, varied and easily accessible information on the progress, behaviour and attendance of their children. Many of our schools and best leaders are already using the latest technology to do this, but it should be a right for all parents. So, from 2010, all secondary schools, and from 2012, all primary schools, will report online to parents, something that has been made possible because of our investment in universal home internet access for all families with children, something that Jim Knight has been pushing and made funds available to happen. So, the mother that’s worried about her son struggling with his reading can find out more about how she can help. The dad who works long hours and can’t make a parents’ evening can keep in touch with his daughter’s progress at whatever time of day or night that he’s free.
And, because we know that sometimes talking face-to-face to a teacher who knows the child well is what parents really want, we will build on the good practice that already exists in schools and ensure that, by September next year, every secondary pupil has the opportunity of a personal tutor.
For me, like all parents, school discipline matters. A school that has satisfactory behaviour is simply not good enough. We know what works, as many of you here today have shown: clear rules consistently enforced can turn around poor discipline. It is simply unacceptable that a minority of children can disrupt the learning of the majority.
But, as well as being directly engaged in their children’s learning, and knowing that the school is tackling their concerns about behaviour, parents must want to know also that they will have a good offer of secondary school places and, crucially, that, if the offer is not good enough, they can demand action.
Now, there are some who argue that the solution for parents who are unhappy with the choice available is to break away and create their own schools. I believe there is a role for parents running schools where they wish to. Indeed, that’s why this government has made that possible. The first parent-promoted school has already opened in Lambeth. It’s why we will go further in improving the support we give to parents’ groups who want to take this route.
But, the vast majority of parents don’t want the burden of running their own school. They don’t want to be expected to do it themselves. They want world-class teachers and school providers to work with them to do it.
So, if parents are dissatisfied with the availability of good school places in their local area or with the mix of provision on offer, then we have an obligation to respond to their concerns. We have made good progress on providing all parents with a good choice of school. This year 83% of parents got their first-choice school; 94.6% got one of their first three choices. And through policies like the national challenge we will continue to drive up the quality of school places and so improve the options for every parent.
But I want to go further still. So, we will look at how local authorities can improve their knowledge of what parents want and how satisfied parents are with their local schools. Where there is significant dissatisfaction with the pattern of secondary school provision, and where standards across the area are too low, then the local authority will be required to act. This could mean either the creation of a federation of schools, an expansion of good school places or, in some cases, the establishment of entirely new schools.
Working together and working towards these improvements needs to happen within the context of a system of fair admissions, so that the education of other children in the area will not be undermined and, unlike the free-market free-for-all, this is a policy agenda focused on raising standards for all, not raising standards for some at the expense of others.
So, through the steps I have sought to outline today, we want to deliver a system that is more accountable to parents, offering them more access to information, emphasising an increasingly personal approach to the teaching and support the individual child receives, enforcing stronger discipline, and providing testing and assessment with a school report card that informs them about the performance of the school in a well-rounded way, not just in the basic traditional subjects, but across the breadth of the education the school delivers.
We will focus on developing the professionalism and greater leadership in our schools, supporting the development of teaching with new opportunities for training, bringing new talent into the profession; we will back success and offer greater freedoms in return for a continuous and relentless focus on raising the bar for every child.
And, through extending the reach of our best leaders as executive heads, and in the development of chains and federations, we will improve schools across the country so that, working with you, we raise standards for all, not just standards for some.
With your help we can achieve what you want to achieve: the goal of a good school place for every child in Britain. Working through your excellence we can secure the economic future of Britain for generations to come.
And, with your leadership, we can enable every child to say that truly, their education focused on making the best of their talents and making the most of their potential, and that their destiny will be determined by them, and never again determined for them.
Thank you very much.
Question
I spoke this morning partly through my work as a national leader with a principal of an academy, a very, very challenging academy, and he’d already picked up the sound-bite this morning on Radio 4 about giving parents more power, and, he said, ‘Please speak to the Prime Minister about this.’ He said, ‘On the one hand, I’m trying so hard to get parents to come in and be involved in the school.’ He said, ‘We’ve put such a lot of effort into our recent Year 10 Parents’ Evening, and 30% of the parents only turned up.’
And, frankly, those parents were the ones he did not want to see. You know, one of my schools is a very highly academic, middle-class school, and all of the parents turn up, all of the time. And it really worries me when we think about empowering them more because, frankly, sometimes it is the wrong parents. We don’t want to be interfered with. Sorry to go on, but that 30% of parents were the ones who understood about parenting in this challenging school. The 70% of parents who need to understand more about parenting skills and the importance of being engaged. So, a big continuum, lots of issues, it sends a trickle of fear down my back when you talk about empowering parents more.
Question
Prime Minister, I’ll never have this opportunity again. I’m from Southampton. You very generously mentioned me in your Annual Lecture last year in terms of the curriculum development going on at Redbridge Community School. Had my dad been alive last year, I know he would have been the proudest parent in the Midlands. Thank you very much; the power of praise is enormously powerful, as you know.
To my question, I am grappling at the moment with the idea of moving my curriculum forward as you recognised in your speech last year. I am also mindful that there are number of colleagues certainly sat here today that are enormously grateful for the amount of investment that has gone in over the years. However, we still are largely wedded to a factory system of education. My question is this: if, in moving increasingly away, particularly through the use of technology, are we not still, particularly in view of some of your comments today about discipline and communication with each other, are we not still essentially wedded to a system of schools as we have know them, schools as buildings, schools as structures where people largely attend at the same time, leave at the same time and work as a team? Or do you foresee a time where we can move to virtually a system of virtual schools with students being far less attached to brick buildings than they are at the moment?
Question
I am from the Association of School and College Leaders. Prime Minister, you have just heard talk about the power of praise, and it’s been really good to hear you this morning in 95% of what you were saying, praising school leaders in what they were doing. That’s quite a high mark, by the way.
And, yet, in the 5% at the end of your speech, and in the one item you chose to float to the press for Radio 4 this morning, it is about instituting another complaints procedure. We have had two new complaints procedures in the last two years, one for Ofsted and one coming up in the bill with the Local Government Ombudsman. Isn’t it time for the government to accentuate the positive in the way that you did today, and not ensure that tomorrow’s headlines are about the schools that aren’t doing well?
Prime Minister
Well, we have moved into some controversial territory, and I just want to set out my thoughts, and obviously there’ll be a response to that from some people in the audience who don’t agree with me.
When I was at school, there was very little encouragement for parents to be involved at any stage. That was the culture of the time. That was how teachers and Headteachers saw the best way of getting on with education. Even when I became a Member of Parliament in 1983, which sounds a long time ago, I remember the Chairman of the Education Committee of the local authority where I was at school, ‘Parents, they don’t want to be involved. They just want us,’ and he meant him, the councillor, ‘to get on with the job.’
And, it is true that, in the traditions of British education, we rightly value the role of the professionals, which is what I am saying today. And we rightly value your ability to innovate, which is what I’ve been talking about, your ability to get together, to make for better systems through federations, and the initiatives that you’ve taken to improve the curriculum are really something that we owe you a great debt of gratitude for.
But, is there anybody here who would disagree that, if you could get a better partnership between the parents and the teachers, it would make for a far more effective education of the child?
And, if we could get that 70% of parents who were not involved, to feel that they had some responsibility to be involved, we would be in a better place, and, particularly, when we know that there are so many sources of influence on a child. When I was growing up, the influences on a child, on me, were my parents, my school friends and my teacher.
And now we’re in a situation where we know for a fact that the influences on our children – even very young children – are the internet, videos, films, emailing and texting and all those other influences that are placed upon that child that make parenting more difficult and make teaching more difficult. So is there not a case for us thinking of how a better alliance between parents and teachers could prevent some of these terrible influences that flow from the freedoms of our society and are difficult to control, that can make the education of a child more effective?
If, as we know, the individual talent of that child needs nurturing to find out where that potential is, do we not need more information from the parent and more link-up with home and school? Now, we have tried to give parents enabling information. So we are trying, as Jim is, to link the parents up to the school. Obviously, we give people a trigger to complain but that is true in every profession. I am more talking about how you can build a more effective partnership for the future. And I am not saying I have all the answers, but I think parents have to be involved in this process in a bigger way than previously.
I repeat, the world is changing so fast that if you could cut out the influence of a bad parent by the influence of a good teacher, you might have succeeded 20 or 30 years ago. But you have now got to cut out the influence of video violence and internet engagement and everything else, as well as peer pressure. So we do need this alliance and I hesitate to comment on experiments that have been unsuccessful where hardly any parents turn up, but I think we should hesitate to say that it’s not going to work. In fact, we have a duty to make it work.
So that’s my argument to you this morning. And while it’s difficult, I think, for you to welcome reforms that suggest that teachers are under more pressure, I think it’s right to say that we would in the long run benefit from a greater parental involvement. And that’s why I’m talking about what I’m talking about today.
On the second issue about innovation in schools, young people learning from home, well of course that is going to happen more as people find the internet, texting, emailing and everything else more effective in getting access to knowledge. But it will never replace two things: the central role of the individual person-to-person contact that is at the essence of teaching; and the community that is built up through pupils being together and working together in a school.
And so I think while all the evidence around us is that information can be transmitted by a whole range of different methods other than simply the teaching process, that the tutoring of the mind, the encouragement of the imagination, the development of the full personality as part of a community of people, you are not going to do without the idea of a school and the idea of the teacher as tutor. And these are absolutely central to the future of our country.
Question
Prime Minister, much of what you said was about system leadership and how the whole system must improve, which I would support very strongly. So could I just check that that means, on the one hand, a local authority will not be allowed to sit on its hands if things are not going well, and on the other, that everyone in the system must cooperate in order to achieve greater outcomes? To be specific, there is already a duty to cooperate in law. Is that going to be strengthened and given teeth so that people within the system who want to go their own way and not contribute to the benefit of all children will actually be constrained to work together to achieve greater standards for absolutely all children?
Prime Minister
Jim has been taking the Bill through and it’s in it already.
Jim Knight MP
We are legislating at the moment. In fact, in the House later on today we’ve got the report stage of the bill. And in there is the duty for all schools to be in behaviour partnerships, including academies, for example. There’s also the measures in respect of schools having the duty to cooperate within Children’s Trusts, so that gives schools the opportunity to influence Children’s Trust arrangements as well as be in receipt of some of those services. So that then enables earlier intervention, I think very much, in the spirit of what you are talking about.
Question
Prime Minister, thank you for your speech. I represent independent-sector schools, who have worked quite closely with NCSL and they have identified outstanding leaders and tried to encourage as many independent/state-school partnerships as possible. And I just interested to know whether you envisage independent-sector outstanding leaders being involved in the federations that you speak of and system leadership.
Jim Knight MP
Yes, we do.
Question
I am really interested in what you have to say about accountability and speaking for governing bodies, who are the accountable body who didn’t get a mention this morning. We would just like to ask a question about, in this complex world of more interesting institutions, whether the mechanisms are there to make sure that governing bodies are equipped to be properly accountable with training and the other things that we need like good clerks, professionalised with proper pay scales.
Prime Minister
I think the whole spirit of what I have said this morning is one of devolution to support innovation, and for us to release any central barriers there are to people being able to make their own decisions locally. And independent schools will be involved in this, as Jim as said. We are just completing a review of school governance, as you know. Jim, you might want to say where it is going to lead us.
Jim Knight MP
We very much want to properly resource and value school governance. As the role of schools evolves, we have to ensure that we evolve school governance alongside it. We have to make sure that we have the right set of skills on governing bodies, that there is therefore the right sort of training available to those people who take on the role of being a school governor, in particular the chairs of governors but also the clerks of governors, as Clare has said.
That is something we will set out in a few weeks’ time in more detail when we publish the White Paper, but if we are going to have a self-sustaining model of school improvement, governance has to be right at the heart of it, both supporting and challenging school leaders. As in any other walk of life, governance is absolutely crucial.
Question
Thank you, Prime Minister, for giving us this opportunity. We heard in the news that hundreds of thousands of records of the general public, who had been either unjustly or frivolously accused of some misdemeanour are going to be destroyed. We are very concerned that there are thousands of teachers who have been similarly frivolously accused of various things. Can you give us the assurance that they also will have their records expunged, because it is affecting not only their careers but also their lives?
Question
We have done a lot of work back to parents and families. My concern is the gap with the technology in some of the most deprived areas, because many of our parents and families do not have computers at home and computers are not necessarily used for the right reasons. So I just wondered with the plans for the future, how are we going to stop the gap actually widening rather than giving parents more access?
Question
Prime Minister, I am mentoring young people here in the borough. First of all, thank you very much for your supportive comments about the work we are doing. I would also pay tribute to Erica for the work she is doing as well. One thing I wanted to ask about is the way in which you see school admissions working going forward. Because I think for London local authorities, this is one of our biggest and toughest issues, and one which excites the interest of parents for obvious reasons. Do you see central government playing a bigger role in issuing guidance on that or giving more powers to local authorities in this regard? I’m not saying this lightly; it’s a very serious issue for us and I would be interested to hear what you have to say and what the Minister has to say.
Jim Knight MP
In terms of that last point, the admissions code that we’ve developed in the last couple of years and we’ve refined a little quite recently I think has been a huge step forward in respect of fair admissions for schools and ensuring that in the end it’s back to parents again. It’s parents choosing schools rather than the other way around. I think we want a period of stability around admissions by and large, rather than rushing to yet another admissions code, but we will now be focusing much more on local authorities, ensuring that it’s properly enforced and they know what’s going on in respect of anyone trying to play the system, which just occasionally might happen.
In response to the other question from the lady from Manchester, if you have time go down the road to Oldham, which is one of the two areas that is piloting the home access initiative, which we will start the national roll out for in November. What you will see there are the poorest families in the borough in receipt of the technology, where not only is that helping children in their learning, but when I went up there a month or so ago I was really struck. 75% of the parents are going to UK Online centres to learn how to use that technology. It genuinely is education going into the homes that really need it: the 70% who don’t turn up to parents’ evenings but who are a fantastic untapped resource for education if we can engage them in our schools.
Prime Minister
The intention of our Digital Britain programme is to link up every household. What Jim is doing is giving special help to people where we want the kids to be linked up and the parents to be linked up to the school. I should add also that our family intervention programme has been extended so that we work far more closely with families of people who are in difficulty, but children who then have behavioural problems as a result of that. And we are trying to extend our parenting advice and help and counselling to thousands of families who don’t have it at the moment. So we are looking at the problem from the other side as well: how we can help parents be more effective parents that can themselves be more effective in helping you make pupils better pupils. So a lot of work is being done on the parenting side, and I would like to see more work being done myself because it is such an important area.
As far as teachers’ records, I think Delyth Morgan, the Minister at Jim’s department, is looking at this. And I will write you a note if you like about what progress has been made.
Jim has answered the point about stability in the admissions code, but obviously problems arise year to year on how people see it as being applied. Let me say that what I’ve taken out of this discussion is that while you have questions, rightly so, about the measures that we are proposing and will of course be discussed in the next few months, that the general agreement that exists about the need for devolution, innovation and freedom for schools to get on with the job, to invest in our professionals, to get parents more motivated to support their children, and for the government to have this more strategic rather than directive rule, is where you would like things to go. And it is when we can praise good schools and show them as model schools for other schools that we will start to see other schools adopting all the good techniques and all the good methods and all the good innovation that you have followed.
I went back to my old school a few months ago and two things really stuck me. First of all, we had had a motto for my school, which was ‘usque conabor’, the Latin. And it meant ‘I will strive my utmost.’ For 20 years, it had been reinterpreted not as ‘I will strive my utmost’; the translation was something like ‘we will help each other’. And now this new teacher had brought the old motto in its original translation back: ‘I will strive my utmost’. And I think most of the schools I go to have such aspirational mottos. The one next door to me is ‘rise to the light’, which was a mining community where children were encouraged to look up to the opportunities that were available. And every school I go to, I see that level of ambition and that aspiration for the children. And that is a hugely different world from where we’ve been, I think. More aspirational, more ambition for the children, more faith in people’s potential, and these mottos simply reflect it.
The second thing that happened when I went back to the school was that there was an enterprise class being held at one of the places. When I was at school, no business ever came near the school. I do not know what many of you remember, but there was no link-up with businesses or enterprise or companies. Now, of course, what you’ve achieved is that the rest of the community becomes part of the school and businesses come in.
But the change that is taking place in our schools is quite incredible and it is due to your innovation, moving things forward, making you right at the centre of the community. You are genuine leaders in every community of our country in which you live, and I want to thank you for your tolerance of government and thank you for your innovation.
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