................................................................................ 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...