Tackle failure first

Veteran education adviser Sir Cyril Taylor urges the new administration to set challenging priorities

By John O'Leary

Michael Gove should start at the bottom, rather than the top, as he tries to reform the school system as the new Education Secretary, according to the man who advised his predecessors, both Tory and Labour, for 20 years.

The Academies Bill, which is already on its way through Parliament, puts the emphasis on new freedoms for outstanding schools. But Sir Cyril Taylor, who founded the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), would prefer that top priority went to tackling low levels of literacy and improving 167 failing schools.

Sir Cyril, who still sits on the SSAT’s board, is a keen supporter of the academies model and believes that the increased autonomy promised to head teachers by the new administration is a prerequisite to increased performance in schools.  But he is trying to persuade Mr Gove that what used to be known as the ‘long tail of underachievement’ requires particular attention.

Although retired from the formal business of policy advice at the age of 75, Sir Cyril has certainly not stopped offering opinions to ministers. He sent Mr Gove his version of Labour’s proposed School Report Card long before the election, dispensing with the summative grade by which schools would be judged (unfairly, in his view). Interviewed in his office at the American Institute for Foreign Study, he is still a mine of statistics and policy proposals.

Sir Cyril understands the decision to maximise the number of academies by creating a fast track for high-performing schools – although he is suspicious of light-touch Ofsted inspections and the official calculations of ‘contextual value added’ as criteria for eligibility. But he has reminded Mr Gove that the mechanism was established to respond to entrenched failure. “It’s fine to have as many academies as want to become them, but in five years’ time he shouldn’t have any failing schools,” Sir Cyril says.

The 167 schools that he considers to be failing have been identified by Professor David Jesson, of York University, who has produced many analyses for the SSAT. The total is significantly lower than the 247 which remain at risk of closure under the National Challenge programme set up by Labour. Professor Jesson – and Sir Cyril – believe that the National Challenge measure of 30 per cent achieving five GCSEs, including maths and English, at grade C or above is too crude a measure by which to judge failure. “There are many schools that are below 30 per cent but are making progress and should not be regarded as failing,” he says.

His preferred benchmarks include a value added score devised by Professor Jesson and a measure of recent progress at GCSE, which Sir Cyril regards as the most telling evidence of whether or not a school should be given more time to transform results. Predicted GCSE scores produced by Professor Jesson suggest that 50 per cent of GCSE candidates at some of the schools on the list should be achieving five A-C grades, including English and maths, rather than less than 30 per cent.

The list includes schools where more than half of the pupils claim free school meals – 71 per cent in one case – but there are others where the proportion is less than 10 per cent. Sir Cyril has never been one to accept poverty as an excuse for failure, although he acknowledges that the figures set a school’s results in context.

Neither is Sir Cyril among the critics of the Labour government who assume that the apparent advances in education were illusory, the result of devalued exam grades. “It’s very easy to criticise and teachers get very depressed about that. If you go back to the 1988 Education Reform Act, there has been enormous progress raising standards in the UK, he says. “Most teachers are very dedicated, competent people and we need to say that more often.”

He adds that Labour made some progress on failing schools, reducing their number from between 500 and 600 to the current total. But he finds it unacceptable that the remainder are blighting the education of some 150,000 pupils at any one time. “It will not be cheap to take the necessary action – most of the leadership and probably a third of the staff have to be sacked in a typical failing school,” he says. “But the cost of failure is enormous.”

Sir Cyril’s solution is to incentivise academies and other high-performing schools to take over failing schools. “Federations work well and high-performing schools usually have good deputies, who can take on extra responsibilities.”

He parts company with the radicals who see no role for local authorities. “We need to define the local authority role,” he says. “My instinct is to transfer as many responsibilities as possible to schools, but some should stay with local authorities because councillors do know a lot about their schools.”

That is not to suggest that Sir Cyril favours eroding the independence of academies. He is critical of Ed Balls, Mr Gove’s predecessor for watering down their autonomy.

“Academies are not as free as when we set them up,” he says. “We have to go back to that freedom and link it to proper accountability.”

The other priority Sir Cyril is encouraging Mr Gove to adopt – perhaps even ahead of failing secondary schools – is literacy. He believes that the official figures mask even greater problems because so many children reach the Government benchmark only after intensive coaching for National Curriculum tests. Even so, 20 per cent fail to reach the expected standard and 10 per cent of 11-year-olds miss the target set for the age of seven.

Sir Cyril is a supporter of the STAR reading test, which can be taken in ten minutes and is less susceptible to coaching than National Curriculum tests. “There should be a statutory requirement to show progress in literacy, with tests taken online and not coached,” he says. “Most head teachers would make it the top priority because it is so essential for subsequent learning.”

Having seen ten education secretaries, with various departmental titles, come and go while he was advising governments from 1987 to 2007, Sir Cyril knows the importance of getting his message across while the agenda is still being set. “I’m generally optimistic,” he says. “I think there’s very good chance that we will build on the progress that has already been made if the Government stops interfering in the way that Ed Balls did.”

30 June 2010

John O'Leary. Editor, Policy Review Magazine