Routledge & Falmer 2000.
paper £12.99 pp151.
This is a remarkable book. A youngish head, in his first appointment takes over a school, the first in England to be put into `special measures' by Ofsted and threatened, not for the first time, with closure. Two years later he has turned the school round, it is taken off special measures, and the head becomes the second head teacher in the history of Wolverhampton schools to be knighted for his services to education. He leaves Northicote, becomes director of Midlands Leadership at the University of Wolverhampton is Dean of its School of Education and now the author of this book which could well be a best seller. Sir Geoffrey Hampton, this is Your Life!
This success was achieved against the almost impossible odds of primitive Conservative educational theory and practice of the survival of the fittest. This rewarded `successful' schools by giving them more money and punished `failing' schools by taking money away from them.
The first effect of the enormous adverse publicity of the `failed' school was that parents of the `most able' children removed them from the school thus adding to its woes. Fortunately, the school had the support of the local education authority which spends more on education than almost any other authority outside some in London; it was thus able to assist Northicote with both finance and advice.
Hampton's first task in dragging the school up was to set an ideal. This resulted in the slogan Excellence for All. This repudiated the widespread idea that many of the children were destined to he hewers of wood and drawers of water. Such a view becomes self-fulfilling as children under achieve and teachers feel that this is inevitable. The idea that some children are `more able' than others, however, is to tacitly accept the theory of innate intelligence, the rejection of which led to the setting up of the comprehensive school system. A better term for such children is `more advanced'. Disadvantaged children need time to catch up with other students. The mistake of David Blunkett in his admirable but mistaken insistence that all schools can achieve equal GCSE results and if they don't they are `failing' is that disadvantaged children take more years to develop than Year 11 and the further Labour Party insistence on life long learning must pick up those that the schools failed. Wolverhampton is in the forefront of this movement with the fifth largest University, the greatest concentration of working class children in the country, and one of the best supported Adult Education services in the country.
Hampton started at the right end by winning over his children. To call them `students' and not `pupils' was a good start. Insistence on the wearing of school uniform was another. This was first enforced with a first year intake, but spread quickly with other students and parents when a shop was set up to sell uniforms at wholesale prices. Each student was shown that it was valued by giving it an educational target which it could manage. A very controversial question was the introduction of homework for all children with emphasis on its relevance, it being marked, and a clear idea given of how it fitted into the programme of work for the student.
Pride and morale were then restored with a series of class and year student committees which picked up matters unknown to the staff and reinforced most other decisions reached by the head and the governors.
The staff were the next target. All staff were treated as equal whether teaching, support or manual. The caretaker was given a fancy title and played a key role in school improvement as did office staff in dealing with complaints and irate parents and dinner ladies and others in supervising the critical dinner hour, especially on wet days.
With regard to teachers, many were demoralised, some of the best had fled, many were locked in the old philosophy reinforced by many years of practice that in a deprived area substantial progress was very difficult. Observation of class teaching was a first priority by the head and members of senior teacher teams. But to make progress a mutual system of criticism and self-criticism which goes deeply against the grain of English teaching practice was instituted. This gave rise to team teaching, the spread of best practice among all teachers, and maximum use of information technology.
The third target was the parents. Hampton understood that no school can go ahead without the enthusiastic support of its parents, both to support the aims of the school and also to raise money for projects that the budget does not allow for. Enormous amounts of time and resources must be devoted to this among parents, many of them so deprived that they had derived no advantage from school and were hostile to it for their children. Frequent reports with identifiable targets of achievement and suggestions for help from parents, and similarly clear targets for parents' evenings helped with this. Parents in the school assisting teachers became a common feature and parents taking courses to improve their own qualifications was a natural follow-up as the school became a true community school.
Lastly, the role of governors was crucial as was that of the local authority. The above review has emphasised principles and does scant justice to the detail of the book which differs from most that have come my way in its practicality and the eschewing of generalities. It is indeed a handbook for the transforming of schools.
I would make the following points. The emphasis on child-teacher-parent is the one that has driven the comprehensive school ideal and is deeply socialist. The only time I have been exposed to such a comprehensive practice has been the Summer School for German teachers of English run each year at Potsdam in East Germany until that country was taken over by the west in a process called unification. The principles are also those of the great Soviet educational philosophers of the early years of the Soviet Union when virtually the whole of an almost completely illiterate society was made literate, and those of Cuba which has produced one of the best education systems in the world. These ideas are the complete opposite of Conservatives who believe that intelligence is limited and innate and therefore the elitist policy of giving further educational resources to those who already posess some educational qualifications and taking away from schools that have not makes the best use of education money. Yet Geoff Hampton shows no signs of being even the pinkest of socialists. Some Liberals, however, can embrace socialist ideas of equality and it may be this that drives Hampton. But a man who both preaches and puts himself into a position to be able to practice comprehensive education is indeed a rarity.
A peculiarity of his method is that he appears to ignore the black children in his school. Not until page 67 of his book does he mention `equal opportunities' and the term ethnic minority child never appears in the book. It is true that Bushbury has a smaller percentage of ethnic minority people than most other wards in Wolverhampton, but the school probably had between 10% and 15% of ethnic minority children. (This uncertainty arises from the fact that we have only two years of official ethnic minority break down in schools and that for 1999 is vitiated by there being large numbers of unclassified pupils; the 1998 figures shows 12.5%). There are other puzzles. Hampton says that when he took over the school there was only 600 children on the roll whereas in the 1970s there had been 1,300. But a Wolverhampton Race Equality Council report on pupils in schools averaged over the period 1986 to 1990 showed 631 pupils on the rolls. Incidentally, this WREC report quoted dealt with exclusions from schools in that period and Northicote was the largest excluder of children with 70, although both Asian and Black children were under-represented in these figures. Whether the figure of 1,300 children had any relevance to the situation facing Hampton in 1993, therefore, might be questioned.
With regard to school results, when the damning OFSTED report was issued in 1994 the percentage of pupils with 5 or more GCSEs at Grades A-C was 13%. It was the same the following year. In 1996 it had fallen to 10%. For December 1999 Hampton projected in his book (page 143) that it would be 30%. It turned out to be 26%, but by that time all other schools had also improved their results and only Pendeford (26%), Deansfield (18%), and Moreton (12%), were below them. Out of 19 schools Northicote therefore ranked 16th. Nor did the position alter in 2000. With 17% of 5 or more GCSEs at A to C Northicote ranked 19th out of 21 schools; in points for grades of all GCSEs it ranked 18th; and in `A' Level results it ranked 18 out of 21 schools.
It is interesting to compare these results with those of a decade earlier. In 1989 Northicote ranked a splendid 10th out of 21 schools and was well clear of the other `proletarian' schools of the town such as Valley Park, Parkfield, Deansfield, Moreton, Aldersley and others schools usually cast as the villains and castigated as `failing'.
Then with regard to teachers. Hampton started with 40. By the time he had turned the school round 30% of them had left and of those, Hampton says he regretted the loss of only two. Such horrendous figures of turnover, I suspect, will be found not to be uncommon among the vilified disadvantaged schools, if anyone took the trouble to collect them. But, as every teacher knows, the basis of discipline in any school rests with those who have been at a school for many years. And perhaps most of all those who have taught the students' parents!
But why was Northicote chosen as the first school to be put into `special measures'? Any of the proletarian schools mentioned above could at some time or other have been cast in the same role. One wonders if the `failure' of Northicote by the Ofsted inspectors paralleled the other notorious `failure' in Wolverhampton when inspectors went into Bilston Community College after about one third of the staff had been dismissed or made redundant and declared it the most inefficient college it had ever inspected. It begins to look as if the government wanted a victim which could be turned into a success. When this had been achieved Hampton was knighted. No one in Wolverhampton appears to have been consulted, it could only have been through the active intervention of the DfEE or the government. Much of the difficulty at Northicote seems to have originated from a period of illness of the previous head, although Northicote suffered from the same problems as other proletarian schools in Wolverhampton e.g. being the victims of parental choice as parents opted for other seemingly more successful schools and thus locked into a continuing spiral of the loss of the most advantaged children, reluctance of able teachers either to stay or join the school and the subsequent loss of income which could only end in closure. The previous record of Northicote suggests that it could have pulled itself up by its own bootstraps, but it had Hampton who did it more quickly, although not with regard to the government's main criterion - comparative examination results.
Many questions need to be asked when academic achievement becomes the main or only criterion. How competent were the Ofsted inspectors who condemned Northicote School? What sort of education are our children receiving? To follow Hampton's regime of target setting and class and homework marking, for instance, would occupy more hours of a teacher's time than there are hours in the week. What sort of subjects does the national curriculum demand? Is the teaching of how to invest on the stock exchange a proper or moral project for a school. Is the teaching of English history a project of either interest or use to a class with 30% ethnic minority students, or is it an attempt to inculcate imperialist ideas? If teachers are entitled to a life of their own outside the classroom, what about children? Are they not entitled to their childhood and would not much now taught at school be much more easily assimilated at a later age if proper life-long learning is implemented. Perhaps the most important school principle is the Happiness Principle. Would there not be less truanting and juvenile offending if there were more emphasis on how children want to be taught and how they learn rather than what and how we want to teach them?
It is unfortunate for Sir Geoffrey Hampton that he did not take his democracy to its logical conclusion and hold an exit meeting of staff and pupils to ask to what extent they approved his methods and policies. He is therefore reduced to printing, in his book, various tributes by pupils and staff without our being able to judge whether these are representative or not. He is now being presented as a super head and we know how quickly such headmasters have been appointed and resigned recently. The government tries to bolt on extra facilities to situations which need root and branch reform. One of the latest extras is Action Zones. It is still too early to judge our own Education Action Zone, but the last I heard was a plea that it would not be able to affect 2000 examination results; but could be expected to influence those of 2001. We shall see, but in the meantime it now seems to be generally held that they have failed.
How many hundreds of millions of taxpayers money has been spent in trying to improve education by the Woodhead/Conservative method of reckless and unprincipled castigation of teachers? And the damage has continued with the present government's decision to continue to employ him. Fortunately he has taken himself off to his ideological Conservative home, but the damage he caused cannot be over-estimated.
The solution to Wolverhampton's education problem should be clear by now. It is to return our schools to the local education authority with schools inspected by LEA inspectors whose job is to help teachers not terrorise them. The correlation between teachers' assessment of pupil achievement and results achieved in the national tests are probably sufficient to show that the vast, costly and bureaucratic apparatus of Key Stage tests, special measures etc. are totally unnecessary. As has been said our LEA spends more on education than almost any other and has therefore been able to put money into schools and thus avoid the worst excesses of the Conservative/Woodhead regime. When this was the case schools which were found wanting were, in a civilised way, given the expertise and money to rectify their faults instead of being put on the treadmill of survival of the fittest (fittest for what?) with closure being held over their heads. The money saved by ending national tests will enable a rational regime of three year funding at least which will give stability to schools and teachers. A national skeletal framework at the DfEE will, of course, be necessary, to oversee that local authorities are continuously improving their educational system, but the exorbitant cost of the vastly bloated apparatus erected by the Woodhead/Blunkett regime will be returned to the schools.
Finally, we can discuss the folly of the two occasions when the government has directly intervened in Wolverhampton education. The first was support for the closure of Bilston Community College. This was the first college in the country set up to educate the disadvantaged ethnic minority and white population of the area. 1t did this to such great effect that it met with vituperative criticism and unprecedented hostility because it rejected the elitist educational view of most of the establishment of the town that money should be spent on those who already had educational qualifications. Wymer the principal, his governors and the local authority insisted that those without qualifications should be funded at least equally with those already advantaged. The mental stress of the unequal struggle to provide basic education for students who took longer to gain recognised qualifications at under-funded rates undoubtedly affected the principal, Keith Wymer. Things were done that should not have been done, especially in the period of Tory madness when it was expand or see your local students taken over by other colleges. This was no excuse for the Further Education Funding Council deliberately and vindictively closing Bilston (the only College in the country to have been closed). The Friends of Bilston Community College have charged this as an act of Institutional Racism. Truth has a habit of asserting itself eventually, however. After the whole apparatus of Community Education at Bilston had been dismantled along came Gordon Brown who proclaimed that his aim was to abolish poverty and to that end the highest educational priority was to educate the uneducated. Thus the present management of Wolverhampton College which took over Bilston was put into the undignified position of being instructed to do an about turn and replicating the methods of Bilston Community College if it is to reach government recruitment targets. This it cannot do and to institutional racism it now adds the charge of incompetence as it fails to reach targets, fails to provide the education to the community to the groups who had been served by Bilston Community College, faces almost universal dissatisfaction from its staff whose grievances it cannot or will not rectify, and faces charge of bullying and creating an atmosphere of fear in the College. Yet a letter from Department for Education dated 23 August 2000 states: `Ministers Baroness Blackstone and David Blunkett are satisfied that the dissolution of the former Bilston Community College and its merger (sic!) with Wulfrun College to form the new Wolverhampton College has been fully justified.. The matter is not open to reconsideration'.
The second case of government intervention in the educational affairs of Wolverhampton seems to have been the reverse of Bilston Community College. Tony Blair seems to have been prepared to allow considerable sums of government money and his own reputation on the ability of Geoffrey Hampton to turn round Northicote school. Whether this school was as bad as it was made to appear when Hampton arrived or as brilliant as has been presented when he left has been questioned and much cynicism has been among his fellow heads and teachers who have not benefited from the largesse lavished on Northicote. Is this sour grapes on the part of less gifted fellow professionals and has Wolverhampton been blessed with a genius who has discovered the secret of transforming all schools? I am sure Geoffrey would not wish to cast himself in this light, but he would do well to reconnect himself with some of the normal channels of inter-professional intercourse which includes heads' associations, and those bodies and individuals grappling with the serious problems of equal opportunities in schools which have led to our proportion of ethnic minority teachers falling to under 5%. As dean of the School of Education at the local University he is already encountering serious problems.
But we must be thankful that the book Sir Geoffrey has written has a progressive and humanistic theme and it is now up to him to prove that he can continue to implement the theories that he advocates.