2014 Hmc Annual Conference

2014 HMC ANNUAL CONFERENCE

SPEECH BY RICHARD HARMAN

Headmaster of Uppingham School and Chairman of HMC (the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference), representing the UK’s leading independent schools

EMBARGOED UNTIL 0001 MONDAY 29 SEPTEMBER 2014

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One of George Osborne’s predecessors, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, found it more and more difficult to compose his own speeches and therefore delegated the task to his private secretary. After some years, the worm turned, and when the Chancellor was making his annual speech at the Mansion House, he read it as follows:

‘My Lords, Your Grace, My Lord Bishop, My Lords Sheriffs, Ladies and Gentlemen.

‘The problem which faces us today is perhaps the most daunting which has ever faced our nation in its island history. Unless we can find a solution in the coming months I see nothing but catastrophe ahead. There are only three possible ways of escape from the dangers now confronting us …’

Then he turned over the page and read out: ‘From now on, you’re on your own, you bastard!’

I’m pleased to tell you that, a month in to this role, I don’t feel I’m on my own. Indeed one of the hallmarks of HMC is that, though we are all fiercely independent, we are also by nature and inclination team players, a great chorus of voices if you like. We may have one or two divas in our choir, but we do make quite a sound when we’re together.

Finding a Voice is the theme of this Conference and there is no better place to do that than in this beautiful South Wales valley. If we hear echoes of voices raised here before us, they may be a male voice choir, a victorious Ryder cup team, or some of our world leaders, whose summit was the warm-up act for ours; the security may be less tight for HMC than for NATO, but we too can change the world; because we’re in the business of building the future.

So welcome to Celtic Manor and the 2014 Conference. I hope you enjoy the three days that are about to unfold.

Opening the very first Conference at Uppingham in 1869, our founder Chairman Edward Thring, who the previous year had been very sceptical of the value of such a gathering, said this: “I have been exceedingly struck of late by the isolation of schools, and the want, not only of a common voice, but of any pronounced opinion from the most important profession in England. It seems to me very strange that….there is no professional voice raised, or capable of being raised, at a time when all England is full of cries, and judgments, and legislation about Education.”

145 years later Thring’s voice still resonates. I hope that none of us here feels “the isolation of schools” and I trust you believe, and will sense even more strongly at the end of this week, that HMC raises a strong professional voice on behalf of all of us. Because in 2014 the cacophony of cries, judgements and legislation about education is still grating on the ear. We remain uniquely placed to insist, sometimes in a still, small voice, sometimes fortissimo, on the vital importance of a liberal, holistic education for children in the 21st century. Our schools are rightly regarded as among the best in the world for that reason. Academic success and excellent exam results are necessary but not sufficient. Following in the footsteps of Thring and other great Victorian educationalists, we continue to educate the whole child and prepare young people for the whole of life in our own era.

And yet, undoubtedly HMC today is much changed and is now defined both by its quality and its diversity. We count among our number all sorts of schools; co-ed and single sex; boarding and day and all stations in between; all through and stand-alone senior schools; highly selective and broad church; local, national and international; rural, urban, suburban. Our membership criteria guarantee quality, but we are all different shapes and sizes. Contrary to lazy media stereotypes, we are not all cut from one kind of cloth. What does mark us out is that we are all genuinely independent, not funded by the State or local authority, directly accountable to parents, with whom as Heads we have a specific written contract. Our genuine independence allows us to be flexible, nimble and responsive to change, strong on the best of tradition yes, and also innovative, unafraid to do our own thing, and as Tim Hands rightly stressed this time last year, focused on the child first, last and always.

The diversity within our Association means it is not always easy to speak in sound bites; the truth is usually a bit more complex than that. Yet, when need be, we do and must speak truth to power. This week is our annual chance to talk together, as well as our annual opportunity to engage with guests from within and beyond the world of education. It’s a chance to speak with the journalists who grace these occasions, and through them to address a wider public. As we raise our voices here in these Welsh valleys, what do we want to say to the world beyond?

First, it is time to stop scapegoating and start celebrating our schools and their contribution. Stop using them as lazy shorthand for the social ills of our country. Move beyond envy and take collective pride in the fact that a small country like Britain has created some of the very best schools in the world. Quite apart from the parents in the UK who are making real sacrifices to send their children to our schools, there are also parents from Azerbaijan to Germany to China and beyond, looking to get the best education for their child in this country. Why do they choose to send their children to the UK, usually to an HMC school?

First, of course, because our schools are constantly searching for and sustaining academic excellence, in every individual child we teach. Our schools consistently do this, and increasingly well; it can hardly be headline news, therefore, that our pupils go on to do well in university entrance to selective institutions; nor that they then progress to stimulating graduate jobs in the public, private and third sectors. Furthermore, in this country, university faculties in science, engineering, technology, economics, medicine and dentistry, modern languages and classics depend absolutely on a strong supply of candidates from our schools. We are a crucial academic resource, sending out pupils who go on to the best universities, take full advantage of academic opportunities and give back to society and the economy throughout their working lives. At the heart of this academic enterprise is, of course, our hallmark of outstanding teaching and committed teachers. Many of them then become educational leaders who inspire successive generations of new professionals. We should celebrate the fact that, for example, around one in five of those going into Teach First has come through our schools. Collectively now we want to increase the number of talented and energetic people entering the profession, particularly important when it comes to subject areas underrepresented in the maintained sector, and so at this Conference we are launching our own teacher training initiative to be known as HMCTT. The scheme has been developed by HMC, working with the University of Buckingham, and is based on extensive market research. It will provide us with a strong voice in recruiting fresh talent. We know, though, that simple recruitment is not enough. Many good people have left teaching because they found themselves spending so much of their time filling in paperwork and trying to hit narrow, sterile performance targets, missing the bigger picture. We want to keep good people in teaching by inviting them to work in schools where these things do not predominate. Instead they can experience the excellence of a liberal, holistic education, enjoy their subject expertise and develop their skill in imparting deep learning, which their pupils will need as citizens of the 21st century. Our recruits might teach first in HMC schools, but they will emerge qualified and prepared to inspire pupils across the sectors, or indeed around the world. Having caught the vision and virus of academic and all-round excellence, they will be hard to stop.

These new teachers will imbibe, as well, the culture of our schools. And I mean culture in two senses. First, our schools offer brilliant, creative education. That’s why many of our alumni go on to do so well in the fields of media, the arts, music, sport. I hope this Conference, indeed, will be a celebration of that creativity, with a focus on music but embracing our cultural contribution to education and society more broadly. The creative industries in this country are of major importance and they build, to a growing extent, on our proven success in nurturing passion and skills in our pupils.

Then there is school culture in the broader and deeper sense. In the holistic sense of how things are done in our schools, the values that underpin our everyday work, the way pupils are taught to communicate, to handle relationships, to deal with one another, however different they may be. School culture in this sense embraces all that our schools do to educate children in ways that cannot be measured in league tables. Nurturing intellectual, emotional and spiritual awareness; developing character, creativity and critical thinking. It is this DNA that marks our schools out as exceptional and it is this kind of school culture that means our vision and our brand is in such demand around the world. It means that our pupils will be better equipped for the world of work. Writing in The Times recently, John Cridland, Director-General of the CBI made this very point: “By character”, he said, “I mean resilience, humility, emotional intelligence, team spirit, someone who will go the extra mile.” Exactly so. And as The Times’ leader writer then pointed out, this is not a new idea; Aristotle said much the same thing. It is independent schools, not State-driven systems, that have kept this flame alive in the UK; our work is not just to tend it like the high priests of some quaint, antique sect, but to strengthen it, apply it in new ways and share it more widely; never has it been more important to our future.

Independent school leaders, along with many others, may be concerned by what one journalist recently called the UK’s sclerotic social mobility. This disease does not just affect the UK, of course, but attacking the excellence of the education we provide will never help solve it. Indeed our schools have a hugely positive economic impact on the country at large. As a reminder, a recent Oxford Economics report found that independent schools add nearly £12 billion to UK GDP each year -- equivalent to the economic output of the city of Bristol. For every two pupils in our schools, one full-time equivalent job is supported, in the school or the local economy. More than £4.7 billion in tax revenue flows annually into the Exchequer from the direct activity of independent schools; and by educating our pupils we save the taxpayer £3.9 billion pounds a year, equivalent to building more than 590 new free schools annually. Contrary to what some dinosaurs from the class-war era would have you believe, we are not a drain on national resources; we add significant value to UK plc.

And so we raise our voices and say ‘recognise our contribution’. We are and want to continue to be part of the solution to this country’s and the world’s challenges. We descend from veritable powerhouses of charitable enterprise like the Victorian public schools, many founded before there was any state education system at all. We have powerful charitable instincts and a desire to share excellence and best practice wherever we can. But don’t lecture us, especially when there is much more important work to do in other areas of the education system and especially when many of you who do so, have yourselves benefited from or use the service we provide. Hypocrisy is out of tune with the times.

This time last year, and on several occasions since, we have been treated to a lecture by the Ofsted Chief Inspector, as he surely exceeded his brief by demanding that independent schools each sponsor an academy. And thus Michael Gove’s apparently off the cuff proposal at this year’s conference in Brighton College, that he couldn’t imagine anyone better than Sir Michael Wilshaw to inspect all our schools, brought us together like nothing else in recent memory. I am all for a frank exchange of views, and I welcome the fact that Sir Michael has responded to my request for a private meeting, but I don’t take well to being hectored and I doubt you do either. It will be interesting to hear what Baroness Sally Morgan has to say later this afternoon about her experience of Ofsted and the DfE over the last few years. And of course Mr Gove has moved jobs since Brighton; his successor as Secretary of State is clearly under instructions to upset fewer people, at least until May, but I look forward to hearing the conversation on Wednesday between our own knight Sir Anthony Seldon, David Blunkett and Stephen Dorrell about which way the wind might blow come election night.

The key thing for me meanwhile is to change the tone of conversation with policy makers. We have centuries of expertise to offer, a deep engagement with young people, great energy and wit as an Association. The collective talent, experience and intelligence in this room is astonishing. We have solutions to offer. But too often those in power are embarrassed to be seen talking with us, preferring instead to threaten us with loss of charitable status or more state control.

Meanwhile we do all we can as the HMC to advocate for pupils across the country in all kinds of schools on a wide variety of issues. At the moment we are, it seems, a lone voice scrutinising the work of Ofqual, that body which should be guaranteeing justice in our exam system. We know how hard young people work for these exams; we know that for most it is their first real encounter with ‘the system’ beyond school. When Ofqual reports that 6% of examiners are ‘inadequate’, someone needs to jump up and down demanding higher standards. 6% translates to 950,000 scripts inadequately marked. That’s just not good enough and although eyes can glaze over at the detail in this area, our work in pointing it all out is vital for everyone if teachers and pupils across Britain, not just those in our schools, are to feel their efforts in a very high stakes exam system have been justly rewarded.

Certain academic subject areas have been hit particularly hard by inadequacies in the exam system and we have raised voices in protest. To quote John Cridland again, in a letter he wrote to me very recently, “The issues around language learning you identify remain a concern for employers – who know the importance of MFL skills to our future international competitiveness. It will be interesting to monitor the response of Ofqual and awarding bodies on this topic.” It will certainly be interesting and, in recent days, Ofqual has briefed us on important changes to how boards should calculate A level grades from 2015 for the most able language candidates. Nevertheless, confidence in the accuracy of the current public exam system remains low. Even Ofqual's own survey shows that. As HMC speaks to this issue, we would welcome a charter containing at least these four points:

There should be clear comparability between subjects and boards: at the moment this is not the case, for example, in Modern Foreign Languages.
There should be accountability with regard to examiners. Steps to redress the injustices perpetrated by those inadequate markers should be made clear and exam boards held accountable.
There should be proactive responsibility, i.e. to use its own metaphor, Ofqual should provide air traffic control, not air crash investigation – this could be done by monitoring the boards so that when there is a pattern of marks across a subject or within a centre that shows clear, unexplained variation from what was expected, this is investigated to see whether it is down to rogue or inconsistent marking: example: A level history.
There must be a proper, fair enquiries and appeals process that inspires confidence and trust for both pupils and schools. At the moment this is lacking.

We need a high confidence, high trust exams system. There have been some small steps forward. We welcome the resolve of Ofqual finally to tackle the problem of harsh grading in language exams and their promise to institute root and branch reforms to post-results remedy when things go wrong. It is a long time coming, though. The mills of the regulator grind slowly, but let’s hope, exceeding small. What I’m sure of is that without the pressure and persistence of HMC’s voice over the last few years, the gradual improvements we’ve seen wouldn’t have happened at all. Irritating though it may be for those in power, we are speaking up on behalf of fairness for candidates and schools; all candidates in all schools.