EXCELLENCE ACROSS SECTORS:
SPEECH BY ESTELLE MORRIS, SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EDUCATION AND SKILLS, THURSDAY 16 MAY 2002
We have a good and improving school system. We have centres of excellence and we have teachers and students with talent, energy and enthusiasm.
But for the society we want to be, we have to aim even higher. We still don’t have an education service that meets everyone’s needs and enables them to reach their potential.
If we are to achieve this, we must face up to some of the barriers in the way.
Of course, some of these are the direct responsibility of Government: investment, reform, leadership, recruitment and retention of teachers – we accept the role of Government in all of these.
Some are the responsibility of others – quality of teaching, leadership of educational institutions, support from industry and business, an parental support and commitment
There are, though, some barriers that are more deep seated – almost cultural.
Unless we break these taboos, we’ll find ourselves falling short of what we believe we can achieve. I’ve already spoken about the taboo of parental expectations and holding parents responsible for their role in supporting teachers on discipline and behaviour.
I want to talk today about how our education system and our society in general views excellence.
As a nation, we sometimes seem embarrassed by excellence, most especially academic excellence
Being clever is sometimes seen as a term of abuse - clever clogs”; “too clever by half”; “swot”; “too clever for your own good”.
[Film: About A Boy – example of the two boys who study computers and are labelled “sad”]
Compare that to how we react to sporting excellence. We’re pleased if a child is a good footballer and we celebrate sporting excellence. We don’t mind an 8 year old playing football for the under 11s, but we worry he might feel “different” or “upset the others” if he’s academically bright and is asked to work with older children.
We have thousands of children striving for excellence in sport every day – they all believe they can be Beckham or Nasser Hussain. Most won’t. But it doesn’t ruin their lives.
But for whatever reasons, we have failed to develop the same attitude to excellence in other areas.
Look at our nation’s attitude to testing and assessment. Children are tested in sport continually – they take part in trials and competitions and are tested for badges and certificates. No-one complains that it puts them under too much stress. If a child learns a musical instrument or dances, testing is an accepted and regular part of that activity. It can be rigorous, but it doesn’t dent their confidence. Indeed, there is evidence that children who have a structured goal to work towards are more motivated.
We formally test our children academically four times in eleven years of schooling. But we’re constantly fretting that it damages children, that they feel oppressed, that it’s somehow robbing them of their childhood.
We have developed world class tests as a way of allowing our most able children to compare themselves with the most able else where in the world, but we are constantly challenged about whether singing them out like this would damage them, or make others feel excluded.
We are nervous about identifying, vigorously pursuing and celebrating excellence.
It’s a sort of British malaise. We love the idea of our sportsmen and women improving and becoming world class, of our young musicians, dancers and singers performing better than those older than them, but if academic achievement is seen to have improved, the cry immediately goes up that standards must have been fixed.
And this British malaise is more than that, it’s a disease, and it has real consequences. It’s too easy to move from being embarrassed about academic success to knocking people who do well. If we carry on like that we will never as a nation reach our potential. We’ll waste individual talent and that will damage our productivity and our economic growth.
If as a nation we cannot accept success how on earth can we promote and strive for excellence.
I believe the reasons for this are deep seated and go back a long way.
As part of its obsession with ‘class’, Britain has always confused elitism with excellence. That is because historically we've had a society where who you were mattered much more that what you were. The elite - the people at the top - were all too often the privileged, not the best. And that's been of true about education as of society as a whole. The opportunity to achieve excellence was too often restricted to the well off, the already comfortable. Don’t forget it’s only just over a hundred years since we started to offer formal education to both the rich and the poor, to both girls and boys and only sixty years since a universal state secondary education was introduced to everyone.
The political right was more than comfortable with this. They were happy with a system that rewarded those of high birth rather than high worth. They were happy with a society where you accepted your lot - "the rich man in his castle, the poor man in his gate."
On the left, we have always opposed this. Ridding our society of this kind of attitude was one of the reasons that the Labour Party came into existence. We have always wanted to make opportunity open to all, to allow people to progress and improve themselves by merit and hard-work, and to tear down the barriers that prevented the disadvantaged from making a better life for themselves.
And in this we were, and still are, right. But we made a mistake. In our determination to open up opportunity to the whole of society, we confused elitism with excellence. In opposing the way in which our top education institutions were too often the reserves of the well-off, we made the mistake of not just opposing the achievement of privilege, but also the achievement of excellence itself. In understanding the barriers of poverty and expectation that preventing so many young people from reaching their potential, we made the mistake of talking only about the barriers to excellence, not excellence itself.
On the left, we often talked about underachievement, but we didn’t seek out and celebrate achievement. It might have been well-intentioned, but it was wrong. We were embarrassed to celebrate excellence, for fear we would be taken for celebrating the elite. It went further. There were those who thought that the highest achievers could take care of themselves and our efforts should be put into those who were under-performing. We thought there was a trade-off between tackling underachievement and promoting excellence - we created our own set of illusionary taboos.
It is time to break them.
Excellence is not the enemy of universal high standards. Recognising and celebrating those who achieve excellence doesn’t hold others back. No school, or college, or University, no place of learning, needs to make the false choice between focusing on excellence and ending underachievement.
But we should always be worried if we find that in celebrating excellence we are celebrating the achievement of one group, one neighbourhood, one social class.
I am immensely proud of my Party’s history and record in fighting divisive and unproductive elitism. It’s not only me, but hundreds of thousands of my generation who owe their life chances to the changes bought about by the Labour Party and the Labour movement in those post year wars
When I go to schools and colleges and Universities and see the quality of art, of drama, hear the music and see the standards of academic work of some of our young people, I know that we were right and we are right and that excellence isn’t determined by where you were born, or how much wealth your family has, but it is there to be found and celebrated in every community in the country.
Excellence, recognising and celebrating it, is fundamental to the sort of society and education service we want.
So we have to turn away from an education system that couldn’t see that excellence didn’t come from wealth, and we should get over our hang-up that elitism and excellence are somehow inter-related. We should be as openly proud of our academically gifted eight year old as we are of our gifted eight year old footballer. Equally, we must begin to worry as much about encouraging and motivating the brightest as we already do about encouraging and motivating those who fall behind.
Our economy needs excellence – in research, in the skills of its employees, and to drive economic growth.
Our public services need excellence to set standards, to pull up and celebrate the performance of others.
Because the right were happy with an essentially static, elitist society, and the left concentrated most of its firepower on underachievement, we are only now beginning to see the outline of what’s really achievable. Breaking taboos, curing national diseases, and changing cultures isn’t easy.
But we are developing a strategy that will make sure that in every area of our education policy we will identify and promote excellence.
Just as we will do all on our power to achieve high basic standards for every citizen, and close what was a yawning achievement gap, so at every level we want to stretch the most able.
No Government has ever taken this approach. We will commit ourselves to excellence. Indeed, we have made a start.
In each area of our curriculum areas, in primary schools and secondary schools, we have set stretching targets at the highest level as well as targets to tackle underachievement and provided extra resources and support to teachers and students.
We already have a national strategy to improve gifted and talented education, through Excellence in Cities, summer schools, world class tests and the Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth.
But bringing about these changes is not easy. Some schools were very reluctant to identify their most able students. But teachers are now reacting positively and we’ve made a start.
EiC now covers 58 local authority areas and provides for about one third of the country’s secondary age pupils in our cities, including all disadvantaged urban areas.
It covers 1,000 maintained secondary schools, as many primary schools, and over 100 post 16 institutions.
1.4 million pupils and students are benefiting from the EiC programme as a whole and between 5 to 10% of that number are benefiting from the Gifted and Talented strand. The aim is to raise standards and transform city education so that these young people gain as much from their education as their counterparts anywhere else in the country.
The Gifted and Talented programme asks teachers to identify their most able students – not always the same as their highest achieving students – and address their needs. It’s often meant extra lessons, specialist teachers and master classes. It’s meant that they’ve built partnerships with each other and with Universities.
And the Gifted and Talented programme goes beyond the classroom.
13 Art ‘A’level students from 8 Wirrall schools visited Venice as part of the programme and followed up with post visit lectures and practical workshops.
During the summer, Fellows from Hertford College, Oxfordspend a day with a group of the most able Year 10 students from six London boroughs: Newham, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich, Lewisham, Bexley and Waltham Forest. The students receive specialist advice and find out about University life. In November, the same group of students spend the day at Oxford, where they have a chance to meet undergraduates. This project raises the expectations of the students and encourages them to consider University entrance. It has been successful and is being extended to Cambridge University.
500 Summer Schools, now run for 10-11 year old gifted and talented children.
This year, 5,465 Year 11 students have been placed at 102 HEIs. For many of them, it will be the first time they have ever been inside a University.
This summer, our National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth will begin with a small scale pilot of three week summer schools for our most academically able 11-16 year olds. It is based at Warwick University.
This summer, our National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, based at Warwick University, will begin its year long pilot, providing learning opportunities to the top 5% ability range nationally, with some targeted provision for the top 1%. It will include out of school activity, such as summer schools and holiday schools, with in-school provision in the pupils' own schools. The Academy will officially launch the pilot in July, starting with a small-scale trial of residential summer schools for our most academically able 10-14 year olds.
The pilot programme will begin with the 11 to 16 age range, but we intend to extend it further in the future to younger and older pupils, and those with a talent in the arts and sports.
These are early days for the Gifted and Talented initiative. But an independent evaluation of Excellence in Cities – led by NFER – shows that schools’ attitudes to Gifted and Talented children are at last beginning to change. And it’s attracting children from all backgrounds. 55% of those that were identified as gifted and talented were female, and 76% identified themselves as being of white origin. This has led some to claim that the Gifted and Talented element of Excellence in Cities has been hijacked by white middle class girls. That is not so. The figures are broadly representative of the school population as a whole – 51% of those not identified as gifted and talented were female and 73% of them described themselves as being of white origin. 11% of those identified as Gifted and Talented were known to be entitled to free school meals, compared with 17% of those not identified. So the findings of NFER do underline the need to ensure that schools identify gifted and talented children even where those gifts and those talents may not have made themselves evident.
None of those things were in place five years ago. We’re supporting and promoting excellence by changing the culture in each of the schools covered by the Excellence in Cities Programme. And we will do the same elsewhere.
In the Music and Dance Scheme, together with the Choir School Scholarship, we will continue to promote excellence as well. They are some of the best centres of excellence in music and dance anywhere in the world.
At the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Royal Ballet School, Wells Cathedral School, The Purcell School, the Arts Educational School, Elmhurst School for Dance and Performing Arts, Chetham’s School of Music and, from September, the Hammond School of Dance in Chester, over 800 of our most talented children are aided by the Government. Annually we put in £12 million to the scheme – and it gives the nation and the world dancers such as Darcey Bussell, musicians like Tamsin Little and conductors like Daniel Harding.
And we will do the same with our Universities and Colleges. Where there is excellence in Colleges of Further Education we will recognise it through Centres of Vocational Excellence.
In Higher Education, we will unashamedly celebrate excellence in research in our leading Universities. If we don’t invest in them, we may lose our pre-eminence in the world – and we won’t let that happen.
But even this is not enough. Our ambition for our education system must be to change our culture. To stop being embarrassed by academic success; to start believing that improved academic standards could actually result in a more able nation; to end the British condition of being too embarrassed to shout that we are good; to break the taboo and cure the malaise that has dogged us for so long.
Anything less will mean that we have failed to create an educational system that fulfills the potential of every child. That’s a failure I’m not prepared to even contemplate.