Post-14 Research Group
WORKING TOGETHER:
THE INDEPENDENT/STATE SCHOOL
PARTNERSHIPS SCHEME
Paul Sharp, Jeremy Higham, David Yeomans
and David Mills Daniel
School of Education
University of Leeds
CONTENTS
Page
Abbreviations
An Historical PerspectiveThe Independent/State School Partnerships Scheme
Partnerships and Projects
Case Study 1: The Wakefield LEA Partnership
Case Study 2: The University of Surrey Partnership
Case Study 3: The Croydon Partnership
The Outcomes of the Pilot Partnership
The Funding of Non-ISSP Partnerships
The Partnership Approach
Notes
References / 2
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ABBREVIATIONS
APS
/ Assisted Places SchemeCTCs
/ City Technology CollegesDES
/ Department of Education and ScienceDfEE
/ Department for Education and EmploymentDG
/ Direct GrantEAZs
/ Education Action ZonesFE
/ Further EducationGBA
/ Governing Bodies’ AssociationGBGSA
/ Governing Bodies of Girls’ Schools AssociationGCSE
/ General Certificate of Secondary EducationGSA
/ Girls’ Schools AssociationHE
/ Higher EducationHMC
/ Headmasters’ ConferenceICT
/ Information and Communication TechnologyINSET
/ In-service Education and TrainingISC
/ Independent Schools CouncilISIS
/ Independent Schools Information ServiceISJC
/ Independent Schools Joint CouncilISSP
/ Independent/State School PartnershipsLEAs
/ Local Education AuthoritiesLMS
/ Local Management of SchoolsNVQ
/ National Vocational QualificationSCITT
/ School Centred Initial Teacher TrainingSENCO
/ Special Educational Needs Co-ordinatorIn 1998, the Department for Education and Employment’s (DfEE) Independent/State School Partnerships (ISSP) Scheme came into operation. The scheme was designed to bring independent and state schools closer together by encouraging their pupils and teachers to work in partnership on projects which would raise standards in education.
This paper, based on research carried out for the independent evaluation of the 1998-99 ISSP pilot partnership by the School of Education, University of Leeds (Sharp et al. 1999), examines the aims, nature, operation, present outcomes and possible future development of the ISSP scheme, and locates it in the broader context of independent/state school relationships. Three diverse ISSP partnerships are studied, to show how partnerships work, to explore the range of benefits partnership projects are generating, and to indicate models of future partnership development. The outcomes of the ISSP scheme as a whole are examined, and the experience of partnerships outside the scheme discussed.
We begin with a brief historical survey of political attitudes to independent schools and their relationship to the rest of the education system since the Second World War. While it is recognised that much of this ground has been covered by others, it provides an historical context within which to examine the ISSP initiative (which marks a break with the Labour Party’s long-standing hostility to the independent sector) and to consider whether it is an example of New Labour’s ‘third way’ in action.
AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Until the 1960s, there was little practical difference between the way that the Labour and Conservative Parties behaved towards the independent sector of education. During the postwar period, there was broad consensus between the two major parties about the creation and development of a welfare state, and both made improvement of the state system their priority. Thus, neither did anything to implement the report of the Fleming Committee, set up by R A Butler, in 1942, to look at ways of associating the public schools (schools in membership of the Headmasters’ Conference (HMC) and the Governing Bodies’ Association (GBA))1 more closely with the ‘general educational system of the country’, and which (in their Scheme B) had recommended filling, at state expense, a quarter of the places at independent boarding schools with pupils educated at state primary schools (Board of Education, 1944, 60-81). Indeed, it was a Conservative Minister of Education, David Eccles, who, despite endorsing the idea of closer association between the two sectors, explicitly rejected Fleming Scheme B, in the face of strong support for it from the boarding schools, on the grounds that, as government was raising standards in maintained schools, there was no reason for it to spend public money in order to subsidise the transfer of children from one system to another (Dancy, 1963, 28-32).
Labour Party Conferences might object to the social exclusiveness of the independent boarding schools, and demand an end to them on the grounds that (as the Fleming Committee had been informed by the critics of these schools): ‘the Public Schools originated in, and still tend to increase, the cleavage between social classes - and particularly between rich and poor’ (Board of Education, 1944, 53). But action against independent schools was prevented by the majority view in the Party that it would be unpopular with the electorate, and that these schools would anyway ‘wither on the vine as parents abandoned them for a steadily improving state sector. No direct positive action was necessary . . . ’(Salter and Tapper, 1985, 128). In government, Labour ‘encouraged’ LEAs to meet their boarding needs by making ‘arrangements with independent boarding schools’ (Ministry of Education, 1946), and operated the direct grant (DG) system. This retained its essential prewar structure, despite recommendations for reform by the Fleming Committee, designed to make DG grammar schools ‘fully accessible to pupils without regard to income’ (Board of Education, 1944, 62-65).
However, independent schools failed to wither away, while the consensus broke down as a result of the Labour Party’s commitment to ‘a universal system of secondary education organised along comprehensive lines’ (Salter and Tapper, 1984, 183). The Labour Party had criticised the independent boarding schools for their social exclusiveness. Now it also objected to the academically selective nature of both the fully independent boarding and day schools and the DG grammar schools. Selection by ability had become as unacceptable as selection by ability to pay fees, and the view prevailed that selective independent schools and the LEA-maintained comprehensive system, which Labour wished to create, could not coexist. In 1965, the Labour government appointed the Public Schools Commission to advise on the best way of ‘integrating’ the public schools into the state system.
When Labour returned to office in 1974, it implemented the Donnison Report recommendation to end DG, so that DG grammar schools could ‘participate as soon as possible in the movement towards comprehensive reorganisation’ (DES, 1970, 147); it also sought to ensure that any LEA use of independent schools was ‘consistent with the Government’s policy of abolishing selection for secondary education’ (DES, 1977). However, ‘integration’ would have required the DG grammar schools to change their character and become non-selective;2 most of them (119 out of 174) chose to become fully independent, adding substantially to the number of schools without any link with the state: ‘the largest addition ever made in one ‘sweep’ to the private sector’ (Edwards, Fitz and Whitty, 1989, 28).
It has been argued that one element in the intensification of the Labour Party’s hostility towards the independent sector, during the 1970s and 1980s, was a ‘response to the intractable problems surrounding integration’ (Salter and Tapper, 1984, 183), the result of its frustration that attempts at integrating independent schools into the state system had only strengthened the independent sector. Labour became committed to ending tax relief and charitable status for independent schools, and ultimately, through abolition of fee-paying, to their elimination. This was: ‘justified by the damage which the very presence of independent schools is said to inflict on public education and by their importance as ‘a huge barrier to equality of educational, social and occupational opportunity’. As a result of Labour’s hostility (and an additional cause of it), the independent sector ‘became more organised and coherent in its own defence’ (Edwards, Fitz and Whitty, 1989, 23), with the creation of the Independent Schools Information Service (ISIS), in 1972 and the Independent Schools Joint Council (ISJC; now Independent Schools Council: ISC) in 1974. It also moved closer to the Conservative Party, which undertook to ‘put the Assisted Places Scheme [APS] on the policy agenda of the next government’ (Salter and Tapper, 1985, 199).
The introduction (in 1981) of APS, a flexible replacement for DG, designed to enable children, otherwise unable to do so, ‘to benefit from education at independent schools’ (Education Act, 1980, Section 17) and which involved a wider range of independent schools than the former DG grammar schools, was evidence of the Thatcher government’s commitment to the independent sector. It was also seen as an early indication that her government, dissatisfied with the weaknesses it perceived in state schools, intended to use the independent sector as ‘a model of acceptable practice’ (Salter and Tapper, 1984, 189) and as ‘one of the first steps in the Thatcherite agenda of privatisation and marketisation’ (Power and Whitty, 1999, 538). The Labour Party denounced APS on the grounds of cost and its likely divisive effects of ‘pirating scholastic talent from the state sector’, and pledged to scrap it when returned to office (Edwards, Fitz and Whitty, 1989, 40).
Thus, by the 1980s, political attitudes towards independent schools had moved a long way from the consensus of the 1950s. On the one hand, the Labour Party was committed to their elimination in the context of creating a fully comprehensive system of state education; on the other, the Conservative government was operating APS and introducing changes to the state system (‘privatisation and marketisation’), such as ‘grant-maintained schools, the CTCs, formula funding . . . the local management of schools [LMS], the enhanced powers of governors’ (Tapper, 1997, 184), which were making state schools, to a greater or lesser extent, more like independent schools.
Yet, as Tapper pointed out, these Conservative reforms of the state system, together with what he calls ‘the evolving character of the fee-paying schools’ have ‘brought the fee-paying and maintained sectors of schooling closer together’. As examples of their ‘evolving character’, Tapper cited the number of former boys’ schools that are now coeducational, the way that the single-sex education provided by reinvigorated girls’ schools meets some feminists’ preferences, and the changing profile of independent sector users, indicated by the expansion of day provision. Another significant development is that many independent schools now follow the National Curriculum, at least in part. The prospect of bringing the two sectors together was made more likely by the fact that the Labour Party, after years of having to work ‘within policy parameters established by successive Conservative governments’ (Tapper, 1997, 176-189), changed its education policies. For the most part, New Labour accepted Conservative reforms of the state system and, while remaining opposed to APS, no longer sought abolition of independent schools, or even an end to charitable status.
However, in accepting Conservative reforms of the state system and ending its hostility to the independent sector, New Labour claimed that it was doing more than merely jettisoning Labour’s traditional education policies in order to replace them with those of its opponents. In his introduction to the Party’s Manifesto for the 1997 General Election, Tony Blair argued that in education, as in other policy areas, New Labour was offering the country:
a programme for ‘a new centre and centre-left politics’ - a set of proposals in each area of policy that differed ‘both from the solutions of the old Left and from those of the Conservative Right’ (Chitty, 1999, 3).
New Labour’s education policies, including those relating to independent schools, were set out in detail in the White Paper, Excellence in Schools, published shortly after its election victory in 1997.
New Labour’s priority is ‘raising standards in schools’; and it is pragmatic about the means of achieving this end. For example, the White Paper reiterated Labour’s commitment to comprehensive education, but accepted that this could not, in itself, guarantee improved educational standards; indeed, there was criticism of the way in which ‘the search for equality of opportunity in some cases became a tendency to uniformity . . . The pursuit of excellence was too often equated with elitism’. On the other hand, LMS and the enhanced powers of state school governors were seen as important contributors to improving school performance: ‘Schools have thrived on the opportunities offered by delegation of budgets and managerial responsibilities’.
While it would be the responsibility of ‘self-determining’ schools ‘actively’ to ‘seek to improve their performance’, raising standards would require the support of a ‘partnership’ involving all those concerned with education, such as school governors, LEAs, the churches and other foundations. Further, instead of Labour’s traditional hostility, New Labour invited independent schools to join this ‘new partnership for raising standards’, suggesting that, they might, for example, share ‘activities and facilities with the local community’. There was no reference to the issues of selection or fee-paying, and, although APS would be phased out, this was presented, not as an attack on the independent sector, but as part of the process of raising standards: the resources released would be used to reduce class sizes for 5-7 years-olds (DfEE, 1997a, 5-14, 66-73). The seriousness of New Labour’s commitment to involvement of the independent sector in its new partnership was demonstrated by appointment of an Advisory Group on Independent/State School Partnerships and the introduction of the Independent State School Partnerships (ISSP) pilot scheme.
THE INDEPENDENT/STATE SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS SCHEME
The pilot scheme was announced by the then Minister of State for Education, Stephen Byers, at the Girls’ Schools Association (GSA) Conference in November 1997. Stressing the ‘vital role’ of the independent sector ‘within our education system’ and the government’s commitment to ‘fostering closer links between the state and private sector’, he explained the scheme’s double purpose: to bridge ‘the public/private divide [which] diminishes the whole education system’, and to involve independent schools ‘in achieving our standards agenda’ by enabling schools from the two sectors to work together in partnership on specific projects (DfEE, 1997b). In January 1998, all schools in England were invited to apply for £600,000 of funding (£250,000 from Peter Lampl’s Sutton Trust)3 for school-based pilot partnerships between state and independent schools. Applicant partnerships were required to submit a detailed description of their proposed project (to commence in the summer or autumn terms 1998) and arrangements for monitoring and evaluating it, together with a financial plan, by March 1998. 294 applications were considered against five selection criteria to test the extent to which partnerships and projects matched the overarching aim of the scheme:
to promote collaborative working by maintained and independent schools in partnership to raise standards in education.
The selection criteria were encapsulated in the following questions:
is it a genuine partnership, involving at least one independent and one maintained school (DfEE, 1998a, regulation 3 (1)), from which both partners can gain significantly, with pupils and teachers working together towards a mutual goal;
is it a demonstration project, a workable example of how the two sectors can work together, capable, whether innovative or an extension of good practice, of being replicated anywhere in the country;
will it engender further links, having the potential for expansion and involvement of other schools and organisations;
will it add benefit to pupils locally, enriching educational opportunities for pupils, teachers and the wider community;
does it provide good value for money, offering an excellent return, in the form of increased educational opportunities, on the investment made?
(DfEE, 1998b).
Forty-seven pilot projects were selected for funding in 1998-99. The process of evaluating the pilot partnership scheme included self-evaluation by partnerships and DfEE evaluation; the DfEE’s Advisory Group on Partnerships recommended that there should also be independent evaluation by an appropriate outside organisation (DfEE, 1998c, 10). In December 1998, the School of Education at the University of Leeds was contracted to undertake this independent evaluation.
The main focus of the independent evaluation was a broad assessment of the scheme against the overarching aim of the partnership initiative and the project objectives of individual partnerships, to identify the extent to which pupils in both sectors (and also teachers and the wider community) were benefiting from it, and to show how partnerships could contribute to raising standards in cost-effective ways. Other research issues were generation of evidence of good practice in partnership development and operation; and a comparison of pilot partnership projects with partnership projects outside the scheme, principally to assess the effects of funding and to determine whether or not this was a key to the success of partnerships.
In order to ensure a wide evidence base and also in-depth information at the level of individual partnerships, sixty-three partnerships (all forty-seven pilot partnerships and sixteen non-ISSP partnerships) were covered by documentary analysis, while twelve partnerships (eight pilot partnerships and four non-ISSP partnerships) were the focus of case study visits. For the pilot partnerships, documentary analysis focused on the substantial body of evidence generated by the ISSP application, monitoring and evaluation procedures; the sixteen non-ISSP partnerships were sent a questionnaire, devised by the evaluation team, to obtain quantitative and qualitative information equivalent to that available for the pilot partnerships. The twelve partnerships selected for case study visits comprised a range of: types and size of partnership; numbers of pupils and teachers involved; phases; curricular areas and individual project objectives; amount of funding received; and geographical areas. During the visits partnership co-ordinators, headteachers and members of staff and students involved in different aspects of the partnerships were interviewed.
PARTNERSHIPS AND PROJECTS
Although only sixteen per cent of applicant partnerships were successful in receiving a grant, they showed rich diversity of type, size and project. While most (thirty-eight) involved two schools, the rest involved between three and fifteen schools, and some had partners other than schools. Twenty-three partnerships involved fewer than 100 pupils, while seven involved more than 400; nineteen involved fewer than ten teachers, while six involved more than thirty. Schools in partnership exhibited many differences apart from membership of independent or state sectors: same or cross-phase, single-sex and coeducational, selective and non-selective, mainstream and special, large and small, urban and rural.