Post Keynote Address Interview

Transcription

1 Making Education a Priority Conference Post Keynote Address Interview Key transcription notes transcribed by Danielle Thomson Making Education a Priority 18/05/2013 Interview LT2 Diane Abbott, MP interviewed by Andy Jones, Pro Vice Chancellor and Dean of Education Andy Jones (AJ): Diane, thank you so much for your talk. We re very grateful to you for travelling to Manchester today and obviously you ve got a huge amount to say and huge amount of experience that is.important. Some of the things you said in your speech, I d just like to pick up on in terms of further questioning and perhaps expand on those further if that s OK? You stressed at one point the problem about low expectations and you described that I think as a serious and continuing problem. I was just wondering if you could say a bit more about how schools and the system in education can actually really practically start to change that problem about low expectations? Diane Abbott (DA): I think parents have a very important role to play and I think that schools and educational institutions have to do more to reach out to parents. I ve spoken to black teachers in schools who ve said that one of the pressures they find is that black parents will come to talk to them but they don t necessarily talk to noneminority teachers and so I think that schools have to make it clear that they re there to engage with all parents not just perhaps the more articulate middle class parent that s the first thing. The second thing is, I think that teachers have to leave behind some of their stereotypes about what black children are capable of and not capable of. There s an assumption that we ll be good at games and so on and we re not necessarily academic. I think key to this is local educational authorities actually setting, well, keeping statistics on achievements which will illustrate the gaps but also setting schools targets to eliminate those differentials. We need a clear system of targets for schools which will incentivise them to eliminate some of the racial differences in achievements. AJ: Do you think that some of that low expectation comes from the training side? Obviously I represent a Faculty that trains a lot of teachers and it is something that we re very conscious of in the training process but obviously we haven t in any sense got it right and I just wonder whether you ve got any views on how the training and development of teachers can better address this problem about, if you like, accepting low expectations? 1

2 DA: Well, I think in the first instance a lot of training institutions don t actually have enough black people in leadership, frankly and so it s difficult to counter a culture of low expectations when the people talking about themselves are not BME. I think there needs to be a lot more specific attention paid to the work of people like Professor David Gillborne who s based over in Birmingham [and] done a lot of work on showing that it s not just class, as a lot of teachers like to say, race is also [a] determinant in educational outcome. But there s also been some very interesting work done by the Institute of Education in London where they do in-service training so existing black teachers go on a course and are trained for management positions and leadership. So I think it s about the initial training teachers have but also enabling existing black teachers to go forward in management and leadership and perhaps have leadership positions in institutions like yours. AJ: OK.. Perhaps just linked [to] this but thinking ahead to what I hope will be a future Labour government.what would you like to see change in practical terms for the schools? So, where in your view is the direction of the policy on future schooling to address some of these concerns? DA: Well, I think that you ve got to have targets for schools in terms of ethnic minority achievements which they don t currently have. Education after education authority draws up educational development plans for their authority with no targets for eliminating differential achievement between ethnicities because as an underlying assumption that you can t do that; they have to be set rigorous targets. I think that schools, individual schools and education authorities have to do more to recruit black teachers, particularly black male teachers, particularly in primary schools because you know, we need a teaching workforce that reflects the children they re teaching. Because very often you can have skilled teachers who lack cultural literacy and the point about having more black teachers in the classroom is not that only black teachers can teach black children because that s clearly absurd but that if you have a significant number of black teachers in the classroom that helps to aid cultural literacy of the entire workforce in a school. AJ: There has been a concerted drive over many years to try and recruit more black and minority ethnic teachers into training and into schools which has had limited success I think it s fair to say, but what more could the government or the system be doing to encourage that recruitment because we do see and awful lot of black and minority ethnicity students within the university system but we find in the Faculty of Education that proportionally very few of them are actually coming through to train as teachers, they re aspiring to other kinds of professions. So how do we raise the status of teaching as a profession? DA: Well there s a general problem about raising the status of teaching but I think one avenue for recruiting black teachers is from teaching assistants because you often have quite large numbers of minority teaching assistants in schools. And I think 2

3 there needs to be more thought given to how you help teaching assistants move on from that, to being teachers because very often teaching assistants tend to be local and be very grounded in their local community and can have a great contribution to make. Another problem though, is that very often teaching assistants and black people that are thinking about teaching are thinking about going into it may be slightly later in their career and may need more support in their studying than somebody doing teacher training as a very young person will. I think we need to consider bursaries for men in teaching and also I think it s really important that we get more men in teaching. So I think working with teaching assistants trying to encourage them to move forward and providing more support for black people that do train as teachers in the course of their careers. I suspect though, as the recession moves forward and job opportunities get more difficult, I don t think you re going to find it so hard to get black people interested in teaching; the problem is giving them support when they train. AJ: Of course, the current fee arrangements have actually made things even more costly because its more expensive certainly for those mature career changes to come into training or to retrain for any profession, frankly but to come into teaching is more difficult..can I just ask a bit more about the early interventions that you mentioned because I think that s a really interesting one and again it was stressed today about the need for, if you like, at primary level for there to be more intervention and there s often been a concept about if we leave it too late, if we certainly leave it until secondary school age, we ve often missed the boat here. And there s a problem because we ve not addressed it early enough. So again thinking about I guess Labour policy or your own views on this; Where and in what ways can we practically make a difference in primary schools? What sort of options might we have to encourage better, early intervention? DA: Well, as I said in my speech I think sometimes if you don t get to these children before they go to secondary school, it can be too late. I think it s really important for boys to see more men in the classroom so even if one isn t able to immediately recruit more male primary school teachers, there s all sorts of things that can be done linking with business and industry to have men in the classroom helping with reading on a weekly basis and so on. I think after school clubs which we heard mentioned can be very important with some children but also working with parents, making parents feel they re part of the educational system. Sometimes minority parents whom themselves have had bad experiences of education can be a little adversarial with their child s school and its skilling them up, which is something perhaps community organisations are better placed to do, skilling them up to be involved to come to PTA meetings to be able to make demands in a way that an educational institution can accept rather than waiting till your child is 14 and can t read. 3

4 AJ: It struck me when you were talking about Saturday schools and about the need for more time and opportunity that there was a resonance there actually with some of the things recently that Michael Gove said about extending the school day which of course has gone down very badly in the education profession; badly in terms of contractual arrangements and how it would affect teachers working week etc but I think from my perspective there s a lot of merits in thinking about whether that provision for additional time in tuition can be better funded and I just wondered whether you had any thoughts about how that could practically be worked up if, say Manchester for example, were to look at extending its school day for black and ethnic minority pupils. How do we go about that practically? DA: It s not for me to tell the leader of Manchester City Council how to spend his money. I think though, schools, secondary schools certainly that I know that have been successful in raising BME achievement have put a lot of focus on after school study. I know of one head teacher who was very successful with black boys and.this was at a secondary school and he monitored the boys very carefully, they were all set targets term on term and if a boy wasn t meeting his educational targets he had to go to homework club. I mean it was voluntary but not really voluntary and it was by careful targeting, careful monitoring. And after school homework that he drove up their boys achievement and frankly in some of our communities these boys were better off doing homework in the evenings than just being on the street. AJ: Could you say more about the point you got to at the end of your talk when you talked about the licky licky because that wasn t something I was familiar with and I just wondered whether you could expand a bit more on that? DA: Well, I think sometimes community leaders are more focused on getting money for their own project [rather] than on advancing strategic demands. And I think sometimes community leaders in their anxiety to get money for their own project lose sight of the fact that we don t necessarily want alternative provision for black children. We want black and minority children to be able to access fully mainstream education. Alternative provision is not an end in itself. In the end, we want our children to access mainstream provision and move through the mainstream and into university and sometimes community leaders get caught up in getting funding for projects which are almost a cul-de-sac for our children. And sometimes community leaders are often bought off with relatively small sums of money. What I m really what s going forward is for education authorities to commit substantial sums to training black teachers and so on. It s the long term versus the short term; it s the personal advantage to your organisation versus long term advantage to the community. AJ: You mentioned that you d run for the Labour party leadership in your talk and I just wondered whether in a future cabinet if you were to be part of that cabinet, if not as leader, which you may well be of course, but if you were part of the cabinet, 4

5 would education be something that you would be particularly interested in working within as a policy role? DA: I m interested in the education. I m also very interested in health. I m a health.my mother was a nurse, one of the earliest generations of black nurses to come to this country. I m also interested in law and order and prisoners and police. So education is a passion but there are other things I m interested in. AJ: OK Diane can I say thank you for your time today and I thank you for coming here to Manchester with this incredibly important agenda and I m sure you ve inspired a lot of people to think differently today, so thank you for that. 5