Views

SPEECH BY DAVID MILIBAND MP

TO THE NATIONAL GIFTED AND TALENTED EDUCATION CONFERENCE

BIRMINGHAM, 12 NOVEMBER 2002

Let me start by telling you about my two abiding images of the Gifted and Talented Programme. First, I attended a Gifted &Talented summer school in my own constituency, and was told that over the previous year twenty students from South Shields had been doing after school Latin - and forty had been turned away. Second, I visited the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at Warwick University last August, and saw at the apex of Gifted and Talented activities benefiting 100 000 young people across the country, a group of young people were putting together a production of 'The Tempest'; they were ordinary but extraordinary; they came from all backgrounds, literally spanning education at Eton and education in inner city Haringey; they covered all races; and they were completely absorbed in their team work.

It is because of those experiences, and the power of dedicated provision to help tap the talent of young people, that I wanted to be here today, to congratulate you on all you have done, to applaud the innovation and commitment you have shown, and to discuss with you how we can go forward. We have done a lot, but we have a fair distance still to go.

I have a very simple philosophy. Our task, whether we are Ministers or teachers or parents or citizens, is to help develop an education system that matches the potential of young people in this country. For too long, we have failed to do that, not just for gifted and talented young people, but for the majority of young people. In putting that right, as a country, we hold our own futures in our hands - our economic futures in a world where more than eight out of ten new jobs require qualifications above A Level, and our social futures in a world of interdependence, where what we do together is critical to our freedom and our security.

My argument is quite simple:

- we need to get the basics right in our education system, notably in English, maths and science, but also in the 21st century skills of group work, communication and innovation: that means high standards of teaching and learning for every child, delivered in a disciplined and orderly environment in every class and every school up and down the country

- but we also need to do more: we need to cater for the special needs of every single pupil, whether they have statements of special needs because they are struggling with learning, or because they have special gifts and talents that mean they are bored in too many lessons, and fail to make the most of themselves.

Not many people can afford to opt for private education. That means that without special provision, many young people don't develop their gifts or their talents. We need to provide a service to those young people, and in the process do a service to the country. And for those families who can afford to go private, I want the state sector to be an attractive option. You should not have to go private to be stretched, developed, nurtured.

Every School Excellent or Improving or Both

Let me start at the beginning. The OECD recently reported that England has one of the fastest improving education systems in the industrialised world. We should celebrate that: 7th out of 32 in literacy, 8th in science, 4th in maths is a good record. But we can do better.

I say that not just because 50% of young people do not get five GCSEs at grade A-C, or because we stand 20th out of 24 industrialised countries for participation in education at age 17, or because less than one in five working class children go to university compared to 75% of the middle class, though these figures show there is no room for complacency. The case for reform is not just that we need to do better, but that in many schools teachers and pupils are already doing better.

We are reaching a key stage in education reform. In the last six or seven years, we have seen rapid progress in primary schools, so that three quarters of young people are leaving able to read, write and count well. Secondary schools have seen steady progress. But if we are to achieve a real breakthrough, then we need step change.

We need step change in funding - its level and its location. The government has delivered on the former: by 2005/6 spending per pupil will be up by 24% in real terms on its 1997 level, that is £3,430 per pupil per year. We also need to deliver funding to the front line, which is why from next April there will be real transparency between separate LEA and schools blocks of money, why levels of delegation will rise, why we want schools to have three year budgets, and why the DFES has taken a self-denying ordinance to cut in real terms the amount of central funding, with the system of separate pots of money significantly rationalised. Power will reside in the hands of head teachers up and down the country.

But we also need reform. Our strategy is based on four points of what we call the 'diamond of reform'. At the centre is the personal experience of the learner.

Our starting point is that school leadership is the single most important contributor to school performance. Our determination is to ensure that every secondary Head in England is able to do more than run a stable school. To transform it requires leadership which:

can frame a clear vision that engages the school community
can imagine the future and plan strategically for it
can motivate and inspire
pursues change in a consistent and disciplined way
understands and leads the professional business of teaching.

Second, the structure of schooling. We want every school to be special, with its own mission, its own ethos, its own centre of excellence. The rationale is simple: the search for a unique identity is the most potent contributor to the critical self evaluation that is vital to continuous improvement in any organisation.

So our Specialist Schools programme is designed to raise standards across the curriculum, not just in areas of specialism. With institutional drive and accountability goes collaboration. LEAs have a vital role in school improvement, but it needs to be supplemented by local professional collaboration. Up to 300 'advanced schools' will lead the way in spreading good practice. Federations will pioneer the idea of good schools leading the less successful to improvement.

The third plank of our reform programme is focussed on the school workforce of the future. Our concern is to put teaching at the cutting edge of public sector professionalism, which is not just a matter of pay. We want to see teachers with the time, support and leadership to help them do their jobs better. Time for teachers to teach depends on more reform, not less, because only reform of staffing can put the classroom assistants into schools to relieve teachers of the bureaucratic tasks that clog up their day - or weekends.

Finally, we know that this demanding agenda for schools needs to be supported from outside the classroom - notably by parents, but also by civil society, from universities to businesses. Summer schools and masterclasses are central not peripheral.

I set out this background for a simple reason. Gifted and talented provision will prosper best in a high aspiration, high attainment system. Bolted on to an underperforming system, it will offer oases of achievement in deserts of poor performance. But built on the secure foundations of a successful system, it can both empower gifted and talented pupils, and reflect back on the system itself.

Gifted and talented students need to develop their potential through acquiring and applying an increasingly wide range of learning skills. They need to be spotted and they need to be nurtured. They need to know how to problem solve, to work effectively in groups, to use feedback to improve their performance, to think inductively. These learning skills are not inherited but are developed by teachers in schools where expectations are high and the curriculum embraces not only content but also a wide range of teaching strategies. This is the common ground of educational provision not just for gifted and talented students but for all our students. On that foundation we need to build.

Gifted and Talented Provision

It is worthwhile reviewing how far we have come. It is astonishing to think that until four years ago there was no significant national support for G&T provision in the state sector. Yet now there is powerful evidence of the new approach:

- Excellence in Cities, Excellence Clusters and the Excellence Challenge have established a gifted and talented programme in well over 1,000 secondary schools, 500 primary schools and 100 post-16 institutions, with up to 180,000 pupils and students reaping the benefit.

- In 2001, key stage 3 improvements were relatively stronger in Excellence in Cities areas than elsewhere.

- Provisional 2002 reports from EIC partnerships show 35% reporting gains of 3% or more in numbers achieving five GCSE grades A*-C, with Tower Hamlets reporting a 7.2% increase and Birmingham a provisional 6.9% increase against this measure;

- And Sheffield tell us that the nine lowest achieving schools have the fastest increasing attainment in the City.

I want to build on these signs of success. We want to put more money into Gifted and Talented provision. That is why I can announce today that on top of the expenditure of £70 million in 2003/4, we plan to make available another £11 million a year on national projects, including funding for the National Academy and the continuation of the summer schools programme. The new Director of the Academy, Deborah Eyre is here today. The Academy will launch its second talent search in January, and is actively encouraging LEAs and schools to help identify and register eligible students. We need parents and teachers to nominate pupils who they feel have the ability and can truly benefit from the support we can offer gifted and talented children. We know there is a lot of talent out there in our classrooms, but we need you to tell us about it. There is a particular onus on Excellence in Cities partnerships to help ensure that the Academy remains a socially inclusive entity.
Within Excellence in Cities, we are expanding the primary extension project and increasing the number of excellence clusters, which target smaller pockets of disadvantage. Alongside this expansion, we shall renew our focus on progress in the existing partnerships and clusters, to secure the sustained improvement in pupil and student attainment that we seek. In addition Stephen Twigg will shortly announce details of the gifted and talented arm of the London Challenge, further to improve the quality of provision there.
But our challenge is not just to offer national leadership. True leadership needs to come from the bottom up as well as the top down. That is not just where the money is; that is where the children are, it is where the teachers are, it is where the partnerships can be forged, the role models established, the culture changed.

Let me highlight four ways in which we will be seeking to advance provision for Gifted and Talented pupils.

First, we need to continue to promote tailor-made provision for the most able. That means taking the highest standards of teaching in Beacon schools and Advanced Schools and ensuring that it is understood and spread across the system. It means ensuring that the investment in high quality facilities through the specialist school programme genuinely does deliver those facilities to all pupils in an area. It means developing setting arrangements, if necessary through federations of schools, that stretch the highest performers. And it means working to develop the ICT base that can make such a contribution to personalised learning.

Second, we need to work to ensure that Gifted and Talented provision is not an add-on. That means every LEA reflecting Gifted and Talented provision in its Education Development Plans, every inspection report covering Gifted and Talented provision, every school thinking about how to cater for exceptional pupils during school time and out of school time.

Third, we need to continue to develop teaching styles and approaches to bring out the best in young people. That is the thinking behind the revisions of Key Stage 3; it lies behind our attempt to produce a more flexible curriculum at 14-19; it is at the heart of our concern to see teachers' professional development taken to a new level.

Fourth, we need to recognise that delivering for gifted and talented children means we have to organise schooling in new ways. New ways of timetabling; new ways of organising lessons; new ways of promoting personal pacing; new ways of bringing extra adults into schools, whether as sports coaches, language specialists or arts and musical experts; and new ways of building partnerships across the education system, so that not only do older pupils get an insight into the benefits of FE and universities, but FE and university lecturers and students come to schools to offer their expertise.

Conclusion

I am immensely attracted by Howard Gardner's concept of 'multiple intelligences'. He argues that there are several types of intelligence - visual/spatial intelligence; musical intelligence; verbal intelligence; logical/mathematical intelligence; interpersonal intelligence; intrapersonal intelligence; and kinaesthetic intelligence. The tragedy of education during the 20th century was that it measured achievement in only one way, and even on that measure it failed to deliver for the majority of young people in this country.
Gifted and talented provision rises to the challenge of Gardner's notion of multiple intelligence. It says that gifts and talents come in a number of shapes and sizes, and rather than forcing the child to conform to the structures of the education system we need to adapt the education system to bring out the best in the individual child.
We will show we have succeeded when 'too clever by half' is no longer a particularly English insult. The change is cultural as well as structural.
It is a huge challenge, as big as the challenge to business in the 1970s and 1980s to move from mass production - 'you can have any car as long as it is black'- to the flexible systems of customised production that are the norm today.
Our challenge is if anything more stimulating - to deliver customised provision not just in niche markets but on a universal basis. It is a tribute to all of you in this room that you have gone so far to rise to that challenge, and I look forward to working with you in the months ahead to go further and faster.