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'SCHOOL LEADERSHIP: THE PRODUCTIVITY CHALLENGE'

SPEECH BY DAVID MILIBAND MP

MINISTER OF STATE FOR SCHOOL STANDARDS

AT THE NATIONAL COLLEGE FOR SCHOOL LEADERSHIP

22 OCTOBER 2003

It is a real honour to deliver this inaugural NCSL lecture. The college has been methodical and professional in its approach to its task. The commitment of College staff, led by Heather du Quesney, to serious analysis and thoughtful practice is admirable. I believe they are now ready to lead a major drive to equip our school leaders for the challenges they face. I hope I can live up to their standard tonight.

I believe we are at a key moment in the national drive to build an education system of which parents can be confident, pupils can be glad and the nation can be proud.

It is not just that in many schools there is outstanding provision: the best ever exam and test results, Ofsted's judgement that we have the best generation of teachers ever, international acclaim for the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools, and the growing evidence that more schools are breaking the link between poverty and educational achievement.

There is also significant reform underway. This is the academic year when more than half of all schools gain specialist status, aspiring to become a centre of excellence in their specialism; when over a third of secondary schools in the most challenging circumstances will embrace the reform agenda of the Leadership Incentive Grant; when for all teachers we start to reverse through contractual change the decades-long drift towards extra responsibilities and longer hours; and when in primary schools we seek avowedly and explicitly to enhance the drive for higher standards through the enrichment of the primary school experience.

But the biggest change in my judgement is a change of culture, and above all a change in the terms of trade between those who say public education is condemned to mediocrity, and those who argue that it represents the best hope for a fair society and a productive economy. People still say that ambitious targets cannot be hit, that family poverty cannot be overcome, that 'more will mean worse'. But in reply we can point to facts:

that getting three quarters of 11 year olds to read, write and count well is not a target but now an annual reality
that getting schools in poor areas to improve faster than the national average is not a pipe-dream but is taking place
and that rising scores in tests and exams are due to improved standards of teaching and learning not political interference.

The goal is clear. It is what the Prime Minister described in his party conference speech as 'personalised learning': an education system where assessment, curriculum, teaching style, and out of hours provision are all designed to discover and nurture the unique talents of every single pupil.

The delivery of this vision of course takes investment. The Government is committed to raise the share of national income devoted to education. And as Charles Clarke made clear in his party conference speech, the priority for the public contribution to this investment is under fives' education and schooling.

But while extra investment is necessary, it is not sufficient. Spending more money in the same ways will not deliver the rising returns we need. We have to work together to spend additional resources in new ways if we are to add sufficient value to the learning experience of young people. We need to spend smartly as well as spend more.

Educational Productivity

Our task, simply put but far from simply delivered, is to scrutinise the relationship between inputs to teaching and outputs of learning, for the benefit of pupils. I am not talking about warping educational practice to meet spurious productivity outcomes; I am talking about an honest debate about how best to use rising resources to maximum effect. To provide the service that pupils deserve, for more pupils never mind all pupils, we need to raise the productivity of our system.

Productivity can be a scary word. It has in the past been used as an alternative to rising investment. But productivity is what teachers and parents care about: the level of improvement in student performance, measured in appropriate ways, delivered by schools, with the support of the community, for a given level of resource. It holds the key to excellence and equity in our education system.

Any sort of crude transfer of productivity measures from private to public sectors would be wrong. Any lurch in policy or flurry of initiatives would be damaging. But I do not think we can make the sort of progress we need without developing our own story about productivity - defining educational productivity in our own way to the benefit of our own pupils. We cannot rail against crude and unsuitable measures of educational productivity and not rise to the challenge of developing our own understanding of the issue, rooted in teaching and learning.

The productivity challenge is substantial: it is to help all schools raise student performance at the rate of the best. It is a project that needs to engage the whole school community: governors, heads, teachers and teacher unions, support staff, parents. It needs to be led and owned by head teachers. But it will mean different ways of working for the DfES as well as for schools. So it is a challenge we need to face together.

It demands that we debate seriously the teaching and learning strategies that will bring out the best in young people. It raises big questions about how we make best use of our most valuable resource - school staff. It requires that we think end to end about how we support young people in their learning, including what demands we as the education sector make of the rest of the community. And of course it requires that we think seriously about how we measure success.

Inputs and Outputs

I am clear that the purpose of schooling is three-fold: to help ensure that knowledge and culture is passed on and developed from generation to generation; to broaden the horizons of young people in a country still scarred by far too much disadvantage; and to arm young people with the skills to be productive employees and active citizens in adult life.

Measuring our success in doing this is not straightforward. In England we have gone further than most countries in developing measures of pupil attainment, and school effectiveness, at different levels of the education system. The tests and exams at KS2, KS3, GCSE and Advanced Level may not be perfect, but they do represent worthwhile standards of achievement. One reason I support reform of 14 to 19 education is to give every student the opportunity to show what they can do across the divide between academic and vocational qualifications, in a way that has credibility with higher education, with employees, and with fellow citizens.

It is nevertheless striking how using current data we can see that different schools and different teachers achieve different results with similar resources. If every maintained mainstream primary school was able to achieve for its pupils the performance of the upper quartile school within its free school meal band, then 85% of pupils would achieve level 4 in English at Key Stage 2. The same improvement in the secondary sector would deliver almost 50,000 more young people with five good GCSEs. These are lives changed and futures made more secure. Delivery on this issue is the heart of the productivity challenge.

We always need to scrutinise the cost base so we get maximum resources to our priorities. For example, if we were to squeeze premises costs across the English education system by 3%, we would liberate £40m for teaching and learning: enough for about 1100 extra teachers.

But incremental change is not enough. Management in my book is about the more efficient administration of things as they are; leadership is about the reform of things so that they are as we would hope them to be. That is why this institution is called the National College of School Leadership.

The most fundamental change comes from a simple question: how would we organise schooling if we were designing it around what we know about how young people learn and how we can maximise the potential of every youngster in the school? If we approach the productivity challenge from this vantage point, I believe we would develop answers in seven key areas.

Meeting the Productivity Challenge

First, the most effective teaching depends on really knowing the needs, strengthens and weaknesses of individual pupils. So the biggest driver for change and gain is use of data on pupil achievement to design learning experiences that really stretch individual pupils.

There is now a wealth of data available to schools, from their own internal assessment to compulsory national tests. The presentation of the data now allows teachers and school leaders to compare and contrast the performance of different groups of pupils, and fine tune provision according to their needs, revising teaching strategies, setting arrangements and putting on extra provision as necessary.

Yet according to this year's OFSTED report on assessment in secondary schools, use of assessment was good or better in less than four in ten schools. Part of the responsibility lies with national and local agencies - notably to cut out the multiple data requests that give data a bad name. But we also need leaders to lead change in schools, so that ongoing use of formative data is central to the role of a class teacher.

Second, if we are to make good the promise of personalised learning as a spur to school productivity, we need to look at how we deploy, manage, train and motivate people. They are the keys to the quality of the learning experience, and therefore the heart of any notion of productivity.

The core of this agenda must be the quality of teaching. The challenge is posed by the striking fact that in the 2001 PISA study for the OECD within-school variation in pupil performance in the UK was four times greater than between-school variation. Some of this variation reflects comprehensive student intake. But the quality of teaching and the school accounts for almost a third of the achievement gap. This equates to an additional year's education for those students in a school with the most effective teachers as compared with those with the least.

It is therefore imperative that we do not only seek to level up standards of teaching between schools, but also raise standards of teaching within each school to the standards of the best.

We are already supporting teachers with a range of new opportunities and tools to develop their knowledge and skills of effective teaching and learning. But effective leadership is a key determinant in creating professional learning communities within and across schools where teachers see themselves as learners, working in a culture characterised by high expectations, collaboration and innovation.

Trainee teachers need to develop the capabilities to learn from the good practice they see in schools, to be able to reflect on their experiences with outstanding mentors in ways that promote mastery of the craft of teaching. But this challenge is not only for them: our newly qualified teachers need to join a highly skilled, dynamic and creative teaching profession engaged in serious professional development at every level. As the NCSL makes clear in a new project to tackle in-school variation, the drive for excellence "is principally a question of what leaders do in their schools: how they build a culture and belief systems across the organisation, how they use data and assessment for learning, develop teaching skills, evaluate and finally hold staff to account for the quality of the work they do."

Workforce reform can be a massive help.

Teachers are not helped by all inclusive job descriptions, administrative burdens, insufficient help in dealing with behavioural issues, and the choice of progressing their careers by moving out of the classroom. How many leadership teams struggle to balance the demands of financial, site and premises management, and don't have time for a clear focus on leading teaching and learning? And how many support staff have the talent and drive to ramp up their contribution to learning, but are prevented from doing so by old-fashioned demarcations and working practices?

Workforce reform is about answering those questions. It's about a fundamental review of how schools organise education in the 21st century. It's about how we organise classes and lessons. It is critically linked to the vexed issues of performance management in our system, and professional development. It is key to better productivity in the interests of better outcomes for all.

Third, we need to recognise that in many ways education is unique because of the extent to which students are co-producers of effective education with adults. Pupils help themselves and pupils help each other. We need to take seriously their capacity for taking forward their own learning. Above all, we need to renew our commitment in three areas - helping young people to be motivated by learning, to learn to learn and to be supported in learning.

Let me address these points directly:

Student performance depends on engagement, and the curriculum needs to support this engagement at every stage from the early years on. That is why I am a strong supporter of reforms at 14-19. The new flexibilities at KS4 are encouraging more and more schools to take seriously a wider range of provision, notably in partnerships with local colleges. In the longer term, the Tomlinson review holds out the prospect of a genuinely unified system of general and specialised provision, able to motivate all learners.

Student performance also depends on independent learning. It is inspiring to visit schools where pupils can speak with insight and intelligence about how they learn, about 'mind maps' and other strategies that help them do so, and about those teaching strategies that are also learning strategies that are giving them skills for life. This is the future. Many teachers are committed to it. But in how many schools is there set time each week dedicated for pupils to focus on learning how to learn? In how many schools is assessment for learning designed to support individual target-setting. The answer is not enough.

We also need to engage families and communities in supporting their children and teachers. This is the promise of the Green Paper Every Child Matters, and the machinery of government changes that have joined up previously disparate services for supporting children. The Green Paper provides a tremendous opportunity for the DFES to support local people in designing supports from the community for the biggest motor of social change - achievement at school.

Fourth, we need to support teaching and learning with buildings and ICT that both facilitate more personalised learning and to drive us towards it.

This is not the time for long discussion of school buildings. But three-fifths of schools are more than forty years old - and they are often the ones in the best condition! We will spend over £5bn on school capital in 2005/6. Spending on primaries will rise by 25%, and for secondaries we inaugurate the Building Schools for the Future project that promises to transform the schools estate across the country so that no area is left behind. This in itself is a contribution to higher productivity, and a spur to the sort of changes I am describing.

We can make faster progress on ICT. e-learning empowers students to take greater responsibility for what and how they learn. It gives them the ability to progress at a pace of learning suited to their needs, and the capacity to assess themselves as they develop.

If you observe students watch and listen as NASA's Mission Control launches crafts into space, or use new technology to work on homework with pupils across the world, or sit at their desk as a class teacher uses an interactive whiteboard to bring whole new dimensions to whole class teaching, then you know you are watching a revolution in teaching and learning.
I learnt in the preparation of this lecture that Parrs Wood School in Manchester has guaranteed that all students can be on-line from home, with free technology and support for those homes that cannot afford PCs. e-learning offers greater flexibility, building an increasingly responsive education system - one capable of adapting to the needs of all learners, wherever and however they need to learn, on campus, at home, or as life long learners in the workplace.

Fifth, we need to build a system which continually challenges its own conventional wisdom by sponsoring structural innovation in the system. This is the potential of the Academies Programme.

Academies provide a radical and of necessity innovative alternative to the weakest schools in the most challenging areas of the country - with the same annual revenue funding as other local schools. Through the influence of their sponsors, Academies are open to new and different ways of educating the most challenging youngsters. Most are looking at a five term year; at an extended day; at longer learning sessions; at applying their specialism throughout the curriculum.

All academies must be part of the local pattern of provision, and all must support other local schools. Already Capital City Academy, with its sports specialism, is helping other primary and secondary schools in Brent to raise standards in sport. Already Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough is tying in its community through inventive use of ICT links with its feeder primary schools. And in Walsall, intensive personalised learning arrangements have taken the GCSE scores from 22% good passes in 2002 to 49% in 2003.

Academies work through innovation; but their work should not be confined behind their walls, but instead used as a testbed for innovation across the system.

Sixth, and related, we need to address in a fundamental way whether it makes sense to expect 25 000 institutions to reinvent the productivity wheel.

Of course, the answer is it doesn't. The 1944 Act talked of a national system locally administered. But top down intervention is not the only way to share and develop good practice and good process. Schools can help each other and lead reform. This commitment to collaboration and networking is absolutely central to our strategy for school improvement.

Collaboration is central to the networks of specialist schools that offer their partners both expertise in curriculum specialisms and best practice on school improvement. For example Montgomery High School, a Language College in Blackpool, offers French, German and Japanese to Year 6 pupils in its partner primary schools, and provides literacy and numeracy co-ordinators to strengthen pedagogy.

The commitment to schools leading reform is central to the Leading Edge programme, which enables teachers to take outstanding practice and use it to find solutions to our toughest learning challenges. In July I was delighted to announce the first 103 Leading Edge partnerships whose priorities include the sharing of pupil data to smooth the transition of ethnic minority pupils between primary and secondary school, and teacher websites to share successful personalised learning practice.
Collaboration is also central to Excellence in Cities which develops effective partnerships and shared responsibility between schools - whether it be in working together to deliver enhanced opportunities for gifted and talented students, to share facilities in a City Learning Centre, or to develop Learning Mentors to spread good practice.
This is a new model of school improvement - with schools at the centre. It can be a locomotive for change around the system if it is supported by a seventh and final change - in the role of the DFES, with our partners in national agencies and local government.

The drive for educational productivity applies across the whole service, and not just in schools. With Ofsted and our partners in local authorities, we have a responsibility at the centre to examine ways in which we can deliver our support for schools in a simpler and more-effective way. There are four dimensions to this:

first, we need to build more strongly on schools' capacity for self-evaluation, using the very rich data and benchmarks now available on every aspect of school performance; this is central to the Leadership Incentive Grant and the early evidence is encouraging

second we need to use inspection more powerfully to drive improvement: David Bell has recently announced his intention to consult on a new model of inspection, designed to deliver up to date information to parents, close links between inspection and self-evaluation, and streamlining of inspection surveys; I welcome his initiative, which could be a major contribution to the quality enhancement role of Ofsted.

third we need to ensure that the policy and funding streams from DfES work together, coordinating our school improvement work more strongly with that of local authorities; the drive to deliver three year budgets to schools can only help with this, and the deliberations of the STRB are key in this regard

and fourth we need to ensure that services for children are brought together with services in schools; this is the promise of the recent Children's Green Paper, and one on which the whole of the DFES is committed to deliver.

The principles should be clear: flexibility at the front line matched by intelligent accountability and reduced bureaucracy, with smarter flows of data throughout the system, better information services for school leaders, and effort and resource devoted to high-value activity, rather than being siphoned off into lower-impact or administrative work.

Working with the Implementation Review Unit - our task force of twelve serving heads and teachers - and LEAs we are determined to deliver a leaner, smarter offer to support schools. So raising productivity is up to you, but it is also up to us.

Conclusion

These are first reflections on how we raise productivity in the education system. They are intended as an aid to discussion, not the last word on the subject. I believe that to address these issues at a time of rising investment, notwithstanding the school funding difficulties this year, is an appropriate and necessary process.

Of course, I recognise that there are many reasons for people to believe that the concept of productivity is alien to education service. They can argue that productivity is a concept best suited to private sector, where the financial bottom line provides easy measure of success. In public services the outputs are more diffuse, complex and multifaceted. They can argue that the concept of productivity is in any case not just a prisoner of a different sector of society, but also a prisoner of a bygone industrial age of mass production. Today, they can argue that post-industrial society needs concepts of quality and service. They can argue that the focus on productivity will be self-defeating: as someone wrote to me in preparation for this lecture, for the concept to be meaningful it has to be measurable, but for it to be measurable it may not be meaningful. They can also argue that since things seem to be going in the right direction in English education, we should leave well alone.

These are perfectly legitimate points. But they are not compelling. They are a counsel of caution and complacency. Yet our education system needs more.

When it comes to a public spending round, there are two approaches facing a Department. One is to say to No 10 and the Treasury that its services are really feeling the pinch, that without rises in investment there will be pain and loss. A strategy not to be rejected out of hand, and one which for many schools has the merit of being true.

But there is a more convincing strategy: to show that increased investment will lead to changed life-chances, which after all is the purpose of a Labour government. That is what I want to be able to argue: that investment in education should be the top priority not just because education is the most important investment for the future of the country, but that education will put investment to best effect when it comes to changing the life chances of young people. That is why we must not duck the productivity challenge: it is not an alternative to increased investment, it is a spur to it.

To deliver, we will depend on school leaders, and therefore the NCSL. The more I see of this College, the people who staff it, and the partnerships it has built, the more confident I am that both will do so.