Tag: Nick Gibb

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb, the Minister of State for Schools, on 27 March 2015.

Good morning.

It’s a pleasure to be here today at the Harris Primary maths conference. This government’s education reforms have been the most radical for a generation. And the growth of the Harris Federation of academies and free schools to a chain of 36 primary and secondary schools has been one of the great successes of the last 5 years. Our approach to deliver greater autonomy for schools through academisation was based on clear evidence from around the world that in the most successful school systems schools are autonomous and accountable.

The Harris Federation is also part of another of the evidence-based approaches we have put at the heart of our education reforms – mathematics for mastery. In early years teaching, Harris schools use Singapore maths and beyond the early years, Harris primary schools have adopted the effective mathematics curriculum, which combines Singapore and Shanghai approaches, and use maths no problem textbooks.

As part of the second wave of the Shanghai teacher exchange, last week I was fortunate enough to observe a lesson at the Harris Primary Academy in Chafford Hundred, Essex, led by Lin Lei. In a 35 minute lesson, with all pupils facing the teacher and engaged throughout, Lin taught all of the pupils to carry out complex types of long multiplication through clear explanation of calculation methods.

Some of you may have already heard me tell that story (perhaps even more than once) since I observed the lesson last week! But I think that reflects something truly positive – that we are undergoing a transformation in our approach to maths and how it is taught in schools.

That transformation is so important, because our performance in maths had been stagnating over a number of years. From 2005 to 2010, while in opposition I visited hundreds of schools across the country. What I learnt from these visits was that few pupils at primary or secondary school knew their times tables. Long multiplication and long division were rarely taught, with inefficient methods such as the grid method for multiplication and chunking for long division commonplace in classrooms, neither of which are used in the Far East. When I showed visiting members of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission they were bemused.

I have also spent time reviewing grade E and F scripts of all 3 main exam boards maths GCSEs. What this exercise revealed was that most of the problems came down to a lack of knowledge of how to carry out basic arithmetic: pupils couldn’t multiply numbers of more than 1 digit. This was a result of the approach to teaching maths.

For too long we set expectations too low for pupils. An approach of differentiation in primary schools saw classes being taught in different groups, pupils expected to progress at different rates and acceleration on to new topics for those doing well rather than consolidation. An over-emphasis on concepts at the expense of practice, fluency and, through that, understanding meant that too many pupils simply did not know how to perform calculations. Using textbooks became unpopular, with only 10% of maths teachers in England using a textbook for core teaching, compared to 70% in Singapore and 95% in Finland according to TIMSS 2011.

This stagnation was reflected in our international performance in maths. Coming 24th in the PISA maths tables in 2012 was equivalent to a 3 year difference between the performance of our 15-year-olds and those at the top of the table – in Shanghai. And take up of the study of maths post-15 in England was among the lowest throughout the OECD.

Education was failing pupils – too often those from poorer backgrounds – and denying them the opportunities that come with the study of maths. Only a solid grounding in the basics of maths will allow pupils to do well at the next level and proceed to further study such as A level. People with an A level in maths go on to earn 7 to 10% more than similarly educated people without the qualification and it opens doors to a whole range of interesting careers. We want to inspire young people to recognise the importance of maths and the opportunities it can offer, and continue studying it to the highest level so that they can compete with the best in the world and succeed throughout their education and careers.

That is why we have attached such importance to maths, along with STEM subjects more widely. We have introduced the 34 new maths hubs and £67 million announced by the Prime Minister for STEM teaching will improve the skills of 15,000 existing teachers, and recruit an additional 2,500 specialist maths and physics teachers over the next Parliament.

We have come a long way already. Here we are today talking about mastery – which embodies the idea that every pupil can do well and achieve high standards in maths. Mastery is the model of the high-performing Asian systems such as Shanghai, Singapore and South Korea. It delivers a meticulous approach to arithmetic, whole class teaching and focused 35 minute lessons. Frequent practice allows pupils to consolidate their understanding, and pupils are assisted through immediate and tailored in-class questioning and scaffolding techniques. Homework is frequent, and simply and quickly marked.

The mastery approach also uses high quality resources and teaching tools – especially textbooks. Great effort and collaboration goes towards perfecting lesson design, with close attention to effective teaching methods. Whole lessons are devoted to thorough teaching of small steps of calculation – the use of the zero, for example in long multiplication.

We have introduced a new national curriculum, which is more detailed and more demanding, to reflect the mastery approach. Year 1 pupils are introduced to all 4 functions and to basic fractions. In year 2, basic columnar addition and subtraction is studied, with carrying and borrowing in year 3. In year 2 the teaching of times tables begins, and pupils are expected to know all of the times tables up to 12 x 12 by year 4.

Instant recall of facts like times tables is crucial because the working memory is small and so they need to be committed to long term memory, as explained by Daniel Willingham in his book ‘Why don’t students like school’. Such recall from long term memory is essential to be able to add fractions, and perform long multiplication and division, which pupils will be taught in year 5 and year 6. The year by year approach sets out greater clarity and the focus on fluency in the essentials of maths allows time for pupils to practise more to ensure deep knowledge. We are also expecting the majority of pupils to move through programmes of study at roughly the same pace.

We have made important changes to testing. The new key stage 2 tests will assess pupils’ mastery of mathematics and the first of these new tests will be taken in summer 2016. At secondary level, reformed maths GCSEs will be more challenging qualifications, sat for the first time in 2017, with teaching beginning in September this year. While A levels will only introduce a small amount of new content, students will be required to have a deeper understanding of the mathematics they are taught. We have also focused on progression to A level, which has increased by 13% since 2010, meaning maths is now the most popular A level.

There is no doubt that we could not be delivering these reforms to maths without the work and dedication of schools and school groups like Harris and others who are also here today.

Through the maths hubs programme, you have been taking part in the Shanghai teacher exchange, which provides an important opportunity to learn from teachers in one of the best systems in the world, as you implement teaching for mastery in your schools. The most recent exchange came to an end on Friday, and was a resounding success. Across the maths hubs, schools are also trialling Singapore textbooks, which provide a coherent, structured programme and benefit teachers, pupils and parents.

The next step to help spread and embed mastery is to develop a cadre of 140 primary mastery experts, who will support 3,500 teachers across primary schools to introduce teaching for mastery of mathematics effectively.

I am grateful to all of you for being part of these reforms. They are an important example of how we have looked to the evidence of what works to deliver better outcomes to inform our policymaking. I am confident that the reward we reap from this approach will be a better quality maths teaching in our schools, higher standards of attainment among pupils and greater opportunities for them as a result.

Thank you.

Below is the text of the speech made by Nick Gibb to the Catholic Education Service on 13th October 2010.

Thank you, Father [Michael] O’Dowd, for that introduction.

With the Spending Review imminent, members of the Cabinet are locked in rooms across Westminster this week. But Michael asked me to pass on his best wishes to you for your conference and I’m delighted to be here to share our vision for education with you.

The last time that I saw many of you was at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham for the Big Assembly with His Holiness Pope Benedict [XVI].

First and foremost, it was an extremely successful event and I’d like to congratulate Oona [Stannard] and the Catholic Education Service on the leading role that it played in organising it.

There were some of the very best choirs that I’ve ever heard, which is testament to the importance that Catholic schools place on the wider development of pupils through extra-curricular activities.

But above all, it was a fantastic celebration of the role that the Catholic Church plays in our education system and the perfect way to mark the start of the Year of Catholic Education.

In his speech, His Holiness said:

As the relative roles of church and state in the field of education continue to evolve, never forget that religions have a unique contribution to offer.

Faith schools have been part of the English education system since it began.

The historian Nicholas Orme traced this back as early as the 7th century when he described churches and cathedrals as ‘centres of literacy’.

By the 15th and 16th centuries, the Church had become one of the most important providers of education in local communities.

And when Catholicism re-established itself in the mid-19th century, the establishment of Catholic schools was prioritised so that children had places to learn.

Faith organisations have just as important a role to play in education in the 21st century.

Today, around a third of maintained schools in England are faith schools and, despite operating in some of the poorest areas of the country, they are consistently outperforming other schools.

At a pupil level, 6 per cent more pupils in secondary faith schools achieved 5 A* to C GCSEs including English and mathematics than the national average, while 6 per cent more pupils in primary faith schools reached the expected level in English and mathematics. When you look just at Catholic schools, both of these figures increase further still to 7 per cent.

At a school level, almost half of the 200 best-performing secondary schools in the country are faith schools, while 64 per cent of the 200 best-performing primaries are faith schools – of which nearly a quarter are Catholic.

And as well as having more diverse intakes than other schools, Ofsted recognises that faith schools are more successful than non-faith schools at promoting community cohesion.

A few weeks ago, I visited St Gregory’s Catholic Science College in Harrow.

It was the first school I visited when I became a minister and I was delighted to be asked back because I was blown away by my first visit there.

Last summer, 66 per cent of pupils achieved five A*-C GCSEs including English and mathematics. But I was struck most by the strong ethos that the headteacher has instilled, the emphasis on aspiration and, as tends to be the case with the happiest and most industrious schools, how I could tell just walking through the gates that there was a culture of respect and good behaviour.

If we could replicate schools like St Gregory’s, there would be no need to have a schools minister or a Department for Education. But while we do have some of the best schools in the world in our country, we also have too many which are still struggling.

Still a long way to go

As we saw from the Key Stage 2 progression statistics published last week, there are hundreds of primary schools where the majority of children fail to get to an acceptable level in mathematics and English.

The majority of children leave those schools without the knowledge and skills required properly to follow the secondary school curriculum and make a success of the rest of their time in education.

Overall, four in ten pupils don’t meet basic standards by the age of eleven, and only about half manage at least a ‘C’ in both English and mathematics GCSE.

What makes this so much worse is that poor performance is so powerfully concentrated in the areas of the greatest disadvantage.

It is enormously demoralising to track the progress of the poorest pupils.

The stark report published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission earlier this week showed that only a third of children eligible for free school meals reach a good level of development by the age of five, compared to more than half who are not.

This gap then continues through primary and secondary school until, aged 16, pupils entitled to free school meals are over half as likely to achieve five good GCSEs and more than twice as likely to be permanently excluded.

By the time they reach university, just 45 children out of a cohort of 80,000 on free school meals make it to Oxbridge.

It is because deprivation still far too often dictates destiny that we are introducing a pupil premium. It will provide extra funding for schools with the poorest pupils to pay for smaller classes, extra tuition and the best teachers.

But we are also determined to learn from the other nations that have been much more successful recently in getting more and more people to be educated to a higher level.

The most recent PIRLs study of 10-year-olds saw England fall from 3rd out of 15 countries in 2001 to 15th out of 40 countries in 2006.

While the PISA study showed that only 2 out of 57 countries have a wider gap in attainment between the highest and lowest achievers.

Three pillars of reform

There are three essential characteristics which mark out the best performing and fastest reforming education systems.

First, they are guided by the principle that more autonomy for individual schools helps drive up standards.

Second, the highest performing education nations invariably also have the best teachers.

Third, there is rigorous external assessment based on a curriculum that provides a deep and rich learning experience.

The coalition government is determined to implement all of these lessons in our country and I will reflect on how we intend to do so today.

Greater autonomy

One of the first things we did was to offer all schools – including primary schools for the first time – the chance to take on academy status – starting with those rated outstanding by Ofsted.

In recent years, academies have consistently outperformed other schools. Last year, their rate of improvement was twice that of other schools, with some individual academies posting incredible improvements of between 15 and 25 per cent. Those in some particularly challenging areas, such as Burlington Danes on London’s White City estate, run by the charity ARK, and the Harris Academies in South London, have all secured dramatic gains.

In his memoirs, Tony Blair gave an excellent description of why they’re so effective:

[An academy] belongs not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself. The school is in charge of its own destiny. This gives it pride and purpose. And most of all, freed from the extraordinarily debilitating and often, in the worst sense, political correct interference from state or municipality, academies have just one thing in mind, something shaped not by political prejudice but by common sense: what will make the school excellent.

Whether it’s new approaches to the curriculum, to assessment, to discipline and behaviour, to pastoral care, to careers guidance, to sport, the arts and music, new ways of gathering data on pupil performance, new ways of supporting teachers to improve their practice, new ways of tackling entrenched illiteracy and new ways of ending the culture of low expectations, it is that single-minded focus on what will work for them that we want all schools to have.

Over 140 outstanding schools have already taken up our offer and will lead the way – and I hope that many more will follow, including faith schools.

I am grateful to Oona and to the CES for the constructive dialogue that we’ve had over the past few months about the involvement of faith schools in the Academies programme.

In that spirit of partnership, let me also say that you have been right to raise concerns about the potential impact that conversion would have on land, on governance, on the curriculum, amongst other things.

I want us to work through all of these issues and that is why we were pleased to provide a small amount of funding to help develop a model funding agreement for Catholic schools.

And I do want to be 100 per cent clear that it would be wrong for us to expect faith schools converting to academies to do anything differently. That is why faith designation will continue into academies and, while they must of course comply with the School Admissions Code so that they are inclusive, academies will be able to continue to give priority to children of their faith.

I believe that, in time, faith schools can play the same kind of leading role in the Academies programme as they do in the wider schools system, not least because they have so much to offer in working with other schools that need more support to improve.

As well as expanding the Academies programme, we’re helping teachers, charities, churches and parent groups to start new free schools.

Bishop McMahon pointed out earlier this year that free schools are about local communities getting together, pooling their resources and supporting the needs of the local community, and how this resonates with the way that so many Catholic primary schools were founded.

Despite the robust approach that we’re taking to assessing proposals, we’ve already announced the first sixteen projects that are progressing to the next stage of development and want to be up and running next September.

Given that it typically takes between three and five years to set up a new school, it is a tribute to the incredible energy and commitment of these pioneering groups that they have already reached such an advanced stage.

Encouragingly, there are already a number of proposals from faith groups and, while the door of course remains open for faith groups to establish new schools through the existing voluntary-aided route, I hope you will look at this route as a means of increasing the number of faith places available.

While I’m on the subject of new schools, let me also say that I understand why some communities were disappointed by the announcement to end the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme.

Sadly, we inherited a scheme that was characterised by massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy so we had to take action.

The end of the BSF programme does not mean the end of school rebuilding. I believe we can build more schools more efficiently and more quickly in the areas that need it the most in the future and that is what we’ve asked our review team to deliver.

Similarly, Oona has been lobbying on your behalf recently about the removal of home to school transport, which I understand is an important consideration for you and for parents.

Parents have the right to bring up their children in the way that they see fit and, if they adhere to a faith, to bring up their children with respect to the tenets of that faith.

Our education system must reflect that choice and LAs must respect a parent’s wishes.

Every council’s budget is under pressure but their primary responsibility is to spend taxpayers’ money in a way that meets local needs and, if you or parents don’t believe that’s happening, I have no doubt that you will let them know.

While the drive towards greater autonomy is an essential part of our plans, it is only part of a comprehensive programme of reforms to make us truly competitive internationally and to close the gap between rich and poor.

Comprehensive programme of reform

Our first Education White Paper, to be launched later this year, will set out the whole-system improvement needed to improve standards and close the gap between rich and poor.

Teachers and other education professionals will be at the fore because everything we want to achieve starts with, and flows from, the quality of the workforce.

In the White Paper, we will unveil a whole range of further proposals to ensure we attract the best possible people into education and, perhaps even more critically, provide those teaching now with the support, professional development and security they need.

We’ve already doubled the size of the Teach First programme so that more highly skilled graduates come in to help us with our mission, and we will also make it easier for experienced, talented people to change career and move into teaching.

To ensure they get off to the best possible start, we will look at how we can improve the quality of initial teacher training and, in particular, strengthen phonics and mathematics training for primary teachers.

And because the best teachers apply their passion for learning to their own careers as well as to their pupils, we will make it easier and more rewarding for teachers to acquire deeper knowledge and new qualifications, including postgraduate and management qualifications.

As crucial as recruitment and training will be, there is nothing more dispiriting for teachers than dealing with a grinding load of bureaucracy and nothing more likely to put them off completely than dealing with bad behaviour,

We are determined to lift burdens on teachers so that they can get on with their jobs, and to build on the action that we’ve already on ill discipline by simplifying the use of force guidance and protecting teachers against false and malicious allegations from pupils and parents.

Once teachers are secure and able to develop their professional skills, we then have to create more room for them to use them.

So we will develop a new National Curriculum that excites and challenges young people. It will be informed by teachers and experts, but based on the best global evidence of what knowledge and concepts can be introduced to children at different ages.

We will set out more details in the White Paper but I can assure you that I believe that RE is an important part of the curriculum.

RE is thought provoking, allows pupils to develop a greater understanding of the communities they live in and, importantly, it is valued by parents.

Finally, hand in hand with curriculum reform comes the need to restore confidence in our battered qualifications system.

So we will legislate to strengthen Ofqual and we will also ask it to evaluate how our exams compare with those in other countries so that we know how well our children stand against those from the countries with whom we are increasingly competing.

Conclusion

I’m proud to call myself a supporter of faith schools – and Catholic schools in particular – because they have such a strong track record of building strong communities that work together to help one another and of supporting the most disadvantaged.

We want to learn from you and are committed to working with you as we take forward the far-reaching reform programme that I’ve set out.

Because, just like the Catholic Church, we want to ensure that all children get the best possible chance to succeed.