MACDONALD: My school is for pupils aged eleven to sixteen. It's got 1,200 pupils. It's mixed in terms of gender. It's also mixed ethnically, as with most innercity schools. About half the pupils are of Bangladeshi origin. About 30 percent are [from] White working-class backgrounds, and the remaining 15 to 20 percent are a mixture of African, Caribbean, Turkish, Chinese, and Vietnamese. For just over 60 percent of pupils, English is not their first language. About the same percentage are of Muslim background, and 70 percent are what we say in Britain “entitled to free school meals.” What that means is that they are from families that are below the poverty line. The national rate is about 16 percent, so at 70 percent we're one of the highest in the country.

MACDONALD: Yes. Our government is obsessed with measurement and attainment, and I think some of it is spurious. In any case, using their measures, then we have made significant progress. That's over a period of time. It's been an improvement that has had its ups and downs along the way. The overall trend has been markedly upward, but it's not been, by any means, a straight line. There have been years in which the results have gone down before they went up again.

What our government measures is the number of pupils who get five good passes, and we've gone from about 11 percent getting that in 1994 to 76 percent last year. I think percentages are a better way of looking at things, but I sometimes think that raw numbers are also important. So in 1994 or 1995, there were seventeen pupils in the school who got the standard measure you're supposed to get — the nearest equivalent would be graduation, I suppose, in an American context — there were seventeen then, and last year it was 167. That's the kind of change that has taken place.

Partnerships for an Enriched Learning Environment

Q: We're looking at the ways that schools link with partners in the community to improve student outcomes. How has your school engaged partners to support students?

MACDONALD: Our city schools are a very mixed, very heterogeneous environment. We've got all sorts of different types of schools: we've got single-sex schools, faith schools, and all sorts of stuff. We're unusual in that we're a straightforward community school. And the four junior schools where most of our pupils come from are also the same. So we've got a very strong local community of schools, which you might expect to be the norm — but in fact, it's anything but the norm.

Most of our partnership work over the past ten or fifteen years has been focused very much on creating continuity of education from three-year-olds through the sixteen-year-olds. We've worked in very close partnership with the four local junior schools — primary schools — and that has focused both on the young people themselves and also on their parents and families.

You'll find other schools that have had a greater emphasis on social aspects, on health aspects, and so on. We have focused very heavily on education itself. One of the strongest drivers of what we're trying to do is trying to create an enriched curriculum. The basic curriculum is the same as in any country — English, math, science, and so on. What middle-class families provide for their children is a whole wealth of enrichment opportunities, from holidays to visits to museums to reading to discussions, whatever. Our young people tend not to have similar opportunities. They are just not there for them in the same way. Not because they don't want [the opportunities]; they just don't have the wherewithal to do that. So we have a very strong tradition of trying to work with our primary schools in trying to grab any opportunity that we can, whether it's a residential experience, whether it's working with local businesses, whether it's taking kids to theaters, to art galleries, to whatever.

And we have a very, very strong what we call out-of-hours learning program. A significant number of students will come into the school early in the morning for supplementary classes, will come in on Saturday mornings, will come in holidays, and so on, and a lot of it is focused on classes that are about to take public examinations. So on a Saturday morning in March or April, we'll have 150 kids in school doing additional math or science or whatever it is they are doing that particular morning.

So we have a program around two things: one is supplementary learning — trying to give our kids additional support they need there — but also supplementary enrichment activities, which we think have a double value. They have a value in their own right — take the kids to see a play or whatever it is, on a visit somewhere abroad, or whatever. But the second advantage is that the kids, then, if you excuse the expression, can buy into our core business, because school's interesting, school's fun, interesting things happen. So as well as experiencing something of value in its own right, it also helps to engage them with school.

The Importance of Including Families

MACDONALD: What happened was, we started off doing these enrichment programs with the primary schools and with our pupils and a lot of things that cut across age ranges, and over a period of time we gradually realized that we had to engage with the parents as well wherever we could. It's quite difficult to do that in a community where the majority of parents have very limited English.

We had a government-funded project at our school site, which is called an education action zone, and through that we started to develop an adult/parent education program. We started that out somewhat — arrogant is too strong a word — but somewhat, we thought we knew what the parents would want. And we offered them courses, and the take-up wasn't very good. So then we engaged with a group of parents to find out what it was they really wanted. And we started, then, to develop programs and educational opportunities that met their needs. And it's been very successful.

Interestingly, it's overwhelmingly with women. It's very difficult to engage the men. They're either working or reluctant to come forward. But in an average week we would have, probably, 150 adults or parents attending a class of some kind in the school.

MACDONALD: They are the things you would expect, like English as an additional language or ICT [information and communications technology]. We also teach them a straightforward math course, because a lot of them want to improve their own qualifications. We do some kind of in-preparation-for-employment courses, so that people might get jobs in the public sector.

We've also had very successful textile classes. Many of the mothers are actually very accomplished at needlework. And we discovered we got it slightly wrong: we provided a involved — because many of them, for the first time in their lives, are making a financial contribution to their family. One woman I spoke to not long ago had been in the country for fourteen years, and she'd only taken home £250 [around $450] as a result of this exercise but she was really so proud of herself, because in the fourteen years she had been in England she never made any financial contribution to her family. So in terms of self-esteem and so on, those kinds of things can be very important.

For us, again, we're quite unashamedly focusing on education and attainment. We want our young people to get basic qualifications that will enable them to go on. Even the work that we're doing with parents, the hidden agenda is, we want them to value education. If they are learning themselves, then that's a very positive message for children. So in a sense, we're trying to get at the children through the parents. It's a double thing — a value in itself for them, but also it's helping us with our core task, which is to get the kids to achieve more highly.

MACDONALD: Absolutely. As you know, measuring anything in education is incredibly hard, because you never know what's made the difference. It's very hard to disaggregate what's made the difference. But here is a good example. We have a small but not insignificant population of young people from Somalia. When we offered classes to the parents, the Somali mothers said, actually, we don't want classes for ourselves, what we want is supplementary classes for our children. So we started classes on Sunday morning, whereby we provided teachers, and an average of forty young people come in, and they come with their mothers. And that takes place, and it's learning, but it's also social. Out of that, most of the mothers who came to that have now started to come to our adult classes as well. And we have seen a distinct shift in terms of the attitude of our Somali pupils toward school and toward attainment. As I said, we can't prove it, but we are very confident that there's been a significant impact from this engagement with the whole family as well as with the child.

MACDONALD: The obvious one always is money. Statutory education for all young people up to the age of sixteen in England is funded by government, so that's never a problem. To fund other things, you're always looking for sources of revenues, so that's a given. We have to put quite a lot of effort into that. That's one issue.

There's a big issue around how you actually make contact with families, and how you engage with them, and how you overcome their fear and suspicion about coming into school. Interestingly, one of the things weÕve done — all of our adult education classes take place at the back of the school, where there's a separate entrance. It sounds as if it's not important, but actually it is quite important. The parents don't have to come in at the same entrance as the children. They can quietly come in; the children don't have to see them coming in, and the children don't have to be embarrassed that their parents are coming in to go to extra classes.

There's a whole issue around how you actually reach out to the community, and you've got to be quite flexible. Our community has got different [ethnic groups] in it. I described earlier how we reached out to the Somali community; it would be very different with West African or Caribbean parents, or Bengali or Turkish or whatever. You've got to have some sensitivity and understanding of the different communities and how you might engage with them.

And, I suppose it's the same with any organization, you're always dependent to a certain extent on the quality of the individuals you are leaning on in something like this. We're very fortunate in having people in this part of our program who are very skilled, very talented, and very committed. That''s obviously a huge part of the success of what we've done.

MACDONALD: Not really. Occasionally we do. But in the main I would say that's not an issue. The biggest issue we face, funnily enough, in this area now is, we've been very successful in finding a whole range of opportunities, and some of our staff now feel that pupils do so much outof- school activity, have so much extracurricular activity, it's starting to impact their basic learning in class. Because we've just become very good at grabbing opportunities that are there, whatever they are, whether it be in outdoor education, or whether it be in visits of any kind. Being here in central London, there are all sorts of opportunities in music and in drama and so on that come our way. We have very good links with people like the Holocaust Trust, and we've taken kids to visit some of the concentration camps in Poland.

It's an incredibly broad range of activities that we provide, and we've almost gone too far with it, to the point where it's starting to have an effect on our core business.

But we haven't encountered problems [with our partners]. When our pupils go out, they love it, and they almost invariably present themselves incredibly well wherever they go.

MACDONALD: I don't think significantly. It may be indirect; there may be funding that's available to us that we've come on because of that. But at the school level, I couldn't honestly say that there's been a change as a result of that. I suppose you could argue that we were already doing quite a lot of the things about that agenda before it became the national agenda. And therefore, perhaps, there was less of a shift that took place.

MACDONALD: Obviously, resources. The argument that I would have — and do have, whenever I get the chance, with government officials — is around the notion that they see this — and I'm guilty of it as well — as supplementary. Everything is talked about as “extended schools,” “supplementary education,” and so on. The big shift in mindset we need is the one that says, actually, this is part of our core business, not part of our additionality. Because I think that, particularly for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, it feels like it should be part of an entitlement they have. My view would be that if we could move a bit in that direction, then we would see just as significant an improvement in attainment as we would get by putting the same amount of money into more textbooks, more computers, more teachers. I would be prepared to argue, you might even get more.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that if you wanted to drive up attainments in schools like the one I work in, you can drive them up, little by little, through better assessment, better teaching, better resourcing, more computers. I think you can argue that you can get just as much improvement, if not more, by changing the ethos of the institution such that the young people want to come to school, enjoy being in school, and therefore engage with learning. And therefore, the job of the teacher is that much easier, because they're not having to fight against disaffection and lack of engagement.

Using our school as an example, the biggest increases that we got have not been from actually what the teachers did in the classroom, but, actually, because the pupils they are teaching want to be there and want to engage with the learning, and therefore the same teaching effort produces much higher levels of attainment. Teachers are supported in their efforts.

Somewhere, it's about convincing people — the policy-makers — that this is not an extra. It's not extended; it's actually part of the core business of what we should be doing.