By Rt Hon Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.

29 November 2007

-Check against delivery-

It’s a great privilege to be here – and I apologise that I was not able to be with you yesterday as planned.

And let me start by saying how delighted I am to speak today at what has become the largest annual education conference in Britain - probably in Europe.

With 4,700 members, including a growing international network -not least in China - this is quite an organisation.

And over the last few years, we’ve seen what a powerful force for good specialist schools and Academies have become:

Providing excellent teaching and learning;

Focusing on improving standards of education for all and especially in disadvantaged communities;

and above all, bringing leadership, energy and the expertise of sponsors to raising standards across the education system.

We now have 2,779 Specialist schools - 86 per cent of all secondary schools in England

Over the last decade, you have demonstrated the enormous benefits that strong partnerships between specialist schools and external partners can bring to pupils and parents.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I saw this first hand, when I visited Bitterne Park Specialist School in Southampton, which has a specialism in performing arts, a very dynamic head teacher, strong links with parents and the wider community and results improving year on year.

And across the country, over the past ten years, specialist schools have produced excellent results.

And within your membership we now have 83 academies – with 133 expected to be open by next September. And we are now accelerating our Academies programme so 230 will be open by 2010.

Disproportionately set up in deprived communities;

with intakes that have a disproportionately large number of poorer children than in their catchment areas as well as more children with special educational needs;

and still achieving faster increases in results than the average;

Together, your actions demonstrate both our commitment to excellence for all and our determination to break the link between poverty and attainment which has scarred our country for so long.

That is why we want every secondary school to be a specialist school, a trust or an academy – and every one of them will have a university or a business partner.

And I also want to strengthen and extend that engagement between schools and sponsors.

So today, I can announce that we will now provide an extra £50 million over the next three years so that every specialist school, as they are successfully re-designated, has the opportunity to access £25,000 if they can raise matched funding from an external sponsor or sponsors.

Our aim in encouraging you to seek this sponsorship is not only - or even mainly - to raise additional funding, but to help stimulate a broader and deeper engagement between schools and external partners, particularly local employers and businesses.

As you know, these partners can offer a great deal more than financial sponsorship. They can assist in numerous ways, including providing work placements, mentors, governors, curriculum support and support for staff.

Many specialist schools already benefit from such partnerships, and I want this to become the norm.

And in the coming weeks - starting with announcements I will make today and then next month in our Children’s Plan - we will set out what more we must do together to deliver the world class education system our country needs with excellence for all our young people.

And I am determined we learn from your achievements.

Your success is based on leadership creating an ethos of achievement and ambition for every child.

Overcoming the barriers to learning in the classroom;

and tackling the barriers to achievement that are outside the school.

Our task is to spread excellence throughout the entire school system by promoting diversity and choice among schools and collaboration between schools;

tackling schools that are failing;

And improving schools that are coasting and could be achieving more.

So that all children achieve not just enough, but all they are capable of achieving in a world class, 21st century education system.

Let me take each of these ingredients of success in turn.

First, tackling barriers in the classroom.

Together, we have made huge progress in raising standards in schools. Over the last decade, our school system has gone from below average to above average.

But we are not yet world class. Too many children are still failing to fulfil their potential and are leaving school without good qualifications. And too often, it’s the poorest children who achieve least.

As you know, the foundation of school achievement is excellent teaching by excellent teachers.

We have seen unprecedented investment in the workforce – numbers of teachers and support staff are at their highest for 25 years. And as Ofsted has said, today’s teachers are the best generation ever.

We have put in place reforms to deliver an engaging, inspiring curriculum – which is why the diploma programme and the reform of the Key Stage 3 curriculum are so important.

You also need good facilities - which is why we are delivering unprecedented levels of capital investment through Building Schools for the Future.

And we also need good discipline in schools, which is why we have given heads and teachers new powers to tackle poor behaviour.

But what makes the best schools stands out for me is that they focus on the progress of each child and young person.

High achievers at primary school go on to become high achievers at secondary school.

And pupils who leave primary school and haven’t got where they need to be in reading, writing or maths get the extra support they need.

We know that this doesn’t happen in every school.

Too many pupils make good progress in primary school and then get stuck during Key Stage 3.

Last year’s Key Stage 3 tests showed that more than 50,000 children, who had reached or exceeded the expected level in English when they were 11, had not progressed even one level in the last three years.

Only 34% of children who had entered secondary school at level 3 had progressed to level 5 by age 14.

If we want to be world class, then this is simply not good enough.

If we’re genuinely committed to tackling the achievement gap, we need a wider change in culture in all schools about progress for all pupils.

The best teachers assess pupil performance continuously and consistently. And they use those assessments to tailor the way they teach - to identify children as soon as they show signs of falling off the pace, and intervening immediately.

I want to see every school using data to track the progress of every child, following the example of the best.

And there has been some excellent ground-work – with an additional £1.75 billion in investment to help you deliver one-to-one teaching and personalised learning, including additional investment in Assessment for Learning.

We are now implementing the recommendations of the Rose report into early reading to ensure all schools and nurseries teach phonics properly.

And alongside Every Child a Reader, we are introducing Every Child a Writer, to help ensure that every child makes proper progress in writing in primary schools too.

But I also want to see whether we can go even further.

That is why I am looking forward to seeing the results of the Making Good Progress pilot, which began this term in over 450 primary and secondary schools.

It explores a smarter way to monitor and assess pupil performance, using objective, Single Level Tests, taken when ready, to motivate and drive improvement, not just measure it.

Because to be world class, every child needs to make progress – and not just some. I reject the arguments of those who claim that excellence must by definition only ever be for a few.

This is not the case in countries such as Finland and Canada, where achievement is high but the achievement gap is smaller.

Excellence for all does not mean everyone must reach the same level - there will always be a range of achievement. But everyone should be given an equal chance to fulfil their potential and make all the progress they can.

But second, that also means tackling barriers to progress outside the classroom.

Because while the best leaders know that the quality of what goes on in the classroom is critical, they also know that even more critical is the engagement of parents and what happens at home.

Children are only at school for 14% of time.

Evidence shows that if parents are engaged, especially fathers, children do better at school - as exemplified by the research the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust commissioned last year on how schools can work with parents more effectively.

But the Children’s Plan consultation shows there is a gap here.

Secondary schools say it is often really difficult to engage parents.

Parents say it’s difficult to engage schools, especially once their children leave primary school.

This is something we must address in the Children’s Plan.

We also need to do more to help parents supporting learning and especially reading at home.

The PIRLS report, published yesterday, makes this point very powerfully.

Look at the facts.

38 per cent of ten year olds are playing computer games for three hours or more a day – more than five years ago, more than in other countries.

And high achievers are reading less – in particular, less fiction.

I want children to look forward to reading when they get home as much as they look forward to texting their friends or playing computer games.

We need a culture change about reading in this country – among parents and children and teachers, but beyond this, among employers and the wider community to encourage children and young people to read more. And to be not only fluent readers, but enthusiastic readers too.

This is why we are having a national year of reading, a nationwide campaign, to promote the importance of reading to parents, children and communities.

But we are not going to get to world class unless schools also play their role in addressing the barriers to learning that some children face because of special educational needs or wider difficulties at home or elsewhere.

Learning difficulties, mental health problems, caring responsibilities, violence at home or getting into trouble on the streets in the evenings and at weekends – all can have a major impact on learning.

That is why we need schools - starting in the early years and primary schools - to help identify children, young people and families who are at the greatest risk and need extra support and to help them access effective and impartial information, advice and support appropriate to their needs.

Let me be clear – I’m not saying I want teachers to double up as social workers, doctors, nurses or housing officers.

Nor is it about loading new responsibilities on to schools without making it easier for them to draw on the help they need.

But it does mean schools acting as an early warning indicator and building partnerships with other services to enable them to intervene early.

And that also means other services for children must work in partnership with schools and respond to their needs.

Many schools and local authorities are making real progress.

Last month, I visited New Brompton College, a specialist school in Gillingham, which has gone from being one of the worst performing schools to one of the top performing schools when CVA is taken into account.

It has a team of staff delivering pastoral support to children and families in school, while teachers focus on teaching. And through the school, parents and children can access other vital services – there are mentors and counsellors and a community psychiatric nurse all based on the school site.

But in too many local areas, things are happening too slowly.

In some areas, schools have been reluctant to engage.

In others, schools are only able to support children and parents in this way because of their own dogged persistence, and without the kind of support from local authorities and health services that they would ideally receive.

And in preparation for the children’s plan, we have been learning from best examples round the country of how the modern 21st century school should look.

For example, Shropshire has set up five multi-agency teams, one in each borough. Each team is located in a school and serves all the schools in the borough.

It is right that both school and local authority are responsible together for delivering the five Every Child Matters outcomes – and this is something Ofsted now must take into account when they inspect schools and local authorities.

We must reject the idea that there is a choice to made between focusing on Every Child Matters and on raising standards.

We know that in the best schools, addressing barriers to learning outside the school is part of their core business – part and parcel of improving achievement for every child.

Diversity, choice and collaboration

I know from my discussions and visits over the last few months that the best schools - many of your members – are doing an outstanding job of overcoming these barriers to learning inside and outside the classroom.

You do it through a combination of:

an ethos of high expectations and ambition for every single pupil;

a commitment to innovation, using your freedoms and independence to tackle old and persistent problems in new ways;

and a strong sense of responsibility and a leadership role across schools and in the wider community.

Because specialist schools aren't just about raising standards in their own school.

They are also about developing centres of curriculum excellence school by school.

The specialist missions of your schools - from sport and science to maths, music and modern languages, with many others besides - are fundamental to your status as specialist schools, and I want to see these missions intensify.

I want, for example:

to see sports colleges which pioneer a renaissance of competitive sport in their localities;

languages colleges which pioneer the introduction of language teaching in their feeder primary schools;

science colleges which offer the three individual sciences at GCSE and make this opportunity available to students in neighbouring schools;

engineering schools which pioneer the new diploma in engineering.

I could go on.

Every specialist school head teacher should be thinking: what can I do this year to make my specialism more special, and to enrich our engagement with other schools in our specialist field.

This part of your mission is often missed in the debate about Specialist, Academy and Trust status.

You play a critical role in creating choice and diversity in the schools system - offering parents real choice of an ethos or focus that suits their child.

This diversity and specialism also generates through innovation new routes to excellence. Because your freedom and autonomy – and the will to use new ideas to tackle old problems – that can drive change.

Like Haberdashers’ Aske’s Knights Academy in Lewisham, which has replaced a school deserted by parents, and is now oversubscribed and achieving excellent results. One of the reasons for this is innovation in the curriculum. The school runs compressed, two year Key Stage 3 courses, which keep children engaged and motivated, and where all pupils make good progress.

Or Edmonton County High school in north London, where as part of assessment for learning, small groups of teachers work together on progress and challenges in improving their teaching. The idea, borrowed from schemes such as weight watchers, uses the concept of peer accountability to change longstanding teaching habits.

But you don’t want that excellence to remain locked up within the gates of an individual school.

The reason why we are here today – the reasons why the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is so successfully – is that you want all schools to learn from the best.

That is why our reforms are based on diversity and collaboration with schools working together:

sharing best practice and learning from each other
coordinating on exclusions and behaviour
and increasingly, now working together on the 14 to 19 curriculum

Of the first 30 schools in trusts, 23 are working in a variety collaborative arrangements with other schools.

For example, in my constituency, the Aspire Trust will involve 3 schools – Horbury School, Outward Grange School and Wakefield City High School.

They will work in partnership with Leeds Met University and local employers to get more young people going to university and improve the schools’ outreach to the wider community.

And this is also why we want to see the best schools working with weaker schools to drive up standards through Trusts and federations, including with Academies.

Like Shirelands Language College, which is collaborating with George Salter High School in Sandwell, In 2003 only 16% of children at George Salter achieved five or more good GCSES. By 2006, this had risen to 63%.

Some people claim that we have to make a choice between autonomy and strong leadership for our outstanding schools, and them playing a wider role in the school system.

But this is a false choice.

By collaborating, and spreading the benefits of their innovation to others, the best schools know they achieve more for their own pupils and for others too.

Tackling failure

Choice and diversity, promote innovation and they create incentives to tackle poor performance and drive up standards across the board.

School league tables, Ofsted inspections, parental choice and contestability are all powerful spurs to improvement.

It is right that heads and governing bodies must today be concerned if their results don’t compare with the best.

They should feel the pressure if their value added does not match that of the school down the road.

If things are going in the wrong direction, I want heads to act quickly to set things right before someone else tells them to.

And where parents want to establish their own schools, and the demand is there, we will support them, as we have done in Lambeth.

So I am all for healthy competition between excellent schools.

However, contestability can not be the sole lever to drive up school performance.

Competition will bring pressure on schools that are underperforming, are poorly led, or where teaching is mediocre.

But it won’t bring it sufficiently quickly to help the children in that school – and that isn’t good enough.

We cannot simply stand back and wait for incentives to bite, school by school, because in too many cases, this will not happen quickly enough.

And where a culture of low aspirations has become established, there is too often not enough parental demand to cause the necessary change.

So a truly radical education policy will not abdicate responsibility for children’s futures.

It should not divert billions of pounds from the Building Schools for the Future programme in areas which badly need new investment in new schools to areas where the need for new school places has not been established.

That is why national and local government have a duty to parents and children to take a strategic view and ensure there is early intervention to tackle failing schools.

I am proud of this government’s record in tackling failure.

Since 1997, we have reduced the number of schools where less than 25% of children achieve five or more good GCSEs from 616 to 26.

The Prime Minister recently announced a more ambitious goal still - that over the next five years, all schools will get 30% or more children achieving five or more good GCSEs including english and maths.

But when I stress the importance of local government’s strategic role, I am not talking about turning the clock back.

It was the 2006 Education and Inspections Act that introduced new powers for local authorities, as part of the shift in their role from providers to strategic commissioners, so we have a robust system of intervention to deal with failure as well as the new admissions code.

Local authorities now have the powers to issue a formal warning notice if they think that a school is at risk of failing – they don’t have to wait for the school to go into special measures.

Following this, they can make changes to the governing body of the school, or they can require the school to collaborate with another, more successful institution.

And if necessary, it can replace a failing school with an Academy, or encourage the Governing Body to set up a trust - so that new leadership and new energy can challenge traditional thinking and low expectations.

And local government must be held to account for whether its takes its responsibilities seriously and uses these powers to tackle failure.

So far, 79 local authorities are working with us on academies, and more are coming forward week by week.

And nine local authorities are going further still: they are not just working with us but have decided to co-sponsor academies - Manchester; Sunderland; the Corporation of London, Cheshire; Coventry, Kensington and Chelsea, Kent, Telford and Wrekin, and West Sussex.

This is local government working closely with you and properly playing its strategic role, tackling failure and focusing intervention where it’s needed most to break the link between low achievement and disadvantage.

So my argument is that it is a false choice between diversity and contestability on the one hand, and intervention to tackle failure on the other.

The only coherent strategy to tackle failure is through both a constant competitive pressure to drive up performance, and early intervention when schools are underperforming.

So we must continue to work together - schools, governing bodies and local authorities and national government - to tackle failure with all the tools at our disposal.

Addressing coasting

But now I believe we need to raise our sights further.

Because intervention at the point of failure is really too late.

The process through which a school goes into special measures, and either comes out of special measures or is replaced can last two or three years.

That’s two or three more years of failure for children and parents.

There is a responsibility for us to act quickly when schools are at risk of failing.

We now need to take coasting as seriously as we do more obvious forms of failure.

You will know of schools in your area, which on the surface are doing reasonably well, but where improvement has been static for many years.

Schools which may well even be hitting the national averages at GCSE, but where, for many years, it’s been acceptable for 40 out of every 100 kids to leave without five or more good GCSEs.

And where neither the head, nor the governing body, nor the local authority have seen fit to challenge this lack of progress.

Once again, I believe there is a crucial role for specialist schools and Academies in driving up standards across the system by providing the challenge, the example, and the expertise that can spur these coasting schools to improve.

So over the coming years, I want us all to focus more on coasting, not just failing schools.

And I expect local authorities to know which schools, secondary or primary, are coasting – and to be working with parents, schools and governing bodies to take the action necessary to improve standards.

My challenge to you, as successful leaders of your schools, is to work with us and with those schools in your area that are less strong to help improve the outcomes for all children in your local area.

So that we can build a world class education system for all and not just for some of our young people.

Conclusion

Too often, the debate about schools policy seems to get stuck in a series of false choices:

The false choice between school standards and every child matters.

Between excellence for some and excellence for all.

Between competition and collaboration.

Between choice and intervention.

Between standards and structures.

As the best schools know, tackling barriers to learning is necessary to raising standards - and every child matters means all children achieving more.

Our goal is excellence for all and not just some – as the best schools show us, opportunity for all doesn’t mean the same mediocre schooling for everyone. It means that every child - regardless of where they start - makes excellent progress.

But excellence for all demands competition and collaboration.

This is what the best specialist schools and Academies have been doing in practice for years – striving to be the best, but working with other schools, sponsors and local partners to raise standards for all children.

And to deliver excellence for all we also need choice, contestability and intervention – both are important as part of a coherent strategy to tackle school failure.

Over the past 10 years, you have helped us to transform our schools.

Your leadership has been critical

And it will be in the coming years as we work together to tackle failing and coasting schools. This is where the autonomy that you have, the leadership you bring and your capacity to collaborate and drive improvement can really make a difference. Not just to the children in your schools. But to each and every child in the local area.

That is how we will build on our achievements so far and build the world class education system we all want to see.