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Report on Meetings held during the Autumn Term 2000

4th December: KS3 Consultation meeting at QCA

The meeting opened with Cathy August outlining the work being done in pilot schools in a number of areas. The thrust of her presentation was the need to continue the best practice of the primary sector into KS3. She used the phrase "putting the child at the centre of the education process". Only two middle schools are being used in the pilot scheme, Staffordshire schools that Cathy could not name.

After Cathy's presentation an adviser from Essex told us about their experiences with their schools and their attempts to develop the literacy and numeracy programmes in their secondary schools. We then broke into discussion groups.

It quickly became clear that the secondary sector was attempting to re-invent the middle school wheel. The idea that departments in secondary schools should speak to each other about matters of common interest seemed quite novel to some members of my group. My radical suggestion that science and/or maths departments might put up word lists to help the least able improve their vocabulary was regarded as a positive initiative.

At the plenary session after lunch many questions were raised which have already been answered by our middle schools. When I pointed out that Cathy had unintentionally quoted the Plowden Report of 1967, she smiled and pointed out that she was too young to remember such things, but she felt that the government was quite serious about putting resources into KS3 and therefore we were likely to see this attempt to put children at the centre of teaching and learning, achieve some success. I went home with a spring in my step!

NB. Since this meeting Anita Straker, as you may be aware now heads up the KS3 strategy. We are urgently seeking a meeting with her.

11th December: Meeting with Peter Jackson at QCA

Peter was very welcoming and clearly interested in what we had to say. (He is chair of governors at a Northampton middle school). It is clear that QCA are trying to analyse the data that is slowing coming on line from the results of those pupils who took the first KS1 and KS2 tests. Our inability to deliver the results we had hoped to provide last year was accepted, but he believed it should be possible to do an analysis of results for those pupils who had now done KS2 and KS3 tests. Our argument that we may not be strong at KS2 because of the breadth of our curriculum but would to be equal to, or better than, our competitors at |KS3 was accepted subject to the proof of the analysis of this year's results. We discussed various ways of getting accurate data and because middle schools and upper schools are not identifiable as a discrete group in the QCA data it was agreed that years of entry to a school would be as close as we could come nationally. The meeting ended with Peter agreeing to let us know what his early findings were like as soon as the figures were available in the New Year.

As a result of the meeting we are attempting to put the KS2 results of all middle schools on a spreadsheet covering the years from 1996 onwards. These results will then be easy to analyse under a number of different headings. It is hoped to complete this work by our January meeting.

11th December: Meeting with Ralph Taberer at TTA

Ralph was very upbeat about teacher recruitment numbers this year. He expressed some concern about the overcrowded curriculum for trainee teachers and indicated that review was about to begin.

He was pleased at the success of the KS2/3 courses being offered nationally and indicated that they were likely to continue. He suggested that we made our feelings known during the consultation process and he agreed to add our name to the list of organisations invited to submit recommendations.

The role of the new leadership college headed by Heather DuQuesnay was discussed and Ralph suggested that we might benefit from establishing links with Heather and the college. This will be discussed at our January meeting.

We left the meeting feeling that it had been worthwhile and with a renewed hope that Ralph Taberer would be able to speak at the Poole conference in September.

12th December: Meeting with David Howarth of Ofsted

The meeting with David Howarth was very positive. We covered three main areas - Ofsted data, School self-evaluation and Inspection issues.

David agreed that data on middle school inspections was improving and being updated as inspections took place. New data would be available after the annual report on the 6th February. He will be happy to make it available to after that date.

He believed it possible that the school inspection system would change to one of self-evaluation in the not too distant future. The form of self-evaluation would be clearly structured and would form the background to both LEA and Ofsted inspections. Schools with weaknesses would continue to be inspected until they were deemed to be at an acceptable standard. We detected a different ethos in Ofsted during our meeting.

The issue of the membership of Ofsted teams inspecting middle school was raised and received a sympathetic hearing from David. He agreed to remind contractors about their obligation to include people with relevant experience in the next edition of their newsletter. He understood the reluctance of middle school heads to complain about the composition of inspection teams but asked us to seek reports from members of when teams did not include members with middle school experience. We will discuss this issue in January and make recommendations to members about the best way of tackling this problem after the meeting.

We concluded the meeting with David by discussing the possibility of transferring data between Ofsted, QCA and ourselves to ensure that we continue to work together with accurate information and thereby improve the quality of the education we offer as successfully as possible. Reference was made to the Good Practice website which lists schools with areas graded 1 and 2.