Joining Forces to Tackle Obesity, 21-22 January 2002

 

Transcript : The Role of Education

 

Speaker

Tom Jeffery, Director of Pupil Support and Inclusion Group, Department for Education Skills

 

ANDREW HILL: Thank you very much David. Our next speaker is Tom Jeffery. Tom is Director of the Pupil Support and Inclusion Group from the Department of Education and Skills.

 

TOM JEFFERY: Thank you very much indeed for inviting me here today. I quail a little when I hear two such experts deny their expertise. But I shall do so for my part and I think it’s rather more important that I do so.

 

Nonetheless, in what I say, I want to leave you in no doubt that we in education recognise the contribution we must make to tackling health inequalities to tackling obesity. And I want to leave you in no doubt that we recognise that obesity, like many other difficult issues facing public services, does involve working in partnership, through joint action, on the part of the Department for Educational Skills and many others, so that we do focus on the needs of the whole child. We in DFES are committed to raising achievement in education. We are committed also to working with the health service, with colleagues in culture and sport and with the voluntary sector. Because we do know that health and education are indivisible. Without educational achievement, without higher levels of attainment right across the board and without much higher levels of attainment among certain underachieving groups, we won’t see a healthier population in childhood or in adult life. And we are therefore committed to raising achievement for all and to policies which focus further on disadvantaged groups and close achievement gaps. Some of those disadvantages affect really large groups of children: those from poor backgrounds, some ethnic minority children, often the very same groups amongst whom obesity is most prevalent. Other groups are smaller but show very stark underachievement, e.g. children in care. We want to raise achievement for all these children.

 

We share this perspective with colleagues in the Department of Health. We share too a broad understanding of what achievement means. It does mean real gains in achievement in numeracy and literacy, in science and in the basics for learning. But it means too, what in our recent White Paper we called education with character. Schools which develop children’s sense of citizenship, build their emotional confidence and self esteem, provide rich opportunities in culture and sport, which promote children’s health, and which children enjoy and themselves help to shape through their active participation. These are large ambitions and if they are to be realised the quality of schooling is obviously key, the quality of leadership, the highest possible expectations, rigour in teaching and learning. But we do know that schools cannot possibly succeed alone, that they depend upon progress in the early years; the positive involvement of parents and family learning. The support and engagement of communities; a focus on prevention and promotion and the involvement of other statutory and voluntary agencies. And they depend, therefore, on the success of new partnerships, which are developing around the country, which draw together services of all kinds to focus, as I say, on the whole child, and create both better childhoods and better life chances which can, we believe, improve children’s health and the health of the nation in the long term.

 

In what I want to say now, I want to say a word about some of these things. About the early years. About new partnerships. About the work of schools. And some pointers to the future.

First, the early years. There is no doubt about the positive impact of quality pre-school experience. And there is something of a quiet revolution going on in early years at the moment with nursery education available to all four year olds. By 2004 it will be available to all three year olds. There is a common understanding about early education through the foundation stage. We’re developing far more integrated services - take the example of early excellence centres: 49 announced, we will have 100 by 2004. They bring together excellent early learning, high quality child-care, one-stop early intervention for children with special needs, family support and health services. And parents are always fully involved, including often as adult learners. We are creating many more high quality, affordable, accessible child-care places. We are concentrating on disadvantaged areas, particularly through the neighbourhood child-care initiative. We are linking early excellence with our Sure Start programme and I think that Sure Start, with which I guess very many of you are familiar, does begin to deal with some of the themes which previous speakers were mentioning. It focuses on communities and individuals. It does focus on prevention, promotion, certainly on the long term. It does involve parents, the community, adults as well as children and it fundamentally tries to get away from the blame culture. The importance of nourishment for babies and young children is recognised in most Sure Start programmes. There are ‘Get Cooking’ groups, there are community dieticians, there are community cafes, there are local food co-ops. If you take, for example, Sure Start Hastings, where there is a food co-op, they are providing cheap and healthy food for disadvantaged children and their families. It is a huge success since launched by Yvette Cooper and Sophie Griggson. The venue was found, local wholesalers contacted. Parents or families pay £1 to join and they request food and that’s usually fruit and vegetables delivered the next day. There is a newsletter with recipes, food news, updates. Local nurseries receive free fruit and vegetables. Fruit tuck shops in local primary schools allow children to buy fruit at significantly reduced prices. And many, many Sure Start programmes, as well as that emphasis on nutrition, also emphasise physical activities and some of the first practical projects have been playgrounds and outdoor play spaces for under fours.

 

And having established these kinds of services for young children and families, we need to ensure that they are carried forward towards the primary school years. And that’s the importance of the launch following the last spending review of the Children and Young People’s Unit which works right across government to seek to co-ordinate services and which launched last November a major strategy to join up public services for children and young people. The CYPU promotes the Children’s Fund, which is a fund to lever change right across local provision, including provision in the voluntary sector, to promote better outcomes for children, including better health, better sports and physical activity, better emotional well-being, greater parental skills and confidence. It’s worth stressing and reflecting on those powerful messages that David Hall was talking about: all the work of the Children and Young People’s Unit pays huge attention to the much greater involvement of children in the creation of policy and in the development and evaluation of services. And that is something that we have to learn and are trying very hard indeed to learn, right across the government.

 

So some of these developments on which schools depend, wider partnerships for children, greater parental and community engagement, are taking shape. But I’ll turn now to what we are seeking to do through schools.

 

We are securing real gains in achievement, significant gains in primary schools, so far less dramatic in secondary schools. We have a raft of policies in place, which should deliver significant achievement gains over the next two or three years and well beyond.

But I want to stress now some of those things we are doing to promote both achievement and the education with character to which I referred earlier. Take the Healthy Schools Standard, which was introduced in October 1999. It encourages schools to address key themes - healthy eating, physical activity, personal, social and health education, citizenship, drugs alcohol and tobacco, emotional health including the key issue of bullying, safety and sex and relationship education. And it encourages local education authorities and schools to work in effective partnership with health authorities. To date all LEA’s have taken up partnership grants and we’re on track to accredit all the partnerships by this April.

 

As I say, healthy eating is one of the areas covered by the standard and last April, April 2001, we issued new nutritional standards for schools, which were the first for over 20 years. They prescribed the frequency with which food should be available for children to choose. Fruit and vegetables must be available on a daily basis. They’re simple for caterers to implement and for children to understand. They’re complimented by guidance and information about healthy cooking, which have been found to encourage children to make healthier choices. And over the next few months we will be setting in place means of fully evaluating those new nutritional standards.

 

Standards for lunches are not the only key aspect of eating in schools. We are encouraging schools to develop healthy whole school food policies and we are delighted that the national school fruit scheme will be expanded through generous support from the New Opportunities Fund and rolled out significantly by 2004.

So there are developments in nutrition and eating in school. There are significant developments in physical education and in sport. I don’t want to dwell on these at length because Sue will cover them in a moment. But there will be, by 2004, 1000 school sports co-ordinators and the Prime Minister has made a commitment that each child shall have an entitlement of a minimum two hours high quality PE and sport within and beyond the formal curriculum. Sue will be saying something about how we in Education, the Department of Health, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and many other sports organisations are working on the delivery of that entitlement.

Other themes in the healthy school standard include emotional well being, which is something key to children, parents and, of course, teachers. We recognise the need to do much more to promote positive behaviour and emotional well being across schools.

Let me say something about work beyond the school day, because what schools do in their normal school day is, of course, limited. There are significant developments here. I think prime amongst those is study support. The whole range of activities of homework clubs, sports, games, outdoor activities and creative ventures, which can make a huge difference to children’s attainment, but also to their well-being, their attitudes, their attendance and there’s positive research evaluation of study support activities on which we want to build. One interesting example of study support is a program called, ‘Playing for Success’ which puts study support centres in top sports clubs. The evaluation of that program is again very positive in terms of attainment and self-esteem. Many centres have woven health education, diet and exercise into their programmes. There’s Queens Park Rangers Football Club where only fruit is available as snacks for children. Everton where children are devising healthy diets with footballers. Sheffield Sharks basketball where players coach children and share their exercise and diet regimes with them. And, in addition to all that there is, as David Hall mentioned, the really significant growth of breakfast clubs across the country, but particularly in poor areas and with very positive evaluation of their impact on raising attainment levels and improving social skills.

 

Finally, let me look forward and in doing so, return to some of my earlier remarks about the indivisibility of health and education, the importance of schools working with their communities, the importance of parental involvement and family learning. In the White Paper we spoke about what we call extended schools. Schools which open up their facilities and extend the services they offer to the wider community, to raise pupil attainment, to improve health, to provide education with character to make a real contribution to neighbourhood renewal and community regeneration. Take an example of the Millennium Primary School in Greenwich which opened in February last year. It offers a full curriculum, of course, but it offers too full inclusion for children with special educational needs, latest information and communications technology, a health centre, where many of the pupils have a family doctor and works very closely with parents on healthy living, on prevention and promotion. Open 48 weeks of the year with the local community having access to the hall, dance studio, learning facilities, meeting rooms, all weather pitch and an extended day and extended year for children in their early years with purpose designed playrooms and play space, with study support activities and a breakfast club. And we should like to see many more schools take on those integrated services in the way that Millennium Primary has done. Giving both children and parents and others in the local community access in a convenient welcoming environment of the sort of services they want. We promised in the White Paper that we would legislate to make the creation of extended schools easier and the Education Bill currently before Parliament gives Governors legal powers to develop services for pupils, families of pupils, staff and the wider community if they wish to do so. Last month, Ivan Lewis, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, announced the setting up of three demonstration projects on extended schools in Brighton and the Hove, in Cambridgeshire and in Durham, which will evaluate some of these services and promote and disseminate good practice in this field.

 

It’s for schools themselves to decide whether they want to go down this route, working with other local services, including the health service. But it is a route, which is, I think, consistent with the principles I’ve been trying to set out. It promises to raise attainment, focuses on disadvantaged groups and areas, it’s got health promotion built in, it’s got prevention built in, it focuses on the whole child and the whole family. And it’s a theme we want to explore further in future.

 

At the same time, we do need, in education, to work very closely with colleagues in the Department of Health on the development of a National Service Framework for children. We have a key interest in all the main themes of the NSF, in maternity services and infant health through Sure Start, in mental health and emotional well being, in children with disabilities and special educational needs, in health promotion and the healthy child.

So, as I said at the start, we are committed through education to tackling health inequalities, to promoting good health and to promoting better life chances for all children. One of those means, as I have touched on, is more sport and physical activity in and around school and that’s the theme of Sue Campbell’s contribution. Thank you.