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Valerie Davey (Bristol, West): Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. Before the hon. Lady intervenes, may I say that the report is about the work of Ofsted? I would not want the right hon. and learned Gentleman to dwell on the position of former grant-maintained schools in Lincolnshire. That is not relevant to the report before us.
Mr. Hogg: May I try to address the anxiety which I anticipated would be in your mind, Mr. Deputy Speaker? My purpose, obviously, is to highlight the problems of the former grant-maintained schools in Lincolnshire, because they are suffering from a deficit that is the direct and intended consequence of Government policy. [Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. All Members of Parliament have problems relating to their constituencies and their communities. Hon. Members know as well as I do that there are many avenues through which to highlight those problems, such as Adjournment debates and perhaps other education debates. However, in this debate the right hon. and learned Gentleman must stick to the terms of the report.
Mr. Hogg: I accept the rebuke, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am trying briefly to highlight the point, but to stay in order. You have kindly reminded us that there are many ways in which the point can be highlighted. May I suggest to you that this may be one such, because it is part of the function of the inspectorate to look into schools? I suggest to the House, through you, that there is a particular problem with former grant-maintained schools, which the inspectorate ought to address.
The estimates give to the inspectorate £59.5 million, so it should have ample opportunity to look into those specific problems. To enable the inspectorate more fully
and effectively to confront that task, I suggest that it would be in order for me briefly to identify the problem. I think that that is in order.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
The right hon. and learned Gentleman should not dwell on the matter. If he wants to mention in passing the problems that might arise and which the inspectorate should examine, that is fine, but I am trying to say as bluntly as I can that he should not make a meal of it.
Mr. Hogg:
You have put your ruling graciously, Mr. Deputy Speaker. That being so, I shall respond in precisely the way that you suggest--not by making a meal of it, but in broad terms. As you see, I have put aside my notes.
In broad terms, the problem confronting all grant-maintained schools is that in providing funding in the current year, the Government have ensured that the funding of former grant-maintained schools is being frozen at the cash level in 1998-99. That is resulted in Lincolnshire and no doubt in many other places--
Mr. Bob Blizzard (Waveney):
What about Suffolk?
Mr. Hogg:
The same may well be true of Suffolk. The Government's policy has resulted in redundancies--
Valerie Davey:
Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. The right hon. and learned Gentleman has made his point. He has put the matter on record. He should leave it at that and concentrate on the report before us.
Mr. Hogg:
You have put the ruling very clearly, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Therefore I shall not go on challenging it. I have identified a serious problem with regard to former grant-maintained schools. The problem may well occur in Suffolk; it certainly occurs in Lincolnshire.
Miss Melanie Johnson (Welwyn Hatfield):
I am minded to follow the remarks of the right hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) by referring to "Inspection '98: the Supplement to the Inspection Handbooks Containing New Requirements and Guidance". The annexe, which is headed "Seriously Misleading Reports", states:
I have many interests to declare. I am still accredited to work as an Ofsted team inspector, which is my former occupation, and I declare that interest in case hon.
Members believe it to be significant to the debate. I have further interests: my three children are in the schools system and my constituency is full of children. All of us in the Chamber have tremendous interest in that aspect of our provision.
I shall make a number of comments on the report, and I begin with a few on the efficiency of the system. I was a member of a county curriculum committee some years ago, when Her Majesty's inspectorate was responsible for reporting on schools. It is worth recalling that its reports often arrived with county councils and local education authorities as many as 12 months after the inspection. Although we are considering extending by a week or so the time that the inspector has to complete the report, one of the triumphs of the present system is they are completed to a tight schedule. As a result, there is a tremendously fast turnaround for schools.
I believe, as the report suggests, that it is better for schools to have less notice that the inspectors are going in. I have been on the opposite end of the process from the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis)--he was on the receiving end--and I agree with the report's comments about the anticipatory dread experienced by many schools as a result of the long lead-in times. It is better that they have less time to worry about the imminent visit of the inspectors, not least because less paperwork will be produced in some cases.
The report comments wisely that often too much paperwork is produced for inspectors. I remember inspecting a school at which 42 box files of paper were presented to us; the experience was similar to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Mr. Wicks), of the man with the van who had to collect the paperwork. Those masses of paper are often the result of nothing but panic in the school management team about the arrival of Ofsted. That does not help the team, the school, the staff or the system. I commend the suggestion that we give schools as little notice as is practicable for all sides.
On the question of the quality of the teams, there is always a danger with the present system--indeed, with any system--that the bad or the cynical will paint a picture of the system for everybody else. There has been too much of that in the present circumstances. Section 3.1 of the inspection framework for schools requires that the inspection reflects the nature of the school, which is important. It is important to remember that a report is a snapshot of a school during the inspection and inspectors in good teams always take into account the nature of the children, the school's circumstances and its recent history.
Although I have not checked this out recently, when I last spoke to colleagues I gathered that team members are no longer named on bids for Ofsted contracts. I am a little concerned about that. At one time, it was standard for Ofsted to require the team to be named on the bid for a school. In the light of the Select Committee's remark that it would be highly desirable to achieve a better match between experience and the school and to ensure that the quality of the team is good, it would be excellent if team members could be put forward as part of the contracting process in more cases, or at least in sensitive ones. The schools are not known by the contractors, which makes the process of contracting blind on both sides, and, although that situation will end in August, that does not help in respect of quality.
As different parties remarked in evidence to the Select Committee, larger contractors are not necessarily synonymous with higher quality. A message was left on my home answering machine only a few weeks ago by someone I had never heard of informing me that an inspection was taking place near my home and asking whether I would like to do it. I am obviously still on the list of inspectors and that person did not know that I was otherwise engaged in other places. Some of the smaller teams work closely together, and their members are used to doing that, so the problem of car park syndrome--teams were thought to have met in the car park--can be avoided. That was not my experience of working, and I played a part in inspecting about 50 schools in the four years before I was elected to the House.
Paragraph 69 discusses pre-Ofsted inspection and consultancies. It is worth remarking in this context that that highlights the need for the Government's proposals on appraisal and re-emphasises the importance of head teachers and leadership in schools. As we all know from our experience, a surprisingly large number of schools are going for pre-Ofsted consultancies. Making sure that the school is performing as it should be in the normal course of events, monitoring its work, reviewing its activities and appraising the performance of the staff and of the school as an organisation should be part of the normal work of managing the school and a normal activity for head teachers, heads of department and other senior managers in the school.
Quality depends in large part on the quality of the registered inspector. In this context, it is relevant to consider some of the financial issues on which the Select Committee took evidence. In my experience, a large number of such people have retired early. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington, North (Helen Jones) commented on age, to the discomfort of our Whip, but I should point out that some such people have retired only recently and may be younger than some of those still working in the service. A tranche of people retired early at about the time at which Ofsted was established and they are probably reaching the age at which they will retire from the system once and for all. As a result, a large number of people will leave the system in the not-too-distant future. Most inspectors work part-time. The occupation is not full-time and the financial aspects of the system require them to be dedicated to other things. People cannot work part-time--in part, that was my situation--or they have to have a pension or money coming in from elsewhere.
Although the quality of the registered inspector is important, there is a lot to be said about the quality of team members. As a number of hon. Members have commented, it would be highly desirable for serving heads, deputies and, possibly, even teachers to be on inspection teams, although that would have resource implications. For example, I served on a number of inspection teams with the head teacher of a special school. He was an invaluable member of those teams, but, because of the nature of the inspection process, he had to leave his own school for a week during the inspection and for a period either side of it. Schools have to be able to cope with such absence, which ought to be the case, and cover arrangements would have to be made. Those who currently serve in our schools are unable to be greatly involved in inspections, and they would have to be trained, but trying to increase participation in such positions would be worth while.
I have already mentioned the need to match the team to the school and we could be doing more on that. I do not think that shadowing is viable because it puts people in a difficult position. I have been a school governor for many years and, if I were invited to shadow the members of an inspection team, things would be difficult for them and difficult for me.
Paragraph 126 of the report showed that there was a reassuringly high correlation in the judgments made by inspectors on the same lesson. People have commented about the nature of inspectors' judgments and the discrepancies between local education authorities' inspections and the inspection reports that have been issued. Sometimes, the reports by Ofsted inspectors have been better than those by LEA inspectors, and sometimes the converse. It is important to recognise, however, that judgment is not a science but an art. People who are in a position to judge the performance of others bring only their own ability to look at them in that context and to make a human decision about how well they are doing. It will never be an exact science.
It is important to consider the issue of special schools. Inspecting a special school is very different from inspecting a primary or secondary school. Too much is made of whether special schools should be inspected, but such inspections are almost inevitable. The framework for them is now different: for the first two years, there was a common framework, but that was subsequently split into three separate sections--secondary, primary and special. Thus, to some degree, the framework has already been tailored and, more recently, moves have been made to ensure that it is more tailored. The advice given to inspectors reflects that.
Inspections place enormous pressure on small primary schools where it is difficult for the inspection team not to be a heavyweight presence. While it is there, it probably has to inspect most of the classes most of the time, whereas in a large secondary school many teachers are often not seen by team members. It is therefore important to look at how inspections work, particularly with small primary schools.
Two of the points made in the report are about the inspection of only parts of lessons. That occurs for a variety of practical reasons, not least because timetabling sometimes results in very long lessons. Another reason is that inspectors of particular subjects must see a mix of the year group, the teachers and the subjects within a particular department, such as modern languages, where more than one subject is taught. It is important to be aware that the only constraint on inspectors staying longer in a lesson is that of resources--the number of hours allocated to a team to cover a school inspection. Paragraph 92 on feedback also has resource implications as it relates to inspectors going straight into lessons. If one is following up in one lesson, one obviously cannot be there at the start of the next. Those two points need to be brought together.
Paragraph 90 deals with the grading of lessons and points out that it is not teachers who are being graded. It is important to realise that, in the original system, Ofsted inspectors graded not teachers but lessons. I am slightly uncomfortable about how, subsequently, teachers became the subject of grading. That was not necessarily constructive and did not help to reinforce the fact that the school and the teaching, rather than individual members of staff, were being inspected.
On accountability, I believe that the annual report that we are debating would be a constructive move. It would allow more public discussion of the report itself and would highlight the information in the report, which sometimes receives scant and, as others have said, fairly skewed coverage for a variety of reasons. We must be careful about how the information is presented. Last week's report on improvements in primary standards as a result of the national literacy and numeracy hours shows that we can either present the results nicely and say that four out of five lessons were satisfactory or better, or we can say that only one in five lessons was unsatisfactory. It is question of presentation, and we need to get that right.
Ofsted has done much that is good. Hon. Members might expect me to say that, but neither the local education authority inspectorates nor HMI ever had the same collection of evidence from across the entire education system as Ofsted now has. Last week's primary report is based on 1.25 million lessons, which is a phenomenal evidence base. Although it is better to target resources as we propose, because we have completed a full cycle in all cases, the collection of a large amount of evidence in the first place shows the vital role that Ofsted has played.
"Procedures are established for dealing with reports which are judged to be seriously misleading."
I introduce that reference to the debate so that hon. Members can reflect on it in the present context.
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