Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 12 MARCH 2003
MR DAVID
BELL, MISS
ELIZABETH PASSMORE,
MR MAURICE
SMITH AND
MR DAVID
TAYLOR
Chairman
1. Can I welcome David Bell and his colleagues
to our proceedings this morning and say that this is an occasion
we have been looking forward to, your first annual report. I was
saying in private earlier that it is interesting that you are
now developing more attitude. So, we are beginning to see what
manner of inspector we have before us. We like a bit of attitude,
David, do not worry about that, but not too much!
(Mr Bell) Chairman, as I come up to the
end of my first year in post, I am pleased to have this opportunity
to appear in front of the Committee this morning. I suspect that
much of your questioning will focus on the content of the report
and I would just say again that I think it is a great privilege
and pleasure to be able to report like this because Ofsted does
have the most authoritative overview of the state of education
in the country. I would also say that it embodies that unique
contribution that Ofsted can make speaking as it does independently
on the basis of our evidence. You will know too, Chairman, that
Ofsted has reported separately on many other important issues
over the past 12 months. We have reviewed the impact of the national
literacy and numeracy strategies, we have published an overview
of the inspection of local education authorities, we have reported
on issues such as the early professional development of teachers,
the role of supply teachers, the transition from primary to secondary
education and so on and, last week, we published our report on
the Key Stage 3 strategy and assessment in secondary schools and
I am sure that you will want to follow up much of that today.
It is also worth saying just by way of introduction that the day-to-day
work of Ofsted continues. Around 4,000 schools have been inspected
over the past 12 months. Our important programme of inspecting
post-16 colleges is now into its second year and we started a
new round of teacher education inspections under a new framework.
I would also like to highlight to you our work in Early Years
as we come to the end of the transitional period that has run
since September 2001 when Ofsted took over the responsibility
for the regulation and inspection of childcare. Ofsted was given
the formidable task of inspecting around 100,000 childcare settings
at the same time as it was establishing its own organisation to
do so. I am pleased to say, Chairman, that this task will be completed
by the end of March and I think that such an achievement allows
us to come back to this Committee in due course and report again
on the basis of our evidence and what we found. Mentioning Early
Years allows me also to highlight new developments in this area
of work and others. In terms of Early Years, we will be introducing
quality-based judgments in the next round of our Early Years inspections
and we will also be making our inspection system more proportionate
in that successful settings will be inspected less frequently.
Other major developments for Ofsted include the preparations for
our new framework for inspection which comes in in September 2003
and the work we are doing to ready ourselves for the 14-19 area-wide
inspections, a new responsibility that has been given to us under
the 2002 Education Act. So, Chairman, Ofsted's work is never done!
May I make one final comment. Today represents Elizabeth Passmore's
last appearance in front of you before she retires at the end
of the month. My colleagues and I within Ofsted will be marking
Elizabeth's departure in a number of ways. However, Chairman,
I know that you and your Committee have always welcomed and appreciated
Elizabeth's contribution to your work and I did not want the moment
to pass without drawing her leaving to your attention.
2. Chief Inspector, you have stolen my thunder!
I was going to mention that it is a very sad day to see Elizabeth,
who has given evidence to this Committee on numerous occasions,
even going beyond the pale and following us to Birmingham when
we were there to give evidence. We cannot believe that such a
young woman should be retiring from service at this age and I
know that we will be watching very carefully because I am sure
that she will not be leaving the education sector entirely and
we hope that her very great talents will be used in many other
directions. So, Elizabeth, I hope there is going to be an occasion
when we can thank you in a less formal way. Can we now switch
to really the central role that we have. You report to Parliament
through this Committee and of course as your range of responsibilities
and indeed the number of staff to do it increases, our job in
the scrutiny of Ofsted does become larger as well and of course
we will be meeting on many occasions over the coming year. Your
first annual report is an important occasion. What would you say,
Mr Bell, if we finished this session by saying that, by and large,
we think your performance over the last year has been satisfactory?
(Mr Bell) I would say that it has met the required
standard but I hope that I would also say that I would not be
satisfied to be satisfactory, I would want to be good and I would
want to become excellent in what I did. So, I think to be described
as satisfactory is appropriate if you have met the standard but
I hope that none of us, myself included, would be satisfied with
satisfactory and that we would want to improve in the future.
3. It is a bit of slippery slope, is it not,
Chief Inspector, when a number of people in our country send their
children to schools and are quite pleased when they discover that
they are satisfactory and it gives them a reasonably warm feeling
about their children's future. Then suddenly to put a question
mark over, dare I call it, the gold standard of satisfaction is
a little unnerving for parents and students.
(Mr Bell) Putting it in the context of the annual
report, I highlighted very significant improvements that we have
seen in the quality of teaching over the past ten years. We have
moved from a position in the late 1980s and even early 1990s where
we had a high percentage of teaching that was unsatisfactory or
poor. As I point out in the report, we now have just under 70%
of the teaching observed during inspection that is good or better
and that is a very real achievement on the part of teachers. I
pose the question however, is satisfactory good enough because
I would pose that in the context of the very real challenges that
I think my report highlights are still there for the education
system. I can also report more anecdotally in that, when you go
to schools—and I am sure this will be the case for members
of the Committee—and talk to teachers, they will often say
to you that to be a satisfactory teacher is fine, but it is not
going to be good enough in this setting. We actually really have
to raise our game to improve what we are doing given the challenges
that face us in the classroom. So, I think it was a chance in
my report to recognise the achievements of teachers and improving
their performance and, in some ways, pose the question, what next?
Where do we go next with the quality of teachers and the quality
of education in our schools?
4. My colleagues will come back to that. How
satisfactory is your relationship with the Department for Education
and Skills at the moment?
(Mr Bell) I think it is more than satisfactory, Chairman.
I think I have a good relationship and I think it is a proper
relationship in that the Department welcomes and continues to
value the advice that Ofsted gives because, as I said in my opening
remarks, we have the perspective of being able to talk from the
evidence. We can cite so many different examples of where our
evidence has been presented to the Department and welcomed. There
are times, of course, when what Ofsted says is not always comfortable
for the Department and I think it is important that Ofsted continues
to speak without fear or favour and is able to say what it finds
on the basis of evidence. I would say as well that the relationship
is such that the Department is even more keen to ensure that all
of our evidence is available to them in all sorts of ways. So,
I am satisfied with that relationship. I think it is a good one
and I also think it is a proper relationship and that is the way
it should be.
5. Does it not worry you that there is such
a high turnover of ministers? One moment you are dealing with
the Schools Minister and the next minute he or she has disappeared
down the road. It seems that the only constant in your life is
the Select Committee!
(Mr Bell) It is always good to have things you can
rely on!
6. Does it give you an easy ride if ministers
move too quickly?
(Mr Bell) No. In fact, you could perhaps argue the
opposite because you then have to brief new ministers, which is
entirely appropriate, and they will ask important and searching
questions about the work of Ofsted. We have to accommodate ourselves
to the political process. We have to recognise that that is the
nature of change within government departments. I can only comment
on the last 12 months and I have not found it personally unsettling
to deal with new ministers and I think I can say with some confidence
that it has not affected the relationship that Ofsted staff have
with officials or even ministers at the Department. It is a fact
of life and we have to deal with it.
7. But it is a worry in the educational system
when not only do you have a high turnover of ministers and, in
the relatively short time that I have chaired this Committee,
all the ministers have changed apart from Margaret Hodge who has
moved from Early Years to Higher Education, but there is a very
high turnover of senior civil servants through the Department.
Is that not a destabilising influence on our education system?
(Mr Bell) I cannot say that I have seen the evidence
to suggest that that does destabilise the education system. I
think there are times of course when Ofsted officials have to
then brief new officials at the DfES end but, as I say, that is
just a fact of life and you have to accommodate yourselves to
it. The value of Ofsted's role, when you are talking about change
and turbulence and so on, is that it continues to do what it has
always done and that is to report on the basis of evidence. I
think if you are seeing different people, you might argue that
that is a little unsettling, but I do not really think that it
could be argued that it would destabilise the relationship. I
can only speak as I find.
8. What I am trying to get at, Chief Inspector,
is that you have a great deal of experience and you have an enormous
staff—you have half the size of the whole department—and
you are increasingly going to have experience under your belt
and sometimes, with all the abilities you have of evaluating schools
and evaluation education authorities, it is quite useful to say
how you evaluate the quality of the Department.
(Mr Bell) That is not for me to do, Chairman. I have
been given very specific responsibilities by Parliament to inspect
and regulate and I think that is more than enough for us to be
getting on with. You commented on the number of staff that we
have and it is true that our staff numbers have grown considerably,
but of course that is almost entirely due to the advent of our
responsibilities in Early Years because we took over 1,500 staff
and had to appoint other staff to carry out our Early Years functions.
The size of Ofsted's staffing in its other responsibilities has
remained largely constant over the two years.
Chairman: Chief Inspector, thank you
for those opening answers to my opening questions.
Ms Munn
9. Returning to the "satisfactory"
issue, one of Ofsted's roles is as guarantor of public accountability.
(Mr Bell) Yes.
10. Looking at this whole issue of judgments
that are made by inspectors when they are going into schools,
one of the roles is that it comes back up, it is all put in the
pot and we look at what schools overall are doing, but individual
inspectors going into schools are perhaps much more conscious
of the other audiences for their report, namely the teachers themselves,
the parents and the governors, and they are working very much
within a context. Are you confident that all of the judgments
are being made in a similar way within schools in order to be
able to make the kind of comments you have made?
(Mr Bell) Chairman, would you mind if, when answering
Ms Munn's question, I draw in my colleagues?
Chairman
11. We would love to hear them. We would hate
to think that they turned up here and did not sing for their supper!
(Mr Bell) Chairman, I would hate to think
that they turned up and were silent! It is an important point
but of course one of the virtues of the inspection system is that
inspectors work to a framework. That is a framework that is publically
available; the inspectors know what they are inspecting against
and of course those that are being inspected understand that.
So, I think it is important that that is there and that it is
understood. Ofsted does pay a lot of attention to the extent to
which it quality controls its processes and of course that is
quite a challenge for Ofsted given that we have thousands of folks
who are working for us via the section 10 inspection system, but
it is something that we take very seriously and perhaps I might
ask Elizabeth to comment on some of the particular processes we
undertake to carry out that role.
(Miss Passmore) The process has been monitored throughout
the time that we have had the section 10 inspections. We sample
to get a picture across all of them and we also focus quite a
lot of our attention on those inspectors where we have reason
to want to check whether the work they are doing is of the right
quality and quite a number of inspectors indeed have been deregistered
over the years when they have failed to improve, having been given
the chance to do so. We have a requirement for training every
year and the process that we are going through at the moment with
the new framework for September is that there will be a new set
of handbooks for primary, second and special schools inspectors,
and those have criteria against each judgment that has to be made
in order that inspectors and the schools—and anybody else
who reads the handbook—can see what is being assessed. We
are making it a requirement of continued registration for this
September that every one of our inspectors, including lay inspectors,
will undergo a further period of training between June and August
of this year. So, of course, with the number that we have, there
are people who from time to time do not do the job as well as
they should do. We follow that up, provided schools and others
let us know, and we also do everything we can to train them better
for next time around.
Ms Munn
12. I suppose the kind of thing I am trying
to get at—and it goes very much to the point that David
Bell made earlier—is that you could have a teacher teaching
in a classroom with a group of rowdy kids and some kids who have
special needs and difficulties in concentrating and you could
have a teacher in an independent school with a much smaller class
and the teaching is satisfactory in both those circumstances but,
because it is only satisfactory in the class where there are the
rowdy kids, nothing gets done and the kids do not learn anything.
Are they both coming out with satisfactory as a judgment on that?
(Miss Passmore) We have a range of things
that we ask inspectors to look at to take account of the context
in which teachers are working and we do look at not just whether
the class is being controlled of course but the challenge of the
work that is being provided, whether it is appropriate for the
pupils within that class, the extent to which there are high aspirations
for those pupils and so on. So, it is not a single criterion about
"is this okay or not?", we do ask inspectors to look
more closely than that and we do accept that there are some circumstances
where it is much harder to take the youngsters forward than it
is in others.
13. Do you feel that there is a danger to some
extent perhaps within a school where inspectors are seeing a number
of lessons that what they are doing is saying, "That is excellent,
that is good and, oops, that is only satisfactory"? It helps
the school to know where they need to concentrate their efforts
but that they are being influenced . . . I accept that you have
your criteria and everything but these are human beings who are
going in to carry out the inspections and not machines. Are they
not going to be influenced to some extent by the context of what
else is going on within the school?
(Miss Passmore) Inevitably there may be some influence
but we keep saying, and, as inspectors, we keep saying to ourselves,
"Have we reported accurately and fairly on what we have seen?"
and it is a danger sometimes, if you have seen a lot of work of
high quality and you see something that is not quite so good,
but then you have to stop and say, "How does it compare with
the criteria?" and that should bring us back to making the
right judgments.
14. Obviously these are judgments and they are
comparisons both within schools but there will be comparisons
over time as well. One of the problems about raising the issue
about, is the right way of judging it is, if you move it, then
you change the criteria and you have the problem of, are we judging
on the same basis? Are you confident that, over a period of time,
these judgments have been held steady and that we are getting
the accurate view from David Bell that things are getting better
rather than judgments moving?
(Miss Passmore) We very much feel that that is the
case. We do look carefully at what we have said before. As for
what will happen from September 2003 onwards, obviously that will
not feed through for some while but, with the improvements that
we have seen, we know that when the inspectors are there, we do
feel confident that the improvements that they see are real.
Paul Holmes
15. Coming back on this theme of the use of
the word "satisfactory", it really does seem, certainly
to a lot of teachers, that it is an incredibly perverse use of
the language to say to a teacher, "We have inspected you,
you are satisfactory, you are doing the job you are paid for,
you are competent and we can find nothing wrong with what you
have done, but that is unsatisfactory and we are going to come
back and inspect you again as a result."
(Mr Bell) I have certainly not said that.
I deliberately, in my commentary to the annual report, posed the
question, is satisfactory good enough? Again, I would want to
put that in the context of where we have come from. We have come
from a position where there was 25-30% of teaching that was unsatisfactory
or poor to a situation now where we have just under 70% that is
good or better. So, we have moved an awful long way. I think it
is an entirely reasonable question to ask, what do we need to
do next to take forward educational improvements? I also pointed
out in my commentary that there are some very real pressures that
face the education system. Some of the difficulties we have identified
to do with some students in some schools that find it difficult
to raise attainment. Those are very real questions. I think we
have made very significant improvements over the past 10 years
and it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable to ask question,
what do we have to do next if we are going to meet the next set
of challenges? That is the reason for posing the question, is
satisfactory good enough? When I have spoken to teachers and head
teachers up and down the country, I think they have taken it in
that spirit. They have taken it as a real question about what
has to be done next.
16. I know I am a little typecast in this but,
three years ago when I was still teaching, the school I worked
at was inspected and the lead inspectors came in before the inspection
and chatted to us and said, "If your classed as satisfactory,
that is fine, you are doing your job, no problem." When the
report came out it was that far too much of the teaching in the
school was only satisfactory, that it was not good enough and
that the school would have to be re-inspected. The teachers I
worked with did not say, "That's a fair assessment."
They were outraged; they were absolutely appalled. One of them,
who was one of the finest teachers I ever worked with, had a nervous
breakdown and left teaching permanently as a result. It does seem
very perverse to say, "You are doing your job fine, we cannot
find fault, but we are going to re-inspect because you are only
satisfactory."
(Mr Bell) I obviously will not and should not comment
on any individual inspection, but if you look at the national
evidence that we cited in the annual report, we are finding the
quality of teaching to be good in those two-thirds-plus of cases.
So, the picture generally is one of a system where the teaching
has improved significantly. However, none of us can sit here and
say that we are absolutely satisfied with everything in the education
system. There are some really big problems left for us to tackle
and it seems to me entirely appropriate in my position, perhaps
coming back to the Chairman's opening remarks, to raise those
questions like, where do we go next? What do we have to do next
to improve attainment and to improve teaching? Can I now ask David
to comment.
(Mr Taylor) It was really just to pick up Paul Holmes's
comment about re-inspection and the point, which is really a very
obvious one, that, if all the work were satisfactory or better,
then schools or colleges will not be subject to re-inspection
because the purpose of re-inspection is to deal with that which
is unsatisfactory. So, it is important to realise that we have
criteria which generate re-inspection which are all to do with
work that was below what David correctly described as the acceptable
threshold of satisfaction and I would just want to add—and
I do not know if directors are allowed to have attitude as well
as chief inspectors—that my attitude to you would have been
to turn the tables on you and ask you, if you had been told that
the work of the Select Committee for Education and Skills was
only satisfactory, would you be satisfied?
17. That is, in a sense, what I was going to
go on to ask. Are we then saying that in future in teacher training
courses and in teacher job interviews and in every other walk
of life, that is lawyers, policemen and McDonalds workers or whatever,
we are now going to be saying to people, "If you do your
job well/satisfactorily and there is nothing wrong with what you
do, that is not enough"? Satisfactory is now unsatisfactory.
(Mr Taylor) Could I just elaborate the point behind
my question which was obviously that satisfactory is the fourth
grade on a seven point scale. If there were no distinction between
a Grade 1 and a Grade 4, then obviously it would entirely inappropriate
for us to suggest that people could do better. The Chairman introduced
the concept of the gold standard and a gold standard in the Olympic
games is given to the person who comes first, the Grade 1. That
is our gold standard. The person who comes fourth in the Olympic
games does not even get a medal. So, plainly there is room to
do better and it seems to me actually that it is logically entirely
clear that satisfactory is not good because good is the third
point of that same scale. So, all we are talking about is raising
aspirations and expectations. This is not to punish teachers.
It is not to say that a school that has satisfactory teaching
throughout deserves to be punished, re-inspected or in any other
way told it is not doing a competent job, but it is to raise sights
and to raise expectations. Just as you would not be happy to be
Graded 4 on seven point scale because you would want to do better,
we hope all schools and colleges will feel exactly the same.
18. So effectively you are saying that, in all
walks of life from now, everybody has to become an Olympic gold
medal winner rather than just doing the job well.
(Mr Bell) May I come in on that as well because I
think it is a fact of our lives whether it is the services we
use or what we purchase. Our expectations are greater and greater
than they have ever been and so they should be greater. We are
not arguing that satisfactory then somehow becomes unsatisfactory.
We are not arguing that. We are raising the question about heightening
their aspirations for the education system and for those who work
in the education system and that seems to be entirely reasonable.
It is entirely reasonable to raise that question. We all want
to do better not just for the children who are in the system now
but for those who are coming into the system in the future.
19. With respect, there does seem to be a contradiction
in what you are saying because if satisfactory at number four
on a seven point scale is now unsatisfactory, why not change the
name and change the label and move satisfactory up to point three.
It just seems so perverse to say it is satisfactory but we are
not going to accept that because it is not good enough.
(Mr Bell) I think we have to be very clear about.
I am not saying that satisfactory becomes unsatisfactory. What
we have said is that we have seen very significant improvements
in the education system and that those which are satisfactory
will I am sure want to become better. That is the challenge. How
can we make the satisfactory teacher in our schools which, as
we have said, has met the acceptable threshold, good or better?
That seems to be a very sensible question to ask.
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