Oral evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Wednesday 5 November 2003

Members present:

Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Paul Holmes
Helen Jones
Mr Kerry Pollard
Jonathan Shaw
Mr Andrew Turner

 

In the absence of the Chairman, Valerie Davey was called to the Chair

__________

Witnesses: MR DAVID BELL, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, MR DAVID TAYLOR, Director of Inspection, MR ROBERT GREEN, Strategy and Resources Directorate, and MR MAURICE SMITH, Early Years Directorate, Ofsted, examined.

 

Q1  Valerie Davey: Good morning and we welcome you all, especially David Bell and the Ofsted team. The reason I am chairing today is that Barry Sheerman extends his apologies. He is actually in India, so it is not an easy journey! We welcome David Bell, David Taylor, Robert Green and Maurice Smith who I think has been confirmed in his post for Early Years, so congratulations and welcome. Before we move on to the business of today which is to further scrutinise the work of Ofsted, I am sure that all of us were deeply shocked last night by the death of a teenager in a school corridor. I think that we should all pause and remember this morning that Luke Walmsley has lost his life and although, at this stage, we can do no more than extend our sympathy to his family and to the whole school community there, I am sure that at a later stage there will be an opportunity to reflect on whether there is anything further that we could do. At this stage, I am sure we would all want to register our sympathy to the family and to the community. Moving on, the Ofsted empire has grown, certainly almost since last time we saw you, I think. More and more areas of work are being incorporated and I think our concern as a committee is whether they have actually been integrated or whether they have been tacked on, whether we are now getting value for a larger amount of money which taxpayers are putting into Ofsted or not and I want to start by reflecting that, for all public services and for all examining and inspection bodies, the Prime Minister's Office of the Public Service Reform has specifically questioned such bodies and is asking (a) that you do have regard for value for money when you make your inspections but also on your own account and I would like to ask therefore how you are monitoring value for money in Ofsted and in what way you are doing it.

Mr Bell: Just before I come to that direct question, just picking up your point about the expansion of Ofsted's work, I presume that you are referring to the new responsibilities that are likely to come our way under Every Child Matters and I would be more than happy to take some questions on that later on. On the issue of value for money, it is an issue that Ofsted takes very seriously. We are currently engaged in a piece of work internally looking at the impact of Ofsted, looking at the extent to which we provide value for money, the extent to which our information is utilised by the public and the extent to which our findings are helpful to the education system and the care system in this country. We are very mindful of the wider cross-governmental review of inspection and we are participating in that work, but we are certainly not at all complacent about what we have to do. I think I would just make one other observation and that is of course that Parliament itself has determined that Ofsted has to take on new responsibilities. For example, people often comment about the rapid growth in the size of Ofsted. That was largely attributable to the impact of the Care Standards Act which transferred over to Ofsted the responsibility for the inspection and regulation of childcare and it would seem to me, if one takes that as an example, that we now have for the first time in this country a national overview of childcare which we have never had previously. So, yes, we took on the responsibilities that Parliament gave us and I think that in that example and many others we can demonstrate that we are doing what Parliament wants us to do and I hope keeping our work under scrutiny.

 

Q2  Valerie Davey: What evidence will you be able to give this Committee and the wider public that you are doing that?

Mr Bell: That is one of the questions that we are addressing. What would constitute evidence that would count for value for money? We are looking at perceptions of inspection: what does it look like on the part of those who are on the receiving end of inspection? That is something we have done from the beginning and we have some evidence and we continue to have evidence from those who are inspected and, broadly speaking, if one takes school inspections, over 90 per cent of those who are questioned after inspection say that they have found the inspection process to be useful and helpful. That is not something that we engineer. All we do is send the questionnaire out. We ask the head teacher and a randomly selected member of staff to comment. So, we want the perceptions of those who are on the receiving end of inspection. I think it is also important to try to gather perceptions from those who use the information from inspection. If one takes school inspection, one would immediately say parents and we do know anecdotally - and we want to try to get more systematic evidence of this - that parents do value Ofsted inspection reports and consult Ofsted inspection reports at different times. I think it is important too that our work is seen to inform policy. I can cite a number of examples where Ofsted inspection reports have been important in helping to shape government policy and the way in which things should be done. For example, this morning, we have just published our report about the teaching of primary French in initial teacher training. That makes a number of recommendations which we would put to the DfES and also to the Teacher Training Agency and that is one of many, many examples where we can show that we are influencing government policy. I think we have to accept in the end that there will always be a degree of debate about the value for money that you get from inspection and regulation. It does seem to me that Parliament and successive governments have seen inspection and regulation as an important part of the monitoring of public services and their improving effectiveness and that is not in any sense to be complacent about our work, but I think that, in the end, there are some choices that have to be made about inspection and regulation and whether or not it is a good thing.

 

Q3  Valerie Davey: Most of us, and parents as well, would want to know that you are actually improving the service delivery.

Mr Bell: That is an interesting point because Ofsted would say that the key responsibility for improving the service offered, whether it is in a school, in a college or wherever, rests with those who work in that school or college. What Ofsted inspection does first of all is to give evidence of the quality in that institution and then, on the basis of what it is found, to identify some issues - we call them key issues, as you know, in our school inspection reports. I think it is important that we have that responsibility of reporting frankly and fearlessly, identifying those things that need to be done but properly leaving the task of improvement in the hands of those who are in institutions. People often ask, "How can you demonstrate that the inspection element has added value to the improvement of an institution?" It is very difficult to disentangle the inspection effect. I think it is very difficult to say, "This school has improved in this way and that bit of the improvement is attributable to inspection and that bit is attributable to a national policy and that bit is attributable to the staff" and so on. It is quite difficult to disentangle, but one of the things that we do look at in school inspection is the improvement between first and second inspection and I reported on that in my annual report this year. We have found - and now that we have just about completed the inspection of every school in England twice - that, in just over 90 per cent of schools inspected, there has been at least satisfactory improvement since the previous inspection. I do not say that that is all because of Ofsted or that is all because of inspection, but I do think that we are one of a whole variety of measures and approaches that help schools and other institutions to improve.

 

Q4  Valerie Davey: Given your answer, I think you can understand why the debate will continue.

Mr Bell: I think it is an important debate and I think it is very important that any inspectorate or regulator keeps its own work under review. After all, we look at institutions and make a judgment about the value for money that they offer. It seems to me entirely appropriate that the same questions are put to us in the work that we do.

Valerie Davey: Good. We accept that.

 

Q5  Mr Pollard: How do you interpret the findings of the research from Newcastle University that inspection has had a negative impact on GCSE attainment in many schools?

Mr Bell: In a funny sort of way perhaps, it reinforces the point I have just made about disentangling the different effects and impacts. The thing to say about the Newcastle research was that it was based on the aftermath GCSE findings in the early stages of inspection and I think, in that respect, it is quite out of date and it is a point that we made publicly at the time. We are not complacent again about that and I think it is fair to say that, in those early days of inspection, in the early 1990s, everyone was getting used to the impact of inspection and of course, in those days, the schools themselves and perhaps inspectors wanted to put a lot of effort into the preparation and the documentation that had to be prepared, all the materials that had to be prepared, and I think that may have dissipated energy in a way that was not particularly helpful. Of course now - and this is a point which the Committee has made previously - we are very keen to ensure and we state publicly that we do not want schools and other institutions being inspected to engage in unnecessary preparation. So, we did look at that research and we took it seriously, but I think it is important to put it in context that it really is now quite a bit out of date and did refer to a relatively small number of schools early on in the inspection process.

 

Q6  Mr Pollard: What can you say to reassure the Committee that Ofsted is worth the public money it receives and that this money would not be better spent filling the holes in school budgets and perhaps the ex-teachers you employ being back in teaching.

Mr Bell: There is quite a lot there! Ofsted's budget for 2003/04 is £207 million. About one third of that is on Early Years and it is back to what I was saying about those new responsibilities being given to us by Parliament. Half of the budget is related to inspection of schools and colleges. Again, I think that, in the end, you are back to choices that have to be made. You would expect me of course to say, "I think that is a relatively small sum of money in context of total education expenditure in this country which each year runs into billions", so I think that point is the obvious point to make. I think I would also then say that, as part of that general improvement effort, it is terribly important that we know what is going on, that Parliament knows and that the public know what it is getting for those billions of pounds that are being spent on education and I think that is, in the end, the most important role that Ofsted plays, reporting fearlessly and frankly on the state of education. I hope that you would accept that, over the years, Ofsted has not pulled its punches. It has highlighted where things are going well in the system but it has also been able, because of its independent status, to report frankly on what it has found.

 

Q7  Mr Pollard: "Satisfactory" is a word that is used quite a lot and we have had this discussion before about how we might find a word other than "satisfactory". I used to get that on my school reports and I used to think it was really awful because it meant that I was just sort of ticking along. Have you given any more thought to finding another word or another phrase that might describe how schools are doing really rather well but is different to "satisfactory".

Mr Bell: I recall that we discussed this at some length at the last meeting. What we have tried to do----

 

Q8  Mr Pollard: This is your second inspection now!

Mr Bell: Thank you! What we have tried to do in the new handbooks that accompany the new inspection framework is be very clear about the criteria against which we make different judgments. It is very clear criteria that we provide when inspectors are making judgments about teaching. So, they will know what we would consider to be the attributes of satisfactory teaching. They would know what we would consider to be the attributes good teaching and so on. That is a difference to the previous arrangements where we did not quite have that same clarity in those terms. Coming back to your point about the actual term used, you probably could argue until the cows came home about a term. I think our response to that has been to try to make it absolutely clear about what those terms mean rather than get too hung up about which word we actually use.

Mr Pollard: That is satisfactory!

 

Q9  Mr Chaytor: On the question of value for money, in the strategic plan for 2004-2007, the section on aims and values does not mention value for money at all. So, my question is: if it did mention it, what would be the criteria by which Parliament and the public should judge the value for money provided by Ofsted?

Mr Bell: I am happy to start that but perhaps I could ask my colleague Robert Green to supplement it. I think there are a number of points that one would make. I think first and foremost you would want us to reassure you that we are spending wisely and efficiently the money that comes to us. In some ways, that is the most basic level of just looking after the money that we are given. Then I think you are into identifying the sorts of things that I have already described: how much our information is used and how much it is valued; what impact it is having on policy; what impact it has on developing and identifying practice that other schools and colleges can use and so on. So, we are not at all complacent about that. I think it is fair to say - and Robert may want to supplement this - that value for money is an important feature that, in a sense, enthuses our plan, not least in our reference to the need to carry out further reviews of inspection in the future. Just coming back to an opening remark that Valerie Davey made, the issue of new responsibilities coming Ofsted's way is not simply a case of adding that on to everything else. We are going to look very carefully at how we can avoid a new inspection responsibility just simply adding to the weight of inspection. So, I think an important feature of demonstrating value for money is demonstrating that we use our inspection resources efficiently and effectively and do not just keep adding and adding to the weight of inspection.

Mr Green: There are a number of ways into this question and David has touched on many of them so far. If you look back at what has happened to Ofsted's budget over the past 10 or 11 years, it was fairly stable during many of the years in the 1990s, though it went up and down a bit, and obviously it has increased recently. So, if you go back over the last five years, in cash terms, it has gone up by about three quarters but, during that time, we have taken on the massive new work involved in Early Years operations and post-16 inspection. So, a lot of new functions. One way of looking at it is simply to say, "What does the budget look like and what work is being done?" As David mentioned, we want to do quite a major piece of work that looks at the impact of Ofsted in relation to the resources that are put into Ofsted. There are a number of strands to this and one of them is of course that now we have not only completed the second cycle of inspection but are into the third cycle and one can begin to track from one inspection to another to another, so we can look at that dimension of things alongside all the perception dimensions, the various stakeholder groups that David was talking about, and we want to do that in a piece of work which we hope will be coming to fruition by about Easter next year, so we will have the first findings in the first part of next year and then really we hope to publish something quite serious about that. So, recognising that it is a point that the Committee has put to us previously and recognising that we have an obligation to be as public as we can about what we perceive as the value for money that Ofsted is generating, it is a small part of the education budget but, in absolute terms, it is a lot of money. The other thing I would touch on is the point that David was again talking about in terms of the way various people - groups of teachers and parents - actually make use of the findings of Ofsted's work. This will be part of our study, but there are products like the Pandas which we are making more and more accessible and which schools are making more and more use of. We are conscious that other people are fishing in the same waters and that we are not the only people producing this sort of information. So, it is not just Ofsted looking for value for money; Ofsted working with the DfES is very much looking to avoid overlap, working with the QCA to avoid overlap, so that we are using money wisely and we are minimising the burden that we put on schools. Perhaps the final thing to say is that, in the jargon, we are trying to benchmark ourselves against other organisations, obviously against other inspectorates. Reference has been made to the work in central government on the role of inspectorates and their contribution and it was interesting that, in a survey associated with that, Ofsted was by far the best recognised inspectorate in the public sector, perhaps not surprising given the sort of work we are in, but that, I think, recognised our position there. We look at basic things like how much we spend on our computers and on our support services and we think that, in comparison with other organisations, we are at very lean and efficient levels of expenditure but always ready to look for further tightening there where we can find it. So, it is an interesting point. If we forgot to put value for money in our values, that does not mean that they are not there and I think we said that the strategic plan will be a continuing and improving document and that is probably an early point for us to note.

 

Q10  Mr Chaytor: What about the impact on school performance, particularly in terms of primary, secondary and post-16? Would you not accept that there has to be a relationship between the amount invested in inspection and improving performance? Otherwise, why are we inspecting if performance is static or declining?

Mr Bell: I think it is important to make the point that inspection is to provide a public report on what is going on in this school or college and that is an important purpose that in one sense is slightly distinct to the issue of improvement, but I think it is fair to say that our reports do help the improvement effort by diagnosing what is going on and then what the school or college might do to improve in the future. So, I think it is important to make that point but to say that if you are then wanting us to identify X percentage of improvement or this kind of improvement or that kind of improvement that comes about simply attributable to inspection, I think it is an almost impossible task, actually. I think we can also identify other ways in which we contribute to improvement because we are able to use all the findings of our inspection reports to contribute to improvement. For example, we published a report just at the turn of the summer on boys' writing which I think was an important report because not only did that say that this is the state of the nation, as it were, on boys' writing, but it actually gave a number of pointers that schools could consider. So, at that level, I think improvement can be demonstrated. I would like to bring David Taylor in at this point.

Mr Taylor: I wonder whether we might wish to challenge this kind of Panglossian view that the world is one of continuous improvement and that, unless you are showing that things are getting better, you are not doing your job. We would be doing our job just as well, indeed it is a job we ought to do, if we say that things have become worse and that this Government's policy is not working. We are there to hold Government to account for policies which cost far more than our budget and if we say that these policies are not producing value for money, not only are they not producing improvement but they are making things worse, then we are actually doing our job. So, I think it is important to say, firstly, that we want to beware of this kind of assumption that every initiative automatically engenders improvement and, secondly, that the only way in which you can validate an organisation such as Ofsted is if you can demonstrate that things are getting better. If things are getting worse and we stop them getting worse by saying the right thing at the right time, we are doing our job.

 

Q11  Mr Chaytor: The underlying assumption there is inspection, to inspect Government policy and not to inspect the performance of schools.

Mr Taylor: Government policy is designed to lead to improvement. We are there to help Government to tell whether the polices are having that effect or not.

Mr Bell: We have not used the 'A' word this morning "accountability". It is about accountability; it is the accountability of schools for their performance; it is the accountability of Government for the policies that they accept. David is absolutely right, I can think of one or two reports in the last year or so where we have actually said, "Really, this policy is not working and it is not very effective." I think it is important that there is an independent body and I think it is a great virtue of Ofsted's status constitutionally that we have that capacity to speak out and say what we think based on our inspection evidence.

Mr Chaytor: Does it not also follow that the evaluation of your own effectiveness should not be conducted internally, as Mr Green was suggesting, but also by an independent body?

 

Q12  Mr Pollard: Who would inspect that independent body?

Mr Bell: There is an incredibly important independent body that does hold us to account and that is called Parliament and it is through this Committee that our work is called to account.

 

Q13  Mr Chaytor: But you would accept that there is a paradox here. If you are working on a piece of research at the moment which is identifying ways in which your value for money can be better evaluated, this is rather like the police investigating complaints against the police and my argument is, why is the Audit Commission not doing this job? Why are you subject to the same regimes as local authorities are of schools themselves? There has to be some professional external accountability and investigation.

Mr Bell: I would like to leave that point for Robert to answer because that is part of our thinking in terms of this impact project. On the issue of complaints, of course there are two sorts of complaints, as it were. There are complaints that people might have about the way in which an inspection is carried out and of course there is a person called the independent complaints adjudicator, so Ofsted is not the final judge and jury, as it were, when it comes to complaints against our activity. In terms of that more general review of Ofsted's work, I think that all of us in Ofsted take very seriously the accountability that we have to Parliament. From our point of view, that is the accountability that properly should govern our work. That is not to say of course that we are not interested in what others have to say and perhaps Robert might add to that.

Mr Green: That is absolutely true. Of course, we are not subject to the Audit Commission though we do a lot of work with them, but we are subject to the National Audit Office who look not only at the financial figures but also increasingly at the substance of our work and very properly so. In our Audit Committee, we get into this sort of discussion rather more in fact than about the figures. They are the sort of questions which increasingly we are being asked. So, there is that sort of formal scrutiny and accountability which helps Parliament to identify whether we are working effectively or not. On the question of this review, I am sorry if I gave the impression that we are thinking that this should be a wholly in-house activity. We have not absolutely finalised how we want to do it yet but the sort of work that I was talking about, looking at the changes in schools from one cycle of inspection to another to the third, is very much the sort of thing where we can envisage real value in bringing in somebody from outside with an independent look at the findings. So, we certainly envisage independent elements in the report/work and, when we have completed it, of course it will be there for public scrutiny and debate and no doubt other people will then want to take things on further. I think that, in a way, it is pulling the range of issues together that we would like to do which will be a first, so we want to be very closely involved in doing that, but then it very much is up to others to scrutinise what we have said.

Valerie Davey: Can I just say that I hope within that resource you will recognise the actual staffing that you have because it seems to me that that is the most valuable resource and they are working for you, rather than, as my colleague suggested, being in schools and I think that human resource for which you are responsible has to be quantified and understood as well.

 

Q14  Paul Holmes: If you have such a large empire that dominates the educational scene and you spend £200 million of taxpayers' money a year, one measure of value for money would be that at least your reports will be accurate and reliable. Obviously, some people will sometimes question that. Myerscough College in Lancashire have submitted evidence to us that they are contesting a recent report that Ofsted did on them and Summerhill School have done the same although we are going to ask you about that later, so I do not want you to respond on that one at the moment. Obviously, sometimes these are matters of judgment where the school or the college will say, "They have not taken this into account" and so on. There is at least one clear-cut case that we can look at. Ofsted inspected a school and said that the principal and the senior management team provided strong leadership and a clear ethos, they thought that the head teacher provided strong, sensitive and skilful leadership and the Ofsted report said that financial planning and administration were good. Now, this school was St. John Rigby College in Bromley and it turned out in fact that, at the time Ofsted undertook that report, the head teacher, Colleen McCabe, was in the process of embezzling £500,000 from school funds for her own personal use. She was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and the court were told that the staff and students shivered for an entire winter as heating systems went unrepaired, that library shelves were bare, staff training was non-existent, there was not a single computer for pupil use, and the court was told that the head teacher was not only a thief but that she was a bully who brook no dissent. You will say that Ofsted undertook that inspection in 1996. How can we be sure that, in 2003, Ofsted are not producing reports like that that were not worth the paper they were written on?

Mr Bell: I will not respond to that last comment but I think it is important to make the point that we do take those sorts of issues very seriously. You are right to highlight the concerns that were expressed by Myerscough College. We accept that there were aspects of that that might have been done differently, although it is interesting actually that that one went all the way to the independent complaints adjudicator and she commented, "there was an unresolved disagreement between the college principal and the inspectorates over the conduct of that inspector." The college principal and senior management had one view and the inspectorates had another. I think that does illustrate some of the complexities in dealing with complaints. We are not complacent at all but we can always cite examples where it has not quite gone to plan. However, if one looks back over the last ten years, there have been almost 50,000 school inspections and the level of complaint has been actually remarkably low. I think there are ways in which we can always improve our inspection practice. We want to give greater attention, for example, in school inspection to the views of pupils. We do take account of the views of parents. We always are interested in the views of staff. So, I think there is a whole variety of ways in which we can continue to learn, but I would be extremely foolish if I sat here and gave you an absolute assurance that every inspection from now on in would be conducted faultlessly and that there would never be a difficulty. What I can say to you is that Ofsted takes the monitoring and the evaluation of inspection very seriously and actually, within our own budget, we spend quite a bit of money monitoring inspections and actually following up the conduct of inspectors where we are not satisfied with it.

 

Q15  Paul Holmes: In the specific St John Rigby College case, your report said the exact opposite to what was actually happening, that financial management was good - she was a crook and she was robbing the school; and that she was a strong, skilful and sensitive leader - she was a bully. How can a thorough Ofsted inspection actually get it so wrong?

Mr Bell: I think there is an important point - and you refer to it yourself - about the timing of that inspection, when it actually took place in relation to head teacher's career in the school. The other point I would make - and we said this at the time - is that Ofsted inspectors are not auditors. In terms of the financial management or mismanagement, clearly one would hope that inspectors would be able to identify elements of that but, in terms of the detailed scrutiny of the books, as it were, that is not a job that Ofsted inspectors carry out because that would be a duplication of resource because we actually have an audit system that carries out that kind of inspection. I think you are right to highlight the case, but maybe, in highlighting the case, it really demonstrates quite how exceptional it was and we have to look at that as we do with any inspections which go wrong and see if there are lessons that we can learn.

 

Q16  Helen Jones: While I accept that your inspectors are not auditors, it is difficult, when going round a school, to miss the fact that it does not have books on its shelves and does not have computers and that the heating keeps breaking down. The question that I think the Committee would like you to answer is, having seen how that inspection went so wrong, what steps has Ofsted taken to make sure that nothing like that can happen again? I do not think that you have quite told us that yet.

Mr Bell: I think it is important to make the point that the inspectors in that inspection in 1996, as in all inspections, will report what they find at the time. There were all kinds of things that emerged, as I understand it, during the court case, but it may quite conceivably have been possible that some of the things that were highlighted during the trial were not in evidence during the inspection. I would be terribly concerned if inspectors carried out an inspection and all sorts of things were going badly wrong and they just were not reported on. The truth of the matter is that I do not think I can honestly say because I do not know whether there were all sorts of things that were or were not going on during that inspection that the inspectors failed to record. What happened subsequently in this school clearly then did become a matter of public record through the court trial. So, where we have evidence provided to us at the time or afterwards of a report that has been misleading, in other words it was not stated properly what has actually been going on, we follow those sorts of problems up very, very carefully indeed. That is the most extreme example but I have to say that there are other examples where one might inspect a school and inspectors go back three or four years later and find the school in a very different state altogether. That has happened in other cases.

 

Q17  Helen Jones: Have you carried out a review of that particular case?

Mr Bell: Not an explicit direct view because actually my judgment was that it was so far ago that going back and trying to trawl through all the evidence and find out what was actually going on in the school against what the inspector said, I actually did not think that was an efficient -

 

Q18  Valerie Davey: It was not an efficient use of time and money.

Mr Bell: I genuinely did not think that was efficient. If it had happened last year, then maybe it would have made more sense to do it, but I just did not think it made sense to do it in that level of detail, but we have obviously looked at the case.

 

Q19  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Bell, the empire does continue to expand, if not through your own doing, obviously you would say that is Parliament's will, but I wonder if you have a map on your office wall, so that looking at responsibility, all the pink bits are ours and it gets bigger and bigger. I wonder if, in your considerations, you look at areas where you might be able to reduce your involvement. You say that you comment on policy and whether is successful, so let us look at Ofsted for a minute and the future of inspection. We are often told that we are now data rich and I think that is something you have said to this Committee before. Part of that richness is that we now have value added results. We know whether, for example, high-performing schools are actually assisting pupils to improve. It could be argued that the outcome of many inspections could be predicted because we have all this information. So, with all this rich data that we have now, do you really need to be coming to this Committee in a couple of years time saying, "We have inspected all schools three times"?

Mr Bell: Just picking up the first point in relation to asking ourselves the question, do we think that there are things we could do differently and the Ofsted role expanding, I mentioned in relation to children's services that that is a very, very serious consideration at the moment. We have been asked to look, working with other inspectors, at how we might reduce the total burden. So, that is very much on our programme of work. So, we do not just say on children's services, "Let us just add it to everything else that we are doing."

 

Q20  Jonathan Shaw: I would like to perhaps come to that later. School inspection.

Mr Bell: I have a couple of points to make. The first thing to say is that inspection, as driven by legislation, does not just look at the standards attained by pupils. There are four things that we have to look at in inspection and this is in legislation: (1) is the standards; (2) is the quality of education; (3) is the leadership and management; and finally (4) is the ethos of the school. I think inspection gives you that rounded picture. Now, as we have said in the strategic plan, there is a debate to be had in what we are describing as the future of inspection about how you go about carrying out inspection in the future because the world is different to the world that first came into being in 1992 and those are the sorts of questions that I am sure we would want to look at. I do go back to the point that I made earlier however and that is that, in the end, inspection is about holding the education system/the care system to account. That seems to me to be, as it were, non-negotiable within what Parliament has asked us to do. Beyond that, how we go about doing it, what evidence we draw upon, how we deploy our inspections, when we inspect and how we inspect, all of that seems to me to be quite properly a matter for attention and I will be talking much more about that in the consultation paper referred to in the strategic plan.

 

Q21  Jonathan Shaw: Can you envisage a time where there will be a criteria to inspect or not? If we have so much information available to us about the school's success or not and then you can use your resources to inspect those schools that are struggling, those schools that are in serious weakness and those schools that are in special measures.

Mr Bell: I would make the obvious but I think important point that that would be for Parliament to determine. At the moment, that is what Parliament is determined.

 

Q22  Jonathan Shaw: Mr Bell, I appreciate that you are playing a straight ballast, as you do, but you said earlier on that you comment on government policy and you say what works or does not and I am asking you to comment on government policy in looking to the future.

Mr Bell: I think it could be superficially attractive to say that all you should ever inspect is where there is a weakness. One would obviously have to work out how you would identify that in the first place, but let us assume that you could identify that. I think personally that that would be a great disservice to parents and children in all schools because it seems to me that, for parents in any school, what an Ofsted report provides is an independent evaluation of how that school is doing. So, directly to answer your question, I think that inspection and reporting should stay and I think that is value for money. The big questions and legitimate questions in the future are, how do you do it and can you do it differently?

 

Q23  Mr Chaytor: If I could just follow on this point about identifying the weaknesses of schools, in an interview, I think it was responding to the Newcastle University research, you defended the role of inspection by saying that Ofsted, over the 10/11 year period, had identified I think it was 1,000 schools in serious weaknesses. My question is, do you not think that these schools were not known as schools that were struggling? Was this a great scandal only discovered by Ofsted or had you asked local education authorities previously, would they not have produced more or less the same list of 1,000 schools?

Mr Bell: The question is not whether they were known, the question is what was being done about them. I think that, in the vast majority of cases, probably local authorities would have accepted that those schools were struggling and knew that they were struggling. The reality is that until we had national inspections from 1992 onwards, there was, I think, a lack of will to deal with such schools and it seems to me that what the inspection arrangements did was provide a mechanism to identify those schools and, alongside the identification, to put into place procedures that would help those schools to improve.

Mr Taylor: Could I just add that we do not just inspect schools, we inspect local education authorities. That programme shone a very fierce spotlight on local authorities that did not know or were doing nothing about their weak schools. Since that, the improvement of local authorities has been one of the major findings of Ofsted inspection. Indeed, I would argue that, in looking for the things which Ofsted has contributed to improvement, making LEAs more able to concentrate on their support and challenged role in relation to struggling schools has been one of our major achievements. The recent round of LEA inspections has shown that most LEAs are now performing at least satisfactorily, to go back to our word, and often well in relation to functions which previously they were failing to deliver. So, I think that we do have evidence not only that there was a considerable amount of under-recognition of the extent of the problem at the local level but also of a failure to tackle it with the resolution which is now being shown.

 

Q24  Mr Chaytor: In the last 12 months, there has been a 35 per cent increase in schools in special measures and a 30 per cent increase in schools in serious weaknesses. Earlier you said that even if school performance was declining, Ofsted could be succeeding. Does it equally follow that, if there is an increase in schools in special measures and an increase in schools in serious weaknesses, Ofsted is succeeding?

Mr Bell: We are still talking about a relatively small percentage of schools overall but I think that there are one or two issues that we should be concerned about. For example, the number of schools that have previously been in serious weaknesses and then have slipped into special measures. Of course, there was a trend emerging and of course Ofsted was given new responsibilities to visit all serious weaknesses schools within about eight months of being so declared to make an initial judgment about how they were doing. I think that may be one factor that has contributed to a rise that we have seen. So, there may be specific factors at play there. I think we would still all want to express concern however that, even after ten years of inspection, there are schools that still do slip into special measures and serious weaknesses and I have to say that there are times when I look at the paperwork, as I do for all schools in such a situation, where I do wonder how the school has got into the state that has been described because you would ask how after ten years of inspection, after more rigorous managing and after better identification, this is still happening? I think that remains a serious question to ask even though it is still a relatively small percentage of schools overall.

Valerie Davey: I am aware that this whole area we have started with is crucially important but there are other specific things that we want to come on to fairly soon.

 

Q25  Mr Pollard: All other government departments are required by the Treasury to include at least one target for a two per cent efficiency improvement each year. You escaped that net. Do you have efficiency targets and what are they?

Mr Green: We do not escape that net because we do not negotiate directly with the Treasury, we negotiate with the DfES. So, our negotiations in that context are with the Department and, as David said earlier, we are still in the throes of that process at the moment. Referring back to the question that was asked earlier about efficiency, the Department is expecting us to make efficiency savings of at least that order throughout. We are arguing that there are special factors in some areas that apply to Ofsted, but that is very much the territory that we are in. We currently, as the Committee will know, have a service delivery agreement which does not get into that sort of detail. We are proposing with the Treasury's and the Department's agreement that the strategic plan now becomes the place in which we set out the targets that we should be setting and again, if there are areas that we need to look at in future versions, then we can do that.

 

Q26  Mr Pollard: Looking at the number of staff, you have 2,520, the Audit Commission is the next highest, 2,437 and everybody else much less than that. You mentioned earlier that you have benchmarking exercises with other inspectorates but you did not give any details of that and what the outcome of the benchmarking was.

Mr Green: We are going to do some benchmarking insofar as we can. Of course, when you get close to other inspectorates, everybody is operating in different ways. The reason for our very large number of staff again, as the Committee will know, is that it grew essentially from 500 or thereabouts to 2,500 or a few more absolutely and precisely because of the link with the Early Years work where we were taking on functions which local authorities no longer carry on. So, in terms of the share of the public budget that has gone, it is a transfer to Ofsted rather than an addition. With that - and other colleagues will be able to speak more directly about that - we now have 100,000 providers of childcare to inspect with that additional staffing.

 

Q27  Mr Pollard: Is it your view that there has been some benefit from economies of scale of being one part of one inspectorate now rather than every LEA having their own?

Mr Smith: There are benefits ----

 

Q28  Mr Pollard: Just an objective view.

Mr Smith: You asked about the benefits in terms of economies of scale and there are some benefits in terms of economy of scale in terms of the services that Robert's division, the corporate services, if you like, personnel, finance, IT etc, deliver to the organisation because, with the addition of the Early Years Directorate, there are broad economies of scale in terms of those corporate-type services. There are some probably relatively minor economies of scale in terms of the use of buildings and premises etc. So, for example, we have eight regional centres for the Early Years setup which can be used by HMI colleagues etc, etc. There are probably economies of scale at the senior management-type level where we have one Director of Strategy and Resources for the whole of Ofsted and we do not have a sub-director for Early Years so to speak, whereas if it had been a separate organisation you would have had a separate person on that salary. So there are some economies of scale by the Early Years work coming into Ofsted. What is perhaps even more important is the benefits in terms of joined-up work and it moves into the more qualitative area. For example, we are doing a number of projects driven by the Department in relation to things like the foundation stage and birth to three matters where we have an economy of skills because we can draw on different skills within the organisation which we would not have been able to do before and in some ways that is perhaps even more important.

 

Q29  Mr Turner: I have just two questions. Firstly, merely looking at the number of people you employ is highly misleading, is it not, because you use a lot of contractors? What is the full-time equivalent change over the period between 1992 and when you took on Early Years? Secondly, have you looked at the effectiveness of employing contractors as against directly employed staff in Early Years, and are you considering perhaps going over to more direct employment or, alternatively, going over to more employment of contractors in the Early Years area?

Mr Bell: To take the first question, we moved pretty well from stable staffing of around 500 really from the beginning of Ofsted through the 1990s to 2,600 full-time equivalents now and about 1,800 of those 2,600 are employed on the Early Years side, so in a sense the major movement was in Early Years.

 

Q30  Mr Turner: I am sorry, maybe I did not make myself clear. You were retaining lots of contractors who were doing lots of work.

Mr Bell: Indeed, and the pool of people that were on the roll to carry out inspections under section 10 in schools was around 7,000 but now it is about 5,000. So that is 5,000 separate individuals who are on the inspection roll to carry out school inspections.

 

Q31  Mr Turner: Could you say how many man days, for example, they were working? I am just trying to contrast the 1,800 employed staff who are presumably working 1,800 years altogether in each year with a rather amorphous number of contractors, 7,000, who may be doing one day a week or maybe seven days a week.

Mr Bell: That is the big problem.

Mr Green: I do not know the precise answer. The number of person days or person years the contracted inspectors will be working will be a function of the cycle of school inspections. In the Early Years it was a four year cycle and now it is a six year cycle, so that will have caused a reduction in person years. The other factor - and David Taylor will correct me if there are other factors I am forgetting - will be the nature of the inspection process. Has that caused more or less intensive use of inspections? I am not sure about that, although I think it has reduced in recent years. So my expectation would be - and we can certainly do some work on this and let the Committee have the figures as best we can estimate them - that the number of person years of contracted inspectors has declined.

Mr Taylor: And if you turn that into cash equivalent the obvious third factor is the effect of a competitive market on pricing. For much of that decade we watched that unit cost of an inspection reduce as a result of fierce bidding pressure and competition. That is not something which we can absolutely control. Nonetheless, if you map that decade in terms of the total costs of the contracted inspector system against, say, an inflation index over the same period then the costs of contracted inspections have actually fallen relative to what they were in 2003 and we have figures that we could produce on that.

Mr Bell: The second part of your question goes to the heart of what we say in the Strategic Plan under the "Future of Inspection" because I think we say quite explicitly we want to look at the total inspection resource available to Ofsted, that is a full-time HMIs, it is the additional inspectors that we have in occasionally to carry out exercises or to do inspections in areas like colleges and initial teacher training, it includes our section 10 contracted inspectors and of course it also includes our substantial body of staff in Early Years. The straight answer to your question is we have not yet considered in any great detail how we might reconfigure the use of those different elements of inspection resource, but that is precisely what we are going to be looking at in the next document I have referred to because I think it is a really important question to ask, could you get a different sort of mix, could it become better value for money if you did it this way, what are the benefits of having more people in-house, what are the benefits of having less people in-house and so on. That is absolutely central to what we are going to be reporting on in the spring.

 

Q32  Paul Holmes: Just looking at one particular aspect of Ofsted inspections in terms of taking account of pupils' special needs and disabilities, the NASUWT have written to the Committee and said that they are a little concerned at the emphasis, for example, on you having a role to play in race equality and inspections and how looking at that sort of issue might overshadow other issues such as disability or special needs or gender equality and so forth. Have you any general comments to make on that?

Mr Bell: Yes, I have. I think Ofsted led the way amongst inspectorates by putting inclusion right at the heart of the work that we do. A couple of years ago we required all inspectors as a condition of continuing registration to undergo our training on inspecting education inclusion. I think we did something very important through that exercise and we continue to do it through inspection and that is we do not say to inspectors as an add-on to write something about inclusion. What we actually say to inspectors is that that perspective on inclusion should go right through the whole of the inspection activity. So I think it is very important that we do that. The second point I would make is that the new framework in particular really requires inspectors to look at what one might describe as the differential performance of different groups of youngsters. That might be youngsters with particular disabilities, it might be youngsters from particular ethnic minority groups, it might be youngsters who for one reason or another are performing very well or performing poorly. So there is even greater attention now being given to that in the new inspection arrangements. On the specific point of race equality, again I think it is fair to say - and I am sure the CRE would confirm this - that we were fairly quick off the mark on this in terms of ensuring that the new inspection framework took account of the Race Relations Amendment Act, as we were required to do, and that is a very specific and explicit requirement on inspectors when they are inspecting to look at racial equality issues.

Mr Taylor: It is important to focus on the totality of Ofsted's output and not only the school inspection reports because HMI surveys have probed questions such as the underachievement of boys. When I first became an HMI 25 years ago one of our most influential reports was on girls in science and I think it is a long HMI tradition to look at those questions of inclusion and entitlement for gender, for particular disabilities and so on and the surveys which we produced on the achievement of different ethnic groups have been well documented in this Committee over the years. I think it is therefore a recommendation of our broad approach that we should combine the sweep of the section 10 inspections with these HMI surveys, which is really where we can quite often get bogged down in the level of detail to analyse, along with the support we now have from the pupil data that has been referred to in order to find out what is happening to the groups most at risk. It is a central part of our value to emphasise inclusions not only through our general inspections but through reporting on specific surveys.

 

Q33  Paul Holmes: We had some mention earlier on about the introduction of value added measures for schools and David Taylor mentioned earlier that of course one role of Ofsted is to say where Government programmes are not working or are working in the opposite way to the way in which they were intended. One issue for people concerned about disability and special needs is that the schools that tend to do best in league tables - and Ofsted figures show this - tend to take well below national averages of children with disabilities and special needs and some form of selection covert or overt is going on. Have you any comments to make on that? Is it something they are going to look at in future reports?

Mr Taylor: I think it links to the point I was just making actually, which is that increasingly through the work of our research analysis division we can input into the system really detailed analysis of the data on individual pupils and then we can become more subtle and sophisticated in how we track the progress of those pupils and hence how well schools with different mixes of pupils are forming. Even as things are and have been over the last few years, it has been absolutely central to the inspection process that we contextualise the school inspection by looking at the prior achievement of pupils, by benchmarking against schools of a similar kind and hence we do not run the risk of appearing to think that just because a school is in a leafy suburb it is automatically a better school. Our lists of good schools over the years have systematically drawn attention to the achievement of schools in more disadvantaged areas.

Paul Holmes: I recently visited a special school in Redruth in Cornwall, an absolutely fantastic school. They have had two Ofsted inspections which were very good in general, but they were very incensed about one particular aspect. This is a school where they take their kids from the age of four to 19. Most of these kids will never even reach Level 1 because of the special needs they have got and yet Ofsted were criticising them because they do not teach them Shakespeare and modern languages. Is it always appropriate to apply these yardsticks to every school in every situation?

 

Q34  Valerie Davey: I think that is very specific.

Mr Taylor: I think we have been very much at the vanguard of enabling inspectors to look in detail at the performance of pupils at the bottom level of achievement by the use of the "p scales". The training materials we produced to encourage inspectors to be able to map and record progress even where it is infinitesimal has been one of our really important contributions to the evaluation of special educational needs and I believe we will continue to push for proper and detailed and subtle ways of evaluating the performance of those children whose progress is most difficult to measure and recognise.

Valerie Davey: Well done!

 

Q35  Jonathan Shaw: I want to talk about the new responsibilities. Mr Bell, you have referred to the Green Paper Every Child Matters on a couple of occasions and I will give you an opportunity to talk about that. I would be interested to hear your thinking about the interface between your existing inspectors, school inspections, child protection and children in care. The Green Paper is going to change the world as we know it at the moment as to how children's services are delivered and it is going to be your organisation's responsibility to make sure that that happens.

Mr Bell: There is probably hardly an inspection system that Ofsted currently runs that will not be affected by the inspection of children's services and that is why it is so important this does not just become another weight and we have to think about it. Clearly if one is going to make a judgment about the quality of service to children in a particular area, and that will be our aspiration in the inspection report, we will want to know what is happening for the very youngest children so it will impact on our Early Years responsibilities. We currently carry out inspections of the Connexions service and youth services, that is going to be encompassed in this and there is a big discussion to be had about the future of local education authority inspection because clearly we cannot just continue to do that as though nothing has changed. Things will change, not least the new requirement in the Green Paper that local authorities reconfigure their own delivery of services, so all of that has got to happen and, of course, school inspection has to be considered. I cannot say to you we have got it all cracked. We are actually working very hard on it at the moment and we are working very well with a range of other inspectorates and there are quite a number of other inspectorates involved. We are all very mindful of the fact that we need to get to the judgment about the quality of children's services at the same time and not just saying let us keep on doing what we have always done before. There is a tension there because it may be that in focusing on children's services and in wanting to get a proper analysis of what is going on there and at the same time reduce the weight of inspection there may be things that all inspectorates have done previously that they determine they will no longer do and that is an important challenge for inspectorates, not just to add to the weight.

 

Q36  Jonathan Shaw: Might that be using the rich data that we have where you can reasonably predict the outcome of schools' performance and the level that it is teaching the kids etcetera and you will be focusing on where the need is greatest, whether that is children living in poverty, whether it is children at risk, in need, in care and those who we can reasonably predict are at greatest risk. So you will be doing a super inspection of a whole LEA area, looking at those particular points, at the interface between the health visitors, the social workers and where these kids fall between the gap. Do you think that will be the future for Ofsted rather than school inspection, school inspection, school inspection on an individual basis?

Mr Bell: The commission that Ofsted has been given to develop the inspection arrangements has asked us to look at universal provision and specialist and targeted provision. I think that is quite an important point because if you say let us just focus on the most vulnerable children, the children who are at risk, you may fail to see the extent to which universal services are meeting the needs of those children. Also, I think if one says you could imagine school or individual institutional inspections just evolving or perhaps disappearing because what you would be looking at is the interface, again I would ask the question how will we know what some of those individual institutions are doing, whether they are children's homes or schools or day care providers? If we do not know what each of those are doing can we really then say with absolute certainty that we know what children's services are like in an area? Going back to your opening comment, we will make very substantial use of the data we already have and I think that will certainly help us in terms of looking at where we focus our effort. I can imagine, for example, going to an area, carrying out a children's services inspection, doing the universal bit, if I can put it that way, knowing from the data you have in advance that there is a huge issue in relation to children in care or there is a huge issue about the number of children who appear not to be getting special services. The only other point I would make is do not forget that children's services is not simply a matter of services delivered by local government. That is going to be one of the interesting issues for us. Health, the justice system, the private sector, it will be interesting to see how we track our way through all of that.

 

Q37  Jonathan Shaw: I know local authorities are meeting up and down the country to look at how they are going to shape their services and announcements from you as to how you are going to inspect them will certainly influence what framework is set up. You are in a very influential position. Not only is the empire growing but its influence is becoming even more dominant.

Mr Bell: I am very aware of that and we are working to a timetable to try to have our first consultation papers out probably in the spring of next year. We are working to quite a tight deadline. If we are looking at the new financial year beginning April 2005, there is a lot to do to get all of this into place because at the same time as we are being asked to provide a new integrated framework for children's services we have also been asked to ensure that there is still the capacity to make what one would describe as single service judgments about local authority services. So the assumption will be that we make a judgement about children's services but continue to make a separate judgment about education services, etcetera.

Valerie Davey: The other aspect that I was pleased to see you make some reference to recently is out of school children, that is those children who still fall between all these stools. I think we need to move on. I think I would like to come to Helen now who wants to talk about the burden of inspection in a different context.

 

Q38  Helen Jones: I want to talk about the mechanics of inspection as well as the burden of it. We have heard representations continually on this Committee from teachers who believe that the inspection process itself puts an additional burden on them. I know that Ofsted has said quite frequently they need not do more than the normal level of preparation. I want to ask you two things about that. Firstly, what are you doing as an organisation in regard to the notice you give of inspections? Would it not minimise the impact on some teachers with heads who want to rewrite all their policies the week before if you gave even less notice of an inspection or even did unannounced inspections as well as helping you to get a better snapshot of what is going on in the school? What training are your inspectors given on looking at the policies in place in the school when they do inspect and working out how long they have actually been in place and been running?

Mr Bell: At the moment the notice period is somewhere between six and ten weeks and that is constrained by the requirement for contracting and principally for consultation in advance with both parents and governors. Those are statutory requirements on us at the moment. I think a number of people made the point would it not be better to have a shorter period of notice and that may be something that we could look at as part of our consultation paper in the autumn. There is an argument that says that if the notice period was much shorter there would be much less incentive to go through a whole lot of elaborate preparation. We will continue to express some frustration at that elaborate preparation despite all the signals being given to schools about not preparing in advance and the actual list of documents we ask for in advance. I think it is about half a dozen things we ask for and one of those things is a timetable and another is a map of the school. We really do not overburden people in advance. I have always said to head teachers that there is a shared responsibility for this. There is a responsibility on Ofsted to make sure that it minimises the burdens in advance and tries to minimise the burdensome nature of the process, but I do think there is a responsibility on school leaders as well. It is their responsibility in a sense not to charge around and get everyone to do all that additional preparation. They have to have the confidence to stick with what they are doing, to provide what Ofsted provides and not get into all kinds of elaborate preparation and I have to say that the picture does vary from school to school. You go to some schools and the staff will say to you, "We know the inspection is coming, but that's fine, we've tweaked a few things,." then you go to other schools and there is a sense of panic that grips them there.

Mr Taylor: I am sure you will know that all our inspectors, both leading inspectors and team members, were trained in the new inspection framework which started in September. If you are looking at the changes which that new framework embodies, at the heart of those are strengthening the relationship between self-evaluation and inspection such that inspectors go into the school with the clearest possible analysis both of the context and history of the school from the head teacher's own statement, which is the self-evaluation input into the inspection. The visits to the school by the lead inspector are designed to enable that inspector to understand and share with the rest of the team those contextual factors about the length of time policies have been in place, about the length of time the head has been in post and significant changes in the catchment and the intake and the exam results and so on. I know the question of self-evaluation has been raised with you. We believe that we are working towards a much more integrated and better articulated relationship between what the schools tell the inspectors.

 

Q39  Helen Jones: I want to ask you about the make up of your inspection teams as well. Now that lay inspectors can lead inspection teams, have you provided any extra training for those inspectors leading the teams? Can you justify to me a lay inspector being the lead inspector in a school inspection whereas in a health inspection we would not adopt the same kind of policy? I might like to inspect a brain surgeon's work but I am probably not qualified to do so. I would be interested in your views on that.

Mr Bell: The most important point to make is that anyone who is going to become an inspector leading an inspection has to undergo training. So it is not as though the person who is an inspector can just lead an inspection, there is a supplementary element to the training and I think that is very important. There has been an important principle really from the beginning of the inspection process and that is that the inspectors bring a distinctive perspective to the work of the inspection team, but they are there in their own right as inspectors. I think our view was that they should also have the right to additional training to become registered inspectors. I think to argue against that almost is in principle to argue against the contribution that they can make to inspection. The other point I would make is that some lay inspectors are quite highly experienced now in school inspection. I know that raises another set of issues about when do you stop becoming a lay inspector if you are very experienced in inspection. I think the very important principle and the reassuring point is that anyone who leads school inspections has to be properly trained for the task.

 

Q40  Helen Jones: What have you done to recruit more inspectors from a variety of different backgrounds? I am thinking particularly of your lay inspectors from a variety of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Can you give us some idea at least of what the current make up of your inspectorate is?

Mr Bell: I probably could not do that offhand, but I could make sure we provide that information. We did try to target some of our recruitment of lay inspectors at under-represented groups. I do not think we have been particularly successful. Frankly, there is still a big job to be done there to make our lay inspectorate more representative and we have had to think again how we might do that. At the moment we have not got that exactly how we would want it, although that was on the back of more targeted recruitment. We will have to think again about how we can best do that. We will provide the data you are looking for, the background by ethnic group of lay inspectors. We can actually do it for all inspectors if you would like that as well.

Valerie Davey: However perfect the system, you still allow for complaints and we are coming on to that briefly at least.

 

Q41  Jonathan Shaw: In your opening remarks to Valerie Davey, Mr Bell, you talked about the perception of inspections and those who use information from those inspections in forming policy. With that in mind I want to talk about Summerhill School and the dispute that has been going on for four years now. Members of the Committee are very aware of the report in 1999 from Ofsted that made a lot of criticisms about the school. Following that report the school pursued a legal appeal against the judgment and also went through the adjudication process. Can you assist in drawing a line as to what is an unsatisfactory position because it seems people are still referring to this report?

Mr Bell: I think that is one of the difficulties in relation to what would be considered drawing a line on this because it has undergone all the processes that you have described, including going to the Independent Adjudicator. So it is quite difficult from our perspective now to know what more needs to be done. I was struck, however, by the submission from Summerhill this time which talked about the voice of pupils and I think I would say that that is something that we have given more attention to in all inspections. I hope that what we are doing there is going to reassure the Summerhill students and staff and others that the voice of pupils is now more prominent in school inspection. I should also say that the Government's Green Paper Every Child Matters makes a very explicit reference to the need to canvass the views of pupils and part of our work in preparing for Every Child Matters and the inspection of children's services is to ensure that we have effective systems for gathering the views of pupils.

Mr Taylor: If I could just reflect on two things. One is, I believe that the debate at the time around Summerhill was a very important debate in enabling the country to book at the balance between the duties upon a regulatory body in accepting minimal standards and the rights of individuals, parents, pupils, schools themselves to provide something which fits their particular clientele and that debate was quite a finely balanced one. The second point is that things have not stood still on the legislative front because in 2002 there was a new Act which defined the minimal standards for independent schools in a new way and the new Independent School Inspection Programme which we are sharing with the Independent Schools Inspectorate is now conducted against that rather clearer framework of standards, which I think means that both our Summerhill School and an inspectorate will be somewhat more certain what the ground rules of engagement are. At least to some extent as a matter of statute we now have a framework in place which will enable us to test out the limits of acceptability. It is the duty of an inspectorate to answer questions about whether an institution designed to give education is providing a satisfactory education and we made a professional judgment on that matter.

 

Q42  Jonathan Shaw: The 1999 inspection document, is that a credible document on which to make a judgment about the school today?

Mr Taylor: We are not in the school today. As I have said, there has been a new framework and a new legislative basis for inspections since 2002.

 

Q43  Jonathan Shaw: If the local authority said, "We're not prepared to send this child to this particular school because of what they said in 1999," is that fair?

Mr Bell: The situation on all school inspection reports, whether it is independent or maintained schools, is that the previous school's report stands as a matter of record unless there is a decision made that it is completely misleading. So it is not as if Summerhill or any school in that position is being treated differently. As David said, that is the inspection report. The next inspection report will then describe the school as it is at that time.

 

Q44  Jonathan Shaw: There was obviously an appeal and there were changes to that report. Would you expect this 1999 report to be relevant in making a decision about a school today? That is quite a simple question, is it not?

Mr Bell: It has to be relevant insofar as it was a proper report of a school at that moment in time and that is how all reports lie on the Ofsted record as it were. One would always say to anyone who is looking at a report that that report is seen in the context of when the inspection took place. If there has been a period of time that has elapsed since the inspection then parents and others will need to find other ways of supplementing their information and knowledge, but that applies to every school in the country that might have experienced a bit of a gap between the previous inspection and the current day.

 

Q45  Helen Jones: We have raised a couple of issues with you of where things appear to have gone wrong. I think what would help the Committee is if you could tell us what processes there are within Ofsted, when there are complaints and when things go wrong, for making sure that similar things do not happen again. Certainly, from what I have heard this morning both about Summerhill and St John Rigby, I am not clear about that.

Mr Bell: If one takes section 10 inspections of schools, the first port of call when a school is dissatisfied is obviously with the registered inspector during the school inspection itself, then it is with the contractor who has secured the inspection and we think that is right because in a sense those are the people who are closest to the inspection.

 

Q46  Helen Jones: I am not asking you about the complaints process, I am asking what Ofsted has in place internally in order to enable it to learn from complaints.

Mr Bell: Obviously there is a report published of the number of complaints that go to the Independent Complaints Adjudicator. We are required to make a response to the Independent Complaints Adjudicator and I can cite examples of things that we have changed in the light of recommendations by the Complaints Adjudicator. That is at the most formal level, but below that, obviously as an Ofsted board we keep an eye on the kinds of complaints that are made and if there are processes and procedures that could be put into place that could be changed. We do take it very seriously. We do look annually at the pattern of complaints that come in and what we might actually do about them. The Independent Complaints Adjudicator commented in our last report that she was pleased at the extent to which she was able to have a good discussion with Ofsted about its own processes and procedures. So she recognised that we try to move on complaints. You will not be surprised to know that we do not always agree with the judgments made by the Independent Complaints Adjudicator, but we do take seriously what she says and do respond accordingly.

Helen Jones: I am shocked!

Valerie Davey: We are going to move on now to look in more detail at Early Years.

 

Q47  Mr Pollard: The British Association of Early Childhood has raised concerns regarding the inconsistency between the standards expected of the private and voluntary sectors inspected and those of the maintained sectors. Which standard does Ofsted inspect against?

Mr Smith: We inspect against both.

 

Q48  Mr Pollard: Is there an inconsistency there?

Mr Smith: I think one of your colleagues used the word "clunky" before. I do not know if that is a proper word. It is a "clunky" position because we inspect under two different primary legislative powers. It is not just in this particular area of maintained and non-maintained provision where that "clunkyness" exists. We try to alleviate the "clunkyness". A particular example of that is something called combined inspections, where we combine the inspection of funded nursery provision with the day care inspection. Going back to Mr Chaytor's question some time ago, that reduces the number of inspections that an institution would receive and the burden of the inspection. I am sorry to say that there is a "clunkyness" to some of the Early Years inspection functions. I think one of the reasons is that Early Years policy and Early Years development has moved rather quickly over the last three or four years. Good examples are Early Excellence Centres and the Neighbourhood Nursery Initiative and Sure Start centres and they move more quickly than the law governing inspection and regulation, so we do not catch up. What we then have to do is to try to join together or mix and match a little bit our legislative powers in order to deliver a coherent inspection programme and because of that there are some discrepancies pointed out by the Early Education Association, which is a fair comment, but my plea is that we are bound by the legislative programme under which we inspect.

Mr Bell: "Declunking" may not be altogether straightforward because sometimes people say to us that what we need is just a single inspection framework that will cover every child in every conceivable setting between, say from birth to the age of five and I think that sounds like a great idea and then you think whether we are actually saying that there should be a single framework that applies absolutely in the same way to a childminder looking after a couple of children and a maintained school with a nursery class. There will clearly and quite properly be elements that should be consistent in the early education of children, but I think we have to be sensitive so that in the legitimate desire to gain consistency we do not end up with something that really is not fit for purpose.

 

Q49  Mr Pollard: Do parents understand that?

Mr Smith: That is a question I cannot answer. I find it difficult to understand sometimes and I am a parent.

 

Q50  Mr Pollard: I am a parent of seven children. Can you match that?

Mr Smith: No, I cannot, but I am working on it!

Mr Taylor: It is quality not quantity!

 

Q51  Mr Pollard: We talked about parents just briefly then. Parents who entrust their children to a day care provider and complain do not get included in the feedback loop and that has left a big hole. What is your view about that? Is that fair on parents?

Mr Smith: This is a difficult area for us and I would not wish to pretend to the Committee that it is not and indeed your Chairman has personally intervened in this area. There are two strands to it and I hope you will not mind me explaining a little bit of the detail. One is the complaints history of the institution or childminder. David has no power to publish a complaints history. This is an issue that was particularly relevant to the Osborne family whose child died with a childminder prior to Ofsted's role. One strand is the complaints history of the place. If you are a parent, unless you have their free will then you cannot get at that and that is because David's powers in terms of publications in the Early Years sector are very different from his powers in the schools sector. I think we explained this last time. We have written a very detailed letter to your Chairman about it. His powers are constrained by the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act. The other strand is that if a parent complains they do not get a decision from Ofsted that says that complaint is upheld or not upheld. What they get is a letter that says, "This person continues to be suitable to provide day care," and that is actually not what they want. What they want is to know whether their complaint is justified or not. We cannot tell them that for the same reasons that I have described and we have delved deep and hard with government solicitors to find ways to change that. Your Chairman is very keen that we should do so and indeed has approached the Secretary of State about that. We have three strands of that approach. We would like to bring change about in primary legislation that would enable the Chief Inspector to report more widely and we are looking at the window that may present itself in terms of Every Child Matters. Let me just step back. We are also looking at that window in relation to "clunky" inspections and whether we can do something there. The second strand is that we can make some changes in the regulation - we do not make the changes in the regulation, the Department makes the changes in regulation which we can then implement and the Department, with our advice and influence, is now consulting in two separate sections in the New Year about how we can extend this a bit. The third thing is that we can do something ourselves, if we can. The only thing that we found sensible to do is to bring in a voluntary scheme where, if the provider agrees, they can disclose the details of the complaint and its outcome. We brought that in in mid-July and that is up and running now and we have had some response.

Q52  Mr Pollard: I fear that when this new role is undertaken by Ofsted it may drive underground some of the child care provision because of the inspections. Have you got a feel for that? Has anything like that happened?

Mr Bell: We have been quite clear that where child minding is being done illegally we would pursue that and it is absolutely proper that we do and there have been one or two cases that we have taken to force action against illegal child minding. In a sense that has been dealt with properly. In terms of family and so on, the arrangements that have applied historically did not change in relation to child care. This is all about child care in a sense which is contractually entered into for a certain period of time, a week and so on. I cannot answer your question directly as to whether people have stopped it. I would not have thought they would have because the legislation that drives our work was not affecting families who make their own arrangements with other members of their families.

Mr Smith: It is a proper concern. There are two pieces of evidence. Firstly, the number of child care places is growing.

 

Q53  Mr Pollard: Good!

Mr Smith: So that would suggest that Ofsted, either through its registration programme or its inspection programme, is not a barrier. Of course it could be argued it may have grown more, but we do not know that because it is entirely speculative. The second thing is that we do conduct MORI-type work with providers who have been inspected and we conducted a major exercise last year and the feedback was in the 90 plus per cent range right across the piece in terms of people's experience of inspections and that relates back to previous comments about the schools.

 

Q54  Mr Turner: This is a question for the Chief Inspector. You were quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying that disruptive and dishevelled upbringing left children ill-prepared for education. Do you not think it would be valuable if you could comment on that in relation to individual schools rather than use proxies such as free school meals?

Mr Bell: It is quite difficult to get at. I was very clear when I was being interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph that I was speaking very much on the basis of what head teachers and teachers were telling me rather than inspection evidence that we had. We had a very limited amount of inspection evidence on that specific subject through our work in early excellence centres. So you are right, it is quite difficult to get at. I thought about that after this all came into the public domain perhaps in a way that I did not expect, but it is quite difficult. David Taylor referred earlier to schools' self-evaluation and the head teacher's statement in advance and there is a good opportunity there for head teachers to comment on the prior experience of children coming into school and to try to provide some of the context against which the teachers are working with the pupils that they have got. I think it is interesting that since I made those comments at the end of August there have been a couple of independent research projects, including one that the DfES published, that demonstrated the absolutely crucial importance of parental support in advance of children going to school and really nailing down some quite tight evidence on that. So it is there and there is a lot of attention being given to it. I am not sure we can go much beyond doing what we do at the moment in terms of inspection to get at this issue.

 

Q55  Mr Turner: Is that because you do not have the evidence or because you feel it is outside your scope?

Mr Bell: I think methodologically it is quite difficult to get at. What kinds of things would you be looking at? How could you measure them? What head teachers will tell you, of course, is that children come into school with very limited capacity to speak in sentences, the children cannot settle to work and they cannot socialise with other children. These are all real and observable but they are actually quite difficult to get at systematically and therefore I think the kind of qualitative way in which we ask kids to do it, put that down as a statement by way of introduction, by context in your school self-evaluation, is probably as good as it will get rather than trying to find some very rigid measures to say X number of children can sit for Y number of minutes. So I think probably it is about as good as it will get at the moment.

Valerie Davey: I think Committee members might come into that category if we are not careful.

 

Q56  Mr Turner: We have had a submission from one of your inspectors who says, "The Government claims, on the basis of improving Ofsted reports, that standards in schools are rising are misleading. The nature of inspections has changed since Ofsted began. The changes in the 2000 and 2003 handbooks have led to less objectivity by inspectors. The largest single factor in this is the requirement to feed back verbally to teachers immediately or soon after a lesson is observed. Many inspectors are now grading teaching higher than they did previously because of the potential confrontation with teachers."

Mr Bell: I found that a curious submission because the inspector appeared to be implying that if you talked to teachers and fed back on their work somehow you had corrupted the process. You have to say to yourself that it does seem rather strange if that is the perception. One of the things that is important about inspection is trying to provide not just institutional level feedback at the end of the process and ultimately through a published report, but, where possible, short feedback to individual teachers about what has gone on. That just seems to me sensible to do. As far as the suggestion that somehow inspectors are going soft because they have to do it is concerned, that is something that we will have to keep under review. I will certainly not move from the position that inspectors have a responsibility to provide feedback because if they are not able to provide that feedback to teachers I do not really think they should be inspecting.

 

Q57  Mr Turner: So you do not believe that there is too much emphasis on feedback, as this submission suggests, on negotiation and inspectors are losing their objectivity as a result?

Mr Bell: Certainly not negotiation, that is a really important point and again I think I would be concerned about the behaviour of an individual inspector if they thought it was about negotiation. We are very clear that inspectors should be feeding back and telling us what they have found, what they have seen and that is the general principle. At the end of inspections inspectors will correct matters of fact. Matters of judgment are non-negotiable. That is the principle behind the inspection system. As far as the system generally losing objectivity is concerned, I just do not think there is evidence for that at all.

 

Q58  Mr Turner: How do you demonstrate that?

Mr Bell: We do pursue on-site our monitoring of inspection because our subjects and quality assurance division go out on-site and monitor inspections and see how they are being conducted, so they can watch all elements of that. We follow up any particular concerns that we might have about individual inspectors. For example, if complaints are made that might lead us to look at the work of an inspector on-site. We have at our fingertips all the data in relation to the inspection grades awarded by individual inspectors and we can look at patterns of grade award and so on. We look very carefully at this because the general point is right, the system's credibility could be undermined if it was seen to be going soft. The thing that I find rather paradoxical about the comment about feedback is that often teachers would criticise us for not providing enough feedback and not having enough time to provide feedback, but then you are down to the simple logistics. I think the important principle is that feedback should be there during inspection.

Valerie Davey: Paul wants to make another comment on the satisfactory issue.

 

Q59  Paul Holmes: Your new handle for training for the inspections that started this September contains the section that says, "teaching that is generally satisfactory with little that is better merits a judgment of unsatisfactory owing to a lack of aspirational teaching". You are now telling your inspectors that satisfactory schools and teaching should now be judged unsatisfactory. If that is so we might expect to see a big jump in the number of failing schools. You gave us some figures yesterday showing that comparing September to October this year 2003 with September to October last year there has been a 35 per cent increase in schools being judged as needing to enter special measures and a 30 per cent increase in schools judged as having serious weaknesses, is this because of your new ruling that satisfactory is now unsatisfactory?

Mr Bell: If I can take the second point and perhaps David might want to come in on the satisfactory issue. Those are early figures, we are talking about the first half-term, September/October, and clearly you are right those figures suggest what you have described but frankly I think it is too early to be drawing judgments. I look at the paperwork in association with every school that is going into special measures and the kind of evidence I am looking at is not, as it were, simply attributable to one factor, it rarely is in schools going into special measures. As I said earlier in response to a question, there is a separate question and concern that we should have if a pattern of schools continuing to go into serious weakness and special measures emerges over the year as a whole, that is a separate discussion, but I think it is rather early to talk about a trend and it being attributable to this or that. Certainly the evidence I have looked at is not down to one particular factor.

Mr Taylor: I may have shot my bolt on satisfactory last time. I think it is important just to underline that what we are saying is that if there is an unrelieved diet of education which never rises above the midpoint of a seven point scale then overall as judgment on the education received by those pupils in that school this is not a situation which is good enough, is satisfactory. There is a distinction, and it is a fundamental distinction, between a lesson grade on the quality of teaching in one lesson and an overview of the whole school based on what might be 100 lessons. If you see one lesson that is satisfactory that lesson is satisfactory, if you see 100 lessons that are only satisfactory you may be entitled to draw the conclusion that we have drawn that overall this is not a good enough standard of education. I also want to add, we are constantly trying, this is why we have a new framework in traditional training, to make sure there is not a slippage in inspectors' standards, that we do keep the intellectual muscles and the judgmental muscles of the inspectors fully toned. I believe when you have a new framework it is a chance to say, "we are here standing for very high standards, we expect you out there in the field to be making sure that those are maintained". I think when you have a new, if you like, boost to the system through a fresh inspection framework and training you may expect that inspectors are not going to be on their firmest and best behaviour as they implement it.

Mr Bell: If I can make one further quick observation on that, I have spoken to a number of heads who have undergone inspection since the beginning of September, they have said that the interesting issue for them is not the satisfactory/unsatisfactory borderline, for them the sharper and clearer criteria we have given to distinguish good from satisfactory has proved to be quite interesting in their own schools. They are not criticising it, they are saying that sharper distinction really has helped them as heads as well as inspectors to get at the distinction between good teaching and satisfactory teaching.

Valerie Davey: We must leave it there because we must spend some time on post 16.

 

Q60  Mr Chaytor: How long before Ofsted takes over ALI?

Mr Bell: Goodness! We have only had the post 16 inspection arrangements running for a couple of years, when I went into the third year of inspection, and we worked together properly, as we have to and should do, with the Adult Learning Inspectorate, so that is not on the radar screen as far as I am aware.

 

Q61  Mr Chaytor: Given the direction in other parts of your work, particularly the inspection of all children's services and the understanding of the relationship between preschool and primary, what is the case for having a separate inspection post 16 because it simply means that the same curriculum delivered by different institutions is inspected by two different inspectorates.

Mr Bell: What I would say is that most colleges who have undergone inspections since the autumn of 2001 would say that they cannot see the joins, if I can put it that way. Although Ofsted and ALI do inspections jointly people never say to us, "that was the ALI bit or that was the Ofsted bit and they were clearly in contradiction with each court". Operationally it is working reasonably well.

 

Q62  Mr Chaytor: Does that not strengthen the argument for a complete merger?

Mr Bell: It might but it is really beyond my responsibilities to comment on that. What I would say about integration is that interestingly although we have the lead responsibility on Every Child Matters it is not integration in the sense that we are subsuming all of the inspectors from different inspectorates into Ofsted, in some ways that was the Early Years model, where all of these inspectors were brought in from local authorities up and down the country and they all came to the Ofsted. Under the Every Child Matters arrangements we will be leading inspections, that is very clear, but we will have to work alongside other inspectorates. Ofsted has had a history of working with other inspectorates, formally with the Audit Commission on LEA inspections but also in informal and occasional ways with the Social Service Inspectorate, sometimes with joint inspections of local councils. Last year we worked very successfully with the Criminal Justice Inspectorate looking at the Street Crime Initiative, and so on. It is incumbent on inspectorates to work together where they are required to do so and the case for integration or merger is a separate issue. For the sake of those being inspected and for the sake good accountability we need to make the arrangements work we have at the moment.

 

Q63  Mr Chaytor: Moving on from inspections or institutions and looking at the issue of area inspections post 16, in your strategic plan you establish as an objective the assessment of national strategies for improving education in the 14 to 19 age group, what is your assessment of the national strategies of area inspections and the role of the LSCs in implementing the recommendations of the area inspections?

Mr Bell: Again this is where the timings did not coincide, Ofsted began inspecting area provisions 16 to 19 in 1999 and then under the Learning and Skills Act we were given the responsibility to carry out 14 to 19 area inspections and we are very early into that cycle of inspection. There is going to be a very interesting overlap with the findings of our inspection and the work of Learning and Skills Councils and other local players when it comes to the Strategic Area Reviews that are being carried out. In the some cases the inspection will be prior to the Strategic Area Review and arguably that will be a very useful analysis of the state of provision 14 to 19 and it would help, one would hope, to drive the Strategic Review. In other cases because of the timing, the timings do not fall into synch, we will be inspecting 14 to 19 provision after a Strategic Area Review has been carried out, but that may be no less valuable because of course then we will have the ability to look at the early evidence of what has happened in the light of strategic review. On the specific point about the LSC role, I think it is a complex area of governance, if I can put it that way, 14 to 19, because you have a whole variety of players, you have the LSC clearly with responsibilities, you have the local education authorities retaining important responsibilities, many of which incidentally go well beyond the school functions but would involve other services, and of course you have the individual institutions, colleges and schools. In a sense nobody has absolute power over the whole system. A lot of this has to be done within the context of what the LSC is leading but with the consent of others. I think it is an interesting question, and I do not have an answer to it at the moment, about how the LSC are going to carry this out.

 

Q64  Mr Chaytor: Can I suggest one or two answers, what you are doing, Mr Bell, is describing the structures we have but I think we are trying to tease out of you what is your assessment of the effectiveness of those structures. In describing it in such length are you implicitly saying, "we have an over-complicated, over-bureaucratic, ineffective set of arrangements between 14 and 19"?

Mr Bell: I think that remains the question and I think it is fair to say that it is probably too early for us to say.

 

Q65  Mr Chaytor: How long do we have to wait?

Mr Bell: We are carrying out inspections across the 47 LSC areas over the next three or four years so we will have an overview at the end of that period but it would be fair to say after a year or so we are going to be able to draw upon our evidence of the first 14 to 19 area inspections.

Mr Taylor: The timetable for evaluation is a complex one and if you look at the Government's strategy for 14 to 19 and the phased implementation of that we are actually moving into what for even David Bell might look quite a long way in the future, for me it is well off the sideline. I think we really have to say that 14 to 19 is a very complex area, the lines of accountability are complex but it is also complicated in terms of curricula change. We are doing a number of probes into specific aspects of that change, an increased flexibility programme for 14 to 16 year olds, Pathfinders, all of these initiatives which are breaking up the rigid separation between schools and colleges. I think we are hoping to be able to give early advice to Government, to the Tomlinson Committee, and so on, on the direction of change in 14 to 19, but to evaluate that strategy in the round is certainly going to be something for possibly even your successors.

 

Q66  Mr Chaytor: The area-wide inspections of all 47 LSCs will be all completed by September 2006, that will be 18 years after the Education Reform Act which set the process of proliferation of small sixth forms in schools underway and 13 years after the incorporation of FE colleges which created this internal market of FE colleges. Do you think that is an acceptable way for Government to manage arrangements for 14 to 19? A whole generation has gone by and yet we still have not come up with a sensible way of government intervening and planning and we are still debating it and producing more inspection reports. When does Ofsted say to the Government, "this is what you need to do"?

Mr Bell: I think one can draw an important distinction between what is happening nationally to make things work and what is happening locally. We will find, as we have already found in our first published 14 to 19 reports, a variety of approaches and actually in some places it looks more coherent than it does in others already. In a sense we are not waiting for the never, never to make an evaluation of what is happening in particular areas, we can make those points and they should have an impact on young people's lives and education soon. That is an important point to make, we are not doing nothing until the end of the process. It is, however, difficult to make a judgment about the national picture and the national scene. What you have described is right, those sort of milestones that you have described are right but as David said a moment or two ago it is not going to get any more straightforward because if you take what has been said publically about any changes that might come from the qualification structure in the light of Mike Tomlinson's work that could be another seven or eight years given what has been said about changes within this decade. I think we just have to accept, certainly for the foreseeable future, that we are going to be in turbulent times when it comes to 14 to 19 provision, but that should not deflect us from what we can all do now to make a difference to the life chances of young people in schools and colleges and elsewhere.

 

Q67  Jonathan Shaw: You will have seen the submission from the Association of Colleges where they felt that some colleges were penalised because of the inspection process, there was criticism where there was a lack of completion amongst students and clearly colleges take students who have a history of poor achievement. Is it right that you should be penalising them in this way?

Mr Bell: We do not, as it were, simply penalise colleges on the basis of one particular indicator or not. We have said to this Committee, and it is something that I can repeat today, that we are very sensitive to the issue of getting a better basket of indicators to enable us to make proper comparisons between different kinds of post 16 provision. We said last year in the Annual Report that generally speaking sixth form colleges and school sixth forms in achievement terms will do better than general Further Education colleges but we immediately went on to say that they are serving different sorts of populations. I will not pretend we have got there yet but the task is to try to find an appropriate basket of measures. The one slight concern about the AoC submission is the suggestion that this is the case everywhere, it is not the case everywhere, we know some general Further Education colleges are more successful in meeting the needs of students and helping students to remain in education than in others. I think we are right and I should acknowledge the work that we are doing to try to get a better set of indicators but we should not suggest that somehow all FE colleges are the same and because one college is not very successful at retaining students that applies in every case because it certainly does not.

 

Q68  Mr Turner: I would like to refer to your joint report with the Audit Commission on school place planning. You refer in paragraph 10 to the reduction in surplus places, primary 9.5 to 9.0 per cent and secondary from 11.6 to 8.6 per cent "as a result of which" you say "authorities have been able indirectly to promote higher standards in schools and scarce resources have been released for spending more efficiently on other things than surplus capacity". Are you saying that that use of resources is a better driver to improved performance than competition between schools?

Mr Bell: I do not think we said that. I do not think that it is quite as straightforward as saying it is one or the other. I think it is very interesting, certainly speaking from my experience as a Local Authority Chief Education Officer that there was always this paradox, on the one hand you were being driven to reduce surplus places and people would say to you, "you are reducing choice" and you would say, "yes, but we are being told to reduce the surplus places to free up the resource". There is always a paradox there that if you make more efficient use of the places you have and free-up money to invest you may then remove some choice in the system because there are less surplus places. I do not think it is a case of one driver is more effective than another, I think there have been many benefits over the last 15 years or so of local management where schools have in a sense laid out a stall and have developed their own distinctive identity and parents have been given more information, all of those things seem to be absolutely right. What we tried to do in this Report - and I believe I am coming in front of the Committee in a couple of weeks to talk about it - is to make the point it is not as straightforward as sometimes it is made to be because there are difficulties associated with this whole very complex area. I believe I am back a week on Monday to discuss in some detail this whole report.

 

Q69  Valerie Davey: We are having David Bell back on this specific issue.

Mr Bell: You have given me good advance warning to think about it.

Valerie Davey: Thank you all very much for a fairly intense and wide-ranging session. We are most grateful. It is not six months, as it sometimes is, before you are back because, as you rightly indicated, in the context of our report on school admissions you are coming to give evidence fairly soon. Thank you all very much indeed.