WEDNESDAY 12 MARCH 2003

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Members present:

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Mr David Chaytor
Valerie Davey
Paul Holmes
Ms Meg Munn
Mr Kerry Pollard
Jonathan Shaw
Mr Andrew Turner

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MR DAVID BELL, HM Chief Inspector of Schools, MISS ELIZABETH PASSMORE, Director of Inspection, MR MAURICE SMITH, Acting Director Early Years, and MR DAVID TAYLOR, Director of Inspection, examined.

Chairman

Can I welcome David Bell and his colleagues to our proceedings this morning and say that this is an occasion we have been looking forward to, your first annual report. I was saying in private earlier that it is interesting that you are now developing more attitude. So, we are beginning to see what manner of inspector we have before us. We like a bit of attitude, David, do not worry about that, but not too much!

(Mr Bell) Chairman, as I come up to the end of my first year in post, I am pleased to have this opportunity to appear in front of the Committee this morning. I suspect that much of your questioning will focus on the content of the report and I would just say again that I think it is a great privilege and pleasure to be able to report like this because Ofsted does have the most authoritative overview of the state of education in the country. I would also say that it embodies that unique contribution that Ofsted can make speaking as it does independently on the basis of our evidence. You will know too, Chairman, that Ofsted has reported separately on many other important issues over the past 12 months. We have reviewed the impact of the national literacy and numeracy strategies, we have published an overview of the inspection of local education authorities, we have reported on issues such as the early professional development of teachers, the role of supply teachers, the transition from primary to secondary education and so on and, last week, we published our report on the Key Stage 3 strategy and assessment in secondary schools and I am sure that you will want to follow up much of that today. It is also worth saying just by way of introduction that the day-to-day work of Ofsted continues. Around 4,000 schools have been inspected over the past 12 months. Our important programme of inspecting post-16 colleges is now into its second year and we started a new round of teacher education inspections under a new framework. I would also like to highlight to you our work in Early Years as we come to the end of the transitional period that has run since September 2001 when Ofsted took over the responsibility for the regulation and inspection of childcare. Ofsted was given the formidable task of inspecting around 100,000 childcare settings at the same time as it was establishing its own organisation to do so. I am pleased to say, Chairman, that this task will be completed by the end of March and I think that such an achievement allows us to come back to this Committee in due course and report again on the basis of our evidence and what we found. Mentioning Early Years allows me also to highlight new developments in this area of work and others. In terms of Early Years, we will be introducing quality-based judgments in the next round of our Early Years inspections and we will also be making our inspection system more proportionate in that successful settings will be inspected less frequently. Other major developments for Ofsted include the preparations for our new framework for inspection which comes in in September 2003 and the work we are doing to ready ourselves for the 14-19 area-wide inspections, a new responsibility that has been given to us under the 2002 Education Act. So, Chairman, Ofsted= s work is never done! May I make one final comment. Today represents Elizabeth Passmore= s last appearance in front of you before she retires at the end of the month. My colleagues and I within Ofsted will be marking Elizabeth= s departure in a number of ways. However, Chairman, I know that you and your Committee have always welcomed and appreciated Elizabeth= s contribution to your work and I did not want the moment to pass without drawing her leaving to your attention.

Chief Inspector, you have stolen my thunder! I was going to mention that it is a very sad day to see Elizabeth, who has given evidence to this Committee on numerous occasions, even going beyond the pale and following us to Birmingham when we were there to give evidence. We cannot believe that such a young woman should be retiring from service at this age and I know that we will be watching very carefully because I am sure that she will not be leaving the education sector entirely and we hope that her very great talents will be used in many other directions. So, Elizabeth, I hope there is going to be an occasion when we can thank you in a less formal way. Can we now switch to really the central role that we have. You report to Parliament through this Committee and of course as your range of responsibilities and indeed the number of staff to do it increases, our job in the scrutiny of Ofsted does become larger as well and of course we will be meeting on many occasions over the coming year. Your first annual report is an important occasion. What would you say, Mr Bell, if we finished this session by saying that, by and large, we think your performance over the last year has been satisfactory?

(Mr Bell) I would say that it has met the required standard but I hope that I would also say that I would not be satisfied to be satisfactory, I would want to be good and I would want to become excellent in what I did. So, I think to be described as satisfactory is appropriate if you have met the standard but I hope that none of us, myself included, would be satisfied with satisfactory and that we would want to improve in the future.

It is a bit of slippery slope, is it not, Chief Inspector, when a number of people in our country send their children to schools and are quite pleased when they discover that they are satisfactory and it gives them a reasonably warm feeling about their children= s future. Then suddenly to put a question mark over, dare I call it, the gold standard of satisfaction is a little unnerving for parents and students.

(Mr Bell) Putting it in the context of the annual report, I highlighted very significant improvements that we have seen in the quality of teaching over the past ten years. We have moved from a position in the late 1980s and even early 1990s where we had a high percentage of teaching that was unsatisfactory or poor. As I point out in the report, we now have just under 70 per cent of the teaching observed during inspection that is good or better and that is a very real achievement on the part of teachers. I pose the question however, is satisfactory good enough because I would pose that in the context of the very real challenges that I think my report highlights are still there for the education system. I can also report more anecdotally in that, when you go to schools - and I am sure this will be the case for members of the Committee - and talk to teachers, they will often say to you that to be a satisfactory teacher is fine, but it is not going to be good enough in this setting. We actually really have to raise our game to improve what we are doing given the challenges that face us in the classroom. So, I think it was a chance in my report to recognise the achievements of teachers and improving their performance and, in some ways, pose the question, what next? Where do we go next with the quality of teachers and the quality of education in our schools?

My colleagues will come back to that. How satisfactory is your relationship with the Department for Education and Skills at the moment?

(Mr Bell) I think it is more than satisfactory, Chairman. I think I have a good relationship and I think it is a proper relationship in that the Department welcomes and continues to value the advice that Ofsted gives because, as I said in my opening remarks, we have the perspective of being able to talk from the evidence. We can cite so many different examples of where our evidence has been presented to the Department and welcomed. There are times, of course, when what Ofsted says is not always comfortable for the Department and I think it is important that Ofsted continues to speak without fear or favour and is able to say what it finds on the basis of evidence. I would say as well that the relationship is such that the Department is even more keen to ensure that all of our evidence is available to them in all sorts of ways. So, I am satisfied with that relationship. I think it is a good one and I also think it is a proper relationship and that is the way it should be.

Does it not worry you that there is such a high turnover of ministers? One moment you are dealing with the Schools Minister and the next minute he or she has disappeared down the road. It seems that the only constant in your life is the Select Committee!

(Mr Bell) It is always good to have things you can rely on!

Does it give you an easy ride if ministers move too quickly?

(Mr Bell) No. In fact, you could perhaps argue the opposite because you then have to brief new ministers, which is entirely appropriate, and they will ask important and searching questions about the work of Ofsted. We have to accommodate ourselves to the political process. We have to recognise that that is the nature of change within government departments. I can only comment on the last 12 months and I have not found it personally unsettling to deal with new ministers and I think I can say with some confidence that it has not affected the relationship that Ofsted staff have with officials or even ministers at the Department. It is a fact of life and we have to deal with it.

But it is a worry in the educational system when not only do you have a high turnover of ministers and, in the relatively short time that I have chaired this Committee, all the ministers have changed apart from Margaret Hodge who has moved from Early Years to Higher Education, but there is a very high turnover of senior civil servants through the Department. Is that not a destabilising influence on our education system?

(Mr Bell) I cannot say that I have seen the evidence to suggest that that does destabilise the education system. I think there are times of course when Ofsted officials have to then brief new officials at the DfES end but, as I say, that is just a fact of life and you have to accommodate yourselves to it. The value of Ofsted= s role, when you are talking about change and turbulence and so on, is that it continues to do what it has always done and that is to report on the basis of evidence. I think if you are seeing different people, you might argue that that is a little unsettling, but I do not really think that it could be argued that it would destabilise the relationship. I can only speak as I find.

What I am trying to get at, Chief Inspector, is that you have a great deal of experience and you have an enormous staff - you have half the size of the whole department - and you are increasingly going to have experience under your belt and sometimes, with all the abilities you have of evaluating schools and evaluation education authorities, it is quite useful to say how you evaluate the quality of the Department.

(Mr Bell) That is not for me to do, Chairman. I have been given very specific responsibilities by Parliament to inspect and regulate and I think that is more than enough for us to be getting on with. You commented on the number of staff that we have and it is true that our staff numbers have grown considerably, but of course that is almost entirely due to the advent of our responsibilities in Early Years because we took over 1,500 staff and had to appoint other staff to carry out our Early Years functions. The size of Ofsted= s staffing in its other responsibilities has remained largely constant over the two years.

Chairman: Chief Inspector, thank you for those opening answers to my opening questions.

Ms Munn

Returning to the A satisfactory@ issue, one of Ofsted= s roles is as guarantor of public accountability.

(Mr Bell) Yes.

Looking at this whole issue of judgments that are made by inspectors when they are going into schools, one of the roles is that it comes back up, it is all put in the pot and we look at what schools overall are doing, but individual inspectors going into schools are perhaps much more conscious of the other audiences for their report, namely the teachers themselves, the parents and the governors, and they are working very much within a context. Are you confident that all of the judgments are being made in a similar way within schools in order to be able to make the kind of comments you have made?

(Mr Bell) Chairman, would you mind if, when answering Ms Munn= s question, I draw in my colleagues?

Chairman

We would love to hear them. We would hate to think that they turned up here and did not sing for their supper!

(Mr Bell) Chairman, I would hate to think that they turned up and were silent! It is an important point but of course one of the virtues of the inspection system is that inspectors work to a framework. That is a framework that is publically available; the inspectors know what they are inspecting against and of course those that are being inspected understand that. So, I think it is important that that is there and that it is understood. Ofsted does pay a lot of attention to the extent to which it quality controls its processes and of course that is quite a challenge for Ofsted given that we have thousands of folks who are working for us via the section 10 inspection system, but it is something that we take very seriously and perhaps I might ask Elizabeth to comment on some of the particular processes we undertake to carry out that role.

(Miss Passmore) The process has been monitored throughout the time that we have had the section 10 inspections. We sample to get a picture across all of them and we also focus quite a lot of our attention on those inspectors where we have reason to want to check whether the work they are doing is of the right quality and quite a number of inspectors indeed have been deregistered over the years when they have failed to improve, having been given the chance to do so. We have a requirement for training every year and the process that we are going through at the moment with the new framework for September is that there will be a new set of handbooks for primary, second and special schools inspectors, and those have criteria against each judgment that has to be made in order that inspectors and the schools - and anybody else who reads the handbook - can see what is being assessed. We are making it a requirement of continued registration for this September that every one of our inspectors, including lay inspectors, will undergo a further period of training between June and August of this year. So, of course, with the number that we have, there are people who from time to time do not do the job as well as they should do. We follow that up, provided schools and others let us know, and we also do everything we can to train them better for next time around.

Ms Munn

I suppose the kind of thing I am trying to get at - and it goes very much to the point that David Bell made earlier - is that you could have a teacher teaching in a classroom with a group of rowdy kids and some kids who have special needs and difficulties in concentrating and you could have a teacher in an independent school with a much smaller class and the teaching is satisfactory in both those circumstances but, because it is only satisfactory in the class where there are the rowdy kids, nothing gets done and the kids do not learn anything. Are they both coming out with satisfactory as a judgment on that?

(Miss Passmore) We have a range of things that we ask inspectors to look at to take account of the context in which teachers are working and we do look at not just whether the class is being controlled of course but the challenge of the work that is being provided, whether it is appropriate for the pupils within that class, the extent to which there are high aspirations for those pupils and so on. So, it is not a single criterion about > is this okay or not?= , we do ask inspectors to look more closely than that and we do accept that there are some circumstances where it is much harder to take the youngsters forward than it is in others.

Do you feel that there is a danger to some extent perhaps within a school where inspectors are seeing a number of lessons that what they are doing is saying, A That is excellent, that is good and, oops, that is only satisfactory@ ? It helps the school to know where they need to concentrate their efforts but that they are being influenced ... I accept that you have your criteria and everything but these are human beings who are going in to carry out the inspections and not machines. Are they not going to be influenced to some extent by the context of what else is going on within the school?

(Miss Passmore) Inevitably there may be some influence but we keep saying, and, as inspectors, we keep saying to ourselves, A Have we reported accurately and fairly on what we have seen?@ and it is a danger sometimes, if you have seen a lot of work of high quality and you see something that is not quite so good, but then you have to stop and say, A How does it compare with the criteria?@ and that should bring us back to making the right judgments.

Obviously these are judgments and they are comparisons both within schools but there will be comparisons over time as well. One of the problems about raising the issue about, is the right way of judging it is, if you move it, then you change the criteria and you have the problem of, are we judging on the same basis? Are you confident that, over a period of time, these judgments have been held steady and that we are getting the accurate view from David Bell that things are getting better rather than judgments moving?

(Miss Passmore) We very much feel that that is the case. We do look carefully at what we have said before. As for what will happen from September 2003 onwards, obviously that will not feed through for some while but, with the improvements that we have seen, we know that when the inspectors are there, we do feel confident that the improvements that they see are real.

Paul Holmes

Coming back on this theme of the use of the word A satisfactory@ , it really does seem, certainly to a lot of teachers, that it is an incredibly perverse use of the language to say to a teacher, A We have inspected you, you are satisfactory, you are doing the job you are paid for, you are competent and we can find nothing wrong with what you have done, but that is unsatisfactory and we are going to come back and inspect you again as a result.@

(Mr Bell) I have certainly not said that. I deliberately, in my commentary to the annual report, posed the question, is satisfactory good enough? Again, I would want to put that in the context of where we have come from. We have come from a position where there was 25/30 per cent of teaching that was unsatisfactory or poor to a situation now where we have just under 70 per cent that is good or better. So, we have moved an awful long way. I think it is an entirely reasonable question to ask, what do we need to do next to take forward educational improvements? I also pointed out in my commentary that there are some very real pressures that face the education system. Some of the difficulties we have identified to do with some students in some schools that find it difficult to raise attainment. Those are very real questions. I think we have made very significant improvements over the past ten years and it seems to me that it is entirely reasonable to ask question, what do we have to do next if we are going to meet the next set of challenges? That is the reason for posing the question, is satisfactory good enough? When I have spoken to teachers and head teachers up and down the country, I think they have taken it in that spirit. They have taken it as a real question about what has to be done next.

I know I am a little typecast in this but, three years ago when I was still teaching, the school I worked at was inspected and the lead inspectors came in before the inspection and chatted to us and said, A If your classed as satisfactory, that is fine, you are doing your job, no problem.@ When the report came out it was that far too much of the teaching in the school was only satisfactory, that it was not good enough and that the school would have to be re-inspected. The teachers I worked with did not say, A That= s a fair assessment.@ They were outraged; they were absolutely appalled. One of them, who was one of the finest teachers I ever worked with, had a nervous breakdown and left teaching permanently as a result. It does seem very perverse to say, A You are doing your job fine, we cannot find fault, but we are going to re-inspect because you are only satisfactory.@

(Mr Bell) I obviously will not and should not comment on any individual inspection, but if you look at the national evidence that we cited in the annual report, we are finding the quality of teaching to be good in those two-thirds-plus of cases. So, the picture generally is one of a system where the teaching has improved significantly. However, none of us can sit here and say that we are absolutely satisfied with everything in the education system. There are some really big problems left for us to tackle and it seems to me entirely appropriate in my position, perhaps coming back to the Chairman= s opening remarks, to raise those questions like, where do we go next? What do we have to do next to improve attainment and to improve teaching? Can I now ask David to comment.

(Mr Taylor) It was really just to pick up Paul Holmes= s comment about re-inspection and the point, which is really a very obvious one, that, if all the work were satisfactory or better, then schools or colleges will not be subject to re-inspection because the purpose of re-inspection is to deal with that which is unsatisfactory. So, it is important to realise that we have criteria which generate re-inspection which are all to do with work that was below what David correctly described as the acceptable threshold of satisfaction and I would just want to add - and I do not know if directors are allowed to have attitude as well as chief inspectors - that my attitude to you would have been to turn the tables on you and ask you, if you had been told that the work of the Select Committee for Education and Skills was only satisfactory, would you be satisfied?

That is, in a sense, what I was going to go on to ask. Are we then saying that in future in teacher training courses and in teacher job interviews and in every other walk of life, that is lawyers, policemen and McDonalds workers or whatever, we are now going to be saying to people, A If you do your job well/satisfactorily and there is nothing wrong with what you do, that is not enough@ ? Satisfactory is now unsatisfactory.

(Mr Taylor) Could I just elaborate the point behind my question which was obviously that satisfactory is the fourth grade on a seven point scale. If there were no distinction between a grade 1 and a grade 4, then obviously it would entirely inappropriate for us to suggest that people could do better. The Chairman introduced the concept of the gold standard and a gold standard in the Olympic games is given to the person who comes first, the grade 1. That is our gold standard. The person who comes fourth in the Olympic games does not even get a medal. So, plainly there is room to do better and it seems to me actually that it is logically entirely clear that satisfactory is not good because good is the third point of that same scale. So, all we are talking about is raising aspirations and expectations. This is not to punish teachers. It is not to say that a school that has satisfactory teaching throughout deserves to be punished, re-inspected or in any other way told it is not doing a competent job, but it is to raise sights and to raise expectations. Just as you would not be happy to be graded 4 on seven point scale because you would want to do better, we hope all schools and colleges will feel exactly the same.

So effectively you are saying that, in all walks of life from now, everybody has to become an Olympic gold medal winner rather than just doing the job well.

(Mr Bell) May I come in on that as well because I think it is a fact of our lives whether it is the services we use or what we purchase. Our expectations are greater and greater than they have ever been and so they should be greater. We are not arguing that satisfactory then somehow becomes unsatisfactory. We are not arguing that. We are raising the question about heightening their aspirations for the education system and for those who work in the education system and that seems to be entirely reasonable. It is entirely reasonable to raise that question. We all want to do better not just for the children who are in the system now but for those who are coming into the system in the future.

With respect, there does seem to be a contradiction in what you are saying because if satisfactory at number four on a seven point scale is now unsatisfactory, why not change the name and change the label and move satisfactory up to point three. It just seems so perverse to say it is satisfactory but we are not going to accept that because it is not good enough.

(Mr Bell) I think we have to be very clear about. I am not saying that satisfactory becomes unsatisfactory. What we have said is that we have seen very significant improvements in the education system and that those which are satisfactory will I am sure want to become better. That is the challenge. How can we make the satisfactory teacher in our schools which, as we have said, has met the acceptable threshold, good or better? That seems to be a very sensible question to ask.

Chairman

What the Committee is trying to tease out is, by putting this question mark satisfactory, have you not made yourself very vulnerable to the sort of criticisms that come from senior academics like Professor Fitzgibbons at Durham University who all along has said that you can go in and make these inspections and you make them look as thought they are some sort of science based on firm principles but it is very intuitive, it is very subjective and, by coming back and saying, A Well, satisfactory may not mean satisfactory@ , you play right into the hands of the critics like Professor Fitzgibbons who say, A Well, it is all touchy-feeley and subjective in the first place. So, how can you then defend your standards if you yourself have said that the satisfactory one is not as good as you thought it might be?

(Mr Bell) I think we just need to separate points.

You are aware of Professor Fitzgibbons?

(Mr Bell) I am very aware of Professor Fitzgibbons= s comments about inspection. As Elizabeth said in her remarks in response to Ms Munn, we take great care to ensure the quality of inspection process and we do track standards over time. That is one thing. It seems to me to be a separate issue to say, outside the methodology of inspection, what do we need to do next to improve the quality of education? That is nothing about changing the judgments or anything like that, it is actually reporting accurately that we found more and more teaching that is good and we want the satisfactory teaching. We have raised the question that we want the satisfactory teaching to be better. It does not seem to me that that impacts at all on the question of methodology.

(Mr Taylor) Could I just add one point which is that we do not just use these terms. In the handbooks that accompany the framework for inspection, we spell out what we mean. Teaching has a number of criteria and, for each of those criteria, there is a set of descriptors. We show what we mean by satisfactory quality, quality that is acceptable. We also show that, in order to be excellent, certain other characteristics have to come into the work. If that is not our purpose in raising standards and raising expectations and indeed bringing about improvements through inspection, then obviously we are in the wrong business. I am convinced that that is precisely what we must do. We must set out - and we have set out clearly and consistently over the years in these detailed handbooks for inspection which are available to all schools, everybody being inspected - what we mean by satisfactory and what we mean by good and what we mean by excellent in order that people can see, if they are not content to be only satisfactory, what they have to do to aspire to the higher grades.

Chairman: I think that has been a useful exchange. I want to move briefly to Secondary Education.

Jonathan Shaw

Just before we move into secondary school education, Mr Bell, would you be deliriously satisfied if the Secretary of State announced that he was going to abolish tests for 11 year olds?

(Mr Bell) No, I would not be.

You would not?

(Mr Bell) I would not be satisfied at all. I made a very strong point in the commentary to the annual report that we must never go back to a system where there was not good quality information available to parents and to others about what is happening in the education system. I believe that a combination of test/examination results made public and Ofsted reports has given greater transparency to the education system in this country than has ever been the case. So, I would be very, very opposed to no longer publishing test results or even no longer having tests.

But you have said that you do not want to see the targets scrapped and that that would give you satisfaction.

(Mr Bell) No, I did not say that. If I might just comment a little further about targets.

You did not join the chorus against tests as was reported in the TES?

(Mr Bell) I am sure the TES always reports what I say accurately, but I would perhaps draw your attention to where I made those remarks. I made those remarks in a speech to the City of York Education Conference and I made the point about tests that I have just made very strongly but I also made the point about targets. It was absolutely right to set targets to raise aspirations and achievement. Take the Key Stage 2 targets for example. We had a situation four or five years ago where just under 60 per cent of children were achieving the Level 4 standard. It seems to me absolutely right that we raised our aspirations and set targets to do better. It was absolutely right that we did that and I stand by the targets. The comments that I made a couple of weeks ago however were that, in some places, targets have acted more as a demotivator rather than a motivator and, just concentrating on the national targets and saying that we all have to do better does not really take you much further. What you have to do then is to say, what are the particular strategies and processes that go on at individual school level to make that happen? I cited in my opening remarks that we published a report on good assessment practices in secondary schools last week and there you saw some very good examples of the practical use that can be made of targets at the classroom level, the individual pupil level, to help to raise attainment. So, it is important to have targets and it is important to have tests, but we always have to be careful that they do not act then as a demotivator and end up, as I said in my remarks in York, not being the tool of improvement, but actually end up just being dismissed by people who do not take them seriously.

You said, A The one thing that distresses me is that ministers are still set on the national targets for 2004. It defies commonsense.@

(Mr Bell) I do not recall saying that it defies commonsense. I think I was reported as saying things that I have never said. I have never said publically that the targets should not be there. What I have said - and I think it is fair to say what Ofsted said last year when it published its reports on the literacy and numeracy targets - is that it is a very tall order to achieve the targets that have been set for 11 year olds in 2004 if you look at how the test results have plateau= ed for the last two or three years. That was the point that I made and I think it is an important one.

I am sure we can all appreciate that saying A a very tall order@ would be very easily become misconstrued into A it defies commonsense@ . Do you think that the targets have any impact on the transition from primary to secondary school? You have highlighted concerns in your report around this age and you say that, whilst there do not seem to be any problems in the independent sector, certainly in the State sector, not all schools are managing that transition satisfactorily and obviously we have the Key Stage 3 strategy in place now which I will come onto in a minute. Do you think that the focus in primary schools on those targets somehow distracts from what you could argue is more important to ensure that the transition from primary to secondary is more successful?

(Mr Bell) Perhaps I could ask David to come in on the transition point more generally in a moment and I could just comment on the targets issue. I thought that the Secretary of State made a very useful point a week-and-a-half/couple of weeks ago when he said of course that, if you get to the Level 4 achievement at age 11, that can set you up very effectively for secondary education. In other words, you can become more confident at doing well at secondary school because you have those basic literacy and numeracy skills. I think that is a very important point to make and that is why it was really vital that we had high aspirations for more and more children achieving that level. I think where you have to always be cautious is to ensure that that Level 4 does represent, as it were, a grounded achievement. In other words, that the progress that children make by the age of 11 is such that they will make an effective start to secondary school. One of the comments that I also made in my City of York lecture was that whilst people will focus on people= s literacy levels at Year 6 because of the national tests, what you really should be doing and what good schools always do is build that literacy ability from the beginning and do not just leave it, as it were, to the last minute to bring children up to a particular level. So, I think it is an important aspiration to ensure that children achieve Level 4 but it should not just be a last minute, as it were, dash to the line. It has to be built on previous experience and proper learning earlier. I think that David might want to talk about the transition point.

(Mr Taylor) If I may just add a word or two, please. I am grateful to Jonathan Shaw for mentioning our report Making the Change, which really highlighted a number of things that have to be right if secondary schools are to make an effective transfer for those pupils and what we were particularly keen to stress was that that transition depends on, above everything else, effective communication and that is communication between staff at primary schools and those at secondary schools in the records that are transmitted and, in particular, over what the pupils can do and know by the age of 11 across the whole curriculum because one of the problems of focusing only on Level 4 and Key Stage 2 tests in English and mathematics is the risk that the breadth of the curriculum, which is the subject of another of our reports on Primary Education, is constrained and recently that has been a theme that some of the papers have picked up, that if Year 6 does become what David called a mad dash for the line, one of the effects is that that breadth of curriculum is squeezed out and consequently there is a real danger that when teachers try to introduce the secondary curriculum across the big range of subjects that pupils have to face with different teachers of course, then they simply will have lost out on that subject knowledge. I am not suggesting we ought to have standard tests in all subjects at the end of Key Stage 2, but it is important that information about pupils= achievements in those subjects is passed on. That is a question about curriculum. Also about curriculum is the business of access and access to the secondary curriculum depends essentially on achieving good standards in the basic skills. Reading, writing and arithmetic if you like are things that are tested through Key Stage 2. So, it is not a separate issue. If we do not get all our pupils or as many as we possibly can up to that Level 4 which we would still say is a modest, possibly even only a satisfactory level, for 11 year olds, then those children are disenfranchised from the whole secondary curriculum because they cannot make sense of the materials, of the teaching and of the words that are used. So, the Key Stage 3 strategy, which Jonathan mentioned, then has to play catch-up and spend a lot of its time doing things which should have been done before those pupils ever got through the gates into a secondary school.

So do you think that the barriers to implementing a successful Key Stage 3 strategy exist in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 1? Is that what you are effectively saying?

(Mr Taylor) I think we have to make absolutely certain that the fundamentals, when we talk both in the basic skills that I was talking about and in the breadth of the curriculum, are set down by the end of primary schooling. Otherwise, secondary schools have an impossible job. We have seen tremendous improvements in Primary Education and primary science - there have been big success stories seen internationally - but, of recent years, we have seen worrying signs that some of the ambitions for the primary curriculum that were enshrined in the education format until 1988 are at risk from an excessively narrow concentration in some schools at some stages of Primary Education. What we need to do is make sure that all subjects within the primary curriculum are equally committed both to ensuring a basic foundation within their own subject and doing their part to reinforce the learning of basic language literacy and numeracy. That is absolutely vital otherwise Key Stage 3 strategy just has too much to do.

(Mr Bell) If I might add - and you might want to come on to this - that we did identify other issues about the Key Stage 3 strategy that can make it succeed or fail.

I wanted to ask you a little about ICT. You have highlighted concerns in ICT. I think that sometimes there is a concern that ICT is taught in isolation whereas it should be part of the broader curriculum, so that when pupils are learning a particular area of history, they are using ICT and that, rather than being a bolt-on, it will be an integral part of the learning process. The Government in the 14-19 White Paper said that they want youngsters to develop ICT skills through other subjects and that, in time, ICT would not be a core strategy subject. Are you concerned about?

(Mr Bell) It is a very interesting issue. One of the observations I would make is that schools are much better equipped now in ICT terms than they have ever been before and there has been a very substantial investment in ICT. However, as the annual report points out, interestingly, that is not always translated into good quality teaching and learning and you may think there is an interesting question to pursue further as to why it is that we have that investment in the kit, as it were, but we have not quite made it happen in terms of effective teaching and learning and, if you look at the teaching by subject data in the annual report, you will see that, to some extent, the unsatisfactory or poor teaching in ICT is greater than it is in other subjects. I think you have highlighted a real dilemma for primary schools in particular - and we will come to 14-19 in a minute - regarding grounding the basics in ICT. More and more schools that I visit, including one yesterday interestingly, have put into place an ICT suite and again the investment in hardware has allowed quite a number of schools to do that. So, you have an ICT suite where you may have enough computers for every child in the class to participate in the use of interactive Y-board which allows the teacher to teach quite effectively. I also would add that more and more schools are now doing discrete ICT lessons. I think that is a good thing if it ensures that children have the basic skills in ICT because I think we can all recall the early days of ICT where children were expected to do all sorts of things but actually did not know how to find their way around a keyboard to use all the functions of the computer. So, that is important but it is not enough for reasons that you have cited because actually it is very important that ICT is then applied as a tool to ensure that children learn effectively, whether it is in history, geography, science or whatever. I think it is about getting that balance right between the basic skills in ICT, if I might use that terminology, but also applying that elsewhere. I actually think that the same principle will then apply as you go forward through into Secondary Education. In fact, actually you may argue that children need to have more and more of the skills developed, but actually the real key is to use ICT as a tool.

(Mr Taylor) IT or ICT as a subject has changed more in 20 years than the subject I used to teach has changed in 2000 years! That was maths. We use the word A basic@ ; in 1983, much of the IT curriculum was about learning how to programme in basic. Who would construct an IT curriculum on learning how to programme in basic now? Nobody. Most of the applications of ICT through the computer system were not even heard of in 1983. So, there is a real challenge to what the body of knowledge which is ICT is and what the content of it as a subject, a discipline, is. The focus and the mood towards talking about skills and applications and tools is entirely consistent with exactly how the industry has gone and with the whole way in which we use and think about ICT. So, it seems to me that the Government are spot on in this case. If we can make sure that those skills are understood and mastered by the age of 14, such that pupils can apply them across a range of curricula applications, that has to be the way to go.

What has your assessment been of the impact of different types of schools in terms of raising standards? One of the things which this Committee is looking at is the issue of specialist schools. You do not refer greatly to it in your report. You mention it but it does not feature that strongly. Have you seen specialist schools improving standards?

(Mr Bell) The first and perhaps most obvious point to make is that we have to inspect schools as we find them against the framework. It is an obvious point but it is an important point to emphasise that it is really terribly important that inspectors do not go into schools with a pre-conception of whether the school is good or not because it is a specialist school. We have to base our inspection evidence on what we find. As far as different types of schools are concerned, we have reported previously - I know that colleagues came in front of this Committee to talk about specialist schools - and we have highlighted some of the benefits that specialist status has brought schools. We did also however highlight that you cannot argue for a massive differential in achievement between specialist schools and other schools and I think that is widely accepted, but there are other benefits that specialist status has brought and we have reported on those over the past months.

The Government have said two things recently: first of all that they want every school to be a specialist school, but they have also said that schools in the club 25, those getting less than 25 per cent of A to Cs, will not qualify for specialist school status. What is your assessment on that? Is that going to hold certain schools back from actually getting out of that 25 per cent because of the extra investment that it brings? Do you see a contradiction there? Is it just a force from the Department on to local education authorities particularly to focus on this area?

(Mr Bell) I think the issue about all schools being specialist schools is clearly a matter of policy, but one of the advantages that one might see, as we have highlighted in specialist schools to date, is that sense of mission and that sense of being able to really shape what they want to do and offer a particular kind of fare to the students and so on. One can see that specialist status brings that about but, as I have said on previous occasions, you do not need specialist status to do that. Lots of schools can bring about a sense of renewed identity without specialist status. I think your point about those schools that may not be eligible for specialist status is a genuinely difficult point because those schools that you describe of course range in quality from those that Ofsted would judge to be requiring special measures and one would say that if a school is in special measures, it has enough to be getting on with without worrying about specialist status C

There is quite a difference between special measures and 25 per cent A to Cs, is it not?

(Mr Bell) Yes, but I am commenting on that 25 per cent because you may have some schools, as I say, that are at one end of the extreme where in special measures they have to maintain the focus of improving. There are other schools in that category that, yes, although attainment may be low, recent inspection evidence would suggest that they are doing a good job in all sorts of different ways. I think that underpinning your question was the point, could specialist status act as an additional lever to improve what is going on in the school? Again, I think that is a debatable question. I would however be very anxious about any suggestion that specialist status would act as a panacea. I think we have to be very careful about assuming that if you just gave this school specialist status, all would be well because we do know that there is a range of performance within specialist schools as there is in all categories of schools.

Chairman

Chief Inspector, may I briefly bring you back on to secondary schools to focus on an area of your report that seems to be missing in one sense and that is, we have had evidence to this Committee and certainly evidence that we have picked up both in New Zealand and in our week in Birmingham that many people do think we over- test and the damaging side to that is that the quality of teaching and learning suffers because of that. I am reminded of that when we were talking recently about how the independent sector is extremely good at taking young people and bringing them through and glossing up their A levels in order that that they can get into research-rich universities. However, that is a lot of evidence coming that, while the independent sector may be very good at getting them three stunning A levels, there is a question mark over the quality of education that then prepares them to go on and benefit from higher education. The sort of voices we were getting when we were away from this country in New Zealand but also as we went round the country and evidence here was that there is a downside and a very damaging downside to over-testing because it does put an emphasis on always getting a mark that is going to add to the overall status of the school and there is damage to individual students= quality of education.

(Mr Bell) I think that David very usefully answered that earlier when he was commenting on Key Stage 2. You always have to be anxious that a narrowing of the curriculum will affect the quality of education. One might argue that one manifestation of the narrowing of the curriculum is an over-concentration on testing. I think that schools need to be careful. We can talk about this at this sort of national level but, when you go to individual schools, you just find lots of schools where people are making very intelligent use of testing and assessment and they do not see it as burdensome and I think that is a really important point. You cannot go to every school in the country and say that people are overwhelmed by tests. I think that what people are increasingly doing is making more intelligent use of the data that they have about pupil performance and we cited in our report - and I do think it is an important report- last week in Good Practice and Assessment in Secondary Schools some really interesting examples of where students and progress was much more carefully monitored and, on the basis of that good-quality data, there was a very interesting dialogue taking place between the student and the teachers and the parents. That is really intelligent use of performance data. Nobody could argue in favour of over-testing, of course you could not argue in favour of that, but it is about using that information intelligently that makes all the difference.

(Mr Taylor) One obvious link is between the tests themselves and the effect they have on those who do not do well in them. It comes back to our discussion at the beginning about what is good enough. All our evidence suggests - and this is the point I was making to Mr Shaw about transition - that it was linked on good data well used. The problem of course with testing is that, if you are on the wrong end, as it were, and you are always coming out at the bottom of the scale, you lose motivation, you become disaffected and you feel you are a failure and therefore the downside of testing, if not handled as sensitively and carefully as it can be, is that you have not answered the needs of those pupils and all you have done is exposed the weaknesses in their knowledge. So, unless you have that link between the testing process and really sensitive teacher follow up in terms of finding courses and finding remedial action, what will actually make those pupils not feel like failures but feel like people who have their own needs generally recognised and catered for, then you really do have a significant problem and it is a worsening problem. I am sure that it is strongly linked in our evidence to some of the things that start to go wrong in Key Stage 3 where people have been told that boys, working class boys particularly, are the failures of the system. Unless we can actually tackle that side of it, then the testing regime itself can have casualties and I think we need to keep saying that.

Interestingly enough, Chief Inspector, what I did not pick up in your report was that there was any downside to testing and it is interesting that, from what you and David Taylor have said, you are sensitive to this. I would have expected something more because when you get out of the sector - it was really refreshing when we were out of the country looking back on our own experience - there are a number of people saying that there are inevitable consequences of testing at ages 7 and 11 and 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 and 18. To most educational systems that are not ours, it seems crazy. Then to publish most of these tests so that everybody knows what the level is, the downside is worrying.

(Mr Bell) I would say that we made quite a lot of some of the students who do not achieve well in tests within our report and I can cite two examples. I highlighted in my commentary those students, particularly boys, getting to the age of 11 and not achieving the appropriate level and then, in a sense, that being exacerbated by the time we look again at their achievement at 14.

But I would presume that a good teacher in term in school would always be able to know when a child is not performing as well as it might and be able to take corrective action. They do not have to have national and published tests in order to do that as a good teacher.

(Mr Bell) However, one of the things I would argue is that it helps to raise our aspirations if we know. One of the issues one could argue is that these sorts of problems have gone not unrecognised at the individual school level, of course I would agree with you that individual teachers would want to be sensitive and provide the right support, and maybe being able to highlight the scale of the problem nationally helps policymakers and others to look at ways in which we might make things better. I think there is real value in highlighting those issues. The second example I was going to cite was in relation to our evidence on post-16 - and 14-19 but post-16 in particular - where we point out that, for some students, our education system really does not offer them the sorts of opportunities that they should have in comparison to others. So, I think we have been really quite robust in this report in highlighting those students who do not do as well out of the system as others and I think that is an important role for Ofsted. As David said, we have to keep highlighting where those areas exist in order that we can focus attention on them.

Mr Chaytor

You have defended the test on the argument that the issue is the use of the test and not the test itself and that the use of the test is important for individual progress, but can I just ask about the publication of test results and whether you defend that in the same way, that it is the publication of test results for a whole school and how they are used by the school that is important, or do you not think there is a separate issue about the publication of raw test scores for schools that, through their geographical location, means they are always serving communities in very difficult circumstances?

(Mr Bell) Just picking up on your first point, I think it is possible and it is right that you can see tests serving the purpose of public accountability on the one hand and, on the other hand, use that information within the confines of the school to direct particular strategies to help individual pupils. So, these two purposes of test results seem to me not to be incompatible. I would only repeat what I said earlier. I think it would be a dreadfully retrograde step for the education system in this country to stop making available information about the performance of individual schools because I think that has been very important in giving greater transparency for the education system. It is also important to make the point that test results are not the only indicator of what makes a good school and I think the sales pitch, as it were, for Ofsted here is that Ofsted inspection reports will give you a more rounded picture of the achievements of a school. Attainment of pupils is one very important part of what goes on in a school and I can only say that we know that hundreds of thousands of parents make use of the information that is published by Ofsted and I am sure they set that alongside the information they have about test results and also I am sure that they go and visit schools to find out what they are like for themselves. I think it is that combination of information that helps to keep the system open and transparent.

Do you think those hundreds of thousands of parents are representative of the parent body as a whole?

(Mr Bell) Do not underestimate the extent to which Ofsted reports are talked about and used in schools and in all sorts of different places.

Mr Pollard: They are in estate agents= windows as well.

Chairman

What is your evidence for that?

(Mr Bell) Interestingly, we did a survey a little while ago looking at brand recognition and Ofsted is one of the most widely known brands in the public sector.

With great respect to you, that is different from saying that you have done a survey which shows that parents looking for a school for their children systematically look at schools.

(Mr Bell) We do know, in terms of our data, that there is significant use of the website for Ofsted reports. In fact, I can give you a specific example of that. We know that 80 per cent of people who use the Ofsted website will have the reports home page as their point of entry. In other words, people do really know where the evidence and information lies about school performance and they go to Ofsted reports.

(Miss Passmore) I think it is 0.5 million hits a week on the reports website.

Does that not indicate that certain sections of parents are using that information and that it may not be being used by a large number of other parents of a different social and economic background?

(Miss Passmore) The website is of course but one source of information for parents and I think that that extent does show that a very large number of people are using it, but of course it is a legal requirement on all schools to make available to every parent at the school a summary of the inspection report and that these are made available to parents who are interested in finding out about a school before considering which to send their child to. So, with the combination of that legal requirement to make the reports available and having them available, I think that a lot of people do make use of them.

Mr Chaytor

Just one further point on the publication. This year saw the first publication of value-added scores in secondary schools; what is your view of that and do you think that, in time, that should become more prominent than the raw scores?

(Mr Bell) I seem to recall a discussion maybe a few years ago when people were saying, A Just wait until we get the value-added data and all will be well. We will really know what is going on.@ I think that, to some extent, the value-added data does what all data does. Yes, it is important but it actually raises other questions. It does not give you, as it were, the final answer about whether a school is good or bad. I think it adds to that richness of data and I think it will, over time, be utilised and more and more people will become comfortable with what it means, but I think it is not going to give us, as it were, the answer to whether a school is a good or bad school.

Paul Holmes

There has been a lot of concern in the last year or two about the dip in attainment when you get the transfer come Year 6 into Year 7. What do you think from your inspections is the key reason for that dip?

(Mr Bell) That was picked up in our report on transition from primary to secondary school. Some of it is to do with what we have discussed already. As David suggested, not making adequate use of the data in order that we know where children are when they start secondary school. We found in our report that the vast majority of pupils settle well socially into secondary school. So, primary and secondary schools together have done much to make that transition easier than it has been previously. One of the things that I think was most striking in our inspection evidence was where students were observed being taught in Year 6 classes and then the same students were being observed taught in Year 7 classes. There was evidence that the challenge and the pace and the expectation in Year 6 was greater than it was in Year 7 and actually, in some ways, pupil were standing still at Year 7 and I think that only reinforces the point David made about good data because if you understand properly what a child is capable of, then you can ensure at Year 7 that they make a flying start at secondary school. I think that is a really important point. We have also found in our report that you will find a greater preponderance of non-subject specialist teaching in the early years of Key Stage 3 and I pointed out when we launched the report last year that one can understand, as it were, the rationale of a secondary school saying, A We can afford to do that at the bottom end of Key Stage 3 because we want our subject specialism and, where we have gaps, let us put them at the bottom of Key Stage 3.@ I felt that might be a short-sighted approach if you find that the quality of teaching is not quite as good as it might be because it may mean that children are not getting that start that they should in secondary school. I think there is a variety of factors there and it may be that David will want to add to that.

How far will you in future reports try to evaluate the other reasons that have been put forward? For example, you comment in the report that, in independent schools, they do not seem to have the same dip, but is that, for example, because they have far smaller class sizes than State secondary schools do or how far could it be attributed to the teaching to the test at Key Stage 2 that a number of people are saying just dominates Year 6 at the expense of lots of other things in the curriculum whereas then they come into Year 7 and they have nine different specialist teachers for nine different subjects and that actually perhaps the dip is that they are returning to their real current level of ability rather than being hot-housed in Year 6?

(Mr Taylor) That is an interesting point. We have not done detailed work on the whole independent sector because a large part of that is inspected by the independent and public schools inspectorate, but there are a number of characteristics which are important. One is that a large element of the independent sector is all through schools. In other words the junior school and the senior school are linked very closely and therefore transfer, for at least a large proportion of pupils, is much more straightforward and there is good dialogue between teachers who know each other and work together in Years 6 and 7. The second thing is that a large number of independent schools, and particularly the best known ones, tend to have a transfer at the end of Year 8, 13 year olds rather than 11 year olds, so that they may actually have considerable transition issues around what happens to those pupils in Years 9 and 10 but they are not in Year 6 and 7 because they are still part of a progression. Interestingly, the same is true of middle schools which of course are a shrinking breed but which some of us still have more than sneaking admiration for because they provided a kind of continuity across these difficult middle years between 9 and 13 but maybe again stored up similar challenges in Years 9 and 10. So, what we can see is that patterns of transfer are quite important here. It is not a question necessarily of state versus independent but about ages and stages of transfer. Equally, I am sure that things you refer to about the closeness of teaching interest that you can have in very small classes is true of some schools but again analysis does not show huge variations in the size of classes across the independent sector and the maintained sector, not such that we can have confidence that that is the only reason. Anyway, plenty of pupils in independent schools have trouble with transfer as well because although we have commented, as David says, on how well schools have worked on the social aspects of transfer, it is still for many pupils, from what they say and write, an enormously traumatic event and the kind of tales of woe you hear about people getting lost and bullied and feeling that they are alone in a big sea of unfamiliar faces are legion and I am absolutely certain that we need more and better efforts to help the transition from that standpoint.

Chairman: Can I move on now to early years and nursery schools with Val Davey?

Valerie Davey

If it is true - and as a former secondary school teacher I thought it was - that you need good primary school teaching before you move into secondary then, surely, it is even more fundamental that we need good pre-school work for the primary schools to achieve. Is it not, perhaps, belated that Ofsted has now taken over the whole of the childcare, daycare sector in this country?

(Mr Bell) Mr Chairman, I am delighted to hear Valerie Davey= s advocacy of Ofsted= s work in this area. My own personal view is that there is a lot there, that we have seen this as a somewhat neglected part of our education - I define A education@ in a broader sense - system. I think that one of the virtues of Ofsted taking over this work is that it will give it a prominence that it deserves. I said in my opening remarks that we are just coming to the end of the transitional inspections so we are not really going to be in a position to talk too much at this stage about all that we found, and, of course, as I also suggested in my opening remarks, as we move to having quality gradings added to the inspection process we will have even better evidence of the quality of what goes on. I absolutely agree that this is a very good opportunity, given Ofsted= s national remit, to be able to comment with some authority on early years and childcare, yes.

I do appreciate that this is transitional and your report is coming out later this month in this area. Given the huge diversity, both of provision and settings, that you are finding, do you think that you (a) have got the flexibility of staff and understanding of that and (b) will be able to come up with some very generic quality kite-markings for this diversity?

(Mr Bell) Mr Chairman, can I bring in Maurice Smith, the Acting Director of Early Years?

Chairman

We would be delighted to hear from Mr Smith.

(Mr Smith) Thank you, Chairman. In relation to the two questions, in terms of flexibility I think the size of our work force which David referred to earlier does give us that flexibility. We have, if you like, a two-tier element to that workforce of inspectors who number over 1,000. There is a separate tier that can inspect the funded nursery education settings. Not all of our childcare inspectors can inspect the funded nursery education settings. Those inspectors have to pass an entrance position in terms of their experience and previous work, but following additional training they are formally assessed in order to be able to carry out that work. So I think, in terms of flexibility, the scale of the operation gives Ofsted that opportunity which I suggest may not have been the case when it was dealt with by 150 separate local authorities. You would not have had that scale. Could you repeat the second part of your question?

Valerie Davey

The second one was, given this diversity, have you got the indication at this stage that there will be some generic kite-marking in quality terms that you will be able to give across the whole sector?

(Mr Smith) Thank you. We have faced a position from September 2001 until a week on Friday where we have only made judgments with regard to what we term compliance: does the setting meet the standards or not? If it does, fine; if it does not we have used the transitional period to set actions for those settings to try and meet the standards. With effect from the Tuesday after that we bring in a very straightforward, not a seven-point scale but a three-point scale which includes the descriptor of A satisfactory@ . Effectively what we will be saying is where a previous A compliant@ or A not compliant@ hits the mark of A satisfactory@ and A unsatisfactory@ , we shall be bringing in a higher mark of A good@ . On the same principles that were discussed earlier in the Committee we hope that that will play a part in raising the standards and quality of childcare and early years education in the system.

Could I ask, perhaps again directly to Mr Smith, the Government has clearly put store by the Early Excellence Centres as a means of raising quality throughout the sector. It would appear from your report so far, or from the work you have done, that they are falling short, perhaps, of providing high quality nursery education across all areas of learning in the foundation stage. That seems a fairly damming statement. Is that really the inference you are drawing at this stage?

(Mr Bell) Early Excellence Centres, I think, established on a very sound premise that you want to have available on the same site a range of services for young children and their families. I think that is an admirable approach. However, they are actually quite complex institutions precisely for that reason. I think there is a real test here of those that lead and manage Early Excellence Centres, that they continue to focus on the quality of the education being provided to the children and do not allow themselves to be diverted into the other activities. I do not want that to be characterised as it is an either/or - you either focus on the education or you focus on all those other supporting elements. Clearly, in a good Early Excellence Centre, and we have reported on some good practice and inspected some good institutions, the leadership gets that right, but it is not straightforward and it is not simple. It also, I think, has raised quite interesting issues for us in how we go about inspecting them, because there was, I think, an aspiration that you could have a single inspection model that would encompass everything going on in an early years setting or in an Early Excellence Centre, and of course it is not that straightforward because there are elements of it that are regulatory. In other words, if an Early Excellence Centre is running childcare it then, by law, has to be regulated according to the standards that Maurice described. However, of course, if it is providing education it then has to be inspected against the education standards, if I can use that terminology in this context. So it is not straightforward and it is not easy. I think that our report rightly highlighted the value of early intervention, as you have described, but I just sounded a note of caution: this is not straightforward, it is quite complex.

I welcome that response. Could I just pick up one other thing before we go on, presumably, from even the primary sector. One of you mentioned the amazing development which we have now got at primary level in science. Can someone explain why we are now doing so well in science and why that seems overall to be making such a dramatic leap forward, and why it is not happening in the other two main areas?

(Mr Bell) I will bring David in in a moment. I am sure my long-standing colleagues would be far too modest to say it but I think that the historic role of HMI was very important in this respect, because there were reports - and I remember being on the receiving end of reports from the late 1970s onwards - identifying the weaknesses in primary science and the fact that in many schools there would be no science taught at all except the ubiquitous nature studies, as I recall. Often the science education would be entirely dependent on having expertise within the system. Of course, the general background of primary teachers often did not have a science bias. So you have a number of things together that actually meant that science education was not given a lot of priority. Of course, on the back of that then we had the National Curriculum and the requirements to have primary school science. Alongside that, I think, went a very effective staff development programme, so that many primary teachers that previously had no confidence in science became more confident about teaching science. So I think there is a long story to tell here about why primary science has improved. David may want to add to that.

(Mr Taylor) Simply to say, if I may, that I doubt whether you will find the word A amazing@ in the transcript. However, I certainly did report on it as a success story and also in international terms. I think a lot of the factors that David was talking about are here relevant, that some other countries have certainly not had the focus on primary science that we have had over a number of years. Elizabeth is a scientist so might well be able to add.

(Miss Passmore) I think it was one of those rather perverse situations that because so few primary teachers had the sort of science background that David has referred to, when the training was made available people attended and were very keen and enthusiastic - the 20-day courses, for example - and there has also been an extremely strong influence in developing primary science from the Association of Science Education. That work stemming from the 1980s onwards has both stimulated it then and continues to provide extremely good support to primary teachers now.

Valerie Davey: It is good to hear a success story. Can we associate you with it and say a personal thank you for all the work you have done.

Chairman: Can I remind the Committee that this is National Science Week. Those of us who were at the launch of National Science Week at the Science Museum last Thursday evening were troubled to hear, though, a leading head of a comprehensive school say that she had wonderful pupils who were really dedicated to science but at the secondary level the curriculum in her view is so awful that it puts people off science. What on earth are we going to do about it when some very good head teachers believe that the science curriculum deadens rather that stimulates science in our schools? Is that opinion shared by any of the inspectors? Elizabeth?

Jonathan Shaw

You are leaving; you can say what you want now!

(Mr Bell) Not for a couple of weeks.

(Miss Passmore) We have talked about transition from primary to secondary and one of the particular down-sides that there has been over this very good science in primary schools is that we have had too much of, and in some cases still do see, people going into secondary school and there being a bit of A We have got to start again@ - that sort of attitude. So we recognise there are some problems around but there is a lot of work, through the last year science year and the continuing work now, to try and make sure that we make it more interesting and more exciting and do not allow people to be put off. Some of the things I did as a science teacher I would not be allowed to do now; they would not be regarded as safe under some of our current arrangements, but we have got to find ways of doing more exciting things to keep people engaged.

Chairman

I take it you are agreeing with that head teacher= s view?

(Miss Passmore) There are things that could be done to make it more exciting for more pupils.

Mr Turner

I never had the opportunity to cut up sheep eyeballs but I understand that is very popular! When the National Care Standards were established they were, I think, pretty good from the point of view of improving aspirations as to the care of elderly people but pretty disastrous in terms of the physical standards that they set. The consequence was that the Secretary of State has withdrawn them for existing homes. Now, 40,000 of the 50,000 existing providers whom you have inspected required action and for some number - which for some reason you do not report - you set conditions as to their continuation as early years providers. Firstly, what is the number of those for whom you set conditions? Secondly, how much of that relates broadly to the physical conditions of the provision?

(Mr Smith) Thank you, Mr Turner. Mr Chairman, if I may just as a contextual remark before I comment say that we have moved some way in time since the report was written and the report covers the period up until September 2002. I am able to bring with me today, as you would expect, the evidence right bang up to 28 February 2003. It is correct to say - and it was correct to say at the time up to that point - that of those settings that were inspected eight out of ten, or four out of five, were set actions and/or conditions. That is excluding the condition that every setting has, which is about the numbers and ages of children, because we discount that, if you like. Up until 28 February the proportion of settings that are set actions and conditions has reduced. We can speculate about why that would be but we do not have any particular evidence. However, it may be that settings are more familiar with the standards and, as the programme has developed, they would then gain more knowledge and understanding of them and, if you like, bring themselves up to the standards, hence the improvement through inspection. It may be that our inspectors, having got over their initial enthusiasm, are taking a more measured approach. However, the current position is as follows: up until the date I have mentioned there are now 47 per cent of settings that have no actions or conditions; there are 5 per cent that have conditions only; 34 per cent that have actions only and 13 per cent (I think that adds up to 99 per cent, so some rounding there) that have actions and conditions. It is important, I think, to flesh out what this was about, really. It was a transitional programme to bring 100,000 different settings into one framework over an 18-month period. Actions are the lower tier, if you like, of those of our responsibilities. We can give you data and detail of the type and nature of those actions, etc. However, the amount of enforcement action that we have had to take has been very, very modest in number. So I think that Ofsted and the providers themselves have taken a measured and accepted approach towards the bringing in of the national standards. It has been different in the care homes sector, the adult sector - and fortunately we are not in that business - but here we have what we would consider to have been a sensible, balanced measured approach where a brand new set of standards comes in, 14 standards across five different types of settings, where, yes, still half require actions and conditions during this transitional period but in less than a quarter of a percentage point (0.25 per cent) have we had to take enforcement action.

Chairman: We are getting to the stage now where there is a lot of territory to cover and it is going to be quick questions and rather short, sharp answers. Okay?

Mr Turner

Two quick questions. One: what proportion were for reasons of physical compliance? Two: how many have closed or show signs of closure because of their inability - perhaps because they share facilities, for instance, in church halls - to meet physical standards?

(Mr Smith) In terms of the physical, of the actions which I have mentioned, safety and health are the most common, and we can break those down for you and send them to you, if you desire. In terms of closing down, as I say we have taken 234 enforcement actions, half of those have been against illegal childminders, the other half are against settings at a varying level, and, again, I can give you a written response.

Some will close down not because you have closed down but because they have accepted that they cannot meet the standards?

(Mr Smith) Yes.

Have you any indication of those numbers?

(Mr Smith) Yes. I cannot give them offhand, but I can send them to you. It is a very, very small number.

Ms Munn

Just trying to clarify some of the issues about the joint centres, where they are not just education but they are also social services, we have now got this new concept - we have had Early Excellence Centres - of Children Centres, which are supposed to be in areas to provide the range of services. Will the Children Centres be required to have qualified teachers within them in order to deliver the educational aspects of early years?

(Mr Smith) It depends on what they wish to provide. I was hoping to get in on the back of Valerie Davey= s question about Early Excellence Centres. We now have quite a range of different types of provision that do not neatly fit into either any Ofsted box or indeed into any regulatory box. So we have, as we have separated out in this report, Early Excellence Centres, we have Neighbourhood Nurseries, we have Sure Start Centres and there is a degree of re-badging going on, if you like, and we will have, as far as we are aware from the department, Children Centres. How they are inspected and against which regulatory system they are inspected - whether that be the care standards regulatory system or whether that be the Section 10 system will depend upon what they provide.

What you are saying at this point in time is that that is unclear. Will you be offering any advice to the Department for Education and Skills about that issue?

(Mr Smith) Yes, we are in constant touch with the department about this issue as it develops. You may be aware that we have brought in something called combined inspections, which inspect funded nursery provision in a setting where childcare is provided. So where two types of things are in the same setting, in order to reduce the burden of inspection on those settings we do the two things at the same time.

I think this is something we will want to come back to in the future. I think it is a very confusing area. I see we share a similar background as former assistant directors of social services, so I am well aware of the background to this. From this Committee= s point of view, it is understanding how Ofsted is both advising on this range of provision that is there and ensuring that the appropriate inspections are happening to make sure, as Val Davey said, that children in these particular settings are getting the best they can in terms of early education and experiences which will help them into school.

(Mr Bell) Chairman, just a very quick point. It is a good example of what you asked me about earlier, keeping in very close touch with the department. It is not easy, it is quite a technically complex area because there is different legislation applying, but we are on the case and I hope we will be able to come back to you with greater clarity in the future.

Chairman: The highly respected special advisers on our Early Years Report have flagged up to the Committee that they are concerned not just about the inspection process but these Children Centres are being rather taken over by the social services element and the educational part, which they always thought was very, very valuable and very, very important, is being squeezed out. Baroness Ashton is taking her eye off that ball or, indeed, if she is not taking her eye off the ball is kicking the wrong one. I do flag that up to you. There is supposed to be an important educational element in Children Centres. That has been flagged up by three senior experts on early years and we hope you take that away with you. I am now switching to Jonathan who has a very quick question on this before we rapidly move on.

Jonathan Shaw

There was a concern during the passage of the Care Standards Bill (now Act) that the early years staff, because they were being removed from local authority responsibility, would not be able to have the flexibility to respond to certain events within the community, to have good liaison with other staff, given that they are doing all these inspections. How do you respond to that?

(Mr Smith) I do not think that is borne out in practice. We have a member of staff on every early years childcare development partnership in all 150 different local authorities. They work differently now; they work from home - whether that brings them either closer or further away from the community, I think, is a matter to be decided in the future. I have no evidence and no reason to believe that by joining Ofsted as opposed to being part of local government B my view and the evidence will be that they provide a stronger and more consistent service.

Jonathan Shaw: Can I just place on the record my thanks to you and your staff for responding very promptly to an urgent situation in my constituency. It was very, very helpful.

Chairman: I hope you are all pleased with that. Well done. We are now going to move on, just to stop an insurrection on the Committee, on post-compulsory education, and Kerry Pollard will lead.

Mr Pollard

Thank you very much, Chairman. I am exceedingly grateful. You are performing satisfactorily this morning. Could I just say that in St Albans we have exceedingly satisfactory sixth forms but because of the change in funding recently, where the fund has gone to the LSC rather than the LEA, there is a frisson of worry spreading throughout our sixth forms. Have sixth forms got a future in comprehensive schools?

(Mr Bell) I am sure they have, Mr Pollard. One of the virtues, again, of the Ofsted approach is that we have now got capacity to inspect post-16 education in a number of settings. We can inspect post-16 education in schools - in fact, we have given greater weight to that in the inspection process - we can inspect post-16 education in sixth form colleges and, of course, we inspect post-16 further education colleges, as well. So we have got good evidence for what is happening now and I think we have highlighted that in the report. I would be very surprised if thriving sixth forms had anything other than a positive and rosy future.

Can I talk about further education now? Further education has not been delivering due to underfunding, undervaluing and a whole range of reasons. Are you confident that you are measuring the right things in further education? Are you clear that the rapid improvements that we do need in the country are possible in the further education sector?

(Mr Bell) Perhaps David and I can answer this round of questions together. I think the first and most important thing to say is that we have got this very powerful evidence now, after the first year= s round of inspection of colleges, and I think we say quite frankly in the report that we have got a mixed picture. You have rightly highlighted the importance of further education colleges in delivering the Government= s aspirations for 14-19 education. In fact, I think that is why this becomes an even more crucial issue; if there is going to be this wider and broader approach to 14-19 education everyone has to play their part. It does concern us, on the basis of our inspection evidence, that we have found levels of inadequacy in colleges in the first year of inspection. I think the early signs are that on our revisits to those colleges that have found to be inadequate we have seen steady improvements. So that is the good news part of it, but I do think that there remains a formidable challenge in improving standards more generally in FE colleges. David?

(Mr Taylor) Could I just pick up on, as it were, the middle bit of your question which was the bit about are we measuring the right things? My feeling here is that this is one of the reasons why the spotlight has been rather fierce, because - while not suggesting that before colleges were inspected by Ofsted the wrong things were being measured - the focus that we have put on the quality of management in managing the curriculum and in making sure that students are on the right courses and that they do not drop out without anybody knowing what is happening to them and so on, I believe, has been such as to ratchet up standards quite significantly and, also, to expose a number of colleges where the eye of senior management was on other things. That was partly because of the history post-incorporation, where putting posteriors on benches was a number one priority. It seems to me that one of the things we have been able to do is say A Yes, of course it is important that we keep students in the system and that we attract especially those with low skills into colleges@ . We are entirely with the colleges; we are not, in any way, penalising colleges which have wide access provision and numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds - very far from it. We are asking the question A Are they providing courses that actually work and meet those students= needs?@ At the moment, we are finding rather a disturbing amount of relatively unsatisfactory (to go back to the much-loved word) provision in terms of the quality of leadership and management and the quality of the curriculum. Therefore, the report is by no means entirely upbeat but, in response to your last point, I believe we are already seeing signs of improvement following from the change of inspection focus, and I think colleges have got a long way further to go.

Mr Pollard: One more quick point. I notice Elizabeth is five years younger than me, so clearly she has to retrain for something else. Could I encourage her to train as a plumber because we are exceedingly short of them? There is a science in plumbing these days. Chairman, thank you, I have finished.

Chairman: That was not a question. We will learn about Elizabeth= s future career intentions later. I am sure she is going to retrain properly for whatever she does.

Mr Chaytor

Just to pursue the point about the weaknesses you identified in colleges. Do you think there is a relationship between the weaknesses you have identified and the criticism you made of the lack of strategic planning in the post-16 area? If so, what is that relationship?

(Mr Taylor) I am absolutely certain there is a relationship but I am equally certain it is not a very simple one. So, yes, a complex relationship. I believe you are right: in terms of what we found from trying to map provision across areas, looking at colleges, training providers and school sixth forms - and, in one sense, this is not the fault of individual providers because it is a question of national strategy as well which has not given any one body locally until the LSC the responsibility for mapping across all that range - we have said, time and time again, it is not very well done. There is not much of a strategy, especially there is not much of a strategy that caters for those most at risk of dropping out of the system. Indeed, there is a considerable amount of overlap and duplication of courses where concentration and rationalisation would actually make better sense. So now, we hope, the Learning and Skills Council in its 47 local branches will be able to work very closely in convincing local partnerships to make sure there is a strategy, because it is badly needed.

It is now ten years since the incorporation of colleges; it is two years since the LSCs were established and you say, in your summary, that the LSCs are beginning to establish structures intended to bring about better and more collaborative planning. So how many more years before they actually do bring about better and more collaborative planning?

(Mr Taylor) It has been a slowish start but, actually, it is not even quite two years yet since the formal vesting date and a considerable amount of their energy in the first six months or so was simply getting up and running. Our report only goes up to last summer, so I think what we would see now is a picture that has moved on considerably. I think, however, we are still posing questions about whether the LSCs in all 47 regions are yet functioning at full throttle in terms of the strategic overview.

(Mr Bell) I think, if I may just add as well, the spotlight gets even harsher because we have got the 14-19 area-wide inspections. We have already had the 16-19 area-wide inspections but of course the 14-19 area-wide inspections are coming in in the context that you described LSCs and, of course, local LSCs have been given new responsibilities for coming forward with strategic plans. So this is an area where I do not think we should be saying five years from now we have got to get it up and running; this really has to happen pretty rapidly in the next two to five years.

In terms of your criticisms of the provision for young people who are least motivated and least likely to stay on beyond school, is that just a matter of strategic planning, or what else needs to be there to give them the same opportunities and the same quality as those who are high-flying, academic types?

(Mr Taylor) I think it is easy to say it is a matter of finding the right courses, taught as well as possible, but we recognise that is pretty challenging because these are pupils with a history of failure - the ones we were talking about earlier, in a sense - and I think the Association of Colleges is right to stress that we must have a system that recognises that colleges are dealing with some of these most difficult youngsters and trying to do a very hard job in finding courses that really meet their needs and keep them engaged. Some are succeeding. We are beginning, as the system develops, to be able to highlight good practice and hope that that will spread. However, it does seem to us that in the first place it is about making sure that in your portfolio of courses colleges are really looking at the needs for entry level and sub-level two courses and making sure that there are things there that actually meet those students when they come into the colleges.

The original inspection framework was revised slightly, as I recall, to take account of some of the criticisms that were made and the complexity of some of the larger colleges. Are you content now that the inspection guidelines are absolutely right for complex, large general further education colleges as well as for smaller sixth form colleges?

(Mr Taylor) We would, of course, never be fully satisfied with anything less than perfection, would we - grade one? I am not certain that we would give ourselves a grade one on that. I think the common inspection framework has stood the test pretty well. It is a simple framework. It clearly focuses on the needs of learners and, to the extent we have been able to adapt it already, that is the focus that we are trying to develop. When the first cycle of inspections is completed I am certain we will be looking for further improvements.

(Mr Bell) May I quickly add that one of the intriguing prospects for us, as inspectors, is to see how students move between settings in future. Clearly, that is one of the aspirations that the Government has laid out for 14-19 education; that you might see more diverse pathways - students spending some time in school, some time in college and so on. I think that will be well worth watching. Certainly from our perspective it raises interesting questions about how the system is held to account if students are being educated for more and more time in more and more settings.

Chairman

Would you like to get your hands on internal inspection of the LSCs? You have the LEAs. Is that not a ruthless logic, given the fact that we hear of differential performance already of LSCs up and down the country?

(Mr Bell) The 14-19 area-wide inspections will look at the work of the local LSCs and I think it is entirely appropriate that they do, because if we are saying, on the one hand, that there is concern over the strategic direction of 14-19 provision we cannot say, on the other, that we will not bother looking at the body that is responsible for it. I think it has got to be entirely reasonable for FE college principals and for secondary head teachers to recognise that not only is their performance going to be judged but so is the strategic body at the local level.

So that is within your remit at the moment?

(Mr Bell) That is what we are going to be looking at, yes.

(Mr Taylor) It is the local Learning and Skills Council which has the responsibility for producing an action plan in the light of an area inspection. Therefore, Government has already recognised that the focus of the issues which we raise in those area inspections is principally for that body to address, in partnership with the local authority and others.

Paul Holmes

One of the headline captions in your report, which the Minister says he picked up on, was that 20 per cent of colleges were offering inadequate teaching. However, you also, in the report (this is the 2001/02 inspection) said that 90 per cent of the teaching was satisfactory or better. So only 10 per cent of teaching in colleges is less than satisfactory but 20 per cent of colleges are inadequate. How do you reconcile the two figures?

(Mr Bell) That is not quite as you described it. Obviously, just under 20 per cent of colleges we declared as inadequate and, of course, the inadequacy judgment takes account of a whole range of factors through the inspections, but that can be, as David suggested, quality of leadership and management as well as quality of teaching, and so on. The other thing to say is that there are unfortunately in many of the colleges that were described as inadequate a very high concentration of inadequate and poor teaching. So I think it is important to make that point, that you do get a concentration of teaching. The other thing I would say is that in almost every college we did find areas of weakness in particular curriculum areas. I think there is a danger here of trying to say the story is not quite as it is; I think it does not do any of us any service to suggest that there are not difficulties within this sector but, on the other hand, as we also point out, there are things that are going well. If general further education colleges and all post-16 providers are going to play their part in terms of achieving the Government= s aspirations for 14-19 education, we really do have to improve the quality right across the sector.

You say it is a disservice to pretend there is no problem, but surely it is a disservice to exaggerate the problem as well? Chris Woodhead was widely criticised previously for wanting to over-exaggerate and get the headlines about how bad things were. Would one example be that when you inspect a college you look at 14 curriculum areas and if four of them are found to be inadequate you therefore say the college has got serious problems, it is inadequate, yet ten out of the 14 curriculum areas, which might be dealing with by far the largest number of students, are doing fine or doing excellent or whatever? So you are getting a headline that 20 per cent of colleges are inadequate but it is over-exaggerating the case.

(Mr Bell) I will bring David in as well, but just to comment on this: I would not in any sense say that I over-exaggerated this issue. The judgment about a college being inadequate is a very serious judgment - of course it is - and it is made on the basis of the evidence that the inspectors have gathered. I reported what we had found; I did not exaggerate it, I did not over-emphasise it. I did say, however, that it is a very striking finding, and given that so many young people are educated in those colleges I think it is actually quite a worrying finding.

(Mr Taylor) A quick point on the proportion of curriculum areas which are found unsatisfactory, since you mention figures. What the fairly elaborate discussions that led to the concordat (which is the technical term) between us and the adult learning inspectorate and the Department for Education and the Learning and Skills Councils came up with was that as a trigger for inspectors to consider a judgment of inadequacy, a third of curriculum areas seemed about right. Any college where more than a third of the curriculum areas were judged to be weak or unsatisfactory was prima facie a candidate for that inadequacy judgment. That had to be then supported by looking at the weight of weakness within those areas and, also, other features - the broader picture from the whole judgment of leadership and management. At the end of that, mostly, I think, we would be prepared to say we feel that from the standpoint of the consumer, or the parent or anybody looking at a college, a third is too many. If you were in those four curriculum areas you would not have much of an education. To focus really strongly on the nature of the provision that students get, which as I say is the real thrust of the common inspection framework, leads us to say that we have to put those students first. If they are in those poor areas then they are not getting an adequate education. If too many of them are like that, then we think that the inadequate judgment is a fair one and it triggers very supportive processes to work with colleges in order to bring them out of that category of inadequacy, as many of them are indeed now doing because re-inspection is proving that colleges once they have their attention drawn very closely to these weaknesses are able to address them and are making significant improvements, which is a good news story.

Paul Holmes: Given the penchant of the press and politicians for picking up on certain headline figures, do you not have a responsibility to emphasise the other side of the coin as well? So you could say that 90 per cent of teaching is satisfactory or better, or you could emphasise the 10 per cent as not. You could say 20 per cent of colleges are inadequate, or you could say that in less than 20 per cent of colleges less than one-third of the provision is adequate - which are quite different headlines.

Chairman

I think you have put that question several different ways, Paul. Do you want to come back at all?

(Mr Taylor) Only very quickly. I think we always do emphasise both but it is important to know that that figure of 9 per cent of teaching in general FE colleges is considerably higher than the figure for either sixth forms or for sixth form colleges. Therefore, even though 9 per cent of unsatisfactory may not sound a huge number, it has to be set in the context of our overall responsibility for inspecting ----

Chairman: We wondered what was going on with the inspection process before Ofsted took over, quite honestly. Moving on to special schools and pupil referral units.

Ms Munn

Special schools and pupil referral units is quite a small part of the report so I will just ask two brief questions about it. Firstly, on the independent special schools inspected by HMI that we are looking at, these schools - just to clarify - would be the ones who are often catering for pupils with severe learning difficulties, emotional behavioural difficulties etc. One of the findings which I think is quite worrying (but, to me personally, not surprising) is that in terms of value for money and fees charged, it is the ones who charge the most who seem to be doing the least well. That is not a surprise to me, having been in a position in social services of having placed children in those situations; you tend to get the children who have been through everything or are very challenging, very difficult, having a lot of problems who are the ones ending up in the schools which, in the end, charge vast amounts of money because they are the only ones who will take them. That is a solution to a problem, in one way, for the person who is sitting in social services or education, but it is a bit worrying really in terms of the children and where things are going. What is Ofsted= s view on this?

(Mr Taylor) I think I agree with Meg Munn= s analysis entirely. In drawing attention to the fact that some of those schools which have high fees - and fees are astronomically high - we really do have to ask the question about the value for money, recognising all that she says about the very distinctive nature of the pupils who are in these schools. So we draw attention to it and we have made a number of positive comments about these very difficult independent special schools, but there are some serious issues that we have drawn attention to.

(Mr Bell) Can I just highlight that I think it is very interesting in our report, when we talk about the quality of leadership and management - and make the very obvious point that we consider that leadership and management affects the quality - there is one specific issue that we do highlight which is the particular weakness in many of these head teachers= monitoring the quality of teaching and learning. I think that is an issue that has become of greater prominence across the vast majority of schools in this country. The key responsibility is on the head teacher to do that. We do highlight that as a particular issue. We do recognise - and I think everyone here would recognise - the complexity of needs that many of these schools have to manage. One could argue then that it is even more important that there is good quality monitoring and assessment of what is going on to ensure that the needs of those children are being properly met.

Is there any sense that at a national level we are getting any joined-up government with the Department for Health and the Department for Education and Skills being aware of just how serious a problem this is, and that they are getting to grips with it at all?

(Mr Bell) I am not aware of any conversations. Obviously, our annual report is not just sent to the Department for Education and Skills it is also sent to, amongst other departments, the Department for Health. Certainly I have not been taking part in any discussions about what next with this kind of provision.

My second issue is in relation to pupil referral units and the whole issue of DfES guidance that PRUs are not usually suitable places for pupils with statements of special educational needs, yet three-quarters of the units contain pupils with statements. Certainly it does not seem surprising to me that three-quarters of pupils have statements. In a sense it seems almost self-evident that that would happen. Have you got any views about how these children can be helped properly within pupil referral units, because I cannot see that that is not going to happen because a lot of statements are, indeed, for behavioural issues, and that is why children end up in pupil referral units.

(Mr Taylor) Our point is that if they are there, despite the DfES guidance, then they jolly well need proper provision, and we have said that so few units have staffing, accommodation or resources which enable them to meet fully the needs specified in the pupils= statements. So the recipe is there: if you have got these pupils the responsibility is on you to staff it properly, to follow up the particular aspects of their statements and to provide accommodation where they can learn. It is not the ideal setting for them, we recognise, but if they are there that is what has got to be done.

It is not a surprise to me that these are the kinds of young people you have got in pupil referral units, so is the DfES being naive in saying that they should not be there or are they being idealistic in saying that they should not there because it is not the right place? If they are going to be the kids who end up there - and I cannot see any way that that is not going to be the case - should the DfES be a bit more realistic in its guidance about giving clear ways forward and issues about resourcing in order that these children who do end up there get a proper level of education?

(Mr Bell) It is a real difficulty, this. You could argue, of course, that the priority that the Government has given to the full-time education of youngsters in these schools is absolutely appropriate, but it is only appropriate as far as the provision is good for those youngsters. I accept the point. I have got no solution to it. I am just thinking of something we said recently in a report about local education authorities. There is no doubt that meeting the needs of pupils with special educational needs and, often, in particular, the needs of pupils with behavioural difficulties, represent the most significant flashpoint between schools and their local authorities. It is very difficult to deal with those students. You can always understand the concerns that the schools will express about having to manage those students and, eventually, coming to a point of saying A We cannot cope any more@ . In the end, those children are the whole system= s responsibility. That is why I think we have this tension because local education authorities will also say to you that it is very expensive to educate those children in-house, in LEAs. There is no easy answer to this one at all. All we can do here is highlight some of the weaknesses in the provision that has been offered.

I suppose what I am arguing for is an accepting of the reality rather than what we are saying. Therefore, if you accept the reality you can begin to deal with it. I think, as you say, at the moment it just puts pressure on people on the front line.

(Mr Taylor) I think that if you start with what is a PRU really aiming to do and what do you want for it, and that is not repository for SEN students that you cannot cope with, then that does drive you to looking at proper alternative solutions for your pupils with statements. Therefore, I would not say that the DfES is being either naive or idealistic; I think it is right to try to establish a proper rationale for PRUs and to look at the needs of SEN students separately.

Jonathan Shaw

You said that the child is the system= s responsibility, but frequently the way that the funding is organised is that if a child is excluded from one school and goes to another and they have a special educational needs statement, etc, and so that is additional funding that the school gets, the money does not follow. So then if you have a school that has a falling role they can often receive lots of children with lots of problems and never get any of the money. Is that something you have looked at?

(Mr Bell) This would really be a matter for the department to comment on. I think it is still the case, however, that once a child is permanently on the books of a receiving school, a new school, then the money - and if that includes additional resources on the back of a special educational needs statement - follows the child. I think there has always been a historic problem of a short-term hiatus in whether all of the money goes quickly enough to the school. I have to confess this is really a policy matter for the department rather than one that I can comment on with any great authority.

Chairman: We are getting very squeezed in these last two to three sections. Can we look very briefly at strategies for school improvements?

Mr Chaytor

The section on strategies for school improvement is actually all about schools in difficult circumstances - inadequate sixth forms, special measures, challenging circumstances. Following your comments about specialist schools earlier, where you said that specialist schools are not to be seen as a panacea, in the last few weeks the Government has published a document The New Specialist System which really argues that specialist schools might be a panacea. Do you anticipate that next year= s report in this section on strategies for school improvement will be all about the contribution of specialist schools to the whole range of schools, or will you continue to focus on the schools in the most difficult circumstances? There is nowhere else in the document about school improvement across the board for schools in reasonable or comfortable circumstances.

(Mr Bell) There is always a question about how much we put into this document. There is sometimes an argument that we put too much into it. I think the organisation of the report is just to try to group together those strategies that have specific impact on schools in difficulty - the way you have described schools in difficulty. I was not entirely clear, Mr Chaytor, about the connection you were making between this section and specialist schools.

There is nowhere else in the document that really focuses on specialist schools. This is the 2001/02 report, admittedly, but the Government has now published its document on the future of specialist schools. I am just concerned to find out where in this document do we find out about school improvements across the board? Next year will there be a bigger focus on specialist schools, given the Government= s recent policy statement?

(Mr Bell) It is fair to say that school improvement does not just arise here. If you look at the evidence that we cite, we cite improvements that we have seen, what the contribution is from improving leadership in management, I think it is sprinkled throughout the document. I think to some extent this is just an organisational point about the structure of this document, to group together this very important part of Ofsted's work. As far as specialist schools are concerned, of course we continue to report on specialist schools through the Section 10 inspection arrangements. In the new framework for inspection from September 2003 I think we will take a little bit more account of any specialism that the school has and how that impacts on the school. Again, going back to what I said earlier, that is not going into an individual school and saying this is a specialist school and therefore it must be a good school or whatever, it is using that evidence very carefully. You are highlighting a point about how the thrust of government policy is going in a particular direction. Will we be reporting on it? I am sure we will be reporting on it. We are seeing more and more specialist schools coming on-stream all the time never mind what aspirations the Government has for the future, so it may get more coverage next year.

In respect of the schools in challenging circumstances and schools with special measures, teacher recruitment and retention is identified as a major issue. Is it inevitable that the schools in the most difficult circumstances will have the biggest problems in recruiting and retaining teachers or are there strategies and policies that could be introduced that would reverse that situation?

(Miss Passmore) It is certainly true that schools in difficult circumstances do tend to have proportionately more problems recruiting and retaining staff than others, but what we do see is that one important step that they need to take is to say this is the position in which we find ourselves, what are the things that we need to do to cope with being in that position, so having particularly good arrangements for the staff who come in for varying lengths of time, the supply cover, providing proper support, having good curriculum documents so that everybody who comes in does not go back and start at the beginning again, but they know where the particular class has got to and move on. So difficulties, yes, but where the schools are beginning to improve, they have the strategies to do that. What we did see last year, some work that has just been done by the DfES, an analysis of the data, for example, is that the schools facing challenging circumstances and for a particular group that was identified, their increased performance at GCSE was actually twice the national average of increase. So some of the strategies that are being put in place, things like changes in teachers, are now beginning to be effective.

Those are essentially coping strategies at the level of the individual school. In terms of national policy, have you advised Government as to the steps that could be taken to deal with the fundamental problem of recruitment to difficult schools?

(Miss Passmore) We have not given specific things that need to be undertaken other than the sort of things that I have been saying in terms of coping, but we have suggested that there is greater attention given to continuing induction and support for newly qualified teachers who go into such schools. The support they get in their first year tends to be pretty good, but it is the retaining of them once we have recruited them and to focus more support there and we will be looking at the level of that support and how effective it is.

Chairman: I want to move on to teacher training, development and supply.

Mr Pollard

I met recently with our primary head teachers and I was able to praise them for the commitment, dedication and professionalism that they have exhibited in raising standards across the piece. I am sure you will agree with that. Moving on from that, head teachers are very lonely individuals in their school, they have to support their teachers and the governors and all that. Is there anything that Ofsted can do to help them through this loneliness of leadership that we all know exists?

(Mr Bell) It is an interesting question. I think it is fair to say that nationally recognition has been given to the key role of head teachers and others through the creation of the National College for School Leadership and I do not think we should under-estimate the role that such a college can play in supporting teachers. Ofsted, except in the case of those schools which are in special measures or in serious weaknesses, has no continuing relationship with a school. What I would not underestimate, however, is the extent to which the Ofsted framework, the hand books that we produce, the reports that we produce, all help to give head teachers a sense of what they can do in their own schools to improve performance. We do not have that continuing relationship, but I think we can continue to provide external guidance and advice on what we are finding.

(Mr Taylor) I have two specific points to make. One is the fact that when schools are in special measures and serious weaknesses we are able to use our HMCI, working with the school to follow up on the action plan and so on and that is work that Elizabeth has led and the appreciation of schools and particularly heads of having somebody who is external but not there in a formal inspectional role all the time, just as a sounding board to see if they are on the right lines, is one thing that is very strong. The second is that we do have a dissemination role and we have mentioned before a report we produced called Improving City Schools which has been followed up by a number of conferences, working with heads in inner urban areas really to identify good practice, to work with them and spread that good practice. So already we do try to engage, especially through the HMCI in Ofsted, with the challenge of leadership and particularly with the new leadership improvement grant that is coming out from the DfES, we believe we will have a continuing role and it may be we can extend the role of using HMCI, working in that kind of training and disseminatory role with heads and other school leaders.

We are having difficulty recruiting head teachers because of the load on them. How do we encourage teachers to become deputy heads and then into headship?

(Mr Bell) If I could cite a report that we produced in the last month or so about the early professional development of teachers. We highlighted in a sense the point that you are hinting at, the importance of giving good professional advice to teachers and allowing them to take part in a wide range of activities in the early stages of their career because that is the generation of school leaders of tomorrow so that is very important. I think the advent of the National College for School Leadership is going to be very important because there you have got training not just for the heads of today, not even the deputy heads of today, you have actually got training being available for managers and leaders at all levels in schools and I think that is a really powerful tool because that way not only will you build the capacity of management within schools now, you may encourage and help people to look for senior positions in the future.

Head teachers complain about initiative overload. Is this true?

(Mr Bell) I think sometimes head teachers are right to complain about too many initiatives but, on the other hand, head teachers are intelligent people and they have got to make choices about where they put their time and effort.

Valerie Davey

I am proud to have the best primary school in the country in my constituency, where over 90 young people leaving the primary school got 4s in every area, but there was this tremendously wide curriculum going on as well and we put it down to the head teacher, but it is a head teacher with stability in that school. I am not quite sure how you get this balance between keeping stability in a school and moving on best practice and seeing people move and I think it is a real tension and I do not know whether you have any advice?

(Mr Bell) It is a really interesting issue. We published a report last year called The Curriculum in Successful Primary Schools and I think it exemplified what you said on two fronts. One, schools that were achieving in our sample high standards in literacy and numeracy were also demonstrating that you can have a broad and balanced and enriched curriculum. Two, many of the schools that we looked at had long-standing and very experienced heads not necessarily just in the same school but perhaps on the back of two or three headships. So you are right, there are some good ingredients there. On the other hand, you do want to ensure that that kind of practice is made available more widely. One of the things that we did a few years ago on the back of special measures was to look at examples of where local authorities had used head teachers to support other schools who were in difficulty, that is a way in which you can disseminate good practice. We are able to cite examples, as I am sure you will know from your own experience, of head teachers that have been seconded to local authorities to assist with numeracy or literacy. There are lots of ways in which you can do it and I think it is an important point that you try to draw upon the best of practice and expertise that resides in schools, to make it more widely available. However, head teachers will always have an eye on their own school and rightly so and parents will always have an eye on their children's school and however much the head teacher might be used to how unflattering that is to the school, there is always that pressure of spending too much time away from home as it were.

He has exemplified it for me in two words, he said I am the sponge and buffer in this school and he said I know what comes in from wherever and it goes in the bottom drawer and I know when it is right to give it to my staff.

(Mr Bell) It is very interesting because that is what we found in that report on the primary school curriculum last year, we found head teachers that were bold and innovative and who did not think that the world was doing unto them. They were able to make professional and intelligent decisions at the school level about what was right for their pupils and that is a very important message to get right through the education system, Mr Chairman.

Chairman

I think you are right, but I have recently visited the very good John Bull Primary School in Blackheath and the very good new head there explained that the difficulty is that these days there is so much turnover and change in the teaching profession, the number of people actually staying long term as a teacher is very few because there are so many opportunities to go off and do other things, but in the south of England the high turnover is what one naturally gets. So the core of teachers that are there building the good practice and passing it on is less and less. I saw a school with very good teachers, many of them were from New Zealand and South Africa and so on and what the head was saying was about retaining the core and I thought that was an extremely important point. That will be familiar to you.

(Mr Bell) I think some of this is to do perhaps with changing employment patterns. I just wonder if more and more young people now will not start a job at 21 or 22 and think they are going to do it forever and perhaps they will be a bit more flexible and say now that I have done that for three or four years, I will do something else. There are some quite specific issues relating to the retention of teachers that the Teacher Training Agency have drawn attention to. They have said that one quite important factor which ex-teachers will cite if they have left within five years is workload and pressure. That is quite a serious point. There may be some factors at work here that we cannot control because they are wider changes, but there may be other factors we can control and surely that comes back to head teachers making intelligent decisions and actually making intelligent demands on their staff to let them get on with the key job.

Chairman: We are running out of time, but I wanted a couple of questions on local education authorities. Andrew?

Mr Turner

I asked you last time when you proposed to look at the different strategies for intervention in local authorities which have followed on your finding that some of them seem to be failing. Do you not think that where a major initiative is developed by the Government, of which this is clearly one and in the light of the 2002 Education Act there may be many others, it is incumbent on your office to inspect the implementation of that strategy and see whether it is working?

(Mr Bell) We have inspected individual authorities and in quite a number of cases now we have inspected for a second time the authorities after intervention. I would just make one point about that and that is, of course, even when we have inspected for a second time, it is very often very early days in the intervention process because some of these intervention contracts are for long periods of time. So I think there is a question about how valuable it would be to do more work in addition to the inspection of individual authorities at this point. I think I can say that in almost all of the authorities where there has been intervention we have seen some improvement, but in some cases it has been more modest than others. I would also have to say that we have seen improvements in authorities that were graded at a lower level, we have seen improvements second time round even where there has not been intervention. I do not think we can say intervention leads to improvement.

(Miss Passmore) One of the difficulties of drawing together the information about intervention is that each authority has been slightly different in what that intervention has been and it would be very unlikely to give us valid statistical information that one particular sort of intervention is better than any other. What does seem to be most important is that the intervention is right for the particular circumstances of that authority, so that it has been graded and changed to cope with the different circumstances.

And you recognise that in your second inspection?

(Miss Passmore) Indeed.

The other question really relates to special needs and the effectiveness of local education authorities' strategies. Figure 33 is pretty appalling, is it not, in that on two of the four measures 40 per cent of authorities are unsatisfactory? One wonders, when local authorities have such a key role in provision particularly for statemented pupils, how such authorities can possibly be graded other than unsatisfactory overall if they are unable to carry out this absolutely vital role?

(Miss Passmore) It is an area where we have recorded more unsatisfactory provision than virtually anywhere else, but it is also an area where, when we are now going back to authorities for the second time, they have taken action and they are significantly better than they were when we first saw them. In terms of making an overall judgment, in local authorities, as with schools and colleges, where you make that overall judgment about an authority, it is the composite of everything and we have not taken the line that a single indicator would override every other one, but you are quite right, it is a particularly worrying one when the provision for special educational needs is not satisfactory.

(Mr Bell) This is probably the most difficult part of an LEA's work insofar as you are having to manage a whole range of competing interests and those interests are sometimes incompatible. It is no excuse, I think you are absolutely right to highlight it, but it is difficult territory.

Mr Chaytor

You referred to the improved record of LEAs in school improvement policies. Is there a direct relationship between the quality of an LEA's school improvement policies and levels of support and the improvement in the schools?

(Miss Passmore) In some authorities yes and in other authorities no. In the improvement in an individual school the biggest factor is usually the particular member of the authority linked with that school. Taking them overall, at the moment we do not have the positive correlation that we would like.

Can you put a percentage figure on the proportion that an LEA can contribute to improvements in either individual schools or their overall group of schools? I think we asked this question to Professor Brighouse in Birmingham and I have forgotten his answer, but I will check it after you give your answer.

(Miss Passmore) I cannot put a figure on the proportion.

(Mr Bell) I think what we did highlight in our report last year, looking back over the five years, were the specific areas of activity where local authorities could make most difference to the work of their schools, for example support for leadership in management, support for literacy and numeracy strategies, intervention in schools in difficulties. Rather than saying it represents five per cent of work, you could look at the specific areas and say we have got some evidence of where that has a direct impact on what schools are doing.

But it is still fairly peripheral. You are saying there is some evidence in some areas. Can we have significantly improving LEAs without also having significantly improving schools, and what is the purpose of a significantly improving LEA if it does not directly translate into significantly improving schools?

(Mr Bell) It is a very good question and I think it is what we are trying to get to the heart of now not just in second round inspections, but we are actually consulting with local authorities just at this moment about getting that sharper and sharper analysis of what makes a difference in individual schools and what contribution can specific LEA functions make to that. I think you are right, if after a second cycle of LEA inspections we are still saying there is not that link then there are quite important questions raised. It would be useful if we could direct our inspection activities and really tease that out.

Chairman: Before Elizabeth leaves Ofsted in two weeks' time perhaps she could give a more considered written reply to David on that.

Mr Chaytor

It might be better if she did it after she left Ofsted.

(Mr Bell) I am quite happy with that as I can disown it then.

Paul Holmes

Many schools feel that Ofsted is not very accountable if a school feels aggrieved by their judgments and that is certainly true in the state sector. In 1999 you inspected Summer Hill School and said it should be closed. In 2002 you inspected them and approved them. Summer Hill School insist that they changed nothing about their teaching and learning in between, it was your judgment that changed, but publicly you have never said anything although you have given them two private apologies. They had to spend , 160,000 on legal fees fighting you which a state school could not do. Have you learned any lessons from this for the accountability of Ofsted?

(Mr Bell) I do not think it would be appropriate to talk about the specifics of an individual case in a setting like this, we have not done that with any others, although I am happy to give you something in writing. As David Taylor said in a slightly different context in answer to another question, we would never pretend that absolutely everything that Ofsted does is right.

Mr Pollard

Satisfactory?

(Mr Bell) When there are issues raised with us we do look very carefully at them. As you will be aware, the ultimate point of the course is to the complaints adjudicator who is independent of Ofsted and their reports do give us pause to think each year about what we need to do. In every case where issues of concern are raised we will treat them very seriously, but I am happy to write separately on the Summer Hill issue.

Chairman

Chief Inspector, thank you for your evidence. You have had a slightly shorter time today because the Chairman has a question for the Prime Minister and he is eager to get a seat in the Chamber. Thank you very much for your attendance. It has been a good session and there will be some areas that we did not dwell on enough that we will be writing to you on.

(Mr Bell) Thank you very much.