Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
MR DAVID
BELL, MRS
MIRIAM ROSEN,
MR ROBERT
GREEN, MR
MAURICE SMITH
AND MR
JONATHAN THOMPSON
3 NOVEMBER 2004
Q40 Paul Holmes: So if the colleges were
hoping that was the case, then they have had their hopes dashed
with what you have just said.
Mr Bell: I think it is for colleges
to speak for themselves, but I do not think that colleges could
have read anything that we have produced and reached that conclusion.
Q41 Paul Holmes: I can assure you that
they have reached that conclusion, but have had it corrected now.
Mr Bell: We will take that away
and we obviously want to be very clear about that. That is an
important point. It is very important to be clear about that distinction
between in a sense assessment or contact on the one hand and advice
and consultancy on the other. It is very clear to be important
about that distinction.
Q42 Chairman: I just want to follow this
through in a practical sort of way, Chief Inspector. You do an
inspection of a school in a local education authority area and
you might find it very good but a couple of things that need improving
or you might think it is in more challenging circumstances so
you do your report. What is the contact with the local education
authority when you have done the report?
Mr Bell: Currently there is no
direct contact with the local education authority but one of the
issues that we are looking at in the light of the changes that
we are proposing is to how our contact with the local authority—I
use those words deliberately rather than the local education authority—will
have to change in the light of the children's services inspection.
Without going into too much detail about this unless you want
me to, as part of the children's services inspection process there
will be something called the Annual Performance Assessment
which will be carried out jointly by Ofsted and the Commission
for Social Care Improvement. We will sit down with the local authority
and we will have with us a whole bank of evidence, some of which
will be examination test evidence, some of which will be inspection
evidence. I actually think—trying to second guess what you
are getting at—that provides us with a better opportunity
to do that. The other thing to comment on is that under this new
system of inspection—more frequently but lighter touch—we
will have in a sense a third of all authority schools inspected
in any one year. That is a very powerful evidence base and another
virtue of this system is that because we are going to be responsible
for deciding who gets inspected when and where—although
contractors will continue to work with us—we can, in a sense,
focus our inspections in a way. We might, for example, ask what
is going on in an area. We have some intelligence that maybe the
secondary schools are not doing so well and the primary schools
are not doing so well, why do we not try to coincide the inspections
at much the same time. I actually think there are all sorts of
opportunities available to us in the future which have for perfectly
understandable reasons not been available to us in the past.
Q43 Chairman: What I am trying to get
at is that a lot of people we represent—and this is why
we are here questioning you—would say, is it not rather
strange that an inspection can take place in school and there
is a view in terms of how Ofsted works that you do not do the
follow-through to try to help the school pick itself up and change.
I understand that is the philosophy. But for someone to say, well,
when you have done an inspection the inspector who has done it
would not pick up the phone to the chief education officer or
the director of education and say, "You ought to know we
have done this and this is the sort of thing you ought to do".
That there is no communication would astonish a lot of the people
we represent.
Mr Bell: Mr Chairman, I have to
act under the statute that created Ofsted and the statute that
created Ofsted and under which we still operate describes the
school governing body as—to use the technical term—the
appropriate authority. It is not the local education authority.
Our inspection report is directed in law to the school's governors
and the school's governors are required under law to prepare the
action plan. In the case of the most extreme—in other words,
failing schools—although we do not in a sense contact the
local authority directly, the local authority is involved. When
we invite chairs of governors and head teachers to come to seminars
to think through the first steps of coming out of special measures
we often have an invitation there for the local education authority
as well. However, on a routine basis it would neither be practical
nor, I would suggest, desirable for us to be involved in the way
in which you have suggested because it is very clear that the
governors are responsible for that. A good local authority will
continue to track the evidence from school inspection. In other
words, the authority will say, "Right, we know Ofsted is
coming, what do we do?" and then "We know Ofsted has
been, what are we going to do?" I do not think it is really
for us to make the contact and say, "Do you know what happened
when we inspected that school?" The authority is perfectly
capable of reading the inspection report and deciding what action
it might take.
Q44 Chairman: I must say, it does not
sound very joined up to me. I do not know about my colleagues,
but perhaps we will take this up with the secretary of state when
we meet him if you are inhibited from having what I think is an
intelligent relationship with the local education authority.
Mr Bell: I was making the point
about statute because of who our report is directed to. Do not
forget we are carrying out 4,000 school inspections a year. Under
the new system that we are proposing, that is going to go up even
more. We will be carrying out, we reckon, 300 school inspections
a week under the proposed new system. It is just not practical
for us to have the contact that you are suggesting school by school.
However, what I am saying to you is that I think under the new
arrangements that are partly driven by children's service inspection
we are going to have an opportunity on an annual basis to sit
down with the local authority—the local education authority
and social services authority together—and look at the quality
of children's social services and education. I think we are going
to move more in the direction that you have suggested.
Q45 Chairman: Chief Inspector, I can
understand that and that is interesting because you are welcoming
that change in your ability to have a relationship but what is
surprising to me is that there is no stage where a particular
concern about the educational provision—say in secondary
education in a particular local education authority—there
is no time when someone at Ofsted could talk to the director of
education and say, "You have a systemic problem here and
we are getting the picture that unless you do something about
it, it is going to impact on our relationship and of course on
our inspection of the LEA".
Mr Bell: Let me reassure you on
that, Mr Chairman.
Q46 Chairman: How many LEAs are there?
Mr Bell: 151.[3]
Q47 Chairman: That is not many.
Mr Bell: If we pick up that kind
of intelligence that you are describing we do share that with
officials at the DfES because the intervention role and the annual
support role for LEAs is a function exercised by the DfES. That
is one of the functions the DfES has so I can assure you that
there are cases where we will draw together some of our evidence
in the way that you are describing and bring it to the attention
of the local authority. I think it is fair to say as well that
the system that we are proposing for the future will give us a
greater capacity to do that because we will have a regional presence
for Ofsted. We are going to have our HMIs organised in such a
way that they will have a better handle, as it were, on the performance
in inspection terms of schools in a local area, so I think we
can do it. Just to reassume you, we do that where we have those
concerns. We do that presently, it is then for the DfES to decide
what action it might take on the back of our evidence.
Q48 Chairman: We are going to have a
brief question session on prison education but before we always
hate to see highly paid Ofsted officials who might go away from
this meeting miffed that they have not been asked a question.
Mr Bell: I hate to see that as
well, Mr Chairman.
Q49 Chairman: Jonathan Thompson, you
are the new financial broom in Ofsted. I have never met a new
director of finance who has not gone to the chief executive after
being in post a month and saying, "My God, there are some
pretty horrific things going on here". Has anything hit you
between the eyes since you came along and joined the team?
Mr Thompson: Until I have been
here six months my post is not confirmed so it would not be right
for me to say too much. I think it is fair to say that all we
are doing is a review of financial management and corporate governance.
There are some treasury rules which have been issued fairly
recently for departments to do reviews of financial management
and corporate governance which is part of the chancellor's professionalisation
agenda to improve resources management across the whole of central
government. We are following that methodology. We hope to be able
to report that internally some time before Christmas. If there
is something you are particularly interested in I am sure it is
something we could bring to you next time round.
Q50 Chairman: Would you, in your job,
have looked at your location and said, "Look, this is a very
expensive location." It would be so much cheaper if you moved
to West Yorkshire. I understood the Lyons review had you as a
prime candidate for moving out of the metropolis and moving somewhere
more civilised. That would save you a lot of money, would it not?
Mr Thompson: It would but we have
to take into account the practical effects of moving the whole
of Ofsted. We are taking into account the Lyons review as part
of our broad efficiency review. It will be a strand of the 20%
savings that we will need to move a considerable proportion of
the staff away from Alexandra House and out into the regional
centres.
Q51 Chairman: Do you think it would be
a good idea to move to a cheaper location?
Mr Thompson: Not in its entirety
but certainly a good proportion.
Q52 Chairman: It might help sort out
the stress and the bullying that has been going on in Ofsted.
A new environment might give the opportunity to start anew.
Mr Thompson: I am afraid I cannot
comment on that.
Q53 Chairman: David, do you want to come
in on that?
Mr Bell: We have already announced
to our own staff and publicly that we will be setting up core
centres in Bristol, Manchester and Nottingham. Under our new system
of inspection of education of schools, colleges and early years
the work for managing our inspection will be in those three regions.
Alongside that goes a considerable reduction in the number of
staff who will be London based. We have taken the view—and
I think it is consistent with what Lyons has suggested and it
is certainly consistent with the way I have to do my job, Mr Chairman—that
it is sensible to have a continuing policy function in central
London. That is the reality; this is where the ministers are and
I have frequent conversations with ministers and officials. However,
in terms of the day to day delivery of Ofsted's business, that
should be out in the regions. One of the great virtues of having
Jonathan—I am sure would be far too modest to suggest this—is
that he comes with considerable experience from his previous role
as a local authority director of finance and that already has
started to be very useful to us in looking at the options and
where we go in the future. There is absolutely no doubt that we
are right here for this. Valerie Davey asked me earlier is it
a bad thing, the efficiency; no it is not, it has given us an
opportunity to look at where we put our functions. I am very sorry,
Mr Chairman, that West Yorkshire was not on our radar screen but
perhaps if you had made a case earlier, who knows what might have
happened.
Q54 Chairman: Chief Inspector, you know
I have been making that case to you for a very long time so do
not try to get away with that one. I fully expected you to be
in Huddersfield by now.
Mr Bell: I am in Huddersfield
next week, Mr Chairman, as you know.
Q55 Mr Turner: Could I just pursue that?
What you seem to be doing is moving from one metropolis to another.
If we are really talking about putting economic drivers into the
regions then why did you not choose Worksop, Workington and Penzance?
Mr Bell: There are two things
I can say about that. Do not forget that when we talk about Ofsted
staff more than half of them are home based. That is the first
thing to say and that is where we get mentioned in despatches
as being a real advocate of new ways of working. More than half
our staff are home based so we are not talking about all the Ofsted
staff being in offices. We are actually in those locations already;
we are in Bristol, we are in Manchester and we are in Nottingham.
One of the things that we had to look at was the disruption in
going to brand new places. Our view—very much based on the
numbers and having to consider all the factors, the impact on
staff and so on—was that it was sensible to consolidate
in places where we already had a presence. It did seem to us to
be harder to justify turning the whole organisation on its head,
as it were, and moving to places where we had never been before.
One of the things that I keep reminding myself as well as my colleagues,
at a time of great change we have to remind ourselves that we
have a substantial day job to do and it is really important that
I do not lose sight of that. All of these changes that are going
on—£40 million reduction and relocation and all these
things—you will not forgive me, Mr Chairman, if I come to
you and say, "Forgive me, Mr Chairman, I have not been able
to do all the inspection work for the past year because I have
been so busy doing this, that and the other". I think from
our point of view, it was kind of assessing the risk of changing
everything. We are changing a lot of things in Ofsted actually
at the moment and we just felt it was important to consolidate
in places where we already had a presence.
Q56 Chairman: The report on your internal
survey was quite shocking, was it not? Here is an organisation
which is very interested in bullying in schools and yet a very
high proportion of your employees considered they were bullied
and under unacceptable stress. Most of the organisations I know
that are well managed try to change the structure of management
and the way in which the people are organised, is that best done
with several sites all over the country? Would it give you more
control over how you managed your organisation if you were on
one site?
Mr Bell: Let me pick up this whole
question now that you have alluded to it on a couple of occasions.
The first thing to say is, that was generated by Ofsted, an internal
staff survey. We made it no secret. It was published as an exclusive
in one of the newspapers but it was hardly exclusive because I
sent it out to two and a half members of our staff; I have told
them what the results are. It seems to me that again it is that
principle of transparency and openness. There are a lot of things
that we have achieved as an organisation but here is something
we have to do. We have not just wrung our hands since then and
thought that the whole thing was just terrible. We have conducted
internal work. We have asked people to identify themselves, not
to identify themselves as being bullied (although we have made
that invitation to people) but we have set up work internally
looking at the causes of bullying and harassment. One of the things
I would say to you, Mr Chairman—and I think our report and
analysis suggests this—there are a lot of different interpretations
of what constitutes bullying. For example, a number of staff commented
that bullying was being given an earful by a member of the public
who was very aggrieved about something. Other people said it was
about quite unacceptable behaviour. I have said that to some extent
within Ofsted. In other cases some people said that they do not
like being held to account for their performance. I think we have
to be clear about that. I do not want managers to bully people
but I do want managers to hold people to account for their performance.
So although you get the headline that 20% of staff say what they
said about bullying, it is more complex than that. We have not
sat, as I suggested, on our hands and done nothing. Maybe I could
ask Robert to comment a bit further because he has been working
very hard on this.
Mr Green: This was our second
staff survey and it followed barely a year on the first staff
survey which was itself conducted a year after we had taken over
the early years functions, so we were what the consultants call
"an organisation in transition" at that stage. The first
survey identified a number of things which we needed to act on
urgently and we made some priorities. One priority was about communication,
one was about support to home based staff and one was about development.
In all those areas we made it clear to staff after consultation
that those were the things we were going to focus on and we set
ourselves what I think was a tough challenge of having another
staff survey barely a year after the first and we have seen some
real improvements. In all those areas we did see improvements
and some of them were described by the consultants who ran it
for us as really quite startling. In terms of home based staff
we have moved from a situation in which the home base staff felt
very poorly supported I have to say, to one of which both home
based and office based staff felt that their working environments
were more broadly satisfactory. So we made quite a lot of progress
and the bullying and harassment and more broadly cultural issues
certainly stand out from that second survey as the area we now
need to address. What we have been doing, as David said, is inviting
people to talk in confidence about what they actually mean by
bullying, by their feelings of stress. We have working groups
with our trade union side looking at both the bullying issue and
the issue of the stress that people feel. Where we can identify
causes we are working on removing them. Some of them have been
to do with IT which I think we have largely addressed now. We
are also setting out clear expectations for managers. I think
to some extent that what you said earlier, bringing an organisation
into more of a sense of unity, having possibly fewer management
units, is probably a good step in that sort of direction and that
is one of the things that will guide us in the changes that we
are going to make in the future.
Mr Bell: Can I just add one comment
to that, Mr Chairman? Robert talked about an organisation in transition
and it is hard to suggest that we are going to be in any other
state if we have to reduce our budget by £40 million. We
are not naïve about the continuing challenge that we have
because that will bring about potentially more stress, more anxiety,
more pressure. I think there is a big task for the management
board and all the managers in Ofsted to really keep this in mind
when they are taking forward our changes.
Q57 Chairman: I hear what you say and
I hear what Robert Green says, but what I understand from the
two surveys is that in terms of particularly bullying it has got
worse from the first survey to the second survey. Things have
got worse, and I quote from the report, "One in five who
responded said they had been bullied at work and nearly two thirds
claimed to be so stressed that the quality of their work was being
adversely affected". That is a serious situation for any
organisation. Most people do know what bullying is. I really cannot
believe that most of your employees who feel they were bullied
felt they were being bullied by the people they are dealing with
in their job. Bullying is usually described as people within your
organisation.
Mr Green: I do not think we would
claim that the majority of this was generated from outside. From
talking to people where people have been willing to talk about
this, it is clear that it is a variety of things, as David Bell
said earlier. Quite a lot of it is sometimes encapsulated in what
people call the "target culture" and I think some people
have found it quite difficult to adjust to a situation in which
there are pretty clearly specified things for them to do. In a
way there is a head and a tail side to this coin because at the
same time people are saying they are very clear what their job
is in Ofsted which is not something that you always get. I think
the point about stress is that there are number of causes for
that but again some of those we have already begun to address.
If you look, for instance, in the early years area, a lot of the
stress was at one stage associated with some of the difficulties
we were having in using IT remotely. David talked about the fact
that the majority of our staff work from home. For some that was
really quite a difficult adjustment to come to terms with but
we are now beginning to see increasingly a sense that many staff
see the advantages of working from home, understand the IT—we
have given them better IT to work with—so we are addressing
those issues. There remain difficult points and, as I said earlier,
we are working with the unions on what we hope will be an agreed
position which we can take forward jointly and so that the unions
and we will be moving forward on training, on clarity about what
we expect of our managers. I do not think that cultural issues
like this are ones which you can change over night but they are
ones that we need to work at, very much taking David's point that
circumstances are going to make it more important and not less
in addressing those issues.
Q58 Valerie Davey: First of all can I
congratulate you on actually discussing this issue in the open
way as you are now and say that it is timely. Only last week the
all party Dignity at Work group in the House helped to launch
a partnership which Amicus and the DTI have just launched with
some major employers and you would be very welcome to come on
board to look at an in depth three year programme on what does
constitute bullying and best practice and prevention.[4]
I would hope that Ofsted would sign up to that. The interesting
thing is that you are the people who are inspecting and defining—and
the Minister has done brilliantly—bullying at school so
within education you have huge experience to bring to bear. Is
there anyway that you could, as it were, bring and twin all this
experience to really produce something that would be of value
not just to your organisation but to the others within this partnership?
Mr Green: I think that is a really
good point. We say to ourselves that we must apply internally
the things that we know about and apply externally. I think we
are increasingly trying to do that. For example, on the group
that is looking with the unions at the issue of bullying and harassment
we have two HMI who both happen to be educational psychologists
participating and bringing their experience of their professional
background to bear. I think we very much accept that we need to
look in that kind of way. We are also talking to the University
of Greenwich about a research project to look at the way we manage
in particular our support for training and development for our
dispersed workforce. They are looking for funding for that at
the moment, but if that gets off the ground that will be another
area in which we very much want to look at how we are doing and
use it as an opportunity to work with others. I am very interested
to hear about the Dignity at Work project which I think we will
want to follow through. We have been asked by a number of departments
to lead work and we are therefore bringing together a group across
the civil service of organisations who are in the business of
home based working or thinking of moving in that direction. I
am not saying that we have the answers but because we are a large
organisation with that sort of workforce we are sharing our experience
with other organisations. I think we very much agree with the
point you are making.
Chairman: Paul, you want to say something
about the New Relationship with Schools inspection.
Q59 Paul Holmes: There are six million
learners involved in post-compulsory education and four million
of those are in FE colleges, sixth form colleges or specialist
colleges which is an area you inspect. On the last five occasions
that you have come before the Committee to give evidence from
October 2002 through to today you have not actually brought a
member of the team with any specific responsibility for post-compulsory
education. Why not?
Mr Bell: There is nothing sinister
in that. I have not brought with me either my lead person with
responsibility for primary education or secondary education or
schools in special measures. The view that I have taken is that
as the Chief Inspector with my board colleagues we should be able
to answer the questions that you put to us. We believe, unless
you tell us to the contrary, that the questions you have put to
us we have answered. You might not always like the answers we
have given you but we have answered them. There really is nothing
sinister about it, it is just the way that I think we have done
business with the Committee. There is no issue about that colleague
or colleagues from my post-compulsory team being here but I think
this is just the way we conduct business, otherwise you would
have an even longer table perhaps of Ofsted senior managers.
3 Note by Witness: There are, in fact, 150
LEAs, not 151. Back
4
Note: See (OFS 16). Back
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