Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-70)
MR DAVID
BELL, MRS
MIRIAM ROSEN,
MR ROBERT
GREEN, MR
MAURICE SMITH
AND MR
JONATHAN THOMPSON
3 NOVEMBER 2004
Q60 Paul Holmes: A question that links
back partly to what we were asking about young offenders' institutions
which was, how far do you take into account when you are inspecting
the particular circumstances of the institution and your answer
was, no, we apply the same yardstick effectively. I am sure that
is the same answer now with colleges. I know that FE colleges
feel that sometimes this works out quite unfairly because, for
example, you are applying a yardstick largely designed for students
studying GCSEs and A levels, level two and level three, but you
are applying it sometimes to a college where 94% of the people
there might be adults doing short courses of one kind or another
which do not have the same outcome—quantitative outcome
or measurable outcome—and therefore the colleges feel they
get some pretty unfair judgment.
Mr Bell: I think to be fair we
have been quite open about that. In fact, that was one of the
reasons why, in conjunction with the Learning Skills Council,
the DfES and the Adult Learning Inspectorate we published our
consultation paper about getting a more rounded set of measures
to deal in some ways with exactly the points that you are making.
If you were looking, for example, at 16-19 provision in a school
or Sixth form centre you are not then just looking at the output
measures, what percentage of youngsters get this, that and the
other; you are actually going to look at the progress those youngsters
made: how many started, how many finished. We are absolutely behind
that. Also on the point about adult education, that point is made
too; we want to find more robust measures. There was a very warm
reaction in the main to those proposals. The idea—just in
case you are not aware of this—is that these should be piloted.
I have to say, I have some concern at a suggestion that this may
not now take place in schools when it was expected because the
idea was for this to be kicked off in 2005-06 for pilot with full
implementation in 2006. There does seem to be some suggestion
from the department that it will not be possible for a variety
of reasons for schools to come fully on stream with these rounded
measures until 2008. I actually believe for exactly the reasons
that you believe that that is not reasonable. I think if we are
going to get proper measures of performance that enable us to
make those comparisons—and coming back to the bit about
providing public information—it should be a priority to
get that into the schools system as well as the colleges system.
I am absolutely behind you on this one. We think it is very important
to get that rounded set of measures.
Q61 Paul Holmes: You say it is important
in the schools as well, but obviously it is more of a problem
specifically in colleges where, for example, you have the inclusion
programmes, you have a lot of adult learners coming in from work
based learning where they might do the NVQ part of a modern apprenticeship
but not do the key skills and therefore that would be judged a
failure, yet to that individual it is a great success.
Mr Bell: One of the other proposals
at the moment of course is to look at measuring precisely that
kind of performance on the part of adults and there is a scheme
to do that. I do not think there is any unwillingness on the part
of the inspectorates nor the LSC to do this. Of course, it is
fair to say that when the Adult Learning Inspectorate is looking
at its single remit for work based learning for post-19 adults,
they are going to take account of exactly the sorts of things
that you have described. I do think that it is right that we have
a broader range of measures; I do think it is right that the complexity
of provision that often surrounds the way adults learn because
of the variety of circumstances should be reflected in colleges.
The only other comment I would make about that is that we do know
there are general further education colleges doing all the things
that you have described and are doing an outstanding job. We named
some of them last year and there are some more this year that
are doing that kind of job. Going back to the point about primary
schools, more can be expected because some can do it, it is exactly
the case—even if all these problems about success measures
and so on—the same is true, there are outstandingly good
general further education driven colleges providing that provision.
I think one of the things that we would say that continues to
concern us is greater polarisation between those that are really
good in the GFE sector and those that continue to provide an inadequate
standard of education and training.
Q62 Paul Holmes: You said that one of
the benefits of Ofsted inspection across the board is that it
shines a light on what is happening. For that to be effective
there should be some fairness in the comparisons the consumer
will then make in looking at reports that they have pulled down
off the Internet. Again there is a feeling that if you look, for
example, at an 11 to 18/19 school then the post-16 part of it
is quite a small part of the inspection, whereas the same report
looking at an FE college is throwing the entire spotlight purely
and simply on the post-16 section. Would you get some unfair comparisons
there because it is such a small part of the report in one institution
but it is the whole focus on another one?
Mr Bell: In some ways that goes
back to your point, we know that a lot of young people aged 16-19
are educated in those colleges and therefore it is right that
they get that priority. By the same token, of course, the whole
purpose of doing joint inspection with the Adult Learning Inspectorate
is to get that rounded picture of what a college is doing. I think
our evidence from the most successful general further education
colleges—we are really talking about this group at the moment—is
that they can combine high quality provision for 16-19 year olds
with high quality provision for adults. I do not think it is a
fair charge that somehow we are in a sense providing a disproportionate
focus on the 16-19 provision within a college. I think we are
doing what we should be doing which is recognising that that provision
in many colleges—most colleges—is significant, as
is the adult work alongside it.
Q63 Paul Holmes: How far is there any
attempt to overcome the overlapping ends of inspection whereby
an FE college, for example, has Ofsted, it has the Adult Learning
Inspectorate, it has the Quality Assurance Agency, it has some
monitoring by the Learning and Skills Council and then it has
groups like Health and Safety Executive coming in as well. Is
there anything in the pipeline on that?
Mr Bell: I am sure you will be
aware that Sir Andrew Foster has been looking at this issue of
relationship in his wider survey of bureaucracy in the post-16
sector. From my recent conversation with him he is certainly encouraged
by what the inspectorates are doing and are proposing to do in
the future along the lines that we suggested. The issue of the
Quality Assurance Agency is, of course, an issue where you have
higher education and further education and we are talking to the
QAA about rationalising that. I think it gets slightly more difficult
when you get into the activities of others. The Health and Safety
Executive, for example, have a different set of statutory responsibilities
which I think we would all accept. I think where there is an issue
for us in the future—and the LSC recognises this—is
that we do not subject colleges to what is seen to be a disproportionate
burden. They have to provide one set of information for inspectors
but on the other hand they have the LSC coming along and asking
for additional information. We are actually in the process of
discussing with the LSC how we can rationalise those information
demands. It is in everyone's interest to do that.
Q64 Mr Pollard: A New Relationship
with Schools proposes a number of changes to the school inspection
regime, smaller teams for example, and the requirement for a lay
inspector will be removed. Do you have any conclusions about the
role of lay inspectors in the new regime?
Mr Bell: As you know, as part
of the original statute that was set up Ofsted required a lay
inspector to be on every inspection team. That, in many ways,
was sustainable when you had largish teams covering absolutely
everything subject by subject and all the other things that are
covered in a school. My view has been that if we are moving to
a system where you have got a much shorter inspection, you have
many fewer inspectors inspecting, that it would not make sense
to have a lay inspector on every inspection. There is also a practical
point. We would not have enough anyway. I would make another point
about lay inspectors: there are some lay inspectors who have worked
for Ofsted for the past 12 years who have done over 250 inspections.
Many of them are very effective inspectors. I think I do question,
however, whether you are a lay inspector if you have done 250
inspections. I think you are an inspector and you are a good inspector
if you continue to be used, but I am not sure that you are a lay
inspector. To ensure that we continue to tap that expertise in
the future we will offer the opportunity for currently designated
lay inspectors to become inspectors under the new system. They
will be able to apply. There is one more comment I would make
about that. We also have to be very clear about the public perception
of this. If we had the possibility of one or two inspectors as
will be the case inspecting smallish primary schools, I have to
think about how it would be perceived by the school if one of
those people, however competent they were as an inspector, had
no professional educational background. I have to think about
that as well. That is why we think that designated people as lay
inspectors in a very different inspection system does not make
sense but we want to continue to use the best of the people we
have.
Q65 Mr Pollard: My constituents take
school inspections very seriously and value highly Ofsted reports
on schools that they may wish to send their children to. In fact,
in my constituency house prices are higher closer to schools with
the best Ofsted inspection. That is a fact of the matter and yet
you are removing the role of parents in this or reducing the need.
Why?
Mr Bell: We are not removing the
role of parents. It is very important to make that point. A couple
of weeks ago we published on our website our consultation document
on the user perspective. I mentioned earlier that we have been
carrying out pilot inspections; we have carried out 70 pilot inspections.
We have recently spoken to parents and pupils who have been subject
to this new system to get their perspective. We have had no negative
feedback from parents; in fact, very much the opposite. The parents
have felt that the system that we have has enabled them at slightly
shorter notice to say what they wanted to say, there was no difficulty
expressing their views and there was no difficulty communicating
with the school. By no stretch of the imagination do we want to
remove that parental voice and we have some other suggestions
about how we might generate the views of parents in this consultation
document. What we will not have in the future, it is fair to say,
is the parents meeting in advance of inspection. I have to say—I
have again said this publicly—that I think our evidence
suggests that that was becoming of increasingly limited value.
We have done this twice now and we are actually beginning to find
that in most cases there is a very poor turnout to parents' meetings
in advance of inspection. Often these meetings were dominated
by a very single issue about my child kind of point. Those can
be useful because they might illustrate something more about the
school, but inspectors obviously have to say that they cannot
really take and pursue individual cases. I think our view is that
the removal of the parents' meeting in advance is not going to
disadvantage parents given that very few of them are now taking
up the opportunity to attend, but we must ensure in the new system
that we continue to capture the voice of parents.
Q66 Mr Pollard: You mentioned voices,
how will the voice of students be heard?
Mr Bell: I continue to emphasis
the point that students are a major focus of what inspectors do
when they are there and again we have carried out some post-inspection
research with students under the pilot inspections. Again they
have said that inspectors were approachable, they had plenty of
opportunity to inspect, they were quite struck with pupils' comments,
they were quite struck by the extent to which inspectors almost
went out of their way to talk to the pupils. I think we can capture
the voice of pupils. Any inspector, however short on an inspection,
is only worth their salt if they get out there and talk to the
students. I say get out there, that is in a lesson or in the playground
or school yard or lunchtime or break time and so on. I am very
confident that we will continue to capture the voice of pupils
and students.[5]
Q67 Mr Turner: Could I ask something
which in a way follows on from Kerry but in a way relates to joined-up
inspections and that is that it seems to me there are very few
agencies which are prepared to look at the single example—and
you have just given a very good reason why not—and then
see whether lessons can be learned about the institution. In the
case of special educational needs—which I know I am a bit
obsessive about—a parent is told that the local government
ombudsman cannot get involved because there is another remedy;
the remedy is tribunal, the tribunal will only look at the individual
case. The ombudsman will only look at the individual case but
at least it is a bit more public and there is the opportunity
for interaction with the school. If you are not prepared to look
at individual cases—perhaps a number of them—and draw
out from them the lessons either in the school or in the
joined-up inspections which you intend to undertake, then I do
not honestly think you are doing your job.
Mr Bell: Can I pick up on the
joined-up inspection because I think there is a very interesting
case study here, if I can put it that way. The Social Services
Inspectorate as was—the CSCI as is now—has a history
of looking at individual case files as part of its work with local
authorities. One of the very interesting questions that we have
been debating with the CSCI is how you, in doing children's services
inspections, capture the big picture at the same time as focussing
down on those individual case files. Interestingly that will be
a feature and will continue to be a feature of inspection with
CSI so when we are doing children's services inspections they
will be exactly what you have described. The problem with that,
of course, is—and this has been very interesting for Ofsted
because this has not been part of our methodology in the past—how
many case files do you look at to get the picture? Probably what
you are not trying to do is to say that it has to be X to constitute
a statistical valid sample; what you are actually saying is, if
we take a number of different cases of different types, there
are some interesting issues that can emerge out of this. There is
an opportunity—and there will be an opportunity—under
our joint children's services inspection. I am not sure, however,
that that really gets at what you are asking because really, in
a sense, I think you are asking about what happens if an individual
parent in an individual school has a concern about a child's special
educational needs and can you not look at some of those to get
an insight into what the school is doing. The reality is, even
at the moment where inspections involve far more inspectors and
more days, it is just not practical to do it. I am not sure I
have an answer for that because I am not convinced that it is
the job of inspection to, as it were, pursue those individual
cases. Inspectors, of course, have to look at groups of students
and pupils. I do think we will have the opportunity—as we
do now—to look at the provision a school says it is making
for pupils with special educational needs and try to test that
out, but I do accept that that is not quite the same as doing
what I think you are suggesting, which is to take a whole set
of individual case files and pursue them at the school level.
Q68 Mr Turner: At present it seems we
concentrate on the mass rather than the particular needs and maybe
looking at those outlines will help, but I was disappointed in
glancing through this document to see that there is a reference
to the performance of special schools but you do not have a reference
as far as I can see in any detail to the performance of the
schools with regard to pupils with special educational needs.
In an atmosphere where there is pressure to close special schools—although
the Government would deny it, it seems to be happening at local
government level—I think parents need some guarantees about
the treatment of pupils with special educational needs in the
mainstream sector.
Mr Bell: What I have said so far,
of course, is not to suggest that we do not comment on the subject
of special educational needs because just a couple of weeks ago
we talked about inclusion in the schools and I was very much at
pains to point out that inclusion is not a sort of ideology where
you close every special school and put every child into mainstream.
That is very clear in our report and I have been very clear in
my public utterances on the subject. We have commented on particular
issues—youngsters with behavioural difficulties, youngsters
who are in hospital—and we have commented recently on youngsters
who have particular disabilities, so we can do it at that kind
of macro level. I hope I would reassure you that for Ofsted and
for me personally it is a very important issue for us to keep
looking at but again I will just come back to where you started,
I am not sure we can quite look at that level of individual analysis
to draw out lessons about the whole school.
Q69 Mr Turner: Will you look at health
service provision in your joined-up inspections?
Mr Bell: Yes. In fact one of the
key partners in our work is the Health Care Commission. I probably
should say a little bit about that, of course, and the interesting
issue for children's services inspection is that it operates really
at two levels. We have a very clear responsibility to inspect
local authority provision for children. That is part of the remit
letter that I have been sent in terms of reporting and using some
of that data to feed into the comprehensive performance assessment
of local authorities. We are also actually required to report
on children's services more generally which takes you elsewhere
into the public sector—health, for example—and the
voluntary sector. The Health Care Commission would say that they
do not have, in a sense, the rich data that in the main education
and children's social services has about children's services,
if I can put it that way. They do not have that. They are going
to have to work that up over time so there is going to be a time
lag before the Health Care Commission is able to contribute absolutely
the evidence we might want to see, but I am really, really keen
that we do this because we actually know in relation to children's
special educational needs that it is often that interface between
the local authorities services and the health service services
where things fall down. Probably in the immediate short term one
of the things that we can look at, even if we do not have all
the data about children's related health services, we can look
at—and will look at—those relationships: how are they
conducted, how are they carried out? You will probably be aware
as well, Mr Turner, that the Government is looking at Pathfinder
Children's Trusts, in other words how do you in some ways get
greater formalisation of these arrangements. I think those will
be quite an interesting test bed for models where you get greater
connection between education, social services for children and
health services.
Q70 Mr Turner: Finally, just reverting
to school self-evaluation, how much of what you expect to inspect
under this model will be what schools themselves—as they
become more differentiated, as the choice agenda develops—are
offering to parents which may be different from what is offered
by other schools and how successful they are in meeting their
aspirations and parents' aspirations?
Mr Bell: I think that is the virtue
of starting with the school self-evaluation as part of the evidence
base because you should be able, in good self-evaluation, to get
a very quick impression of that: what is this school doing that
is unique and different? What is the offer that it is providing
to parents and pupils? We want to start at that level. I think
it is very important to capture the individuality of the school,
at the same time not falling into the trap of saying that this
is so different that we cannot really apply a national framework
of inspection because it is so different. I think it is really
important to capture that. The evidence in the pilot inspections—the
70 or so that we have done so far—suggests that we are getting
at that. I have not heard—and we have taken a lot of soundings
from schools who have been on the receiving end of these pilots—of
schools where we have not just captured the particular flavour
of this school. I can think of examples of specialist schools
that have been inspected; I can think of examples of schools that
have put a particular emphasis on particular aspects of the curriculum
or whatever. We seem to have been able to capture that. The faith
dimension, for example, it is very important to chart the schools,
to make sure that that is seen as part of their ethos. Again,
we have captured that. I think actually, in a funny sort of way,
if you use that self-evaluation as a starting point without being
driven by it you can get at what the school wants to do that is
unique and different and special.
Chairman: Thank you for those answers.
I now want to move on to questions in our inquiry into education
outside the classroom.
5 Note: See (OFS 16). Back
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