Memorandum submitted by Dr Geoffrey Penzer,
Director, Penzer Allen Limited (OFS 02)
SUMMARY
— Ofsted's planned changes to school
inspection from September 2005 afford an opportunity to increase
the benefits to pupils from having their schools inspected.
— The most important thing is to address
the tension between accountability and improvement that has bedevilled
the present system.
— The proposed centrality of a school's
self-evaluation is a risky strategy because it will work least
well for many of the schools most in need of improvement.
— The new regime involves a school's
stakeholders (parents, carers, governors) less than the present
one because of the reduced notice of inspection.
— The abolition of mandatory lay inspector
participation is another change that risks reducing the inspection
focus on what stakeholders regard as important.
— Problems such as these are not insurmountable,
but they demand high quality effort if they are to be overcome
satisfactorily.
— If they are not resolved, inspection
may not provide good value for money.
PURPOSE
1. Penzer Allen is a management consultancy.
Our clients are mainly from the public and not-for-profit sectors.
Through Open Book Inspections, a division of the company, we have
been school inspection providers for Ofsted continuously since
1993 and have supported the inspection of about 1,000 schools.
We believe that inspection can be a powerful force for good. This
submission is intended to highlight some questions that the Select
Committee might choose to pursue in order to help Ofsted to develop
a properly effective new school inspection regime.
CONTEXT
2. Ofsted is in the midst of major developments—in
terms of its expanding remit, its changing organisational structures,
and its approach to inspecting schools. Our focus is on the third
of these, but we recognise that the demands of the others have
an inevitable impact on school inspection too.
3. We regard the major changes proposed
for school inspection from September 2005 as a great opportunity
to increase the value for money obtained through inspection—where
value is measured in terms of the extent to which all pupils and
students are enabled to achieve their true potential through their
schooling. Our concerns, insofar as we have them, are that elements
of this "great opportunity" may be missed. What is being
proposed is a step change: the challenge to which Ofsted is currently
responding is that of ensuring that the step is decisively and
securely forwards (not sideways or even backwards).
ACCOUNTABILITY AND
IMPROVEMENT
4. School inspections since 1993 have often
proved helpful to individual schools, but all of us involved—successive
HMCIs to lay inspectors, head teachers to NQTs, local education
authorities to governors to diocesan boards of education to parents
to the Select Committee itself—have failed to build a national
ethos in which inspection is welcomed as a real opportunity to
help a school improve what it offers its pupils. The stakeholders
who are expected to hold individual schools to account are the
parents of pupils, yet none of us has put enough effort into ensuring
that they are able to fulfil this role reliably. Most schools
want parents to be compliant and content, not challenging and
exigent, and inspectors have very rarely criticised this attitude.
5. A failure to resolve the tension between
accountability and improvement, between carrot and stick, has
proved to be the Achilles heel of the present system and whether
or not the new arrangements resolve it will determine their value.
Many schools are keener to get a "good" report (a useful
marketing tool) than an accurate and objective one. This attitude
is encouraged by some local education authorities where "not
getting a bad Ofsted report" appears to be a higher priority
than ensuring that schools improve as quickly as possible.
6. The support available to help schools
address issues identified by inspection is indeed meagre, except
for schools deemed to require special measures, as already identified
by the Select Committee.[6]
The categorisation of the very worst schools (the five plus per
cent of those inspected each year with "serious weaknesses"
or requiring special measures) has tended to distract from the
fact that a much larger proportion (probably about a third of
schools) are distinctly weaker than they should be.
SELF EVALUATION
IS DIFFICULT
7. The approach to inspection now being
proposed is constructed round a school's self-evaluation. This
is potentially a way to promote an ethos of collaboration between
inspectors and schools, and hence to encourage schools to own
the inspection outcomes. Current experience, unsurprisingly, is
that it is the weakest third of schools that produce the least
acute self-evaluations and this tends to undermine ownership when
an inspection team reports contrary conclusions. An objective
for the new regime must be to promote an inspection ethos in which
schools and inspectors collaborate without compromising rigour
or objectivity.
8. Ofsted has told us that experience from
the pilot inspections run so far is that this objective can be
achieved. The extent to which it is reliably and routinely achieved
when there are 300 inspections a week will be one important measure
of the success of the new regime. It will be difficult for inspectors
to collect sufficient persuasive evidence in the time available
conclusively to overturn an inappropriate self-evaluation in any
instance where a school itself is not 100% co-operative. This
may be most the case for secondary schools which, it is proposed,
will have proportionately much smaller effort provided than primary
schools (very roughly, half the number of inspector days in school
per pupil).
9. The risks are either that inspections
will fail to report where many schools have weaknesses because
it is impossible to prove the existence of shortcomings even where
there are very strong suspicions, or that such shortcomings are
reported and provoke a rash of complaints and challenges to the
security of the judgements. Neither situation is likely to promote
improvement. In our view this is an area of major risk to the
effectiveness of the inspection regime that is being piloted.
It needs to be monitored closely.
LISTENING TO
STAKEHOLDERS
10. One of the virtues of the current inspection
Framework (introduced in September 2003) is that it increases
the focus given to exploring a school's relations with its stakeholders
(pupils, students, parents, carers, etc). This is an important
component of any evaluation of how inclusive a school is, of how
well it ensures that all pupils are given the opportunity to realise
their full potential. Several of the instruments and approaches
by which this has been achieved are unavoidably lost in what is
now being proposed.
11. For example, the short notice of inspection
planned means that meetings with parents and governors cannot
take place in advance of inspection in order to help inform the
focus of the inspectors' approach. Ofsted states that it does
not believe that "current arrangements for parents'' evenings
[sic] are satisfactory". It is certainly true that many parents'
meetings (often held during the day when it is more convenient
for parents) have less good attendance than anyone wishes, but
to suggest that they do not yield interesting and valuable information
is, in our view, inaccurate. They, and meetings with governing
bodies, will be a loss.
12. A second example is this. The proposed
removal of a lay perspective from every inspection team, where
an identified inspector has specific responsibility for ensuring
that stakeholder concerns are kept in front of inspectors throughout
the inspection, is a consequence of greatly reduced team size.
The suggestion that `the lay viewpoint' can be introduced through
the quality assurance process is an interesting proposal, but
does not address the loss of a "stakeholder champion"
on the inspection team. It is not clear whether Ofsted recognises
the significance of this loss. How, in the new regime, will grit
get into the oyster? It is needed, and the fact that lay inspectors
do not always provide it currently (though often they do) is no
argument for ignoring it.
THE TASK
FACING OFSTED
IS DEMANDING
13. The Select Committee's sixth report
on Ofsted expresses the view that a more penetrating self-evaluation
by Ofsted of the effectiveness of its inspection regimes is desirable
in order, at least in part, to provide persuasive evidence that
the resources put into Ofsted yield a good return. We entirely
agree. Developing a radically new and different approach to school
inspection is a challenge, and the examples we have given of the
difficulties are not intended to suggest that Ofsted itself is
unaware of how much it has bitten off. Whether it is devoting
sufficient resources of the right calibre to the task of resolving
all the conundrums is the question we cannot answer.
14. What we can say is that Ofsted's
consultation with its existing supplier base, including providers
such as ourselves, over practical details has been much more open
than in the past. This is definitely a positive development. Our
doubts do not concern details, however. We believe that the devils
in there, and there are certainly plenty, can be conquered. But
is the overall strategy well enough conceived to provide real
benefits for pupils in schools?
15. A good school system is vital. Inspection
ought to aspire to being central to the maintenance and improvement
of high standards of education. We have no doubt at all that this
aspiration is fully embraced by HMCI and Ofsted. However, as inspectors
often tell schools, there are no prizes for good intentions or
for trying hard. Outcomes are what matter. As has been said before,
attempting to live on hope risks dying of starvation.
22 October 2004
6 Education and Skills Committee, Sixth Report of
Session 2003-04, The Work of Ofsted, HC 426. Back
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