Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-68)
5 NOVEMBER 2003
MR DAVID
BELL, MR
DAVID TAYLOR,
MR ROBERT
GREEN AND
MR MAURICE
SMITH
Q60 Mr Chaytor: Given the direction
in other parts of your work, particularly the inspection of all
children's services and the understanding of the relationship
between preschool and primary, what is the case for having a separate
inspection post-16 because it simply means that the same curriculum
delivered by different institutions is inspected by two different
inspectorates.
Mr Bell: What I would say is that
most colleges who have undergone inspections since the autumn
of 2001 would say that they cannot see the joins, if I can put
it that way. Although Ofsted and ALI do inspections jointly people
never say to us, "that was the ALI bit or that was the Ofsted
bit and they were clearly in contradiction with each court".
Operationally it is working reasonably well.
Q61 Mr Chaytor: Does that not strengthen
the argument for a complete merger?
Mr Bell: It might but it is really
beyond my responsibilities to comment on that. What I would say
about integration is that interestingly although we have the lead
responsibility on Every Child Matters it is not
integration in the sense that we are subsuming all of the inspectors
from different inspectorates into Ofsted, in some ways that was
the Early Years model, where all of these inspectors were brought
in from local authorities up and down the country and they all
came to the Ofsted. Under the Every Child Matters arrangements
we will be leading inspections, that is very clear, but we will
have to work alongside other inspectorates. Ofsted has had a history
of working with other inspectorates, formally with the Audit Commission
on LEA inspections but also in informal and occasional ways with
the Social Service Inspectorate, sometimes with joint inspections
of local councils. Last year we worked very successfully with
the Criminal Justice Inspectorate looking at the Street Crime
Initiative, and so on. It is incumbent on inspectorates to work
together where they are required to do so and the case for integration
or merger is a separate issue. For the sake of those being inspected
and for the sake of good accountability we need to make the arrangements
work we have at the moment.
Q62 Mr Chaytor: Moving on from inspections
or institutions and looking at the issue of area inspections post-16,
in your strategic plan you establish as an objective the assessment
of national strategies for improving education in the 14-19 age
group, what is your assessment of the national strategies of area
inspections and the role of the LSCs in implementing the recommendations
of the area inspections?
Mr Bell: Again this is where the
timings did not coincide, Ofsted began inspecting area provisions
16-19 in 1999 and then under the Learning and Skills Act we were
given the responsibility to carry out 14-19 area inspections and
we are very early into that cycle of inspection. There is going
to be a very interesting overlap with the findings of our inspection
and the work of Learning and Skills Councils and other local players
when it comes to the Strategic Area Reviews that are being carried
out. In the some cases the inspection will be prior to the Strategic
Area Review and arguably that will be a very useful analysis of
the state of provision 14-19 and it would help, one would hope,
to drive the Strategic Review. In other cases because of the timing,
the timings do not fall into synch, we will be inspecting 14-19
provision after a Strategic Area Review has been carried out,
but that may be no less valuable because of course then we will
have the ability to look at the early evidence of what has happened
in the light of strategic review. On the specific point about
the LSC role, I think it is a complex area of governance, if I
can put it that way, 14-19, because you have a whole variety of
players, you have the LSC clearly with responsibilities, you have
the local education authorities retaining important responsibilities,
many of which incidentally go well beyond the school functions
but would involve other services, and of course you have the individual
institutions, colleges and schools. In a sense nobody has absolute
power over the whole system. A lot of this has to be done within
the context of what the LSC is leading but with the consent of
others. I think it is an interesting question, and I do not have
an answer to it at the moment, about how the LSC are going to
carry this out.
Q63 Mr Chaytor: Can I suggest one
or two answers, what you are doing, Mr Bell, is describing the
structures we have but I think we are trying to tease out of you
what is your assessment of the effectiveness of those structures.
In describing it in such length are you implicitly saying, "we
have an over-complicated, over-bureaucratic, ineffective set of
arrangements between 14-19"?
Mr Bell: I think that remains
the question and I think it is fair to say that it is probably
too early for us to say.
Q64 Mr Chaytor: How long do we have
to wait?
Mr Bell: We are carrying out inspections
across the 47 LSC areas over the next three or four years so we
will have an overview at the end of that period but it would be
fair to say after a year or so we are going to be able to draw
upon our evidence of the first 14-19 area inspections.
Mr Taylor: The timetable for evaluation
is a complex one and if you look at the Government's strategy
for 14-19 and the phased implementation of that we are actually
moving into what for even David Bell might look quite a long way
in the future, and for me it is well off the sight line. I think
we really have to say that 14-19 is a very complex area, the lines
of accountability are complex but it is also complicated in terms
of curricula change. We are doing a number of probes into specific
aspects of that change, an increased flexibility programme for
14-16 year olds, Pathfinders, all of these initiatives which are
breaking up the rigid separation between schools and colleges.
I think we are hoping to be able to give early advice to Government,
to the Tomlinson Committee, and so on, on the direction of change
in 14-19, but to evaluate that strategy in the round is certainly
going to be something for possibly even your successors.
Q65 Mr Chaytor: The area-wide inspections
of all 47 LSCs will be all completed by September 2006, that will
be 18 years after the Education Reform Act which set the process
of proliferation of small sixth forms in schools underway and
13 years after the incorporation of FE colleges which created
this internal market of FE colleges. Do you think that is an acceptable
way for Government to manage arrangements for 14-19? A whole generation
has gone by and yet we still have not come up with a sensible
way of Government intervening and planning and we are still debating
it and producing more inspection reports. When does Ofsted say
to the Government, "this is what you need to do"?
Mr Bell: I think one can draw
an important distinction between what is happening nationally
to make things work and what is happening locally. We will find,
as we have already found in our first published 14-19 reports,
a variety of approaches and actually in some places it looks more
coherent than it does in others already. In a sense we are not
waiting for the never, never to make an evaluation of what is
happening in particular areas, we can make those points and they
should have an impact on young people's lives and education soon.
That is an important point to make, we are not doing nothing until
the end of the process. It is, however, difficult to make a judgment
about the national picture and the national scene. What you have
described is right, those sort of milestones that you have described
are right but as David said a moment or two ago it is not going
to get any more straightforward because if you take what has been
said publically about any changes that might come from the qualification
structure in the light of Mike Tomlinson's work that could be
another seven or eight years given what has been said about changes
within this decade. I think we just have to accept, certainly
for the foreseeable future, that we are going to be in turbulent
times when it comes to 14-19 provision, but that should not deflect
us from what we can all do now to make a difference to the life
chances of young people in schools and colleges and elsewhere.
Q66 Jonathan Shaw: You will have
seen the submission from the Association of Colleges where they
felt that some colleges were penalised because of the inspection
process, there was criticism where there was a lack of completion
amongst students and clearly colleges take students who have a
history of poor achievement. Is it right that you should be penalising
them in this way?
Mr Bell: We do not, as it were,
simply penalise colleges on the basis of one particular indicator
or not. We have said to this Committee, and it is something that
I can repeat today, that we are very sensitive to the issue of
getting a better basket of indicators to enable us to make proper
comparisons between different kinds of post-16 provision. We said
last year in the Annual Report that generally speaking sixth form
colleges and school sixth forms in achievement terms will do better
than general Further Education colleges but we immediately went
on to say that they are serving different sorts of populations.
I will not pretend we have got there yet but the task is to try
to find an appropriate basket of measures. The one slight concern
about the AoC submission is the suggestion that this is the case
everywhere, it is not the case everywhere, we know some general
Further Education colleges are more successful in meeting the
needs of students and helping students to remain in education
than in others. I think we are right and I should acknowledge
the work that we are doing to try to get a better set of indicators
but we should not suggest that somehow all FE colleges are the
same and because one college is not very successful at retaining
students that applies in every case because it certainly does
not.
Q67 Mr Turner: I would like to refer
to your joint report with the Audit Commission on school place
planning. You refer in paragraph 10 to the reduction in surplus
places, primary 9.5 to 9.0% and secondary from 11.6 to 8.6% as
a result of which you say "authorities have been able indirectly
to promote higher standards in schools and scarce resources have
been released for spending more efficiently on other things than
surplus capacity". Are you saying that that use of resources
is a better driver to improved performance than competition between
schools?
Mr Bell: I do not think we said
that. I do not think that it is quite as straightforward as saying
it is one or the other. I think it is very interesting, certainly
speaking from my experience as a Local Authority Chief Education
Officer that there was always this paradox, on the one hand you
were being driven to reduce surplus places and people would say
to you, "you are reducing choice" and you would say,
"yes, but we are being told to reduce the surplus places
to free up the resource". There is always a paradox there
that if you make more efficient use of the places you have and
free-up money to invest you may then remove some choice in the
system because there are less surplus places. I do not think it
is a case of one driver is more effective than another, I think
there have been many benefits over the last 15 years or so of
local management where schools have in a sense laid out a stall
and have developed their own distinctive identity and parents
have been given more information, all of those things seem to
be absolutely right. What we tried to do in this report—and
I believe I am coming in front of the Committee in a couple of
weeks to talk about it—is to make the point it is not as
straightforward as sometimes it is made to be because there are
difficulties associated with this whole very complex area. I believe
I am back a week on Monday to discuss in some detail this whole
report.
Q68 Valerie Davey: We are having
David Bell back on this specific issue.
Mr Bell: You have given me good
advance warning to think about it.
Valerie Davey: Thank you all very
much for a fairly intense and wide-ranging session. We are most
grateful. It is not six months, as it sometimes is, before you
are back because, as you rightly indicated, in the context of
our report on school admissions you are coming to give evidence
fairly soon. Thank you all very much indeed.
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