Appendix I
Government's response to the Sixth Report from the
Education and Skills Committee, Session 2003-04.
The work of Ofsted in 2003-04, Growth of Ofsted's
responsibilities and Value for money
Recommendations 1, 2, 3 and 6
The growth of Ofsted responsibilities over time has
posed and will continue to pose challenges for Ofsted's management,
as David Bell's response has acknowledged. It also makes it complicated
to identify real trends in costs and value for money. Ofsted's
overall costs reduced from 1996 to 2000, but have increased substantially
since, in line with significant additions to its remit for 16-19
education in colleges, and the registration and inspection of
child care. The Ofsted response notes that matching education
inspection costs with public investment in education gives a very
different picture from a more general comparison.
It is important to maintain downward pressure on
costs. Ofsted's recently published Strategic Plan for 2005-2008
includes a target to improve the efficiency of Ofsted and to reduce
the overall costs of the inspectorate by 20% by 2008, notwithstanding
the new responsibilities for children's services under the Children
Act. Ofsted staffing is planned to reduce by some 500 posts, with
remaining staff shared among three region offices and a smaller
head office.
The independent evaluation report to which the Committee
refers, 'Improvement through inspection', is the first attempt
of which we are aware by any inspectorate to undertake a genuine
'value for money' study. It looked into the full costs and benefits
of the system, including the demands made on institutions by the
inspection process, and the value placed by various stakeholders
on the outcomes of inspection. We welcome the Committee's continuing
interest in this work, as inspection continues to evolve, and
we will continue to work with Ofsted on reducing the demands of
inspection and increasing the value of its outputs, and the efficiency
with which they are delivered. We would however endorse David
Bell's words of caution about the search for any simple causal
links in policy areas where there is rapid and simultaneous change
in a number of important variables.
Every Child Matters
Recommendation 4
The project to develop new integrated inspection
arrangements for children's services is formidable. But the debates
on the Children Act made clear that inspection reform is an essential
part of the whole system change which is necessary to secure the
outcomes set out in the Every Child Matters Green Paper and subsequent
documents.
The inspectorates and commissions charged with working
together under the Act have made good progress, and on 6 December
launched a full consultation on the draft Framework for Inspection
of Children's Services, joint area reviews, and the annual performance
assessment of councils' services for children. Development is
on course for the programme of joint area reviews to start in
September 2005.
The Act gives Ofsted the lead role in developing
the new arrangements. Clarity of accountability requires a single
lead body, although the success of the operation will depend on
all the inspectorates working together. The joint work which has
gone into the development of the consultation papers has been
an extremely encouraging start to this process.
Ofsted was selected as the lead body as the only
inspectorate whose focus is almost entirely on the inspection
of children's services. Ofsted is responsible for inspecting not
just schools but nursery education, day care, local authorities
role in education, Connexions, youth services and further education
in colleges provision—and so is well-placed to lead on this
work. For other inspectorates such as CSCI and the Healthcare
Commission, children's services are a minority, though important,
part of their remit.
The Committee notes that it has been a challenge
to create an inspection regime which strikes the right balance
between the need for thoroughness and the need to limit the demands
on services, and the right balance between a focus on services
that is proportionate to risk, but also ensures that standards
are maintained in all services. These tensions, inherent in any
inspection regime, are the more apparent when the scope is as
wide as that for Joint Area Reviews.
These issues have been the subject of rigorous debate
by the inspectorates working up proposals for the reviews, and
we believe that the proposals achieve a sensible balance. The
proposals identify 42 key judgements on service contributions
to outcomes for children, which are intended to span the spectrum
of children's services. They envisage, however, that many of these
42 judgements can be made from analysis of performance data, self-assessment
and documents, with no more than 10 selected for fieldwork. The
intention is similarly that self assessment will not cover every
key judgement.
We are confident that implementing the new arrangements
will not increase Ofsted's size or costs. Joint area reviews will
be integrated into Ofsted's structures and replace several separate
inspection programmes currently operated by Ofsted, in some cases
alongside other inspectorates: inspections of local education
authorities, Connexions services, area-wide provision for students
aged 14-19 and youth services. They will mean that there are fewer
separate inspections to schedule and fewer separate inspection
reports to finalise and publish. The consultation proposals for
joint area reviews would mean that they would involve significantly
less fieldwork for Ofsted than the sum of fieldwork for the inspection
programmes they replace.
There will be opportunity to explore these issues
more fully during the consultation period, which will run until
28 February 2005.
School inspections and School improvement
Recommendations 7, 8 and 9
Under the New Relationship with Schools proposals
(DfES and Ofsted 2004: A New Relationship with Schools (PP/D16/(5585)/0604/22)
all schools will have a School Improvement Partner (SIP). The
SIP will be a "critical friend", in many cases a serving
head, who will act as the conduit between central government,
the LEA and the school. The Partner will help set targets and
priorities and identify support needed.
There will be a continuing series of contacts between
each school and its SIP. Central to these contacts will be a discussion
of how the school's plans respond to Ofsted findings and other
evidence. If the school needs help to respond to the issues, the
SIP will help the school find appropriate external support, whether
from the LEA or from other agencies. And, in the most extreme
cases, the SIP will be involved in formal intervention.
In many cases, LEAs already provide or secure systematic
follow-up to Ofsted reports. To make such follow-up universal,
Capita, through its new contract with the DfES, will operate a
regional infrastructure which will work with LEAs to ensure that
the New Relationship with Schools operates effectively everywhere.
Effective operation includes securing follow-up to negative Ofsted
reports.
The Education Bill which contains the planned changes
to school inspection legislation includes continuing provisions
to require local authorities to draw up action plans to support
schools requiring special measures or in need of significant improvement.
The Committee mentions the issue of schools facing
difficulties falling into a downward spiral. The Government is
conscious of the risks of such schools being required, because
of the availability of places, to take more than their fair share
of the most challenging pupils. That is why we have issued guidance
to help LEAs, schools and Admission Forums, develop and agree
protocols to ensure that no school is required to take more than
their fair share of pupils excluded from other schools.
The guidance emphasises that all schools share a
collective responsibility to ensure that these children, when
they are ready to return to school are admitted to a suitable
school as quickly as possible under the terms of the protocol,
including schools that are technically full. The protocols will
also need to take into account that some pupils may need to be
provided with alternative provision, such as in a Pupil Referral
Unit, for a period of time before they can be successfully re-integrated
into mainstream schooling.
Parents (reliability of reports)
Recommendation 10
Like Ofsted, we share the Committee's desire to maintain
and improve the reliability of reports. The changes to school
inspection proposed under the Education Bill will mean that HMCI
will be directly accountable for all reports, and Ofsted is developing
new quality assurance procedures to ensure that reports are fit
for purpose and that standards are consistently high. Ofsted is
consulting parents during the trials of the new inspection model
to ensure that the new style reports are meeting their needs and
we have asked David Bell to keep us informed about these consultations.
The move to three-yearly inspections of schools will
ensure that reports give a more up-to-date assessment. All reports
will continue to comment on the progress made since the previous
inspection. They will also give a clear view of the capacity of
the school to improve, so that schools are not placed in special
measures when (for example) a new management team is already in
place, which is tackling the problems identified and is clearly
demonstrating that they are making progress in resolving them.
This will be more helpful for parents than a simple judgement
about the current position of the school.
More generally, the Education Bill also requires
the publication of an annual School Profile, which will contain
clear and readily understood information for parents and other
stakeholders about the performance of each school.
Policy
Recommendation 11
We welcome the Committee's recognition of the important
role that Ofsted has to play in the evaluation and development
of policy, particularly in the area of more integrated children's
services where we need to identify and share best practice as
local areas work to make a reality of the Every Child Matters
vision.
Ofsted's programme of subject and thematic reports
have been and will remain an important source of independent evidence
for those developing and evaluating policy, helping to inform
future direction. We are in the process of considering with Ofsted
their programme of reviews for the next three years and will be
looking to ensure that this feeds into the Departmental priorities
and our 5 year strategy.
Early years: disclosure of information
Recommendation 12
Following the consultation mentioned in Ofsted's
response, new disclosure regulations were laid before Parliament
on 8 December 2004 and are due to come into force on 31 December
2004. They will place a duty on Ofsted to give parents on request
information about the child care provider they use.
New national standards regulations, imposing additional
requirements on childcare providers in relation to complaints
investigation and records, will be finalised in 2005.
In addition, as Ofsted indicated in their response,
from 1 November 2004 Ofsted is including a section in its inspection
reports summarising information on complaints about the childcare
provider.
A New relationship with schools
Recommendation 14
a) Self-evaluation
Like the Committee, we recognise the important role
that regular and honest self- evaluation can play in school improvement
and accountability. We also recognise that the self-evaluation
process must lead to judgements about areas of strength and weakness;
and that it would not be appropriate to disadvantage schools for
identifying these aspects of their provision.
School self-evaluation is an essential driver of
school improvement and a key component of school accountability.
It enables schools to:
· identify
and make judgements about their own strengths and weaknesses;
· decide how
best to plan and act to share their strengths within the school
and with others and how to address any problem areas;
· be in a powerful
position of self-knowledge when accounting for their decisions
and actions.
Self-evaluation is therefore a key strand within
the New Relationship with Schools. The New Relationship is founded
on trusting the professional judgements of leadership and management
teams, who know their schools best. They will be judged on the
outcomes from self-evaluation. It is in their interests to have
effective processes that feed into the completion of the Self
Evaluation Form (SEF) that will be the starting point of proposed
future Ofsted inspections.
Many schools and LEAs have already developed strong
routines of self-evaluation, but others have not. There is a lot
of variation in the effectiveness, regularity and depth with which
schools review their work.
The approach in the New Relationship trials is to
help make strong self-evaluation common practice in all schools.
Schools will be free to use whatever process they choose for self-evaluation.
We do not want to weigh down school self-evaluation with excessive
bureaucracy or prescription. But schools will be expected to have
available a summary of their self-evaluation and evidence on the
SEF.
As well as its use in discussion with the school
improvement partner, this self-evaluation will be the basis for
the shorter sharper Ofsted inspections. But there is an important
distinction between the completion of the SEE and the school self-evaluation
process. The SEE is a summary document, derived from whatever
process the school uses for its own purposes to evaluate its performance.
DfES, jointly with Ofsted, intends to develop minimal
central guidance, which will set out guidance on how schools can
judge whether they are doing self-evaluation well. It will include:
· six
key principles or "acid tests" of effective self-evaluation;
· Ofsted's self-evaluation
form (SEE);
· guidance on
how to complete the SEE.
Draft guidance is currently under development, with
a view to finalising it by Spring 2005.
The new self-evaluation arrangements are part of
the New Relationship trials involving eight LEAs and 92 primary
and secondary schools. These structured trials will run until
July 2005 during which time the Department will work in partnership
with the schools and local authorities to develop and test out
various elements, including self-evaluation, to identify the best
approaches.
During the New Relationship trials, all schools are
completing the new Ofsted Self-Evaluation Form (SEE) and have
been asked to provide feedback on how it fits with their overall
self-evaluation processes. The National Foundation for Educational
Research (NEER) are doing a specific research exercise to identify
the different tools which schools use for self-evaluation, and
to gauge what further support needs to be offered by Ofsted and/or
the DfES to support effective self-evaluation. We are also asking
the School Improvement Partners operating this year for their
views of the effectiveness of self-evaluation in schools, with
a view to making recommendations for the future about how the
processes can be improved.
We recognise that for the new inspection regime to
be successful, it needs to be founded on honest self-evaluation,
and only by testing it more fully with schools can we make informed
judgements about how helpful this process is for driving school
improvement.
b) 14-19
area inspections
Ofsted's response noted that it would no longer be
sustainable to run 14-19
area inspections alongside the new joint area reviews and Ministers
have subsequently agreed with Ofsted that separate 14-19
area inspections should stop in summer 2005, after which joint
area reviews are to be introduced.
The Department is looking at how best to incorporate
the benefits of area inspection into the new arrangements. In
addition the LSC's strategic area reviews will be running alongside
inspection, ensuring high quality configuration of provision and
introducing changes to improve the system.
The revised Common Inspection Framework, currently
out for consultation, includes the requirement that inspectors
assess how effective are the links made with other providers,
services, employers and other organisations to promote the integration
of care, education and any extended services to enhance learning.
c) Further Education
The introduction of new inspection arrangements for
the post-16 sector is planned for April 2005, for those providers
for whom ALl is the sole inspectorate (mainly work-based trainers),
and for September 2005 for FE college inspections in which ALl
and Ofsted are jointly engaged, although Ofsted has the lead under
the Learning and Skills Act 2000.
All colleges will be inspected by the end of the
academic year 2008-09 but better performers will be subject to
a lighter touch. The Common Inspection Framework has been revised
to reflect these changes. The revisions are currently the subject
of public consultation, with a deadline of 31 January.
The proposed changes mirror those planned for school
inspection regime. There will be an estimated 50% reduction of
inspection days for colleges compared to the current inspection
cycle. This combined with a reduction in the period of notice
given to an institution will substantially reduce the demands
which inspection places upon providers.
The new arrangements focus inspection more closely
on the agenda for improvement through an annual assessment of
performance and encourage the use and development of self-assessment
to improve the quality of provision. Ofsted will also introduce
periodic national surveys of areas of learning so we can still
get a balanced picture of standards in curriculum areas. Because
of the more variable quality of the FE sector the new arrangements
for FE take account of a college's track record of quality and
performance to determine the scope and frequency of inspection.
Inspection will be proportionate to risk.
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