Uncorrected Evidence 463

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 463

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION & SKILLS COMMITTEE

THE WORK OF OFSTED

Wednesday 16 March 2005

MR DAVID BELL, MRS MIRIAM ROSEN, MR ROBERT GREEN,

MR MAURICE SMITH and MR JONATHAN THOMPSON

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 87

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education & Skills Committee

on Wednesday 16 March 2005

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Mr David Chaytor

Valerie Davey

Mr Nick Gibb

Mr John Greenway

Paul Holmes

Helen Jones

Jonathan Shaw

Mr Andrew Turner

________________

Witnesses: Mr David Bell, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, Mrs Miriam Rosen, Director, Education, Mr Robert Green, Director, Corporate Services, Mr Maurice Smith, Director, Early Years, and Mr Jonathan Thompson, Director, Finance, Ofsted, examined.

Chairman: Can I welcome Chief Inspector David Bell and his team. It will be quite an historic day. It certainly is an historic day in that we are starting slightly early, which is not normal for this Committee. It is also an historic day for Maurice Smith because it is his fiftieth birthday, and I understand champagne will be served later in the day! We could not possibly accept, but we might appear! Thirdly, if the vicious rumours are that there will be an election on 5 May, this could be the last evidence session of this Committee until after the election. So, three auspicious elements in the day, but happy birthday, Mike! Now you have got to find out who told me!

Jonathan Shaw: Then you have got to tell us what you got!

Q1 Chairman: I think it is quite appropriate, if it is the final evidence session before the election, that it should be you, David, and your team in front of the Committee on your annual report. Let us get started. I want to ask you, as usual, to have a brief few words for us to set the scene.

Mr Bell: Thank you very much. What Maurice got for his birthday was an appearance in front of this Committee!

Q2 Chairman: Some people have all the luck!

Mr Bell: In introducing my annual report it is worth highlighting to the Committee the scope of Ofsted's responsibilities. We inspect and regulate over 129,000 providers, from child‑minders working in their own homes to very large general further education colleges. Our work touches over a million professionals in education and care, which incidentally is about five per cent of the working population of the country. We reckon we serve about 30 million young people and adults, informing them about the quality of education and care, so in some ways in every sense Ofsted is big business. Turning to the commentary that began my annual report, I argued that we had an improving education system with many of the conditions in place for further improvement. I repeat that again today. I would reject the arguments of those who would suggest that English education is a terminal state of decline or that there is a mass dissatisfaction with standards in our schools. Neither of those propositions is supported by Ofsted's evidence. It is undoubtedly true that we expect more from our schools and colleges and other providers than we have ever done before. It is also true that inspection has raised the bar and will continue to do so, particularly as our new inspection system comes into force in the autumn, legislation permitting. That is the way it should be, as parents and the wider public expect more and certainly expect more and more young people to do better and better. I would have no truck with those that would promote a council of despair. Equally, and even if it is uncomfortable for some, this Chief Inspector and Ofsted will not allow a culture of complacency to take root in our education system. There are issues of concern that we highlighted and have highlighted previously, and I suspect, Chairman, you will want to pick up some of those for debate too, though I do hope, as this Committee has always done, we are able to look at things that are working well in our education system as well as those that are not working quite so well. I make one other quick point by way of introduction. Ofsted itself cannot afford to be complacent as it takes forward its responsibilities. You know, as you have heard on previous occasions, that we have new inspection systems coming across all of our responsibilities. We need to make inspection sharper, more proportionate and less costly and burdensome. We are leading the ground‑breaking work in children's services, as the Committee has heard previously, and we are vigorously implementing the efficiency reductions, but at the same time as doing all of that we have to ensure that our current responsibilities met well and within a fortnight, I am pleased to say, we will have completed our second major inspection cycle of Early Years providers, all 107,000 of them. That is a very significant achievement, and I pay tribute to my colleagues in the Early Years directorate, led ably, of course, by Maurice Smith. I think also our uncompromising work in schools facing special measures and other categories of concern is also paying dividends. There was some concern a year or so ago about a slight increase in the numbers of schools in such categories, but I am pleased to say this week I was able to report there are 40 schools out of those categories, 40 fewer schools in those categories than was the case at the end of July 2004. With children, pupils, students and parents at the heart of our work, Chairman, and sensible but, I hope you would agree, never cosy relationships with providers and government, I believe that Ofsted continues to make a very powerful contribution to the English education system. My colleagues and I, of course, are now happy to take forward your questions.

Q3 Chairman: Thank you for that, Chief Inspector. Can I open the questioning by asking you something that is very current, this whole question of how far the national curriculum is holding back pupil achievement. There has been much discussion, and I have only seen the Financial Times' comments on the Minister for Schools talking about freeing up schools to have a much more flexible approach to curriculum, and, of course, we have had one of the political parties suggesting that one of your predecessors, Chris Woodhead, will be in charge of the curriculum if the Conservatives were in power. Is the curriculum really a barrier to children's achievement? We have had how long? 1988 the national curriculum came in.

Mr Bell: Yes.

Q4 Chairman: Is it a barrier? Is it getting in the way of pupil achievement now?

Mr Bell: No, it is not, but it has to be kept under review. Putting a brief historical perspective on this, one of the reasons why the then government introduced the national curriculum was because there was such unevenness of provision across schools. In fact, interestingly, successive reports by Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools have highlighted how uneven the curriculum experience was in different parts of the country; so it was absolutely right that we moved to a position where every child in every school had a guarantee to a minimum entitlement across all subjects within the curriculum. Of course, the national curriculum, almost since its inception, has not stood still, and there have been successive reviews over the past ten or 15 years. Some people have been critical and have said that that shows the curriculum is wrong in the first place. I do not think it suggests that. I think there are aspects of the curriculum which probably were wrong in the first place insofar as they were too heavily weighted in some ways as opposed to others, but I think it has been right to keep the curriculum under review. When you look at the future and you think about the national curriculum, there is a difficult balance to strike. On the one hand, I think it is important to maintain that entitlement to a broad range of experiences for children and young people. On the other hand, there are some young people that do not benefit as much as they should from the national curriculum, and I think that becomes particularly pertinent when you get 14 plus. I think there are some issues there about whether at that point in young people's education breadth and balance is less important as ensuring that we find courses and qualification that will motivate them to stay in education and training: because I think the danger is that if you say breadth and balance is all through to the end of compulsory education, quite a lot of young people opt out anyway, and I would rather keep them in the system and have them learning things that were particularly relevant and particularly of interest to them. Therefore, I think it is right to keep the national curriculum under review. Maybe for some young people it is holding them back, but I still support very strongly the principle of a curriculum across all schools and to which all children are entitled.

Q5 Chairman: How do you think it is best up-rated, updated and kept relevant?

Mr Bell: The qualification and curriculum authority has the key responsibility for keeping that under review. I think Ofsted, interestingly, plays an important role in that respect, because our reports on subjects of the curriculum, which in a sense supplements the annual report and other publications, I think help to keep the curriculum under review. There are times, of course, when there are public debates lodged. We have a debate going at the moment launched by the QCA on the English curriculum. The Historical Association are having a debate about the nature of the teaching of history in schools. There was a report last year on the teaching of mathematics. I think you can have a statutory body like the QCA responsible for the review of the curriculum, but there are ways you have to involve others. It is important, I think, is it not, that this does not just become a conversation amongst professionals, that politicians, parents and employers all need to contribute: because it may be the case that what was appropriate in 1988 and 1995 is not actually as appropriate now in 2005. It must not ever just become a debate amongst the professionals.

Q6 Chairman: Chief Inspector, you have been in the job how long now?

Mr Bell: Three years on 1 May 2005.

Q7 Chairman: So you have really settled in?

Mr Bell: Indeed.

Q8 Chairman: Reading about you and reading about Ofsted, it seems that you now have great confidence in the job, in the sense that you like to put your head above the parapet more often in quite controversial subjects, and some of us get a sense ‑ and this is not criticism; it is just a probe ‑ that you are getting into the area where, with Ofsted, you want to play a role in changing policy. Would that be a fair comment?

Mr Bell: I think we have always had a role in commenting on the implementation of policy, whether that has been national strategies or whether it has been policy in relation to particular sectors of the education system. I believe very strongly that the independence of the Chief Inspector and the unique constitutional status of Ofsted is helpful in that respect, because I think it enables to us speak out fearlessly and frankly about what we find. On the other hand, I do not think it is in Ofsted's interests or the education system's interests for Ofsted to become so far out on a limb that nobody takes any account of what we say. In the end, I am very clear, ministers have to determine what policy is, and there are aspects of what we report on where we make recommendations that ministers say, "Thank you very much, but we are going to do something different." That is entirely appropriate. Equally, and we have done this before, Chairman, in front of your Committee, we can highlight many occasions where our evidence has provoked ministers to act in a particular way, and I think that is the way it should be.

Q9 Chairman: I do not disagree with that, Chief Inspector, but you are on the record as saying you are criticising people and rubbishing the achievements of young people, and I think the Committee would whole‑heartedly endorse that view; but sometimes some of the high‑profile things you say seem to get the balance in the public's mind slightly askew in the sense that, here is your report, which, as you have just said in your introductory remarks, of a steadily improving education system, high achievement, getting better, a very good picture of the English educational system, and ogres and some people may query that, but that is the general picture that comes out from reading your report. Yet some of your interventions actually do seem to accentuate the very small percentage, relatively small percentage, of under achievement and bad behaviour. If you added up all the press clippings, it does paint a rather different picture. Does it not distort the truth?

Mr Bell: It can distort the truth, and I think the annual report is quite an interesting example because the comments that I refer to in the commentary in particular got quite cursory coverage in the media despite our press statement, my comments in advance of the launch of the report at the press conference, all making the point that I thought we had this pattern of improvement with conditions in place for further improvement. Equally, I did highlight the one in ten schools where progress had been insufficient between inspections. The danger is that those who report, the media, will say that is a really interesting story because it is telling a bad story ‑ and I am not naive about that, I recognise that is the case ‑ but you have to then ask yourself what is the alternative, that the Chief Inspector only says things that are good because he or she is concerned that the media will highlight disproportionately that which is negative. I do not think the job is worth doing if that is the basis on which it would be done. We keep under fairly careful review the way in which these messages are presented, and it is difficult at times to get that balance right. There is one other comment I would make about that. For all of us who in a sense are London based or have a London HQ there is a tendency, is there not, to think what the national newspapers and the national media are saying is all. One of the very nice things about the annual report is that it gets huge coverage at a local and regional level. In fact, colleagues across the table here, across the airwaves up and down the country, are pushing very hard those messages, and I think you get a much fairer hearing about the strengths and weaknesses at the local and regional level and sometimes you do at the national level, and that has been good; we have been able to get out there and promote that message. One of the things we always like about the annual report, or the time when the annual report is produced, is the schools that have been outstanding, because these are always very positive local stories which are promoted. I am not complacent about it at all, Chairman, and it concerns me if we do not get a balanced message out there, but I guess, like everyone who works in the public eye, you just have to accept that at times the media will be more interested in those things that are going wrong than those things that are going right.

Q10 Chairman: I detect a softening in your attitude to my invitation for you to relocate in Huddersfield. It would give a much better perspective of what is going on in the real world. I know the Government wants more people like yourselves to relocate out of this dreadful London and the South East, and I look forward to it.

Mr Bell: Chairman, I know from my visit to Huddersfield that I had an excellent perspective on the world.

Q11 Chairman: Thank you for that, Chief Inspector. Can I lastly say, the general picture is improving and encouraging in British education. What about the continual criticism of that kind of picture from Professor Timms at Durham University? He and his colleagues seem to run counter. I know that they are interested in selling a different testing system, and I am not saying that plays any role in their comments, but it is consistently used by some members of this Committee as a criticism that here is the Chief Inspector saying the English education system is improving steadily, it is a good news story, but here is a leading academic that says it is not.

Mr Bell: One of the aspects of Ofsted's work is not just to report on attainment or examinations, and so on, because there are other mechanisms for doing that and we are interested in that, but we have to look more widely at the quality of education, leadership and management in schools, spiritual, moral, social and cultural aspects. Parliament has charged us to do that. That is the basis on which we carry out inspection. I think what we try to do is to take account properly of those standards in attainment, examination results and test results, and set them alongside the wider evidence that we gather. I think it is important to stress that the comments that are made about the improvements in English education are not just, as it were, from inside the English education system. There is a lot of evidence now from international comparisons that we are steadily improving. Again, people can say, "Yes, but it only measures this, it only measures that", but I do think that we can report on a steady improvement in the quality of education in England. The other thing I would say as well is that the inspectors that work for Ofsted get into schools, literally hundreds of schools, week in week out and see what is happening. I know, for example, if you visit primary schools now and you look at the top end of primary schools, the quality of work that the children are doing is consistently better and much more demanding than it was. I speak as somebody with a background, as you know, Chairman, of primary education working in the late 1980s and early 1990s there, and I see the quality of work that children are doing as being much more demanding and much more stretching, teachers teaching aspects of the curriculum much more systematically and coherently than they have ever done before. Again, the other side of the story is that more young people do better in the English education system but a lot still do not do as well as they might. Maybe the biggest concern that I have and continue to have with the English education system is that gap, and that gap in many senses is widening because as more do better, those that do not achieve well just slip further and further behind.

Chairman: Chief Inspector, I will hand you over to Paul.

Q12 Paul Holmes: I want to explore something that you have already touched on with the Chairman. I was just wondering, if you had to define the role of Ofsted in one sentence, the job description, what is it?

Mr Bell: It is to report independently, fearlessly and frankly principally to parents on the quality of their children's education.

Q13 Paul Holmes: That reflects things that we have often asked you about or which some people have asked you about before, where we have said one of the criticisms of Ofsted when it goes into schools is that it comes in, it does the snapshot inspection in the sense, "That is excellent, that is good, that is special measures", and then it goes away - it leaves other people to pick up the pieces - whereas as HMIs, in my experience, give advice, "This is what we can do to improve." You have always stuck by that line, "Our job is just to give a snapshot inspection." It seems more and more in a lot of the speeches and reports that you do that you are trying at a national level to influence policy, which is not giving a snapshot, saying, "This is how it is", you are then going on to say, "This is what we should do about it." Why are you willing to influence policy or recommend changes at a national level but not for schools that you say are failing?

Mr Bell: If you take the example of schools that are failing, actually Ofsted continues to have a relationship with them. Schools that are in special measures have regular termly visits from Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, and often when those schools come out of special measures head teachers will say one of the most powerful tools to assist their improvement has been the regular monitoring by HMI. That is inspection, in the sense that HMI go there to monitor the progress, in a sense to enable me to report to the Secretary of State under the arrangements for schools in special measures, but at the same time the quality of the discussion and the debate and the dialogue usually between the HMI and the head teacher really does help to shape the head teacher's thinking to assist them to look at different ways to in a sense bring them up short on things that are not going quite so well, to encourage them to keep doing that which is improving the school. You might say that is just advice. Our view is it is inspection, but it is using the expertise of HMI to help the head teacher and others in the school to think about what they do next. You might say, "Why do not you go the whole hog then and sit there as advisers?" The concern I have about that is not theological or philosophical in that sense, it is more about those who are responsible for running school are those who work in the school themselves or are associated with the governance of schools, i.e. the government, and it seems to me that it is properly the responsibility of the head teacher, senior leaders and the governors to run the school and to use the information and the evidence that Ofsted provides. Even if you go beyond special measures, of course, every school that gets an inspection report gets a list of key issues or recommendations to follow up; and I think it is fair to say that over the 12 years or so we have been carrying out school inspection we have always kept under review the quality of the recommendations. I will not pretend that in every place those recommendations are as sharp and as incisive as they should be, but it is really important that if you get really good recommendations that can help the school to improve. The proper responsibility for taking that school or college forward rests with the school itself. I think if we ended up getting confused about that, you would have people in front of this Committee saying, "We do not know where we stand with the inspectors, because now they are inspecting their own advice and we are not sure whether we should be taking what they say as gospel, because if they give it to us and we reject it, they will come back and hang us out to dry." So I do think there are good, sensible reasons for us working the way we are working. One other comment, Chairman, Mr Holmes, about the new inspection system: I think that we are going to help to drive that improvement, not least through the increased frequency of inspection, because one of the key lessons we have learned over the past ten years is that nothing seems to drive improvement than the absolute certainty of revisiting by inspectors. We have found that in schools with special measures, we have found it in colleges, we have found it elsewhere. So you can, I think, as we are arguing, reduce substantially the weight of inspection, but by having it sharper and more frequent you can help to drive that improvement that we all want to see.

Q14 Paul Holmes: Given what you say about the inspection at school level which we have talked about before and disagreed on, why then, if you want to be hands‑off in terms of not giving advice to the schools and colleges you inspect, do you seem to be becoming much more proactive in wanting to give advice to the Government about where our schools should go? For example, one of the speeches you made about Tomlinson, I seem to recall, you suggested that the expansion of 14 to 16 education should not be in general schools and it should not be in colleges, it should be in vocational schools, something like old secondary moderns. You seem to be trying to make your own policy there, and yet you said that the remit of Ofsted is to inspect and report on what is happening?

Mr Bell: To be very clear, the job description of the Chief Inspector, so formally the job description of the Chief Inspector, is to provide advice to ministers and to contribute to the public debate about education. That is explicitly written into the job description. I am very clear that I am not trying to make policy. I am trying to influence policy, because I think, uniquely within the education universe, the Chief Inspector, drawing upon the huge amount of evidence gathered by inspectors is able to say, "This is what is happening in the system, this is our interpretation of what is happening in the system and we think you should consider this or that." On that specific issue that you cited, I did not actually develop my ideas because that is something to do later in the year, but I think it is a good example of Ofsted saying: "We are seeing a lot beginning to emerge in relation to 14 to 16 opportunities for youngsters, and we are seeing many youngsters who seem to be more engaged in education by alternative routes." At the same time, we are finding that schools are saying, "We do not have the facilities in every single institution to provide that kind of education", therefore it seems to be entirely sensible for me to start to think about what that might mean or could mean for the future. In the end ministers will have to take a view on that, as they do in all subjects. I think it is a sensible use of our evidence. I think it is very important that the Chief Inspector always has that hook back to the evidence and is able to say, "We are saying what we are saying based on this evidence, but our recommendations‑‑‑" It is not just me and it is not just recently. Ofsted reports and the reports of HMI over many decades always had that element of recommending that this is how things might be, recognising ministers make the final decisions.

Q15 Paul Holmes: You do not see any dangers, for example, in your predecessor, Chris Woodall, doing it, but do you see any dangers in the head of Ofsted using the media to try and shape policy? A permanent secretary at the Department of Education and Skills will give ministers advice on the direction of policy, but they do that in private discussion. They do not do it through tabloid headlines?

Mr Bell: I think it is very important to see that this is not megaphone diplomacy. One of the important elements of the job, not just the Chief Inspector personally but my colleagues and other colleagues, is to work very closely and properly with officials in the Department, and in fact other departments, in talking about the issues that they are finding. That goes on all the time, but, again, it is a proper separation between the role of the ministers and the officials on the one hand and the role of the inspectorate on the other. I think there are occasions, however, where there are important issues that the Chief Inspector should raise more publicly and widely. I just think that is part of contributing to the public debate about education, but I would be concerned if that was in a sense just merely the views of the Chief Inspector, because I think that the one thing that separates us out in providing our opinions about education is the evidence we gather. For example, in talking about the future shape and direction of the Childcare Strategy or Early Years in education, we are able to do that on the basis of 107,000 separate inspections and really put a handle on what is happening. Much of that advice, discussion, goes on privately, Maurice will provide that kind of comment, but just occasionally, as Maurice has done, as I have done, we have made public statements to help to move the debate forward.

Q16 Paul Holmes: Looking at one example possibly, when you make a comment or a speech or something you know the press are going to feast on it in various ways, so you have to be careful about what you emphasise. The Chairman has already touched upon the point that you seem to get quite negative in speeches even though overall you say that things are improving. With colleges, for example, you have been very critical about the ten, 15 per cent that are a national disgrace but you do not emphasise the 85 per cent who are not, or the Learning and Skills Council Report last year and this year that showed 90 odd per cent satisfaction from the customers, from the students. Should you not be advertising more the positives where the positives are so overwhelming?

Mr Bell: I think that in some ways is a very good example of what we have just been discussing. I have an enormous passion for an interest in the quality and improvement of further education because I believe that if we are going to meet the aspirations, I guess, of everyone to improve the quality of vocational education, we must have the best possible further education system imaginable. The reality is, as you know, that the inadequacy rate in colleges continues to be higher than in other institutions within the system, and particularly other institutions providing 14 plus education, whether those are schools or sixth‑form colleges. I did use the words that it was a "national disgrace" that we had that level of inadequacy in our further education colleges, because we will not bring about the kind of ambitions and aspirations I have for young people if you have such a significant percentage of colleges and places in colleges were providing proper education. On that one I would argue that I probably said more about further education generally than any of my predecessors in taking a particular interest in all of this issue in a way that has, I think, not been typical of others, because there have been other priorities at different times. I just feel very, very strongly. If we get ourselves into a position of thinking all is well in the further education world, frankly we are deluding ourselves and we are deluding those who will depend on high quality further education to offer them the kinds of opportunities they need; and I just think there is always a danger of going to the opposite extreme, that you become a kind of uncritical cheer leader for a sector when, in fact, the reality is quite different.

Q17 Paul Holmes: But surely what you have just said, the danger of going to the extreme, is that not what you done? You go to the extreme of really emphasising, which the tabloids love, "ten to 15 per cent national disgrace, " but you do not balance it in the same sentence by saying "but over 90 per cent of students when surveyed by the LSC two years running say that they are getting a really good education in college"?

Mr Bell: The inadequacy of the special measures rate in secondary schools is running at 1.3 per cent of schools. There are no sixth‑form colleges in that category. It seems to me that there is a huge issue, despite the many good things that are going on in further education, and I think one of the key issues for the sector is to help to explain this huge polarisation in quality, because I think it is at its starkest in the further education sector. I notice that Chris Hughes, who was previously the head of the Further Education Development Agency, made that point recently. Why is it that we have such an extreme and in some ways in larger numbers than we do anywhere else in the system? That is what we should be getting at. The point I would make is that the two reports that we published in this area of why colleges succeed and why colleges fail I think provided an analysis on why some of these things are happening that nobody had provided yet. It was Ofsted, I think, for the first time that had diagnosed some of the key characteristics, some of which, incidentally, are outside the control of the colleges that bring about that. I think we have caught quite a few people up short by arguing there may be systemic issues about the nature of organisations in certain areas that it appears almost to doom some general further education colleges to failure. That is the more textured picture. I think if we do not say that, who is going to say it? I am not sure that there are other people in the system who are saying that.

Q18 Helen Jones: Can I move you on to the new system of inspection. A lighter touch inspection system is going to require, as we all know, much more vigorous self‑evaluation procedures in schools and, yes, the research shows that schools with good self‑evaluation procedures can make real progress, but are you convinced that enough of our schools have in place the rigorous self‑evaluation procedures that they are going to need and, if not, how are we going to encourage them? How are we going to get past the view, that I have seen in real life and I am sure you have, schools in night nice leafy suburbs saying, "We are doing very well in comparison to everyone else", and we say, "Yes, but have a look at your intake and you should be doing a lot better." We see it at the other end of the spectrum as well. How are we going to get past that sort of mindset?

Mr Bell: Perhaps if I begin to answer and then bring Miriam who has been leading up to this development work on the new system of inspection. To answer your question directly, I am uncertain, frankly, about whether we have that capacity there. I say that based on our evidence. We commented in the annual report that, whilst in management terms within schools the quality of self‑evaluation has been one of those features that has improved over recent years, it is still one of the weaker elements of school management. It is improvement, but it is still not as strong as it might be, so I think I am right to be uncertain. That is why, to some extent, we need to ensure that schools carry out proper rigorous evaluative self‑evaluation rather than just descriptive self‑evaluation, and there are a number of ways that can be done ‑ by advice in documents that are published by the DfES, advice given by local authorities, and so on, about how you carry that out. I do, however, make the point that when some people are saying this new system of school self‑evaluation is terribly cosy and it is dead easy and Ofsted simply has to tick the box. First, it is not true that Ofsted is there to tick the box; Ofsted is there to continue to make an independent rigorous judgment about the quality of education in school based on a national framework. Secondly and more importantly, far from this being a soft touch, I think this is even more penetrating light on the quality of leadership and management, because if self‑evaluation, as it has been in some places, turned out to be self‑delusion, then it tells you quite a bit about the quality of leadership and management and the quality of leadership and management as it affects the education of children. Let me pass to Miriam, if I might, Chairman.

Mrs Rosen: In the most recent annual report we say that one school in ten still has problems with school self‑evaluation; so we are taking this seriously and we have produced further guidance together with the Department on the process of self‑evaluation and also how schools might go about filling in their self‑evaluation forms. We have given examples where schools in our pilot inspections have actually filled in their self‑evaluation forms and they have completed their self‑evaluation and we have worked those examples up with the schools and published them; so there is extra guidance, which went out only last week into the system. There is also the dialogue which the inspectors hold with the School Senior Leadership Team. When they go into the school to inspect it they start from the self‑evaluation, but they start to test that out again the data, talk to the school about it, so it rapidly becomes clear where there are gaps and inconsistencies. The inspection system is not just reliant on the school having done it properly; the inspectors will find out if the school has not been able to do so. One of the outcomes of this is that the schools will get better at their self‑evaluation and be in a much better position to start bringing about their own improvement.

Q19 Helen Jones: That may be true, but the worry is that you could develop a culture of people filling in their forms very well without developing throughout the whole school a culture of self‑evaluation that permeates anything people do. It seems to me that while you can quite rightly inspect and say this school has got this wrong, that does not get us over the problem of how to develop the right culture. Crucial in that, it seems to me, is the role of link advisers - what we used to call LEA link advisors but I am told we are not to call them LEAs any more. If that role is downgraded, does it not in your opinion make it much more difficult to offer the advice and support to schools to develop the approach that they need?

Mr Bell: You are absolutely right to stress the point that filling in a self‑evaluation form is not the same as self‑evaluation, and we are very clear about that, but the self‑evaluation form in a sense is capturing the process of self‑evaluation that the school will have carried out. Many schools do, I think, in fact I know, use the self‑evaluation forms as a kind of template for helping to work out what that process might be. That is not new, that has been happening for a number of years, and increasingly over the last three or four years, as we have given more priority to the schools own statement about its strengths or weaknesses. I think we are one with you on this. We have to build up that capacity to evaluate the quality of education in a school at school level. The other side of this new relationship with schools which we have talked about, or which you have heard about, I am sure, on the part of ministers has been the School Improvement Partners. It is not for me to talk about that because that is the DfES, but we have been very clear about the relationships between the new inspection system and the School Improvement Partners, so I think the kind of work that you would like to see to assist schools to become better at their own improvement is clearly one of the driving forces behind the school improvement partner initiative. I do not think there is any suggestion that schools are just going to be left on their own, it is sink or swim and Ofsted will tell you which it is going to be and then work it out after that. There is going to be within the system, I think, more and more support. Frankly, schools are at different levels along a continuum. There are some schools, and we have seen this in the pilot inspections, that are outstandingly good at diagnosing their own strengths and weaknesses and really knowing what needs to happen next. Frankly, we have seen one or two schools that have not got it, and often they are schools where the quality of education has turned out to be extremely poor with significant dissatisfaction that we have picked up on the part of parents. So it is really important. I think there are mechanisms in the system to help schools get better at this.

Q20 Helen Jones: There are, but you said, for instance, with schools in special measures, 60 per cent of those turn around within two years, and I have seen in my own constituency a school with a very good head and a lot of local authority support that was turned around and became an excellent school, I have to say. That means that 40 per cent are not. What is going wrong? If we learn what is going wrong in those 40 per cent it might give some guidance as to how we can work on making all schools improve?

Mr Bell: I think the kind of two‑year window, if I can put it that way, is an important driver: because if you assume that a school has gone into special measures because it has been failing to offer an acceptable standard of education, it seems to me entirely appropriate to say there should be at least a review point after a couple of years. The reality is, of course ‑ I am sure you would accept this ‑ that in the main primary schools would tend to come out of special measures more quickly than secondary schools. Secondary schools often would be more complex institutions. I would want to see all schools improving rapidly and coming out of special measures as soon as possible. I am not sure that the fact that some do not come out as soon as others is simply a function of the quality of the self‑evaluation. Often it can be a function of the problems they have faced. I think that does beg the question, and I have made this point before, Chairman, 12 years into the Ofsted inspection system, even though we have the numbers very small in special measures, it is still rather disconcerting to go to some schools and find them in a pretty dire state, because it does beg the question what has happened and what has been happening? I think one of the other drivers on the back of the new inspection system is to ensure that at least the gap between the inspection is not as long as it has been previously.

Q21 Helen Jones: One final question. Is there not a tension between the Government's attempts to give more freedom to individual schools and making sure that schools take the kind of actions that we would all want to see where they are failing to bring them up to scratch?

Mr Bell: Yes.

Q22 Helen Jones: I think one of the things that concerns this Committee is what will happen to the role of local authorities in this: because they have been, in many areas, major forces in helping to turn schools around when they are in special measures or helping schools that were not in special measures but needed to improve. Are you confident that the two things can fit together, that you can get that improvement with the extra attendance?

Mr Bell: It is very interesting. We have already talked about the 1988 Act, and, of course, one of the great benefits of the 1988 Education Reform Act was giving a much higher degree of autonomy to individual schools. When we look back now it is rather curious to think that all these decisions, including the colour of the window frames, was determined at the Town Hall. It does seem right that schools should in the main have responsibility for leading and managing themselves and bringing about improvement. The best schools, of course, interestingly, often are schools that do not work in isolation, because they are often very open to all kinds of influences, not just from LEAs, it has to be said, and sometimes very often not from LEAs, but from a variety of places they are open to influences. I think, and this is the evidence, is it not, the vast majority of schools in the main get by largely by using their own capacity to improve drawing upon expertise as they require it from outside, and we are talking about a relatively small minority that do not have that capacity to do so. I think the constant challenge is to find ways to intervene in those schools early enough so that we do not get to a position where Ofsted is coming in and saying, "This school is now failing to provide an acceptable standard of education." I think it is fair to say from the back of our early inspection evidence that this is an area in which in the main local authorities do well, the identification of schools in different categories, supporting schools in advance of inspection and, where they go into special measures, providing solid support. I think this is done usually pretty will. As I say, I would not pretend always. Sometimes I get in front of me papers about schools ‑ as I do with all schools that go into special measures ‑ and I do think, "Oh my goodness, how has it got to this stage before it is Ofsted that has picked it up?"

Q23 Chairman: Chief Inspector, only in answer to that very last question did you say something positive about the local education authority role. If you remember the last time you were in front of this Committee, we said how do you look at systemic failure in a local education authority area when reports from Ofsted go back to the school and the governors but do not go to the local education authority, so the LEA has quite a lot of difficulty facing up when you get systemic failure across a number of schools. Early on you did say it rests with the school itself to sort itself out, in answer to Paul Holmes. I wonder, how do you view‑‑‑. We had the informal meeting with the LGA (Local Government Association) who said there are no longer any local education authorities with the Children Act and direct funding of schools. There are local authorities with responsibilities for children, but there is no local education authority. Does that change your relationship now? You are charged with inspecting local education authorities. If they do not exist, what are you going to be inspecting?

Mr Bell: It is a very interesting point. We were here in November, I think, talking about the inspection of children's services, and we made the point that the all encompassing LEA inspection that we have all known and loved, as it were, is not going to be there in the future, but again I think it is a natural evolution. I am not sure actually about reporting on the quality of grounds maintenance and those sorts of things needs to be done at a national level the way it was the first time, because there were clearly some failures in the services provided by authorities to schools, but, of course, the schools have got greater and greater autonomy to choose whether to purchase those services. In one sense it is a bit of an irrelevance finding out about those services through a national inspection system. The Children's Services Inspection, however, does and will continue to focus on these crucial elements of educational performance, which includes, of course, the performance of schools and the work that local authorities do to support schools. I think, at the same time as local authorities (and I use the terminology advisedly, as you are, Chairman) are changing their role, I think it is only right that the inspection system changes accordingly. As far as the more general point is concerned about "It is the first time you have mentioned LEAs", we have had this debate around this table before, have we not, that LEAs have this at times rather uneasy role in the system, and that is a fact. They have an uneasy position in the system, but they have certain statutory responsibilities in relation to improvement. At the same time the vast majority of the decisions are made at the local level, and probably the best of the local authorities now are those that are using the power of influence, rather than the influence of power, as it were, but actually the powers left to local authorities are relatively limited so they have to then use their influence to have impact on schools; but we should not be ashamed, and we should not be afraid to say that the majority of schools can do this for themselves. Surely that is a great thing to say. The majority of local schools get on with the job of improvement, they draw upon support as they need it. They do not need somebody from above, as it were, holding their hands.

Q24 Chairman: Chief Inspector, I have visited a lot of schools, most of this Committee visit a lot of schools, and consistently you hear that when a school has problems they look to the advisory service at their local education authority for substantial help to get that improvement. Are you saying that is now going to disappear and you want more than that disappearance?

Mr Bell: No, I am not. I am saying precisely in a sense what you are saying. Where that help is required that should be available, and in the vast majority of local authorities it is available. What I would not mean ‑ I am not sure it is there to mean ‑ is a huge infrastructure which suggests that somehow the expertise about all aspects of school leadership and management resides elsewhere other than the school. I think that is quite inappropriate, but I do think there needs to be a mechanism elsewhere in the system to help where there are difficulties. Again, for a lot of the local authorities we are looking at, that is not proving to be a problem. They will, however, say to you the danger can be that you end up only dealing with the failure and you do not get a chance, as it were, to influence the broader range of schools; but again the best authorities we see tap into that expertise in the best of schools and make sure that it is available, not just to them and the local authority officers and members but also to other schools in their area.

Q25 Helen Jones: If there is a school which a local authority sees as being in difficulties or heading for difficulties, shall we say, and the school does not want that intervention, there is no way of influencing it in the new system really until it has failed. Is that not too late? We want to stop them failing the first place, do we not?

Mr Bell: I think the reality is in a very small number of cases exactly as you describe. Some schools are highly resistant, even though from outside it looks as if they are going downhill. Often, interestingly, parents feel that same sense of frustration and often will write to me about that. Yes, there are occasion when that happens, there is no doubt there are occasions when that happens, but I would be very nervous to have a hugely disproportionate system established just for the very small number of schools where that applies. I think, again, without in a sense putting all the eggs into the Ofsted basket, which I would not want to do at all, greater frequency of inspection may allow us to get to that, and of course the Chief Inspector does have the power to inspect any school at any time without being invited, if I can put it in that way, and just occasionally we do that, reflecting local concerns and I think you have to have that, but I would not want to change the whole system just because of a very small number of schools that are resistant to efforts to improve them from outside.

Chairman: That has been a very interesting section, but we must move on and talk about some of the aspects of Early Years education. Nick.

Q26 Mr Gibb: Thank you, Chairman. Just before that, I wanted to ask you something about the Education Bill. How long will the inspections be under the new regime?

Mr Bell: Do you mean in terms of any single inspection?

Q27 Mr Gibb: Yes.

Mr Bell: Two days.

Q28 Mr Gibb: How long are they at the moment?

Mr Bell: Four and a half days.

Q29 Mr Gibb: Do you think you can really do enough? Will you be examining the quality of teaching in those two days, going into classrooms?

Mr Bell: Yes.

Q30 Mr Gibb: At the same time having all these discussions with senior management?

Mr Bell: Yes.

Q31 Mr Gibb: How many classes do you think will be examined during the two days?

Mr Bell: It will vary from school to school. In primary schools you might observe, say, 15, 20 lessons, in a secondary school it might be 20, 25 or 30. What we have said is that we are not going to visit all classrooms under this. Can I just explain why. One of the arguments that has been put up, "If you do not do all this classroom observation, you are not going to know what the school is like." We are going to do classroom observation, but we are not going to do as much as we have done previously. I think there is a slight danger of over‑emphasising the classroom observation, particularly in the system we have at the moment with a long lead in. As said in a speech last week actually, launching the new relationship with schools just occasionally you think that inspectors are observing a performance rather than a lesson. If you have much shorter notice and you draw upon the other evidence about the school ‑ and there is huge evidence about the school from its test results, examination results, value added data, what the school said about itself ‑ you have got quite a lot to go on. So we will continue to observe teachers at work, but you must never build an inspection system that only relies on classroom observation and does not take account of the continuity of education over the months and years since the last inspection. Can I ask Miriam if she might come in ‑ in fact you were on one last week, one of the pilot inspections ‑ just to give you a flavour of how it is operating?

Mrs Rosen: Yes, the inspection I was on last week was looking at lessons, but what the inspectors were doing was looking to see where the school had evaluated its teaching as good and where there were problems, and it was partly doing some checking out of that, but it was also looking at continuity over time to see what the results of the children's experience had been, so actually there was less of a snapshot flavour there. With access to all the school's records, actually the inspectors did have access to a greater range of lesson observations than the ones they were carrying out themselves; so that was an important point. Overall we feel confident that we are able to get quite a good picture of what the school is doing without necessarily going into quite so many lessons as we had done previously.

Q32 Mr Gibb: Most of that data is already published. I am trying to work out what it is that is new that you bring to the party. Why not have the short notice and continue the same level of inspections and the same level of classroom examinations? Is it a cost issue?

Mr Bell: I think it is partly a cost issue, because obviously, as I said before, the problem is there are efficiency targets for Ofsted and other government departments to meet, but there is also a wider philosophical point about the burden of inspection and regulation. We have done two full cycles of inspection under the current systems. A number of schools have now been inspected for the third time under the system that we have, and I think you have to ask yourself: are you getting something of a diminishing law of returns on the back of that? I think perhaps going into the third cycle that was the case. Therefore what we are doing is continuing to inspect schools against the national frame work ‑ in a sense that is what we bring to the party. This is not going in and saying to the school, "How are you doing? That looks nice." This is saying here is a national framework that looks at quality standards, etc, and judging the school against that national framework. At the same time it is recognising that there is much more evidence available than there was. I think one of the reasons why the system was set up ‑ it was one of the reasons why the system was set up in the way it was in 1992 ‑ but one crucial reason why the inspection system had to be set up the way it was in 1992 was because there was not any other data much available. Twelve, 15 years on the education system is probably about the most data‑rich of all the public services, and we have got that, so we can build on that, but we do not just inspect uncritically. I can think of examples during the pilot inspections under the new system where the data has been there in a school's self‑evaluation and the school's analysis of it is divorced from reality. It is the same data, but our interpretation of it has led us in very different directions. I think you bring our interpretation against the national framework, you bring our observations of classrooms, you bring our discussions with teachers, and so on. I think it is the right direction. I just think it is the right direction to go.

Q33 Valerie Davey: I want to turn to the document which, I think, had most acclaim, certainly from teachers in my area, namely Excellence and Enjoyment. I am surprised, therefore, to see your comment that very few schools have made any substantial changes. I would have thought, first of all, it is a fairly short time‑frame, but I am more concerned about your comment on the teachers, that you are saying that there is neither sufficient enthusiasm nor the robust subject knowledge required to implement a more creative approach. I wish all of you on Sunday evening had been with me in the Colston Hall in Bristol and seen the performance of dance from schools throughout Bristol, the culmination of a year's work in dance, where 1,500 children have taken part and we had the most superb performance from primary and secondary schools. If you had commented that any of the teachers involved in that lacked either enthusiasm or a robust subject knowledge, you would have been drummed out, and I mean literally drummed out creatively, because you could not. My concern is that that was organised by the LEA, the actual structure of that goes through the LEA. You would not have inspected that as you looked at each individual school; so on what basis are you actually saying that teachers cannot implement excellence and enjoyment, which is the fundamental statement from your report?

Mr Bell: If I can just make one or two observations on that, we produced a report a couple of years ago ahead of Excellence and Enjoyment, and which Excellence and Enjoyment makes quite a lot of reference to, which is an interesting issue about advising the shape of government policy, called The Curriculum in Successful Primary Schools. We demonstrated very strongly, and I am sure it will be the Committee's experience as well, that very good schools can ensure a proper focus on literacy and numeracy at the same time as offering youngsters a very broad, balanced and creative curriculum. What we report on in the annual report is an uncertainty in quite a lot of schools, one, about how you just go about doing that, and two, the expertise available. The expertise available need not just be in the staff that have to work in that school. In fact, one of the interesting things that we are seeing, of course, is increasing use of non-teaching staff and other specialists. I absolutely agree that it is important to build that expertise and knowledge amongst teachers, but it need not necessarily need to be the teachers themselves. I will give you two examples. We reported last year on the Government's use of the Standards Fund to promote music education in local authorities and schools. It is a very positive report on the very substantial impact that the LEA music services were having, not just from afar but actually influencing the quality of practice in individual schools. The second example I would give you is in relation to the Primary French Initiative. We have done a brief evaluation of the early stages of the Primary French Initiative. There is very, very interesting and impressive work going on there, where it is a combination sometimes of external support, and if I might just give you a very specific example of that, I was in a school in Northamptonshire a couple of weeks ago where they are moving forward great guns on primary French, but they are working together with other primary schools in the area with a secondary school to ensure that the specialist knowledge about teaching modern languages is made available. So they are actually going to put together a small sum of money in each school to get more of that available. I think what we are saying in our report is that there is a bit of uncertainty about how you go about accessing expertise to offer that rich and varied curriculum, and we would say that the best schools offer literacy and numeracy, focus rigorously on it, but also do what you describe.

Q34 Valerie Davey: Then why are you not highlighting good practice? I mentioned Bristol. You could go to other cities and find celebration either of language or of music in just this way, and it just seems a pity that, having got this, I think, one of the best reports out, you are not encouraging that, especially given the new non-contact time. So that is a creative opportunity to bring in, exactly as you say, specialists in these different areas to work in the schools. Why not highlight that, instead of have this damning statement about teachers having neither this, that or the other? It does not help, surely, to be creative.

Mr Bell: Yes. Appropriately, blowing their own trumpet when it comes to the music report, the music report actually was on a DVD, and the DVD contained a whole set of examples of classroom practice, of how teachers and others were helping to improve music education, and actually we got a very warm response to that, because people said, "You have reported on the facts as you found them, but actually, here's a whole set of examples very practically of what you are doing." That was also accompanied by some advice about questions you might ask in relation to setting up music arrangements, who you might contact. It is probably inappropriate, if I can put it that way, for the annual report to do that kind of thing, because we have to report on the facts as we find them, but do not see Ofsted as a one-trick pony in that respect. We have a whole range of other reports and ways of reporting that actually do highlight excellent practice. I can think of another example recently over physical education, outdoor education, which you asked me about the last time I was here, Chairman.

Q35 Chairman: You published a report.

Mr Bell: More than that, that report contained a whole set of case studies about what particular schools and other organisations were doing, and I just hope it would reassure you that increasingly our reports do include case studies, checklists, ideas to consider. So we are trying different ways to get that evidence out.

Q36 Valerie Davey: I suppose my underlying concern is that you are somehow again polarising these two aspects, the core and the creative. As far as I am concerned, for every single individual teacher in school, they go together. There is no splitting them apart. You and I know that many youngsters - and those youngsters I saw on the stage at Colston Hall last Saturday - will gain enormously from that experience and their core subjects will improve as a result. So the two things go together. Just as the title of Excellence and Enjoyment hangs them together, how is your report perhaps going to bring those together instead of trying to polarise them and look at them as two different aspects?

Mr Bell: I think actually Ofsted and HMI over many years have a long and distinguished tradition of not polarising them, and actually saying that the breadth and balance in the curriculum is crucial. I do think there is a moment in time here as well, is there not? You will know I said before that the introduction of the national literacy and numeracy strategies was a thoroughly good thing for the education system, because it helped to consolidate knowledge and expertise in teachers, it helped them to teach better, but that obviously requires schools to give quite a lot of focus to bringing that about. I think what we are beginning to see now is schools getting more confidence in using the knowledge and expertise, but now thinking, "What do we do for the rest of the curriculum?" That is what we are highlighting. We would be the last people that would want to polarise the debate, for the reasons of breadth and balance we talked about at the very beginning, but I think we are highlighting the facts on the basis of evidence. Quite a lot of schools are still struggling to get this balance right, and partly they are struggling because they do not think that expertise is always accessible. What you cited, of course, could be replicated up and down the country where schools come together to offer students tremendously exciting opportunities.

Q37 Valerie Davey: Through the medium of the LEA.

Mr Bell: Absolutely. The music report made that point. It was about Standards Fund-funded, LEA music initiatives that were having a direct impact on the experience of children in classrooms.

Q38 Mr Gibb: You said recently that half of all boys cannot write properly when they go on to secondary school. Is there a link between that statistic and the fact that half of all 16 year olds are failing to achieve five or more good GSCEs?

Mr Bell: Yes, is the answer to that, because if you do not leave primary school with the appropriate skills in literacy, you are much less likely to do well in secondary education.

Q39 Mr Gibb: Why are we performing so badly with writing?

Mr Bell: This is a difficult one. Partly, it is about those technical skills that youngsters need to be able to write effectively, which includes their capacity to spell correctly, their capacity to actually do the physical mechanics of writing, although within the National Literacy Strategy there is a lot of emphasis given to writing. Sometimes - and I think this would reflect what we have said this year gone by - quite a lot of schools are still uncertain about what this means in terms of classroom practice: what do you start doing, what do you do next, what do you do next? Although there is quite a lot of debate about the particular approaches taken, the point I would highlight, that we highlighted in our report before Christmas, is the quality of the leadership being crucial. If school leaders, head teachers, do not know what is going on in their own classrooms and are not systematic about the teaching of different elements of literacy, then you are not likely to see children achieve as well as they might.

Q40 Mr Gibb: Can I ask you about reading? There has been an increase in the percentage achieving level 4 at age 11 from 56 per cent in 1996 up to about 77 per cent now. I did not feel you answered the Chairman's question properly about the work that Professor Timms had carried out at Durham University, which shows that over that period, although the test results have improved from 56 to 77, he does not see in his standardised testing that he has conducted in a large number of primary schools any evidence of any improvement in literacy. How do you react to those studies?

Mr Bell: In one sense, picking up the Chairman's point, they all measure slightly different things, do they not? What we look at in the classroom is the evidence of the quality of the work done by the pupils, which in a sense is the wider literacy that I think Professor Timms is commenting about, as well as the attainment; in other words, the percentage of pupils who are achieving the requisite level by the age of 11. Our view is that there have been improvements, significant improvements. Whether that is 77 per cent or 76 per cent or 75per cent, I just think our evidence suggests very, very strongly that more children have a wider range of literacy skills and are more capable of coping with a secondary curriculum than has been the case historically. That is borne out by the link between those youngsters that get level 4 at the end of primary school and go on to get five-plus GCSEs at secondary level.

Q41 Mr Gibb: How do you account for the plateau in that 77 per cent figure over the last four or five years? Why are we not getting up to 80-90 per cent that we are getting in some schools?

Mr Bell: Absolutely; the "some schools" issue. One of the reasons why it is still important to keep focused on a target of around 85 per cent is that if all schools were able to achieve the top level of those that were most like them, they would be there, almost without sweat, and that is why there is a great danger in suggesting that the plateau is somehow about that 23 per cent or that 25 per cent who just cannot do it, when in fact, as you rightly point out, some schools are doing it. Interestingly, in terms of the methods used, I do think the methods used are important, but I think the crucial factor is the quality of leadership. I can just give a really vivid example of that: in our report published in December we quote an inspector asking a head, "How do you develop the teaching of phonics in year one?" and the response was "I just need to go and ask the teacher." That seems to me to say it all. If, as the head, you have to go and ask the teacher, if you do not understand how that progresses in your school, then it might not be too much of a surprise if your school is not doing as well as it should. I think the plateau effect is partly because there is still an under-performance in some schools that could bring about improvement. Again, should it be 85 per cent, 83 per cent? You could argue there are certainly many pupils in many schools that could do better if you look at the corresponding performance in otherwise similar schools.

Q42 Mr Gibb: You said recently that teaching phonics was good in schools with high standards. Rapid, early coverage of phonic knowledge in schools ensured that pupils had a strong foundation for decoding. In the ineffective schools you have said low expectations of the speed at which pupils should acquire phonic knowledge and skills too often hindered their progress and achievement. That is a quote from you. What is your view of the well publicised Clackmannanshire study that came out very recently?

Mr Bell: My view is that there is much in common between the teaching of phonics, as I understand the Clackmannanshire research, which obviously I have read quite carefully since it was published, and the work of the National Literacy Strategy. This is not a new debate, as I am sure you will recognise, Mr Gibb. It is one that has been running for many years. I suppose my observation on it would be exactly as you have quoted me as saying: rapid, progressive, good teaching, etc, but does that not then come back to your point about if some schools are doing it, why are others not? It is less about the method, because I do not think anyone is saying to schools "Don't teach according to the method that you have described", the rapid progression, etc. It is about the leadership having the insight and the teachers having the knowledge and the teaching being at that sufficient pace. I know that there is quite a lot of debate and there has been quite a lot of debate about "If only the National Literacy Strategy would do what Clackmannanshire has done." My analysis of it is that there is a lot in common between the Clackmannanshire approach and the approach of the National Literacy Strategy, and I would say again - back to Ofsted - we said three years ago in the report that it was rather incoherent, the approach to phonics within the National Literacy Strategy, and better clarity was required. Due credit to officials and ministers; they took that on and are giving greater clarity, which makes the approach within the National Literacy Strategy much closer to what you see in the Clackmannanshire system.

Q43 Mr Gibb: There are still some problems with the NLS, which says, for example, that the long vowels are not taught until term three, year one, whereas the Clackmannanshire approach and the phonics lobby want all the 44 sounds taught within the first 16 weeks. That is a huge philosophical difference in the approach to teaching. How can you then, through Ofsted, make sure that the effective method, the one which the evidence shows works, happens in all primary schools?

Mr Bell: We have seen exactly what you have described in some schools. Obviously, some schools in England do use something that is very much more like the phonics approach in Clackmannanshire through a commercial product called Jolly Phonics. My slight reservation on this would simply be to prescribe absolutely, because there is nothing that prevents the primary school in England looking at the development of their children to bring forward that teaching within the first term as opposed to the third term. As the National Literacy Strategy has evolved, you would want to say to schools, "For goodness' sake, don't treat this as absolute tablets in stone. If your children are ready for this, don't hold them back." I recognise that is a difference, and that is one of the differences that has been highlighted. The issue is not about method; it is more about pace. In other words, it is when you bring that forward, and it seems to me if schools have students or pupils or young children that are ready, they should get on with it.

Q44 Chairman: Can we be crystal clear on this, chief inspector? At the moment the National Literacy Strategy has a number of approaches, some of which stimulate and would be good for some children and others for other children. It is a number of methodologies. On the other hand, the evidence we have had in this Committee from the phonics movement is that it should be phonics that should replace the National Literacy Strategy. Which camp are you in?

Mr Bell: I think there is a false dichotomy being created here, Chairman, because even in the Clackmannanshire schools, if you look at the research, they do not say do not do anything else except teach phonics according to the synthetic method. That is not the reality of primary classrooms. Teachers do use a variety of approaches. Where I think the National Literacy Strategy and the Clackmannanshire approach have got it right is that we have given a centrality to the systematic teaching of phonics which was sadly lacking. Frankly, without sounding too much like Ofsted blowing its own trumpet, it was the Ofsted report of 1996 in the Inner London authorities that highlighted the real requirement to get real on the teaching of reading in a much more systematic way, including systematic teaching of phonics.

Q45 Jonathan Shaw: I have some questions on pre-school education. You said earlier, Mr Bell, that the Department has efficiency targets to meet in the same way as other government departments and agencies do. Have we therefore seen a reduction in the number of pre-school inspectors?

Mr Bell: No, is the answer to that. The reductions that we are proposing - and I will obviously have to bring Mr Smith in - are largely going to be on administrative staff. There will be some slight reduction in the number of inspectors simply because we are moving to a three-year cycle of inspection rather than a two-year one. In a sense, we have already accommodated that. We have been very clear throughout our efficiency programme that Ofsted's front line - and it is Ofsted's front line - are those who carry out inspections, whether they are in schools, colleges or in pre-school settings. We have done all that we can to protect our inspection front line on this one.

Q46 Jonathan Shaw: There has been a 15 per cent growth, you have said, since the first national database of providers. That has obviously meant a lot more work for you, Mr Smith. How have you managed that? You have just completed the entire inspection of all of the providers.

Mr Smith: We are just about to complete the second programme of inspection, and we are very proud to bring that in to the Government on time, to specification. There is growth in the system, desired by the Government and accommodated by us. We have various ways of making that accommodation, and one of the ways, as David has described, is that the Government has prescribed that the next round of inspections will have a frequency of three years. That will bring this entirely into line with our colleagues on the schools side. If I can mention two things where that will be helpful, one is that where early years provision exists in a school, on a school site, then of course we can, when the frequencies are the same, join those things together, and of course, it is far more economical and efficient to do so. Secondly, we have brought about - just to pick up on your earlier question - significant reductions in our administrative staff by going to a position of no-notice inspections for group day-care, and I am afraid I was quoted as well in the press as saying, "To start with, that is 100,000 less letters." So we can make considerable economies in that area.

Q47 Jonathan Shaw: In the table in your report we have seen the number of child minders increase by seven per cent, and the number of places increase by seven per cent. There is only one per cent that is unsatisfactory or poor. How long are your inspectors in situ? How long does an inspection take? We know it is four to five days for a school, which is down to two days. How long would you be with a child minder? Obviously, you would be with a child minder less time than a large day-care centre.

Mr Smith: It is very dependent, again, as the chief inspector said, on the size of the provision. I go out on inspections all the time. A child minder, generally speaking - depending, again - may have six children; some of them have more, if they have an assistant, but generally speaking, for child minders, say, with an average of three or four children, the inspector would arrive probably about quarter past nine in the morning, once the children are settled, and they would probably try and get through the detailed process of inspection by the time the children are ready to have their lunch. So it is a half-day, perhaps the feedback just after that, and then home to write the report. To do a big, 120-place nursery, you may well have two inspectors for two days. It very much depends on the size.

Q48 Jonathan Shaw: Would your inspectors of a child minder see any of the parents?

Mr Smith: Yes. One of the issues we thought might be raised today was the issue about how we communicate and contact parents. We have tried a number of methods, because they are not always successful. We tried originally a method of questionnaire, as we have in schools. Frankly, the response to that was pretty slim. Most parents, though not all, love their child minder and really cannot be bothered filling in a form about it. What we try to do is to be there at some time when the parents will be backwards or forwards, either picking up or dropping off. It is much easier, I have to say, in what we would call group day-care in a nursery than it is with a child minder, but I do not think it would help us significantly if we had inspectors turning up at child minders at eight o'clock in the morning. It would be too disruptive to the provision. We have other methods: posters and helplines, etc, and we have made a lot of developments with complaints information.

Q49 Mr Greenway: Chief inspector, several times this morning you have pointed to the importance of leadership in head teachers, but you have also said that leadership by head teachers is not always mirrored in other staff. Why is this? Why is there a lack of leadership in other staff, in your view? How is it holding back improvement, and is there any substance in the suggestion from some that part of the problem is a lack of professional development opportunities for heads of departments and leading teachers?

Mr Bell: It varies from subject to subject. If I take subject leadership, which is the most significant part of middle management, particularly in secondary schools: English, just under half is very good or better in subject leadership terms, down to a new subject like Citizenship, where that is one in five which is very good or better, and there are some subjects where you have a higher percentage of unsatisfactory leadership. For example, one in ten in religious education and ICT would be unsatisfactory or worse. Why does it happen? I think it is less to do with professional development at the subject level and more to do, as I think you are suggesting, with the leadership level. Properly, quite a lot of priority has been given over the past few years nationally to funding for head teacher leadership or for aspiring head teacher leadership through the national professional qualification for headship. I think it is just a matter of fact that there has been less money available for the middle management leadership. Secondary heads - primary heads too - will tell you that they have to do that within their own resources, whereas there is actually quite a lot of external money available for the senior cadre of leaders within the schools system. Again, it is one of those balancing acts. I think it is right to give priority to senior leadership. Your opening remarks suggested it is all very well having the highest quality senior leadership, but if you do not have the NCOs making things happen, then you are not going to be as successful as you can be. Is this not also just a state of mind issue? Head teachers have to believe that the development of their middle management is important, and it is not just super heroic leadership at the top; it actually does take high-quality leadership. I would have thought the funding issue is a fair point to make. There has not been as much at the national level.

Q50 Mr Greenway: I think you are saying that needs some attention. The LEA advisors are an important source of help in this area. We had this discussion earlier about the role of the LEAs. Is there not a danger that we are going to head in the wrong direction if we reduce the importance of LEAs? That would be one of the more important external sources of help in improving leadership below head teacher level.

Mr Bell: I think this is an interesting point. One of the criticisms - and I think it is probably a fair criticism, and it certainly comes out in our inspection reports - is that LEAs often do not have people in their advisory ranks who have had experience of secondary headship. In fact, it is very rare to have that. There was often a criticism that LEAs are actually ill-placed to provide that kind of advice. I do not actually subscribe to the view that you have to have been there and done it before you can provide the advice, but it probably does help in an LEA that somebody has been there and done it, and quite a lot of LEAs frankly do not have that kind of expertise. Often, schools have to look for middle management professional development elsewhere and, to be fair, there is quite a thriving private sector in this area. There are quite a lot of organisations out there very effectively providing high-quality support. On the subject leadership front, funnily enough, here I think you have more of a primary problem. If we go back to Ms Davey's point, where quite a lot of the primary teachers would not have expertise in other subjects of the curriculum to a sufficient level, often the LEA advisory service historically has provided good professional development, but I cannot think of many LEAs except the very largest that now can employ a complete range of subject advisors. I think there is a question mark about the support for middle management elsewhere in government.

Q51 Mr Greenway: Can I just turn briefly to behaviour? How far do you think poor leadership is reflected in poor behaviour? Is there a link? What is your opinion generally on the extent to which poor behaviour holds down standards in schools?

Mr Bell: If I can take the second question first and then come to the first question second, the extent: the vast majority of schools in England, primary and secondary, are orderly places in the main. I think that is an important point to keep emphasizing, and certainly, for some youngsters, school is the most orderly place in an otherwise dishevelled and disorganised life. There is no doubt, however, that there appears to be more of the kind of low-level disruption, noise in the system, and it is not irrelevant; it is quite significant because it can be quite debilitating to teachers who want to teach and do not feel as if they can get on with the job, and it can be really disruptive to other youngsters who want to learn and find that the teacher is always being diverted. We would highlight - and our evidence picks this up - that whilst, as I say, the majority of schools have reasonable behaviour, the percentage of schools that have very good behaviour has actually slipped over the years. So it is, I think, an issue, and it is an issue that concerns parents, because any school probably has some children that cause this low-level disruption. This is where it is very interesting. The report we produced a couple of weeks ago about managing behaviour made the point that often it is about the quality of leadership in the school. One of the problems of writing a report like that is you almost end up stating the obvious, but it is things like clear standards of behaviour and expectation, a clear and well understood tariff of sanctions, good understanding at classroom level of what support is available from senior leadership in the team, good links with the outside agencies to bring students in, alternative curriculum opportunities where those are appropriate, in-school exclusion units, etc. You say that, and you come back to the point: why can they all not do it?

Q52 Mr Greenway: There is quite a lively debate at the moment about how we deal with the problem, and we probably do not have enough time to extend the debate too much this morning, but I would be interested in your view on whether the suggested method by which the new Secretary of State's zero tolerance approach is to be delivered, that is, more re‑inspection, partnerships of schools, is really going to solve the problem if head teachers' abilities to exclude are constrained.

Mr Bell: That is running together two slightly separate issues. Head teachers must retain the right to exclude for the most extreme behaviour, but actually, the most extreme behaviour, although it does cause huge difficulty, is not what the major problem is in the system. I think the problem of that low-level disruption that we have talked bout, and that noise, is not, frankly, amenable to mass expulsion in schools. They are slightly separate issues. I made the point earlier about those inspections and the contribution it makes. Re-inspection will not bring about in itself the improvement, but the certainty of the re-inspection has often galvanised efforts at school level to bring about the kinds of changes we have talked about in the leadership. By giving the priority to the quality of leadership and all the things that I just described a few moments ago, that is absolutely right, but it seems to me a slightly separate issue to the issue of exclusion and what head teachers have the power to do.

Q53 Mr Greenway: Again, back to the role of LEAs. What is going to happen to behavioural support teams?

Mr Bell: In the best LEAs they provide really good support, and in fact head teachers will often speak very warmly of the support they are given from outside. Again, to be fair, this has been an area where the Government, through targeted national funding, has helped LEAs to establish teams, and I think that is right. This is a major priority, and I think it would be of concern if that funding was not available for local authorities. Of course, local authorities do not just deal through behaviour support teams; they support misbehaviour, bad behaviour, call it what you will, in a whole variety of ways.

Q54 Mr Chaytor: Chief inspector, I want to ask about children with special educational needs. In your report you draw attention to the problem of lack of progress in many schools with children with special needs. Is this the result of the inclusion of children with SEN in mainstream schools having gone too far and has Ofsted made any recommendation about the balance between the continuation of special schools and the inclusion in mainstream schools?

Mr Bell: This is similar to the answer that I gave to Mr Greenway, because we published a report last year, in the tail end of 2004, highlighting that where schools had in place all of those very clear procedures for managing inclusion, it often was not a problem, and I visited a number of schools that were in that category. There is a state of mind issue, partly about inclusion: do you want it to happen or do you not want it to happen? Where head teachers want it to happen, often it happens, and they make it happen; in the best sense they make it happen. I do not think it has gone too far, but I would make the point that probably the inclusion of children who have behavioural difficulties is seen as the most difficult part of inclusion, because often teachers will say, "Well, that's just making it more difficult for us to act." In relation to special schools, our position is very clear on this. We have no ideology about whether they should all be closed or anything like that. That would be a deeply retrograde step and, as far as I can see, no political party is advocating that all special schools should be closed. I think you are seeing changes in the special schools system as more people with physical disabilities are now accommodated in mainstream schools.

Chairman: Much of what I have seen in my own patch is that there is sometimes a fuss about closing old and rather inappropriate special schools, and you might close three of those and open a fine new facility.

Mr Turner: First, can I just put this on the record? I do not know whose policy it is but it is the Conservatives' policy that Chris Woodhead should be in charge of the curriculum. It is our policy that he undertakes a curriculum review

Chairman: Thank you for that, Andrew.

Q55 Mr Turner: Going back to the question of behaviour, you have said in your report Managing Challenging Behaviour that "...boys' behaviour troubles others, affects the climate of the learning community and disrupts their own and others' progress. A significant proportion of pupils with difficult behaviour have SEN and face disadvantage and disturbance in their family lives." To what extent is that the result of the lack of male role models (a) in the home and (b) in schools?

Mr Bell: I honestly do not know the answer to that, Mr Turner. Certainly, if you look at primary education, there are few male primary school teachers, but I must confess I have never subscribed to the view that all would be better if there there 25 per cent or 30 per cent male teachers in primary schools. I think it is very complex and I would have to say I just do not know the answer to that.

Q56 Mr Turner: Do you think you should find out?

Mr Bell: I am not sure how I could go about finding out because I believe others have tried and, to be honest about this, this is an issue which is very polemical. This is an issue that is often tied up with moral views about family structures as much as it is about hard evidence about the impact or lack of impact of male role models. I am not sure. To be absolutely frank with you, I think that would be a stretch too far for Ofsted, in saying it is now our responsibility to undertake a major study on the impact of males being in the home or not being in the home.

Q57 Mr Turner: But you congratulate schools on their inclusion agenda where appropriate, you congratulate them on action they have taken to balance the teaching staff in other ways, in terms of ethnicity and so on, and you recognise that may have an impact on outcomes. I accept it is polemical, but it seems to be polemical from all sort of different angles of the political spectrum. I understand it is difficult, but if it has the impact which many people allege, that surely is a place where action should be taken if action can be taken.

Mr Bell: Yes. I can think of one or two examples where in a sense we would comment perhaps in the direction that you are describing. Take, for example, the impact of learning mentors in secondary schools under the Excellence in Cities programme. I think it is commonly accepted, and certainly our evidence would suggest this, that those adults who are not teachers but often are drawn from the local community with a range of expertise and background - sometimes male, sometimes female - do seem to have an impact on children's behaviour and help children, particularly teenagers, to cope with some of the pressures that they are under, whether those pressures are in school or outside. That often is as much as anything about people not, as it were, being seen as part of the traditional teaching structure of the school as it is about them being male or female. Often I have seen that those are issues which seem to impact on children. The only other thing I would say about what you have suggested is there is an interesting distinction between inspection and research. This is one you could talk for hours on. Inspection, in my view, is a kind of research, but it is not research in the sense that we would commonly understand academic research, longitudinal and so on. What you have described, I think, about the impact of male role models in families and in educational performance is probably more properly a work for a research institute or body than it is for an inspectorate. We do however - and the behaviour report is a very good example - draw upon research. There was a report that accompanied the publication of the Challenging Behaviour report that tried to draw together some of the research findings. I am not sure that inspection can add much more.

Q58 Mr Turner: Is there now any excuse for LEAs and therefore for parents, governors and the public more widely, not to know which schools are doing well and which are doing badly?

Mr Bell: No excuse at all, no. I actually think they have that evidence.

Q59 Mr Turner: That is what I thought. The governors in my area complain that they are not given this information by the LEA, and the LEA claims it does not know because we have a three-tier system which is improperly aligned to Key Stage results. They have commissioned lots of reports and the reports tend to concentrate on structure rather than what goes on in the classroom. I am concerned to know where and indeed whether it is the LEAs' responsibility, given that we are a poorly performing LEA, although you have not actually said it is failing, to obtain that advice for schools where schools - some of them certainly, but we do not know which because they will not say - clearly are not performing to a sufficient standard.

Mr Bell: This is a very interesting question. There is a whole set of publicly available data about how each individual school in that system or any other system is doing, whether it is an Ofsted report or test results or whatever. There is no secret store of data - or if there is, Ofsted does not have it. We have published what we have published. I think for the LEA, as with all LEAs, in looking at organisational issues, they then have to balance up a range of factors, and successive governments have always required LEAs to balance up a range of factors. It is not simply a case of what the standards evidence tells you about the structure of schooling. Properly, LEAs have to look at efficiency reasons for structures being as they are. I find it astonishing that anyone could argue that we do not have the evidence about how individual schools are doing, because that seems to me to be available.

Q60 Mr Turner: The last question really is: where do you think that schools or LEAs can get really good advice on how to improve their performance?

Mr Bell: There is a range of places. Some LEA advisors in some LEAs do provide outstandingly good advice about improvement. Other schools will use external partners or bodies. For example, some secondary schools increasingly now rely on good advice from the Special Schools Trust, which has become a kind of quasi-advisory body, but of course, that has the virtue that you can buy into it or choose not to buy into it. A number of schools use private consultants. In the very best sense, we actually have a market of advice out there, and it is for schools to draw upon that. There is one thing I would say about LEAs, although it is a little bit out of date now. We published our overview report of the role of LEAs. We highlighted the data about which LEAs were doing particularly well in particular areas, and there are a range of national agencies - the Improvement and Development Agency - for local government and so on. I do not think anyone can say "We don't know where the advice is." There is lots of it out there.

Q61 Jonathan Shaw: I want to ask you about the Every Child Matters agenda. There has been a lot of debate, which I am sure you are aware of, about the duty to cooperate, where local authorities and strategic health authorities and trusts, etc, do have a duty to cooperate, but where children spend most of their time, in schools, they do not have a duty to cooperate. Do you think that is going to impede good working relationships?

Mr Bell: No, I do not think it will. I was always agnostic about this issue, I confess, partly going back to what we described earlier about the autonomy of schools. I think putting a legal duty on schools would perhaps not have made very much difference at all about what they did or did not do. The best places will collaborate or encourage collaboration and cooperation. I think it was also slightly unfortunate that the impression was given that schools up and down the country were somehow hostile to cooperation and collaboration. Actually, quite a lot of schools would say they see some virtue in moving forward in this way, because it would help them to tie up the services they need to provide. In fact, it goes back to an earlier answer to Mr Turner, the impact of all these social factors. So frankly, I do not think it will make a difference, and I was always agnostic about it anyway.

Q62 Jonathan Shaw: What is your new regime going to be looking at in terms of cooperation? What message can you send schools today about the sort of things that you will be looking for to demonstrate that they are cooperating with other agencies in order that this ambitious agenda is fulfilled, and also that we do not have children who are at risk falling into the gaps?

Mr Bell: Often, as I say, schools do excellent work in bringing this about, and I would say the message is: continue to ensure that you make those good links with the other public and voluntary agencies that impact on your children's lives. As you know, I am sure, from your own constituency, some schools, by the nature of the intake, have a lot of links and have to have a lot of links, and I am sure the heads in these schools would say the success of their business with these young people relies on them establishing those sorts of links.

Q63 Jonathan Shaw: That is a very important point that, yes, schools that are familiar with that sort of territory would have lots of links, as you rightly describe, Mr Bell. I think what has concerned some of us in this debate is where you might have a school that does not traditionally have those type of links because of the intake in a different way from that that you described. They may not feel the need. What happens to those children, perhaps a small minority of that type of child, in a school like that that will not engage with its local partners? What message do you have for them?

Mr Bell: If you believe in the principle, as I am sure everyone does, that every child matters, the very fact that you may only have a very small minority of pupils who are not benefiting from what you are offering should cause you concern, and I think, again, it does cause the vast majority of schools concern; they want to do their best for the students that they have under their care. One of the difficulties for inspection often is getting at these children and at this issue. People say to us "You should inspect who is not there." In a sense, you can if there is huge absence or lots of youngsters excluded. What you cannot really get at through inspection is perhaps policies or practices that may, behind the scenes, as it were, keep some children out or make it more difficult for children to go to some schools and offer them the opportunities they might otherwise have.

Q64 Jonathan Shaw: Are you more likely or less likely to be able to do that with a reduced inspection?

Mr Bell: I do not think inspection of five days or inspection of two days makes any difference. I think what we could get to under the inspection of children's services is an opportunity for the local authority and other local services, health and so on, to make that statement, that some of our efforts in relation to the most vulnerable children are impeded by what is going on in the education system. Again, I would be really nervous about suggesting that this is a widespread problem. The vast majority of schools want to make those links. Perhaps a slightly more substantial issue is ensuring that head teachers and others do not have their eye taken off the ball. The most important thing schools do for children is give them a decent education.

Q65 Jonathan Shaw: Indeed. Tying the Every Child Matters agenda together is the responsibility of the local authorities and they are having their conversations with government at the moment. You have referred to that in the report, saying that there are some important areas of challenge for improvement in a few LEAs or local authorities to meet the demands of the Every Child Matters agenda. What therefore is your assessment? It has been a lot of work for Ofsted. We have had a conversation about this previously. What is your assessment as to how ready local authorities are to embrace this agenda?

Mr Bell: Funnily enough, I think the issue may be lessons about how well prepared the local authorities are and perhaps more widely how local services together are prepared for it, because, of course, the inspection system under the joint area reviews is not just about the local council services. It is a bit of a patchwork. In some places there is very good co‑ordination between health services, education and social services, juvenile justice and so on. Let me just make one obvious point. The local authority services in the main are organised with a children focus, whether that is education or social care for children. The health system generally is not so organised in the sense that it is rare to have specialist children's trusts, unless you happen to be an acute hospital trust with a children's focus. So actually, the health system will find it slightly more difficult to orientate it this way, because the way it is organised does not necessarily separate out easily the support given to children and young people. That is not to under-estimate that in some local authorities there will be issues, but I just think this is a very ambitious programme to bring about co-ordination of services that go beyond the control or authority of any one single body.

Q66 Chairman: Can I ask Robert Green - we have neglected you today. You have enormous experience. Your fingers were all over the national curriculum in 1988, if I recall. The fact of the matter is, this is a tremendous responsibility, and the chief inspector, who is also the chief public relations man for Ofsted, at the last meeting was very happy: big new responsibilities, getting rid of staff, you can all cope. What does the personnel feel? Is everybody happy, Robert?

Mr Green: I do not think you can ever be happy when you are having to say to 20 per cent of your staff that they are not going to have a continuing job with Ofsted. We were clear about that from the outset. What we have tried to do is to explain to staff throughout why we are doing what we are doing and to be as supportive as we can and, curiously enough, we are really in the throes of some of those crucial decisions about individual members of staff. It would be unrealistic to say that staff are going to be happy about these kind of changes. I think the staff can mostly see the reasons why we are making them, and I am very pleased to say that, although, plainly, the unions within Ofsted are opposed to the changes we are making, they are quite supportive of the way we are setting about doing it. We have signed an agreement with them in which both parties are united on the ways in which we are supporting staff.

Q67 Chairman: It is all voluntary redundancy, is it?

Mr Green: Our expectation is that there will be redundancies, but that those will be voluntary, yes. It is certainly our aim. It is part of the agreement we have signed with the unions to avoid any compulsory redundancies. Frankly, we are trying to avoid redundancies at all. There will be voluntary redundancies but we are also offering staff opportunities to relocate, with a generous relocation package, and quite a number have said...

Q68 Chairman: Relocate to where?

Mr Green: Part of our strategy is to move away from London and the South East. A lot of staff have said that they are quite keen to take that up. We are also working very hard to look at redeployment opportunities within the civil service, and beginning to get the first successful opportunities there, providing a lot of support to staff in terms of thinking about their own future careers. It is a very varied picture. Some staff are inevitably devastated about what is happening. Others actually see this as a good opportunity, because there are other things that they can do with their life. It is hard to be categoric across the organisation, but the feedback we have had on the whole from the unions and from others is as positive as you could wish in this kind of situation.

Q69 Mr Chaytor: If we are now committed to a 14-19 phase of education, should there not be a 14-19 common inspection programme?

Mr Bell: There will be. That is one of the changes that we are bringing about. There will be a common inspection framework that will apply to schools and colleges, and I think it is long overdue. The other thing that we are going to do as part of that is ensure that we increasingly use data that allows us to compare the respective performance of school sixth forms, sixth form colleges and general further education colleges, because I think it has been a legitimate criticism of some in the further education sector that the measures have not always judged fairly the respective performance of different parts of the system.

Q70 Mr Chaytor: In making those assessments, will the relative funding levels of schools and colleges be taken into account?

Mr Bell: Again, it is one of those interesting issues: can Ofsted inspect what an institution might otherwise have had if the funding had been different? The answer to that is no. We inspect institutions using the funding that they have got, but we have commented, because it is a matter of public record, that there are different levels of funding in different parts of the system.

Q71 Mr Chaytor: If I can put the question another way, if we are now committed to a 14-19 phase of education and a 14-19 curriculum, should there not be a 14-19 funding methodology?

Mr Bell: To be frank, I have not thought this one through exactly myself because the different institutions do different things. Although you have the commonality of the 14-19 phase, a school sixth form is part of a wider school, so there are complexities of funding there; a general further education college is doing a quite different job to a sixth form college, because often the general further education college will be dependent on other sources of funding, given its links with the private sector, business and so on. I think there is a kind of seduction in saying we should have a common single funding framework. We do have that, of course, post 16, with the LSC's involvement of engagement in relation to funding, but as you know, even with that, it masks all sorts of complexities because of the huge diversity in the sector.

Q72 Mr Chaytor: Where the sixth form college or the general FE college or the school is teaching precisely the same course, is there an argument for differential funding there?

Mr Bell: It is difficult is it not? You cannot just isolate one course and what one course costs.

Q73 Mr Chaytor: That is precisely what does happen in further education. That is how the funding methodology is constructed.

Mr Bell: Yes, but what I am saying is, in a sense, the cost of a course in one college will be different to the cost of a course in another college because of the overheads that are associated with that. That is just a fact of the methodology, and the same will be true in a school because there is a perennial debate in school sixth forms about whether the school sixth form curriculum is subsidised by the school. I think it is the devil's own job to try to make sense of the funding of further education, and I would honestly say I am really not in a position to comment on it. The other thing, getting back to the point about what inspectorates do, inspectorates comment on what they find, and I think we have helped to take the debate forward by commenting on what is happening in different parts of the 14-19 world.

Q74 Mr Chaytor: On the implementation of the proposals in the White Paper, what do you think are the most difficult challenges in moving to this more fluid 14-19 system, where pupils will be attached to schools but may still use other schools, may have two days a week in work, may have one day a week in college? What are the real challenges for head teachers and college principals in terms of implementation?

Mr Bell: There is the obvious one that falls out of what you have said, and that is getting the youngsters around from place to place, and the consequences for timetabling and curriculum. I just think it is easy to say that is just a detail - it is a huge detail when it comes to making this system work. I think there is a more fundamental question, and that is the nature of the curriculum. It is going back to something we commented on earlier. There are real debates out there in the system about what kind of curriculum you should offer to 14-plus young people. What is the balance? Should it be much more vocationally orientated? How much time would be best spent in a further education college? Should it be spent at a school? Those are real issues, but one thing that is very encouraging, and I know this from an event I held two days ago with people who are in this business - head teachers, college principals, LEA people - practice out there is almost ahead of policy. People are starting to do things which are extremely interesting. One of the most exciting things about the 14-19 White Paper, in a sense, like the best of White Papers, it is quickly overtaken by events, and I think if we can see these local solutions emerging, then by the time the Government comes to the 2008 review, which it is committed to within the White Paper, we may see that the whole system has already started to move in quite interesting directions. So yes, there are big issues about logistics and making it work but there are quite exciting opportunities to make the system different.

Q75 Mr Chaytor: Going back to the common timetabling, which seems to be a prerequisite, do you think it is realistic to expect that every school and college in a conurbation like Greater London or Birmingham or Manchester would have a common timetable within our lifetime?

Mr Bell: In asking the question in the way you have asked it, I suspect you do not believe that is possible. I do not think it is possible if you have it at that kind of level. What is possible - and what is happening - is that at the kind of level above the local, if that makes sense, two or three secondary schools, maybe a couple of colleges, you are seeing that happen already. People are moving towards a degree of common timetabling. The debate that I was listening to the other night, talking to people who were involved, is how much further should we go with the 14-plus young people? As somebody put it to me the other night, are we fiddling around the margins? If we are going to make this happen, and we are going to overcome those sorts of problems, you may need to have a longer period of time spent in a single place, because you overcome some of the timetabling problems, and also you give greater continuity of education, and that place may not be the school; that may be the further education college.

Q76 Mr Chaytor: Finally, could I ask about guidance and the independence of guidance, because if the key point of decision-making about people's futures is now 14, while they are still in the school setting, how can the system guarantee that the guidance they receive about their future choices will be truly independent, and what incentives are there for the schools to advise those pupils to go elsewhere?

Mr Bell: You hope, do you not, that schools will provide advice that is truly suited to the needs of young people? I think sometimes schools have advised students/pupils to stay on in the school not because they think they will get the money for it but actually they have often been unclear about suitable alternatives. The reality has often been for many young people, as we see by drop-out rates in the first year of the sixth form, that actually, the school was not very suitable either. So having this thriving sector is very important in expanding choice. I do believe in the independence of the advice all the same.

Q77 Mr Chaytor: There is nothing in the White Paper that suggests the establishment of an independent advice and guidance system.

Mr Bell: That is terribly important. While schools must have some oversight, because they deal with the universal part of the advice to all students, I think there is something powerful about an independent careers service. I think it is very important to retain the independence of advice. So the careers officer or the Connections adviser does not look over their shoulder thinking, "I'd better give the advice, because I'm employed at the school, that this young person should be here." It is quite important that that is independent, but equally schools, properly, because they have to manage advice to lots of students, want some say over the time and how that time is allocated in their own institutions. The same is true for colleges.

Q78 Chairman: Are you content with the quality of advice you pick up from the Connections service for young people?

Mr Bell: Our reports so far have been reasonably positive of the Connections service. I think they have a real tension, and I am not sure it is resolved, between the universal and the specialist. They have to provide universal advice of the sort we have just been describing to all young people, but at the same time do not forget that the kind of genesis of Connections was the Bridging the Gap paper that came out in 1998, which was about the need to coordinate services for the most vulnerable young people. So properly, Connections have been held to account for how well they do that. The Connections services will say to you there is a huge demand out there for those specialist services, and I think there is a real tension here about the universality of service at the same time as there are lots of youngsters out there with hugely complex needs that personal advisers have been meeting, but maybe there has been a tendency for that work to take prominence over the more universal careers advice.

Q79 Chairman: Will that not be exactly echoed in early years, in the working of the Children Act, and Every Child Matters, because again, it is very ambitious to cover all children right across the piece? When we were in British Columbia, Vancouver, that system had become a child protection system, not a universal service, and they have had ten years' experience. Do you not think that is a danger?

Mr Bell: It is a danger because, of course, you might say in the end, what politicians, what the media will be interested in is how you have dealt with the most vulnerable and who was accountable when something went tragically wrong. I think what we have got to try to do - and I know local authorities are very keen to do this - is not just have the provision about the emergency end but also as much as anything about the preventative end. If there is one observation we would make about a lot of children's social services work, it is that it has to be at the emergency end, where there is a lot of frustration amongst staff that if they could only get in more at the preventative end. I think that is what SureStart and other initiatives have tried to do, to get in at the preventative end. You are right: there will always be pressure to make sure, properly, that the most vulnerable are looked at, and you put, arguably, a disproportionate resource to preventing tragedies and disasters happening.

Q80 Chairman: Last question, Jonathan Thompson. One thing puzzles me. If someone said to me in my constituency or in the media or wherever "You are supposed to check on Ofsted, aren't you, as the Select Committee? What are its finances like?" how do we know that someone is not putting lots of money in a Swiss bank account or that there is not a precarious Enron situation going on? How would I know that?

Mr Thompson: You would know that, Chairman, by the reports of the National Audit Office. We are audited by the National Audit Office and produce an annual report that goes to an audit committee, which is chaired by a non-executive director, who challenges all five of us about particular issues and is publicly available.

Q81 Chairman: What is the situation? Is it a good financial situation? You are saving all this money, you are building up balances. The taxpayer will be able to get some back soon, surely?

Mr Thompson: The taxpayer is reducing, if you like, the amount of money that we have available. �42 million is the savings target we have to reach. The situation at the moment is that we are well above �30 million but we still have some further work to do to reach the full savings target.

Q82 Chairman: That is genuine savings? It is not robbing Peter to pay Paul, putting a bit back in the DfES, putting a bit over here, sending some off to Bristol?

Mr Thompson: The real situation is that we need to reduce our costs from over �220 million down to �192 million, so there is real cash saving, but quite what happens to that is obviously not a matter for us.

Q83 Chairman: Do you consider your organisation a well paid profession? Are you well remunerated?

Mr Thompson: I am very happy with my own remuneration.

Q84 Chairman: Not just the chiefs - what about the Indians? Let me just give you an example of why I asked the question. Does it not embarrass some of your inspectors when they go to early years settings and you do a report and you have early years people there on very little, minimum wage, not very much training, on tiny salaries, yet they are looking after the most precious commodity or resource of our country, our little children? It must be embarrassing for someone on an Ofsted salary to actually go to those settings and see those people working a long day, doing a wonderful job, on tiny salaries. Does that worry you?

Mr Smith: Yes. The relationship between the pay of the inspector and the pay of the staff whom they are inspecting is an interesting insight.

Q85 Chairman: It is dramatic, is it not?

Mr Smith: There is also quite a differential between the pay of different inspectors, and that is a very interesting challenge for us as an organisation. I think you might be surprised at the pay rates of child care inspectors.

Q86 Chairman: That does not impress me very much, in that you have not answered the question about how you feel about the quality of pay in early years settings.

Mr Smith: The pay for the most junior staff in early years settings, particularly in the private and voluntary sector, is often set at minimum wage.

Q87 Chairman: We will finish on that note. Chief inspector, any last word before you go?

Mr Bell: Thank you very much, Chairman, for treating us so courteously again this morning.

Chairman: God willing and the electorate compliant, we hope to see you again soon.