Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
MR MAURICE
SMITH, MRS
MIRIAM ROSEN,
MR ANDREW
WHITE, MR
DORIAN BRADLEY
AND MR
JONATHAN THOMPSON
8 MAY 2006
Q120 Chairman: Do you blame anyone
for that?
Mr Smith: I think it is enormously
challenging for teachers and parents in some of those environments,
and I have worked in some difficult parts of Liverpool in Croxteth,
Fazakerley and Speke, to develop an enthusiasm for school, peer
pressure is extraordinarily strong and important to those groups
of youngsters and, frankly, people in there are battling really
very hard to try to engage youngsters in the educational process.
That is where the frustration is. I am not sure that anybody has
yet come up with a slick answer to how we might engage what might
be called that long tail of under-performance in white boys in
urban secondary schools. We wrote about this seven or eight years
ago, a seminal report about education in urban secondary schools,
and we find some of those problems remain. We have reported positively
on initiatives, such as Excellence in Cities that we reported
on at the back end of last year. There are areas where progress
is made but, nevertheless, I think that remains a significant
challenge for the educational system of England.
Q121 Chairman: It is all going to
be saved by the academies programme, is it not?
Mr Smith: What do they say in
the jargon these days? I do not think there is a silver bullet
for this challenge that we face. The Government has been imaginative
in taking a radical step in bringing forward the academies programme,
and before that the Fresh Start programme. The Government is not
short of seeking, not single solutions but contributions towards
improvement in that area. As an inspectorate we welcome that and
we report on it without fear or favour, as you have seen, and
we will continue to do so with that independence from the Government.
We will say when it is good and we will say when it is not.
Q122 Chairman: Do you think it is
the uncertainty of leadership that causes some of the problems?
On Friday morning, did your heart not sink when you saw yet again
we have got a new secretary of state, a new schools minister?
Do you think that ministers should hang around rather longer?
Is that part of the problem?
Mr Smith: I take no view about
that, Chairman.
Q123 Chairman: You would in terms
of management. If Ofsted changed its head and senior staff every
year you could not run your organisation, could you?
Mr Smith: Ofsted has had five
chief inspectors since 1992.
Q124 Chairman: That is a pretty good
strike record compared with secretaries of state, is it not?
Mr Smith: Of which there have
been five since I have been on the Ofsted management board. I
think we are more concerned with leadership and management in
schools and in education authorities.
Q125 Chairman: So the turnover of
ministers does not matter?
Mr Smith: Not from our point of
view.
Q126 Chairman: Do you agree with
that, John?
Mr Thompson: I think if the Chief
Inspector said it was not a matter for him it is definitely not
a matter for me.
Q127 Chairman: I am determined to
put you on the spot given your imminent move!
Mr Smith: If I may just say that
leadership and management of schools and institutions and local
authorities is critical and we do judge that. We do have some
interesting evidence about schools coming out of special measures
back into the main club and how many of those had new headteachers
or those who were very, very recently appointed just before the
inspection. It is not an absolute, but the number I was looking
at before I came to the Committee today was out of 78 schools
that came out of special measures in the autumn term of 2005,
only 25 did so with the same headteacher. Leadership and management
is a significant issue in improvement of schools.
Q128 Chairman: What about diversity
of school population? Some of us on this Committee have taken
a particular interest in how you get a more diverse and balanced
population in school. Is that critical too? All of us have visited
schools and I remember visiting an Islington school where the
head said, "If I had 10% more of the middle class background
pupils coming in" and that would have only risen it to 20%,
"I could transform this school". Is it not important
to get a more diverse population coming into schools where that
is possible?
Mr Smith: I need to be careful
with this. Ideologically it would be beneficial to pupils if there
were a more balanced intake or school population, however pragmatically
the how of doing that is difficult. I have experience not just
in the UK and I can remember this issue arising when I spent some
time in the United States in Boston where they attempted to bus
children across the city in order to create the racial mix that
they were looking for and it failed quite dramatically.
Q129 Chairman: Some schools that
are banded in London have found it has given them the ability
to transform the schools. We have had heads give evidence to the
Committee in the past, not this present Committee but the Education
Committee in the last Parliament, who said if it was not for banding
they could not have changed the direction of their school in the
right direction.
Mr Smith: Miriam may have some
experience from her old ILEA days.
Q130 Chairman: Banding, Miriam.
Mrs Rosen: Certainly when I taught
in the ILEA there was banding. If we go to Ofsted's evidence there
are schools with all sorts of intakes which are successful schools
and I would point to that as saying I do not think it is reasonable
just to look at the intake of the school and say this is why the
school is not being successful because we know that schools with
different intakes have been successful in the past. If you now
look at the CVA data that there is in the PANDA, this enables
comparisons between schools with similar cohorts of children,
so we are able to look at that and ask if this school is making
reasonable progress given the children that it has got. Indeed,
we find that many schools are making good progress with the children
that they have got and others are not. I think we should stick
with that evidence.
Q131 Chairman: Do you measure or
take into account the velocity of travel of students, the turnover?
Professor Alan Smithers pointed out schools to us that not only
had an enormous turnover of students, and teachers do not know
who they are going to be teaching from one month to the next,
but also students do not know who is going to be teaching them
from one month to the next. That rapid turnover surely must have
an influence on the ability of schools to deliver a decent education?
Mrs Rosen: Undoubtedly some schools
have a much greater challenge than others and both mobility in
the pupil population and amongst staff are going to have an effect.
Of course, some of the initiatives that have gone into schools
to try to help them raise standards are targeted at schools in
the most difficult circumstances. Maurice mentioned Excellence
in Cities and the schools on the whole that have had the funding
for that and the extra resources are schools in extremely difficult
circumstances. Yes, it is more difficult for some schools.
Q132 Chairman: What do you do with
a school that is coping very well but suddenly find, as happened
with a school in my constituency as well as schools in other parts
of the country, they have a large number of pupils from Eastern
Europe, from Lithuania, from Poland, who do not have English as
their language? That puts a very great strain on the school, does
it not, and the system takes a long time to provide extra resources
to cope with that?
Mrs Rosen: Undoubtedly it does
put extra pressure on the school and each school will have to
respond according to its individual circumstances. Often a local
authority will try and help reasonably quickly, I would have thought.
Chairman: That is enough from me. Let
us get on with the questioning.
Q133 Dr Blackman-Woods: I want to
return to light-touch inspections for just a moment. I was Chair
of Governors at a school that piloted this new system and I have
to say that we were very pleased with it. I wonder whether a bit
of rigour was sacrificed in terms of the new system. Are you confident
that weaknesses in any school are not being missed in this new
system?
Mr Smith: I would be happy for
Miriam to chip in, although I suspect I know what she is going
to say. I would contend that there is no sacrifice of rigour.
What I would put before you is something that Miriam has touched
on, and we may discuss in more depth over the period of hearing,
which is the advent of CVA, the contextually value added data.
If I can just refer back to the Chairman's comments about mobility
of pupils. CVA data does now take into account the mobility of
pupils. This is an added arrow in our sheath in terms of making
judgments about schools and it also takes into account ethnicity
which would also cover the Chairman's comments. With the increasing
level of sophistication of data we can make different choices
about how weightily we inspect a school but we can be assured
in terms of our judgments. This is not to say that it is entirely
data driven because, as the Chairman said, then there would be
no need for Ofsted. There is a need for Ofsted but it can afford
to choose its methodology in accordance with far more sophisticated
data on pupil attainment that we have available. Miriam may want
to support and continue on that.
Mrs Rosen: The point is the methodology
is very sharply focused on the central nervous system of the school
and on exactly how effective the school is. In order to get at
that the inspector will look in advance at both the data and the
school's self-evaluation and see how well those add up. We will
then target the line of inquiry very sharply. You do not pick
up on everything that is going on in the school but hopefully
you pick up on any discrepancies. Also, the inspector would always
make sure they talk to pupils, and pupils are an enormously rich
source of evidence for what is going on in the school, and parents
too would have the opportunity to contribute if they wanted to.
Of course we use well-trained, highly experienced inspectors.
We feel there will be no lack of rigour in these new inspections.
Mr Smith: Can I just add one technical
point. In the past, up until this round of inspections, we relied
upon the school inspection programme largely to make our judgments
about what we call subjects. If you looked at an old school inspection
report for a big secondary school it would have English, maths,
science, history, geography, art, the whole thing would be about
40 pages long. We have changed our methodology in that respect
and in relation to the subject areas we do not do that any more.
We do that in a different way through what we call a survey programme,
and I am happy to go further into that, which enables us to make
the inspection much shorter.
Q134 Dr Blackman-Woods: We might
come back to the survey programme and what is happening to subjects
later on because I think that was one of the perceived weaknesses
in the new system.
Mr Smith: It was.
Q135 Dr Blackman-Woods: If I can
just pick Miriam up on one point. How critical is the quality
of self-evaluation in terms of the overall assessment because
you seemed to be flagging it as being fairly critical?
Mrs Rosen: Good schools are good
at self-evaluation, they know themselves well. We are only using
the very light-touch inspections for the very best schools, we
are not expecting to use this methodology with all schools. There
is a very high likelihood that those schools which we select for
one of the very light-touch inspections have pretty good self-evaluation.
Where that is not the case there is still the data to help the
inspectors probe. For us to have gone into a school on a very
light-touch inspection, the data will be favourable and it will
be pointing us to a school which has done well in the past and
we have also got the previous inspection report. All the indicators
have to add up favourably before we would select a school for
one of the very light-touch inspections.
Q136 Dr Blackman-Woods: Are you going
to reduce the inspection burden further on high performing schools?
Are there any dangers in that?
Mrs Rosen: We have no intention
of moving to less than a day's on-site inspection otherwise I
think it would be very difficult for us to get the evidence we
require. There is quite a lot of evidence from the data but all
the things to do with pupils' behaviour, their personal development,
the Every Child Matters agenda, are not going to be picked
up through the data and we feel we need a minimum amount of time
to assure ourselves and parents that those things are going well
in the school as well as the progress in the attainment of the
pupils.
Mr Smith: It is quite interesting
that we have started a similar sort of process in our college
inspection programme. I know that was not your specific question
but it is quite interesting to note we do these one day annual
assessment visits to colleges and we make a decision as to where
to go next. I think your question was about the rigour and would
we pick up a poor school in a short inspection? Answer: in 11
of these visits last term in colleges the recommendation was that
the next full inspection be earlier than currently planned. We
do feel we have the skills and the capacity with the data, with
the one day visit, and if we felt the school was not up to snuff
we would be back.
Q137 Dr Blackman-Woods: Moving on
to schools that are labelled satisfactory. It may be fair to categorise
what the Government is doing as waging war on coasting schools,
certainly the Education and Inspection Bill pays a lot of attention
to them, but it is language that Ofsted have used to describe
what you are going to do to satisfactory schools. Do you think
that is appropriate language? Is it going to get the backs up
of the professionals you have to get on board, or do you think
it does not matter?
Mr Smith: I have not used the
expression "waging war" and I would be surprised if
my colleagues had.
Q138 Dr Blackman-Woods: I think there
have been some press releases that have done so.
Mrs Rosen: I am not aware that
we have used that language, "waging war". We appreciate
the need for some of the schools which are currently judged to
be satisfactory to make faster progress. Part of our proposals
for moving to proportionate inspection is that some of those schools
should be targeted for a return visit quite specifically to follow
up on the issues identified in the previous inspection report
and to stimulate faster improvement. Our consultation document
has received a reasonable number of responses that are very favourable
in terms of lighter touch for the higher achieving schools and
generally favourable in terms of returning to some Grade 3 schools
as well. Most of the respondents to our consultation were headteachers.
Of course, what we do not know is whether they were headteachers
of higher achieving schools or Grade 3s that we might potentially
be returning to. We have talked to some heads of those schools
to find out what they think. What they are telling us is that
they would welcome a visit, because a visit would be seen as helpful,
but they do not want just a telephone call, they do not think
that would be a very helpful way of monitoring. We have had some
responses through our consultation and, like Maurice, I am not
aware that we have declared that we are waging war.
Chairman: I have seen your press releases,
you are at war with satisfactory schools.
Q139 Dr Blackman-Woods: You do not
think satisfactory is good enough is what they said, which is
good, I am pleased you have said that.
Mr Smith: That was a slightly
different point. I stand to be corrected if I have used the words
"wage war" but I have no recollection of using them.
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