UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 480-ii
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
THE WORK OF OFSTED
Monday 8 May 2006
MR MAURICE SMITH, MRS
MIRIAM ROSEN, MR ANDREW WHITE,
MR DORIAN BRADLEY and
MR JONATHAN THOMPSON
Evidence heard in Public Questions 101 - 223
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Education and Skills Committee
on Monday 8 May 2006
Members present
Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods
Mr Douglas Carswell
Mr David Chaytor
Mrs Nadine Dorries
Jeff Ennis
Mr Gordon Marsden
Stephen Williams
Mr Rob Wilson
________________
Memorandum submitted by Ofsted
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Maurice Smith, Her Majesty's Chief
Inspector of Schools, Mrs Miriam Rosen, Director, Education, Mr Andrew White, Director, Corporate
Services, Mr Dorian Bradley, Director, Early Years, and Mr Jonathan Thompson, Director,
Finance, Ofsted, gave evidence.
Q101 Chairman: Can I welcome Maurice Smith and the team:
Andrew White, Miriam Rosen, Dorian Bradley and Jonathan Thompson. You do look a formidable team. Apart from Miriam there is a good front row
here! Can I apologise - it was not your
fault but ours - that we had to postpone the last meeting due to the programme
that we had involved with the White Paper and the new Bill. Sorry we were thrown a little off course by
that. Now we are back on course and we
do feel that, yes, we have had you come to us on particular inquiries like the
Special Educational Needs Inquiry, but not on the full remit of Ofsted. Today we want to get to grips with a number
of topics. You have got the whole team
to answer the relevant questions.
Maurice, do you want to say anything to open up this session? We usually give you a chance to get us
going.
Mr Smith: I have some short opening remarks, Chairman,
if you will bear with me for a side of A4.
It is my pleasure to appear in front of the Committee again and I
welcome the opportunity to account for the work of Ofsted. I would like to introduce two or three of
the key issues that we feel we face.
First, we have implemented significant changes to our programmes and
frameworks of inspection over the last two terms, or the last year in the case
of early years. In September 2005 we
introduced a new lighter touch school inspection framework and we are pleased
to say we have received very positive feedback from schools and other
stakeholders. Many believe it has
reduced the costs, the stress and the bureaucracy associated with
inspection. Despite the shorter notice
and the lighter touch, there is no doubt that the process and judgments made
are just as rigorous. By the end of March
2006, that was the first two terms, 3,700 school inspections had been completed
and nearly 60 per cent of schools were judged good or better. We are not complacent. We are constantly reflecting as an
organisation and looking at new ways to continue to lighten the weight of
inspection. In this term we have been
developing and piloting a proportionate school inspection model which will
provide an even lighter touch to the best schools and target resources where
they are most needed. In relation to
our work in early years, we welcome the proposed changes to the way that we
regulate and inspect childcare and early years education and the development of
the early years foundation stage outlined in the current Childcare Bill. We have recently reviewed our processes for
determining the suitability of individuals working with children. We remain confident that our verification
and decision-making processes mean that no person who is unsuitable to provide
childcare can be registered with Ofsted.
Secondly, and briefly, we have concluded our Improving Ofsted
programme. We have reduced our estate,
our premises, from 12 offices to four.
We have created a national business unit and contact centre in our
Manchester office for the more efficient handling of customer contact and the
early years' regulation processes. In
doing so, we have reduced our staffing from our agreed 2004-05 baseline by
approximately 20 per cent. We have made
almost 400 staff redundant but we have worked hard to offer displaced staff
alternatives either elsewhere within Ofsted or redeployment to the Civil
Service or other parts of the public sector.
These fundamental changes to inspection regulation and to the structure
of Ofsted will deliver savings to the public purse of £42 million a year from
April 2007, 20 per cent of the total running cost of Ofsted. On that date, subject to the passage of
legislation, there will be the creation of the Office for Standards in
Education, Children's Services and Skills, still to be known as Ofsted.
Currently we are discussing whether any further efficiency savings will be
required by the Better Regulation Executive's influence. Obviously this will continue to bring
challenges but I am confident that Ofsted will deliver. Chairman, my colleagues and I take very
seriously the comments and suggestions of your Committee and the importance of
our own self-evaluation. We look
forward to this afternoon's session contributing to that self-evaluative
process.
Q102 Chairman: Maurice, thank you very much for that. It was remiss of me not to have mentioned
that, young as you appear to Members of this Committee, we hear on the
grapevine that you are going to be retiring at the end of this year as Chief
Inspector, is that correct?
Mr Smith: That is the proposed course of personal
action.
Q103 Chairman: Okay.
We will be very sorry to see you go.
John Thompson is moving across to the Eden Project with all the trees
and the glass across the way to DfES.
Mr Thompson: I am.
Tomorrow I will be the Director General of Finance at the DfES.
Q104 Chairman: From tomorrow?
Mr Thompson: From tomorrow. No doubt I will see you in that new role.
Q105 Chairman: I am sure we will be seeing you in that
role. That will be a reunion for you,
will it not?
Mr Thompson: Yes.
Q106 Chairman: Andrew, this is your first performance in
front of the Committee, is it not?
Mr White: It is, Chairman, yes.
Q107 Chairman: Welcome to you. Dorian, you have been hiding from us since 2000.
Mr Bradley: Far too long.
Q108 Chairman: Welcome back.
Mr Bradley: Thank you.
Q109 Chairman: Let us get started. Maurice, when you talk about the lighter touch of Ofsted, it is not
light enough for some people, is it?
Some people would like it to be no touch at all and rather than having
Ofsted, which even slimmed down is still a pretty big bureaucracy and takes a
lot of taxpayers' money, even some of your greatest friends would say you have
done the job, there has been intense inspection, a good regime, there has been
a great deal of improvement, and some people would say there has been an
improvement but it has not been up to Ofsted, there is a view that Ofsted should
gently fade away now and the money put into school improvement directly. What do you say to those critics?
Mr Smith: I think one of my teaching trade union
colleagues suggested that Ofsted should do itself out of business and, indeed,
if it was not for the ----
Q110 Chairman: They said that about the National Health
Service. In 1948 they confidently
believed that the NHS would eradicate illness and there would be no need for it
any longer.
Mr Smith: Thereby lies the point, does it not? Our view is that Ofsted has a broad
portfolio of work. We have lightened
our touch in terms of school inspection and we are proposing, if we can, to
lighten it further, but that does not mean to say all aspects of our portfolio
are subject to that lightness of touch.
Indeed, the new functions that are to be placed with us may require much
more weighty consideration. I do not
think Ofsted as an organisation is going to go away. The second point I would make is I do believe however light or
heavy our programme is, or however proportionate, parents of children in school
in this country still wish to have a degree of external scrutiny of the school
process and it is Ofsted's role to provide that external scrutiny, as was its
role when it was established in 1992. I
do not think that has gone away. That
is something that the public and parents expect and deserve and it is something
we still wish to provide whilst the statute enables us to do so.
Q111 Chairman: Do you have any evidence to base that last
remark on in terms of 360 degree consultation with all of your stakeholders,
including parents and teachers? Is it
not a fact that all good and efficient organisations do consult regularly on
how people evaluate them? Do you do
that? Have you done it recently?
Mr Smith: Yes.
We do it almost all the time, I might say.
Q112 Chairman: What are the teachers and parents telling us?
Mr Smith: The headteachers are telling us that they
appreciate the new school inspection programme and benefit from it more so than
the previous programme. Parents tell us
that they like to receive their school inspection report and they also tell us
in the early years field, for example, that they are appreciative of having
those reports in the public domain.
Q113 Chairman: Is that an overwhelming view or is it 52/48?
Mr Smith: I think we were 75 on the headteachers' side
in terms of schools.
Q114 Chairman: What about parents?
Mr Smith: I would have to dig out the parent figure for
you, if you do not mind me saying. We
also get some response from our website which is one of the most popular websites;
more popular than Manchester United we are told. It is hit, which is the expression I believe, many times by
parents trying to find out about the provision that they wish to send their
children to.
Q115 Chairman: So they value it as a source of knowledge?
Mr Smith: Yes.
We do some other work on what parents use to choose whatever provision
they are looking for, whether they are choosing provision from primary to
secondary, or entry to primary school, or entry into the childcare market. All of our market research suggests that the
Ofsted report is a key component of that decision making.
Q116 Chairman: Can I ask your colleagues, when you think
about the job, and some of you have been in place for quite some time, do you
still have the same degree of confidence that Ofsted is improving standards,
improving what happens in schools, as when you started? How do you feel about that?
Mrs Rosen: Yes, absolutely. If you are thinking about the impact of Ofsted, over the years we
have had a significant impact in terms of improving schools that have gone into
special measures, improving the quality of initial teacher training, improving
the quality of local education authorities and of colleges through our
inspection programmes. I completely
accept the point that Ofsted is not the only contributor to improvement but
surely the inspection regime has had a lot to do with that. We are now thinking about making our
inspections even more effective by making them more proportionate to risk so
that we can target what are really quite scarce inspection resources at those
providers which need the most. That is
in terms of schools where we are hoping to move towards a lighter touch for the
best schools, but to continue the frequent monitoring for the schools which
need us most which are in special measures or have a notice to improve. For colleges as well we want to move to a
lighter touch for the best. In fact, we
move to a differentiated system this autumn thereby providing better value for
money. The same is true in initial
teacher training where we have already moved to a differentiated training
programme. The best providers get a
lighter touch and we are still looking in more detail at those that have more
problems. Throughout our inspection
systems we are looking to provide better value for money but still stimulate
improvement where it is needed.
Q117 Chairman: John, how confident are you? Are you going to slip over to the Department
tomorrow and whisper into David Bell's ear, "We could save a lot of money if we
got rid of that bunch I have just been working for"?
Mr Thompson: I am afraid I would not, Chairman. I am
fairly convinced that we are adding some significant value to the system. I have personally been on several
inspections and when you are out there working with professionals in the system
you can see the value that is added. I
would also say from personal experience that my son's secondary school has just
been inspected and he had a letter from the inspectors which he thought was
excellent because it gave him some views, as a consumer of education, about his
school. He thought that was valuable
and if we had not been there then possibly he would not have got that.
Mr Smith: We did some work in the early years sector on
stakeholder views of our inspection programme as recently as February 2006, so
perhaps Dorian would like to mention that.
Mr Bradley: We surveyed about 1,200 providers in February
this year. Those providers were
inspected last November and we asked them what they thought of our inspection
work. Ninety-six per cent of them
stated that our report made clear any actions or recommendations that were
needed to improve the quality of childcare.
The interesting thing is to see what they do. I do not want to drown the Committee in data but if I can give
you one or two figures that point towards the positive impact that Ofsted
has. Of the providers we graded
unsatisfactory in the last inspection programme, about a quarter of them in the
new inspection programme are being graded as good or better. Of the ones we graded satisfactory, about 37
per cent of day care providers and over 50 per cent of child minders have moved
from satisfactory to good. I think
those are clear indications that Ofsted's work is being picked up by providers
and the local authorities and other agencies that work with them to improve the
life chances for children in Ofsted registered childcare.
Q118 Chairman: As the new person on the block, Andrew, how
long have you worked for Ofsted?
Mr White: I have worked for Ofsted for nine years,
Chairman, so I have got a view of Ofsted's history. One of the strengths of the organisation is that it is
self-critical. The inspection process
we had in schools nine years ago would not be right for now, it would be too
heavyweight for today. One of the
strengths of the organisation is we are extremely self-critical because that is
our role that we offer externally.
Currently we are looking across our range of inspection regimes to see
where next and it is a question you would rightly demand of us.
Q119 Chairman: If you are all doing such a good job,
Maurice, if there are deficiencies in our educational system, what are the main
reasons? Who is holding up further
progress? What frustrates you about the
system that seems to be stopping the rise in standards across the piece even in
the more difficult schools?
Mr Smith: I think it is important to state that there
has been a rise in standards although that rise occasionally plateaus across
the piece. If you just deal with
schools alone from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 4, over a period - I have been
engaged with Ofsted for ten years, Miriam for 13 years and Andrew for nine - we
have seen a rise in educational standards.
What frustrates me, and I am sure it frustrates my colleagues, is what
might be described as a longish tail to educational progress. What frustrates me - I do not want to
characterise it too generally - is 13 year old boys and above in difficult
schools who seem to lose any track or ownership of the educational process and
vote with their feet.
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 a
difficult part of Liverpool in Crockey Hill in 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
urban white boys in 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 ten per cent more of the middle class background pupils coming in" and that
would have only risen it to 20 per cent, "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.
Q140 Dr Blackman-Woods: I am trying to get at how schools might
experience you giving them more attention if they are deemed to be
unsatisfactory. In addition to more
frequent visits, is there anything else that you are going to do in terms of
the type of inspection that would help them to improve?
Mrs Rosen: What we have found from our experience of
monitoring schools in special measures and schools with serious weaknesses is
the fact that an inspector goes back and looks at the progress they are making
and how they have done in terms of raising standards generally but also in
relation to the issues identified in the previous report, and we give them
further action points, is found to be extremely helpful for schools. They work towards these points and it helps
them to come out of special measures and get up to a satisfactory or better
standard. We have had an awful lot of
feedback from schools that have been through this regime as to how it helps
them to focus and make the necessary improvements. It would be something along those lines. We have only just started to trial these
inspections to Grade 3 schools and we have very little evidence at the moment
but we will have more as the term goes by.
Q141 Dr Blackman-Woods: One last thing. Obviously you would not want to get to a situation where
over-monitoring is leading to a lot of stress, again back to the old system
that was very, very stressful for schools and teachers, so how are you going to
get the balance so that you are monitoring more than usual but not to such an
extent that you are adding to the stress and, in fact, possibly reducing
standards?
Mrs Rosen: What we found in schools subject to special measures
and with serious weaknesses was the initial judgment schools do find very
difficult to take but as they start to get over that they find the monitoring visits
helpful and they help them to make the improvements necessary and move
forward. Yes, the schools have to focus
on those monitoring visits and make sure they are ready for them but I do not
think we would regard those as a big source of additional stress for the
school.
Q142 Mr Wilson: Can I just follow up on a few of the areas
that Roberta was just talking about.
Have you done any assessment of this new lighter touch inspection? Have you anything you can share with us
today, any research findings?
Mr Smith: We have two forms and I will take you through
the two parts, if you like. There is
the lighter touch system that began in September 2005, called the section five
system. We have analysis of the numbers
and we have analysis from the feedback from the headteachers' survey that
Miriam reported on. The analysis from
the numbers is in the first term - we published the first term's outcomes - we
judged about nine per cent to require a category of inadequacy, either notice
to improve or special measures. That
was a slight increase on previous ones, but not statistically significant. Of the remainder, about 50-60 per cent were
in the good category and 30 per cent in the satisfactory category. We have done that level of analysis. What we were talking about a moment ago was
our proposals to go to an even more proportionate system for what probably
would be, although we have not finally decided this, about the top 20 per cent
of maintained schools and whether we can lighten the touch even further. In terms of analysis we are in the pilot
phase of that. We have done some pilot
inspections and feedback so far, as with your colleague, has been positive.
Q143 Mr Wilson: For example, have the new arrangements
contributed to any sort of improvement in the reliability of judgments to do
with standard of teaching? Have you any
facts or figures you can share with us about that?
Mr Smith: I have no reason to feel that they are any
more or less reliable than previously.
Miriam may want to add to that.
Mrs Rosen: Teaching is looked at in a different way in
the new inspections that we are carrying out.
We do make lesson observations, not as many as we used to under the old
section ten regime. We look carefully
at the school's self-evaluation and the school will have evaluated the quality
of teaching. We discuss that with
school management and we check it out to see whether we agree with it.
Q144 Mr Wilson: Is that good enough if, the school is not
evaluating the teaching? Surely you
need third party independent evaluation?
Mrs Rosen: We are doing that as well but we are not
doing such large quantities. We check
out a sample to see whether our judgments agree with those of the school's and
that gives us more confidence in the school's self-evaluation. If we start to find out that our judgments
do not agree with the school's we would start to doubt the quality of the
school's self-evaluation, of its judgments of teaching. We also offer that our inspectors will
undertake joint lesson observation with senior managers of the school. This is quite often taken up and that
enables a discussion to take place about the quality of the lesson and, again,
that contributes to a shared view about the quality of the teaching.
Q145 Mr Wilson: Typically, on the average inspection how many
lessons would be evaluated by the team?
Mrs Rosen: That is going to depend. It might be as few as nine or ten but it
might be going up towards about 30.
That is in a two day inspection with a couple of inspectors. It will depend on what have been identified
as the particular issues for inspection in that school when we were looking at
the self-evaluation and the data. There
will always be some, I can assure you of that.
Chairman: You still look a bit puzzled.
Q146 Mr Wilson: I am just wondering whether that is enough of
an evaluation of teaching in the school, nine lessons.
Mrs Rosen: It depends on the size of the school.
Chairman: We will come back to that in a bit.
Q147 Jeff Ennis: If I could just follow on the point with
regard to the light-touch scenario which in my personal experience, sitting on
two governing bodies, has been quite well received in general, and yet at the
recent National Association of Headteachers' Conference we had a headteacher
from a Roman Catholic school in Barnsley who announced to the conference that
he was quitting because this was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it
were, with all the changes in the inspection regime. He was in his mid-fifties.
Why would he come out with a statement like that when in general the
lighter touch has been positively received?
Mr Smith: I was very upset. I saw him and we had the same transcript. I do not want to make a judgment about the
individual but there was noise in the system from the NAHT and the ASCL Conferences,
no doubt about that. Partly we would
rest back on where we come from, which is that we ask all schools to respond to
our inspection and overwhelmingly the response to the new inspection programme,
as you have heard around this table, has been positive. That is not to say that there are not people
who have genuine concerns about it and who may not like it. I do feel like I am in a bit of a no-win
situation here, frankly. We are urged
by many commentators, including the headteacher trade unions, to lighten the
burden of inspection, to be more proportionate to risk, and when we try to do
so there is criticism in the system. My
back is broad enough to accept that. I
am terribly sorry when it reaches the stage that it did with that particular
colleague. I have to take the broader
view and say in the main this has been a broadly and widely welcomed approach
to the inspection of schools. The three
principles the Secretary of State set out were it should concentrate on the
user, it should focus on improvements, and it should be more efficient. I feel that we have delivered that to the
public. I am proud of that and I am
sorry that some individuals feel over-stretched by that. Just one final point. The issue of notice is a very interesting
one, and I am happy to engage in a debate about it, but you will know that the
stress element of inspection was often blamed on the lengthy period of advance
notice given, 12-16 weeks. Personally,
and as a board, across the board here and under the previous Chief Inspector we
advocated for shorter minimal notice of inspection, and we have delivered
that. There is two days' notice for a
school inspection now. If Dorian's
colleagues go to a nursery they turn up on the doorstep. I think that is entirely right, and the vast
majority of headteachers and teachers do so as well, but nevertheless there are
some people in the system who do not like that.
Q148 Jeff Ennis: Obviously the inspection regime, although it
is not the main priority, will be to some extent to ease some members of the
teaching profession out of the job who are not particularly effective
teachers. I do not count this
particular headteacher as falling into this category, by the way, which is what
concerns me. Have we not got a
situation whereby we are not just easing the less effective teachers out of the
system but because of the pressures we are exerting on them some of the even
better performers in the classroom or at senior management level are thinking,
"I've had enough of this, I am going to do something else"?
Mr Smith: I am not sure it is Ofsted's job to ease poor
teachers out of the system.
Q149 Chairman: One of the previous incumbents seemed to make
that his mission.
Mr Smith: I speak on behalf of 2006 Ofsted. I do not think it is Ofsted's job to ease
teachers out of the system. Frankly, if
there are weak teachers in the system the first and foremost responsibility
lies with the headteacher and the governing body of the school. I do not think
that Ofsted should be used as a proxy for easing weaker teachers out of the
system. I do think Ofsted has a role in
promoting improvements in the quality of teaching in England, and I am very
passionate about that. I think that our
regime works towards that because it does promote improvements in the quality
of teaching and we can see that across the country. I do not want to make an ageist remark here but I am mindful of
young teachers coming into the profession now, young people in initial teacher
training, who are absolutely comfortable with people who are observing their
lessons, who are assessing their capacity for work. I am committed that no longer should the classroom door be closed
for 25 or 30 years behind a teacher who is paid from the public purse.
Q150 Jeff Ennis: I want to go back to the issue of the schools
that fall into the satisfactory or coasting category, whatever you want to call
it. I know the General Secretary of the
Association of School and College Leaders, John Dunford, is concerned about
this. In a recent email he sent to us,
specifically referring to satisfactory schools, he said, "External inspection
is a necessary part of quality assurance but it is no substitute for a
strategic approach to support for schools.
That means such an approach does not currently exist". Is that the case, that we do not have a
strategic approach for schools that fall into the coasting category?
Mr Smith: I do not think it is the case but I do not
think it is necessarily Ofsted's case.
I am delighted that you have quoted our colleague, John Dunford, because
it circularises the debate. I found the
text when you were asking about our press release, Chairman, about weighing the
pig more often does not fatten it. It
was in relation to satisfactory schools, or coasting schools, as you have
described them, that you said our press release said that we were to wage war
on them. I will read you from my
note: "Only The Independent covered the story and said Ofsted has announced its
intention to wage war on up to 8,000 state primary and secondary schools which
have been judged as satisfactory. Wage
war was not a phrase used by Ofsted or the ASCL. It is unclear where The
Independent got it from because they do not site it as a source or
comment". Going back to the actual
issue, I think the purpose of Ofsted is to create improvement through
inspection. That was the first mantra
embedded in my heart when I joined in 1996.
We create that improvement through what we do. The focus that follows post-inspection, unless the school falls
into one of our categories, the responsibility largely sits with what is now
the school improvement partner and the role the school improvement partner has
in guiding that school towards improvement.
I think that is a right and proper division of labour, a right and
proper demarcation between Ofsted's role and, if you like, the hands-on role of
advice and support. I do think Ofsted's
role is one of improvement but I do not think that it is a hands-on role of
advice and support. The Secretary of
State agrees with me because that was what she said in response to the new
Ofsted in terms of our responsibilities that we will adopt from the ALI and the
Commission for Social Care Inspection.
Q151 Chairman: Our former Secretary of State!
Mr Smith: My apologies.
Q152 Jeff Ennis: One other initiative that has been brought in
is the 12 month turnaround period for the schools that fall into the failing
category, which has come under quite a lot of scrutiny. Is that going to impact on the number of
failing schools that close, giving them such a short period to turnaround, or
is it very much being used as a means to try to make sure that schools correct
their weaknesses in a quicker time period?
Mr Smith: That is a great question. For me, there is a bit of a definitional
issue here. As I understand it, the
proposal is that schools should show signs of significant improvement within 12
months. It does not say that schools
should be out of special measures within 12 months, and if it did say that we
would be in a worrying position because the average is longer than that and
either we would have to look again at our methodology or think about that. We do monitor schools in special measures
and every time we conduct a monitoring visit we make a judgment as to whether
that school is on the improvement road.
I think that is right and proper.
When we replied in the past about the impact of Ofsted, that was where
we often lay claim to success because we feel we have played a big part in
schools coming out of special measures and the HMI monitoring of that plays a
big part in its improvement. We would
expect to see improvement within 12 months and, frankly, if we did not we
should be worried.
Q153 Jeff Ennis: One supplementary to that. Do you think the 12 months' turnaround will
impact on the number of future school closures or will it be a negligible
factor?
Mr Smith: I do not know, to be honest. I would not wish to speculate.
Q154 Jeff Ennis: Okay.
Mrs Rosen: Can I just add that it is only a handful of
schools at the moment which are not making satisfactory progress after 12
months.
Q155 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask about the way in which schools
are categorised for the purpose of assessing them. My understanding is that the schools that were causing concern in
your 2004-05 report fell into four categories: schools with special measures,
serious weaknesses, underachieving schools and those with inadequate sixth
forms. That has now changed and in
2005-06 there is a new categorisation.
Could you remind us of that?
Mr Smith: Schools in special measures and schools requiring
a notice to improve.
Q156 Mr Chaytor: Just two categories?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q157 Mr Chaytor: So this concept of failing schools and
coasting schools has no scientific validity in Ofsted's definition?
Mr Smith: The definition we have used that is broadly
categorised as failing schools by people other than Ofsted, not that we do not
ever mention it, is schools in special measures. That categorisation remains the same effectively. The schools with notice to improve could
include any of the other categories you have mentioned, ie schools with serious
weaknesses, schools with weak and inadequate sixth forms, coasting schools, or
those schools could have got out of that category and be in the satisfactory
category. As we said earlier, the
satisfactory category has not escaped our notice, so to speak, in terms of
follow-up.
Q158 Mr Chaytor: A school that is currently inspected as being
satisfactory could receive a notice to improve?
Mr Smith: No, sorry.
I am not being clear enough. You
can be outstanding one, good two, satisfactory three, or inadequate four. In inadequate you can either be notice to
improve or special measures. If you are
in category four, notice to improve or special measures, we will be back. In category three we are consulting on
whether we should be back to some of those.
Q159 Mr Chaytor: Category three is satisfactory?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q160 Mr Chaytor: So the term "coasting" would apply only to
satisfactory schools? What does it
mean? Does it have any meaning at all? Are we better ditching the concept of
coasting?
Mr Smith: I do not use coasting, it has gone.
Q161 Mr Chaytor: So coasting is irrelevant, we are far better
using the Ofsted categorisation.
Mr Smith: Gone completely.
Q162 Mr Chaytor: Can I just move on to this question of value
added. Am I right in thinking that this
year's Key Stage 4 results will be the first set of results that are published
with the contextual value added indicators?
Mr Smith: I think you are. I will bow to greater knowledge.
Mrs Rosen: It is the responsibility of the Department,
not for us, but that is my understanding.
Actually, I have to say I do not know because it is not our
responsibility.
Q163 Mr Chaytor: Generally, what is the Ofsted view on the use
of value added then? Do you think this
is an improvement on simply using raw scores?
Where do the value added scores appear in the judgments you make about
individual scores? What weight do you
attach to them as against the raw scores?
Mr Smith: I will try and kick off and hopefully Miriam
will step in. I have had my three hour
seminar so I should be better on this.
We started off with raw scores and we have had a range of value added
scores, some of them produced by the Department, some of them produced by us in
something called the PANDA. Largely
speaking, the first lot of value added data was built on previous cohort
performance. We have got better at that
and now we can build it on previous individual pupil performance. We have got better at that this year, again,
which is CVA data which means we can add in individual pupil data relating to a
range of variables that may impact on a child's attainment.
Q164 Mr Chaytor: What are those variables? Earlier you mentioned mobility and
ethnicity.
Mr Smith: There are about nine or ten but they include
birth data, because there can be younger or older children in a cohort, they
include ethnicity, special educational needs, mobility, English as a second or
other language. There are about ten
altogether and they are given slightly different weights in accordance with
----
Q165 Jeff Ennis: Would free school meals be in that list?
Mr Smith: Yes, it is.
They are given different weights in relation to their known historic
impact.
Q166 Mr Chaytor: So this year with the CVA scores there is a
more sophisticated measure of value added?
Mr Smith: The schools have their CVA data for the first
time this year, so when they get their results in the summer they will be able
to relate those to the CVA data. Next
year we have a further developed initiative where the Ofsted data and DfES data
come together and then the schools can interact with it so, for want of a
better word, they can play with the data.
They can use it to target their teaching and intervention. They can say, "If we have under-performance
in white boys in key stage four", and they can identify that cohort of pupil
and say, "What if we improve their English or mathematics? What difference would that make to our
school profile?" et cetera. They can
interact with it and do "what if" scenario planning.
Q167 Mr Chaytor: The CVA scores will now supersede the PANDA
information?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Grades online will supersede PANDA.
Q168 Mr Chaytor: In terms of inspections as of 1 September
2006 onwards - i.e., after the new CVA scores are out - what weight will Ofsted
be giving to CVA scores in the assessment process?
Mr Smith: They do not determine the inspection but they
inform it.
Ms Rosen: We have the new CVA data from this year in
the PANDA. It has all those variables
that he mentioned but it also has prior attainment, gender, ethnicity and a
whole basket of indicators in there. It
has enabled us to make very much sharper judgments about the progress that the
pupils are making in a school compared with similar pupils elsewhere. We have said very firmly to inspectors, "You
are not only looking at the data. The
data does not solely determine the judgment.
The data informs the judgment.
You have to take into account other things as well. You must take into account other data that
the school might have and wishes to show you and the whole range of evidence
that you collect." From next September,
we will have an even more sophisticated version which is the grades
online. We will have the CVA data from
September 2005.
Q169 Mr Chaytor: Do you think the existence of the CVA data
has made a significant change to your assessment of schools' performance or
not?
Ms Rosen: Where it may have made a difference is
particularly in schools which have high attainment but, when you look at the
CVA data, the progress made by those pupils is not quite as much as might
reasonably be expected. It is harder
for those schools to hide behind the fact that the absolute attainment looks
reasonably good.
Q170 Mr Chaytor: Does it follow that there are likely to be
significantly different assessments of some schools now that the CVA data is to
be made public?
Ms Rosen: It has sharpened our assessments of
schools. Whether they are significantly
different is very difficult for us to say.
Q171 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the way it is presented the score
is around either side of 1,000. Why is
it so complex? From parents' point of
view they understand 50 or 60 per cent A-Cs.
Why can we not have a simple measure of CVA?
Ms Rosen: I think we have a job to do in terms of good
communication with schools about how they use the data and what the data
means. We have tried to do this
particularly through our online news letter for schools called Ofsted Direct. We have put out information about how you interpret the
data. We would agree that we could
perhaps be even more helpful in that respect.
Q172 Mr Chaytor: Could I return to the question about the
impact of intake on schools? What is
your assessment of the effect of intake in schools' overall performance, either
through raw scores or CVA scores? What
proportion of the totality of the performance of the school would be likely to
be determined by intake?
Mr Smith: I do not think we make that judgment as
finely as that. I rest back on where
Ofsted has been throughout its lifetime.
Although the socio-economic background of pupils may have a significant
impact on the performance of pupils, it is not the only determining
factor. We have evidence over many
years that schools with children with similar socio-economic backgrounds can
make a considerable difference. That is
where we sit our argument. If you asked
me to put my neck on the line ----
Q173 Mr Chaytor: You have used the term "significant impact"
so no one is denying that there is ----
Mr Smith: The data in relation to schools shows that it
has a significant impact but it is not the only impact and schools can make a
difference.
Q174 Mr Chaytor: For example, Professor Gorard in his
submission to the Committee on the impact of value added - he was talking about
the pre-contextual value added - said that frankly they were irrelevant because
the impact of intake amounts to about 76 per cent of a school's ultimate
performance. Three quarters of the
totality of a school's performance is determined by intake. Would that equate to your use of the words
"significant impact"? Is that a
ballpark figure, if you had to define "significant"?
Mr Smith: He is a researcher and I am an
inspector. I will judge as I find. I am not going to second guess research
evidence that suggests it may be 76, 60 or 50 per cent. I do not know. They are his research findings.
I do not do research; I inspect schools and when I inspect schools I
find that schools from poor socio-economic circumstances can make a difference
to children's lives and create improvements.
They may not get the same raw scores as the school in the leafy county
but they can make a difference and that is what inspection seeks to find out.
Q175 Chairman: You are not a researcher but you have a good
feel for schools. Does it make a
difference how big a school is? We are
getting more and more evidence. People
say that small schools are more human.
Going back to Schumacher, small is beautiful. You get over a certain size and heads tell us it is so much more
difficult to manage, to have a human sized community in a school. What is your feeling? Is it all nonsense or is small sometimes
better or often better?
Ms Rosen: What we find is variable and it depends on
the quality of the leadership and the teaching within the school. We have not done any particular study that I
am aware of that looks at small schools as opposed to big schools so we are not
really in a position to pronounce on that.
Q176 Jeff Ennis: The Education Inspection Bill is currently
going through the House and some Members of the House including myself and some
on this Committee feel that entitlement to free school meals, special
educational needs - I know performance league tables are part of your remit -
ought to be added as measures on the performance league tables to cover the
contextual value and I wonder if you have any thoughts on that particular
proposal, to add these measures so that if we are going to continue with league
tables it will make them more effective for parents.
Mr Smith: I do not have a strong view. If my recollection serves me rightly,
special educational needs was a factor previously published in school league
tables. There is a balance to be
reached - the more things you add to this, the more complex it looks - by
keeping them as simple as possible so that they are easily understood and
easily palatable. I am not sure whether
free school meals have been included in the league tables in the past. The CVA data is more sophisticated than
that. I attended a 2,000 pupil, three
split site comprehensive school in Liverpool and look where I ended up.
Q177 Mr Marsden: I wonder if I can prod a little more around
some of these issues to do with value added measures. One is just a point of information. You said earlier that CVAs were adding in a range of variables
and you said they include birth date, ethnicity and SEN. You said mobility. Do I take it by that that you mean an assessment of transience in
schools?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q178 Mr Marsden: Is that a new inclusion, as far as you are
aware?
Mr Smith: It is to my knowledge.
Ms Rosen: The whole CVA package that we produced in
September was new. We did not have
anything like as sophisticated as that.
Q179 Mr Marsden: Some of those other elements that the chief
inspector listed were in a previous value added judgment, were they not?
Mr Smith: The difference is that previously they were
cohort analyses, what did a previous year group have, and now they are pupil
specific analyses. That makes it a far
more finely tuned piece of work.
Q180 Mr Marsden: I would comment in passing that it is rather
curious that you should have that included in there and that the department
should still apparently, despite the reports by Janet Dobson, resolutely not
use transience or mobility. I am not
saying that they have set their face against it but they certainly have not
made any moves towards including it. Is
the issue of transience and its impact, not just on school populations but on
the ability of teachers to teach well, one that you observe in a significant
number of inspections?
Mr Smith: In terms of those variables that I have
mentioned, they are differently weighted as well and the strongest weight is on
previous performance so on a bar chart the previous performance is up here
somewhere and the others are running along here.
Ms Rosen: I think we had a similar question
earlier. High mobility is one of the
factors which makes it harder for schools and teachers. That is undoubtedly the case, but once again
our evidence is that schools in similar circumstances can perform differently.
Q181 Mr Marsden: Can I talk about the impact that these assessments,
whether they are value added, CVA or whatever, have in terms of parents because
obviously, as you know, some of the teaching unions have particular concerns
about their impact. Is the danger that
as you become more and more sophisticated, you refine and you put the various
weighted things in? You have gone to
some pains this afternoon to explain to the Committee what those various
elements are. The average - or even the
non-average - parent would find it rather difficult to get to grips with that. Are they not just going to start looking at
the crude, raw data and saying that is what matters? I am sure there will be mischievous people somewhere who are
saying all this CVA stuff is political correctness which has been fed into the
system to make life a little more opaque.
Mr Smith: Parents will look at what parents wish to
look at. We have to think about how we
present things to parents and what we put or do not put in the public domain. If we make it too complex, nobody will look
at it. Parents will look at raw
scores. I am a parent and I would look
at raw scores. If you are judging the
effectiveness of an institution, you are more likely to dig a little deeper into
how much value that institution is adding.
A previous chief inspector would have said that it does not matter how
much value that school adds; the Civil Service requires five good 'O'
levels. You cannot walk into a Civil
Service interview and say, "I have a lot of added value but I do not have five
good 'O' levels." Times have changed. The Civil Service does not require five good
'O' levels and we have a more sophisticated way of looking at how schools add
value to their pupils' progress and attainment. I guess from the parents' point of view it depends a bit on what
you are looking for in a school. I do
not think it is the role of Ofsted or the chief inspector to determine what
parents can and cannot look at. I think
it is the role of Ofsted or the FES in some cases to put that data in the
public domain and allow parents or other informed observers to make their own
choice. What we should not do is put it
in there in such a complicated way that they do not understand it.
Ms Rosen: The inspectors use the CVA data to assist
them in making the judgments that go in the inspection reports and I suspect
that the parents then probably look at the judgments in the inspection report
itself and that is probably of great interest to them. They may or may not wish to look at the CVA
data.
Q182 Mr Marsden: You say one of its biggest values is that it
is a fine tuning mechanism in the inspection process?
Ms Rosen: That is its value to us. It is enabling us to make sharper judgments
about the progress that can be attributable to the school. That is its major use to us so that we feel
it helps us to produce accurate reports.
Q183 Mr Marsden: I do not want to turn this into a research
seminar but I do want briefly to return to the questions there were earlier in
respect of the views of Professor Gorard.
Professor Gorard in his paper - I accept this is referring to the
previous measure - said, "There are no low to mid attaining schools with high
value added scores. All of the schools
with a GCSE benchmark of 40% or less are deemed negative value added. Similarly there are no high to mid attaining
schools with low value added scores."
That obviously suggests that what he is implying there is a degree of
social determinism about the process.
Are you confident that the new measures will show any difference from
this?
Mr Smith: The correlation between the value added to
the pupil and the socio-economic background of the school is high but not
absolute. We have data within our new
value added data to show that that is the case. It is not an ultimate determinant.
Q184 Mr Marsden: There have been some concerns expressed, not
least in press report, that Ofsted inspectors have said to some secondary
schools that one way of improving their value added scores is not to give
strong support to local primary schools because in that case they could get a
low score at the end of a primary school which would produce better apparent
progress. This is something that the
ASCL have criticised. Sue Kirkham said
it was a perverse disincentive for schools to collaborate. Is it first of all correct that there have
been instances where Ofsted inspectors have discouraged collaboration between
schools in the pursuit of higher value added scores?
Ms Rosen: Not as far as I know. You would expect something like that to turn
up in a particular complaint or in a letter to HMCI. We would have to check but I am not aware that that has come
through to us. I saw the comment in the
press obviously.
Q185 Mr Marsden: Jeff Ennis referred earlier to the current
Schools Inspection Bill going through.
One of the concerns that there has been around that Bill is particularly
the position of children with special educational needs and the extent to which
they might be part of the admissions process or not. For the sake of argument, what view would an Ofsted inspector
take of a mainstream school? We, as you
know, are doing a special educational needs inquiry at the moment. What view would you take of a mainstream
school at secondary level, for the sake of argument, that was giving
significant support to a special school locally or indeed a mainstream type of
school which had a high proportion of SEN pupils? That inevitably would impact upon its position in the value added
scores.
Mr Smith: I am sorry but is the question would we take
that into account?
Q186 Mr Marsden: Yes.
If you would not take it into account, is that not another aspect of
this concern about the perverse effect of an inspection process damaging
collaboration?
Mr Smith: I would be very saddened. I hope it is not
happening; if it is happening, I would like to know about it. If for example a mainstream secondary school
had a particular relationship with a local special school - it may have limited
provision or specialist provision for children with particular forms of
learning difficulty or disability - I would hope that our inspection regime
would be smart enough to recognise that.
Interestingly, it may put the school in a slightly different place, in
some of Blackpool Evening News league
table, but in a sense that is what I believe is one of the strengths of
inspection, that it would unpick that a bit and say, "But in this school it has
a particular relationship with a specialist school or with large grammar
schools in Blackpool", where you might have a fairly big cohort of special
needs pupils in that particular year six or seven transfer group. I would hope inspection would be smart
enough to identify that. That is not
what league tables are very good at.
They do not take into account the individual circumstances of the
school. We have heard from other
critics: what do we do about middle schools?
Your colleague here from Bedfordshire has middle schools. What do we do about stand alone nursery
schools where there is no data? It is
not a perfect system.
Q187 Stephen Williams: In his answer to your question, Chairman, the
chief inspector said there was no silver bullet for standards. The Prime Minister seems to think that
academies are at least one silver bullet for the education system. It is early days but how many academies have
been through an inspection process and what is your general assessment as to
how academies are doing?
Mr Smith: My view is that we have 22 academies that
have had what we call monitoring visits because we agreed to do initial
monitoring visits. We have had 11
through full inspections, one of which is in special measures, one of which has
notice to improve, so two out of 11 in a category which is higher than the
national position but I am not sure you can take a proportionate view on
11. We must be mindful of where they
came from.
Q188 Stephen Williams: Given where they came from, often academies
are failing schools which are just rebranding effectively and rebuilt. Do you think a one year improvement target
is therefore unrealistic? We have a
quote from the head teacher of one of those academies that did fail its
inspection in Middlesbrough saying that it is completely unrealistic to expect
a school such as that to be turned around within 12 months. Do you think that is a fair statement?
Mr Smith: I will offer you a quotation from my
predecessor, although I do not have the exact words. As with your head teacher, he said that it is probably too early
to say. What David Bell did say - and I
endorse both comments - is that (a) it is probably too early to say and (b) the
government has at least taken a radical look at this and made an effort based
on its research in trying to do something that will lift educational standards
in these areas. That in itself has
value.
Ms Rosen: I think we have already touched on it when we
said that when schools are in special measures they receive regular monitoring
visits. We would expect the school to
be getting a judgment of at least reasonable progress on its monitoring visit
at the end of 12 months. Only a few do
not.
Q189 Stephen Williams: The government is saying that community
schools that are perceived to be failing should be closed and reopened under
new auspices. Do you think the same
criterion should apply to academies as they seem to be failing
disproportionately from the statistics you presented to us?
Mr Smith: The point is that if a school - I am not sure
any distinctions have been made - is placed in special measures and within 12
months is not showing signs of improvement the government - I stress that, not Ofsted - would be very
concerned and would need to make a decision about the future of that
school. I do not think that applies any
differently whatever the school, unless I am mistaken. You can get established academies that have
been given a slightly special status and that enables them to have a little
more time to get started off but once they are in the flow that is it.
Q190 Stephen Williams: As far as you are aware, academies should be
treated no differently to a community school.
Mr Smith: They are treated differently at the outset
because they are not inspected for a period of time until they are up and
running. Once they are up and running
and they have their cohorts of pupils, the government and local government will
make its own choice about whether things open and close. We will report back without fear or favour
as to whether that school has improved.
That is our role.
Q191 Stephen Williams: One of the obvious aspects of academies is
often they are new builds. Sir Alan
Steer in his report on school discipline said that design ought to be taken
into account as to the effect the design of a school would have on school
discipline and bullying in particular.
Is that a view you share? Do you
think design is taken into account as much as it should be?
Mr Smith: I was intrigued that we may be asked about
school buildings. It is not an area
that we touch on very often. We have
not reported on the issue of school buildings for some time. We are about to on a commission from the
DfES and I assume that report will be published some time next year. We have not made a judgment about school
buildings for some time and lots of money has been invested in school
buildings. You are receiving some
evidence from David Moore on Wednesday in relation to bullying and
attendance. We also did a report on
food in schools. These may seem
unconnected at this point. One of the
interesting things that came up was that children could do with drinking plenty
of water during the day so that they do not dehydrate. They do not do so because they do not want
to go to the toilet. They do not want
to go to the toilet because the toilets are rough. The toilets are rough; therefore, they think they are going to
get bullied. It seems a far cry from
where you started out but it is illustrative to say that if school buildings
hide events that are taking place, particularly outside of lesson time, surely
we must question the design of the school.
They are the sorts of questions that have been raised elsewhere.
Q192 Stephen Williams: As Mr Smith acknowledges, there has been a huge
amount of government money spent on new build, not just in the academy sector
but in other parts of the state sector as well. How much do you think a new learning environment contributes to
raising standards?
Mr Smith: We have not conducted a survey of that
recently, have we?
Ms Rosen: No, we have not. Under section ten inspections there was always a grade on the
accommodation. I think it is reasonable
to assume that it is easier for teachers to teach and pupils to learn if the
buildings are in a good state, but again we found sometimes that good teaching
and learning was going on despite the environment. The survey that Maurice has spoken about is not in this year's
programme. It is something we are
thinking about for the programme which we are now talking to the department
about for 2007/8. Considering the
amount of money which is being spent on school buildings, it seems that it will
be an appropriate survey for us to carry out, to try and look specifically at
the link.
Q193 Stephen Williams: Moving on to personnel in schools, one
academy that has been a success is the City Academy in Bristol where I am from,
where the results have gone from 18 per cent five GCSE passes to over 50 per
cent over two years. It is a fantastic,
new building but a lot of local people would also say it has an inspirational
head teacher. Where does the balance
lie between a good learning environment or a good person at the top?
Mr Smith: I would be surprised if my colleague, Ms
Rosen, would not say that leadership and management are the critical factors.
Q194 Stephen Williams: If leadership and management are the critical
factors, do you think it should be a cause of major worry to the government in
particular that at the moment a fifth of schools do not have a head teacher in
place and a third of the places that we are trying to fill have to be
re-advertised? Why do you think there
is a reluctance for people to take on the top position within education?
Mr Smith: I am going to treat data about head teacher
vacancies with some scepticism. I had
the privilege of appearing before the public accounts committee with my former
colleague chief inspector who is now the permanent secretary. The National Audit Office which produced the
data, some of which you refer to, has since published an apology and an
addendum to that report to say that the data they published in their report was
not accurate. My most recent data rests
on the parliamentary answer given by the Minister for Schools who said that
head teacher vacancy rates in the maintained sector are at 0.8 per cent and,
for deputy heads and other school leaders, at 0.7 per cent.
Q195 Stephen Williams: A vacancy rate of 0.8 per cent as opposed to
what we were told was 20 per cent? That
is a huge difference. The NAO is not
normally that inaccurate.
Mr Smith: Humbly, I would refer you back to the NAO
report and its addendum. The
measurement of school head teacher vacancy rates is a very mixed science. When?
Do you mean on a day or through the year? Do you mean how many have been advertised or, in the case of the
NAO, how many have been re-advertised?
It is not our beef frankly, but the whole system would benefit from a
degree of clarity about how many head teacher vacancies there are.
Q196 Chairman: You say a degree of clarity has emerged from
the original statement of the National Audit Office and the correction and
apology?
Mr Smith: I think the correction said that these
figures were not correct. I am not sure
it produced another set of figures. I
am quoting to you from a parliamentary answer from the Minister for Schools in
April.
Q197 Chairman: Could you give us the date?
Mr Smith: If you move on to another question I will
deal with it.
Q198 Stephen Williams: At least he answered the question. When
Menzies Campbell asked the Prime Minister about that he treated it as a jocular
matter.
Mr Smith: It is the House of Commons response to PQ
66203, April 2006. The Minister for
Schools: "The first release of school workforce statistical information
published this morning is that in January 2006 there were 180 head teacher
vacancies in local authority maintained schools in England, a vacancy rate of
0.8 per cent. This confirms the current
trend for low and stable vacancy rates since 1997."
Q199 Mr Marsden: I want to ask about FE because this is now
totally your baby under the new set-up.
You are going to be in charge of all FE inspection. You will be aware of the fact that there has
been and no doubt will continue to be some degree of concern about the way in
which inspection rates are judged between sixth form colleges and between sixth
forms. The Association of Colleges in
particular says that they have concerns that whilst colleges' success rates
reflect not only the achievements of their students but their retention rates,
schools are judged solely on achievements.
"No account is taken of their drop-out rates. In fact, many of the students who fail to complete their courses
in the sixth form at school subsequently transfer to colleges." It reminds me that similar arguments have
been made in the past about comparatives between the old universities and the
new universities and taking on board some of their social intake. Is that not a fair comment by the AoC and
should you not be having an inspection regime that is even handed to sixth form
colleges as well as to sixth forms?
Mr Smith: Sixth form colleges as well as GFE colleges?
Q200 Mr Marsden: No; school sixth forms. At the moment, the Association of Colleges
is saying that you are not taking any account of drop-out rates in schools.
Mr Smith: I understand. We inspect school sixth forms as part of the section five school
inspection regime. We would inspect
sixth form colleges, as part of our existing remit in conjunction with the ALI
and we will inspect general and further education colleges as part of our
existing remit in conjunction with the ALI.
In April 2007 as those functions become part of Ofsted, they will become
one. My experience is that it happens
in this direction: sixth form college to school sixth form to GFE college. Generally speaking, that is the direction of
travel of a kid who drops out. If we
talk about a sixth form college, they are likely to go to a school sixth form
or a GFE college. A drop out in a
school sixth form will be likely to go to a GFE college. We will inspect the institution whether it
be a school sixth form as part of a school, a sixth form college or a GFE
college as it stands with its cohort. I
am not quite sure what is next.
Q201 Mr Marsden: Is not the principle quite simple? If at the moment you are not taking account
of drop-out rates in schools which is the case, is it not? This is a point the Association of Colleges
has made. It is either correct or
incorrect so please clarify it.
Ms Rosen: That is right. We are working very hard together with the ALI, the LSC and the
department to bring about the new measures of success which we will apply to
all.
Q202 Mr Marsden: You are telling the Committee that you will
have a common standard which you will apply to school sixth forms, to general
federation colleges and to ordinary colleges.
The same principles in terms of retention will be applied across the
board?
Ms Rosen: That is what we are intending to do. What it depends on is us being able to get
that information in the right format from schools and colleges. That has not been very easy for us.
Q203 Mr Marsden: Forgive me.
The list of names of organisations that you reeled off sounded a bit
like an educational hokey-cokey. The
concern is going to be, is it not, that if you cannot get some common agreement,
some common transparency, on this fairly rapidly after 2007 the present two
tier disadvantaging situation as far as FE is concerned is going to persist in
terms of people looking at the comparatives between what might be achieved in a
school sixth form and what might be achieved in further education?
Mr Smith: You make a very interesting point. Forgive me if I have come here to
learn. I am not clear whether we
measure retention rates in sixth form colleges or school sixth forms for that
matter in terms of a measure of their success.
We do in general further education colleges, as I understand it. If you are saying that is not too fair and
there should be a level playing field between the three if they are serving the
same punters, I think that is a reasonable point and I will go away from this
Committee and have a look at it. There
are some more subtleties underneath it.
One is that nobody has to be there.
It is easier to measure in a school because children have to be in a
school. Post-16 they do not have to be
there so they can walk. They can go
where they want. That is their
call. Secondly, I think it is an
increasingly intriguing part of the education system of England how sixth form
colleges have reinvented selection. I
am modestly surprised that that is so.
I do not make a judgment either way; I just think it is
interesting. Not only is the issue that
you raise around retention. It might be
around admission. My local sixth form
colleges requires a point score at GCSE level for admission and they are very
clear about it.
Q204 Mr Marsden: Is that something that you would comment on
in an inspection regime?
Mr Smith: Yes.
We would say it was a selective sixth form college with probably an
extraordinarily low drop-out rate. I
visited another one recently in the south of England, an overtly selective
sixth form college. There are different
things underneath that in terms of retention rates. I think you would expect that, would you not?
Q205 Mr Marsden: Absolutely.
Mr Smith: It is a very interesting point but what
judgment that will lead us to I am not sure.
Q206 Chairman: Is this widespread for sixth form colleges?
Mr Smith: I do not know. My experience is only what I have seen as the chief
inspector. The two that I have visited
in my brief tenure as chief inspector have both been selective sixth form
colleges and I was intrigued by that.
Q207 Stephen Williams: Can I move on to children's trusts? We had witnesses from DfES and the
Department of Health in on 19 April to talk about the progress of setting up
children's trusts and directorates of children's services. Their impression was that things are going
very well at the moment. Is that an
impression that Ofsted would share?
Mr Smith: In this area, it is our responsibility to
inspect children's trusts in a local authority, a quite different territory
from where we have been throughout the afternoon and indeed the territory
Miriam and I came from as former HMI in the LEA inspection system which was the
stand alone education departments. We
now lead the inspection of a range of inspectorates in terms of inspecting
local authority children's services departments. The department would be accurate in saying that much progress has
been made in creating local authority children's services departments. I think almost all are now in place. There may be one or two still knocking about
that have separate LEAs and social services but even those are almost at that
point. In that sense, in terms of the
structures of local government, progress has been fairly rapid. The move from that to something called a
children's trust we have less evidence on and we have no particular judgment
about.
Ms Rosen: The development of children's trusts and
joint commissioning arrangements we have found to be variable when we have been
looking at the joint area reviews, with good progress in some areas, but there
is little formal pooling of budgets beyond a limited range of fairly specific
services. That is where we would point
out that more progress is needed.
Q208 Stephen Williams: Are you confident that in your own joint area
reviews - it would be Every Child Matters,
would it not? - you are able to evaluate this and harder to evaluate areas?
Mr Smith: Yes.
They are harder to evaluate areas.
It is a complex methodology because it also includes the annual
performance assessments. We are in our
first year of joint area reviews and they are biggish exercises and
complex. We need to be clear that we
are targeting the important things for us to inspect in field work because that
is the expensive part, if you like. On
the APA side we are fairly straightforward.
We have had nearly a year of that; we have had external and internal
evaluation. We have some things to
learn in terms of proportionality and I think we can go further there without
taking our eye off the ball of those crucial issues regarding safeguarding
children. At the end of this year we
will be a third of the way through the programme. It is a programme which we statutorily lead other inspectorates
in but, by the time April 2007 comes, some of those other inspectors will be
us. I think that will make matters more
straightforward.
Q209 Stephen Williams: Have you looked at the joint training of
staff in children's trusts or joined up departments?
Mr Smith: No.
Q210 Stephen Williams: One of the things was that was put to us was
that some primary care trusts and strategic health authorities are not
cooperating with social services and LEAs in the setting up of children's
trusts. Have you come across that at
all?
Mr Smith: I have not.
I do not think we have any evidence from our joint area review
process. I am not necessarily sure that
we would get that from the joint area review process. It is common that the liaison and the relationship between
education and social services leads to a joint department and if you are going
to have a new inspectorate you know that the health of children is outside both
the department where it is delivered and it is in a separate inspectorate.
Q211 Stephen Williams: Can I move to a specific category of children
and their educational attainment? First
of all, looked after children. Your
reports show that at the moment the number of looked after children achieving five
good GCSEs has become 11 per cent in 2005 as opposed to 9.4 per cent in 2004,
as against an average across the population of 56 per cent, so there is a huge
gap there. How does Ofsted monitor the
attainment of looked after children and what schools or their educational
environments are doing to drive up their standards?
Mr Smith: We monitor it in two ways, both of which have
been mentioned. One, through the school
inspection programme and, two, through the joint area review programme. As you have quoted us, you can see that we
report on it in detail. I was asked by
the Chairman at the very outset what concerns me about the education programme
in the country. This must be near the
height of everybody's concern. What is
perhaps even more concerning is that my data indicates to me that 36 per cent
of looked after children do not even sit in front of a GCSE paper.
Q212 Stephen Williams: There are no percentages of a reduced cohort
of looked after children anyway?
Mr Smith: More than a third of looked after children do
not attend or do not sit in front of a GCSE paper.
Q213 Stephen Williams: Can I turn to children who look after, young
carers? This is something I have
brought up before. When we had the DfES
in front of us, I asked them, "Do you have any concerns about the attainment of
children who are young carers, who look after their siblings or a single
parent?" There was some incomprehension
all round. Does Ofsted, when it is
looking at individual schools, ever ask about policies for children who are young
carers?
Mr Smith: I am familiar with and tuned into the issues
and difficulties facing young carers from previous professional contacts and
background. We should be sensitive to
identified young carers in our school inspection system. I do not think, unless Miriam tells me
otherwise or unless it is brought to our attention by a local authority, that
it is a specific area of inquiry in terms of joint area reviews, but of course
there are many things that occur within a local authority that are not
necessarily picked up in joint area reviews.
Ms Rosen: In joint area reviews, we always pick up on
looked after children and children with learning disabilities, but we would not
necessarily always pick up on other groups.
The particular group you are talking about I do not think I am aware that
data exists for as a group.
Q214 Stephen Williams: Do you think it is a gap in the system that
ought to be addressed?
Ms Rosen: It is difficult to monitor how well a group
is getting on if there is not data for them.
We might well be aware of individual cases and individuals might be
picked up but without data of the group as a whole it is difficult. On the other hand, there may well be
sensitivities about gathering it and children wishing to identify themselves as
such.
Q215 Chairman: Getting back to looked after children, it is
pretty scandalous, is it not, what happens to looked after children in our
educational system? Could we not have
some more punchy response from Ofsted?
Should you not be looking seriously at why this is the case? Is there good practice? Is there any practice? What could be done to change this most
vulnerable group of children, to give them a proper chance of education, of
staying on and sitting their GCSE examinations? Warm words are fine but what action can Ofsted take to help us
and the DfES do something about it?
Mr Smith: They are not warm words, are they?
Q216 Chairman: You were quite passionate but you did not
suggest any action.
Mr Smith: They are warm in that sense but they are not
warm in terms of the outcome for those youngsters. I have been in post for four months and I have probably made more
statements about children who are looked after and their educational attainment
than anything else. I did in the very
first week of my appointment at the conference at Gateshead and I have
subsequently in the press. Ofsted has
also done specific survey work in this area in the past, both jointly with the
old SSI colleagues and with the Audit Commission. We have brought this consistently into the public domain and to
the forefront of the public, or at least the public who are interested in it,
and the department for that matter. I
am not sure I need to reflect on your word "scandalous" but it certainly must
be a significant concern for a sophisticated western economy.
Q217 Chairman: I did not mean scandalous inaction from Ofsted. I was not casting any aspersions in that
direction but this Committee had evidence from heads that systematically
excluded any looked after children from getting into their schools. The system allowed them to do it and that is
why I think it is a scandalous situation that there is such a restricted range
of options for the looked after child.
Mr Smith: I have not been involved but I have read of
the involvement of this Committee in promoting that in terms of measures in the
Bill regarding the admissions of looked after children to schools. As a professional I would applaud that. This cohort of youngsters, particularly at
secondary age, is the most vulnerable and end of the line cohort of young
people. I have personal professional
experience of working in this field and we are, from April 2007, going to be
the inspectorate that deals with children in this field. It is my sincere hope that Ofsted will
continue to bring this data and the stories underneath this data to the
attention of the public. I do not think
we have been lax at doing that. That is
our role, to get it into the public domain.
It is not pleasant reading or attractive stuff for the reader. This is not a place where the British public
reader wants to go that often because if they did they might find it even more
unpleasant than this data suggests.
Q218 Jeff Ennis: On the last point, we might want to change
the phraseology from looked after children to looked over children the way
things are carrying on. Moving on to
Ofsted's expanded remit, your predecessor, David Bell, told this Committee last
year that the new regional structure for Ofsted would be fully operational last
month, April 2006. I wonder if you
could just tell the Committee how well the new regional structure is working and
what benefits does Ofsted derive from having a regional rather than a
centralised structure?
Mr White: It is a new regional structure in that there
are three regions but Ofsted has operated a regional structure in early years
since its very inception in 2001. It
was a move from eight regions down to three.
The move is not significant. Our
educational work, whilst it has always operated in the field, has not been
brigaded regionally. We believe it is
making a significant impact and will continue to do so in that we have a
greater presence out there. We now have
local managing inspectors in the education space which are within the field but
we have always been very strong in Dorian's space and in the early years
space. It is in there and it is doing good
work. It is a structure we hope to take
forward in April 2007 with the creation of the new Ofsted.
Mr Smith: Going back to the timing, this was brought to
fruition - we have a bit of a phrase here - under budget, before time, to
specification. We are very proud of it.
Q219 Jeff Ennis: What about the savings? We were told you were going to save £42
million. How much have you achieved?
Mr Thompson: £42 million.
That was the target in the spending review 2004. We had to do it by April 2007. We have achieved it this April. The budget has gone down this year. It will go down again next year and we will
have to renegotiate because of the expanded remit.
Q220 Jeff Ennis: How much of the Adult Learning Inspectorate's
improvement work will Ofsted be taking on and how will this be organised?
Mr Smith: It is slightly early days and it is in the
mix of the strategy board. The
government responded to the consultation to say that some of the improvement
work would stay with Ofsted and some would go to the new Quality Improvement
Agency. It looks pretty clear as to
where that dividing line is going to fall but there are still negotiations
around the edges as to who does what.
Q221 Jeff Ennis: Are you taking steps to build up links with
employers?
Mr Smith: Yes.
I am sure you know this but we have a strategy board in place now to
manage the transition. It is led by
Richard Handover who is also the chairman of the Adult Learning
Inspectorate. It has been high on
Richard's agenda that we should keep close to our stakeholders, particularly in
the field of employment. I am sure you
will be interested to know that I am the guest of one of the former members of
the select committee - one of your former colleagues, Mr Ennis - Mr Turner from
the Isle of Wight, who is hosting me with business leaders on the Isle of Wight
on Thursday evening and with a council member for ----
Q222 Jeff Ennis: He is not in Parkhurst Prison, is he?
Mr Smith: We do some work in security. I have had a word with my diary secretary
from Wigan about dairying me into the Isle of Wight on a Friday.
Q223 Chairman: One of the things that really does irritate
people out there when they talk about Ofsted is something I have brought up
with you before. You seem unable to
comment on systemic failure. Everything
has to be school based. In a town or
local authority area where a group of schools is failing, you do not seem to
have the capacity to do or say anything.
When you visit schools, what use is Ofsted? They respect all the schools.
They will know there is a systemic failure but seem unable to do much
about it. You are inert when you detect
systemic failure. Is that a fair
criticism?
Mr Smith: With humility, I do not agree. I will quote you the evidence, although you
may feel it is a little old. I led an
inspection of Manchester LEA that identified 141 children who were not
anywhere. Nobody knew where they were,
along with other systemic failures relating to school budgets and school
performance in that local education authority.
We published an extraordinarily critical report which got very high
public coverage on The Today Programme and
Newsnight. It is my view that the lives of children missing from school
have changed as a result of that report.
We could say that about reports that we have published in Calderdale, in
Liverpool and a range of other local education authorities. I think they had an impact and created an
improvement. That is exactly what they
were. They were about the systemic
element of a local authority area. I
hope that our work, in conjunction with the other inspectorates and with our
colleagues particularly in social care inspection, will enable us to continue
down that route, although the body that we inspect will be bigger and we will
be saying something about children in a more holistic way in a particular area.
Chairman: Thank you very much for your evidence
today. I think we will squeeze one more
session in with you on the particular inquiry that we are conducting. If we do not, our very best wishes for the
future and to you, Jonathan. Good luck
in the Eden Project.