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.