Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT FOR
EDUCATION AND
SKILLS AND
OFSTED
27 FEBRUARY 2006
Q60 Greg Clark: No, the particular
point is on quality of leadership and management. How many heads
have rated themselves as inadequate?
Mr Smith: I do not know.[1]
Q61 Greg Clark: Will you write to the
Committee with that figure?
Mr Smith: I will write to the
Committee. May I just say that we do still make a judgment, and
a graded judgment, including a numeric judgment on the leadership
and management of the school.
Q62 Greg Clark: We talked about the
leadership and management but the new system is based on self-assessment
which means that your inspectors, who typically used to go in
for a week to make an assessment, now go in for two days, is that
correct?
Mr Smith: That is correct.
Q63 Greg Clark: Assuming that a headteacher
has been loath to describe himself as inadequate but might be,
and as we see there are an increasing number of schools that might
fall into that category, it is all down to your inspectors to
overturn that self-evaluation.
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q64 Greg Clark: They used to have
five days as quite a large team to observe that school, to observe
lessons, observe the ethos of the school, now they have a self-evaluation
form and up to two days with a smaller team to assess that. How
can that be rigorous?
Mr Smith: They also have a far
better background to the school and performance data set, et
cetera, et cetera.
Q65 Greg Clark: Do you think these
things are reducible to figures and statistics?
Mr Smith: No, I do not.
Q66 Greg Clark: Surely there is some
value in observation and inspection?
Mr Smith: Of course there is value
in observation and, indeed, the dialogue with the headteacher
and leadership and management team is now even greater than it
was in the previous regime. I am confident that my inspectors
are making proper judgments on leadership and management. You
said yourself that the proportion has increased slightly, and
indeed it has.
Q67 Greg Clark: Spending two days
in a school does not impair the quality of judgment compared with
five days in a school, you can make the same assessment of a head's
leadership quality during that time?
Mr Smith: Yes, along with the
other materials that we have available to us.
Q68 Greg Clark: There is no parent
survey any more in Ofsted reports. There used to be a statistical
survey of parents that was reported.
Mr Smith: We do conduct the survey
of parents but it is not reported in the same way. One of the
other things we have changed, which has been welcomed widely,
is giving little or no notice to schools.
Q69 Greg Clark: Who has welcomed
it?
Mr Smith: I think it is widely
welcomed that we give little or no notice.
Q70 Greg Clark: Has anyone welcomed
the lack of a parent survey?
Mr Smith: If we give little or
no notice we cannot send a parental questionnaire six weeks in
advance, can we, that would tip them off I think.
Q71 Greg Clark: You could do it afterwards.
Mr Smith: Then we cannot produce
the report in 15 days.
Q72 Greg Clark: It could be a supplementary
report.
Mr Smith: We do conduct it on
the day that we are there, so we do have that data available to
us.
Q73 Greg Clark: But you do not publish
it. I think Ofsted has a hugely important role to play in raising
standards and my question is just when we have a situation in
which far too many schools are causing concern, and it causes
me concern that that proportion seems to be increasing, the rigour
and the usefulness of the information seems to be declining. My
attention was drawn to a statement that a trade union, the NASUWT,
put out, that says: "Headteachers increasingly are setting
less and less store by Ofsted's pronouncements. Ofsted is becoming
a growing irrelevance in terms of its ability to make a meaningful
contribution to raising standards". That strikes me as alarming.
Mr Smith: You would not expect
me to agree with my trade union colleague on that particular issue.
Q74 Greg Clark: They are teachers,
members of the profession.
Mr Smith: I do not think the 87
schools or the parents of the pupils in those 87 schools that
went into Special Measures last term would agree that Ofsted is
an irrelevance. I think that Ofsted's role in providing external
scrutiny of schools is crucially important. What this Report recommends
is that we take a more proportionate approach and try to be less
invasive to those schools that are doing a good job and concentrate
more of our efforts on those that are weaker.
Q75 Chairman: That really sums up
our new approach, does it, this is what we are talking in the
White Paper, what we are talking about this afternoon, you are
going to set headteachers in good schools, Ofsted will be a much
lighter touch, two days rather than five days, the less bureaucracy
and less form-filling the better and you set them free, is that
right?
Mr Smith: There is a broader position
in terms of regulation and inspection as a whole, not just in
schools and not just in Ofsted but more broadly altogether and
we are constantly encouraged by the Better Regulation Executive
to be more proportionate in our activity. In our Early Years work
we were praised in the document Better Regulation for a Civil
Society because of that very proportionate approach. We are
trying to get that model absolutely right so that we are making
good use of public money in terms of analysing those schools that
are the weakest and do not spend lots of time in schools that
are self-evidently very good and getting on with a good job.
Q76 Chairman: So the answer to my
question is yes?
Mr Smith: The answer is yes.
Q77 Mr Bacon: Mr Bell, can I draw
your attention back to the chart on page 4 which identified the
10 indicators of a poorly performing school. You were very reluctant
to single out any one of them, you said that they were all important.
I was quite surprised by that because it strikes me that weak
leadership is that from which all else flows, is it not? If you
have strong leadership you would not have unfilled places because
of a failing reputation, you would have a growing reputation,
because people would say, "That school has got a strong leader
and good headteacher", would they not? You would have better
governance because the headteacher would make sure that there
was good governance. If there was a poor standard of teaching
a strong leader would sort it out. If there were unfilled staff
vacancies a strong leader, a strong head, would sort that out.
I am speaking only from the experience of my own constituency
in visiting other schools. A strong headteacher does not permit
poor behaviour and so on, high rates of pupil absence, something
else we have looked at on this Committee. Why is weak leadership
not the single most important indicator?
Mr Bell: I think in the way that
you have described it I can only but agree with you. Our evidence
would suggest that in a school that is poor it is not just the
leadership, it is all of those other factors to a greater or lesser
extent. In my response to Ms Goodman I was trying to avoid the
sense there is only one thing that really matters. I think the
way you have described it, however, is right, that if you have
got strong leadership those other things should follow.
Q78 Mr Bacon: Surely you do not have
to quite describe it as a silver bullet but nonetheless agree
that a strong headteacher is the single biggest component.
Mr Bell: Hugely important, and
I think Ofsted's evidence over the years would support that.
Q79 Mr Bacon: Is leadership primarily
the responsibility of the headteacher?
Mr Bell: Primarily but not exclusively.
1 Note by witness: Three schools judged their
leadership and management to be inadequate in their self evaluation
forms in the autumn term 2005 inspections. Two of the schools
were subsequently placed in special measures. One other school,
which was going through a period of management change after sickness
and retirement of the headteacher, had judged its leadership and
management to be inadequate. However, inspectors judged the leadership
and management to be satisfactory. Back
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