Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MS CHRISTINE
GILBERT, MR
DORIAN BRADLEY,
MR ROBERT
GREEN, MS
VANESSA HOWLISON
AND MS
MIRIAM ROSEN
13 DECEMBER 2006
Q1 Chairman: Can we welcome Christine
Gilbert, the new Chief Inspector, for her first appearance before
the Committee, and the rest of the team—Robert Green, Miriam
Rosen, Dorian Bradley and Vanessa Howlison—it is very good
to see you all here. As we all know, we have a fixed appointment
every six months and quite a lot in between, depending on what
inquiry the Committee is conducting at that time. As you know,
we are coming to the end of an inquiry into citizenship, so you
will not be surprised if something around citizenship comes up
today, and we also are well into an inquiry into sustainable schools,
and so on, and have been looking at bullying too, so there will
be some of that dropped into the questions that you will get today.
Chief Inspector, we usually give the Chief Inspector a chance
to say something about her Annual Report before we get started.
Would you like a short time to give us, in a nutshell, what you
think are the essentials part of it?
Ms Gilbert: Thank
you, Chairman. I welcome the opportunity to appear in front of
your committee in my new capacity as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector,
and it is a privilege to account for the work of Ofsted through
this parliamentary process. By way of introduction what I would
like to do is to mention some of the key issues that emerged in
the Annual Report, launched just a few weeks ago, and then point
to the establishment of the new Ofsted next April. I took up post
at the beginning of October. One of my very first tasks as HMCI,
in fact during my first week, was to review the Annual Report
and produce a commentary on it. I describe it as my report, but
you will recognise that the inspection activity within it was
carried out with Ofsted under the work of my predecessors David
Bell and Maurice Smith, both of whom I understand appeared before
you on a number of occasions. You will have seen that this year's
report is in two sections. The first provides the state of the
nation summary, if you like, of the quality of education and care
in England—this is a different format from previous years—and
the second offers an overview of a range of issues in education
and care based on surveys and reviews of children's services carried
out this past year. If ever a justification were needed for the
creation of the new Ofsted, then it is to be found in the pages
of this report. The importance of providing high quality support
for vulnerable children and young people cannot be the overestimated.
The Every Child Matters agenda will receive the highest priority
from me personally and from the new Ofsted, and it forms, I think,
a common thread running through the entire report. I want the
new Ofsted to play a central role in the drive for better education,
life-long learning and care for children, for young people and
for adult learners. To place in context where we are now, I found
it useful to go back through the annual reports of my predecessors
and look at how they had viewed the English education system.
Their reports conveyed a sense of improvement and progress, and
that was reinforced by my reading of this year's report. The overwhelming
majority of child care and nursery education settings inspected
are at least satisfactory, and over half are good and outstanding;
almost six out of ten maintained schools inspected this year were
good or outstanding and I think that is a particularly reassuring
statistic and impressive given that the new inspection arrangements
have raised the bar; the trend of improvement in further education
colleges continues and 11% were outstanding and 44% good; the
quality of training for our next generation of teachers, particularly
among the school-based providers is improving; and, last but far
from least, I think, annual performance assessments of local authorities
judged that the overall provision of children's services in three-quarters
of authorities is good or very good. However, as was widely reported
at the time of the Annual Report launch, the picture is not a
wholly positive one. It is not acceptable that one in 12 schools
inspected was judged to be inadequate this past year. In the secondary
school sector this proportion rises to around one in eight, nearly
twice that of the primary sector, and improving these schools
must be a key priority. Equally, the poor levels of attainment
and attendance of many children in care is simply unacceptable.
I welcome the fact that over the next few months colleagues from
the Adult Learning Inspectorate, the Commission for Social Care
Inspection and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Court Administration
will be joining with colleagues from Ofsted to form a potent new
force in the drive to enhance the quality of life of children,
young people and adult learners. The new Ofsted will be built
on the very best of these four inspectorates, and from April we
will have a very real opportunity to create a strong, innovative
organisation that adds value to what happens currently and drives
up performance and standards. The new Ofsted will be supported
by stronger governance arrangements, and a number of experienced
and very capable non-executive members have been appointed to
the new Board, which is to be chaired by Zenna Atkins. The Education
and Skills Act protects the Chief Inspector's independence and
direct accountability to ministers in Parliament; so this will
not be my first and last appearance before your Committee, Mr
Chairman. My colleagues and I now look forward to taking your
questions. Thank you very much.
Q2 Chairman: Chief Inspector, thank
you very much for that. Can I open the questioning by asking you:
it is very good to look at the history, but let us look at the
recent history since you took over as chief inspector? The very
first performance in front of the press seems to have given the
press the impression that English education is going to hell in
a hand-cart. You have given us a fairly balanced view of what
you found as you looked at the report and as you did your commentary
on English education, but the overwhelming impression in the press
was that the state of English education was dreadful and getting
worse. Why do you think they got that view?
Ms Gilbert: I clearly cannot speak
on behalf of the press, and in fact the presentation I gave at
the beginning of the press conference did present a very balanced
view. It gave very positive messages and then the negative ones,
but I guess the negative messages sell more papers. We are running
a number of receptions for outstanding providers of early years,
of childcare, schools and colleges—we are running eight
of them up and down the country. We had two last week with, I
think, 180 in London and 130 people in Manchester, and then we
invited the press. There was not a single representative from
the press at either occasion and both were very positive occasions
both for Ofsted and for those being celebrated in that way.
Q3 Chairman: So you think you got
an unrepresentative press coverage. They did not reflect really
what you said?
Ms Gilbert: I said a number of
very positive things which, to be fair, were reported in most
of the press, I guess they do not make the headlines, and the
picture, I think, is a strong and positive one. Nevertheless,
it is part of Ofsted's job to report fairly and frankly on what
it sees through the inspection process, and it is very important
that I do that too.
Q4 Chairman: I understand that. You
have been reading (and this is a very valuable process) all the
annual reports, so you have got a very good idea of the beginning
of Ofsted. You know for what reason it was introduced, it has
been maintained over two administrations and we are now where
we are, so you have got a good historic overview of the process
over time. Has Ofsted made a difference?
Ms Gilbert: I am very positive
about the inspection process, be it by the Audit Commission, Ofsted
or anybody else. I felt that at school level, local authority
level, and so on. I thought that before I even applied for this
particular job, and I have got lots of anecdotal evidence to show
that inspection certainly supports improvement. It does not do
the improvement but it supports improvement. Since I took up this
post in Ofsted, I have seen more detailed evidence of the impact
of our inspection on the process, because this has been something
that Ofsted has been giving greater to emphasis to over the past
few years; and it is not just me thinking it makes a difference,
parents tell us it makes a difference, teachers tell us it makes
a difference and heads, as part of those responses, tell us it
makes a difference.
Q5 Chairman: What I am trying to
get at is, as you did your review, have schools in England got
better year on year?
Ms Gilbert: Yes, in my view they
have. As you read the annual reports year after year and if you
look at the framework that was used in those, you can see in the
back of those reports the steady improvement. This year, of course,
we have changed the framework for inspection, so it is not quite
clear by looking at the stark data that that improvement has continued,
but one of the reasons that the change in the inspection framework
came about is that schools have improved but, at the same time,
people's expectations of schools and education and care, more
generally, have also risen, and it is important to keep that focus
on accelerating improvement, I think, really clear in our minds.
The new inspection framework was designed to do that. It was to
capture higher expectations and to drive up standards even further.
Q6 Chairman: In your Annual Report
you do not reflect that, in the sense that there is no graph or
there is no narrative that says, over the period that Ofsted has
been operating, there has been a steady improvement in educational
attainment and performance. Why do we not have that historic overview,
because if the press wants to say education is going to hell in
a hand-cart, surely Ofsted can then say, but if you look at the
years that Ofsted has been engaged in this process, things have
either got steadily better or there have been some dips, but where
is the narrative in the report?
Ms Gilbert: Looking through the
Annual Report, that is said sometimes in some of the commentaries;
it is not highlighted every year. I think it would be fairly arid
to make some comment like that every single year, but one would
want to look at trends over time. I think it is important that
we do that. My focus very much, coming in new in the first week
of October, was to look at the report I was being presented with
and to sit back and draw back from that report and look at the
key issues that were emerging from me reading it, to discuss those
with colleagues and then to write the commentary. My focus this
year was very much on what had been achieved this past year.
Q7 Chairman: You do understand?
Ms Gilbert: I do.
Q8 Chairman: If you are a taxpayer,
you would quite like to know if all this taxpayers' money that
has been poured into Ofsted over the last ten years has actually
made a positive difference and an incremental difference?
Ms Gilbert: I take that point,
Chairman.
Q9 Chairman: Can I ask you about
the new inspection. We used to have the Chief Inspector come in
front of us, and the sort of information that we would get from
all sorts of people who knew that the chief inspector was going
to be in front of us would be on the lines of, "Too much
inspection; too rigorous; they are here too long; they take over
our schools; we are terrified; our staff are immobilised by the
fear of Ofsted coming along", and now we are getting people
writing in to us saying, "This is so light-touch, there is
no way it can show the quality of our school. There is no way
that it can do anything very useful. The light touch has gone
beyond anything meaningful." Are you worried about that,
because we are getting that kind of report?
Ms Gilbert: I have had both of
those things said to me since taking up my post, and reviewing
the new process is something that we have taken very seriously
in Ofsted. Miriam might want to talk about that later on, but
the process has changed in a number of ways. We have got better
performance information now than we ever had before, and that
plays a major part in the new process. The second major strand
I would identify is the increased focus on self-evaluation—much
stronger now than ever before and getting better almost as I speak
to you—and schools themselves are universally positive about
the self-evaluation element. So we have those two things, and
we might have a range of data captured in the school evaluation
form, as it is described, but the key piece and the most important
piece is still the inspector's judgment. Inspectors look at that
information before they go into a school, they then test it out
in the school in a number of ways. They test it out by talking
to the senior management, to teachers, to pupils, they have got
information from parents and they go in and out of classrooms.
That process is different from the process before. It happens
more frequently than it happened before—every three years
now, not every six years. Last year, for instance, Ofsted inspected
many more schools than the previous year, so those things, I think,
are very important and are helping us and I have been reassured
that the system is rigorous. I read every single report if a school
is placed in special measures, so I read about maybe half a dozen
a week, and I have to be assured that the judgment is a right
one, and that report will have been through a number of quality
checks before it comes to me, and think there is only one since
October in which I queried the judgment. In the end I was persuaded
and we have left the judgment, but I was persuaded by the quality
of the judgment set out in those reports that the inspectors had
got to the heart of what was going on in that school and were
seeing that school very clearly.
Q10 Chairman: Is that a problem,
Chief Inspector, in the sense that it is in a way easier to evaluate
a school that is in serious trouble perhaps, that the short-comings
really jump up and bite you as your inspectors go into the school
and watch and listen to what is going on? Is that as good when
you are visiting a coasting school, a school that is sort of average,
not going anywhere, not really improving as fast as you would
like, and is that one of the problems that you find? You need
a much more sensitive approach, do you not?
Ms Gilbert: I think this new system
is absolutely right. If you ask me the single biggest difference
will be the closer and tighter focus on a pupil's progress and
school performance in those schools, because this time the performance
data raises a number of questions that you will then debate when
you go into schools. For instance, a school that is getting 70%
five A to Cs will look on paper as though it is a very good school.
The CVA data might suggest that it is not quite as good as it
looks on paper. It is not telling you that it is not, but it is
raising a number of questions that the inspectors would then follow
through when they attended the school, when they inspected the
school.
Q11 Chairman: You have a fascinating
background because you have seen education from almost every view,
but, drawing on that experience, are you really confident? You
have come in and you have got the system you have got; you have
not had time to change it. Are you sure that this great emphasis
on self-evaluation is really the way to go?
Ms Gilbert: I am absolutely sure
that self-evaluation is core to improvement, and I think, whether
an organisation is being inspected or not, knowing yourself well,
knowing your strengths and weaknesses is absolutely crucial in
any organisation. Be it education or the world of business, I
think self-evaluation—you might not call it that—is
absolutely central. If you do not know your strengths and weaknesses,
I do not know how you can progress in a very focused way, and
so I do think self-evaluation is very important. What external
scrutiny does it sharpen that up, and, in fact, that was the most
fascinating thing for me reading the evaluation where, I think,
about 82% of heads were saying how positive it was. A large majority
of them were saying: what it has helped us to do is to validate
the things that we are saying in our own assessment; it is reinforcing,
if you like, that we have identified the right things and we are
going in the right direction.
Q12 Chairman: You do not think, Chief
Inspector, that this enormous growth of Ofsted—the taking
over of the Adult Learning Inspectorate, getting into the Early
Years, the responsibility for Every Child Matters—overall
has weakened, that you are doing so much that you have lost your
focus? Do you not think that is a danger? People outside are suspecting
that that might be the case.
Ms Gilbert: It does not feel a
very big organisation to me. I have come from one that is almost
four times its size, so it does not seem a very big organisation.
I think the issue is whether we are clear about our purpose, and
the bringing together of inspectorates, I think, is key in terms
of that. It is very clear to me that the Act and the job descriptions
I received when I applied for this post focus very much on three
things. They focus on improvement, they ask us to focus on users
and they ask us to focus on the efficient and effective use of
our resources. Those three things are central, and I think that
bringing the four inspectorates together gives us an holistic
view of what is going on in terms of learning, skills, development,
care and so on. We will push forward the ECM agenda, but the broader
agenda too, in terms of performance, in a way it has not been
done before.
Q13 Chairman: It may not be as big
as the last organisation you were with before, but it is a lot
of taxpayers' money.
Ms Gilbert: It is.
Q14 Chairman: There are a lot of
people in education who say, "You got rid of Ofsted. What
can we do with that money in terms of school improvement?"
We could do all sorts of things, and you would agree, would you
not, that if under your leadership Ofsted does not show value
for money, it makes a difference, people will increasingly say,
"Why have Ofsted? We have just come back from Australia.
They do not have an inspection system like this. They seem to
work very well." Unless under your leadership you prove value,
people will increasingly say, "Do we need you?"
Ms Gilbert: I applied for the
job because I believe that Ofsted, the new Ofsted will make more
of a difference actually than even the four inspectorates separately.
If we do not, there is something that I am not doing very well
in leading the organisation, but we will continue to build on
the processes that are already there in the different organisations
to varying degrees, on the processes there for benchmarking ourselves.
It is far more difficult to benchmark Ofsted than it was to benchmark
the organisation from where I came, but we will continue to do
that, we will continue to look at how efficient we are, we will
continue to look at how effective we are and we will ask our users,
and find more innovative ways of asking our users, about the difference
we make to what is going on on the ground.
Q15 Chairman: Chief Inspector, thank
you for that. As you will know, the Chairman of the Committee
is the warm-up act.
Ms Gilbert: I did not.
Chairman: We now have some serious questions
from David Chaytor.
Q16 Mr Chaytor: Chief Inspector,
how do you think the purpose of inspection will change as a result
of the creation of new Ofsted?
Ms Gilbert: I think the three
things that I have just referred to when answering the Chairman's
questions are absolutely central, and they are really clear in
the Act. The focus on improvement is much more stark than was
there before. We do have to be clear that we are making a difference
and that inspection activity is contributing to improvement. We
do not improve things ourselves. The different settings, the different
organisations use our recommendations and they do the work in
terms of improvement, so we do not do that. Secondly, I think
the focus on users is much more strong than it has been probably
in at least three of the four inspectorates. I think it is very
strong in CSCI (the Commission for Social Care Inspection) and
I think the new Ofsted will build on the strengths of the existing
inspectorates and our focus will be really sharp and clear on
users; and in the questions that we have been having about value
for money, and so on, I think those things will be really important
in establishing this new organisation, because we are describing
it very much as a new organisation.
Q17 Mr Chaytor: In terms of the focus
on improvements, the Annual Report highlights that in your inspection
of Early Years you have a responsibility to see through the recommendations
you make in your inspection reports, and I think, from memory,
the report says that you had made 80,400 recommendations during
your inspections of Early Years settings. Your responsibility
is to ensure that these recommendations are implemented, but you
do not have quite that responsibility in respect of school or
college inspections. Do you now envisage that that will change
and there will be a far greater follow-through in the role of
Ofsted?
Ms Gilbert: In terms of schools
and colleges?
Q18 Mr Chaytor: In terms of schools
and colleges?
Ms Gilbert: We cannot force the
schools or colleges to do what we are recommending that they do.
Q19 Mr Chaytor: You can in terms
of Early Years settings?
Ms Gilbert: It is a different
process. It is much more to do with compliance against national
standards. I do not know, but Dorian might want to pick up some
of that. There is much, much more of a regulation aspect, in fact
it is regulatory, in the Early Years, whereas it is very much
inspection activity in schools and colleges; but what we have
established from the evaluation that we have carried out is that
over 80% of schools are telling us that they think the recommendations
are right and that they are using the recommendations. Some of
them are even using them before we have produced the report. So
they are telling us that that is the case. If a school is in an
inadequate category, we will be going back to check what they
are doing, not necessarily the detail of what we have said, but
that their provision in the school is improving.
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