Memorandum submitted by the Association
of Professionals in Education and Children's Trusts (ASPECT)
1. The Association of Professionals in Education
and Children's Trusts (Aspect), formerly the National Association
of Educational Inspectors, Advisers and Consultants (NAEIAC),
offers the following comments on the work of Ofsted to the House
of Commons Education and Skills Committee, for consideration prior
to its meeting with Ms Gilbert on 13 December 2006. As the representative
body for inspectors and other school improvement professionals,
Aspect enjoys regular contact and dialogue with HMCI and Ofsted
over issues of current concern to our members and to local authorities,
schools and colleges, as well as with DfES and other national
agencies in the education and children's services arena.
SUMMARY OF
SUBMISSION
2. Our submission may be summarised as follows:
— HMCI's announcement that a significantly
wider category of schools is to receive only one-day visits by
a single Ofsted inspector raises several practical concerns. These
include the need for more detailed and up-to-date research evidence
on the quality of school self-evaluation in England and how to
further improve it, a reduction in valuable lesson observations,
the problem of the earliest possible identification of the minority
of high-performing schools which suffer sudden deterioration,
and the future role of the inspection regime in monitoring all
schools' responses to their new statutory duty to promote the
well-being of children broadly in accordance with the government's
"Every Child Matters" agenda.
— The recent Local Government White
Paper proposal to alter the newly-introduced Joint Area Review
(JAR) system for inspecting local children's services and to rely
on more restricted inspection activity requires active exploration
of several issues, including the question of how concrete examples
of good practice in local inter-agency co-operation will now be
identified and their practical lessons disseminated across other
local authorities around the country, and the availability or
otherwise of other effective levers to actively promote the ECM
agenda within local areas, based on stronger collaboration between
different children's services.
"LIGHTER TOUCH"
SCHOOL INSPECTIONS:
PRACTICAL CONCERNS
3. The "lighter-touch" S.5 school
inspection system in England, introduced in September 2005 in
line with broader changes to public sector inspection regimes
and involving overall expenditure reductions, is already being
modified. HMCI has announced a significant widening of the category
of high-achieving schools to be viewed as requiring only a single-day
visit by one inspector ("reduced tariff inspections"),
to embrace 30% of all schools from April 2007 ("Times
Educational Supplement" 3 November 2006). This approach
necessarily relies yet more heavily on the nature and quality
of a school's own self-review arrangements, duly reflected in
the contents of its Self Evaluation Form (SEF), a document already
of central importance to the present standard Ofsted inspection
process. However, the available evidence suggests that the quality
of English schools' self-review remains uneven. In 2004, at a
national DfES/ Ofsted conference for school governors, Ofsted
confirmed that, prior to the introduction of its revised S4 self-evaluation
form in 2001, 30% of schools' self-evaluation processes were "weak,
poorly-completed and have not conveyed insight into the school's
strengths and weaknesses". Ofsted then noted that "following
the introduction of the revised S4 in 2001, the quality of self-evaluation
has improved, but is still variable". Last year, Ofsted reminded
all schools that "there is no perfect SEF and inspectors
know this" ("Ofsted Direct" No. 4) and, in useful
practical guidance jointly published with DfES, entitled "A
New Relationship with Schools: Improving Performance Through School
Self-Evaluation", felt it necessary to underline the point
that "self-evaluation is only effective if it is based on
openness, honesty and trust". The overall grading of the
effectiveness of English schools described in HMCI's recent Annual
Report for 2005-06—11% outstanding, 48% good, 34% satisfactory
and 8% inadequate—also implies that further steps are required
to enhance the quality of self-evaluation procedures. Aspect would
therefore urge more detailed and up-to-date research into this
key feature of school life and how to further improve it, since
the culture of too many individual schools still suggests that
traditional "top down" management styles prevail which
can hinder genuine openness regarding internal weaknesses. Fortunately,
more inspectors are learning how to rapidly identify less than
robust SEFs, as their practical experience of the S5 system grows.
4. Even "lighter" one-day visits
to schools by inspectors also reduce opportunities for valuable
lesson observations by inspectors, even though the quality of
classroom-based teaching and learning remains a key factor in
school performance. Reduced tariff inspections tend to involve
just ten-minute classroom observation sessions, which can be frustrating
for inspectors, and also for the teachers and support staff involved,
in terms of arriving at useful opinions on the quality of lessons.
Yet the rigour of an inspection process clearly remains an important
factor and it is worth recalling that the original introduction
of the "lighter-touch" S.5 system was accompanied by
a visible "raising of the bar", in terms of expected
school performance levels, at the same time. Among other considerations,
the expansion of RTIs consequently highlights the need for effective
liaison and information-sharing between Ofsted inspectors and
local authority school improvement professionals working with
the same local schools.
5. A further practical concern is posed
by the risk of a minority of high-performing schools, regarded
as requiring one-day Ofsted visits only, deteriorating due to
such unpredictable internal developments as the sudden illness
or resignation of a key middle manager. This type of problem can
and does occur, but the resultant impact on the school's standards
may not be visible beyond the school for a time. In such cases,
the absence of a better-resourced inspectorial process potentially
removes one of the mechanisms for identifying and remedying such
problems at an early stage. As the universal inspection of schools
in England gives way to more targeted inspections, such risks
can grow.
6. The Education and Inspections Act 2006
now places a specific duty on all schools, whether high or low
achieving, to promote the well-being of children, broadly in line
with the requirements of the government's important "Every
Child Matters" agenda. This represents a new and very welcome
development in itself, which recognises the current reality that
only one in 10 of English schools is, as yet, actively engaging
with the ECM project, despite its importance and intrinsic value
(NFER Annual Survey of Trends in Education, October 2006). The
S.5 inspection framework obliges schools to address ECM issues
in compiling the SEF but there is a genuine concern that positive
local involvement with this key government agenda can be a different
matter. It is, in any case, difficult for inspectors conducting
short school visits to apply certain of the present ECM related
grade descriptions, for example "learners generally act responsibly
when in high-risk situations, based on a good understanding of
what is likely to be dangerous", with full confidence. Such
outcomes are not easy to quantify, and may also relate to out-of-school
factors and experiences.
INSPECTION OF
CHILDREN'S
SERVICES
7. The DCLG Local Government White Paper
"Strong and Prosperous Communities", published in October
2006, has proposed that the relatively new children's services
Joint Area Reviews (JARs) should be altered from April 2009, and
that universal inspection of such services should be replaced
by an annual risk assessment process and "Use of Resources"
and "Direction of Travel" judgements, with inspection
activity proper confined to local services "targeted primarily
on the basis of risk assessment". While this would further
reduce the cost of inspections and doubtless attract support in
those localities where the burden of experiencing formal inspection
processes is eased, this proposal nonetheless raises important
practical considerations. The JAR system, although still evolving
in certain respects with a revised structure due in April 2007,
was originally intended as a central "driver" of the
government's "ECM" agenda, which would also identify
models of good practice in the development of integrated education
and children's services, as well as highlight problems of under-performance
to be addressed by specific local activity to secure improvements.
The newly-proposed change to JARs will therefore require the encouragement
and creation of other mechanisms for detecting, defining and disseminating
good practice in local-level integrated children's service delivery.
8. Many significant components of the wide-ranging
and ambitious national ECM agenda have not yet been fully understood,
at this stage, by those who will be required to implement the
associated local changes over the next few years. The JAR system,
where applied to date, has proved to be important in focussing
greater attention on the nature and content of the ECM project,
within local areas and services. An external perspective can indeed
be helpful to monitoring and objective evaluation of service delivery,
as senior managers and professionals in the field often acknowledge,
and this can prove particularly valuable in a period of major
local changes related to significant central government policy
initiatives. It is accepted, however, that JARs have been complicated
by the operation of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA)
system, with the review process at times delayed by local authorities
challenging individual CPA scores and, to an extent, by the different
cultures and approaches of the Audit Commission and Ofsted. Nevertheless
the projected modification of JARs should necessitate early and
fresh thinking on how best to positively advance the ECM agenda
in the localities from 2009 onwards.
FURTHER INFORMATION
9. Aspect trusts that the above points will
be of interest to the Education and Skills Committee, and would
be willing to respond to any requests for further information
which may assist the Committee's deliberations on the work of
Ofsted in this period of ongoing change.
December 2006
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