Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
CHRISTINE GILBERT
CBE, MICHAEL HART,
MELANIE HUNT,
VANESSA HOWLISON
AND MIRIAM
ROSEN
12 DECEMBER 2007
Q60 Stephen Williams: It is quite
a tall order, considering that over four years, you have made
a reduction of only £30 million. Are you confident that it
will be achieved?
Vanessa Howlison: We are. To a
degree, we are underspending the 2007-08 budget, because we are
gearing ourselves up for the savings that will be delivered in
2008-09. As I say, we have identified sufficient savings schemes
so that we will be able to live within our reduced financial envelope
in future years.
Q61 Stephen Williams: The Chairman
is sometimes sceptical about the Public Accounts Committee, which
is one of the other scrutiny committees in Parliament. Are you
confident that if you are hauled up before that Committee next
year, you will have achieved your rather tough savings target?
Vanessa Howlison: Yes, and I know
that there is some discussion about how certain organisations
have achieved their Gershon savings, but we are clear that Ofsted's
past savings are—it is a horrible term—cashable. They
are real savings, and our money—our funding—has reduced.
We can evidence it.
Q62 Stephen Williams: If the Chief
Inspector follows the career path of her predecessor, she will
have to go around cashable and non-cashable savings, which we
have had some fun with before. May I ask one question on this
year's budget, Chairman, as I suspect you then want to move on?
There is quite a big switch in the 2007-08 budget from learning
and skills, which is Melanie Hunt's area, to children, which is
Michael Hart's area. Learning and skills, which I guess is the
old adult learning area, has gone down by £8 million, and
most of that—£6 million—has gone to children.
The impact in percentage terms is that almost one quarter of the
learning and skills budget has been removed, whereas the increase
for children, which has a much larger budget, is only about 6%
Does that imply that the adult learning and skills side of the
new Ofsted—or the bigger Ofsted, however you want to describe
it—has become less of a priority, certainly in budgetary
terms?
Melanie Hunt: I am happy to answer
that.
Q63 Chairman: You are ditching further
education. You could not care about it, so you are not respecting
it.
Melanie Hunt: No, that is certainly
not the case. The figures that you identify are related to the
bringing together of Ofsted and the Adult Learning Inspectorate,
as a result of which there were some significant savings. That
is what you see there. Neither our intensity nor our focus has
diminished.
Q64 Stephen Williams: So, they were
a bit fat when they came over?
Melanie Hunt: It is more to do
with the back office functions, as Vanessa said—the duplication
of human resources, finance, premises, facilities and so on, which
we have been able to bring in line.
Q65 Stephen Williams: So, in the
current financial year, £26 million is allocated in your
budget to look at learning and skills. Given the tough reductions
that are needed over the next financial year, what do you think
you will be left with?
Melanie Hunt: We have been set
a budget envelope to work within, and we are projecting savings
of almost £1 million next year, part of which has been a
result of reviewing our inspection activities, but as Vanessa
said, much of it relates to the introduction of new inspection
cycles and frameworks from 2009, when both the college cycle and
the work-based cycle, which are significant parts of my directorate's
inspection work, will be reformed and reviewed. We will consider
different ways of working.
Q66 Stephen Williams: Finally, going
back to my previous questions about NEETs and the imperative of
expanding provision for 16 to 18-year-olds, in particular, and
other adults beyond that, I wonder whether you are confident that
you will be able to inspect adequately the revolution in NEETs
and Diplomas, given that that area of education will grow but
your budget will shrink.
Melanie Hunt: It is a serious
concern to us, and we have raised with the Department for Children,
Schools and Families the questions that arise from raising the
participation age, because there is likely to be a wider range
of settings and types of learning, such as mixed learning between
employment and formal learning, which will result in different
inspection demands. We have flagged them up early with the Department,
because the changes will not come through until 2013 to 2015,
which is when we will see the significant change. We are alert
to that, and we are looking as well at maximising our inspection
activity where we work with large providers. Do not forget that
many of those that we inspect are national organisations offering
apprenticeships across all our nine regions.
Chairman: Good. Let us move on to monitoring
race and equality.
Q67 Fiona Mactaggart: Is that an
important part of your job?
Christine Gilbert: It is an absolutely
crucial part of my job and that of everybody sitting at this table
and in Ofsted. We have taken it very seriously. It is one of our
core values. I personally chair the equalities group meetings
every month—I am missing it to be here this morning. We
are launching an equalities standard. It has been a major part
of our work and focus as an organisation.
Q68 Fiona Mactaggart: Specifically
on race equality, in looking through your report—I might
have missed some references—there is little reference to
any ethnic analysis of children's achievement or consequences
for children. There is a reference to the fact that African-Caribbean
children are more likely to be excluded, as are those of mixed
heritage including African-Caribbean descent, but there is no
clear analysis of what works best for children of different ethnic
heritages. Do you think that that is something you ought to have
done under the race equality duty?
Christine Gilbert: The way that
we would do that is through the survey reports. We have done a
couple of survey reports that have been picked up in the Annual
Report for the year that feeds into that, and we have others planned.
We have given a lot of thought to how we should be progressing
our responsibilities under the duty, and we have looked at several
ways. We have looked at what more we should be doing with school
inspections, because there has been some tension about whether
we are a compliance checker of whether schools have a policy and
so on. We thought that our focus should be on outcomes—whether
groups in schools are performing differentially, whether there
are things that the schools should be doing that they are not,
and so on. We have moved some way on that. We have now said that
we expect each setting or organisation that completes the self-evaluation
to address the matter in the self-evaluation. We will then check
randomly whether it is actually happening across the system and
report on it. If the self-evaluation or our look at the data for
a school suggests that there are issues relating to race of the
sort that you gave as an example, we will pursue it in the inspection.
We do that now, actually, but it only emerges in the written report
on the school and does not necessarily find its way into the Annual
Report. I think that you will find that next year's Annual Report—although
there are some references in this year's, as you say—will
make more explicit reference to issues of equality, and we will
systematically pick up across the system more general issues that
we think the system needs to address and improvements that need
to be made, as well as good practice in certain areas.
Q69 Fiona Mactaggart: This positive
response from you seems to conflict with the Commission for Racial
Equality's (CRE) assessment that you were the worst performing
regulatory authority and that legal action should be taken against
you.
Christine Gilbert: I think that
it said that we were the most difficult one to deal with in the
past two years. We did not know where that came from. I arrived
last October, wrote to CRE several times to try to talk about
different things and never had any response. That is not to say
that we did not take its criticisms seriously; we thought that
its criticisms in many areas were well made, and we have taken
them very seriously in what we have done and are doing. We have
reworked all our schemes and are reworking the race scheme to
send to the new organisation by the end of December. To pick
up some of the issues that I have mentioned this morning, we spent
a long time debating what exactly our role should be. We have
only a limited amount of time, and the expectation is that the
organisation itself should discharge its duties, but we are trying
to be more explicit about what the link between the two should
be. Again, I have written to the new organisation, hoping to meet
with it about our work. We want our work in that area to be not
just adequate or satisfactory but good or outstanding. It is a
major focus for us. The meeting I am missing this morning is a
discussion with Edge Hill to establish a standard for across central
Government perhaps, if it works out that way, built on the model
of local government, which we could use and trial in Ofsted and
then perhaps roll out across the system.
Q70 Fiona Mactaggart: What proportion
of your inspectorate team have ethnic minority heritage?
Christine Gilbert: Different inspectorates
vary. Generally, across the piece, I think it is about 5%, but
they are different in different areas.
Miriam Rosen: For HMI, it is 6%.
I think it is more for the inspectors who work in child care.
Michael Hart: It is a little higher,
but it is not high enough. It is something that I have been raising
with managers as a priority that we need to address.
Q71 Fiona Mactaggart: How are you
addressing it? You say you are raising it in an area where the
figure is higher than it is in the rest of the organisation. How
are you addressing it? You have a reasonable vacancy level. Have
you set targets?
Christine Gilbert: We are monitoring
performance in each of the areas. We now have regular monitoring
in this area, which we did not have before. We have not gone down
the road of establishing particular targets in different areas.
We have given ourselves a target overall for Ofsted for inspection
and across the piece, but we have not set specific ones in education
and so on. Whether that has been translated within the directorates,
I do not know. Then we will build up as the year goes on. We have
taken every area of our work and are examining it, which is what
the link is with the equalities standard, to make sure that in
recruiting, retaining, letting contracts and all those sorts of
things, we are demonstrating best practice as an employer.
Q72 Fiona Mactaggart: But you had
a very welcome emphasis in your original remarks about the customer
for your service, stressing that that is very often the student,
the young person in care or whatever. A much higher proportion
than 4% or 5% of those customers is derived from our ethnic minorities.
I am of course not saying that only people from ethnic minorities
can have a full understanding, but if the people who are leading
your inspection teams do not have a full understanding of the
range of experiences that those children have, can they do their
jobs properly?
Christine Gilbert: This was before
the most recent focus on this area. Inspectors are all trained
in equalities. In fact, at the HMI conference—the education
conference I attended in January—equalities was the focus
throughout the day, with training for every inspector, so we do
give training a high priority.
Q73 Fiona Mactaggart: But, with respect,
your boards—there were recent minutes that said the vacancy
level within the organisation meant that there was scope to take
positive action to address under-representation and to commit
to firm targets. You are saying to me, "We can do it without
committing to firm targets." Every other public organisation
I know that does not commit to firm targets does not change. Why
are you different?
Christine Gilbert: We have committed
to targets overall. I am saying that we have decided not to go
down the road of team by team, as we did in my previous employment.
In my previous employment, you could have pointed to a particular
directorate and said, "We want x per cent. in that area."
We have decided not to do that because of the shape of the organisation,
which is unlikely to be the same in a year's time. We are looking
at developing inspection, as I said in my introductory remarks,
and in terms of the shape of the organisation, the look of the
organisation, we may not even sit before you as separate directorates
in a year's time, so it did not seem sensible to go down that
road.
Q74 Fiona Mactaggart: So what is
your overall target, then?
Christine Gilbert: I cannot remember.
We are above the civil service performance overall and the target
we have set ourselves—I think it is 2% higher than that.
Q75 Chairman: What does surprise
me is this. The artist formerly known as Trevor Phillips is still
performing under that name in an expanded organisation. You are
the artist formerly known as Christine Gilbert, and you are performing
in front of this Committee today. A lot of people in my constituency
would say, "Why can't the two of them talk about this?"
Here is a very penetrating and acerbic criticism, and you are
saying you have not had a chance to talk to Trevor Phillips and
say, "Where does this come from and what can we do about
it to change your perception of us?"
Christine Gilbert: I need to be
clear that it was the former Commission for Racial Equality that
made the criticism. We have had similar criticisms from a disability
rights organisation. I went to see it and talked through what
those issues were, but we were not able to make the same sort
of contact—
Chairman: With the CRE?
Christine Gilbert: Yes. We got
some very useful advice from the discussions about disability
and so on, which we built in to the revisions of our scheme. We
were not engaging, for example, external disability organisations
enough in our thinking and planning. We have done that in our
revisions to the scheme.[5]
I have written to the new organisation too and, to be fair, I
think that it is just establishing itself. We hope to see it soon.
Q76 Chairman: So, we can look forward
to that.
Christine Gilbert: Absolutely.
Q77 Mr Heppell: I have three quick
questions, the first of which touches on Fiona's point. The London
School of Islamics states that Ofsted simply is not suitable for
inspecting Muslim schools. What is your response to that? Do you
think there is a role for specialist inspectors who have the same
faith or language as the people in those schools?
Christine Gilbert: We think that
we can inspect those schools, and that these inspectors have a
role over and above that of the normal team, along with a number
of organisations—the Catholic, Church of England and Jewish
organisations—which we work well with. I think that Miriam
is going to say something about them.
Miriam Rosen: In our independent
school inspections, we use additional inspectors as well as HMIs,
a number of whom are from a Muslim background, so we are often
able to supply inspectors with a degree of specialism.
Q78 Mr Heppell: We wonder why the
criticism then, if that is the case. You say that you are sometimes
able to do that, but they seem to be saying that that does not
happen—that they get people who do not understand their
faith and do not speak the language and there is not a proper
inspection as a result.
Miriam Rosen: I would say that
it is normal for us to have people in the independent sector inspecting
for us who are able to do so and understand the background very
well.
Q79 Fiona Mactaggart: There is a
kind of contrary criticism about the inspection of Academies—that
the relationship can be too cosy and that the Vardy Academies,
which have rather controversial views on creationism, have the
same inspector all the time. What do you say to that?
Miriam Rosen: When we first started
inspecting Academies, we were using HMIs from the then school
improvement division. We used them because the Academies often
came from a background of being failing schools or schools in
challenging circumstances. That group of inspectors has now widened
and we are using quite a large group of HMIs to lead those inspections,
but we inspect without fear or favour. We have put two Academies
into categories—they have now managed to make progress and
come out—so there is absolutely nothing cosy about it.
5 Further information on the Ofsted Race Equality
Scheme can be found at: http://live.ofsted.gov.uk/surveys/res08/.
Draft `Black and Minority Ethnic Workforce Targets' are shown
in Table 2 of the Race Equality Scheme: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/assets/Internet-Content/Shared-Content/HR/res2007-rev.pdf Back
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