Examination of Witnesses (Questions 212-219)
CHRISTINE GILBERT
CBE, MICHAEL HART
AND MIRIAM
ROSEN
10 DECEMBER 2008
Q212 Chairman: May I welcome the Chief
Inspector and her team this morning? This is one of the two occasions
when we regularly see you, but this sitting is about your annual
report. We usually give you a chance to say something to get us
started before questions, so over to you.
Christine Gilbert:
Good morning, Chairman. I welcome the opportunity to appear again
before the Committee. This is an important time for inspection
because significant changes are planned, and I want to say something
about those plans and changes. As an inspectorate covering a wide
range of educational and children's provision, Ofsted is in a
stronger position than ever to report and promote good practice,
not just within specific services, but across them. Children do
not grow up in silos, and by covering a range of remits, we can
get a fuller picture of how, for example, children in disadvantaged
circumstances are supported by different services—I highlighted
that in my annual report. That joining-up is the broad context
for inspection reform. When we last met, I gave an indication
of our likely direction of travel, and today I confirm that we
are well advanced in making those changes for 2009. There are
five important aspects of the reforms, and I will deal with them
briefly. First, we want to hear more from service users and those
on the front line, and to make it easier for front-line staff
to tell us when things go wrong. In addition to the measures announced
by the Secretary of State following the tragic events in Haringey,
we are considering the introduction of a confidential whistleblowers
hotline in 2009 for social workers and other front-line professionals
to alert us to any serious concerns about practice that fails
to ensure the safety and welfare of those we serve. Secondly,
there is a growing debate about the extent to which inspections
use data and front-line observations. Since becoming Chief Inspector,
I have been particularly concerned that we get that balance right
so that we can judge the impact of services on those who use them.
I have no time for a tick-box approach, and statistics are no
substitute for inspections. As inspectors, we are far more interested
in outcomes and how they are achieved than in whether people are
crossing t's and dotting i's on their self-evaluation forms. We
want our inspectors to see more of what is happening on the ground,
whether through more lesson observation, talking to social workers
and so on, but data also matter, and given recent concerns, I
have asked council chief executives to assure me of the accuracy
of any data provided by their authorities. Thirdly, we want to
ensure that inspections, particularly with regard to schools and
FE colleges, are proportionate to risk, so there will be more
frequent inspections of those that are weak and satisfactory,
and fewer of those that are rated good or outstanding, thus focusing
our resources on the areas in which we can make the greatest difference.
Fourthly, we are introducing more efficient and speedier reporting
with changes in the reporting process for the Children and Family
Court Advisory and Support Service and initial teacher training.
There will also be a single inspection of all teacher training
programmes when we visit a teacher training college or facility.
Fifthly, as I mentioned to the Committee last time we met, we
will make more use of no-notice inspections for both schools and
children's safeguarding. Time and again, for example, parents
tell us that that is what they want, and they also tell us how
much independent inspection is valued. Inspection offers a much
fuller picture of quality on the ground than test scores or other
data, although the latter are clearly important. As I said in
my annual report, much is going well for many children, but much
is still patently inadequate, and there are too many settings
in which the rate of improvement is unacceptably slow. I am confident
that the changes that we are making will support improvement,
particularly where it is most needed. My colleagues and I look
forward to your questions.
Q213 Chairman: Thank you, Chief Inspector.
We will obviously cover what we can learn from the Haringey experience
in a positive way, but I shall start with the feeling that two
things are happening with Ofsted. The organisation has grown as
your remit has gone down into early years and pre-school, up into
FE and a bit of HE, and across into social care and children's
welfare. There is a feeling among some of your critics—and
I have been one of them—that you might have grown too quickly
and that assimilating all those responsibilities is a bit too
much for one organisation.
Christine Gilbert: Well, since
the new organisation was launched last April, we have delivered
every single programme of inspections for each of those areas
as they would have been delivered by four inspectorates. We have
delivered them to time and so on. More than that, as the year
went on, we began to join up different forms of inspection. The
different places that we inspect do not now have two sets of inspectors
visiting them. Gradually, as the year has gone on, we have streamlined
and co-ordinated our processes. More importantly, the change has
allowed us to look right across all areas of our remit. This year's
annual report picks out three themes that we would not have been
able to cover when I was sitting in front of you this time last
year, when we did not have that breadth of remit. We looked at
outstanding social care and education to try to pick out its features.
We also looked at safeguarding children and at skills for working
lives. That gave us breadth, because all our work and our discussions
with our users and providers—users in particular—show
that users do not experience services not joined up. If you talk
to somebody on a council estate or a parent trying to access services,
you find that they want the whole range. They are not just going
in at tangents. We want to have such focus.
Q214 Chairman: But whistleblowers
from your organisation have contacted us. They fear that the lighter
touch and the expansion of your range of activity mean that there
are actually not such high-quality inspections or such a real
understanding of what is going on at the sharp end. We do not
run a whistleblowers line, but people write to us when they know
that you are coming in front of the Committee. Some of your staff
are concerned about the thinness, especially at a time when you
are cutting staff. That might not be your responsibility, because
the Government want you to be more effective and the Gershon reforms
are pushing you in that direction, but is the picture as good
as you are painting it?
Christine Gilbert: We have been
very careful in the past year to assess the impact of our work
with users themselves, which is new, and with providers, as the
four different organisations did previously. Part of that involved
asking for forms to be returned and so on, but we found, for instance,
that schools that had done better were more inclined to fill in
their satisfaction survey. We therefore went out to the National
Foundation for Educational Research, Ipsos MORI and so on. We
found very high percentages—more than 80% or 90% in all
but one area, I think—saying that we are getting it right,
identifying the right issues and helping improvement. That said,
I do not want to be complacent, and what worries me most about
what you have said—if this comes from whistleblowers in
the organisation—is that people have not felt that they
could make such points in the organisation and be heard. In the
past year, we have focused very much on merging four organisations
to create one that was stronger than the sum of its parts. We
have tried hard to do that with people coming in to critique us.
As I said the last time I appeared before the Committee, we were
keen to have an Investors in People assessment at the end of our
first year. That assessment has taken place and it commented on
our remarkable progress and how the morale of staff has improved.
However, the organisation has been merged and we have a long way
to go.
Q215 Chairman: I know that the Committee
wants to ask questions about what we learn from the Haringey experience.
It has not done the reputation of Ofsted a great deal of good,
has it? Critical comments have been made, and in press interviews,
you held up your hand and said honestly, "Yes, we made mistakes."
Can you take us through why you think that those mistakes were
made?
Christine Gilbert: Do you mean
the judgment of the annual performance assessment for Haringey
in 2007?
Q216 Chairman: Yes. I am asking you
to take us through the chronology. The 2006 inspection was not
very good, but in 2007 Haringey received a rather good one. Take
us through the chronology of why you think that happened.
Christine Gilbert: I am pleased
to do that. In 2006, there was a joint area review, which is essentially
an inspection. It is on-the-ground investigative work that looks
at a range of things, such as the social care duty room and files;
talks with key players, children and young people, and social
workers take place. It was not a bad JAR, but one of the two lowest
grades was for safeguarding—nevertheless, it was adequate.
A number of things were identified and picked out for improvement,
such as the assessment and referral of initial and core cases
of child protection, and the number and stability of social work
placements. There had been real advances from the situation in
Haringey in 2001. The JAR happens once every three years—it
is a three-year programme. We have now come to the end of all
the joint area reviews, and this is also the last year of the
annual performance assessment. Both have now finished. The last
round will happen during this month and the next couple of months.
Q217 Chairman: What will it be replaced
by?
Christine Gilbert: The comprehensive
area assessment.
Q218 Chairman: Which will happen
only every three years?
Christine Gilbert: It will, but
it has two rolling programmes within it: one on safeguarding,
and one on looked-after children. They are every three years,
but in the proposals that we sent out for consultation in September,
we said that we would have to do brief on-site inspection visits
to look at the sort of things that were examined during the recent
Haringey JAR. I shall come to that in a second. Initially, the
JAR grade became the grade for that year, but it looked at a number
of things. It focused on the safeguarding and actually looked
at all five Every Child Matters outcomes to give a general
picture of children's services in the area. The annual performance
assessment is an annual look at performance data. It looks at
briefings from a number of organisations. For example, we had
a full briefing from the Government office, which works closely
with the local authority and feeds back on it, and the local partnership,
which feeds back on a number of things. We had briefings from
a number of organisations, such as the health inspectorate, which
would make comments, as perhaps would the Youth Justice Board.
There would thus be a range of briefings and a range of data.
Two Ofsted inspectors, one with a social care background and one
with a background in education, would have made an initial assessment
of all that before it went through a number of panels. That was
based on data for the 2006-07 financial year, going up to April
2007, so those data are 18 months old.
Q219 Chairman: That is the 2007 report,
as opposed to the 2006 one.
Christine Gilbert: Yes.
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