UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 353-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE

 

SCHOOL ACCOUNTABILITY

MONDAY 16 MARCH 2009

KEITH BARTLEY, MICK BROOKES, DR. JOHN DUNFORD, MARTIN JOHNSON, CHRISTINE BLOWER and JOHN BANGS

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 1 - 66

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
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4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee

on Monday 16 March 2009

Members present:

Mr. Barry Sheerman (Chairman)

Annette Brooke

Mr. David Chaytor

Mr. John Heppell

Paul Holmes

Mr. Andrew Pelling

Mr. Edward Timpson

Derek Twigg

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Keith Bartley, Chief Executive, GTCE, Mick Brookes, General Secretary, NAHT, Dr. John Dunford, General Secretary, ASCL, Martin Johnson, Deputy General Secretary, ATL, Christine Blower, Acting General Secretary, NUT, and John Bangs, Assistant Secretary, Education, Equality and Professional Development, NUT, gave evidence.

 

Chairman: I welcome Christine Blower, John Dunford, Martin Johnson, Mick Brookes and Keith Bartley to our session today. As I said outside, this is a very important beginning of a new inquiry, which is one of the three that we have set ourselves to do this year-testing and assessment, the national curriculum and accountability. It really is a pleasure that you have responded to our request. I know that Christine has some difficulties today, so we are pleased that she has come to the first part of the session. After that, she will suddenly change places with John Bangs to allow her to get her train. That was by mutual consent, and we are very pleased to accommodate her.

Christine Blower: Thank you.

 

Q1 Chairman: The rest of you have to stay the whole time, and if Mick Brookes does not behave, we will keep him on after school.

I am not going to ask you for long statements because we have your CVs, but if you could say whether we should get rid of an inspection system, make one fundamental change to it or what you resent most about it. Give us a starter, Christine.

Christine Blower: My starter is that, at the moment, what we have is a system that is very low in trust and very high in accountability. We could of course ask to move to a system that is low in accountability and high in trust, but what we think is important is a system that is high in accountability and high in trust. Therefore, we should like to see the accent move from the existing Ofsted arrangements to a system in which school self-evaluation is meaningful and owned by the people in the establishment-the teachers-and is also meaningful to parents and students.

Dr. Dunford: That was very good, Christine.

Christine Blower: That is the bar.

Chairman: Christine, you have astonished them all by your succinctness.

Dr. Dunford: If we are pursuing, as I hope we are, a system of what I call intelligent accountability-accountability that drives behaviour in schools that improves the education of children-we have to look at accountability in the round. There are so many different aspects to accountability at the moment. The Secretary of State says that he wants to bring in a report card. If he does that, it has to be in the context of everything else. If the report card comes in, several other things have to go. I have some suggestions, but perhaps they can come later.

Chairman: Can we come back to those in a bit?

Martin Johnson: My plea in these opening remarks is that the Committee does not get bogged down in the detail of the various mechanisms that comprise our accountability framework. It is vital that the Committee maintain a focus on the big picture and how all the mechanisms fit together.

The position of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers is that of course teachers and schools need to be accountable, but at the moment we have too many overlapping mechanisms, which together are unbalanced. They reflect a system with power located in two places: overwhelmingly in central Government and then at school level. The Government have found it necessary to reinvent new, improved local authorities. Crucially, they now have duties with regard to school improvement. For us, the logic is obvious. We need less accountability to Whitehall and more to county hall. We need to put local communities back in the driving seat and schools back under local democratic control. We need better integration of inspection and support. Since Parliament has located the latter with local authorities, it should locate the former there, too.

Let me have a word, if I may, about accountability to parents. Parents are transient. Communities have permanence. Parents are overwhelmingly less concerned about a school than they are about their child in a school. We must try to ensure that parents can feel happy about their relationship with the school, while recognising that that accountability relationship is largely informal.

Finally, to repeat what someone else has said, the kind of accountability mechanisms that we need might depend a lot on how we answer the following questions: what is the condition of public servants in our schools, and ought we to start from a presumption of trust or do they need the continued application of a large hammer?

Mick Brookes: Let me make three points. First, accountability systems have to be manageable, and there is such a stream of accountabilities for schools. Take local authorities for instance: there are not just school improvement partners and local authority school improvement teams-health and safety, human resources and all those things are coming to schools. There is a dimension between larger schools-I am not talking about secondary-that have a team behind them and can manage some of that, and smaller schools where there is the head. Every second that the head is taken away from that role of leading children and their curriculum and well-being is a second wasted.

Secondly, accountability systems have to be fair and based on data that are based on the school's context. We have had quite a lot of debate about that. I agree entirely with John's coining of the phrase "intelligent accountability", but there must also be emotional intelligence. If the outcome of accountability is that we call schools silly names such as "coasting", that is not emotionally intelligent. I do not think that having a large letter on the front of the report card is emotionally intelligent either. It simply undermines morale in those places. That is not a good way of raising the standard of children's education.

Keith Bartley: Our General Teaching Council's primary interest and purpose is to support improvements in teaching and learning in the public interest. In the context of this inquiry, we wish to examine how the accountability arrangements govern the work of schools and how the practice of teachers can be developed so that they support real improvements in practice. That is not in any way to dismiss the important function of scrutiny.

Education is a major public service affecting the life chances of every child and young person, and it must therefore be held to public account. We believe that true accountability should do more. It should support improvements in practice, and it should give parents and pupils a very clear account of how schools and teachers support children's learning. We believe that there is real value in the school self-evaluation process, and that school improvement partners are making a genuine contribution to helping schools to reflect on their progress and their improvement plans.

Inspection is also important, but one-off, episodic inspections can have only limited impact. If accountability is to serve the important purpose of scrutiny and make a positive impact on practice, a more sustained process of dialogue and external support and challenge is needed. Schools have many requirements on them to give an account of their work, and those requirements need to be both intelligent and proportionate. I welcome the signal given last week, by the Prime Minister, that public services will have greater freedoms to make decisions appropriate to their local context, and less central prescription. That might just create the space that teachers and head teachers need to be able to give a more meaningful account of their work to their most important stakeholders-the children, their parents and the community that they serve.

If teachers can give a better, richer account of their work to pupils, parents and their peers, that will strengthen professional accountability for teaching and learning, and serve the public interest very directly.

Chairman: Thank you for that-you were all pretty brief. I am not going to ask a second question. I'm going to hold my questions in reserve. Derek, will you open the batting?

 

Q2 Derek Twigg: Good afternoon. I have a simple question: what should schools be accountable for, and what should they not be accountable for?

Dr. Dunford: Schools spend public money, and it is right that they are held accountable for the efficiency and effectiveness-those are two different things-of the way that they spend that public money. Therefore it is right that schools are held to account for their examination results, for children's attendance and for how they spend the money and whether they give a good, well-managed budget. Then we get into the really difficult area that might come under the general title of children's well-being, which is the wider development of children.

We accept a responsibility to encourage the wider development of the children. We are not just exam factories. Perhaps it would be helpful if we could work with the Government, as a profession, to devise adequate measures whereby that wider role of the school could be part of the accountability system. What we must not do, particularly in that area, is simply hold people to account for what is measurable, because then we get into real difficulties.

Christine Blower: I do not think we are going to differ much on this. One of the significant difficulties that we in the National Union of Teachers see is that there are different accountability systems and they are therefore muddled, because you are using different types of accountability to draw different sorts of conclusion. So, I would agree with John that schools are essentially accountable for all the money that goes into them, but most importantly they are also responsible for all the children and young people and the whole community that is engaged with them.

Clearly, we have to account for what a child experiences in schools-not just the results that they can demonstrably get, but, in a narrative sense, the fact that we have developed as much of their potential as we possibly can, given the time that we have with them. We absolutely have to be able to say that we can account for those kinds of things.

Tiger Woods was described two years ago as the world's best golfer and the following year he was described as the most improved golfer. Those things are not inconsistent. You could be the best school one year and actually be the most improved the next. That is the kind of thing we are looking at. We are saying, "You really want to achieve the absolute most you can with what you've got." Some of that can be done by exam results, but a lot of it cannot.

One of the problems with the report card, if it were distilled into a single letter or number, is that there is no narrative about what that means for the school in a particular area. When I give talks and ask people to evaluate them, I never look at what they have done by way of one to five-from "most boring" to "most interesting". I read the narrative comments, because there you can find out what you did well and how you could do it better if you did not do it particularly well in the first place.

Schools are accountable for everything, but there have to be proper systems of accountability, which disentangle the things, one from the other, so that you are not trying to measure something by using a system that is unreasonable to achieve that result.

Martin Johnson: I am largely in agreement. I would just like to add one small point. The question of what are the desired outcomes of schooling or education is highly contentious. It is a matter of philosophical debate, which, by its nature, is eternal. Only a totalitarian society would try to determine a definitive answer to that question. So, there is, in principle, some difficulty about describing comprehensively what we think the outcomes ought to be and, therefore, for what schools ought to be accountable.

Mick Brookes: I absolutely agree with everything that my colleagues have said about the necessity for public bodies to be publicly accountable. I do not have a problem with that at all, but we have to try to find a system of accountability that does not spawn huge bureaucracy.

Let me give you a quick example of that: financial management in schools. Nobody at all that I know has a problem with schools-of course-being accountable for the money they spend. Indeed, the standards described by that scheme are admirable, but when it gets into the operational aspects and into the hands of some local authority and other accountants, files full of evidence need to be produced showing that you are doing it. It seems to be an accountability under which you are guilty unless you can prove yourselves innocent. I think that is the wrong way round.

There should be greater trust, as has already been said, in the professionals who are being held to account and, in a sense, because they are professionals, we should be taking their word for it.

Keith Bartley: I will not go over ground previously covered. I should like to return to my opening thesis that accountability should support improvements in practice. If that is accepted, it follows that accountability mechanisms governing schools must be fit for that purpose.

There is no doubt that accountability is made more complex by our wider aspirations for children and young people, which are derived from the Every Child Matters framework and outcomes. That framework implies accountability in multiple directions, but for different practices and occupations within a school and beyond. It also implies that there should be accountability for outcomes that are harder to measure-for example, pupil well-being. It is a challenging framework of accountability.

I want to give one small example of the kind of tensions that a teacher can experience between the different elements of our current accountability framework. The high-stakes accountability of published tests and exam results can lead to schools targeting resources on specific pupils within schools-I am talking about grade boundaries-and that can actually legislate against the ethical commitments of many schools and teachers to promoting equality for all. Some real tensions exist within our current framework.

Chairman: Derek, you can carry on, but I warn our witnesses that I am not going to call each one for each question, because if I do we will be here all day. I will take a couple of responses to each question, so they should indicate fast if they want to speak-it is like "University Challenge"-and I will take the first two. Is there anyone here who was not a trade union leader when we first invited them-apart from you, Keith?

 

Q3 Derek Twigg: From what you have previously publicly stated and what you have said in some of the opening statements today, you like being accountable to parents, but are not keen on being accountable to Ofsted and are even less keen on being accountable to the Government. That is a bit of a provocative statement in a sense, but my point is this: to what extent should you be accountable to Government-Ofsted-because you seemed to suggest in your comments that inspections should take place at local authority level and that schools should be more involved in self-assessment? Forgive me if I have got your views on that wrong, but I wonder what you feel in terms of where you should be and how you can be accountable to Government within the sort of scope we have just outlined.

Chairman: That is to John, is it?

Derek Twigg: John and Martin.

Dr. Dunford: First, I do not agree with what my colleague Martin Johnson said about shifting accountability from central Government to local government so that there would be 150 different kinds of accountability. I do not think that that would be progress at all. We will probably find that, in a sense, schools have ownership of the accountability system to parents, and that they decide what kind of surveys they are going to do-pretty well all of them now do surveys.

Accountability systems where you have some ownership of how things are done can be effective as they feed into school improvement. What schools find difficult with the Ofsted and central Government stuff, of course, is that, inevitably, it is being done to them and they do not have ownership of it, but the problem is not whether it should be done. I think everyone would accept that central Government allocate the taxes and that we have to be responsible to them for what we do. Ofsted is part of the arm of that responsibility. I do not have a problem with that at all, but there is some problem with the methodology.

 

Q4 Derek Twigg: What form should that accountability take?

Dr. Dunford: We could go into that in some detail. Regular Ofsted inspections are a perfectly acceptable form of external accountability provided that that links up with a school's self-evaluation. We want quality assurance.

Christine Blower: Yes.

Dr. Dunford: Quality assurance combines internal self-evaluation with external checks. Okay, Ofsted is the body that does the external checks, but that is a proper system of quality assurance, and that is what we should be seeking.

Martin Johnson: I was referring to the balance of accountabilities. Of course schools need to be accountable to Government-after all, the Government are the ultimate paymaster-but the question is who needs to know what. Where I differ with my colleague is that I do not think that a national agency is best placed to do what we might call school improvement activity because it is difficult for a national agency to understand local context and to be sufficiently present in a school to understand what is going on in that school.

Ofsted often says that it takes snapshots, but what we want is an agency that is capable of acquiring continuous knowledge and understanding. From there, I agree with what John was saying. The national Government need to know about system performance, so we need Ofsted, or an agency doing the same job, to collate the findings of local inspection and to seek trends.

One thing that Ofsted does, which I think almost everybody welcomes, is its thematic investigations, which are generally high quality. Ofsted needs to paint the national picture for the Government, which is a slightly different function. The same thing goes, for example, for pupil attainment. National Government need data that you can provide through a sample test; locally, much more knowledge is needed.

Christine Blower: On the need for accountability nationally, we urge the Government to re-establish the assessment and performance unit, because there is scope for ensuring that the system does the things that the taxpayer might reasonably expect it to do. That could be done through the APU, through sampling and so on. You might venture the view that to test every single rising 11-year-old is a cruel and unusual punishment if you are just trying to find out whether there are particular trends in reading, writing and mathematics, and we agree that there is a specific way of doing that.

It is absolutely true that schools must be accountable, and they should be externally inspected, but I concur with the view that the way to do so is through rigorous and robust self-evaluation that is not a tick-box-the self-evaluation form, or SEF-but is all the things that John MacBeath, who was then at Strathclyde, did for and with the NUT. That was about rigorously looking and engaging with the whole school community, saying, "This is a picture of what the school is doing and some ideas about the weaknesses and where we should go." That should then be moderated by an external agency, which we could call Ofsted if you really want to.

Chairman: Do you want to come back, Derek?

Derek Twigg: No.

Chairman: John?

 

Q5Mr. Heppell: I am starting to get a picture-well, I think I had a picture anyway of people's views from the written comments.

Chairman: Not prejudice, John?

Mr. Heppell: No. I have a slight worry. I wonder whether there is an objection to the external evaluation-external exams, if you like-or to the way that performance is reported. You mentioned that one letter-one star-was not a way to report it. What are the views on that? How does the way that performance is reported affect schools?

Mick Brookes: The Ofsted is framework is a pretty good shot at describing what a good school looks like when it is working well, but we are concerned about the framework's operation, and how it is used and, sometimes, misrepresented. Let me reference it again: at a school where everything is going extremely well but there is a problem with boys' writing, the mechanistic way in which the framework works says, "If boys' writing is a problem, therefore leadership and management can't be very good either," is a set of nonsense when everything else in the school is going well. There is a specific problem, but one blip should not describe the whole process.

You are quite right: it is about the way a decent framework operates. I know we are going to talk about quality assurance later, so I shall save that until then.

Keith Bartley: I wanted to respond directly to your question about what we measure and hold schools accountable for. Our advice to this Committee, in its previous inquiry, was very much that the high-stakes testing system-when one set of tests is used for so many different purposes-causes the real problem. We need to find a way of broadening the things that are measured and how they are measured, but not, in any sense, to move away from reporting them. I want to make that very clear.

 

Q6 Mr. Heppell: I see a difference between what the Government say and what comes from you. When the Government talk about putting stuff down to the community, part of it goes to local authorities, and extra responsibilities are being given to them, but I think that the Government's aim is to get down to communities and parents. Part of the worry for me is that Martin is quite dismissive about parents. Someone said-I have forgotten who it was, and I might have read it-that parents come and go, but schools are important for us, for parents and for their individual children. What do you do to ensure that parents are involved in the process if you do not have the sort of system that we have now?

Christine Blower: The point is that we are saying not that there should be no external inspection, but that the system that we have will not necessarily result in teachers finding it a satisfactory experience, or provide the best information to parents. When we sampled the views of our members, most of them responded that Ofsted judgments were fair but, equally, they are concerned that those judgments are now extremely data driven and do not give a well-rounded picture of what the establishment is doing. If parents are interested in a school in the round, they are interested not only in what the GCSE results are, but in all the other things that the school can do. With much shorter inspections-I would not for a moment claim that our members want to spend a lot of time being observed-it is absolutely the case that people sometimes believe that there is no sense of what the whole school does, because some departments or people are not seen. If I were a parent looking for a school for my child, I would want a much more narrative understanding of what this or that school does. We do not believe that the current Ofsted arrangements manage to do that.

 

Q7 Mr. Heppell: Is Ofsted supposed to do that? Are there not other mechanisms for parents to get that broader stuff? Every school must do a profile, and if I were looking for a school for my children now, I would probably visit it and ask to see what information it could give me. My experience is that schools often do that. They sell their big picture rather than just their results. Is there really such a problem?

Dr. Dunford: Surveying parents' views is not a problem, because schools have made huge strides in self-evaluation in the past three or four years, and parent surveys are part of that self-evaluation. Many schools use commercial companies to run the surveys for them, so they are efficient, and the schools receive a lot of cross-referenced feedback and can benchmark parents' views of the school-there are many similar questions-against parents' views of other schools so that they know how well they are doing with the parents.

The extent to which pupil surveys have increased in the past two years is significant. About three years ago, we had a big increase in parent surveys as part of self-evaluation, and there has been a similar increase in pupil surveys in the past year or two. Schools are carrying out surveys because they want to, and they use the information as part of their self-evaluation. As Christine says, that is fed into the self-evaluation form, which is then fed into the Ofsted system. That is the best way of getting views. We may not do that with every parent every year, but we do a sample at least, so you get a run of views, rather than just the spot check that Ofsted has. You can say, "Here are the parent views over the past three years," and that is very powerful.

Mick Brookes: There is a separation between individual parents and schools being held to account for individual pupils' progress. The answer is, "For goodness' sake, go in and see." Schools' information streams and the opportunities for parents to find out how their children and young people are getting on are much improved.

The other issue is how to know how well a school is doing. There are results to be seen, but part of that is the parental community view. There is an interesting split: in individual schools, more than 90% of parents-even according to Ofsted-believe that their school is doing a jolly good job, but when it comes to the general public, that drops to about 54%. I go back to fairness and ensuring that we have a system that describes what schools are doing well, but in a simple way.

Keith Bartley: Can I bring in some evidence from parents that comes from research that we have done and that has been replicated elsewhere? There is the issue of choosing a school and finding out about schools to make that choice, but there is also a sense of engagement, and that is the point that Mick was just starting to raise. Schools that are the most effective in engaging parents with what their children are learning, and know how that learning can be supported, are the schools in which parents have the clearest understanding of what is going on in the school. That, therefore, delivers a form of accountability that certainly, for me, matches that sense of which one promotes improved practice and improved outcomes for children.

 

Q8 Mr. Heppell: One final thing relates to the CVA measures and the value-addeds. You were saying before, "How do you know if a school is doing well?" From the layman's point of view, I would say that that is where it starts. If it starts with a very bad intake, you would not expect it to improve by too much. How important are those measures in terms of assessment generally, and for parents to try to evaluate them?

Mick Brookes: Tracking pupil progress is obviously important throughout the system. We are saying that if you are going to track pupil progress, it should be by the same sort of scheme at the end of foundation, at early primary, at late primary and in secondary. Therefore, tracking pupil progress is very important. CVA is a good idea in itself, but it does not work, for example because high-fliers coming in at year 7 are unable to make anything more than flat progress in terms of CVA scores. The same is true of children with special educational needs; if they are coming into a school that is below average, there is a very good reason for that. This notion of two-level progress is a good scheme, but the way in which it is being used does not properly follow the concept.

 

Q9 Chairman: Martin, you were named in a question. Do you want to come back?

Martin Johnson: Let me go back to the previous point about parents. I am sorry that I did not make myself clear in my earlier remarks. I subscribe to what was said, particularly by Keith and others. The point I was trying to make was that parents are much more interested in their own child than they are in the school as an institution. For reasons that have been explained, the relationship between the parent, the child and the school is vital in terms of the child's progress, but that has to be through informal mechanisms. For example, in the case of younger children, it can be through conversations between the teacher and the parent or carer who is picking up the child at the end of the day. That is accountability.

Dr. Dunford: We do not want to see contextual value added being given a bad reputation because it is not used in the right way. We regard CVA as being better than value added, and value added being better than raw results, as a way of judging the performance of a school. None the less, the formula changes every year. There are all sorts of things about it. It is norm referenced, which means that your exam results can get better, but your CVA score can go down. You might lose two pupils from a particular ethnic minority and that causes your results to go down. It is a black box that most people do not understand. Your score moves and you do not really understand why. What CVA can do-with any statistic you have to take confidence intervals into account-is tell you that those schools in which the whole confidence interval is above 1,000 are significantly better than average schools. The ones that fall entirely below 1,000 are significantly worse than other schools. What you cannot do is use CVA scores to put schools in order and say that, necessarily, 1,002 is better than 1,001, because that is not the case.

Chairman: Derek, a quick one?

Derek Twigg: Got to go.

 

Q10 Chairman: No disrespect to you, but they are both on a statutory instrument Committee. They are going, but they say that they will come back, so make a note of when they come back.

Ofsted developed the Tellus surveys. How effective and useful have they been?

Dr. Dunford: They are voluntary, fortunately, because if they were compulsory, we would be very worried about them.

 

Q11 Chairman: Why?

Dr. Dunford: The nature of some of the questions can be a problem. If you ask a question about bullying without defining what you are talking about, you get some very peculiar answers. We would not be happy about the extension of the Tellus survey.

Chairman: Do you agree, Christine?

Christine Blower: I think it might be useful for the schools to be using them but, as John says, we have more than enough to do without making compulsory things that are currently voluntary. Schools are presumably using them where they find them useful.

Chairman: Excuse me. We are having a slight problem with yet another member of the Committee who is serving on another Committee. He is only going out for five minutes. Sorry Christine, could you repeat that?

Christine Blower: I am concurring, pretty much, with John, in the sense that we certainly would not want them made compulsory given that schools have very large numbers of things to do at the moment. If schools are finding them useful, I am sure they are using them. There is no big lobby from the NUT to make them anything other than what they are.

Dr. Dunford: I might just add that, on the whole, schools do not use them. Ofsted does the survey, uses them and produces a picture of whatever is in the local authority area, but individual schools do not, on the whole, use the information very much.

 

Q12 Chairman: Christine, you are going to change over soon, aren't you? What do you think would happen if Ofsted was magically disappeared? Would school standards plummet?

Christine Blower: No.

 

Q13 Chairman: What would happen?

Christine Blower: I started teaching in 1973, and we have never not had inspection. People will tell you that education used to be a secret garden and that no one knew what was going on, but I do not think that was ever really true in the schools that were really interested in their communities. I think that what would happen is that there would be rather fewer stressed teachers. One of our findings from the survey is, unfortunately, that newer and younger teachers find Ofsted even more stressful than some of their colleagues who have been around for longer. That is counter-intuitive, as one would have expected that they would have been used to the idea. I suspect that if we did not have Ofsted, but did have an inspection system that looked at making sure that they properly evaluated school self-evaluation, we would be decoupling school improvement from the very punitive aspect of Ofsted, and we would therefore have schools that were certainly happier places to work in, and that had more ownership of their own development. At the moment, much of what is done has to be done, as opposed to people buying into it, so I think that school self-evaluation is definitely what we would want to be looking at.

 

Q14 Chairman: So you do not want to abolish Ofsted, but are you thinking of a golden age? Would you go back to HMI and all that?

Christine Blower: I think it is important to have an inspector of schools, yes, and I think that it is important that there is an inspectorate that can publicly give an account of what is going on in schools, but that has to be a proper and genuine account that is based on the experience of colleagues in schools. One of our big problems with Ofsted is that it is separated from the support for school improvement. Going back to what was said at the beginning, if we are talking about accountability that builds on the best that schools are doing and that improves things for schools, you need a system of inspecting schools that does that, not a system where, as soon as they come in, people's feeling is, "They're looking to see whether we're going to go into a category." That is a great concern among a lot of teachers.

 

Q15 Chairman: Christine, when we had the previous Ofsted Chief Inspector, who is now the permanent secretary, he used to say, "School improvement is nothing to do with us; we go in, we inspect, we make our report and then we walk away." But the present Chief Inspector says that she is into school improvement, and that Ofsted should be concerned with it. Which do you prefer?

Christine Blower: I certainly think that it is important that what goes on in schools is about making sure that schools improve. Whether they improve from being very good or satisfactory, it is important that they improve. Whatever system of accountability you have, it has to be clear for what you are accounting, and how that accountability is going to mean that you are now going to do things that improve your practice and the outcomes for the children and young people. So, absolutely, Ofsted should have responsibility for talking about how everything being done in the school that is good could be done better, and how everything that needs improvement could be improved, rather than simply saying, "This needs to improve. Thank you and goodbye; we'll see you again in three years."

 

Q16 Chairman: A lot of money is involved. Is Ofsted a good use of taxpayers' money?

Christine Blower: One of the things that we find when we talk to our members is that, generally speaking, however stressful they find the Ofsted experience and however much they do not really want it to happen, they do, in large part, agree with the outcomes for their school. That is more likely to be the case if they are getting something halfway decent than if they are put on special measures, but in general terms they do. That is what you would expect. You would hope that schools were sufficiently reflective that, when an outside agency came in to look at them, it would find the same things that schools find for themselves. That would be much more widespread and positively felt if the engagement were about looking at what schools were saying about themselves, with proper engagement about that, and talking about school improvement, rather than this ongoing fear that something could be going wrong.

Of course, we are all absolutely well aware that the fact of observing something changes its nature, so there may be a sense in which the shorter inspections are not doing the full job that you would want done, but to do that full job, you would have to be doing it on a basis that was much more collaborative and much more about seeking improvement than finding fault.

Chairman: I will come back to those broader questions and put them to rest of you guys a little later. Thank you, Christine.

Christine Blower: Thank you very much, Chair. I apologise for having to leave.

Chairman: We now welcome John Bangs to the hot seat. Annette is going to lead us in the next set of questions.

 

Q17 Annette Brooke: I think we have reached the point at which everybody accepts that an inspectorate or a system of inspection is desirable, so my questions are how can we make it effective and how can we improve it? First, could we make Ofsted more independent, and if so, how? I shall ask John first, because he has made a comment on that.

Dr. Dunford: There are two specific ways in which I would like to see that happen. First, the Ofsted complaint procedure should be independent of Ofsted, so it should even have a further degree of independence. In relation to Ofsted's independence, the most important thing that happened when it moved out of the Department and became-in inverted commas-"more independent" from it, was that the Department lost the professional voice within it, and its policy making has been much the worse as a result of that since 1994. Prior to that, staff inspectors were always involved in policy-making discussions in the Department.

Ofsted needs to be independent in another sense, because it needs to stand between the Government and the profession. I come back to a point that was being made earlier: it is as important for Ofsted to report on the effectiveness of the system and the policies as it is for it to report on the effectiveness of the individual schools. We have moved from HMI, which did most of its work on the effectiveness of the system and very little on the effectiveness of individual schools-they only came about once every 20 years-to a system where it has shifted too much the other way and is now focused entirely on the effectiveness of the individual schools, and you hear Ofsted say very little about the overall effectiveness of the assessment system, or whatever it may be. We need to move to a position in the middle, where Ofsted reports without fear or favour on both those things equally.

John Bangs: I was listening carefully to Christine's reply-

Dr. Dunford: She's your boss.

John Bangs: I know. That's why I was listening carefully.

The current Chief Inspector tries to be as independent as possible. It is the scope and range of what she evaluates that has been trimmed and that really worries me. There are three studies that Ofsted should have been conducting, but has not been doing. A study on the school improvement partners is currently being carried out by York Consulting and Making Good Progress is being evaluated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, as was the academies programme. All those high stakes Government initiatives are not evaluated by Ofsted. I find that extraordinary. We have this kind of Delphic conversation when the teacher organisations meet the Chief Inspector, about why we would have to ask someone else that and all the rest of it. I think it is for the Committee to ask questions about why Ofsted does not take on those key Government initiatives. As I said, the Chief Inspector tries her best.

The institution is a non-ministerial Government Department accountable to the Crown. I do not think that you can go much further than that, but what ought to be embedded is reporting to Parliament. You have an informal arrangement, Chairman, but as the Chief Inspector is accountable to the Crown, it should be formalised such that the conduit and accountability are through Parliament, through the Select Committee. The arrangement should be formal as well as informal.

Chairman: A good point. Mick?

Mick Brookes: I agree that this Chief Inspector is far more interested in how Ofsted can make a difference in schools, and how the inspection team can leave the school with an agenda for improvement, rather than condemnation, and I welcome that. We will get on to that.

I do not think that there ever was a golden age. There has to be an inspection system, and the key thing that I would like to see is quality assurance in respect of the people who do the work. A complaint was made about the behaviour of an Ofsted inspection which we think was contrary to the code of conduct, and the response to the head teacher was, "I was not there, therefore I cannot tell", which, quite frankly, was a ridiculous response. We wrote back and asked, "Are you tracking that inspector across a number of schools to find out whether there are similar complaints, as we have done?" The current quality assurance of teams that inspect schools is not good enough.

Having said that, there are some extremely good teams out there as well, and it would be wrong to condemn all of them because of the behaviour and actions of a few.

 

Q18 Annette Brooke: One of my other questions, apart from establishing whether inspection should be independent, was about quality. What do you think could be done to address the problem of variability between teams?

Keith Bartley: I would like to go back slightly to reinforce the importance of independence, because it starts to link across to your question about variability. It is vitally important that we have independent, authoritative, secure and robust voices offering commentary on the effectiveness of both national policy and its local translation into practice. That is very important indeed, and I would say that it would come from independent public corporation, wouldn't I?

However, there is more to it than that. The whole notion of variability could in part be addressed if Ofsted were to bring schools more closely into the improvement process. It is already starting to experiment with that. For example, school leaders could become more a part of the inspection teams, and better understand the means by which inspection judgments are arrived at, particularly drawing on the link between school self-evaluation, its inevitably truncated form of expression in the national service framework and the outcomes and inspection. The improvement circle and, therefore, one of the issues around variability would be better addressed by bringing schools more closely into the system.

 

Q19 Annette Brooke: Dr. Dunford, I am interested in how we can improve quality.

Chairman: Hang on. Martin has been more patient, so Martin and then John.

Martin Johnson: You are very kind, Chairman. Thank you.

I am a bit heretical on this independence question. I think that Ofsted is too independent. Its strapline is something like, "Ofsted-never apologise, never explain". I know that this Committee tries very hard to hold Ofsted to account, but it is not accountable enough.

On variability and quality control, Ofsted itself has been working very hard on quality control for at least a decade, and probably longer, but has not cracked it. That suggests to me that the problem is not very amenable to solution, and I think that there are all kinds of reasons why that is almost inevitably true.

It would not matter that there was some variability in judgment if it were not for the fact that we have a national reporting system with very high stakes. Quite honestly, we are now in the situation where schools describe themselves as "'outstanding' (Ofsted)" or "'good' (Ofsted)" as if that were a description of their school. That is how schools behave these days and it is frankly ludicrous, because that is no better at describing the complexities of the strengths and weaknesses of a school than a single grade on a report card. I am sorry to return to my hobby horse, but if inspections were more local and the stakes were lower, the variability would not matter so much.

Dr. Dunford: Specifically on Annette's question, there is room for variability between inspections, but not for variability between standards of inspection-if you understand what I mean. According to the state of the school, the nature of the inspection might vary. If you have an extremely good school with rigorous self-evaluation, you require a different kind of visit from the inspector than that required by a school that is in real difficulty and not doing very well. Some of that variability is being built into the system and we are hearing-and it sounds good-that the new inspection framework coming in next September will involve more of an inspection with the leadership of the school and that, at the end, it will determine recommendations that are much more rounded and connected to the kind of support that is needed for the school to move forward, which was the point that Christine was making.

At the moment, we do not have any kind of a coherent interrelationship between external inspection and support. Indeed, we do not have any kind of coherent system of school support at the moment and we desperately need it. If a school is judged by Ofsted to be in trouble, dozens of different bodies come piling in to "support" the school, and that feels like more pressure, not support.

 

Q20 Annette Brooke: May I throw another question into the pot, and perhaps people who have not answered the other question can pick it up as well? Given that we have identified some variability that is perhaps not desirable, should there be an appeal against Ofsted's judgments? If so, what form could that take?

John Bangs: I will pay a compliment to Ofsted actually-I know, it sounds extraordinary. We fought for and achieved the establishment of a hotline. I do not think that it is well used, but it should be. There is an element of psychology at play, and we try to persuade colleagues to understand that it does not go against you if you phone up and complain about an inspection team. I would be interested to know what Dr. Dunford thinks about this, but having worked with Ofsted all these years, my hunch is that it tries to operate as neutrally as possible in such a situation. However, to take Martin's point, the matter is so high stake that what you correlate in terms of those high stakes is that you will be punished if you complain, which is unfortunate.

There is also an independent adjudicator who adjudicates whether or not the process has taken place. The mechanisms are there, but the high-stakes nature of the system intimidates head teachers from using them when they should use them more. We always get a result from Ofsted. If we complain, we get a decent and substantive reply. Whether or not we like the reply is another matter, but it is actually explored. To use Martin's point, the high-stakes nature does intimidate individual heads from pursuing the matter as much as they might.

 

Q21 Chairman: In any other field, John-or both Johns-in relation to a question like this you would be saying, "Well, the quality of inspection, the quality of teaching or the quality of most things depends on the quality of the staff and how they are recruited and trained." Are staff recruited and trained well? How you become an inspector is a bit murky, is it not?

Dr. Dunford: They have improved over the years. There is no question but that a lot of bad inspectors have been weeded out. I have to say that any cases taken up with Ofsted by our union are looked into in detail and we get a good report back. That happened once we got over the point that Mick Brookes made about people saying, "Well, we weren't there, so we can't judge what happened because A says one thing and B says another." We have largely managed to get over that.

I come back to the point that I made at the beginning: at the end of the day, if you have an adjudicator, that person should not be employed by Ofsted; they should be independent of Ofsted. That degree of independence is necessary.

 

Q22 Chairman: But Keith, you've been an inspector.

Keith Bartley: I've been in HMI, yes.

Chairman: So, is it training, quality? Is it good enough?

Keith Bartley: I was reflecting on that question, because there are two elements to it. One is the extent to which inspection teams are trained. I was a registered inspector before I became an HMI, and that was from the very early days of Ofsted.

Chairman: I wondered why you were sitting on your own at the end.

Keith Bartley: I will confess now a degree of culpability, because we were also responsible for some of the very early training materials for inspectors. But no, I differentiate between the two direct experiences that I have; one was of setting up a massive national group of registered and trained inspectors. The demands were such that quality assuring that product after initial and very intensive training was difficult to do. That has been caught up with a bit now, but from my own experience of being at HMI, it was profoundly the most challenging and professionally rewarding experience of my life. For six months, I was taken completely out of anything I knew about in the education system.

 

Q23Chairman: So, the training. If it is by HMI or by someone hired by an agency-because they are, aren't they?-you're all happy with the quality of inspectors that you get? The quality's all right?

Dr. Dunford: We would much rather have a system in which HMI was always leading the teams.

Chairman: Aha!

Dr. Dunford: There is a higher proportion of HMI-led teams than there used to be in the early days of Ofsted, but we would rather have a system-because we believe it would be more consistent-whereby all teams were led by HMI.

Martin Johnson: I'm sorry to be sordid, but you grilled Ofsted recently about its finances and, I believe, it revealed that because of the need to cut its budgets, it was going to try to remove downwards the costs of an inspection team when they come up for re-tender. Frankly, you get what you pay for.

Chairman: Point well taken. You realise that we are doing the training of teachers just started, so you've got to be back pretty damn quickly on the training of teachers. I hope you're going to say more about the training of teachers than you're saying about the training of inspectors. I've been giving Annette a break because she's not too well today. She has a lot of questions.

 

Q24 Annette Brooke: I have one more question. This comes back to something the Chief Inspector said I had got all wrong, so perhaps I can ask the same question of you. Do Ofsted teams frequently come with almost a pre-determination of the outcome of their reports, in that they have collected the statistical data? Isn't that what the schools are going to be judged on primarily?

Chairman: Let's start with Mick. You can refer back to the last question. You were frustrated about not being able to answer.

Mick Brookes: Thank you. That was one point I was going to make. The complaints that we get in are twofold. There are fewer complaints about the behaviour of the inspector; the complaint that we get most frequently is that the school's context was ignored. The external data are used to judge the school, and whatever else is going on in the school is ignored. Some of that is about the length of inspection, but some of it again is about the attitude of the inspector.

With some, you feel as though the inspection report has been written before they get anywhere near the school. That is really frustrating. There are schools that are really struggling to bring education to those areas where it has not been deemed to be a great thing to have, but they have plenty of other things going on as well as simply standards. It is a standards-driven inspection process, but this is not a simple process. It involves looking at the school-for instance, its work in the community, creativity and arts. All those things make up a good school, not just standards. The standards-driven process needs to change.

John Bangs: May I pick up two issues? First, the training issue. If you have the responsibility for evaluating a school, you should have the responsibility for being based in that school and working with teachers, having given that advice. That is part of the training. The trouble with Ofsted inspectors is that they parachute in and disappear again. That model did, in my experience, work very well in the Inner London education authority. Inspectors based in the schools team targeted schools that were in trouble and worked with them internally. They gave advice, came in and followed through. That would be good practice and good training.

 

Q25 Chairman: For how long?

John Bangs: Six months to a year, Chair. Martin will remember it very well, since he and I worked together in ILEA. On the issue of the data, they inform everything. As Mick said, they prejudge the judgments that are made. That is a real and crying shame. The current permanent secretary at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, David Bell, was the first chief education officer to pick up and run with genuine school self-evaluation. After we had published "Schools Speak for Themselves", which was the initial model document on self-evaluation back in 1995, he got all the teachers together in Newcastle and held a conference about how we can be courageous and ask pupils, parents and members of the community about the strength and weaknesses of schools.

What we have now is a data-drive, high-stakes system. In fact, we have done continuous studies on where self-evaluation should have gone. What suffered is a portrait and a picture of the school climate, for example-teachers feeling confident, parents feeling confident and children feeling confident enough to contribute to the debate on school climate and where the pinch points are in terms of anxieties and bullying. Everything is data-driven down on the results, and the comparisons are made on a fairly arid form. The self-evaluation model has been warped by its high stakes nature. I absolutely agree with Mick on that.

 

Q26 Paul Holmes: I well remember when I was a teacher the long preparation time before an Ofsted inspection. Teachers and heads were not happy with that. Ofsted then moved to short notice for inspections, and teachers and heads were not happy with that. I then remember Ofsted saying that it wanted to move to no notice for inspections, and teachers and heads were not happy with that. What do we do about the length of notice?

Chairman: You are all keen on that, but Mick was first on the buzzer.

Mick Brookes: The unannounced inspections are a nonsense. As for going out to say to parents, "Do you want them?", parents might say conceptually, "Yes, we do," because any school should be able to be inspected at any time. But the operational aspects of that get in the way, particularly with heads of small schools who have a class to teach, so the inspection would be about the quality of the supply teacher. I do not think that the operational aspects or the logistics of the measure have been properly thought through.

It is a bit like going to see your doctor and seeing how well you are, but my preferred view would be that the next inspection is organised by the team that does the current inspection, so a school that is doing well would be told that it does not need to be seen for whatever length of time, while a school that is experiencing difficulties is told that it had better be seen a bit sooner. That would be a highly professional way of going on.

The concept of unannounced inspections, apart from being operationally difficult, could be called "catch you out" inspections, but I do not think that that is possible. If an inspection looks at, for instance, the quality of children's work, even if you had six months, the current two days or the time that there was to do that, you will not improve the quality of the work, certainly over two days, on a short or long-term basis.

Likewise, as for behaviour, it is my view that we cannot suddenly get children for behaviour in schools. In fact, the ones who will behave badly will be even more likely to behave badly when an audience is there. I do not think you can change the fundamental basis of a school, but you can drive towards your desired outcomes for your next inspection. I think that should be a place of partnership-for the school to say, "Look, we've got this work to do before the next inspection, and we want to work on that with our school improvement partner."

Keith Bartley: It is important to distinguish between purposes and inspection. If one of the primary functions of inspection is to assist with improving practice and to help a school develop, unannounced inspections are unlikely to serve that purpose well, because it is about a degree of engagement prior to and subsequent to the inspection itself. However, if the purpose of the inspection is to do with protecting children, there is a strong case to be made for unannounced inspections, so we have to distinguish clearly between the purposes.

 

Q27 Paul Holmes: When you say protecting children, are you talking about children's residential schools?

Keith Bartley: Not necessarily. For example, in early years or child care settings, at the moment, if a complaint is made, Ofsted has the power, and exercises it, to make unannounced visits. I would hate the Committee to take away an assumption that unannounced inspections, per se, were being rejected, because it is about the purpose.

 

Q28 Paul Holmes: So, you would distinguish between one area of Ofsted inspections and mainstream school inspections?

Keith Bartley: Yes.

Chairman: Are all three of you going to answer? Let us start with Dr. Dunford.

Dr. Dunford: I have only one sentence to say really. If Ofsted inspection is part of a quality assurance process, then no-notice inspections do not have a place. If it is simply about catching people out, then that is what you do. I support what has been said about serious child protection issues, for which they may well have to go in unannounced, but not for school improvement purposes.

 

Q29 Chairman: John, do you think it is worrying that Ofsted does both types of inspection?

John Bangs: Yes.

 

Q30 Chairman: I asked the Chief Inspector about that when she gave evidence on I guess what could be described as whole the dreadful Baby P tragedy. I asked whether one of the problems was that an inspection system that was fitted for one system was being applied to another. Do you think there is a problem with that, and that what is appropriate in one sector is deeply inappropriate in another?

Dr. Dunford: I think you are right, Chairman. It may well be that there are different styles of inspection for different purposes, and Ofsted has clearly had a very big learning curve, with the whole children's services inspection issues and safeguarding issues of the last 18 months or so, since it took on responsibility for all those things. It is perfectly possible that the right kind of inspection for that may be quite different to the right kind of inspection for school improvement.

John Bangs: If inspection is supposed to be an iterative process, as they say in fashionable parlance, and it should be, since it should be part of a conversation and dialogue about improvement-if the inspector says, "I want to test you on this one," and you say, "Well, okay, I want to test you on your premises," and then there is a conversation about it-then Martin's model is nearer. I am not arguing for a local inspection, but for a more localised approach to a national framework. We have argued that there should be teams that are more locally based, not necessarily inspecting their own authority's schools, but inspecting other authority's schools, within a national framework for quality assurance of those evaluators.

On the question about the two to five days, you will see a summary of our latest survey in our submission, and the one thing that members felt was fair about the current inspection model and unfair about the future model was the two to five days. Although they did not like the high-stakes nature of inspections, they thought that two to five days was about as good as it got in terms of balance, and they cannot understand why the Chief Inspector is now dallying with the idea. All that we can get, or that I can get from conversations-I have to try to find these mythical parents who are pressing the Chief Inspector and the Government very hard for no-notice inspections-is that it is part of the political agenda which says, "We are now the Government that listens to parents." I do not see any evidence of that, but it is part of a political move. It is fair to say that we expect that evidence to be gathered in those two to five days. There may be pressure, but that is a short amount of time and there is not the same pre-inspection tension.

 

Q31 Paul Holmes: Can I go back to how you complain about Ofsted, which you have talked about? John Bangs mentioned the hotline that has been established but is not used enough. Over the years, I have been contacted by teachers, head teachers and deputy head teachers from around the country who have grievances because they feel that their career has been ended by an Ofsted inspection. They feel that they have no redress as an individual, as opposed to that which a school has as an institution. Is that so? What can we do about it?

John Bangs: The difficulty comes with small departments in schools or with small schools because it is possible to identify individuals. That is the nature of the high-stakes inspection. You can be fingered quite unfairly in a report as an individual rather than the contribution that you make to the institution. Thank goodness Ofsted got rid of the little notes that inspectors gave to the head teacher about the performance of the individual.

The only way to get away from the identification of individuals is through a different form of inspection using the self-evaluative model, under which inspectors challenge the school on its self-evaluation report on a more conversational or iterative basis. I do not think that you will be able to get away from the high-stakes model of identifying individuals in small schools because of the nature of the model.

 

Q32 Chairman: So you do not think that it is part of any inspection to point out that a teacher is struggling in their role?

John Bangs: I do not think that there is a role in the current inspection system or any future inspection system to do that. It is important to have an effective performance management system. Christine raised this earlier and I would like to take up what she said. I am involved in international work with teacher organisations in other countries. Many teacher organisations do not understand the term "assessment", but do understand the term "evaluation". They often remark that the evaluations of the pupil, the teacher, the school and the system are muddled up in this country. As my colleagues have said, you have to be clear about what you want evaluation for. You need a system to evaluate the progress of individual pupils and a system of evaluation that leads to professional development for teachers, such as a performance management system. The different purposes must not be mixed up.

 

Q33 Chairman: Should we not have got that clear early on? One criticism of the GTC is that it does not clear enough poor teachers out of the profession compared with systems in other countries, which seem to be able to identify weak teachers and persuade them by whatever means that it is not the right occupation for them. The GTC hardly ever relieves the profession of very many teachers at all.

Keith Bartley: All my colleagues are involved in research into what incentives and disincentives there are in the current system for referring or not referring teachers to incapability procedures.

Your question misses one point that distinguishes the system in England: each year we set out to train a much larger number of teachers than those who choose to go into the classroom and stay there. There is a sense in which our training gives trainees the opportunity to consider whether this is the right job for them. I am convinced that a number decide during the training that it is not. Other selection and deselection processes are at work beyond teachers being referred to us through competency procedures. I want to make it clear that my powers do not extend to going out and finding them. We are actually at the point at which a referral has to be made to us by an employer.

Chairman: I do not want you to get upset. That was by way of making sure you were still awake. I promise you that we will come back to that.

Dr. Dunford: A quick point. You cannot create a system which relies on Ofsted to identify weak teachers. They only come every three, four or five years, or whatever.

Chairman: John, I merely threw that in, honestly, to wake you up a little bit.

Dr. Dunford: To wake me up? I am as alert as I have been for several days.

 

Q34 Mr. Timpson: One of the common threads that seems to be coming through from pretty much all of you is that the self-evaluation framework that we have at the moment is not playing the part that it should be playing in the process of school accountability. So, bringing together all the different threads that you have been talking about on self-evaluation, can you say what role you believe it should be playing in school accountability and the inspection process?

Mick Brookes: A major role and one that operates-I think we opened up with this-within the parameters of trust, where the people doing the self-evaluation are trusted to make those judgments. Tim Brighouse was talking at the ASCL conference the other day about high trust and low accountability. I do not think that that is right, actually. We want a system that operates in high trust, but the high accountability has to come from the schools themselves. Making sure that the rigour is there and ensuring that they are performing in the way that is correct for the children in those contexts comes from the school itself. Again, you have to move away from a system in which you are guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent.

It has to be done under systems that are also accredited. I should like to get on to the role of the school improvement partner, which is not fit for purpose any more. Certainly, assisting the leadership of the school in that assessment is important, particularly when there may only be two or three other people in that school. So clustering arrangements must be considered, as must ensuring, for instance, that you have a chartered assessor available to make sure that children's work is being assessed at the right levels. Where there are difficulties with teacher performance in the classroom, there must be support for heads-not only the teachers in the classroom-who have to tackle those difficult problems.

Martin Johnson: Chair, your last remarks showed up very much how the drive for school improvement is often conflated with the drive for school accountability. Those things need to be separated. Notwithstanding, as has already been said this afternoon, the addition to Ofsted's statutory remit of a duty to work on improvement, that is still not how it works in practice-and neither can it. The way to embed school improvement in our schools is not through accountability mechanisms, but through growing the culture of a school as a learning institution and a reflective one. Two things that have been mentioned recently are key to that. One is a form of self-evaluation owned by the whole staff that is not a bureaucratic exercise conducted for a high-stakes external observer-I say that again because it is so important-but that is integral to whole-school staff reflection on itself, coupled with performance management, which was recently introduced into the discussion.

Regrettably, too few of our schools still have a performance management process that is embedded into their everyday work. I am a great sponsor of performance management, not least because I spent many happy hours helping to develop the new arrangements with colleagues here. ATL believes strongly in performance management as a tool to improve teacher effectiveness and, therefore, pupil outcomes, but you might say that performance management should be inspected, and I am not clear that it is.

 

Q35 Chairman: Martin, you just said that we have not got much left, but you now want to inspect it. Is that not making you rather vulnerable?

Martin Johnson: What I am saying is that if what we are all about is better teaching and learning, accountability is not as important as some of the other things.

Dr. Dunford: In 2004, we had from the Minister for School Standards a properly thought out new relationship with schools, which had self-evaluation at the centre, driven by the same sort of data that would drive the work of a school improvement partner. I disagree with Mick that that is not fit for purpose, because the role of supporting and challenging heads is fit for purpose, but the problem is that it has become far too top-down, because heads are told what to do and given lots of targets and so on. There is school self-evaluation, a school improvement partner and Ofsted. That is a strong three-legged stool of school accountability. The school self-evaluation feeds into the Ofsted process through the self-evaluation form-the so-called SEF. That works well, and I hope that the relationship will become even stronger.

Between the Ofsted visits, it is the job of the school improvement partner to monitor the progress of the self-evaluation in supporting and challenging the head. That is working well, and I think the huge strides forward that schools have made in the past five years on self-evaluation, encouraged greatly by the people sitting at this table, particularly the NUT, which has always been strong on school self-evaluation, have been an important driver for school improvement.

 

Q36 Chairman: You do not have to say anything now, do you John?

John Bangs: I feel I ought to-there is a brand here.

There are two models of school improvement. One is the delivery model, which characterises "deliverology", which we are all aware of, and one is creating the conditions for change. The model that we have promoted since the mid 1990s-I remember sitting with Dr. Dunford at the annual lecture by the previous Chief Inspector when he lambasted us for our commitment to self-evaluation-is the one about creating the conditions for change. My problem with the current self-evaluation form and the inspector's model is that, actually, it is a cheap substitute for inspectors coming in themselves and spending longer.

We once had a fascinating conversation with the former Chief Inspector, who had just become the permanent secretary, about what came first-the chicken or the egg-in terms of whether self-evaluation was a convenient way of coping with the fact that Ofsted's budget had been cut, or whether it was it a glint in the eye prior to the budget cut. We did not get a satisfactory answer.

The issue is how to get to the guts of what the school community values and knows is working, and then, in terms of the external check on self-evaluation, how you can test that out so that you prove that you know that it is working. Currently, we do not have a system that gets to the guts of the effectiveness of the school overall. It is very results dominated and tick-list based. I say that because I go back to a wonderful thing that a bunch of year 2 and 3 youngsters said about what they thought a good teacher ought to be. This goes back to our original work in the '90s, and I do not have any information that contradicts this. They were clear about what good teachers are: "They are very clever, they do not shout, they help you every day, they are not bossy, they have faith in you, they are funny, they are patient, they are good at their work, they tell you clearly what to do, they help you with your mistakes, they mark your work, they help you to read, they help you with spelling, and they have courage."

Chairman: That is Paul Holmes!

John Bangs: It is a lovely description. Why should you not be interrogating a school on whether or not those attitudes are there? Teachers are committed to that, pupils are committed to that and parents are committed to that, but that voice does not appear in the current self-evaluation model. Why? It is because it is skewed into an incredibly data-based, comparative approach instead of how it describes the nature of the school in the community.

Finally, on SIPs, I agree with Mick. I have to say, John, that this is one area in which I disagree with you. Conceptually, the school improvement partner is flawed. You are supposed to have a critical friend. You cannot have a critical friend if that critical friend keeps on going back to the local authority to snitch on you. I have to say that that is not my definition of a critical friend.

Mick Brookes: Can I just pick that up? We have just passed notes, John. There is a big difference here between the school improvement partners in the secondary sector and the school improvement partners across sectors, particularly in the primary sector. In the secondary sector, it is peer support, by and large, because SIPs usually come from the education or school leadership community. In the primary sector, it is not like that. It has recycled some local authority inspectors who have taken it up. There may be a variation in quality there. The person should be a management and leadership supporter rather than someone who has done the things that John has just said.

Chairman: Edward, you have got them sparkling here.

 

Q37 Mr. Timpson: Maybe I should just keep quiet.

Let me touch again on SEF forms. I went to a school in my constituency recently and spoke to the head teacher. She was very concerned with the form on two fronts. First, it was far too rigid and did not offer the opportunity to express what her school was about, particularly as it was needing to improve from its previous inspection. Secondly, the strengths and the weaknesses of the school, which she readily accepted, were somehow lost in the process, both in terms of filling in the form and of looking at improvement within the school. How would you go about sharpening that tool, or should we get rid of it all together and start again on where we go with the self-evaluation model?

Mick Brookes: Self-evaluation-and written self-evaluation-is at the heart of self-improvement. I was very pleased when Christine Gilbert came to the Social Partnership and reminded us that the SEF is not a statutory instrument. One of the things that we are saying to people is that your SEF is not something that you write for inspectors, but something that you write for your school, and it informs your school improvement programme. Therefore, it has to be a tool that picks up the very things that you are talking about. If the rigid framework and the online version of that does not fit, we are saying very clearly to our members, "You need to take ownership of this document, and it needs to say those things that you want to say about your school provided that it acknowledges that where there are areas of weakness, you will address them in your plan."

Keith Bartley: I was going to offer some principles around what excessive accountability might look like if it has been commissioned, which helps to get at what my good practice in the SEF will be. We were given four things to think about. One was that excessive accountability imposes high demands on office holders under conditions of limited time and energy. Actually, I think that you get plenty of time and opportunity to revisit a SEF. Again, excessive accountability contains mutually contradictory evaluation criteria, and some of the restrictiveness around the SEF starts to go towards that territory. It contains performance standards that extend beyond established good practice and that invite subversive behaviour and goal displacement. It is that latter area in which the restrictive nature of the SEF takes schools towards unintended conclusions or an inability to set out their own store in the language that they would use.

 

Q38 Mr. Timpson: Earlier, you touched on having a commercial operation coming in and doing the self-assessment process. I have two questions about that. How much does it cost a school to do that, and is it deemed to have more credibility by going down that route?

Dr. Dunford: The cost depends on the size of the school. We can give you the figures; I do not have them in my head, but the cost is substantial-a few thousand pounds in a secondary school. But I think that the schools like it because somebody else is processing all the forms-you are not having to go through them-and because you get a lot more information out of it as the stuff is analysed against the performance of other schools in similar surveys. So, by using the commercial companies, you are getting more information with less work on your part, while still having a say in the design of the questionnaire.

John Bangs: I want to upend that a bit. All our experience from our professional development programme is that teachers take to learning how to do research like a duck to water. We work closely with Cambridge University on a project called "Learning Circles". Teachers put up their own research projects and they are tested and evaluated by the Cambridge tutor to see whether they stand up in research terms. The teachers then produce their 60-point contribution to their masters with the research results at the end.

I do not have a problem with anyone outside conducting it, so long as you are in charge of the research. There is a strong argument, as part of self-evaluation, for teachers themselves-as part of the teaching and learning process-not to have additional research bolted on, which you have to do to be able to say, "These results are right because this is an entirely independent commercial company," and to guard against accusations that you are somehow bending the research because you are doing it. It says something about the system that you feel you have to do that.

We have done this work over years and I am in favour of self-evaluation that is about teachers being confident in using their own evaluative and research models that are rigorous and accurate and also involve trust in the system, about knowing that those results will be treated in a developmental way, and about looking at how we can build on what we have found out, rather than viewing things in a punitive way: x, y and z are failing.

Chairman: Edward, do you have one more quick question or are you done?

Mr. Timpson: I am done.

 

Q39 Chairman: We have two sections to cover quickly. The first, on school management, is being led by David-Andrew and David will do these together. First, I have a quick question. Does anybody else know where self-assessment is so heavily leant on? Is there self-assessment in police forces and the health service? Is it contagious?

Dr. Dunford: I hope that it is, because it is the profession acting as professionals to self-evaluate. If that evaluation can be something that is not just done by the head teacher to the staff, but can go down-as John Bangs says-into the root of people's work in the classroom so that you are constantly evaluating what you do yourself, in addition to the institution constantly evaluating what it does, you have real quality assurance.

 

Q40 Chairman: I recognise that it is well used in commercial organisations as a management development tool, but do you know if it is replicated in parallel sectors in the education sector?

Dr. Dunford: Elsewhere in the education sector, colleges certainly have a very strong self-review process.

Martin Johnson: I just want to observe that the whole top-down ethos of the public sector in recent years militates against that kind of approach.

Chairman: But we are using it here.

Martin Johnson: That is because schools continue to resist top-down impositions.

 

Q41 Chairman: Self-evaluation was not the schools' idea, it was Ofsted's, was it not?

Dr. Dunford: No, it comes from him.

John Bangs: Yes, it was John and I-it is our fault.

 

Q42 Chairman: I can see the "Wanted" posters. You are saying that this was not a plot to save money, but that you successfully lobbied to have a measure of self-evaluation-

John Bangs: May I expand on that and give a bit of history? The reaction to Ofsted in 1992 was so strong-at Crook Primary School, which had the first Ofsted inspection, the press were on girders looking into the school with their television cameras-that we commissioned Professor John MacBeath, who was then at Strathclyde University, and his team to see whether the Scottish model of school development and self-evaluation could be used in England. That was the purpose of the research. His findings were that, yes, it could. That captured the imagination of the then Chief Education Officer for Newcastle, who then, I believe, carried that. Separately and independently, you were coming to the same conclusions, John-but John can tell his own story.

Dr. Dunford: That is right-as part of looking at the new inspection process and thinking about quality assurance. The way that Ofsted came in at the beginning, it was about quality control. Industry had moved way beyond quality control, and was very much into quality assurance. We felt that in education it was the bringing together of self-evaluation and external inspection that gave quality assurance.

John Bangs: Your question, Chair, is absolutely spot on. There are models in the private sector, particularly promoted by Deming and a range of management consultants, that are about owning the product that you are producing. That is absolutely behind self-evaluation.

Keith Bartley: It is important to differentiate between the SEF and school self-evaluation. The SEF is a very restricted form of school self-evaluation. Those schools that have the cultures, practices and processes in-built and well established around self-evaluation are probably those schools that will have the greatest capacity to respond to the outcomes of an inspection or, indeed, to the evidence that they present in a SEF. I think that we need to see it in its place, rather than assume that it is the process.

Chairman: Thanks for that. Let us move on. Sorry to hold you up.

 

Q43 Mr. Chaytor: Picking up Keith's point, in terms of the processes other than ticking the boxes on the form, what is best practice in the process of self-evaluation?

Keith Bartley: Do you mean in preparation for inspection, or more generally in terms of school improvement?

Mr. Chaytor: Both really. You are making the point that SEF alone is not enough. In the case of a successful school, there is likely to be a sound and solid process. My question is how do we know? How do we evidence the process? What kind of processes are generally considered to be good practice?

Keith Bartley: For a start, the features of good practice are about schools in which all of the staff are encouraged to be part of that reflective process. In other words, the school's model of organisational development and, indeed, the store by which it sets teachers' professional learning and continuing professional development are very much focused on an examination of practice, a reflection on why practice may be as it is or how it could be changed or improved, and then some consequent planning on that. If those features are evident within a school's self-evaluation processes, they should manifest themselves in improved outcomes for children, which is vitally important, but they are discernible and inspectable features of a school as well.

 

Q44 Mr. Chaytor: And the form itself-is the form fit for purpose? Or does it need further refinement?

Keith Bartley: I want to defer to my colleagues, who will be closer to that, because I have neither inspected nor completed.

Chairman: Mick, you have been quiet for a moment.

Mick Brookes: It is a reasonable framework, which is why we are saying that schools need to take it and shake it down, so that it fits their context, rather than it being a one-size-fits-all document. Schools that do that and own it in that way have it as a working tool in a school, rather than as a document that gets done and put on a shelf.

 

Q45 Mr. Chaytor: Do you have an input? Do the teachers associations or the head teachers have input into amending the form year on year, or is it a given and that is it?

Dr. Dunford: I think you should ask the Chief Inspector about how the form is constructed. The one really good thing that I would say is that the Chief Inspector acts as a gatekeeper against the Department for Education adding bits and pieces every two minutes to the SEF. It is only changed once a year, thank heavens.

The schools for which I have the greatest admiration are the ones that have the courage not to complete a SEF. There are schools that are "outstanding", but do not complete a SEF and have very rigorous self-evaluation processes.

 

Q46 Mr. Chaytor: How do we know?

Dr. Dunford: Because in that situation, inspectors have to look at the self-evaluation. They do not just look at the SEF or the box-ticking exercise, they have to look at the self-evaluation. The SEF is not self-evaluation, it is simply a summary, in a sort of tick-box way, of the real self-evaluation that has taken place. That comes back to the point that Keith and I made earlier, which John alluded to, that the best kind of self-evaluation involves all the staff. The inspectors coming in can recognise that. When they are talking to an individual teacher of mathematics-not even the head-they will recognise that self-evaluation culture in the school.

 

Q47 Mr. Chaytor: There could be a particularly skilful teacher of mathematics who is good at talking self-evaluation language. I spoke at a conference not too far from here, which was set up by an organisation specifically to train head teachers how to fill in their SEF correctly and get a good score with Ofsted. These things are not difficult to do with a bit of training. I am interested in all this stuff about process. Where is this document? How do we know whether over the last year-or the last three or five years-the school has been actively implementing a self-evaluation process?

Dr. Dunford: Because the best inspectors go behind the SEF to look at the processes of self-evaluation that have led to it. In secondary schools, for example, they talk to the head teacher about the evaluation discussions that take place every year with heads of department. They then go and talk to the heads of departments about that, so they see both sides.

Martin Johnson: I do not have a lot to add, except to David's last remarks. This is the whole point about the accountability problem. Where there are high stakes mechanisms, you get negative kinds of reactions. John is talking about the exceptions that prove the rule. For too many schools, it is an exercise in form filling and compliance. For the last quarter of an hour we have been arguing for embedding a culture of improvement, partly through self-evaluation but not only that. You will not get that in a high-stakes inspection regime.

Mick Brookes: It is not only the high stakes, it is also the mechanical nature of it. If the mechanical nature of Ofsted means that someone can tick the boxes and get the right answers, we can play the game as well as anybody. Until we have moved from that to a values-based inspection system where the context of the school is what matters, there will be people playing the game rather than owning their own material to move the school forward.

John Bangs: I think David has asked a really good question. The fact of the matter is that if you have an "outstanding", or even a "good", from Ofsted, you have permission to do anything. You can try out a set of individual instruments constructed within your school community-which is what true self-evaluation is about-that are fit for purpose and stand up to external interrogation about their validity. Those can be tried out because self-evaluation is essentially a creative activity. You are finding out information that you can use, so that you can improve on what you are doing internally within the school, using the instruments that are fit for purpose.

I have seen some fantastic self-evaluation on a European basis; for instance, not written self-evaluation, but youngsters taking photographs of the things that they like and do not like. It could be films, or small video streaming, or whatever, actually saying what we like, what we don't and what we think we can do to improve. The fact is that there are a small number of schools with that confidence. At the other end, there is the picture of the head teacher with the moon in the sky, up against their computer late at night, buffing up their self-evaluation form because the end of the 3-year cycle is coming up and they know that they have to do it.

There could not be two more stark extremes. Martin put it very well: it is about getting to the guts of how you embed a culture with a rigorous sense of how you can improve, knowing that you own it, knowing that you can improve it, and feeling professionally empowered to do so, but without the kind of high-stakes culture that says that someone else who does not know the process that you have go through is not going to come in and hammer you, using a delivery system that is entirely conformist in approach rather than encouraging innovation at school level.

Chairman: A quick one from you, Keith? Then we do need to move on.

Keith Bartley: I want to make two quick points. First, the study conducted in Yorkshire showed real evidence of the high correlation between the best SEFs and the best practice in schools and supporting self-evaluation. It is proven that there is a correlation.

The other point that I would like to make goes back almost to where we started. If we have an accountability framework that is focused on the impact of schools' work on children and young people, then schools' self-evaluation provides an opportunity to reflect upon that broader sense of the outcomes-the differences-that the school is capable of making for each child and young person. You cannot do that in a restricted format.

 

Q48 Mr. Chaytor: Does the role of self-evaluation and the SEF have a particular weighting in the total inspection process? How does it fit in? How is it integrated into the rest of the inspection?

Dr. Dunford: Again, I think that you come back to the proportionality inspections, and the point that John made. It is different looking at a SEF in a school that is good or outstanding, where all the trends are going in the right direction, to a school where things are badly. I think that is the only way I can answer that question.

 

Q49 Mr. Chaytor: Before we leave the SEF and Ofsted, what about the cost? Martin touched earlier upon that question. Do we spend too much on inspections?

Dr. Dunford: Perhaps we would ask the question-

Mr. Chaytor: We are asking the questions.

Dr. Dunford: Perhaps we would answer that question by raising the question of what is the cost of all of this put together, when you include the opportunity cost of the time taken when the moon is in the sky, and filling in the SEF, when you are filling in the school profile-which we have not mentioned; as part of the accountability system, it is completely useless-and when you are involved in numerous discussions, with people coming in asking you about your targets and so on? I think it is not just about the cost of Ofsted; it is about the cost of all of those things.

 

Q50 Mr. Chaytor: Five minutes ago, you were putting the case for good self-evaluation processes, saying this is integral to the culture and management of the school, it takes time, and it involves the head teachers talking to the classroom teachers. You cannot suddenly say, "Hang on, there's a cost to that."

Dr. Dunford: No; we would probably all say that it is money well spent. Particularly if it is done well, that is money well spent. If that money is well spent, perhaps we should put more resources into that, in order to spend less on the extended inspection coming along and validating it.

 

Q51 Mr. Chaytor: The specific question that follows is, do we spend too much on Ofsted?

Dr. Dunford: We probably spend too much on Ofsted investigating individual schools and not enough on Ofsted investigating how the system is going as a whole, which was a point that we made earlier.

 

Q52 Chairman: Why should Ofsted be responsible for all schools? Why should it not take a few schools?

Dr. Dunford: How do you mean?

Chairman: Why don't we have a much trimmed down Ofsted that has only a few schools-many fewer schools?

Dr. Dunford: You could have a system that did that if, for example, you relied more upon school improvement partners, who are having a regular support and challenge conversation with the head teacher. You could also use Ofsted less if there was a much better relationship between inspection and school support, which we talked about earlier, and you focused more resources on the support aspect rather than on the inspection aspect and all that goes with it.

 

Q53 Chairman: I asked that because, as I listened to the Laming inquiry discussions last week, the one question that was left unasked was the fact that what Laming recommends is enormously expensive in resource implications. If that is true, somewhere there is going to be a shift of spend from schools across to other children's services. I am just wondering whether inspection might be an alternative.

Dr. Dunford: We would magnanimously give up some-

Chairman: I thought you might say that. Sorry, I cut across and someone was very frustrated about not getting in there-Martin.

Martin Johnson: I just want to emphasise what I think John was getting round to. I would be very surprised if this Committee did not look at the costs of all the agencies involved in both inspection and improvement work. If you look at Ofsted, the national strategies, the specialist schools trusts, the SIPs and local authority improvement teams, they are all doing overlapping work. Maybe it is for you to recommend how that is rationalised-I have given my take on that-but it certainly needs rationalisation and savings would accrue.

Q54 Mr. Chaytor: Each of your organisations has submitted a written statement to the Committee, and one of them has called for big cuts in budgets either to Ofsted or any of the other agencies that were referred to, Martin.

Mick Brookes: Without a shadow of doubt-I have said this to whoever would listen-when it comes to a choice between front-line services and everybody who purports to support schools, we would be voting for front-line services. If that meant putting a greater emphasis on trusts in schools properly to self-evaluate, with light-touch approval accreditation of that, we would vote for it.

Martin Johnson: We specifically said in our evidence that we believe that Ofsted should no longer carry out section 5 school inspections. There is a saving there.

 

Q55 Mr. Chaytor: We have touched on the question of SIPs. No one seems to be dissenting that SIPs have been a useful innovation. There may be a difference of view in the approach. Do you think they will be there for ever or is it temporary?

Chairman: Are you all right?

John Bangs: I was trying-

Dr. Dunford: To get the first word in.

John Bangs: The idea that an individual school improvement partner can be this Olympian character through which advice can go two ways, data can pass two ways-that they can be the person who provides the judgment about the individual school to the local authority-I find extraordinary.

I think that SIPs betray, to a certain extent, a lack of trust in the school. Conceptually, school improvement partners are wrong. Actually, if you talk to head teachers, they often talk with fond memory of the original external advisers who used to come in, because those external advisers, albeit they were employed by CEA, actually were there to provide the-to use the parlance-challenge and support to the individual head teacher alone.

Often, those head teachers who have been a long time in the business will remember that fondly. Probably one of the best aspects of the old school-the pre-appraisal scheme in the mid-'90s-was the fact that head teachers and chairs of governors used to be involved in school appraisal, and that actually seemed to work relatively well too.

It comes back to the issue about what we spend our money on. The balance between external evaluation and money for school improvement through professional development and the identification of individual professional development is entirely skewed. There is far too little spent on the outcomes of an appraisal or a performance management evaluation compared with the enormous weight of external inspection, whether at local authority or national level.

I know we are coming to the end. We have argued in our submission, and have consistently argued for the past 10 to 15 years, since Ofsted came in, that there ought to be an independent review of the accountability system as it actually bears down on schools. We ought to have had a national debate about the nature of the accountability system. We did not have one. It was simply imposed, if colleagues remember, back in '92. It was a deal done between the Conservative party, which thought it was going to lose the election, and Labour about getting a Bill through Parliament.

There was no debate at the time. Essentially, we have a rushed and truncated model of a top-down inspection system that has gone through various iterations since, but nowhere have we sorted out how you actually evaluate the institution as a whole. That seems to me the key issue.

 

Q56 Mr. Chaytor: Just one more, before we move on-the question of other initiatives, such as National Challenge. There was a little furore when the failing schools were originally identified. Has that settled down and does anyone now deny that the National Challenge programme is targeting resources where they are most needed?

Martin Johnson: We've got a thing about the National Challenge. It's lucky Mary Bousted is not here, otherwise you would have a 10-minute barrage. The fact is that the challenge in particular, but some of the other agencies as well, has a not dissimilar effect on many schools-not the very self-confident ones that have the "outstanding" badge-as an Ofsted inspection. They create the impression, perhaps inadvertently-if you talk to the national strategies people, they declare that of course it is not their intention and not what they do-that, as perceived in too many schools, National Challenge is another example of the imposed conformity. They say they give advice, which they do, but it is perceived as a demand for a rigid answer on why a subject might be taught.

There is a situation where the QCA has been trying to free up the curriculum to quite a lot of support-we await what is suggested for Key Stage 2 to see whether it mirrors Key Stage 3-on the one hand, but the assessment regime is under a lot of pressure as well. You still have these agencies saying that is the way to do it-as perceived by schools.

Chairman: A quick one from you, John, because we have to get to this last section on schools.

Dr. Dunford: National Challenge is a huge £400 million project that was introduced with no project planning. You have local authorities told to create improvement plans over the summer holidays. We had National Challenge advisers not appointed until November-and they are the key people in this. We have had the funding only in the last week or two getting into some of the schools. There is also some very questionable targeting of the resources in that £400 million-into some school reorganisations, but also into simply improving the results of Year 11 in the next two years, not on deep school improvement. I have huge questions around National Challenge.

Chairman: A quick bite from Mick and then we move on.

Mick Brookes: It is an example of how accountability is being misused, sitting in the Department saying, "Oh woe! All these schools have been described as failing schools. That is not what we intended." But it was clearly going to happen. When you have accountability based on a very narrow spectrum of results, you will get those things. The concept that you can have a good school working in a very tough environment moving forward-maybe not as fast as other people would like-has not been understood by politicians.

Chairman: School improvements. Andrew, would you open on that?

 

Q57 Mr. Pelling: I really wanted to deal with the school report card. I apologise for arriving late; I stayed for the statement in the Chamber. I also apologise for the fact that I have come to the conclusion that this debate about school accountability has become so confused over the years that I would like to return to the idea of some accountability to the local community and through local education authorities. Having declared my prejudice, do you think the school report card has a legitimate and useful place in terms of accountability for schools? I know that there was consternation about some of the proposals. How could the proposals be adjusted to make them better suited?

Dr. Dunford: We had a debate about this at the weekend, which you may have read about in the press. We are not keen on the whole school performance coming down to a single grade. However, in principle, a school support card could represent more intelligent accountability. That depends on the detail; the devil really is in the detail.

How do you measure improvement and progress? What wider achievements of the school will be brought in? We must have a discussion over the next couple of years about what those elements will be, how they will be combined and how they will be graded. In principle, replacing league tables with a more sophisticated report card that has been well thought through-with the input of the profession, parents and other stakeholders-could be useful.

We have set out 10 principles, which I could send to you, about what a report card should look like. I will mention just one of them. A good school serving a challenging area should have the same chance of getting a good grade as a good school serving a more favoured area. We will judge all the proposals on the report card against that principle and the others that we have set out.

John Bangs: To follow on from John, there is the germ of a good idea in the school report card. It could be a rich definition of the school's evaluation checked by an external evaluator. Currently, the school report card is another damn thing. It comes on top of the Ofsted inspection result. The consultation document does not resolve the question it poses itself: what do you do if you have decided, given all the data, that you have an "outstanding" and Ofsted comes up with another judgment? The Government refuse to pose report cards as a substitute for or alternative to school performance tables.

This proposal suffers from the greatest sin of all, which is cherry-picking a system from one country and dropping it in elsewhere. It genuinely is cherry-picking because the New York report card is used by individual schools as a way of arguing for better funding. That is not part of the consultation. The United Federation of Teachers agrees with the school report card in New York because it is a vehicle for negotiations with New York City about extra funding for schools. I do not see that here.

The idea of a model or framework for describing in a sensitive way the strengths and weaknesses of a school so that it is understandable for the whole community is good. However, you must get rid of the baggage, such as the overlapping accountability systems that Martin mentioned.

Mick Brookes: If the report card leads to a wiser way of describing and narrating a school's progress and what it is doing for the community, we would support it. However, there is a reductionist theory about trying to get something very simple for parents. As John said at his conference, there are answers to every complex question that are simple and wrong.

Martin Johnson: I want to chuck in something very unpopular. The notion that we can divide our schools into four categories is absolutely bizarre. We are being consulted on whether we would prefer to use A to D or 1 to 4. It is unfortunate from the point of view of policy making that the larger the study, the more it becomes seen as the fact that schools differ in their effectiveness hardly at all. That is the opposite of an assumption that is made throughout policy making, but it is the case. I did not manage to get this into our CVA discussion, but CVA figures only confirm that. Although there are some outriders, the vast bulk of schools' scores vary little, when allowing for statistical issues.

The idea of the score card and actually dividing schools into sheep and goats is fundamentally flawed. I know that my words will go out there into the ether and be disregarded. In a way, it is counter-intuitive-it just happens to be the case.

 

Q58 Chairman: Do you also mean that good teaching doesn't do any good?

Martin Johnson: There is quite a significant classroom effect-a teacher effect-but there is very little school effect. That is a very significant difference-or should be-for education policy. The importance of the teacher in the classroom is becoming more understood but it is still submerged in terms of policy making.

I am not saying anything of which you are not fully aware but, to recap, a school is a very complex organisation. The idea that you can summarise, even in a few pages, as John aspires to, what it is like and likely to be for a range of learners, is just a myth. As for reducing it to a single digit or letter-that is a joke.

 

Q59 Mr. Pelling: So Martin is saying that past education policy has been too obsessed with the idea of school organisation or effectiveness, and that politicians should concentrate on a classroom, pedagogical level.

Martin Johnson: Absolutely.

 

Q60 Mr. Pelling: In terms of the school report card, is it a possibility for schools or teachers or the community to grab back what some witnesses have described as the centralisation of power, despite the pretence otherwise that education policy is about devolution of power? If used properly, could it be used as a means of strengthening accountability to the community and working with the community?

Dr. Dunford: Yes it could, provided, as John Bangs says, it fits properly with the rest of the accountability system. We see what we can get rid of, as I mentioned earlier, and we actually design it so that it complements other parts of the accountability system. In particular, if the report card says what needs to be said about the data, we can have a quite different kind of Ofsted inspection.

 

Q61 Mr. Chaytor: Picking up on Martin's point, we hear from time to time from different witnesses about the narrow differences between achievements in schools. Surely that is a powerful argument for the school report card, because the consequence of introducing a report card that makes a judgment on a broader range of indicators would be precisely to deliver a set of results which, for most schools, would probably be good. You would get far less differentiation than you do now, when judgments are essentially made by league tables dominated by one single raw statistic.

John Bangs: Exactly.

Mr. Chaytor: You have put up a very good argument for the report card as I see it.

John Bangs: Yes, only if you get rid of all the other junk that compromises it.

Keith Bartley: I think schools would have far more ownership of the report card if the consultative process that has been launched genuinely engaged them and gave them some opportunity to have the kind of debate that your questions are prompting. But we have to see it in the context-no one has mentioned this-of the two significant conclusions reached by the House of Lords Merits Committee's report last week. It argued for less Government reliance on regulation in order to leave greater room for the professionalism of practitioners to deliver against the outcomes for improving education. That was part of your question just now. Shouldn't our focus on what we do to improve the actual practice of teaching in our classrooms? As Martin said, everything tells us that is what actually makes the greatest difference for children.

The House of Lords Committee report stated: "We call on the department to shift its primary focus away from the regulation of processes through statutory instruments, towards establishing accountability for the delivery of key outcomes." Engaging schools in how that can be measured and presented could be a rich way forward.

 

Q62 Mr. Chaytor: On the question of the single descriptor, which some of you have objected to, what makes a school different from a hospital, a primary care trust, a local authority or a police authority, all of which are now allocated single descriptors, whether 1 to 5, A to E, excellent to poor? Why is a school different?

Dr. Dunford: I don't find the single descriptor useful in any of those respects. If I want to go into a hospital for a knee operation, I want to know what the hospital is like for knee operations.

Mr. Chaytor: But you can find that out as well.

Dr. Dunford: That's good. Similarly, if I'm going to stay in a hotel, I do not particularly want to know that it is a three-star hotel. I want to know what the facilities and rooms are like, and so on, which points to separate grades for different aspects of school performance, and not to a single, overall grade, which, incidentally, the colleges have at the moment under Framework for Excellence, and I understand are looking at getting rid of.

 

Q63 Mr. Chaytor: But the two are not mutually exclusive. The concept of the report card is to provide an overall, broad assessment, and to include much more information as well. So if you want to know about knee or ankle operations, or performance in year 11 or year 7, CVA, raw stats, progress, well-being, it's all there, surely.

Dr. Dunford: That would be good, and I think we should encourage parents and other people interested in these things to look behind the single grade, but the single grade would be an obstruction to them looking to the other information.

John Bangs: We have to understand where the single grade comes from. It comes from the Government's approach to public sector reform. It is a flight from complexity. It is about giving Ministers simple solutions to complex problems, but, as John said, those are often wrong solutions.

A single grade does not drive up motivation for institutional improvement. What it does is tell the best people in the institution to leave, especially if it is a really bad grade, because it can't differentiate between those who are effective in the institution and those who are not. It is a crude blunderbuss approach that can lead to the best people leaving the institution. Perhaps this is a holy grail, but it is achievable: the key issue is to have a simple summary of the effectiveness of the institution, looking at the key concerns and issues, without having a single grade bracketed into four separate tiers that actually has the effect of demoralising individual people who are really making a difference in the institution.

 

Q64 Mr. Chaytor: Just one very final point. John, do you not think that there is a supreme paradox here? In contrast with hospitals, PCTs, police authorities or local authorities, schools are giving single grades to their pupils every day of the week, every week of the year. How can you object to the public allocating a single grade to the school when the purpose of the school's existence is to allocate a single grade to pupils?

Martin Johnson: The short answer to the question is that it is not very good practice.

 

Q65 Mr. Chaytor: But I have yet to hear a teachers association or anybody within the system argue that we should completely abandon terminal grades or GCSEs.

Martin Johnson: We do.

John Bangs: What David has opened up is a huge debate about the distinction between the evaluation of the pupil, the evaluation of the teacher, the evaluation of the institution and the evaluation of the system. How you actually evaluate the pupil is essentially diagnostic. You are identifying a point to which you believe the child should move next through whatever mechanism you use. To extrapolate that up and say that is the way to evaluate a complex institution is exactly the mistake that the current Government and previous Governments have made. You cannot use one particular set of objectives for a pupil and then use that system-for example, national curriculum tests-as a way of evaluating the institution. What happens is that you strip out very much that is good, and what you have is a single result that, as I say, often demoralises people who have made a real difference, because they are not recognised within that single letter or number. An issue that the Committee ought to address is simply how you look at institutions and provide a 360° picture of the institution that is separate from how you look at the performance of the individual pupil or teacher.

Dr. Dunford: Can I add another gloss to that? In a system where institutions are being encouraged to work in partnership with other institutions, the whole focus, which we have been discussing for two hours, of accountability of the single institution has to be looked at if it is going to drive us more towards partnership working and towards system improvement and lack of polarisation, whereas the accountability driver, at the moment, is all towards competition between schools and beating them in the league tables.

 

Q66 Chairman: If there is any area that we have not looked at in enough detail, from where I am sitting, it is systemic change and systemic evaluation. Mick?

Mick Brookes: It depends on the purpose as well. If the purpose of giving a single grade is either to praise or demean, I think that is not working. As to how parents know how to choose the school for their child, that is a real question, and the answer is that most do not, because they will simply opt for the school that is nearest to them. If they do, the best way of doing that is to ask the parent and pupil population, "What is your school like?" Some schools will not be getting those enormous numbers of GCSEs at A to C, but are nevertheless very good schools and are heading in the right direction. It is about having a school which is appropriate for the child.

Chairman: Keith, do you want to answer?

Keith Bartley: Not on that thanks.

Chairman: This has been a most informative session for us. It has gone on a little, but you have all been on sparkling form. I remember the first time I asked the unions to come in on a regular basis to talk to the Committee, and there seems to have been something of a change since then-you seem quite collegiate today. It is very refreshing. This is a very important inquiry, and I am glad that you have contributed so freely and frankly. Can you stay with this inquiry? If you look at what has been said today and think of things that you should have said or of other things that you would like to communicate to us, let us know, because it will only be a good inquiry if you help us as much as you can. Thanks again, and I hope that you like our national curriculum report that will come out shortly.