UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 70-ii

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

CHILDREN, SCHOOLS AND FAMILIES COMMITTEE

 

THE WORK OF OFSTED

 

CHRISTINE GILBERT, VANESSA HOWLISON, MELANIE HUNT, MIRIAM ROSEN and ROGER SHIPPAM

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 315 - 442

 

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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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee

on Monday 9 February 2009

Members present:

Mr. Barry Sheerman (Chairman)

Mr. Douglas Carswell

Mr. David Chaytor

Mr. John Heppell

Paul Holmes

Fiona Mactaggart

Mr. Andrew Pelling

Mr. Andy Slaughter

Mr. Graham Stuart

Mr. Edward Timpson

Derek Twigg

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Christine Gilbert CBE, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education, Children's Services and Skills, Vanessa Howlison, Director - Finance, Melanie Hunt, Director - Learning and Skills, Miriam Rosen, Director - Education, and Roger Shippam, Director - Children, Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, gave evidence.

 

Q315 Chairman: Christine Gilbert, may I welcome you to this session of the Committee? You might not be a banker, but you still draw a good crowd, so welcome to the proceedings of the Committee-I only say that in light of tomorrow morning's session of the Treasury Committee, which was much publicised over the weekend. It is a pleasure to have you here. As you know, on the last occasion we met to discuss your report, we were understandably concerned, particularly with children's services. Although that will be part of the agenda today, we want to get a broad balance.

Of course, you know that we were going to have a seminar on school accountability last Monday-a week today-and you can guess that it was postponed because of the difficulty that the participants had in getting here. This session would have flowed nicely from that. Some of the broader questions today will be asked because we are getting in mode for considering the third matter-as you know, we have looked at testing and assessment; we are writing a report on the national curriculum; and the next pillar of the three pillars of education reform is school accountability.

We normally give those participating a chance to say a few words to open the sitting. That is your right and privilege at the moment.

Christine Gilbert: Good afternoon everyone. I am pleased to have another opportunity to discuss Ofsted's wider remit, to highlight some of the important matters revealed by our recent annual report and to answer your questions. However, before doing so, I thought that it would be helpful to touch on a key issue that we talked about last time we met-the new comprehensive area assessment, or CAA, as it is called. The details of the CAA are about to be published this week. It will give local people a much better picture of how well or otherwise their local services work and the overall quality of those services for local people. From April, it will replace a number of existing assessments and reviews, and it is the result of joint work between Ofsted, the Audit Commission, and the inspectorates of health, adult social care, police, prisons and probation. It is going to draw on a wide range of inspection evidence from all inspections in the local area.

The intention is that the CAA will provide local people with a straightforward, rounded and independent assessment of the quality of life in their area and of the prospects for improvement. The focus will be much more on outcomes for local people, rather than on an assessment of their council. Where improvements are needed, they will be what is described as "red flagged"-just as particularly good practice will be highlighted. Crucially, the new CAA reports will assess how well local bodies are working together, which, as we have seen in recent tragic cases, is particularly important in the delivery of services for children and young people whose circumstances make them vulnerable.

Although the new system marks the end of joint area reviews and annual performance assessments-APAs-it will not replace existing Ofsted inspections of local settings, institutions and key services. Instead, we hope that it will build on the strength of existing Ofsted inspections by making better use of the data that we collect and the judgments that we make in the 2,500 inspections that we undertake each week. So, we want information that is collected once, but used more than once.

In the area of child protection, we must be particularly vigilant. I can confirm to the Committee that there will now be an annual child protection inspection in every council. That will involve unannounced inspections, which will complement the three-year full inspections that we are introducing in relation to all safeguarded and looked-after children. At the same time, our school inspections are being further improved to ensure that inspectors spend more time in classrooms observing teaching and learning. In particular, there should be a focus on, for example, how one child is making progress or how a teacher is working with different groups of pupils in the classroom. We are also currently piloting the no-notice inspections that I spoke to you about in earlier meetings.

We will further develop that proportionate approach, which means closer monitoring of schools and colleges that are satisfactory. By the same token, it is right that the best schools and colleges have less frequent inspections, although their performance will be monitored to detect signs of slippage. With the new CAAs and our refined approach to inspection, I am confident that we will have a much better picture of local services than before and be in a much better position to bring about improvement, not least in the safeguarding of children and young people. I hope that you welcome those developments and look forward to taking your questions on them and on other things.

 

Q316 Chairman: Chief inspector, that all sounds most interesting. How long had those reforms been planned?

Christine Gilbert: The plans for the revision to annual performance assessments and joint area reviews were published last September, and we have been consulting since then. The school inspection survey was published around last March.

Miriam Rosen: Yes, we consulted through to August.

Christine Gilbert: At the moment, we cannot tell you exactly what the proposals are for the school inspection survey, because we are still piloting in a number of authorities. So the answer is for quite some time.

 

Q317 Chairman: Did you make these changes because, heaven forbid, you listen to what some members of the Select Committee say, or what Ministers say? What is the impetus? Is it the Secretary of State phoning you? Where does it come from?

Christine Gilbert: Absolutely not. The impetus came from the creation of the new organisation. I was appointed six months before the new organisation was established, and the reorganisation and so forth was well under way by then. I decided that it would be foolish to up-end what had been planned. It was really important that users and providers experienced business as usual, so for the first year we made minimal changes to the inspection regimes.

As the first year went on, we set up a project called "Inside Ofsted", to look at the different systems that we had-we had 39 different inspection and regulatory systems operating-to see what coherence we could find across them without straitjacketing. We looked for the best practice in each of them and produced a document, which is internal but which will also be on the web, called "Ofsted Inspects". That document contains a number of core principles that we try to apply to all our remits. It is an ongoing process, and each system is looked at in detail. We were most concerned that those providers that had inspections from different areas experienced them as one inspection. There might have been inspectors with different specialisms, but they would appear at the same time in what we would call a common inspection visit.

 

Q318 Chairman: What I am trying to get at is how do you become a listening and learning organisation? How do you pick up discontent out there? I have relayed some of the discontent that I have picked up in schools; for example, people say that the inspection is now too short. Someone, even today, said that their child's school had had only a day's inspection, which seems rather short. If you hear something like that, at what level of policy direction do you take it up? Where is it considered? Where are these decisions made? I am trying to get a feeling for how you cope with that.

Christine Gilbert: We would consider those things within Ofsted. I go out and about around the country and come back with anecdotes, which people then say are either exceptions or contain the germ of something. We listen hard to what the Committee says, and we listen to what the different organisations that we meet regularly say. There is one thing that we have been really keen to do, when we go out to consultation. On the school inspection proposals, for instance, we could have been completely satisfied with the 1,700 responses, but when we analysed them we found that they were mainly from professionals-from within schools, from heads and so on-and that the minority were from parents. So, we organised some groups with parents, to talk to them. We are really conscious of what we were required to do by the 2006 Act-focusing on improvement, listening hard to users and obtaining value for money. By users, I mean children, learners, parents and employers-that is what the Act says. We probably focus more strongly on the first two requirements than the third, and we have listened really hard. One thing that I have been keen to say is that we learn from anything that we can, so if people are not happy with how they are inspected, they have to tell us about it. I really want to hear what people say, so that we can build it into improvement for the future.

 

Q319 Chairman: Some of my colleagues on the Committee were rather surprised when I wrote the foreword to a recent collection of essays from Civitas. They would not normally expect me to do that, but I decided to do so after reading the essays and thinking that they were good. Have your people read that and absorbed it?

Christine Gilbert: Yes, I read it. I did not think that some of the essays were as good as others.

Chairman: That is the way of such collections. My colleagues are always keen to get in on the questioning. Over to Andy on the Ofsted remit.

 

Q320 Mr. Slaughter: We have difficulty trying to get through your remit in a few Committee sittings. Are you having similar difficulties getting through it? This is the end of the first year of a much broader range of services that must be scrutinised. What problems are you encountering with the enhanced remit?

Christine Gilbert: To reflect on the year, the benefits for users outweigh the difficulties that we have encountered. I hope that you saw in the annual report that we were managing to join things together in part B in a way that we had not done before. Although the question is pointing to our size, the four previous organisations were much bigger than the new one. The new organisation allows a closer focus on the whole experience of the child or learner as they progress.

The difficulty has come with taking a year to look at the structure of the organisation. There will be fairly radical restructuring in September. The informal consultation on that began at the end of last September. It seems to take a long time to go through the various stages of consultation. People are experiencing quite a lot of dislocation because jobs are changing. There are a number of temporary posts in Ofsted. Through the human resources processes, people are slotted back into jobs that they left a year or 18 months ago. All those things are difficult. We must keep focusing on the fact that we are planning and preparing for a much stronger system. For me, that is what has been negative.

 

Q321 Mr. Slaughter: I suppose that that is to be expected. Any reorganisation will cause short-term disruption. Obviously we are interested to hear about the positives. However, I was thinking about how you are not just looking at economies of scale, but are looking at things in a more cross-cutting way. To compare it with setting up a children's services department, often changes are designed to achieve a particular end, but throw up unintended consequences. Can you see any potential pitfalls?

Christine Gilbert: I think that the end goal is worth the difficulty. Change is always difficult, and it is up to me and the staff you see before you to ensure that it is managed as effectively as possible. That is the biggest area that I would highlight.

On the issue of expertise, we were fortunate that people with expertise transferred from the different organisations. In answer to the Chairman, I talked about the changes that we are making in inspection. However, one group of inspectors from education is not changing the core system; people with expertise in that are working on it. We transferred a number of people over from the different organisations. The process is particularly hard for staff who belonged to smaller organisations. For example, the adult learning inspectorate had one base in Coventry with quite a small number of people who felt a strong sense of team. That is why it is really important that we build a new organisation where they feel allegiance. A staff survey showed that they were highly committed to the purpose, and they feel that they can do better here than what they could achieve where they were previously.

 

Q322 Mr. Slaughter: Can one aspect-child protection, for example-become so dominant for a time that it skews the whole orientation of the organisation?

Christine Gilbert: I do not think so. Before the annual report was published in November-the Chairman will know this from previous years-the difficulty always was getting anyone to focus on anything other than schools. The former Ofsted was responsible for child care and early years, and it did not really get a look-in. There was always the danger of something dominating, but we have been trying hard to make sure that that does not happen. Certainly, this annual report resulted in a focus on child protection that we thought was well deserved. There is one thing that is important for us to do. The annual report attracts a lot of publicity, but we have to find a different state and way of doing this at different parts of the year, to publish different things about different areas of work. For instance, no questions were generated at annual report time nor since about learning and skills, yet a number of important things are going on in that area. We have to try to shape the agenda in that way, too.

 

Q323 Mr. Slaughter: We can make our own judgment based on what you tell us here, based on the annual report. One way we will judge whether we think you are doing your job is by looking at your reports on individual local authorities, say, through the annual performance assessments. I know from experience that you are reluctant to release to third parties the information that goes into those assessments, on the grounds that it makes your job easier. This may have come up at your previous session, when I was not present, unfortunately. It makes your job more difficult if you do not have a confidential relationship with the people you are talking to at a local authority. That is all right up to a point if you are talking about individual members of staff, but do you not think that, either through freedom of information or just generally, the documentation that passes between you and local authorities should be available to Members of Parliament and other interested people?

Christine Gilbert: I am not sure exactly what you mean. The information linked to the annual performance assessments is available. If people ask for more detail-as the Birmingham MPs did a couple of weeks ago-we give it to them. If you mean the serious case reviews, that is a different issue but the information relating to annual performance assessments is available.

 

Q324 Mr. Slaughter: Any background documentation that is referred to in your annual letter would be available? That is not my experience.

Christine Gilbert: The issue with the serious case reviews is different. That is not within our gift. Government decide that the full serious case review should not be released. A number of inspectors who deal with that and I sympathise with that viewpoint. They are worried that if the information were published it could compromise other family members and so on. The executive summary is released, but none of that is up to Ofsted-we merely work within the rules. We look at the serious case reviews and make our evaluation, and a number of authorities put the evaluation on the web. I do not know whether there is something else that you are suggesting.

 

Q325 Mr. Slaughter: I am thinking of a specific instance of a college where I am chair of the governors. It asked for information underlying the APA and got a longer letter back explaining why none of it could it be released other than the APA letter itself, which I did not find very helpful. This may be something I need to pursue. I mean things such as evidence notebooks, draft letters and discussions with the local authority that go on before the final letter is produced.

Christine Gilbert: I think that I may be missing something here. Chairman, could I ask Miriam to come in, in case she knows something I am not sure about?

Miriam Rosen: With regard to APA, the data that we use are publicly available. We do not normally release the evidence notebooks in which the inspectors write their contemporaneous notes when they are talking to people for any of our inspections. They are not given out, because there is a confidentiality element in the discussions. That evidence is all synthesised and goes into the reports.

 

Q326 Mr. Slaughter: This is an important point. I have had exactly the same problem with the Audit Commission on CPAs and things of that nature. What generally comes out is the sanitised version of the discussion between the auditing body and the local authority. What is of interest to interested parties is what is discussed at an earlier stage. You can anonymise who said what to you so that it is unattributable, but I do not see why the data of those discussions should not be in the public realm, certainly under the Freedom of Information Act.

Christine Gilbert: Perhaps I can pursue this outside the meeting. In the example I gave of the meeting with Roger and the Birmingham MPs, the MPs had a copy of the APA and wanted further detail about an aspect of it. We went away; we found more details; and we wrote a letter with more details. It might be something particular that we cannot give you information about, in which case I will say so, but I am happy to pursue this outside the meeting.

Chairman: Are you happy with that, Andy?

 

Q327 Mr. Slaughter: I understand that people may wish to tell you things in confidence or you may not wish to reveal what individual officers have said to you. That is a separate issue. But usually draft letters or reports are produced, are they not, which are then the subject of discussion and negotiation with a local authority or whoever, which leads to a final letter? Normally I would have thought, certainly under the Freedom of Information Act procedures, it would be possible to obtain the background information, such as e-mails, letters, drafts that have gone before that. That is the general rule. I am not talking about specific cases here.

Christine Gilbert: We used to send the draft APA letter to every local authority and give them about a fortnight to comment on it, but most people would have discussed that quite widely in the authority.

 

Q328 Mr. Slaughter: You would be surprised. Perhaps I need to write to you about that again. You seem to be saying that you do not see that there is any barrier. Provided that confidentiality in relation to individuals is protected, you do not see any barrier to your negotiations, discussions, correspondence with a local authority being made public.

Christine Gilbert: No, I do not. Unless there is something that I am missing here, I would not. I would be surprised if those letters were not FOI-able.

Mr. Slaughter: So that is okay, according to you.

Chairman: You were going to seek some more information.

Mr. Slaughter: I think I have exhausted my time. What is said on paper by Ofsted contradicts what the chief executive is now telling me. It is probably better that I take it up separately.

Chairman: Douglas, did you want to come in here?

Mr. Carswell: I wanted to come in on finance.

Chairman: Andy, do you want one last bite?

 

Q329 Mr. Slaughter: I want to go back to what Miriam was saying a moment ago about evidence notebooks. This is the collection stage. This is the nitty-gritty of inspection. I understand that there may be other things, but this seems to form the background to any draft notices or draft report before the final report. If people see references in the final letter to these documents, they may wish to see them, if they have a legitimate interest in the case. Why would they not be disclosable, either voluntarily or under the Freedom of Information Act?

Miriam Rosen: One problem is that we feel that if we were to disclose the records of conversations with people, they would not necessarily be quite so frank with us, so we have been reluctant to release those from the beginning. It is the same for other types of inspections as well.

 

Q330 Mr. Slaughter: That is a good reason for not having a Freedom of Information Act. It does not seem to agree with what the chief inspector has just said to me.

Miriam Rosen: It is important that Ofsted can collect information that is then synthesised into a report. It is important that nothing interferes with the free giving of information to Ofsted.

Mr. Slaughter: I am none the wiser, but I think I will leave it there.

Chairman: We will hold that and wait until we get some more information through a different channel. Let us move on to expenditure.

 

Q331 Mr. Chaytor: Chief inspector, in terms of the Ofsted budget, I just want to clarify that this year you were required to reduce it by 30% compared with the 2003-04 budget. Will that target be met?

Christine Gilbert: Yes. What we have been required to do through the Better Regulation Executive is to reduce the budget from the base year of 2003-04 by £80 million. What we have done with the agreement of the Department for Children, Schools and Families-I think we mentioned it here two meetings ago-is reduce it by two thirds, to just under £60 million. I think Vanessa will be happy to talk about the detail of that if you would like, but we have done what we said we would do and taken a substantial reduction through the merger and our work in reducing back-office costs and so on.

 

Q332 Chairman: Vanessa, you are a ruthless cost cutter.

Vanessa Howlison: Ofsted has been on a downward trajectory in terms of its cost since 2005-06, well before the target was in actual fact set for us. The target as it is written will take Ofsted from its 2003-04 position-had it existed in this form at the time-which was £266 million, down by 30% by 2008-09 to £186 million. That headline date that was originally given as our target, but we have been liaising and engaging with the Better Regulation Executive to ensure that we bring our cost down by the amount to which we committed in a way that is safe and can be done without endangering Ofsted's business.

An important date for us is September 2009, because a number of things will happen then that will enable us to take a sharp drop in our costs. Our outsourced inspection contracts will come to an end at that date, and we are in the process of retendering those and we expect to see a significant saving as a result. Also, our inspection frameworks will come to an end in September 2009, which is when we intend to bring in a number of other changes that will reduce our costs. Finally, we are reducing the size of our London office and our lease expires in September 2009, so again at that date we will be able to take a step-down in our costs. That is why we have made sure that every step of the way, we have engaged with the Better Regulation Executive to ensure that it is clear on the trajectory of our cost reductions, and I am very comfortable that we have achieved them.

 

Q333 Mr. Chaytor: The departmental report for 2007-08 clearly states that Ofsted will achieve the target 30% reduction, so things have changed since the publication of that report as the reality, or severity, of that reduction has been recognised. Is that the case?

Vanessa Howlison: It is a severe reduction, because the headline is to reduce by 30% from £266 million. But if you take inflation from 2003-04, and add that to the size of our savings-Christine is right that the headline is to reduce by £80 million-it is actually a £120 million saving that we are looking at, which is 42% in real terms. It is a really significant saving, and I think we have made really good progress to date in achieving it and we have a lot more planned for 2009-10. We have just set our budget for 2009-10, and we have pulled another £20 million out of our cost baseline for that year.

 

Q334 Mr. Chaytor: What is the actual percentage reduction on the 2003-04 baseline?

Vanessa Howlison: To date?

Mr. Chaytor: By the end of the current financial year.

Vanessa Howlison: If you are adding the impact of inflation, we have done two thirds of the savings. By the end of the next financial year, we will have done 80% and there is a small amount that we have yet to deliver.

 

Q335 Mr. Chaytor: That is two thirds of the savings you were required to make. The percentage cost reduction on the 2003-04 baseline was originally going to be 30%. You are £20 million short of that, so, in percentage terms, what is the reduction on the 2003-04 baseline?

Vanessa Howlison: That depends on which way you want to look at it. If you take inflation out of the equation, we have an £80 million saving to make. By 2008-09, we will have achieved £40 million of that £80 million. In 2009-10, we will have achieved £60 million of the £80 million, but if you factor in inflation, the saving that we will have achieved is more significant than that in percentage terms.

 

Q336 Mr. Chaytor: I just want a simple percentage figure, leaving inflation to one side. If you have saved 60 as against 80, what is the percentage saving, if it is not 30%? It is obviously less than 30%.

Vanessa Howlison: It is 15% in 2008-09. We have a savings plan to bring our costs down over the next two financial years, but we have also invested some money to help us to achieve that saving. That is one of the reasons why the costs in the current financial year are a little bit higher than you might expect-not just because of investment in systems, but because we need to reduce our staff numbers, so we are incurring some staff-related costs this year.

 

Q337 Mr. Chaytor: Which areas of the organisation have taken the biggest share of the reduction?

Vanessa Howlison: It has come from a range of areas. If you remember, the base year is 2003-04 and we-not only the current Ofsted, but its predecessor organisations-have been reducing our costs and trajectory for several years beforehand. Since the new Ofsted was formed, one of the biggest savings has come from the back office. Our budget, reset for 2009-10, includes a £7.2 million reduction on back office costs, corporate services and finance. That is a significant element. We have also made productivity savings, and savings from introducing single inspection events and parallel inspection events, thus delivering on the promise of the new Ofsted. You can see that it has come from a range of areas. It has also come from a careful use of proportionality.

 

Q338 Mr. Chaytor: What does that mean?

Vanessa Howlison: It means making sure that our inspections are proportionate to risk, and making sure that we put more resources into those areas where we think they can have more effect.

 

Q339 Mr. Chaytor: Can I ask about back-office reductions? There are two sets of figures and I am not sure how they can be reconciled. We have a chart from the departmental report that suggests that, this year, the administrative budget is 16% of the total budget, which will reduce to 14% in 2009-10, and it will be 14% in 2010-11. There is also a chart that says that the overall corporate administrative functions make up 18.3% of the costs. What is the difference between the administration budget and the corporate administrative functions budget?

Vanessa Howlison: It is difficult to relate our administration budget directly to what we consider to be the cost of our corporate and support services. For example, some of the costs, which are included in our corporate services cost, are the cost of our contact centre, our national business unit and our research and analysis division. Those costs are more related to the delivery of front-line service, so there is a mismatch between what is charged to our administration budget, in Treasury terms, and how we actually capture-and account for internally-the cost of our corporate services, which we believe in some respects is right.

 

Q340 Mr. Chaytor: With research functions, for example, would all similar organisations include those as corporate administrative functions, or would they appear in a different section of the budget? Is there a standard reporting procedure that all Government Departments and agencies and non-departmental public bodies use?

Vanessa Howlison: In terms of the administration budget, absolutely there is. Our accounts are audited by the National Audit Office, and we are both clear that we are charging the right costs to administration in terms of reporting to Treasury. In terms of our research and international division, it provides a lot of data to support front-line inspection and, as it happens, that team is managed from within our corporate services division, but I think it is very much more related to supporting the front line. In fact, within the reorganised structure, front-line divisions will manage that team's work. There is no standard way of dealing with it, but I am clear that what we charge against our administration costs budget is in line with Treasury requirements.

 

Q341 Mr. Heppell: I got a little confused with the stuff about inflation. Were the targets at the very beginning were set with, or without, inflation?

Vanessa Howlison: The target was set without inflation. We were told to reduce our costs by 30% compared with our costs in 2003-04. We went back to the Better Regulation Executive and said, "Are you aware that unless you account for inflation you are requiring a 42% reduction from us, not a 30% reduction?" It is unfortunate that the headline 30% does not really capture the size of the savings that we have been required to make.

 

Q342 Mr. Heppell: The difficulty for me is that I am not sure whether you have met your target or not. If you account for inflation, you have met it with lots to spare. If you do not account for inflation, you have failed to meet it.

Vanessa Howlison: I am not saying that we have met the target yet-I am saying that there are things that we still need to do, but it is not possible to make some of those savings until certain points in time are reached. Given that we were already embarking on an extended piece of procurement from September 2009 to retender our existing contracts in any case, I do not think that it would be wise to renegotiate those contracts when they only had nine months left to run. Our old inspection frameworks do not end until then, and we needed time to develop our new frameworks and to consult on them. Having that time is very important, but we ensured that we went back to the Better Regulation Executive, made our trajectory very clear and made sure that it was comfortable with that. We are not alone in having a little more time to do this.

 

Q343 Mr. Heppell: Was the Ofsted report wrong when it said that Ofsted "will achieve the...target of 30% reduction in costs that we have been set"?

Vanessa Howlison: The important thing to focus on is that we have worked hand in hand with the Better Regulation Executive throughout, to ensure that we came to a position that we have agreed on. Obviously the target was for a 30% reduction, and we were committed to making that reduction. The first thing that we did to get to that position was to find ways to make the remaining savings. When the report was written, that was our intention, but having had time to consider how we would make those savings, it has become clear that we could not make them in full by 2008-09, so we went back to the Better Regulation Executive to ensure that it understood the position and was comfortable with it.

 

Q344 Mr. Heppell: Did it say that that was okay and that you could count inflation?

Vanessa Howlison: To be honest, it is more concerned that we remain committed to achieving our savings in full. I think that we have done very well compared both with some of the other organisations that had mergers planned at the same time and with other inspectorates. I feel very positive about the savings that we have made.

 

Q345 Mr. Heppell: What you are saying is that the savings have been made without hurting your core aims or harming Ofsted at all.

Vanessa Howlison: Absolutely, that has been our focus. It is not easy for any organisation to make significant savings and the first savings are always the easiest to find. We have done a lot of work on fundamental restructuring, particularly of our back office, to make those changes, but you cannot make those savings overnight. Our corporate costs have come down more rapidly than some of the other savings will-those savings depend on contract end dates. We have made those savings as fast as we can without impacting unduly on the business.

 

Q346 Mr. Heppell: I feel as if I am delivering a Catch-22. This may be an unfair question, but one priority identified by Ofsted in the strategic plan was better value for money. To achieve that I would have thought that that budget would not have been touched-it might have increased-but, there has been a 30% reduction in the budget for achieving better value for money. You might say that that itself is achieving better value for money, but it seems to me that, as achieving better value for money was one of your priorities, that was a budget that should not have been touched.

Vanessa Howlison: I am an accountant, but achieving better value for money is not just about reducing costs. It is about cost, but it is also about impact. We have been clear in the work that we have done on our inspection frameworks about the need to ensure that Ofsted is making these savings without damaging impact. In fact, we want to make these savings while enhancing our impact. That is our aim.

 

Q347 Mr. Heppell: I have a follow-up question about the remarks you made about the corporate budget being reduced. Does that mean that your administrative budget has been reduced? I ask that, because when I look at these figures, it seems that the total resource budget seems to be going down. It went up until 2005-06, but then it seems to have gone down. I do not think that the administration budget has followed that. For 2006-07, it actually increased, while you were cutting back on the total budget. What is the reason for that?

Vanessa Howlison: We expect our administration cost budget to reduce. However, the difficulty is that, in the intervening years, the Treasury requires us to charge some of the costs of achieving that corporate change against administration costs. So, for example, with the costs that we will incur in moving to smaller premises in London, which will be incurred this year and next year, we are required to charge them against our administration cost target. In the long run, it is absolutely the case that our administration cost budget will come down, but in the intervening years, when we have to charge the cost of these corporate changes to the administration cost budget, it is difficult to bring that budget down as fast as you would expect.

 

Q348 Mr. Heppell: On that last point, what are you doing to the corporate budget? Does it cover human resources? If you have fewer staff, are there redundancies?

Vanessa Howlison: Yes, is likely there will be some redundancies. One of the things that we have done is look carefully at how we deliver our corporate services. In the past, if you take finance as an example, there were independent finance teams in each of our regional offices, linked to the centre but operating independently. We looked carefully at that model and we did not believe that it was the most effective or cost-efficient model of delivering finance, so we have made some structural changes, as a result of that review. That has also been the pattern in human resources and some of our other corporate functions. It is difficult to make those changes without redundancies. Making those changes obviously reduces staffing and generates some redundancies as a result, so we have also reduced the number of staff in corporate services over the past two years.

 

Q349 Mr. Heppell: Do you think that the target was set too high in the first place?

Vanessa Howlison: I do not think that the target was set too high, because we have a savings target and a savings plan that shows that we can achieve that savings target. I think that the target was set with quite a short time scale for implementation, because the target was set for us in 2006. Two and a half years might sound like quite a long time, but when you have long-running contracts and when you need to restructure functions and departments on that scale, those things take time. You need to go through a period of consultation and ensure that you are doing the right thing, then enact those savings. That all takes time. The time scale was certainly challenging, but we have savings proposals that show that we can meet the target, but just not by 2008-09.

 

Q350 Mr. Heppell: Should not the target have been easier to hit? I say that because if it was 2003-04 to 2010, in the middle of that you had 2006, where the budget rose considerably. I am trying to say things by arguing the wrong way round here. Perhaps it was harder, because you had the higher number to come down to, rather than the 2003 number.

Vanessa Howlison: Yes.

Mr. Heppell: Okay, I get it.

Vanessa Howlison: We had a budget in 2003-04 of £266 million, which rose in 2004-05 and in 2005-06, but from 2005-06 the chart starts to fall. So we were starting to make savings for a range of reasons, before the BRE's target was even set, but from a higher point.

 

Q351 Chairman: Chief inspector, that was a very interesting set of questions and answers between John and Vanessa, but I could not help a wry smile when Vanessa mentioned two and a half years, and of course you would not give that to a school in special measures to sort itself out, would you?

Christine Gilbert: I listened to that interchange. The power of setting the target is strong because it gave us a very strong discipline to do particular things, not on all inspectorates, but certainly on the new organisation. However, there was also the simplicity that nothing would change in that time, and things have changed in that time. We could have made the target without doing a number of things that we are now doing, but we decided, for instance, that the sort of IT we need for supporting the organisation was a significant cost, so that is the sort of thing we negotiated.

Having said that, I was struck by the question about whether we had enough resources. We are now very clear with both the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills that we cannot keep taking on additional work without something else being dropped or additional money being allocated to the budget in future years. One of the things that we were asked to do, for example, was inspect children's centres, and we waited until agreement had been given for that before saying that we would do it. To do that, DCSF had to get the BRE Committee's permission, and Melanie could give you several examples to work with. That is smaller in the area of DIUS, and it is not easy for us. I think that we have been through the easy years in that regard.

 

Q352 Mr. Carswell: My first question is for Christine and then I have a couple of questions for Vanessa. Parliament theoretically approves your budget, as it votes on estimates. Some people might say that that simply rubber-stamps budgets for a whole range of quangos in different areas and that there is no real scope for examination, and Vanessa has talked about having to go back and negotiate with the Better Regulation Executive. Do you, as chief inspector, think that it would enhance Ofsted's accountability if your annual budget was subject to the formal approval of the House of Commons, perhaps by a vote of this Committee?

Christine Gilbert: We do not make representations to the BRE, as the DCSF does that on our behalf. Vanessa, as she will explain in a moment, has had a number of discussions with the DCSF, which, even after the split came, is the lead Department with responsibility for that. I think that the budget is certainly scrutinised: I have a board meeting tomorrow at which the board will scrutinise the budget. Our negotiations with the DCSF are, I think, fairly public and subject to scrutiny.

 

Q353 Mr. Carswell: With respect, that is not the legislature scrutinising it, but yourself and the Executive. Would it enhance your accountability if you were directly accountable to Parliament for your annual budget?

Christine Gilbert: I am perfectly happy with the way it is organised at the moment.

 

Q354 Mr. Carswell: In 2007-08 there was a £12 million, 6% increase in your budget. Was any of that on head count or on topping-up pension contributions, for example, and were is it going?

Vanessa Howlison: We had an additional cost in 2007-08 relating to the staff who used to work for the Commission for Social Care Inspection and who joined Ofsted. They had not previously been part of the principal civil service pension scheme, so when they were transferred, we were required to pick up the cost of the top-up payment on their pensions to transfer them into the civil service pension scheme. We were required to do that.

 

Q355 Mr. Carswell: Was that exclusively for new people coming in, rather than existing employees?

Vanessa Howlison: Yes, it related to people who had previously worked for the CSCI and who were transferred to Ofsted on TUPE-like arrangements. It did not include those from the adult learning inspectorate or elsewhere, because they are already civil servants and already had access to the principal civil service pension scheme.

 

Q356 Mr. Carswell: So, you have not had to increase the budget to top-up the pension pot for existing employees.

Vanessa Howlison: That is correct.

 

Q357 Mr. Carswell: It is, as you say, very impressive how the total budget from 2002-03 to 2010 has gone down. Forgive my scepticism, but has there been some budgetary sleight of hand? Are you re-jigging the accounts, or reclassifying one form of expenditure as another? You say that you have reduced your budget by that impressive amount, but was the Ofsted of 2002-03 the same organisation as it will be in 2010, other than being a super-efficient one, by all accounts? Are you merging two different quangos, or is Whitehall reclassifying one bit of expenditure as something else? Forgive my scepticism, but I find it extraordinary that you can reduce your expenditure by that amount without some Treasury sleight of hand.

Vanessa Howlison: I can assure you that there has certainly been no Treasury sleight of hand, and there has been no sleight of hand from this accountant either. One difficulty was that the baseline year of 2003-04 was before Ofsted existed in its current form, so we had to go back and look at Ofsted's predecessor organisations, identify how much they cost in 2003-04 and add those figures together to get a comparative figure. The 2003-04 budget is what Ofsted would have had if it had existed in its current format. Those figures were submitted to the Better Regulation Executive, which signed them off before using them as the baseline from which Ofsted needed to reduce its costs. There has been no sleight of hand in there; those are real reductions and are all cashable. It has been quite a long journey, and not an easy one at times, but I am more than happy to provide further evidence to you to show that the reductions are real. That is one reason why things have taken a little longer.

 

Q358 Mr. Carswell: I have one final question. To achieve that reduction-you said 42% in real terms-you must either have scaled back your functions massively, or have let a lot of people go, or you must have been mega-inefficient beforehand. Which is it?

Vanessa Howlison: Obviously, the number of staff we employ has gone down. We have tried to make our reductions through natural wastage where possible, and we have been very careful about filling vacancies in the past year or two. If you take Ofsted's predecessor organisations, the old Ofsted had been set a Gershon target to reduce head count by 400, I think it was, and to reduce its budget significantly-I think by £25 million. So, the old Ofsted was already on that journey, from 2005-06. When the merger happened, there was an immediate saving of £15 million because we had a lot of savings on back-office functions. For example, the adult learning inspectorate had its own finance and HR functions, but in the larger, merged organisation, there was an immediate saving there because we did not need to have those separate functions. There was also a significant saving on property. The adult learning inspectorate had an office in Coventry which was not needed after 2007-08, so there has been a £500,000 a year saving as a result of that alone. Also, the comparative £266 million includes a proportion of the Commission for Social Care Inspection's total costs-18.2%. That includes 18.2% of its office accommodation. As Ofsted's delivery model is to home base its inspection staff, we did not need to provide office accommodation for the people who transferred in, so there was a natural saving there as well.

 

Q359 Chairman: I would not accuse you, Vanessa, or you chief inspector, of creative accounting, but could the figures hide a diminution of quality? Is the inspection system that has replaced the adult learning inspectorate as good in quality as it was? Could some of the problems that we have seen in the inspection system for children's services be because we have been trying to do things on the cheap?

Vanessa Howlison: In terms of children's services, that is an area where we have not reduced our costs at all. When you look at our costs for reducing the cost of inspection per learner and user, year on year, you will see some reductions in children's social care, for example, but that is because they are full-costed. It is just showing you the reduction in our corporate services cost behind it. That is not an area that we have targeted for reductions.

 

Q360 Chairman: Chief inspector, no diminution in quality with regard to ALI?

Christine Gilbert: The only thing that I would add to what Vanessa has said is that there were significant inspection changes. There was the move from what was described as section 10 to section 5 inspections. We are just looking at the findings from the National Foundation for Educational Research on the impact of this, so it is not just us who is involved. It is very positive in terms of what schools are saying and what parents are saying. Therefore, I do not think that there is a diminution there. It is just a very different approach. There were significant savings with the first contract for out-sourcing school inspection to the regional inspection providers. As we said earlier, we are just about on to our second contract for next September.

 

Q361 Chairman: But is outsourcing effective in terms of quality, and maintenance of quality? I know that it may be a great cost reduction to get a private sector company to do the work rather than directly employing inspectors. There is a number of companies to which you contract. Presumably your expenditure on those organisations has increased?

Christine Gilbert: The contract was in place when I was appointed. Certainly, coming from outside, I should have known about the contract, but I did not know about it in detail. I might have said this to the Committee before, but I believe that it is the best public-private sector contract I have ever seen operating in terms of its flexibility and what it allows the organisations to do and so on. It is a very well-managed contract, and it does exactly what it says it will do, which is why we are adding to it for this September. We are putting in some of the further education learning skills areas and so on. It gives us a flexibility that we do not have without such a contract.

 

Q362 Chairman: These external private sector people are contracted to do inspections. Is that right across the piece? Do you use them in children's services as well as in school inspections?

Christine Gilbert: No, at the moment, we use them in schools. The contract for September includes surveys and FEs.

Miriam Rosen: At the moment, the present contract includes some other things. For example, it includes independent schools as well as maintained schools. It includes colleges and surveys. The contract from September will also include initial teacher education and the wider remit from the learning and skills side as well. A lot of such inspections are still HMI-led and have HMI involvement as well.

Christine Gilbert: So, over 70% of the schools ones are led by an HMI. All of the inspection reports are checked by the HMI.

 

Q363 Chairman: Is it a very competitive area? I know that there are people at CfBT. Do you contract to a lot of those people?

Christine Gilbert: We are just going through the contracting process now. I will be able to tell you next week.

 

Q364 Chairman: Could we have a list of how many and what the pool is like? By that I mean how diverse it is and what is the range of expertise. Presumably, it is better than a number of companies in the marking of tests market?

Christine Gilbert: It is very well managed. I say that having seen the way in which it has been managed. It is managed by organisations, such as Tribal, Prospects and CfBT. It is linked into regions. That is how it operates at the moment. Whether it will continue to work in exactly the same way, we will have to wait and see until we move into next week.

 

Q365 Chairman: Are you in charge of the training of these people as well as your own?

Christine Gilbert: No, they are obliged to do x, y or z training, but we do not do the training. We might guide them and tell them what they should be doing-for example, they all have to do safeguarding training-but they are responsible for the training.

Chairman: We have to move on to children's services.

 

Q366 Mr. Stuart: May I ask what happens when thresholds for local authority care are not properly understood by partner agencies, whether it be schools or CAFCASS? What are the consequences of any variation among local authorities in the way in which they apply those thresholds?

Christine Gilbert: The second point is really the bigger one. I do not think we have sufficient evidence to pick up the bigger question. I have been talking to the Audit Commission about doing a joint survey just on that in this coming year to see if we can give better information about exactly that second point.

In terms of the first point, the assessment should be a multi-agency one. The vast majority go through the courts, so the courts apply a certain set of processes in that regard. You would expect a full multi-agency assessment. Some would be more hurried than others, depending on what had happened in that particular instance, but there would always be a full multi-agency assessment that related to it.

 

Q367 Mr. Stuart: I was talking particularly about their not understanding the thresholds for access. Is that what you were answering?

Christine Gilbert: I do not know if they would or would not. I have assumed that the people involved locally would understand that. Whether they might all agree that these thresholds are set at the correct level is the issue that I thought you were getting to with your second point. One authority could be much tighter in saying that you would go through a certain process than another authority.

 

Q368 Mr. Stuart: You said in your report that "staff in some services are less well equipped than others to recognise and respond effectively to signs of abuse and neglect." I wonder to what extent that was because of a lack of understanding of the services that they could access on that child's behalf.

Christine Gilbert: I think that is much more to do-I do not know if Roger wants to add to this-with a lack of joining up on the child's needs, and what needs to come from that, and a proper dialogue about that child's needs. I would say that that was probably the key thing.

 

Q369 Mr. Stuart: May I take you back to when you were last before us, when we were discussing the data on the number of child deaths? You will remember well that a figure of 282 was mentioned in your report and yourself and Michael Hart explained to us that 210 of the 282 over that 16 or 17 month period had died as a result of abuse or suspected abuse. Since that time, increasing doubt has been cast over whether that gives an accurate picture; certainly, it is a different picture from the one used by the Department and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. There is a bit of confusion. If we are going hold the Government and yourselves to account, would it not be sensible at the very least for the Department and yourselves to come out with a common way of measuring the data in this area, so that we have a common data set that we can discuss and look at?

Christine Gilbert: Roger wants to speak, but let me just say something on that before I pass the question to him. We stand firmly behind the figures. I went back and double-checked every single figure so that we were absolutely sure about them. The figures are as we gave them to you last time.

We have taken a wider interpretation of neglect or abuse than some other organisations. Somebody gave me the example-I cannot remember if I gave it to you last time-of whether a child crossing a road might not be put down as neglect or abuse. If we have looked at the case and think that there was nobody at home and he was out because he did not want to be at home, and so on, we would have looked at those reasons and perhaps more liberally interpreted the situation. But I think it is appropriate that we tell you what we are getting notifications on. We are saying that not everybody involved would, for instance, have been found guilty in the courts of that.

Roger Shippam: We are very confident that the figure quoted in the annual report is correct. There are two sets of circumstances under which Ofsted would be notified of a tragic death: if the local authorities got a suspicion of abuse or neglect and when a child in local authority care has died. That is a broad way of capturing these figures.

The figures came down to 210 because, over time, we were able to establish that abuse, or neglect, was not a factor in 72 cases. It is true that we are measuring it in a slightly different way from some other agencies, but we are in discussion with them to try to reach agreement on, or a better understanding of, how agencies interpret the figures. It is right that we take a global view initially of the numbers that are notified to us, because that is safer, and ensures that we cover all the youngsters. All deaths are tragic, but we need to know that the numbers we start with are safe.

 

Q370 Mr. Stuart: I presume that you are aware of Michael Hart's letter to the Association of Directors of Children's Services on 22 December. That letter, which I do not believe was provided directly by Ofsted to the Committee, put a slightly different take on the numbers, particularly the figure of 210. For example, it includes nine children died as a result of a killing by another young person, which does not seem to be directly related to abuse in the conventional sense. Why did you not send us a copy of the letter that you sent to the ADCS?

Christine Gilbert: First, I did not know that it had been sent. Secondly, I did not know that you wanted more information. We are very happy to provide more information, and I am happy to take away the example of the nine that you have just given, and to give you chapter and verse on those without mentioning names.

 

Q371 Mr. Stuart: But efforts are being made to reconcile the differences and to ensure that everyone speaks the same way. On this serious matter, no one is well served by confusion on numbers. Is there is a genuine difference or is someone getting it wrong? If it is just a matter of definitions, common definitions would be useful. Are you working on that?

Christine Gilbert: No, not in the discussions that I have had so far.

 

Q372 Mr. Stuart: On serious case reviews, is it your opinion that making them public, suitably redacted, would be a positive step forward to ensure the sharing of best practice and understanding of errors?

Christine Gilbert: I think it would be difficult to do that. I have asked inspector colleagues who go through the reports in great detail about that. I have read several of them, and most identify people by name. It would be very hard for it to be meaningful, and my worry would be that if people knew that they would be made public you would not get at the real lessons to be learned. I understand why people want to see them, but I also understand the argument for not releasing them. The executive summary is released, and I think the letter that we write evaluating them should be released.

 

Q373 Mr. Stuart: To go back to the number of child deaths, when you write to us, will you let us know whether you expect the number of 210 over the period in question to come down? As you said, you were working away from the 282 to reduce it. Can you give us an idea of what is happening about reducing it, and whether you expect it to reduce further? That would be helpful.

Christine Gilbert: The annual report referred to the number of notifications, and the death of any looked-after child is part of that notification. I think we said that last time.

 

Q374 Mr. Stuart: To go back to serious case reviews, given the gravity of the serious case reviews that are referred to local safeguarding children boards, and given your finding that a quarter were inadequate and nearly all were subject to serious delay, what are you doing to rectify that clearly unacceptable situation?

Christine Gilbert: We have a particular role in evaluating the extent to which lessons have been learned from the reviews. That was undertaken by the CSCI, and we started to categorise them into the four grades. It soon became clear that their quality was poor, and that lessons were not being learned quickly enough. We identified that as a serious issue in the joint review by chief inspectors on safeguarding last summer. I ran a special conference that day, inviting people from local safeguarding children boards and from local authorities, and I presented the findings, as we had them before we did the report. As part of the review, we have committed to an annual review of serious case reviews and to explain what we find throughout the country. The attention focused on the area means that it is now a high priority. Support, advice and follow-through are not Ofsted's job. Some of it used to be the CSCI's job, when it was responsible for children, but it is now the responsibility of the Government offices for the regions.

 

Q375Mr. Stuart: Are you aware of the public services programme study by the Economic and Social Research Council's, which looks at child protection practices? The principal investigator is Susan White at the University of Lancaster, but other members of the experienced project team come from the Universities of Huddersfield, Cardiff and Nottingham. Are you aware of that work?

Christine Gilbert: I cannot think of it immediately. If you mentioned what it was, it might strike a chord.

 

Q376 Mr. Stuart: Basically, the study looked at this area and found a worrying picture in many ways. It says that its findings show that the practices that Ofsted reported in its recent more detailed inspection of Haringey, namely incomplete assessment and recording, are produced by the systemic effects of the inspection regime itself, as workers and managers struggle to meet consequential performance targets. It goes back to a question that I asked you, chief inspector, when you were last here, about whether there were systemic reasons for the repeated failure in so many of our children's services departments. As I recall, you did not think that there were. If you are not aware of the report, I do not suppose that there is any point in talking about it further, but it would be interesting to have some written thoughts on it.

Chairman: It figured quite prominently in last week's session on children's services, chief inspector.

Christine Gilbert: As I said the last time I was before the Committee, data can be very important and give you questions to ask and so on, but we are committed to using on-the-ground inspection to get under some of the data issues. We stand by the findings in the joint area reviews, which involved on-site inspection. They do not suggest that the problems identified at Haringey are replicated throughout the country.

Mr. Stuart: For the record, the piece of work is entitled, "Performing 'Initial Assessment': Identifying the Latent Conditions for Error at the Front Door of Local Authority Children's Services".

 

Q377 Mr. Timpson: Chief inspector, can I take you back to your opening statement and your announcement of an annual inspection of children's services in every local authority? I should like to get a little more meat on the bone, and discover whether that inspection will take place in addition to the comprehensive area assessment.

Christine Gilbert: We are asked to rate children's services in every local authority. It was a requirement of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, and we proposed a way of doing so, which I shall go into, if you want me to. The rating would feed into what is described as the area assessment of the comprehensive area assessment. It would look at the outcomes in that area and feed into the CAA's other component, the organisational assessment. That is graded, and the grade that we give to children's services in an area would feed in there.

 

Q378 Mr. Timpson: So the annual child protection inspection of every local authority will take place regardless of whether it falls in the same year as a CAA and regardless of the rating of the local authority's children's services the previous year?

Christine Gilbert: You have conflated two things. The rating of children's services is much broader than child protection. It is a full rating of the performance of the authority across Every Child Matters outcomes. We produce a profile of the area and assess it using all the inspection activity that has been undertaken in the area. We will then make judgments on what that says about the area.

 

Q379 Mr. Timpson: So it is just child protection that we are talking about on the annual basis.

Christine Gilbert: No, the rating is on an annual basis and will look at all inspections that have taken place. It will look at the national indicator set for that area and at the outcomes from the unannounced inspection visit that you have described. It will focus more on child protection. It will also take account of things such as serious case reviews. It will give a broader picture of children's services in an area.

 

Q380 Mr. Timpson: It seems from this announcement that you give specific prominence to child protection in your wide remit as an inspectorate of children's services. It would be helpful to know how that came about. Is it a reaction to the findings in Haringey or was it discussed prior to those events and envisaged regardless of them?

Christine Gilbert: It was discussed prior to those events and the draft proposals were published last September. They are out for consultation. To be fair, we will add more time than we would have added in September. We have reflected hard on what went on, and on what we saw in Haringey. We have added to the inspection inspector days in the authority that will look at what is going on there. However, the proposals were all written out in September.

 

Q381 Mr. Timpson: In your annual report, there is a list of failings that are still too prevalent throughout children's services. Of private fostering arrangements, about 27% were inadequate. Almost 200 children's homes were still rated as inadequate. How will the new inspecting regime that replaces APAs and JARs be different in managing the risks that you know are out there? I apologise for using so many colloquial terms.

Christine Gilbert: Individual inspections of children's homes will carry on. Private fostering is another matter, because the CSCI did one year of inspections and we are doing two. That is not bound in legislation and I will come back to that in a moment. We will continue to inspect children's homes as we do now. That may change over the coming year as the inspection framework changes and as the new minimum standards come in. The inspections will carry on and we will continue to re-inspect homes that are inadequate more quickly. The difference from the APA is that we will look at the children's homes in an area and at the authority's commissioning of placements in children's homes. We will then make a judgment on whether the service the children are getting is good, inadequate and so on. That will influence the overall rating for the authority.

 

Q382 Mr. Timpson: Is this a recognition that APAs were not working?

Christine Gilbert: APAs had a three-year life. When I came to Ofsted, I tried to make some changes in year 2. To be fair, those were not the changes that we are making now. It was very difficult to do that. The commitment had been given to local authorities that there would not be many changes in the final year. We had sent out proposals to make some changes. For example, an authority could not be satisfactory or good if it was inadequate in the areas of living safely and safeguarding. I said that we would come back with more radical plans the following year, which is what we did. APA was of its time, and I never thought that it got sufficiently underneath some of the issues on the ground. That is why we made the changes that we did last September.

 

Q383 Mr. Timpson: Perhaps I can put it like this. Are you confident that the new inspection regime that you are bringing in will be better at rooting out substandard practice as well as promoting good practice where it is found throughout the rest of children's services in other local authorities?

Christine Gilbert: I am more confident that it will be more effective in doing those things than the APA.

 

Q384 Mr. Timpson: When you gave evidence on 10 December, during one of the comments that you made about looking forward to an inspection in the area of child protection and children's services you said, "We need to get underneath the practice of social work, which involves not only looking at what social workers do, but detailed discussions with users about what they think." With these new annual inspections, will there be a greater emphasis on speaking to those on the front line and users of children's services, in order to try and form a judgment as to whether the service that has been provided is of the highest quality that we expect?

Christine Gilbert: There will be some attempt to do that, but there will not be a lot of time to do it in the time that we are there. We are carrying out an annual survey of the views of social workers and users-there are two different sorts of surveys. We want to hear the views of users, which will inform and influence us as we go into an authority.

 

Q385 Mr. Timpson: The availability of support to care leavers is something that comes up again and again. We certainly debated it on a number of occasions during the passage of the Children and Young Persons Bill. Will the inspectorate look at support for care leavers as part of its remit, and will it be on an annual basis rather than the three-year cycle of the comprehensive area assessment?

Christine Gilbert: We will look at that issue in detail in the three-year assessment. The short inspection is mainly focused on assessment, referral and those sorts of things. If those matters show up issues that worry us deeply, we will bring the inspection forward. It will help us in our timetabling of the inspections. We are going to do the safeguarding inspection and the inspection for looked-after children together. Those inspections, particularly of looked-after children, will address the issue that you have identified. We are also worried about that matter; it is identified in both the annual report and the safeguarding report. Although there have been significant improvements, there are still a number of serious weaknesses in those areas.

 

Q386 Paul Holmes: I do not know whether this has already been touched on, but in the evidence that we took, one of the starkest experiences was talking to children who were leaving care aged about 16, 17 and 18. Their experiences of leaving care, and what happened to them at that stage, were widely varied around the country. You said that inspectors will talk to service users. How much emphasis will there be on talking to children in that situation about what they have experienced?

Christine Gilbert: Absolutely, there will be. However, we will not just be waiting for the three-year inspection. We take a number of issues and look at them in some detail. For example, Roger Morgan has a weekly texting system with children in care regarding a particular question or issue. That issue has been brought up time and time again by those children. For example, one of the things that they are most concerned about is the lack of decent housing on leaving care.

 

Q387 Paul Holmes: Let us go back to what has already been talked about, the fairly high number of private fostering arrangements and care homes that are judged not to be adequate or to be inadequate. How often do they get re-inspected? With a school in special measures, the process is very short and brutal. What happens in this instance?

Christine Gilbert: They are two separate things. For private fostering, there are no arrangements-that is one of the things that we shall be recommending in a report to be published in a couple of weeks. I am talking about this at a conference.

 

Q388 Chairman: Is that 11 February?

Christine Gilbert: I am doing a talk on 11 February.

 

Q389 Chairman: But the real report is coming out on Wednesday?

Christine Gilbert: The report will be a little later, because we want to put some other things in that were not there. Essentially, I shall be talking about the headlines of the report on Wednesday. So, that is one of things that we think should happen-there should be another system. There is some agreement, I understand, for one three-year phase, and this is the last year. We do not know what will happen, so we are in negotiation with the DCSF about that being extended. That is separate, because the pattern is still a very poor one in terms of inadequacy-with the same sort of figure now that was quoted a moment ago, or even up to 82.

 

Q390 Paul Holmes: Is it not very worrying that there is no vigorous follow-up on private fostering arrangements and care homes?

Christine Gilbert: Care homes are different. It is worrying that there is no follow-up with private fostering. It has really just been coming to the surface of people's attention.

 

Q391 Paul Holmes: At the same time, there is pressure for the expansion of the use of private fostering arrangements, rather than the normal council-based ones. So, the Government are urging greater use of a system that is not inspected very well and, when it is inspected, is found to be not very satisfactory.

Christine Gilbert: It is not that it is not inspected very well. Whatever the agreement was with the CSCI, it was that this area be inspected for three years. It is not, unlike the other things that we do, built into legislation in some way.

Children's homes are very different. We inspect them regularly. If a home is inadequate, we are back generally within three months to see what is going on. The real worry with children's homes, particularly the inadequate ones, is that they are so volatile, in a way that schools and other areas are not. That is the biggest pattern that we are worried about and want to try and focus attention on.

 

Q392 Chairman: May I clarify, chief inspector? Your report that is coming out on private fostering-that is only where a local authority uses a private sector company to arrange the fostering.

Christine Gilbert: No.

 

Q393 Chairman: That is what I am taking, but from Paul's question to you, that is not the case, is it?

Christine Gilbert: No.

 

Q394 Chairman: It is any local authority using families to provide fostering.

Christine Gilbert: What we are talking about is the sort of situation that Victoria Climbié was in, when she was fostered with a relative and no one knew about the arrangement at all. There are all sorts of questions about whether the right number are being identified and so on.

 

Q395 Chairman: So, the report of yours that is about to come out is about that sort of arrangement and not about using private sector companies to find foster parents.

Christine Gilbert: Yes. I thought you were looking blank.

Chairman: I wanted to make it clear that that was the case.

 

Q396 Fiona Mactaggart: Thank you, chief inspector, for your letter of 29 January following my questions on 10 December about safeguarding and safeguarding procedures with your inspections. On reading the safeguarding policy, which is good in many ways, I am concerned that it does not connect the safeguarding strategies enough to inspection reporting. My anxiety is in cases where there are reasons to be concerned about safeguarding. Your policy rightly focuses on current cases, but it also recognises cases that might be historic. In such cases, parents and others are very concerned to ensure that the issue has been addressed and dealt with and, for example, where staff at a school have been convicted of abuse, that there is not any problem remaining-a ghost of the issue. Your policy does not seem to ensure that this is addressed in inspections. I cannot believe that that is right.

Christine Gilbert: Can I reassure you then? Earlier, I was asked some questions about the changes that are taking place, and I talked about looking at the different inspection and regulation remits that we have. What we have done as a result of that review is insert a judgment on safeguarding for every single inspection and regulation remit. That will happen now in every single one of our remits.

 

Q397 Fiona Mactaggart: Will your inspectors be asked to look at the history of the issue, as well as the current policy in the school, in relation to employment and things like that?

Christine Gilbert: The inspectors will look at employment in those sorts of things, but they would not always know-unless there had been a reason for their attention to be been drawn, and in some cases they would be drawn to ask about the history-if there had been a particular case or something. Is that what you are asking about?

 

Q398 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes, I suppose that it is. All those incidents are reported-there is a reporting centre in Darlington, where serious incidents are always reported, is there not? Therefore, that data must be available to you.

Christine Gilbert: The investigation would not wait for an inspection-that would take place straight away. I do not think that it is automatic that we get that information from anywhere. I would ask Miriam whether that is the case for, for instance, school inspections.

Miriam Rosen: We would not necessarily be informed if there had been a prosecution in a school, but we would look in detail at what was happening in the school at the time of the inspection.

 

Q399 Fiona Mactaggart: I understand that. What I am concerned about is the footprint of previous issues. They create footprints that are not necessarily obvious, unless you are aware of previous history. I am wondering why you do not automatically check to see whether there was an issue in a school that you were investigating and reporting.

Miriam Rosen: We check to see whether there is a current issue.

 

Q400 Fiona Mactaggart: How far back in history does that go?

Miriam Rosen: We would look at the current issues, so if there had been a case, for example, 10 years ago, we would not necessarily know about that.

 

Q401 Fiona Mactaggart: That is 10 years ago. What about five?

Miriam Rosen: I do not think that we would necessarily know about that, either.

 

Q402 Fiona Mactaggart: Do you not think that that might concern parents? It is an incident, which, five years ago, probably affected children who are currently in the school.

Miriam Rosen: If there were an issue that was of concern to parents and children currently in the school, I think that that would be brought to our attention, because we talk to children in many different situations. We also have a parents' questionnaire, so they tell us what their concerns are. If there was anything that affected children currently in the school, I think that we would pick it up.

 

Q403 Fiona Mactaggart: If it were brought to your attention, would it be reflected in the report?

Miriam Rosen: It depends on what we find at the end of the inspection, but I think that if the issue were affecting children currently in the school, then we would be told about it by the parents or the children.

Chairman: A quick question on value for money of children's services from Graham, and then we will finish the session on schools.

 

Q404 Mr. Stuart: How do you reconcile the real needs in children's services, where there are serious problems for improvement, with your year-on-year cost reductions and inspections?

Christine Gilbert: We built the approach that we have adopted to value for money into the way that we think and plan for the organisations-that goes back to the point that I made earlier to the Chairman. If we think that an area of our current work is at risk, we identify it, and say that we cannot do it without dropping something else. We cannot take anything on additionally without some recognition being given for that to be done. I think that we are at the point of having done all the things that we think that we can do-not that we have done them; we might have identified them, and they might be on a journey, but we just cannot keep taking on additional things without it impacting on the work that we are doing.

 

Q405 Mr. Stuart: You have got the lighter touch CAA and the issue that came out with Haringey about your desk-based research. When that research came out and you gave it the thumbs up, you made it clear that it was purely desk based. Those things will feed into concern that if 42% is pared down from your big expenditure, you are often not going to have the resources to be able to respond to additional need and send in another team to look at something and bring it forward. It is all very well in theory, but the truth is it will have to have a big flashing light on it before you are going to be able to sort it out.

Christine Gilbert: That is an issue because we will have to keep a close eye on it. We have factored in a number of what we are calling triggered inspections-where something has arisen and we need to go in to look at it through the CAA process. However, we have not made any reductions in that area or in the inspection of children's social care-absolutely none. For instance, if the contract that we are looking to finalise in the next week or so comes in at a figure higher than anticipated, we are in trouble. We hope that we have made wise estimates in relation to a number of things such as that, but until they have come to fruition we are not sure.

Chairman: I think we will have to leave it there. Paul and Derek have been very patient, as have David and Fiona who are behind them. Would you like to mention school inspection, Paul?

 

Q406 Paul Holmes: A regular issue, about which we have talked before, is that people, such as those involved with the National Association of Head Teachers, often say that there is great fear that Ofsted-especially in relation to more short inspections-uses test results almost to the exclusion of anything else, and that it comes in with a pre-conceived idea based on the stats of test or exam results. Such people have, for example, observed that lead inspectors will say to the school leadership team, "If your standards-in other words your results-are only satisfactory, we can't give you a good award for leadership or management." That might be the case, even though the school has only got to satisfactory because of outstanding leadership and management. Do you have any further observations on that?

Christine Gilbert: That has been said to me too, but it is completely untrue. We could evidence that it is untrue by looking at a number of schools. In the first year of the new school section 5 inspections, I think that there were quite a lot of complaints-Miriam would have been around, but I was not in those days-about the use of and reliance on data. However, that has actually reduced significantly. Although there has been considerable talk about that from the NAHT in particular, it is not evidenced in the complaints that we get about inspection or in the dialogue that I now have with head teachers about inspection.

We rely on and use data, but the key, overriding thing-I cannot stress this enough-is the inspector's judgment of what she or he is seeing in that school having analysed the data. The data help you with the lines of inquiry that you are going to pursue, if you like, but it is what you are seeing in a school-the other evidence that the school presents to you and so on-that allows the inspectors to reach a judgment on the school.

 

Q407 Paul Holmes: So, lead inspectors have never said to a school leadership team, "We can't give you a good rating, because your results are merely satisfactory."?

Christine Gilbert: I cannot say that they have never said it. What I can say to you is that it is not true and if you look at the guidance that we give inspectors, it is pretty clear that it is absolutely not true. It is also not true if you look at the results. You will remember the furore about the schools in national challenge. I think that 17 of those had an outstanding Ofsted categorisation.

 

Q408 Paul Holmes: You mentioned the guidance given to inspectors. In issue 8 of January 2009-so, just four weeks ago-the guidance states, "There are cases where the description of the school being inspected places undue emphasis upon the characteristics of other schools in the locality." It states that, for example, it is preferable for inspectors to use a quote such as, "'this is a non-selective school in a selective area'" rather than comments such as, "'this school is surrounded by a number of grammar schools'" or "'the presence of grammar schools in the area has an impact on the number of higher attaining students at the school'." Why do you feel it necessary to circumscribe in that way the language that inspectors can use?

Christine Gilbert: I will have to pass that one to Miriam. I am not familiar with that example.

Miriam Rosen: The idea is simply to give an accurate description of the context of the school, which is actually about the school itself and the pupils it takes in rather than the surrounding schools, because they may or may not have influenced the children that that particular school has.

 

Q409 Paul Holmes: It is not may or may not, because you also say in the extract here, "Descriptions should only be used if they are directly relevant and make a significant contribution to explaining the inspection outcomes." That is what you have just said. Surely, if a school is a secondary modern-whether you call it a comprehensive, community or specialist school-it is basically a secondary modern, if it is surrounded by grammar schools. That is going to make a significant contribution to explaining the inspection outcome.

Miriam Rosen: The inspection outcome could be outstanding for the school. It does not matter what the intake of the pupils is. What matters is what the school does with those pupils, how well it educates them and how well they then do compared with their starting points. What we were trying to say in that guidance was to be accurate in the description rather than try to describe it in terms of the surrounding schools.

 

Q410 Paul Holmes: Your inspection team, which has been on the ground and into a lot of schools, might feel that the nature of the surrounding schools is relevant. In the infamous case of The Ridings School, for example, it was surrounded by schools that in one form or another selected their intake. It was taking the children who were at the bottom of that system. An inspection team might feel that that was relevant for the report on the school, but you are saying that it should not use those terms.

Miriam Rosen: It can still describe the intake. The really important thing we look at when we go into a school is its effectiveness-how effectively the school educates and cares for its pupils.

 

Q411 Paul Holmes: If there are harsh, abrupt judgments-partly from the Government and partly from yourselves-that the school is not getting X% five grade A to C, it could be relevant that the school is at the bottom of the pecking order in terms of intake.

Miriam Rosen: One of the most important things we look at is the progress that pupils make depending on their starting points. They can make very good progress if they have low attainment on entry, or they can make very good progress starting from higher attainment. Progress is a very important judgment that we make. It is true that the overall attainment pupils reach is also important, because they want to go into the outside world and get jobs or continue into higher education, perhaps. But progress is one of the most important judgments that we make and children from any starting point can make good progress, if they are being given a good education.

 

Q412 Paul Holmes: As a final example, if a school is suffering in terms of its intake because of the nature of the surrounding schools, it becomes more difficult to recruit staff and there are more supply teachers. It is the same as happened in Haringey in a sense-a high number of social workers on short-term contracts passing through, so you did not have the long-term stability of professional staff. If all that is built into a relevant picture of why a school has fewer pupils with five grade A to C, surely the inspectors should have the right to make that clear in their report. You seem to be saying to them that they have got to play that down.

Miriam Rosen: Our evidence is that some schools in that situation do extremely well and some do not. We want all schools to do as well as they can with the pupils that they have.

 

Q413 Paul Holmes: Some of them do extremely well, but the common feature among the bottom 200 schools in the league tables is that they serve very deprived areas.

Miriam Rosen: Yes and, as Christine has just said, some of the schools in the national challenge are judged by us to be outstanding. It is possible to break the mould and to do it. In fact, we are soon to publish a report which looks at 12 outstanding secondary schools, all of which are in deprived areas and do not have particularly advantaged intakes, yet have broken the mould and done exceptionally well. Other schools may learn from that.

Q414 Derek Twigg: Chief inspector, how many struggling schools have you identified so far?

Christine Gilbert: My annual report identified around about 5% inadequate schools, 9% of which are secondary. We are still finding that the secondary sector is stronger than the primary sector.

 

Q415 Derek Twigg: What will you be doing differently to identify struggling schools more quickly?

Christine Gilbert: The new proposals keep the work that we have done on schools in a category-either special measures or notice to improve-much as now. We found that it works well and as schools come out of special measures or notice to improve, they are very positive about it. The difference in the new approach is that we will be looking more closely at satisfactory schools. At the moment, we look at about 5% of those. In future we will look at the progress of satisfactory schools. If it looks from a set of data as though the school is slipping or not making the progress that we want it to, we will go in for a monitoring visit. So that is a feature of the new inspection regime planned for September.

 

Q416 Derek Twigg: How many schools are satisfactory at the moment?

Christine Gilbert: In the secondary sector it must be about 30%

 

Q417 Derek Twigg: So that is quite a large proportion. You intend to inspect all those as part of this quicker regime?

Christine Gilbert: All of them will be inspected once in three years, but annually we will look at the performance of those schools according to things such as their assessment results, attendance, exclusions, and parental satisfaction to assess the risk of leaving the school without an inspection for some time.

 

Q418 Derek Twigg: So once a school is identified as struggling, it will not just be identified more quickly but will be more frequently inspected. Are you talking about an annual inspection?

Christine Gilbert: No. We are saying that we will inspect all schools and this has yet to be agreed because we have asked the DCSF to consider five years rather than six years. The initial proposals were for six years. The idea is that good or outstanding schools would be inspected at least once during that time frame of five or six years. To reassure parents, we would look annually at the data for each of those schools to see whether the picture presented suggested some problem emerging there. So we might go back to one of those more rapidly. But if a school is satisfactory, it would be inspected within three years. That happens now, but we will be doing more frequent monitoring of those schools and monitoring visits to some of those schools to help prevent them from them going into special measures.

 

Q419 Derek Twigg: You said that you would inspect those schools that are either good or excellent every five to six years.

Christine Gilbert: The initial proposals were for six years. Parents were very concerned that generally that meant that a child could go through the school without having an Ofsted inspection. So we asked the DCSF to see whether it would find additional funding for five years. Although it has been positive about that, we have not had a yes yet. It will be five or six years, because we do not think that we can do five years unless we get secure additional funding.

 

Q420 Fiona Mactaggart: Recently three schools in my constituency were inspected at the same time. The conclusion of the inspections was that the first, a secondary modern, was good with promising prospects, the second, a grammar school, was good and the third, a secondary modern, was judged satisfactory. I found that judgment odd. What steps do you take when you have concurrent inspections in a neighbourhood to moderate between them? It seemed to me that the reports on those three schools did not have a shared understanding. That was odd. It struck me that you should have a mechanism whereby if inspections are happening in the same place at the same time there is some effort to moderate between the inspection teams.

Christine Gilbert: Miriam might want to address the detail of that. We have a system of moderation that would be in place up and down the country, but as far as I am aware it would not necessarily pick up the issue that you are identifying.

Miriam Rosen: That is correct. We have quality assurance of inspections across the country so that we can feel reasonably assured that inspections are consistent in their judgments and their approach, but we do not have anything in particular for where three inspections happen to be taking place at the same time within the same local authority.

 

Q421 Fiona Mactaggart: Will you think about that? It is odd that judgments seem really different when inspections are happening at the same time. Perhaps if you have three inspection teams in the same small town at the same time there might be some mechanism to get them to talk to each other briefly.

Christine Gilbert: It would be likely to be the same company, would it not?

Miriam Rosen: Yes.

Christine Gilbert: So, I think that you are pointing to a different issue, which we could at least look at outside this meeting. Generally it would be the same provider doing those inspections. With the new regime that starts in September, we are trying to ensure that we do federations, partnerships and so on at the same time. That is a federation, is it not?

Fiona Mactaggart: Yes, it is a loose federation but a federation nevertheless.

Christine Gilbert: If it is a federation I am surprised that there was no discussion or contact. There would have still been three separate reports, because that is the legislative picture, but if at least two of the institutions are in a federation I am surprised that there was no debate across them.

Miriam Rosen: At the moment, we do not always know when there is a federation. We are trying to put in place mechanisms so that we do know that, and so that when possible we can do the inspections at the same time and produce a judgment about the contribution to the partnership.

 

Q422 Chairman: Is not the Schools Commissioner supposed to know when there is a federation? Should he not tell you when we get another one?

Miriam Rosen: There are 23,000 schools in England and all I can say is that we do not know all of the federations by any means.

 

Q423 Fiona Mactaggart: This is a very loose federation, not a tightly organised one. Can I ask one thing that I have asked you about before? Is your new regime producing a more diverse inspectorate than you previously had?

Christine Gilbert: We are worried about the diversity, not because of the progress that we are making but because we think that the move out of London will impact on the diversity. We identified that as an issue when we were planning and assessing the risk of the move. I will be able to report at the next Committee sitting in May about the progress that we have made. We have made some progress, but we are worried.

 

Q424 Chairman: Where are you moving to? Maidenhead?

Christine Gilbert: We have to reduce our London presence; from next September we will move to a building that we share with-can I say this, Vanessa?

Vanessa Howlison: Yes.

Christine Gilbert:-the Food Standards Agency. We will be downsizing considerably our London presence, and using the buildings in the three regional bases and more home working than previously.

 

Q425 Fiona Mactaggart: My concern is about the diversity of the inspectorate, which I assume does not spend much time at your headquarters.

Christine Gilbert: No.

 

Q426 Fiona Mactaggart: Can we get some figures on that?

Christine Gilbert: We can absolutely give you the figures with the annual monitoring that comes in in April, and we can give you a progress update since the last time that we did it.

Miriam Rosen: I can give you the figures for the inspectors who have conducted school inspections in the past quarter. Of those, 5% were from minority ethnic backgrounds. That is some progress, but we would hope for more.

Christine Gilbert: It has been built into the contract from September.

 

Q427 Chairman: I asked whether you can get information from the schools commissioner. Do you meet the schools commissioner on a regular basis?

Christine Gilbert: Yes. Miriam and I meet him every four months.

 

Q428 Chairman: When do you think there will be a new one?

Christine Gilbert: I have no idea.

 

Q429 Chairman: Nor does anyone as I understand it.

On school inspections, increasingly, federations and co-operation across schools for delivery of diplomas are important-I am absolutely going to get you, Melanie, to say three words on the record, or you will break a Committee tradition-but does it count for much? When I look at your reports, I wonder what is the liaison. Some schools I know could be on the moon for all the consideration that is given to the local community. There is no relation to, or roots in, the local community. The Department wants intelligent home-school liaison, but those things do not seem to play any part in an inspector's report.

Christine Gilbert: I would say two things on that and we will be able to report more fully when we meet you again. First, the judgment on community cohesion is shifting that situation a little and, secondly, the plans for September for school inspection include judgments on partnership working. That is not final, but in the draft that I have seen, it will apply in three things that we judge. The new model will make those things clearer, but a report will still be related to outcomes and impact.

 

Q430 Chairman: If the most significant element in a child's education when you strip everything away is the support it gets from its family, surely you should check whether the school-family connection is being fostered in a positive way.

Christine Gilbert: I thought you meant more formal partnership considerations. We already look at the engagement of parents and so on. We will be assessing parental views every year, which will be helpful.

 

Q431 Chairman: Melanie, do you do anything in terms of the linkages between the further education sector and local schools?

Melanie Hunt: Yes we do. In fact, we look at a number of different sorts of linkages and partnerships. One of things that has struck me as the debate has been going on is the complexity of those relationships. We know that all sorts of different partnerships take place for specialist, cross-phase and quality reasons. One of the challenges that we have had with the new FE inspection framework is mapping those partnerships. Critically, we are running a survey programme-it is in its second year-looking at the introduction of the new diplomas. That especially is based on partnership between school and college and how the joint curriculum planning, delivery and evaluation takes place. I think that that will yield some very helpful results at the end of this first year of the diplomas.

Chairman: I am afraid that you have been squeezed, but we can look quickly at school room report cards.

 

Q432 Mr. Chaytor: Will the abolition of Key Stage 3 SATs make any material difference to Ofsted reporting?

Christine Gilbert: I do not think that it will. The schools will still need to assess the progress of the pupils in the school and we will still need systems for monitoring, evaluation and so on.

 

Q433 Mr. Chaytor: If Key Stage 2 SATs were abolished, would there be any difference to Ofsted's reporting?

Christine Gilbert: That is different. The parents whom I meet, in contrast with the NAHT survey that I read last week-this is not scientific-are positive about having tests at a break in the stage of transfer, as they see it. We use those as part of looking at the overall value added that the secondary school has and so on. I am sure that we would find something else if they were abolished, but they are a real help to us when we look at a school.

 

Q434 Mr. Chaytor: Do you think the school report card concept can give anything more than is currently available through the performance tables and Ofsted reports?

Christine Gilbert: One of the things that parents said to me during our consultation on the school proposals-it mirrored something that this Committee said-was that they were bombarded with information and no longer knew what any of the information about assessment, attainment and so on meant. It is hard for people, even in the professional world, to understand the different tables and so on, so I do see the report card as having the potential to clarify and cut away some of that. One parent who does a lot in the governor world and so is very familiar with a lot of this said, "I want to know the key things that I should be looking at when I look at schools." If we choose the right ones, it will prioritise the things that are captured in a card.

 

Q435 Mr. Chaytor: You are suggesting that there is too much information now and the report card should offer less information? You are suggesting a report card should be a simplification rather than an enrichment of the information?

Christine Gilbert: Yes, and I would still see inspection as complementing that. It is not in itself sufficient, for the reasons that we talked about earlier-the limitations of just looking at data-but you could look at it and it could help you in triggering an inspection, for instance, by just looking at the picture.

 

Q436 Mr. Chaytor: So if it is about simplification rather than enhancement, why not just simplify the data in the performance tables?

Christine Gilbert: This is a way of simplifying the data. I am sure there are others, but it is a way of simplifying the data and capturing, in something quite short, what the picture is.

 

Q437 Mr. Chaytor: What should be taken out of the performance tables?

Christine Gilbert: They just need to be made more readable. If you look at some of the report cards that I have seen-or score cards, as they were described initially-they just give you immediately a picture of what the school is like. But I stress-I cannot underline this enough-that you need to link that with the inspection performance as well.

 

Q438 Mr. Chaytor: So do you think the report card should have a single descriptor of the school's performance that would include some of the data currently in the league tables or performance tables and some of the judgments in the inspection report? Should it be reduced to a star rating or a five-point scale as is the case for other public institutions?

Christine Gilbert: We are still debating that. Miriam is not a member but an assessor on the expert group which is looking at that and contributing to the debate, but, at this stage, I do not think that Ofsted would give a view on it. There are pros and cons with all these things.

 

Q439 Chairman: Are you a bit sceptical about it? It sounds as though you regard it as a gimmick.

Christine Gilbert: No, I thought I was being too positive, so I started to pull back.

 

Q440 Chairman: So you are very positive about the school report card?

Christine Gilbert: I am positive about it. It has the potential to give far greater clarity to parents about the school's performance. There is quite a way to go, and I will be interested in what people are saying through the consultation, which I have not seen.

 

Q441 Chairman: Theoretically, then, Vanessa, we could halve your budget and rely much more on the school report card. That would be a wonderful way of saving money, would it not?

Vanessa Howlison: Even as an accountant, I would say that you still need inspection to get a full, rounded view of provision.

Christine Gilbert: That is why I keep stressing all the time with the report card that it comes with inspection. However, it could help. One of the reasons why we looked at it hard was that we thought that we would not need to do our own risk assessments annually if there were an annual report card-we would use it. We still think that there may be a way to reach that, but the report cards will not be introduced until 2011, if they are introduced, and that is too far away for us. We need to have something in place before then.

It is important that we do not confuse everybody out there by going one way while the DCSF goes another way, so we have been trying to work closely with the Department on this matter.

 

Q442 Mr. Stuart: A quick health check on diplomas, which you mentioned, Melanie. Exam boards told us that it was the most complicated qualification they had ever come across, and there are logistical difficulties, not least in rural areas such as the one that I represent. Are diplomas on track? Are you confident and happy about them, or do you have any warning notes to share with us today?

Melanie Hunt: As part of the survey programme that I mentioned, last year's survey looked at local authorities that had begun to establish partnerships and to engage in planning. The results were actually quite positive. It appears that all the right things were in place.

However, this year will be the true test, because, obviously, it is the first year that learners have been enrolled and the programme is running. It really is too early to say anything. There has been a variety of feedback from the first few visits that have taken place. It is important to bear in mind that the first partnerships that are going through-those that started in September 2008-were the forerunners and therefore perhaps the best. Many had a history and a track record of working together, so they put together strong proposals that enabled them to be part of the first wave. Clearly, it is important that we all learn the lessons from the best going first so that that they can feed out and inform those who follow.

Chairman: Chief inspector, we have had a good session with many varied questions and some positive answers. I am afraid that we will be seeing you again soon because we will be doing an inquiry into social work training imminently and another into the training of teachers. It will not be long before you are sitting in that seat again. Thank you for your attendance today and for your full answers to questions.