Memorandum submitted by Mary Wallis-Jones
The 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) in
effect made governing bodies the main avenue of accountability
for schools. With Local Management of Schools governing bodies,
which included the headteacher, as well as teachers' reps, local
authority representation, elected parents and governors selected
by the GB to represent the local community, took control of the
entire revenue budget and most of the capital budget of the school.
The GB became responsible for planning the budget both on an annual
basis and in the long term, so that all the resources available
to the school were used to maximum effect to ensure progression
for all the pupils, whatever their needs and abilities.
This meant that governing bodies were responsible
for deciding how many people should be employed in the school,
what their responsibilities should be and what they should be
paid. Most importantly, they had responsibility for appointing
the headteacher, and in doing so, for determining how they would
work with the Head in planning the use of resources to deliver
the curriculum effectively to all the pupils. The knowledge and
skills of governing bodies and Headteachers in strategic planning
and financial management obviously varied between schools according
to the individuals involved. This meant that the practical arrangements
for the extent to which issues were:—discussed and agreed
in the whole governing body, or by its committees or Chair, or
the head's recommendations accepted without discussion, varied
between schools. However, there is research evidence that the
most successful schools had "effective" governing bodies
where there was an collaborative partnership between the Head
and the Governing Body. Failing schools have tended to be those
with weak management and weak and ineffective GBs which have rubber
stamped the head's decisions, not involved themselves in trying
to understand why achievement or behaviour was not good, and have
therefore failed in their "critical friend" role and
not held the headteacher to account.
The role of the governing body in accountability
was well recognised in the first Ofsted Framework. (Sections 6.1 and
6.3.) The Governing Body of all maintained schools was seen as
the "responsible authority" and as such the body which
facilitated the inspection arrangements and to which Ofsted reported.
It was then the governing body which was responsible for the post
Ofsted Action Plan.
Successive Ofsted Inspection Frameworks have
reduced the responsibilities of the Governing body and the role
of governors in the inspection process. It is now the head who
arranges everything and the short notice given for inspection
has been given by Ofsted as the rationale for not involving the
GB in the process. With the current framework we understand that
it is unlikely for the inspectors to talk to more than one governor,
ideally the Chair, but that this can consist of a telephone conversation,
and might not happen at all. Governors' organisations think this
is highly unsatisfactory, especially since the governing body
is a corporate entity and individual governors may not act on
their own. All views and decisions need to be ratified by the
full GB, even if this is in retrospect.
Accountability for what?
A major plank of the ERA was the introduction
of the National Curriculum (NC) and National Curriculum Assessment
(NCA). The National Curriculum established an entitlement for
all children between the ages of 5 and 16 to a broad
and balanced curriculum wherever they lived and whatever their
socio-economic background, ethnicity, first language, faith, Special
Educational Needs (SEN) or disability. NCA was designed to check
at the ages of 7, 11, 14, and 16 that all children in England
and Wales were getting their entitlement. This had not previously
been possible because there was no common view of what should
be taught or how. There were probably very wide differences between
schools and between parts of the country. This meant that there
was no way to get any kind of measure of the "standards"
of education being delivered, at least in primary schools, since
their pupils took no national/pubic assessments or tests. Since
there was no common curriculum for each year group, any national
assessment of standards, such as the sampling method used by the
APU could not relate to specific knowledge or factual information.
Throughout the 20th century, educational research
showed that the main determinant of educational achievement in
England was the socio-economic circumstances of the child's parents.
Attempts by successive governments since the 1944 Education
Act to ameliorate this effect on attainment have had little or
no effect. It follows that differences between schools were largely
determined by the socio-economic background of their intake. They
had very little to do with the quality of teaching and learning
in the school, or even the resources available to the school or
the effectiveness of its management. However, research showed
that the best schools could make up to a 10% difference in the
average achievement of pupils in the school and that "good
schools" benefited all their pupils, whatever their "abilities"
and whatever their background.
In 1991 the Conservative Party published
"The Parents' Charter". This was effectively their Education
Manifesto for the 1992 General Election. This asserted that
the then new Key Stage 1 National Curriculum Assessments
for a school should be used by parents to ascertain which were
the "best" primary schools in their choice of school
for their children. Of course, since the above was the case, what
these results largely indicated was which were the predominantly
"middle class" schools. Hence the popularity of league
tables.
NCA was designed to have a number of discreet
purposes. Within the school it helped teachers know what each
child knew and could do, so that they could plan their future
learning and ensure that each child made progress, whatever level
they were working at. For parents it could be used as tangible
evidence that their child was progressing. Average progression,
controlling for individual pupil characteristics (ie Value Added)
in the school could be used by local authorities and Government
to assess how well schools were doing for their pupils.
However, in 1993 teachers boycotted the
KS1 assessments, so they largely did not take place, and
no data was published. The main teachers' complaint was that the
assessments took too long, especially the practical tasks in Science,
and were therefore not manageable in the classroom. This led to
the Dearing Review and a narrowing of the assessments made to
"paper and pencil" tests which all pupils in the class
could do at the same time.
The rest as they say is history. Year by year
the tests became narrower, the curriculum became ever more restricted
to those things which were tested, and eventually KS1 tests
were abandoned and then last year KS3 SATs as well. There
has been some attempt to broaden the curriculum with compulsory
sport, music and cooking, but the straightjacket of the core remains.
Future School Accountability—Why not put
the Governing Body back at the centre?
Since 1997 the role and responsibilities
of the Governing Body have been considerably reduced as their
representativness of relevant stakeholders has diminished. Their
control of strategic budget planning has been undermined by such
moves as performance management of teachers, which gave teachers
massive pay increases as of right if their headteacher considered
them eligible. (NB Since pay in the school is likely to account
for around 85% of the revenue budget, lack of control of large
pay increases has dramatically reduced GBs ability to plan strategically
for changes in the staffing structure and planned maintenance
of the building.) There have also been numerous Government initiatives
which have provided extra money to some schools for short term
programmes, eg Behaviour Improvement Programme (BIP), making long
term budget planning more difficult.
However, CASE believes that true local democratic
accountability of schools can best be achieved through the work
of a stakeholder governing body, where each stakeholder has an
equal voice, and there is a balance between those groups on the
GB which have a sectional short term interest in the school (the
producers and consumers), and those who have a wider and long
term view (the Local Authority and the local community,). Governing
bodies should be large enough to include governors of varying
lengths of experience in each stakeholder group, so that experience
of what works and what does not work can be passed on to newer
governors. Larger GBs (eg at least four in each stakeholder group)
can control their own training and succession planning so that
they are: a) not bereft when a long term Chair leaves, and b)
are not persuaded by their lack of experience or capacity to rubber
stamp everything the headteacher says.
Lack of such a stakeholder governing body is
one of CASE's major objections to Academies, where the sponsor
selects the majority of the governors, and to Trust schools where
the Trust appoints the majority of the governors. These schools
in our view have no form of local democratic accountability, which
as state funded schools, they should have.
As expressed elsewhere, we believe the current
National Curriculum Assessment system, and the Ofsted inspection
system, which hinges its judgements of schools on the very narrow
NCA results and school comparisons based solely on these, are
both totally inadequate as a basis for school accountability.
Judgements of schools need to be much broader and need to be made
and communicated by all the stakeholders in the school. We suggest
the reintroduction of something like the Governors Annual Report
to Parents, abolished in the 2006 Education and Inspections
Act. Abolition was possible because governors, Headteachers and
parents had ceased to take it seriously, because it had become
formulaic, short and lacking in any new information. A new style
Report, compiled by governors on the basis of their knowledge
of the school (not just Headteacher reports) could include a report
on pupil progression in the last year, using NCA results as well
as wider information, report on behaviour and attendance, (progress
or not) SEN including not just what arrangements are made in the
school but the number of children progressing from School Action
Plus to School Action or whatever, curriculum innovations and
their success/popularity, and progress on the five "Every
Child Matters" outcomes.
Such a Governors Annual Report could also be
addressed to the Local Authority as a basis for discussion with
LA Inspectors/SIPs and LA support for school improvement. Involving
LA personnel in a revived Annual Parents Meeting, together with
more meaty content might attract more interest than is the past
experience of most schools. And why not invite the public in too
to visit the school and hear what it is doing?
MWJ was a local authority governor of various
schools in LB Camden from 1974-2006, and a member of the Executive
of the National Governors' Council from 1999-2004, during which
time she represented school governors to government on various
subjects, in particular Attendance and Behaviour and School Finance.
The PhD was awarded in 2003 for a thesis entitled: "Education
Research and Policy: a case study of Primary School Effectiveness
post Plowden", which investigated the relationship between
education policy and practice, and showed how research findings
rarely if ever really affected policy development.
26 February 2009
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