MEMORANDUM
SUBMITTED BY
THE ASSOCIATION
OF SCHOOL
AND COLLEGE
LEADERS (ASCL)
1. The Association of School and College
Leaders (ASCL) represents 14,000 members of the leadership
teams of maintained and independent schools and colleges throughout
the UK. This places the association in a unique position to see
this initiative from the viewpoint of the leaders of both secondary
schools and colleges.
2. ASCL welcomes the Committee's inquiry into
school accountability, an issue in which the association has long
had an interest and on which it has published a number of papers.
Of particular interest are the most recent ASCL paper on Strengthening
intelligent accountability and the association's response
on recent proposals for a "school report card". These
are attached.[7]
They and the earlier papers can be found on the ASCL web site
www.ascl.org.uk
3. It is clearly right that schools are
held to account for their use of public funds and, even more importantly,
their contribution to the lives of the young people whom they
help to educate. Therefore nothing written here or in the other
ASCL documents referred to should be taken as an attempt to avoid
such accountability—the association is strongly of the view
that there should be such accountability.
4. However, it is clear that the present
system is seriously flawed to the extent of not being fit to effectively
and fairly hold schools and their leaders to account. It has grown
haphazardly over generations and now needs to be rethought systematically
and replaced with a properly designed system of a limited number
of elements carefully selected not to be burdensome but that more
accurately reflect the performance of schools and those who work
in them.
5. The accountability system has become
less trusting of schools and teachers, though surveys consistently
show headteachers and schools as amongst the most trusted individuals
and institutions in society.
6. This has led to an ever expanding system
of accountability that, though it does not deliver is hugely expensive.
This cost is especially damaging in its, often ignored, opportunity
cost: it uses a great deal of the time and energy of school leaders
and teachers that would be much better devoted to the education
of young people.
7. Part of the reason for this overburden
is that schools are held accountable in too many different ways
to too many different "masters". The education system
is and should be primarily accountable to and for the young people
in its care. When we are considering children, especially younger
children, that accountability is effectively to their parents.
There is also clearly a need to be accountable to society for
public funds being used to good effect. But this is ramified by
many different agencies of central and local government, so that
headteachers, as prime leaders of schools, find themselves effectively
accountable to children and parents as individuals, those groups
collectively, to the governing body, to the local authority, to
members and officers of the local authority, to school improvement
partners (SIPs), to advisers appointed by National Strategies
or the National Challenge, to Ofsted, to the Children's Commissioner,
to Children's Trusts, to the Learning and Skills Council, to the
press, to partnerships set up to address behaviour, diplomas or
other locally agreed issues, and to many more. Further, most of
these accountabilities are themselves multiples.
8. These accountabilities often conflict,
looking for different priorities and demanding incompatible behaviours.
For example, different plans and different targets have to be
agreed with different bodies.
9. A favourite phrase of recent years has
been "challenge and support", but much of the support
is not actually helpful, and amounts to extra accountability lines.
This is often the result of a mismatch between power and responsibility,
when those advising schools have an expectation that their advice
will be followed, and may be able to punish if it is not, but
have no responsibility for its implementation or outcome.
10. In the 1970s it became accepted wisdom
that schools were not accountable, and that there was too little
information available about them outside their walls. This may
have been true, but the subsequent tendencies for "naming
and shaming", for the publication of misleading "league
tables", for accountability systems to become more intrusive,
and for them to distort educational practice, has been very damaging.
11. Following the 2003 ASCL publication
on school accountability, and a Cabinet Office report on bureaucracy
in schools, the then Schools Minister, David Miliband, introduced
in 2004 a "new relationship with schools" as a
more coherent accountability system for schools. It covered Ofsted
inspections, school self-evaluation, a "single conversation"
with a school improvement partner (SIP), and a school profile
for parents. Performance tables were retained alongside. Since
then Ofsted inspections have been linked better to self-evaluation,
but league tables have become more comprehensive, the school profile
is rarely used by parents, and the single conversation has suffered
from the top-down target setting culture of the DCSF and its agency
the National Strategies.
12. A balanced scorecard can only sensibly
be introduced as the main accountability measure if performance
tables and the school profile are abolished, and if the role of
the SIP returns to what was originally intended—support
from and challenge by an informed, credible peer professional.
13. School self-evaluation is undermined
by the present system, as the self evaluation form has been imposed
on schools and has been increasingly subverted to provide extra
accountability. Self-improvement has been obstructed by a fixation
on categorising schools as failing in various ways, leading to
a culture of fear which stifles creativity and leads instead to
mere compliance.
14. The emphasis has been upon schools as
institutions to be corrected or rewarded rather than upon the
need to do right by all the millions of individual young people
who attend them. So a great deal too much effort is spent on deciding
which schools belong in various categories of failure, and which
should be awarded various prizes and plaudits. (Sometimes the
same schools of course.)
15. Though the present Government has emphasised
partnership the accountability system is predicated on, and encourages,
competition between schools at a destructive level, since it is
wholly based on the performance of the individual school.
16. Too little account is taken of progress,
improvement or performance over time; so that teachers and their
leaders can find that they are only as good as their most recent
results. This has led to an increasing number of school leaders
being dismissed, often in ways more redolent of the football club
than the classroom, contributing to the sense of threat and compliance
culture mentioned in paragraph 13 above.
17. A particular fault of the current situation
is that it systematically rewards those with the easier job and
disadvantages those working in the most difficult circumstances.
Ofsted inspections, leagues tables and just about every other
part of the system seem to be designed to give maximum discouragement
to those working in deprived areas and with children receiving
little support from home. It is possible for the latter group
to avoid actual penalty, and even to be rewarded, but much more
difficult. This in turn exacerbates the difficulties that such
schools often have in recruiting first-class staff at all levels.
18. There is an obsession in the current
accountability regime with numerical performance indicators and
targets based on them. There may be a place for such approaches,
but there is at present little room for anything else. And the
use to which the figures and targets is put reflects a managerialism
drawn from, but generally long abandoned by, private industry.
19. The numerical performance indicators
(PIs) used are not well chosen, creating perverse incentives.
For example the widely used and reported measure "Percentage
of 16 year olds gaining five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C,
including English and maths", has the effect of concentrating
attention on those students who are close to that boundary and
diverting it away from those well above or below that level, whose
needs may be as great or greater.
20. This is compounded when an arbitrary
threshold level is chosen (for example the 30% level of the above
indicator for the National Challenge last year).
21. Too many of the measures used are norm-referenced,
on the other hand, effectively putting schools into a rank order.
This frequently leads to outrage that as many as a quarter of
schools are in the bottom quartile, and half of them are below
the median! This would amuse the numerate if it did not sadden,
and if it did not do so much damage.
22. It is sensible to set targets based
on an analysis of previous performance rather than plucking them
out of the air, as happened with the 30% mentioned above or the
absurd target that every child must make two national curriculum
levels of progress per key stage.
23. However, such measures and targets should
then be baselined in a particular year so that progress can be
seen from year to year. The contextualised value-added (CVA) measure,
for example, is a valiant effort to overcome some of the weaknesses
of other measures by taking account of each student's actual progress
in context. It is the most sophisticated measure of school performance
but still has weaknesses, one of which is that it is re-calculated
on a normative basis each year. So it is possible to improve performance,
but still see a drop in the CVA measure because the improvement
was not as great as that achieved by similar students elsewhere.
24. The obsession with numerical indicators
has largely driven out other means of assessing performance. One
that remains is inspection, but this too has been undermined as
Ofsted inspectors often seem to rely almost entirely on what the
numbers have told them before they visit the school.
25. To a large extent the statistical instruments
of the accountability system are used without full understanding.
An example is in paragraph 21 above. There is also a tendency
to believe that a statistical instrument tells the whole story,
when such can only ever be proxies, and to base far too much on
variations so small as to be well within confidence intervals.
26. It is politically difficult to move
away from some of these measures. The retention of the school
league tables and the overblown testing regime in particular seemed
to have become a test of political machismo. Yet when the KS3 tests
were abolished in 2008 there was relatively little adverse
comment and a good deal of praise for the decision.
27. It is worth contrasting public perception
of the education system (which is that it is poor) with the attitude
of parents and children to their school (which is that it is good).
The factors mentioned above have led to a sense that there is
a crisis in the school system, that it is generally performing
very badly, despite direct experience of it that is almost always
good.
28. This entirely unwanted outcome has been
achieved at great cost, by an accountability system that is not
only flawed but greatly overblown. At every turn there are pressures
to add yet more to it, but those who demand that schools should
report every instance of bullying for example, or every instance
however slight of any use of force, never indicate what it is
that schools should stop doing instead. These are important matters,
but there is simply no need for an extra and elaborate accountability
system in these areas.
29. The possibility of sampling and of other
types of research that would not involve every school in the country
in new reporting, new data collections and new lines of accountability
seems to have been forgotten, presumably because the massive cost
of the more simple-minded system does not have to be borne by
those asking for it.
30. The proposed "school report card"
(or as ASCL would rather have it "balanced scorecard")
is an attempt to address some of the weaknesses of the present
system by drawing different indicators together to offset one
perverse incentive against another and to limit accountability
measures to a single list. As such it is welcome, but ASCL is
not convinced that it will not simply be added to the existing
system rather than replacing it, or that it will not also grow
without limit as every interest group adds its particular favoured
element.
31. The association's considered response
to the school report card proposal sets out very clearly the traps
into which the initiative should not fall. It is attached.
32. The school report card for 11-16 schooling
will need to sit alongside the Learning and Skills Council's Framework
for Excellence, which is a similar set of indicators appropriate
to post-16 education and that should apply to school sixth
forms as well as colleges and other post-16 providers.
33. The present inquiry is into school accountability,
but it is worth noting at this point that the accountability system
for colleges, whilst different from that for schools, shares many
of the same faults.
SUMMARY
34. The accountability system for schools
is immensely more expensive than it needs to be, and produces
little value.
35. It is fixated on certain numerical performance
indicators and targets that are poorly understood by those who
use them, and are frequently misused.
36. It is overdue for a complete redesign
on principles of intelligent accountability.
37. I hope that this is of value to your
inquiry, ASCL is willing to be further consulted and to assist
in any way that it can.
February 2009
7 Not printed. Back
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