EXAMINATION
OF WITNESSES
(QUESTION NUMBERS
1-19)
KEITH BARTLEY,
MICK BROOKES,
DR JOHN
DUNFORD, MARTIN
JOHNSON, CHRISTINE
BLOWER AND
JOHN BANGS
16 MARCH 2009
CHAIRMAN: I
welcome Christine Blower, John Dunford, Martin Johnson, Mick Brookes
and Keith Bartley to our session today. As I said outside, this
is a very important beginning of a new inquiry, which is one of
the three that we have set ourselves to do this year—testing
and assessment, the national curriculum and accountability. It
really is a pleasure that you have responded to our request. I
know that Christine has some difficulties today, so we are pleased
that she has come to the first part of the session. After that,
she will suddenly change places with John Bangs to allow her to
get her train. That was by mutual consent, and we are very pleased
to accommodate her.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: Thank
you.
Q1 CHAIRMAN:
The rest of you have to stay the whole time, and if Mick Brookes
does not behave, we will keep him on after school. I am not going
to ask you for long statements because we have your CVs, but if
you could say whether we should get rid of an inspection system,
make one fundamental change to it or what you resent most about
it. Give us a starter, Christine.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: My starter
is that, at the moment, what we have is a system that is very
low in trust and very high in accountability. We could of course
ask to move to a system that is low in accountability and high
in trust, but what we think is important is a system that is high
in accountability and high in trust. Therefore, we should like
to see the accent move from the existing Ofsted arrangements to
a system in which school self-evaluation is meaningful and owned
by the people in the establishment—the teachers—and
is also meaningful to parents and students.
DR
DUNFORD: That
was very good, Christine.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: That
is the bar.
CHAIRMAN: Christine,
you have astonished them all by your succinctness.
DR
DUNFORD: If
we are pursuing, as I hope we are, a system of what I call intelligent
accountability—accountability that drives behaviour in schools
that improves the education of children—we have to look
at accountability in the round. There are so many different aspects
to accountability at the moment. The Secretary of State says that
he wants to bring in a report card. If he does that, it has to
be in the context of everything else. If the report card comes
in, several other things have to go. I have some suggestions,
but perhaps they can come later.
CHAIRMAN: Can
we come back to those in a bit.
MARTIN
JOHNSON: My
plea in these opening remarks is that the Committee does not get
bogged down in the detail of the various mechanisms that comprise
our accountability framework. It is vital that the Committee maintain
a focus on the big picture and how all the mechanisms fit together.
The position of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers is that
of course teachers and schools need to be accountable, but at
the moment we have too many overlapping mechanisms, which together
are unbalanced. They reflect a system with power located in two
places: overwhelmingly in central government and then at school
level. The Government have found it necessary to reinvent new,
improved local authorities. Crucially, they now have duties with
regard to school improvement. For us, the logic is obvious. We
need less accountability to Whitehall and more to county hall.
We need to put local communities back in the driving seat and
schools back under local democratic control. We need better integration
of inspection and support. Since Parliament has located the latter
with local authorities, it should locate the former there, too.
Let me have a word, if I may, about accountability to parents.
Parents are transient. Communities have permanence. Parents are
overwhelmingly less concerned about a school than they are about
their child in a school. We must try to ensure that parents can
feel happy about their relationship with the school, while recognising
that that accountability relationship is largely informal. Finally,
to repeat what someone else has said, the kind of accountability
mechanisms that we need might depend a lot on how we answer the
following questions: what is the condition of public servants
in our schools, and ought we to start from a presumption of trust
or do they need the continued application of a large hammer?
MICK
BROOKES: Let
me make three points. First, accountability systems have to be
manageable, and there is such a stream of accountabilities for
schools. Take local authorities for instance: there are not just
school improvement partners and local authority school improvement
teams—health and safety, human resources and all those things
are coming to schools. There is a dimension between larger schools—I
am not talking about secondary—that have a team behind them
and can manage some of that, and smaller schools where there is
the head. Every second that the head is taken away from that role
of leading children and their curriculum and well-being is a second
wasted. Secondly, accountability systems have to be fair and based
on data that are based on the school's context. We have had quite
a lot of debate about that. I agree entirely with John's coining
of the phrase "intelligent accountability", but there
must also be emotional intelligence. If the outcome of accountability
is that we call schools silly names such as "coasting",
that is not emotionally intelligent. I do not think that having
a large letter on the front of the report card is emotionally
intelligent either. It simply undermines morale in those places.
That is not a good way of raising the standard of children's education.
KEITH
BARTLEY: Our
General Teaching Council's primary interest and purpose is to
support improvements in teaching and learning in the public interest.
In the context of this inquiry, we wish to examine how the accountability
arrangements govern the work of schools and how the practice of
teachers can be developed so that they support real improvements
in practice. That is not in any way to dismiss the important function
of scrutiny. Education is a major public service affecting the
life chances of every child and young person, and it must therefore
be held to public account. We believe that true accountability
should do more. It should support improvements in practice, and
it should give parents and pupils a very clear account of how
schools and teachers support children's learning. We believe that
there is real value in the school self-evaluation process, and
that school improvement partners are making a genuine contribution
to helping schools to reflect on their progress and their improvement
plans. Inspection is also important, but one-off, episodic inspections
can have only limited impact. If accountability is to serve the
important purpose of scrutiny and make a positive impact on practice,
a more sustained process of dialogue and external support and
challenge is needed. Schools have many requirements on them to
give an account of their work, and those requirements need to
be both intelligent and proportionate. I welcome the signal given
last week, by the Prime Minister, that public services will have
greater freedoms to make decisions appropriate to their local
context, and less central prescription. That might just create
the space that teachers and head teachers need to be able to give
a more meaningful account of their work to their most important
stakeholders—the children, their parents and the community
that they serve. If teachers can give a better, richer account
of their work to pupils, parents and their peers, that will strengthen
professional accountability for teaching and learning, and serve
the public interest very directly.
CHAIRMAN: Thank
you for that—you were all pretty brief. I am not going to
ask a second question. I'm going to hold my questions in reserve.
Derek, will you open the batting.
Q2 DEREK
TWIGG: Good afternoon. I have
a simple question: what should schools be accountable for, and
what should they not be accountable for?
DR
DUNFORD: Schools
spend public money, and it is right that they are held accountable
for the efficiency and effectiveness—those are two different
things—of the way that they spend that public money. Therefore
it is right that schools are held to account for their examination
results, for children's attendance and for how they spend the
money and whether they have a good, well-managed budget. Then
we get into the really difficult area that might come under the
general title of children's well-being, which is the wider development
of children. We accept a responsibility to encourage the wider
development of the children. We are not just exam factories. Perhaps
it would be helpful if we could work with the government, as a
profession, to devise adequate measures whereby that wider role
of the school could be part of the accountability system. What
we must not do, particularly in that area, is simply hold people
to account for what is measurable, because then we get into real
difficulties.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I do
not think we are going to differ much on this. One of the significant
difficulties that we in the National Union of Teachers see is
that there are different accountability systems and they are therefore
muddled, because you are using different types of accountability
to draw different sorts of conclusion. So, I would agree with
John that schools are essentially accountable for all the money
that goes into them, but most importantly they are also responsible
for all the children and young people and the whole community
that is engaged with them. Clearly, we have to account for what
a child experiences in schools—not just the results that
they can demonstrably get, but, in a narrative sense, the fact
that we have developed as much of their potential as we possibly
can, given the time that we have with them. We absolutely have
to be able to say that we can account for those kinds of things.
Tiger Woods was described two years ago as the world's best golfer
and the following year he was described as the most improved golfer.
Those things are not inconsistent. You could be the best school
one year and actually be the most improved the next. That is the
kind of thing we are looking at. We are saying, "You really
want to achieve the absolute most you can with what you've got."
Some of that can be done by exam results, but a lot of it cannot.
One of the problems with the report card, if it were distilled
into a single letter or number, is that there is no narrative
about what that means for the school in a particular area. When
I give talks and ask people to evaluate them, I never look at
what they have done by way of one to five—from "most
boring" to "most interesting". I read the narrative
comments, because there you can find out what you did well and
how you could do it better if you did not do it particularly well
in the first place. Schools are accountable for everything, but
there have to be proper systems of accountability, which disentangle
the things, one from the other, so that you are not trying to
measure something by using a system that is unreasonable to achieve
that result.
MARTIN
JOHNSON: I am
largely in agreement. I would just like to add one small point.
The question of what are the desired outcomes of schooling or
education is highly contentious. It is a matter of philosophical
debate, which, by its nature, is eternal. Only a totalitarian
society would try to determine a definitive answer to that question.
So, there is, in principle, some difficulty about describing comprehensively
what we think the outcomes ought to be and, therefore, for what
schools ought to be accountable.
MICK
BROOKES: I absolutely
agree with everything that my colleagues have said about the necessity
for public bodies to be publicly accountable. I do not have a
problem with that at all, but we have to try to find a system
of accountability that does not spawn huge bureaucracy. Let me
give you a quick example of that: financial management in schools.
Nobody at all that I know has a problem with schools—of
course—being accountable for the money they spend. Indeed,
the standards described by that scheme are admirable, but when
it gets into the operational aspects and into the hands of some
local authority and other accountants, files full of evidence
need to be produced showing that you are doing it. It seems to
be an accountability under which you are guilty unless you can
prove yourselves innocent. I think that is the wrong way round.
There should be greater trust, as has already been said, in the
professionals who are being held to account and, in a sense, because
they are professionals, we should be taking their word for it.
KEITH
BARTLEY: I will
not go over ground previously covered. I should like to return
to my opening thesis that accountability should support improvements
in practice. If that is accepted, it follows that accountability
mechanisms governing schools must be fit for that purpose. There
is no doubt that accountability is made more complex by our wider
aspirations for children and young people, which are derived from
the Every Child Matters framework and outcomes. That framework
implies accountability in multiple directions, but for different
practices and occupations within a school and beyond. It also
implies that there should be accountability for outcomes that
are harder to measure—for example, pupil well-being. It
is a challenging framework of accountability. I want to give one
small example of the kind of tensions that a teacher can experience
between the different elements of our current accountability framework.
The high-stakes accountability of published tests and exam results
can lead to schools targeting resources on specific pupils within
schools—I am talking about grade boundaries—and that
can actually legislate against the ethical commitments of many
schools and teachers to promoting equality for all. Some real
tensions exist within our current framework.
CHAIRMAN: Derek,
you can carry on, but I warn our witnesses that I am not going
to call each one for each question, because if I do we will be
here all day. I will take a couple of responses to each question,
so they should indicate fast if they want to speak—it is
like "University Challenge"—and I will take the
first two. Is there anyone here who was not a trade union leader
when we first invited them—apart from you, Keith?
Q3 DEREK
TWIGG: From what you have previously
publicly stated and what you have said in some of the opening
statements today, you like being accountable to parents, but are
not keen on being accountable to Ofsted and are even less keen
on being accountable to the government. That is a bit of a provocative
statement in a sense, but my point is this: to what extent should
you be accountable to government—Ofsted—because you
seemed to suggest in your comments that inspections should take
place at local authority level and that schools should be more
involved in self-assessment? Forgive me if I have got your views
on that wrong, but I wonder what you feel in terms of where you
should be and how you can be accountable to government within
the sort of scope we have just outlined.
CHAIRMAN: That
is to John, is it?
DEREK TWIGG:
John and Martin.
DR
DUNFORD: First,
I do not agree with what my colleague Martin Johnson said about
shifting accountability from central government to local government
so that there would be 150 different kinds of accountability.
I do not think that that would be progress at all. We will probably
find that, in a sense, schools have ownership of the accountability
system to parents, and that they decide what kind of surveys they
are going to do—pretty well all of them now do surveys.
Accountability systems where you have some ownership of how things
are done can be effective as they feed into school improvement.
What schools find difficult with the Ofsted and central government
stuff, of course, is that, inevitably, it is being done to them
and they do not have ownership of it, but the problem is not whether
it should be done. I think everyone would accept that central
government allocate the taxes and that we have to be responsible
to them for what we do. Ofsted is one arm of that accountability.
I do not have a problem with that at all, but there is some problem
with the methodology.
Q4 DEREK
TWIGG: What form should that accountability
take?
DR
DUNFORD: We
could go into that in some detail. Regular Ofsted inspections
are a perfectly acceptable form of external accountability provided
that that links up with a school's self-evaluation. We want quality
assurance.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: Yes.
DR
DUNFORD: Quality
assurance combines internal self-evaluation with external checks.
Okay, Ofsted is the body that does the external checks, but that
is a proper system of quality assurance, and that is what we should
be seeking.
MARTIN
JOHNSON: I was
referring to the balance of accountabilities. Of course schools
need to be accountable to government—after all, the government
are the ultimate paymaster—but the question is who needs
to know what. Where I differ with my colleague is that I do not
think that a national agency is best placed to do what we might
call school improvement activity because it is difficult for a
national agency to understand local context and to be sufficiently
present in a school to understand what is going on in that school.
Ofsted often says that it takes snapshots, but what we want is
an agency that is capable of acquiring continuous knowledge and
understanding. From there, I agree with what John was saying.
The national government need to know about system performance,
so we need Ofsted, or an agency doing the same job, to collate
the findings of local inspection and to seek trends. One thing
that Ofsted does, which I think almost everybody welcomes, is
its thematic investigations, which are generally high quality.
Ofsted needs to paint the national picture for the government,
which is a slightly different function. The same thing goes, for
example, for pupil attainment. National government need data that
you can provide through a sample test; locally, much more knowledge
is needed.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: On the
need for accountability nationally, we urge the Government to
re-establish the assessment and performance unit, because there
is scope for ensuring that the system does the things that the
taxpayer might reasonably expect it to do. That could be done
through the APU, through sampling and so on. You might venture
the view that to test every single rising 11-year-old is a cruel
and unusual punishment if you are just trying to find out whether
there are particular trends in reading, writing and mathematics,
and we agree that there is a specific way of doing that. It is
absolutely true that schools must be accountable, and they should
be externally inspected, but I concur with the view that the way
to do so is through rigorous and robust self-evaluation that is
not a tick-box—the self-evaluation form, or SEF—but
is all the things that John MacBeath, who was then at Strathclyde,
did for and with the NUT. That was about rigorously looking and
engaging with the whole school community, saying, "This is
a picture of what the school is doing and some ideas about the
weaknesses and where we should go." That should then be moderated
by an external agency, which we could call Ofsted if you really
want to.
CHAIRMAN: Do
you want to come back, Derek?
DEREK TWIGG:
No.
CHAIRMAN: John?
Q5 MR HEPPELL:
I am starting to get a picture—well, I think I had a picture
anyway of people's views from the written comments.
CHAIRMAN: Not
prejudice, John?
MR HEPPELL:
No. I have a slight worry. I wonder whether there is an objection
to the external evaluation—external exams, if you like—or
to the way that performance is reported. You mentioned that one
letter—one star—was not a way to report it. What are
the views on that? How does the way that performance is reported
affect schools?
MICK
BROOKES: The
Ofsted framework is a pretty good shot at describing what a good
school looks like when it is working well, but we are concerned
about the framework's operation, and how it is used and, sometimes,
misrepresented. Let me reference it again: at a school where everything
is going extremely well but there is a problem with boys' writing,
the mechanistic way in which the framework works says, "If
boys' writing is a problem, therefore leadership and management
can't be very good either," is a set of nonsense when everything
else in the school is going well. There is a specific problem,
but one blip should not describe the whole process. You are quite
right: it is about the way a decent framework operates. I know
we are going to talk about quality assurance later, so I shall
save that until then.
KEITH
BARTLEY: I wanted
to respond directly to your question about what we measure and
hold schools accountable for. Our advice to this Committee, in
its previous inquiry, was very much that the high-stakes testing
system—when one set of tests is used for so many different
purposes—causes the real problem. We need to find a way
of broadening the things that are measured and how they are measured,
but not, in any sense, to move away from reporting them. I want
to make that very clear.
Q6 MR HEPPELL:
I see a difference between what the Government say and what comes
from you. When the Government talk about putting stuff down to
the community, part of it goes to local authorities, and extra
responsibilities are being given to them, but I think that the
Government's aim is to get down to communities and parents. Part
of the worry for me is that Martin is quite dismissive about parents.
Someone said—I have forgotten who it was, and I might have
read it—that parents come and go, but schools are important
for us, for parents and for their individual children. What do
you do to ensure that parents are involved in the process if you
do not have the sort of system that we have now?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: The
point is that we are saying not that there should be no external
inspection, but that the system that we have will not necessarily
result in teachers finding it a satisfactory experience, or provide
the best information to parents. When we sampled the views of
our members, most of them responded that Ofsted judgments were
fair but, equally, they are concerned that those judgments are
now extremely data driven and do not give a well-rounded picture
of what the establishment is doing. If parents are interested
in a school in the round, they are interested not only in what
the GCSE results are, but in all the other things that the school
can do. With much shorter inspections—I would not for a
moment claim that our members want to spend a lot of time being
observed—it is absolutely the case that people sometimes
believe that there is no sense of what the whole school does,
because some departments or people are not seen. If I were a parent
looking for a school for my child, I would want a much more narrative
understanding of what this or that school does. We do not believe
that the current Ofsted arrangements manage to do that.
Q7 MR HEPPELL:
Is Ofsted supposed to do that? Are there not other mechanisms
for parents to get that broader stuff? Every school must do a
profile, and if I were looking for a school for my children now,
I would probably visit it and ask to see what information it could
give me. My experience is that schools often do that. They sell
their big picture rather than just their results. Is there really
such a problem?
DR
DUNFORD: Surveying
parents' views is not a problem, because schools have made huge
strides in self-evaluation in the past three or four years, and
parent surveys are part of that self-evaluation. Many schools
use commercial companies to run the surveys for them, so they
are efficient, and the schools receive a lot of cross-referenced
feedback and can benchmark parents' views of the school—there
are many similar questions—against parents' views of other
schools so that they know how well they are doing with the parents.
The extent to which pupil surveys have increased in the past two
years is significant. About three years ago, we had a big increase
in parent surveys as part of self-evaluation, and there has been
a similar increase in pupil surveys in the past year or two. Schools
are carrying out surveys because they want to, and they use the
information as part of their self-evaluation. As Christine says,
that is fed into the self-evaluation form, which is then fed into
the Ofsted system. That is the best way of getting views. We may
not do that with every parent every year, but we do a sample at
least, so you get a run of views, rather than just the spot check
that Ofsted has. You can say, "Here are the parent views
over the past three years," and that is very powerful.
MICK
BROOKES: There
is a separation between individual parents and schools being held
to account for individual pupils' progress. The answer for parents
is, "For goodness' sake, go in and see." Schools' information
streams and the opportunities for parents to find out how their
children and young people are getting on are much improved. The
other issue is how to know how well a school is doing. There are
results to be seen, but part of that is the parental community
view. There is an interesting split: in individual schools, more
than 90% of parents—even according to Ofsted—believe
that their school is doing a jolly good job, but when it comes
to the general public, that drops to about 54%. I go back to fairness
and ensuring that we have a system that describes what schools
are doing well, but in a simple way.
KEITH
BARTLEY: Can
I bring in some evidence from parents that comes from research
that we have done and that has been replicated elsewhere. There
is the issue of choosing a school and finding out about schools
to make that choice, but there is also a sense of engagement,
and that is the point that Mick was just starting to raise. Schools
that are the most effective in engaging parents with what their
children are learning, and know how that learning can be supported,
are the schools in which parents have the clearest understanding
of what is going on in the school. That, therefore, delivers a
form of accountability that certainly, for me, matches that sense
of which one promotes improved practice and improved outcomes
for children.
Q8 MR HEPPELL:
One final thing relates to the CVA measures and the value-addeds.
You were saying before, "How do you know if a school is doing
well?" From the layman's point of view, I would say that
that is where it starts. If it starts with a very bad intake,
you would not expect it to improve by too much. How important
are those measures in terms of assessment generally, and for parents
to try to evaluate them?
MICK
BROOKES: Tracking
pupil progress is obviously important throughout the system. We
are saying that if you are going to track pupil progress, it should
be by the same sort of scheme at the end of foundation, at early
primary, at late primary and in secondary. Therefore, tracking
pupil progress is very important. CVA is a good idea in itself,
but it does not work, for example because high-fliers coming in
at year 7 are unable to make anything more than flat progress
in terms of CVA scores. The same is true of children with special
educational needs; if they are coming into a school that is below
average, there is a very good reason for that. This notion of
two-level progress is a good scheme, but the way in which it is
being used does not properly follow the concept.
Q9 CHAIRMAN:
Martin, you were named in a question. Do you want to come back?
MARTIN
JOHNSON: Let
me go back to the previous point about parents. I am sorry that
I did not make myself clear in my earlier remarks. I subscribe
to what was said, particularly by Keith and others. The point
I was trying to make was that parents are much more interested
in their own child than they are in the school as an institution.
For reasons that have been explained, the relationship between
the parent, the child and the school is vital in terms of the
child's progress, but that has to be through informal mechanisms.
For example, in the case of younger children, it can be through
conversations between the teacher and the parent or carer who
is picking up the child at the end of the day. That is accountability.
DR
DUNFORD: We
do not want to see contextual value added being given a bad reputation
because it is not used in the right way. We regard CVA as being
better than value added, and value added being better than raw
results, as a way of judging the performance of a school. None
the less, the formula changes every year. There are all sorts
of things about it. It is norm referenced, which means that your
exam results can get better, but your CVA score can go down. You
might lose two pupils from a particular ethnic minority and that
causes your results to go down. It is a black box that most people
do not understand. Your score moves and you do not really understand
why. What CVA can do—with any statistic you have to take
confidence intervals into account—is tell you that those
schools in which the whole confidence interval is above 1,000
are significantly better than average schools. The ones that fall
entirely below 1,000 are significantly worse than other schools.
What you cannot do is use CVA scores to put schools in order and
say that, necessarily, 1,002 is better than 1,001, because that
is not the case.
CHAIRMAN: Derek,
a quick one?
DEREK TWIGG:
Got to go.
Q10 CHAIRMAN:
No disrespect to you, but they are both on a statutory instrument
Committee. They are going, but they say that they will come back,
so make a note of when they come back. Ofsted developed the Tellus
surveys. How effective and useful have they been?
DR
DUNFORD: They
are voluntary, fortunately, because if they were compulsory, we
would be very worried about them.
Q11 CHAIRMAN:
Why?
DR
DUNFORD: The
nature of some of the questions can be a problem. If you ask a
question about bullying without defining what you are talking
about, you get some very peculiar answers. We would not be happy
about the extension of the Tellus survey.
CHAIRMAN: Do
you agree, Christine?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I think
it might be useful for the schools to be using them but, as John
says, we have more than enough to do without making compulsory
things that are currently voluntary. Schools are presumably using
them where they find them useful.
CHAIRMAN: Excuse
me. We are having a slight problem with yet another member of
the Committee who is serving on another committee. He is only
going out for five minutes. Sorry Christine, could you repeat
that?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I am
concurring, pretty much, with John, in the sense that we certainly
would not want them made compulsory given that schools have very
large numbers of things to do at the moment. If schools are finding
them useful, I am sure they are using them. There is no big lobby
from the NUT to make them anything other than what they are.
DR
DUNFORD: I might
just add that, on the whole, schools do not use them. Ofsted does
the survey, uses them and produces a picture of whatever is in
the local authority area, but individual schools do not, on the
whole, use the information very much.
Q12 CHAIRMAN:
Christine, you are going to change over soon, aren't you? What
do you think would happen if Ofsted was magically disappeared?
Would school standards plummet?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: No.
Q13 CHAIRMAN:
What would happen?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I started
teaching in 1973, and we have never not had inspection. People
will tell you that education used to be a secret garden and that
no one knew what was going on, but I do not think that was ever
really true in the schools that were really interested in their
communities. I think that what would happen is that there would
be rather fewer stressed teachers. One of our findings from the
survey is, unfortunately, that newer and younger teachers find
Ofsted even more stressful than some of their colleagues who have
been around for longer. That is counter-intuitive, as one would
have expected that they would have been used to the idea. I suspect
that if we did not have Ofsted, but did have an inspection system
that looked at making sure that they properly evaluated school
self-evaluation, we would be decoupling school improvement from
the very punitive aspect of Ofsted, and we would therefore have
schools that were certainly happier places to work in, and that
had more ownership of their own development. At the moment, much
of what is done has to be done, as opposed to people buying into
it, so I think that school self-evaluation is definitely what
we would want to be looking at.
Q14 CHAIRMAN:
So you do not want to abolish Ofsted, but are you thinking of
a golden age? Would you go back to HMI and all that?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I think
it is important to have an inspector of schools, yes, and I think
that it is important that there is an inspectorate that can publicly
give an account of what is going on in schools, but that has to
be a proper and genuine account that is based on the experience
of colleagues in schools. One of our big problems with Ofsted
is that it is separated from the support for school improvement.
Going back to what was said at the beginning, if we are talking
about accountability that builds on the best that schools are
doing and that improves things for schools, you need a system
of inspecting schools that does that, not a system where, as soon
as they come in, people's feeling is, "They're looking to
see whether we're going to go into a category." That is a
great concern among a lot of teachers.
Q15 CHAIRMAN:
Christine, when we had the previous Ofsted Chief Inspector, who
is now the Permanent Secretary, he used to say, "School improvement
is nothing to do with us; we go in, we inspect, we make our report
and then we walk away." But the present Chief Inspector says
that she is into school improvement, and that Ofsted should be
concerned with it. Which do you prefer?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: I certainly
think that it is important that what goes on in schools is about
making sure that schools improve. Whether they improve from being
very good or satisfactory, it is important that they improve.
Whatever system of accountability you have, it has to be clear
for what you are accounting, and how that accountability is going
to mean that you are now going to do things that improve your
practice and the outcomes for the children and young people. So,
absolutely, Ofsted should have responsibility for talking about
how everything being done in the school that is good could be
done better, and how everything that needs improvement could be
improved, rather than simply saying, "This needs to improve.
Thank you and goodbye; we'll see you again in three years."
Q16 CHAIRMAN:
A lot of money is involved. Is Ofsted a good use of taxpayers'
money?
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: One
of the things that we find when we talk to our members is that,
generally speaking, however stressful they find the Ofsted experience
and however much they do not really want it to happen, they do,
in large part, agree with the outcomes for their school. That
is more likely to be the case if they are getting something halfway
decent than if they are put on special measures, but in general
terms they do. That is what you would expect. You would hope that
schools were sufficiently reflective that, when an outside agency
came in to look at them, it would find the same things that schools
find for themselves. That would be much more widespread and positively
felt if the engagement were about looking at what schools were
saying about themselves, with proper engagement about that, and
talking about school improvement, rather than this ongoing fear
that something could be going wrong. Of course, we are all absolutely
well aware that the fact of observing something changes its nature,
so there may be a sense in which the shorter inspections are not
doing the full job that you would want done, but to do that full
job, you would have to be doing it on a basis that was much more
collaborative and much more about seeking improvement than finding
fault.
CHAIRMAN: I
will come back to those broader questions and put them to rest
of you guys a little later. Thank you, Christine.
CHRISTINE
BLOWER: Thank
you very much, Chair. I apologise for having to leave.
CHAIRMAN: We
now welcome John Bangs to the hot seat. Annette is going to lead
us in the next set of questions.
Q17 ANNETTE
BROOKE: I think we have reached
the point at which everybody accepts that an inspectorate or a
system of inspection is desirable, so my questions are how can
we make it effective and how can we improve it. First, could we
make Ofsted more independent, and if so, how? I shall ask John
first, because he has made a comment on that.
DR
DUNFORD: There
are two specific ways in which I would like to see that happen.
First, the Ofsted complaint procedure should be independent of
Ofsted, so it should even have a further degree of independence.
In relation to Ofsted's independence, the most important thing
that happened when it moved out of the Department and became—in
inverted commas—"more independent" from it, was
that the Department lost the professional voice within it, and
its policy making has been much the worse as a result of that
since 1994. Prior to that, staff inspectors were always involved
in policy-making discussions in the Department. Ofsted needs to
be independent in another sense, because it needs to stand between
the Government and the profession. I come back to a point that
was being made earlier: it is as important for Ofsted to report
on the effectiveness of the system and the Government's policies
as it is for it to report on the effectiveness of the individual
schools. We have moved from HMI, which did most of its work on
the effectiveness of the system and very little on the effectiveness
of individual schools—they only came about once every 20
years—to a system where it has shifted too much the other
way and is now focused entirely on the effectiveness of the individual
schools, and you hear Ofsted say very little about the overall
effectiveness of the assessment system, or whatever it may be.
We need to move to a position in the middle, where Ofsted reports
without fear or favour on both those things equally.
JOHN
BANGS: I was
listening carefully to Christine's reply—
DR
DUNFORD: She's
your boss.
JOHN
BANGS: I know.
That's why I was listening carefully. The current Chief Inspector
tries to be as independent as possible. It is the scope and range
of what she evaluates that has been trimmed and that really worries
me. There are three studies that Ofsted should have been conducting,
but has not been doing. A study on the school improvement partners
is currently being carried out by York Consulting and Making Good
Progress is being evaluated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, as was
the academies programme. All those high stakes government initiatives
are not evaluated by Ofsted. I find that extraordinary. We have
this kind of Delphic conversation when the teacher organisations
meet the Chief Inspector, about why we would have to ask someone
else that and all the rest of it. I think it is for the Committee
to ask questions about why Ofsted does not take on those key government
initiatives. As I said, the Chief Inspector tries her best. The
institution is a non-ministerial government department accountable
to the Crown. I do not think that you can go much further than
that, but what ought to be embedded is reporting to Parliament.
You have an informal arrangement, Chairman, but as the Chief Inspector
is accountable to the Crown, it should be formalised such that
the conduit and accountability are through Parliament, through
the Select Committee. The arrangement should be formal as well
as informal.
CHAIRMAN: A
good point. Mick?
MICK
BROOKES: I agree
that this Chief Inspector is far more interested in how Ofsted
can make a difference in schools, and how the inspection team
can leave the school with an agenda for improvement, rather than
condemnation, and I welcome that. We will get on to that. I do
not think that there ever was a golden age. There has to be an
inspection system, and the key thing that I would like to see
is quality assurance in respect of the people who do the work.
A complaint was made about the behaviour of an Ofsted inspection
which we think was contrary to the code of conduct, and the response
to the head teacher was, "I was not there, therefore I cannot
tell", which, quite frankly, was a ridiculous response. We
wrote back and asked, "Are you tracking that inspector across
a number of schools to find out whether there are similar complaints,
as we have done?" The current quality assurance of teams
that inspect schools is not good enough. Having said that, there
are some extremely good teams out there as well, and it would
be wrong to condemn all of them because of the behaviour and actions
of a few.
Q18 ANNETTE
BROOKE: One of my other questions,
apart from establishing whether inspection should be independent,
was about quality. What do you think could be done to address
the problem of variability between teams?
KEITH
BARTLEY: I would
like to go back slightly to reinforce the importance of independence,
because it starts to link across to your question about variability.
It is vitally important that we have independent, authoritative,
secure and robust voices offering commentary on the effectiveness
of both national policy and its local translation into practice.
That is very important indeed, and I would say that coming from
independent public corporation, wouldn't I? However, there is
more to it than that. The whole notion of variability could in
part be addressed if Ofsted were to bring schools more closely
into the improvement process. It is already starting to experiment
with that. For example, school leaders could become more a part
of the inspection teams, and better understand the means by which
inspection judgments are arrived at, particularly drawing on the
link between school self-evaluation, its inevitably truncated
form of expression in the national service framework and the outcomes
and inspection. The improvement circle and, therefore, one of
the issues around variability would be better addressed by bringing
schools more closely into the system.
Q19 ANNETTE
BROOKE: Dr Dunford, I am interested
in how we can improve quality.
CHAIRMAN: Hang
on. Martin has been more patient, so Martin and then John.
MARTIN
JOHNSON: You
are very kind, Chairman. Thank you. I am a bit heretical on this
independence question. I think that Ofsted is too independent.
Its strapline is something like, "Ofsted—never apologise,
never explain". I know that this Committee tries very hard
to hold Ofsted to account, but it is not accountable enough. On
variability and quality control, Ofsted itself has been working
very hard on quality control for at least a decade, and probably
longer, but has not cracked it. That suggests to me that the problem
is not very amenable to solution, and I think that there are all
kinds of reasons why that is almost inevitably true. It would
not matter that there was some variability in judgment if it were
not for the fact that we have a national reporting system with
very high stakes. Quite honestly, we are now in the situation
where schools describe themselves as "`outstanding' (Ofsted)"
or "`good' (Ofsted)" as if that were a description of
their school. That is how schools behave these days and it is
frankly ludicrous, because that is no better at describing the
complexities of the strengths and weaknesses of a school than
a single grade on a report card. I am sorry to return to my hobby
horse, but if inspections were more local and the stakes were
lower, the variability would not matter so much.
DR
DUNFORD: Specifically
on Annette's question, there is room for variability between inspections,
but not for variability between standards of inspection—if
you understand what I mean. According to the state of the school,
the nature of the inspection might vary. If you have an extremely
good school with rigorous self-evaluation, you require a different
kind of visit from the inspector than that required by a school
that is in real difficulty and not doing very well. Some of that
variability is being built into the system and we are hearing—and
it sounds good—that the new inspection framework coming
in next September will involve more of an inspection with the
leadership of the school and that, at the end, it will determine
recommendations that are much more rounded and connected to the
kind of support that is needed for the school to move forward,
which was the point that Christine was making. At the moment,
we do not have any kind of a coherent interrelationship between
external inspection and support. Indeed, we do not have any kind
of coherent system of school support at the moment and we desperately
need it. If a school is judged by Ofsted to be in trouble, dozens
of different bodies come piling in to "support" the
school, and that feels like more pressure, not support.
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