The role and performance of Ofsted - Education Committee Contents

Examination of Witnesses (1-76)

David Sherlock CBE, Maurice Smith, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood KT and Sir Mike Tomlinson

3 November 2010

  Q1 Chair: Good morning. Welcome to our first oral evidence session on the role and performance of Ofsted. It is a great pleasure to welcome four witnesses this morning—well, I believe we will have four. Sir Mike Tomlinson has been delayed. He has sent his apologies and is working hard to get here, despite the weaknesses in London traffic management. It is a great pleasure to welcome Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, Maurice Smith and David Sherlock. Thank you all very much for coming along this morning. Ofsted has friends and enemies, but is there a need for inspection at all when many good educational systems—just to focus on education, initially—do not have inspectors coming in from the outside and still manage to deliver high quality education?

  Lord Sutherland: Yes.

  Maurice Smith: Yes.

  David Sherlock: Yes.

  Q2 Chair: I suppose I was being optimistic in hoping that former senior inspectors were going to tell us about the futility of their profession. Do you think that Ofsted is the organisation that you had hoped to see when it was established?

  Lord Sutherland: For my part, I am disappointed that it has grown so big and has many other responsibilities. That is from someone who is no longer in the front line, I have to say. Maybe you have different evidence. I am disappointed that these additional responsibilities have been given to Ofsted for the purely practical reason that if you are in the seat at the top, as somebody will be, having lines of communication coming up reporting on a hugely diverse range of issues, some of which as we know are real hot potatoes, it is rather a lot to ask and to find one individual, be it the person who chairs the board or the chief inspector, who carries the can ultimately and who will have expertise in all those areas. You always depend on those below you, but it is really a very wide, broad remit to take home to one individual.

  Maurice Smith: I think it looks pretty much as I imagined it would look when I left, near the end of 2006. No doubt we will come on to the breadth of its remit in detail in a few minutes. I have views about that which cut both ways. Should there be an Ofsted? Yes, in terms of its qualitative nature of inspection to add to the quantitative evidence that exists. That is an added value rather than an encumbrance, to expand on your first question.

  Q3 Chair: We will return to whether it has become over-quantitative and a little less qualitative than it should. David, you are still within the world of education, but you weren't an inspector of schools so you have a slightly different perspective.

  David Sherlock: No; I am something of a Daniel in the lions' den. I have never worked for Ofsted. Indeed, I have never been a civil servant. Certainly, I was involved in FEFC when Stewart set up Ofsted and was therefore involved in that set of decisions when the Government of the day decided that adult education, in its broadest sense, should be dealt with separately from school education. That made considerable sense to me and I think it made considerable sense to the people who transferred to the FEFC inspectorate from HMI. We had precisely that concern about excessive span of control in 2006-07 when Ofsted was taking back, in a sense, the colleges and the rest of the now much more heterogeneous adult education sector, as well as the work from CSCI and so on. I certainly think that the span of control is too wide. It would be better to have more focused organisations. That would be an easier thing to run from Ofsted's point of view, as well as probably better for the people on the receiving end who would be getting an absolutely focused service.

  Q4 Chair: In these financial times, of course, the pressure on value for money and doing things in a lean way, more efficiently, would appear to argue against having lots of separate inspectorates with their own head people and governance and all the rest of it. Do you believe that it is possible to have focused inspectorates at an affordable cost? At the moment the coalition Government are merging more and more inspectors. I met with the General Social Care Council yesterday. Of course, that is being put into another inspectorate that has "health" in its name, even though it is not a health body. Can that be done? Is there any reason from a value for money perspective?

  David Sherlock: I think it can be done. I think the signs that the present Government are showing of moving further education, in the broadest sense, back closer to higher education seem to be an entirely positive move. I still remember the time when there was advanced further education and non-advanced further education, and the progression between the two was much more straightforward than it is now. I listened to the chairman of Ford a while ago. He said that he thought there was a problem with the further education system, because, as he put it, there was a polytechnic-shaped hole in it. I think that is broadly right and I would certainly like to see the whole of the further education sector—colleges and the rest of the various provision that makes up the sector—come under the same arrangements as higher education. I think that a reformed HEFCE and QAA would probably be the right vehicle to carry those forward, so there need be no necessary further cost.

  Q5 Bill Esterson: Two of you have indicated that inspection would be better if it was separated. Where does that link in with the move over recent years to bring social care and education together in one place through children's services? Do you think that the two are linked? What are your thoughts about those two points?

  Lord Sutherland: I suppose I implied that it wasn't a good idea. That is my view, because I think that the complexities and the expertise needed for handling the very difficult situations in child care that fall to that branch of the organisation are such that you will inevitably separate out the groups that carry out the inspection and the protocols according to which it is done anyway. If you don't, you've got it wrong. If you've separated those out, that tells you a story about how far you need the different lines. On the Chair's second question, in terms of cost saving, I would look in another direction to back office functions, sharing buildings and regional centres and so on as a way of doing that.

  Maurice Smith: I share some, but not all, of Lord Sutherland's views. I think that the motivation to join social care and education together at both local government and inspectorial level came largely from Lord Laming's report into the death of Victoria Climbié. I have come from both sides of the sector and it speaks a lot of sense to me. A child is a child, and if you start out with the child, I think there is a great deal of mileage in joining those things together. There's then a bit of a chicken or egg thing: if you join them together at local government level, it doesn't make any sense to me to then have separate inspectorates in the sense that the joined-up inspection was, almost inevitably, going to follow. There are arguments on both sides of the coin about whether they should be separated. I accept the arguments about span of control, but either you have separate inspectorates or you break them down within the same one. I think you can make a call on that. Having reread Lord Laming's report in advance of this Committee, I think there is a gap—although it is not part of this debate—because we never quite got the health thing. The health of children has stayed, in a sense, outside this remit. I am not suggesting that it should come in, but I am suggesting that Lord Laming's focus was on the joined-upness between social care and health, not the joined-upness between social care and education. I think that that creates a very interesting debate for the health care inspection and so on.

  Q6 Charlotte Leslie: There have been changes to Ofsted, not just in terms of a wider remit but in the way it functions in terms of focusing more on schools that are in more need of inspections while leaving schools that are doing well out of it. Do you think that has worked and that it is a good model of accountability?

  Maurice Smith: Proportionality was always a desirable feature of inspection—inspecting in proportion to success, or the other way around. That is something that, certainly over the years that I was with Ofsted, it aimed to achieve, and it aimed to achieve it in an incremental way. It has probably gone a little further than when I left in 2006, but over the period I was there from 1996 to 2006, that was the pattern all the way through. I think that that's broadly an accepted pattern across Government in terms of inspection and scrutiny, and I don't have a problem with it. There is then an interesting question of how much and the weight, if you like, and whether you give people a complete inspection vacation if they are outstanding. There are still questions around that and what might be considered to be a deficit model and what message that gives out. In the chief inspector's report from last year, I noticed that she expressed her concern about those that were 'satisfactory'. It was the soft middle, if you like, that people seem to find it hard to get at.

  Lord Sutherland: The boundaries have been changed, because when Ofsted was first set up some schools hadn't been inspected for 20 years, so even in local authorities, let alone in—as it then was—the Department for Education, the knowledge of what was happening in schools was very thin. The database that has been built should change the pattern of inspection, because you start from a different platform. In general, the right way to go is to look for those areas where it would be helpful to schools to inspect those particular aspects in some depth and not to trawl across old ground again and again and again. The understanding and the facts are there, so this can be done. It would be wrong if there hadn't been such change, and I think that that is the right direction.

  Q7 Charlotte Leslie: This may be straying from the subject area slightly, but have you any thoughts on how you create frictionless targets and frictionless criteria—that is, criteria for inspection that do not adversely change the behaviour of teachers in schools to meet those targets? It's the old chestnut, but I was wondering whether you had any wisdom on how you would do that.

  David Sherlock: By way of enlivening the debate, may I have a go at your previous question before we come to that one? I rather disagree with my colleagues. That question goes to the heart of what inspection is for. It is either regulatory, in which case a light touch that looks only at those that are weak and that the statistics reveal to be in need of inspection makes perfect sense, or it is an improvement tool. I think it is an improvement tool, and therefore I have some serious reservations about the whole notion of light touch—seductive though it is in cost terms and, indeed, in logical terms—because the example of the best providers disappears from view. It is no longer there in inspection reports for other people to learn from. We all know that the performance of learning providers of all kinds is cyclical rather than on a settled upward trajectory. They tend to respond very quickly, in fact, to changes in leadership, policy and so on—all sorts of disruptions—and therefore you see that people who were absolutely first rate five or six years ago are suddenly basket cases. You need to pick that up through a settled cycle. It is a considerable disadvantage, particularly to commercial training providers, to have out-of-date grades. I looked up one example that I know well—an organisation in Blackburn called Training 2000. It was last inspected by the Adult Learning Inspectorate on 21 April 2005. It then had largely grade 2s and one grade 1, so there was absolutely nothing to worry about, but they have been agitating with Ofsted for some time to be re-inspected, because, with some justification, they think they are now a grade 1 organisation and that would confer advantages in contracting terms. Inspection is not necessarily punishment; it should be a developmental process, and if it is, it is welcomed by providers.

  Chair: I welcome Sir Mike Tomlinson to our deliberations. Thank you for joining us.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I apologise for being late.

  Q8 Craig Whittaker: David Sherlock, may I just take you up on your point that inspections shouldn't be about punishment? Why do you think that a vast majority of our schools feel as though it is?

  David Sherlock: I can't answer for schools, but the way that ALI did it was to ask people afterwards—without naming themselves if they so wished—what they thought of the service they received from the inspector. By and large, they were extremely positive about it. That depends on the style with which things are done. Light-touch, rather perversely, tends to encourage the notion that the inspectors are regulators rather than agents of development—change agents, if you like—which in personal terms I suspect all my colleagues would see themselves as. They would see themselves as positive contributors.

  Q9 Chair: But if you are a positive change agent, you would hopefully have helped improve self-evaluation skills—their robustness, resilience and capability of self-improvement.

  David Sherlock: Yes.

  Q10 Chair: So you could say that you should be putting yourselves out of business because you do a really good job and the schools should carry on being able to challenge themselves and show that flexible, light-footed, ever-changing improvement that we look for from great leaders.

  David Sherlock: I think that is right, but if you look at the university structure and the QAA, which is probably most like the way that the ALI inspected, where there is a dialogue with the QAA—a peer review group essentially, professionally directed—that is by and large seen by universities as a very positive experience. It helps them focus on their areas of weakness and helps them to develop. Most companies do exactly the same, in my experience.

  Q11 Nic Dakin: I want to pick up a point about style, which you raised, David. A lot of experience of Ofsted inspections suggests that at heart it is a very adversarial process both on behalf of the inspectors and on behalf of the inspected. Is it inevitable that it has to be adversarial? Is that helpful or unhelpful?

  Lord Sutherland: Well, is this an adversarial position? I mean, if you have a wish to get to the truth, you will end up making judgments, and people will like that or not, as the case may be. There is a different way of doing this. Lots of bosses could actually tell me where I was going wrong without my rushing home in distress and never darkening their door again. In that sense, style is very important and that is where the training, the retraining and the protocols for training inspectors are fundamental. They can drift faster than the schools. You get to the stage where people are very nice to you when you go to schools, and you begin to assume you have powers and abilities that probably you don't have. That is not true of everybody but there is a danger, so style at that level is fundamental.   This goes back to the question of the friction. If you make judgments there will be friction, and in the end it is about making judgments that will be part of the process of self-regulation, self-evaluation and self-improvement.

  Maurice Smith: May I go back to Ms Leslie's question about the friction and whether there is a perverse incentive? There is quite a regular phrase around Ofsted's walls that if you put it in the criteria, it will get inspected and people will do it. It depends whether you think that is perverse or not. If there is something you particularly want to happen in the education system in this country, put it in the inspection framework because it will happen. But the bids to get in the framework are very lengthy. It is almost a weekly task—I don't know if this was your experience, Mike—to bat off people who want this or that in the framework. What you put in the Ofsted framework will get inspected and will improve, in my experience, but the bids to get in there are lengthy.

  Q12 Charlotte Leslie: To put it another way because I am not quite sure that I explained it very well, there is an old quote from T. S. Eliot that talks about a "system so perfect that nobody needs to be good". When you look at Ofsted, you wonder whether you could have inspection criteria and those criteria will be met, but that does nothing to make it the kind of school that would meet those criteria were they not there. So it is the role of Ofsted to make a school the kind of school that would do the things that Ofsted would put in its criteria versus a school that can just tick boxes.

  Maurice Smith: And the very best schools will do what you describe, because they will be ahead of the game.

  Q13 Charlotte Leslie: But does the way Ofsted works with criteria encourage a box-ticking system for those schools that may be on the brink of being able to be improved? It may be on the brink of being the kind of school to do it naturally but feels crushed by criteria and tick boxes so is never able to have that freedom to step out and develop as a school.

    Lord Sutherland: But you make it that kind of school by appointing the best possible head teacher and the best possible teachers. The Ofsted inspection should be a useful check, because you can deceive yourself. Even if you are the best possible head teacher, there should be a check against which you can measure yourself. But without the best possible teachers and head teacher, yes, it will be tick boxes and "How do I meet the grade?" and so on.

  Q14 Chair: Could it have a chilling effect on some people? Are there some people—some heads at some schools—who behave like the rabbit in the headlights, which actually leads to worse behaviour as a result of fear of the way they may be perceived by Ofsted?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: There are such cases, yes, and I have seen a number of them in my time. Interestingly, there are cases where, for whatever reason, that effect is often seen in the better schools, which seem to think, "This is so important, but we are not sure about it." Those who do not quite come to that tend to be a bit more blasé about it and say, "Well, let it happen. Whatever." Going back to what Maurice said, one of the difficulties was always the desire by different parties to have what they were keenly interested in and felt was vital in the framework. Increasingly, that led to an expansion of the framework and, to a degree, a lack of coherence in terms of what was being looked at, inspected and commented on. Of course, once you're into that position, the time available gets diluted for the key matters that you might want to focus on. I got very concerned about the shorter inspection. I felt it was not giving sufficient attention to the quality of teaching, which is the key factor controlling the quality of education that young people receive. That was something that I saw on the other side when I was involved with Hackney and looking at the schools that were being inspected—indeed, being inspected as part of Hackney. I worried that we were into a tick-box type thing, and that we were into a potential overuse of data and drawing firm conclusions from data rather than the data enabling you to ask questions that you then looked into. I did get concerned about the way it was moving.

  Q15 Nic Dakin: I am picking up that you are essentially saying, although David might feel slightly differently, that it has to be about regulation—it has to be done to rather than done with. There is also a point coming out that maybe the framework has become a bit of a monster and lost its focus on where it should be and is trying to do the jobs of other people. They are queuing up to try and get you to do their jobs rather than focusing on the key purposes. Is that what you're beginning to say?

  David Sherlock: I am not sure whether that is true. We took this particular problem by the scruff in 2000 when the Common Inspection Framework was designed. It was designed originally for adult learning. It covered three sides of A4—something like that, wasn't it, Mike? It covered the five major things that you would expect. It covered the performance of learners, quality of teaching and so on and so forth—absolutely common-sense things. They were not criteria. To use a borrowed phrase from Sir David Ramsbotham when he was chief inspector of prisons, they were a set of expectations. It has got a little longer and bit more cluttered since, but it is still discernibly the same document that was there in 2000. I do not think that should lead to box-ticking. It should lead to an informed, intelligent debate among colleagues in the inspectorate and in the organisation being inspected.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I heard your phrase and if you go back into the archives you will see that my statement as chief inspector was that inspection is something you should do with the school, not to the school. Nevertheless, as Stewart has indicated, at some point you have to make decisions and reach conclusions. The fact is that there will be some people in some circumstances who do not like the conclusions. The published report makes any judgments public and that is something you have to live with. You simply can't avoid that.

  Q16 Bill Esterson: People's perception of the grades is important. Has that become too important for parents and schools? You see banners outside schools or on their websites on the one hand—or not, on the other hand. Has that gone too far, and if it has, what is the answer to that?

  Lord Sutherland: I was going to say that the press will be the press.

  Q17 Bill Esterson: It is the schools themselves as well, isn't it?

  Lord Sutherland: The press will be the press, and they perform a very important function, because parents want to know. But every report, every set of statistics and every league table should carry a health warning—"this assesses x, but not y." The Ofsted report, however, is in a particularly important category, because it is meant to be written in digestible prose. There is a problem there. We worked hard on it for 18 to 20 years, but it was hard going, not least because of how prose can be misused, which is the problem. I do not know what the answer is, because there is a clash of interests and, almost, of power bases. The press will publish—they will get a good story if they think it is a good story, which sometimes it is.

  Maurice Smith: During my period as a senior official in Ofsted, not just as Chief Inspector, the debate about grades was lively and across the table. One colleague, who left during that time, wrote a 23-page treatise on how many grades there should be and what they should be called. You can argue over it many times, but the one strength is that all the grades across Ofsted's portfolio have been brought together. There are four grades for whatever is inspected. When I joined Ofsted there were 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7—pick a grade, pick the institution, really. At least we have four grades and they are agreed terms. Whether people put that on the front of their school or on their website is a matter for them.

  Q18 Ian Mearns: I have been a school governor for more than 25 years, and I have seen Ofsted inspections from the perspective of a school governor. It has to be said that the regime has changed significantly from our perspective over that period. Fundamentally, I can understand why the inspection framework has developed in the way that it has because, particularly in the early days, inspection teams were very different around the country. There was a very complex process of moderating inspectors' reports, because there was a lack of consistency. I can understand all that, but we are now left with a fairly inflexible inspection framework that largely depends on school self-evaluation followed by inspection against that self-evaluation. Do you think the system could have developed in a different way? Have we made any significant mistakes over the period, or could we have improved things better and sooner?

  Maurice Smith: There is a debate on what Mike said about how much time is spent in the classroom. That debate is alive and kicking. Going back to the Chair's original question, one difference with Ofsted is that it has a high qualitative element, because the inspector is in the classroom. I work in the health service, and I do not see their inspectors on the wards that often. It is one of Ofsted's strengths, but it is expensive—that is expensive time. Ofsted works within a budget set by the Government, as any other inspectorate does. It has to balance the amount of high-quality time it can put in in the classroom against the cost. I was interested to look at the inspection report for a 210-pupil primary school yesterday, because I am at the other end of it now, as you are. The inspectors saw 15 lessons, so they probably saw each teacher twice, which is a fairly good strike rate. If you put that into a secondary context, they would not be seeing that many more lessons, proportionately. My wife has been a teacher in the state system for 30 years, and she has never been observed. So there are some interesting contrasts within the system.

  Q19 Nic Dakin: There has been research by the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and Leslie Rosenthal that suggests that the examined performance of schools goes down in the immediate aftermath of an Ofsted inspection. What do you have to say about that? In a sense, that would suggest that the immediate impact of an Ofsted inspection is a dip in performance rather than an acceleration of it.

  Ian Mearns: There is a sigh of relief.

  Lord Sutherland: After the Olympics, expect athletes to run slower in national meetings, because there has been the ultimate test, as some would see it.

  Q20 Nic Dakin: For the young person, that ultimate test of their institution is having a detrimental effect. The young person has only one opportunity through the system, so that is an area of concern if it is true.

  Lord Sutherland: I have not seen the research, so I cannot comment in detail.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I do not mean that particular piece of research, but early on, since Ofsted's data began to be available in sufficiently large volume to enable people to draw conclusions from it, there has been research that has variously proposed that. Equally, if I dare put it, a lot of schools that were in the special measures or serious weaknesses categories significantly improved following the inspection. I have not seen the research that you mention, but this has been an argument—a proposition put—for significant numbers of years. I do not know whether that is right or not; I do know that many schools, post-inspection, have improved dramatically. That improvement was, in many instances, initiated by inspection and often followed up by the local authority and governors to bring about the change that was needed. So I do not believe that every time an Ofsted inspection is carried out it has a detrimental, negative impact on the school—far from it.

  David Sherlock: May I pick up on the point about the supposed rigidity of the framework? The notion of a dialogue between a self-critical academic community—be it a school, a training provider, or an employer who is training apprentices, whatever—and a set of independent quality assessors, who are there essentially to benchmark against national and international expectations, is pretty much universal. It is certainly universal in my experience—across the world. It is at the heart of the European Framework for Quality Management—the EFQM; it is at the heart of the European quality guidelines; it is at the heart of the process that is used in universities; and it is generally regarded as the best way to assist people to drive up their own performance. I would not say that that is rigid; it is extremely flexible in wise hands. The inspectors that we have in this country, generally speaking, would be regarded has "wise hands."

  Q21 Ian Mearns: You have to accept, though, that all things European are not universally popular in here.

  David Sherlock: That may be true, but I can tell you that it is the case right across the world—it is not simply a European thing. Nevertheless, all businesses work in that kind of way.

  Q22 Chair: To move you on, we have received a lot of written contributions to our inquiry which suggest that giving notice of inspection limits its improvement impact. Do you have any thoughts on that, Sir Mike?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: The period of time that a school might know about its inspection was potentially as long as 18 months in the early years of Ofsted. That has been gradually whittled down. There was enough evidence to suggest that the longer the notice, the more worked up and bothered the school became as a consequence. That was not something that we wanted either to do or see happen. So the time has been reduced—when I was chief inspector it was down to something like four weeks maximum. Part of the reason for the notice was the regulations and the law about having to consult the governors in advance about dates, and so on. So it was not always an Ofsted decision—it was determined, in some cases, by the Act that created Ofsted and the regulations that followed.

  Q23 Chair: Would you like to get rid of it?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: At the moment it is almost only 24 hours' notice, I believe—schools get about one day's notice. The reason for that is that, if you just pull up with no notice, there is the possibility that the school is not in operation and you've wasted an awful lot of public resource. A day is the minimum period of time in which you could possibly operate to be efficient and effective in deploying your resources. I think we've got it there. I came here via a long cab journey. The cab driver's wife works in a school, and he was talking about Ofsted until he asked me what I did.

  Maurice Smith: I was at the centre of the debate that brought inspections down to what is now termed little or no notice, and I am a great advocate of that. The length of notice was difficult. It caused stress within schools and it caused perverse behaviours. I don't think that's acceptable. I think that schools, and anybody else for that matter, should be inspected as they are, not as how they want to be seen.

  Q24 Chair: Are you happy with the current situation?

  Maurice Smith: We introduced no-notice inspection for early years, so in early years inspectors turn up on the doorstep. To reinforce Mike's point, that is partly because early years are always there. We can't do it with child minders—we've had a miss rate of 25%, because they've gone to the park. I think that little or no notice works pretty well with schools. We should occasionally use no notice. We have the power and we should use it occasionally. One anecdote, if I may. I had a little boy in the early years sector. He smashed his mouth open on some plywood, which was around some pipes, early in the morning—it was 7.40 am. When we went to inspect it, we weren't satisfied that there were enough staff on duty, so we sent 45 inspectors on one day to 45 nurseries at 7.30 am. That was one of the most profound reports that we ever wrote, and it had a massive impact on improvement.

  David Sherlock: I will disagree again, I am afraid.

  Chair: Excellent. We will have you again.

  David Sherlock: I have done no-notice inspections, both in prisons and in the armed services in the wake of Deepcut. I think that this takes us back to our old friend, the debate about whether inspection is for regulation or for improvement. We gave three months' notice, which in many cases was necessary to fit around, for example, the production routines of a major employer. During those three months there was a dialogue between the provider's nominee and the lead inspector. They planned the inspection between them, which very often meant that the employer or the training provider was saying, "I would like you to have a look at x, because we're worried about it." Our argument was that if the organisation improved itself during those three months, because they knew that an inspection was imminent, the learners benefited, and generally speaking that improvement was permanent: it held. I worry about the whited sepulchre argument and the anxiety argument.

  Lord Sutherland: The one thing that you lose with no notice is the possibility of a school saying that they have a particular issue on which it would be very helpful to have an inspector's professional view. There must be a way for schools to do that by asking them to come back in three weeks, a month or whatever, but generally, I move very much on the side of the less notice, the better. The big difference is that when this started with 18 months' notice—it came down fairly quickly—nobody knew what to expect. There is a mythology and an understanding about what Ofsted does, how it does it and the kind of questions that it asks, which is the difference. You don't suddenly react to an alien group in your midst, because you know what it's there for, and you know the kind of questions that it's going to ask.

  Q25 Nic Dakin: No-notice inspection does not get rid of the anxiety, because schools know when they're due, don't they? The lack of notice can actually extend the anxiety. So I tend to agree with you about short notice, although David makes a good point. I have experienced an ALI inspection and an Ofsted inspection, and I think that David makes a good point about the opportunities provided by a smaller amount of notice.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: That point is true, but equally, if self-evaluation is a continuing process and that information is lodged with Ofsted, one would expect an issue within the school to be found in the self-evaluation. Ofsted, therefore, would know about it. That wouldn't preclude dialogue about it, and it might perhaps become a focus of the inspection brief for that institution, or one of the foci.

  Q26 Bill Esterson: That sounds like an argument for a combination of no notice and longer notice on different occasions.

  Maurice Smith: If I may say so, because David has raised it three or four times, much of Ofsted's work is regulatory and much of its work now, with its new portfolio, is as the policeman. So it does inspect against standards and it does have that regulatory power.

  Q27 Damian Hinds: A number of times we have heard about the conflict—or the balance, depending on how you see it—between on the one hand the Ofsted role of inspection, grading, regulation and so on, and on the other, consultancy and coaching for improvement. Perhaps I am being over-simplistic, but given that tension, why do the things together? Why not separate them into two discrete functions, one of which is a pure regulatory framework and the other the very different relationship you have with head teachers and teachers, encouraging them to get through the things that they need to get through, not only to meet the criteria that they will face in that inspection, but in general to improve education?

  Lord Sutherland: One of the initial, fundamental principles of setting up Ofsted was to separate out being coach and being referee. These were thought to be in conflict with one another. I think that still should be the guiding line. The coaching was happening and inspectors were coming back and inspecting their own coaching. That's probably not a great idea. But on the other hand, as a matter of practice, as distinct from principle, if you go in and you discuss and your line of questioning shows, as it will, that there's a weakness here, that's indirect coaching. If people don't pick up the message they probably shouldn't be in the job.

  Q28 Damian Hinds: It's a different sort of relationship, isn't it? You can combine them, but in business you would typically have them separate. The people who train are not the same people who grade.

  Lord Sutherland: I think they should be separate, fundamentally.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: As Stewart has indicated, that was very much at the heart of what the then Secretary of State, who introduced Ofsted and its foundations, wanted. He wanted a clear separation between inspection and advice. That was based largely on what he believed was happening at the local level where local inspectors were inspecting, then advising and then inspecting their own advice. I have to say that from my own experience, inspecting your own advice is not a particularly objective exercise.

  Q29 Damian Hinds: I wonder whether David takes a contrary view.

  David Sherlock: I absolutely agree with Maurice. Ofsted in the schools, in compulsory education, is in a particular position because it has a very high regulatory role. The fact that it is part of the Government, underlines that regulatory role. There are other inspectorates, particularly in the adult field, where the relationship is not regulatory and not legally defined. Certainly the first inspectorate that I set up—the Training Standards Council—simply operated down the contract line. It had no statutory powers at all. ALI was a non-departmental public body. It was nowhere near as close to Government as Ofsted is because of that different relationship. Picking up the point about inspecting your own advice, we were very clear in ALI that it was necessary to do something after you had given somebody bad grades. They needed somebody to pick them up, dust them down and give them at least a start on the road to putting things right. But we separated that. The Provider Development Unit was separated within the organisation very strictly. It reported to a different director. People who were giving advice were seconded for a period of two years to do that. They were no longer inspecting. So there were substantial Chinese walls between the two. We never had any complaints about conflicts of interest because we were very strongly aware of the danger.

  Maurice Smith: This is a three-part trick, not a two-part trick. Let me explain. It depends upon definition. Regulatory, to me, means opening and closing things. In parts of the Ofsted portfolio now, it registers them and it opens them and it can shut them down. That does not apply to schools. Ofsted, contrary to all the general myths, cannot close a school. It does not have those powers. But in its early years world, where it conducts 100,000 inspections, and in some of its child care world now, it opens and closes. It is very important to understand that policing role. That is the regulatory role. In schools Ofsted has an inspectorial role. It is the inspector; it is not the adviser. Nevertheless, the Chinese wall is not that robust. For example, all inspection reports carry recommendations. What is that but advice? In those schools that are inadequate, where Ofsted probably does its best work, the subsequent monitoring visits that bring those schools out of special measures are inspections but they have a huge chunk of advice in them, because that is how Ofsted gets those schools to improve and gets them out of those categories. It is important to understand that there is regulation in its statutory sense—opening and closing—and there is inspection, which is a task in itself, but that crossover to advice is mixed. Ofsted has ended up saying, "We will offer advice in the extreme circumstances where things are not going well." I think that is perfectly legitimate.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I was going to make the same point. I think it would be misleading to imagine that in all inspections Ofsted inspectors did not provide some form of support and advice. As Stewart has said, you cannot have a discussion with teachers, head teachers or governors without conveying something, and it is a dialogue. You cannot do that without conveying some sense of advice. But where the school is particularly weak—whether it was in special measures, serious weaknesses or whatever—a quite separate team within Ofsted would follow up that school, and would have an HMI associated with the school right through the process of getting out of special measures. The HMI would be crucial, not only at the inspection but in terms of advice and support. Many of the schools I know that were in special measures speak very highly indeed of the HMI who worked with them through that process of getting out.

  The other thing to remember is that advice is also encompassed in an awful lot of the publications of Ofsted. There is a great deal of advice, either in general terms or where there is a specific survey on a particular topic. So advice comes in different ways, but it would be wrong to say that there was no advice and support coming from Ofsted following inspections.

  Q30 Damian Hinds: You mentioned schools in special measures, and that gets a lot of focus. Also, schools that get the tag "outstanding" end up talking about it a lot. I wonder if that, combined with the conflation of the regulatory certification role with the coaching role, means that you end up having a lot of focus on the very top and the very bottom and not nearly enough on the mass of schools plodding along at the satisfactory level. They have made the grade—satisfactory means that it's all right—but in coaching terms there is presumably an awful lot you could do, as that school, in order to become good.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I agree with you. We tried on many occasions latterly to find a way of clearly identifying those schools—sometimes referred to as coasting schools—where the feeling was very strongly that although they were getting the grades to "stay safe," they were by no means achieving all that was possible with the students that they had. It has proved a perennial problem in terms of identifying criteria that you would then use, which are a combination of quantitative and qualitative. I have to say that I have found myself in the position where this contextual value added ingredient doesn't help on occasions, because although the absolute results are as they are, the contextual value added will be weighed. In fact sometimes that is because other things happening way down the education chain create that contextual value added score, not least what happens to them in a primary school or earlier.

  Q31 Damian Hinds: And hardly anyone understands the contextual bit.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Indeed.

  Q32 Damian Hinds: With the value added bit, at least you can explain to people, "This is what came in and this is what came out." But all these adjustments and so on are impenetrable.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Yes.

  Q33 Damian Hinds: But how do you fix it? Is it not to some extent inevitable while you have this combination of roles that the situation that you outlined will pertain?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think it goes back to the comments made by Stewart. Initially the sort of data that we were generating were intended to enable you to ask questions. Data never, in my experience, answer questions; they enable you to ask questions. Unfortunately, their use has become as the answer, and that is part of the difficulty.

  Lord Sutherland: I would like to make two points on this. First, that is why it is important to have some apparently absolute judgments; they are always relative. Satisfactory is not all that great—it is okay, but schools should be striving to do better than that. Whatever you call it, however it is listed, there should be something above failing, above special measures, but that implies that there is room for manoeuvre. The first time I ever came before this Committee in a previous guise, Mike was with me. We sat outside for 45 minutes, because he had written a report about an inner-city area and said that all the poverty was in there, but that the schools that were in most difficulty were in the next ring out. Those schools were all satisfactory and so they were not given added value. The MPs for that city went bananas—some of whom were on this Committee. I don't know if Mike remembers that.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I do. If you look at what both Tim Brighouse and myself did as head of London Challenge, the "Families of Schools" document has been one of the most influential documents within schools. We were able to put them into families, broadly speaking, and ask, "Why is it that this school in the same family is doing so much better than you are?" Then we got the schools to talk to each other. That is partly why we have seen such dramatic improvements in the performance of London schools, which far outstrips what is happening in the national scene in recent times. There are places for it, and it comes back to the fact that it enables you to ask questions and discuss the difficulties when the data is used as an absolute judgment.

  Maurice Smith: Mr Hinds's analysis is very pertinent and accurate. The current chief inspector, in her latest annual report, said: "The greatest challenge across childcare, social care, education and the skills sector is to raise satisfactory provision to the level of good or outstanding." It has tested chief inspectors for 20 years. The question, if I may put a question back, is: is that the job of the inspectorate? There are all kinds of people who can create improvements, not least the schools, the governing bodies and the head teachers themselves. You have London Challenge and, where I work, you have Greater Manchester Challenge, which has had a significant impact on improving schools in that area. I am not sure, and this is where David will come to a slightly different view, that that is necessarily Ofsted's job. Ofsted's job is to inspect, judge and identify. It does have a role in those schools that are failing, but there are lots of other folk out there who can support improvements.

  Q34 Chair: The Government obviously feel that choice, competition and greater autonomy would lead to greater innovation and that that would be a key to improvement across the board. Do you have any thoughts on whether they are right to think that?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think we come back to the point that there are some schools that, because of a range of factors, not least their personnel and the governing body in some cases, are not capable of improving themselves on their own, with no one concerned or having oversight on them. I am not an absolutely convinced advocate of the idea that if you give all the schools more autonomy, they will by some magic bullet improve. That depends upon the people inside the school. It is not a given at all. In primary terms, for example, it needs the departure of only one teacher or the outstanding head teacher to cause a dramatic change in what happens. That same teacher is unlikely to have the same impact out in a secondary, but in primary it can be dramatic. I am all for giving autonomy, absolutely, but the idea that it automatically leads to improvements is, for me, a step that I would not wish to make and has no basis in evidence at the moment.

  Q35 Chair: Does anyone else have any thoughts on that? If more money is passported to the schools, they become primary academies and the support services, the AA and the RAC of schools—whatever it might be to come in and rescue them from what some might call their innate fragility—are withdrawn, is that going too far? Are primary schools too innately fragile to be put away without the support services available to them?

  Maurice Smith: We have two primary schools in the diocese that are outstanding schools and have applied for new academy status and they will fly. They will be fine, partly because they are outstanding. But I agree with Mike: a school that is in an Ofsted category of inadequacy, or is close to that, by its innate nature won't know how to improve, otherwise it would have done so. The concern is that either you guide that school through things like the London Challenge or whatever it happens to be, or those schools will close. The worry is that if the market really does apply and those schools close, they will close more proportionately in areas of socio-economic deprivation. You then have a problem.

  Q36 Damian Hinds: I suppose the opposite of devolving power to schools is to come up with the perfect golden template that shows what a good school is and does. I suppose that if you are in the role of Ofsted, there will be a tendency over time to try to get closer and closer to that perfect ideal. I am being slightly flippant, but the list of boxes on the tick-box list will grow. The 2009 guidance on the dissemination conferences bringing in the new frameworks states: "The revised framework gives priority to—" and then lists eight areas. That is just the priority areas, let alone all the other ones. I wonder if it is really possible to create the perfect template, and even if it is possible, would schools always get better by trying to follow it. If it is not possible, would it be better to narrow it down to a very small number of things to evaluate basically the quality of the people teaching in and leading the school.

  Lord Sutherland: I think there is no golden template that applies to all schools. It is not just a heresy; it is a frightening mistake. Schools are different—they are in different places, they have different pupils, their teachers move around. On the other hand, just to sound a note of disagreement, I lean further towards autonomy for schools than I think either of my two colleagues were suggesting a moment ago, because one of the ways ahead is to find those schools where greater autonomy would improve things in a way that no template would anticipate. It is finding those and encouraging them. I work with a small education charity where we give sums of money—not huge—to key head teachers in inner-city primary schools in London. We say, "You spend the money the way you want," and the value for money is disproportionate by a factor of 10 for two reasons. One is that we take Ofsted's advice on some of these schools. We know where the money will be well spent, but we don't know how to spend it—they do. That is the kind of autonomy I would like to see much more of.

  Q37 Damian Hinds: So how do you make that distinction? You referred to identifying the schools where that is the case. Do you think that it is a legitimate role of an inspection report to say, "This school is worthy of more autonomy in terms of its cash settlement and so on and this one isn't?"

  Lord Sutherland: Yes.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Depending on how you prove it. If the report says—as I hope it would—that this school is capable of improving itself and it already has the inner resource and inner determination to do that, my answer is yes as well. I think the report can do that and the judgments about its capacity to improve are part of the framework. In that sense, I would say, yes, they should be. I can confirm what Stewart has said about giving schools a small amount of money. When I moved to the post of head of the Learning Trust in Hackney, one of the first things we did was to create an innovation fund that supported schools on ideas about how they might improve their performance—not necessarily the whole school, but some aspect of the school or a group of pupils. It was quite amazing what those schools achieved. That could be spread to other schools and picked up if they so wanted. But that was done within the family. There are ways in which you can do that, without a doubt.

  David Sherlock: Mr Hinds's question and my colleagues' responses to it underline another of the social functions of inspectorates. In a way, they are monster think-tanks. They gather a large amount of educational expertise together in one place, which you can deploy in a variety of different ways. The answer to the point about whether inspectorates should be working on improvements is: probably. They are the best people or, indeed, the only people who have that range and coverage right across the sector.

  Lord Sutherland: May I take you back to the point about advice, because it seems that Ministers and the Department should be seeking even more advice from Ofsted because it is a repository of knowledge about what is happening in virtually all the schools in the country who use it well. Local authorities, in so far as they have any powers left, should be doing the same. The Minister should certainly be drawing on Ofsted.

  Q38 Lisa Nandy: TreeHouse, the autism charity, makes the point that the parents of children with disabilities often have to rely on Ofsted inspections and reports to assess whether a school will meet their child's needs, because they cannot always rely purely on exam or test results. That leads me to wonder whether there are other groups of children for whom Ofsted inspections are critical, even in schools that consistently perform highly in exams. I wonder whether there is a risk from autonomy and from the preferred approach of this Government, which is to free schools and sixth-form colleges from inspection if they consistently perform strongly. Do you share those concerns? If so, what can we do to mitigate the risk for those groups of children?

  Maurice Smith: I think there are groups of children and groups of institutions to which that applies. You have picked a good example. There are then groups of children within schools, if I may deal with them separately. The groups of institutions may include special schools, where children have to travel much further and the relationship with the parent can't be that close for all kinds of reasons. What about children in prisons or closed institutions that we inspect? What about children in public care? My view, which you would expect from my background, is that Ofsted should have a particular eye for those children, because that degree of vulnerability should be a proportionate issue for Ofsted's inspection processes.

  The issue of groups of children within schools can relate to the school self-evaluation. Again, I think there is a risk, which Mr Hinds hinted at, if you give schools a complete inspection holiday or absence. If you say, "If you get 'outstanding,' we won't come in any more," it opens up a risk, although a relatively modest one. As Mike said, in a primary school, such situations can change quite quickly and won't necessarily be reflected immediately in test results. Although I am an advocate of proportionate inspection, I think we need to be a little cautious about saying that all of these schools are free of it, as if it is a burden. Another very interesting thing, of course, is that outstanding schools are the ones that welcome inspection the most. In terms of the religious inspection that I am responsible for, they are now starting to buy it—it's extraordinary.

  Q39 Neil Carmichael: I want to go back to the important question of the autonomy of schools. It seems to me that the discussion we've been having for the last half an hour about regulation versus improvement is really relevant to the issue of autonomy for several reasons. I want to pick up on a few. If Ofsted goes down the improvement route and uses mechanisms to identify schools and help them to be more autonomous, what changes does it need to embrace? That is a big issue, which is made even bigger because autonomy, by its very nature, means that something else is going away, such as local authorities. In a sense, you will need to start identifying a role for yourselves as Ofsted inspectors that fills in a bit of a hole. What are your comments about that?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think your last point is quite correct, if they are autonomous. Let's face it, a number of schools, for understandable reasons, want to become autonomous. They believe that the local authority is holding them back in one way, shape or form. One thing we need to have available—some of our best schools have this—is information that tells schools where they can go. We need organisations or companies that can be contacted, and schools must be assured that such bodies can do a good job for them. Some schools that have been operating in that way for a while have that sort of list. For example, if they want to do a piece of in-service training on x, they know exactly where to go. Unfortunately, some schools don't have that knowledge. Their growth and training has not brought that business side of things into the way in which they operate. If we are going to go down that way, and I have no difficulty with that, there needs to be some mechanism that enables the schools to have initially—after a while they will say, "We know who we want and we know how we can get them"—some form of guidance by way of organisations or companies that they can rely on and trust to be able to do a good job for them. Ultimately, they will be able to make their own decisions as they gain more and more experience.

  Q40 Ian Mearns: Going back to the use of performance data in the inspection process—particularly the compilation of the "bible," the school self-evaluation form—the self-evaluation form is an organic document. It needs to be constantly updated so that the school has an awareness of where it is, against which it can be inspected. By the way, you talked about the 24 hours' notice. That is fine and I think Damian made the point that some schools can have the threat of 24 hours' notice for 15 months or 18 months before the inspectors actually arrive. That can in itself be troublesome, because in that period the focus on doing the self-evaluation form—keeping it up to date and having that evidential base—can be quite burdensome for schools and can detract from the job in hand, which is keeping the school on task and improving standards within the school. Is there any way that we can get round that particular problem? Or is it a problem?

  Lord Sutherland: Well, presumably part of proper self-evaluation is being on top of where your school is that day, that week, that month, and that is a job for a head teacher. If you are going to show the leadership that is necessary—and I believe it is leadership—you have got to do it from an informed base. Okay, maybe you haven't filled the forms in this weekend or brought them up to date because there was a school sports day or whatever it was, but that should be the exception that everybody understands, rather than at the other end of the extreme—"Where are those damn forms? I'll fill them in next vacation." It is really getting the balance right and good leadership is knowing, but the knowing is walking around as much as it is filling in the forms.

  Q41 Chair: The SEF is going. Is that a good or a bad thing?

  Lord Sutherland: Good. Well, a school will have to have that kind of information and a decent governing body will hold them to it.

  Q42 Ian Mearns: But it isn't just the SEF online. When the inspectors come in, they examine the school against what is written in the SEF and then against the evidential base that the school has to hand. Keeping the evidential base up to date is quite burdensome for schools. It really can be.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Yes, it can be. My experience of schools is that, where they try to do everything every year in relation to the self-evaluation, it becomes a huge burden and, after a while, a routine chore. My advice to schools is always that, in a given period, you cannot look at everything that the school is doing and you cannot have your SEF up to date, in that sense, on everything that surrounds the school. So there is a case for saying to schools—I always say it to them now—that you should, at least, decide over what period of time you will have looked at everything in the school that concerns you. But the idea that you have free resource within the establishment to look at everything is simply not realistic. It simply cannot be done, particularly in smaller schools. Here in secondary, the role of the head of department is crucial. In the past, it has been the case that the heads of departments in secondary schools have been the dogs that never bark.

  Lord Sutherland: If the information is good, then it is good management information. If it is not good management information, then it is not necessary to collect it.

  David Sherlock: I wouldn't disagree with anything that has been said. I think there is an undercurrent of sympathy for schools as a stick to beat Ofsted with, which I think is unfortunate. I don't think that they are such fragile beasts as is perhaps implied, nor do I think that they should be exempt from properly managing through the use of data. The bottom line for me as a citizen is that we are still turning out half the kids who do not get five A-C grades in GCSE, including English and Maths. That has incredible knock-on effects, not only for those children but for the further education system, which finds itself largely operating a remedial programme through Skills for Life, which costs £1 billion a year. We are turning out adults who are not fully literate or numerate, so we need to somehow get a grip on the schools. They need firm guidance and assistance, and we should not be over-sympathetic to their plight.

  Q43 Chair: On the abolition of the SEF, I hear your point about the weaknesses in the system, but politicians are always pining about that. We all agree about that, but a measure that they come up with is then opposed, so then we apparently don't care about the weaknesses in the system. The question is: does the SEF help address those weaknesses?

  Lord Sutherland: Self-assessment certainly helps.

  Maurice Smith: People talk about the difference between HMI and contracted inspectors. When I became an HMI and joined the inspectorate, you had a lengthy period of induction, during which I was taught that it is not about the methodology of how you get there, but about the outcome for the youngsters at the end of the day. I don't think anybody's going to lose sleep over whether the SEF is as it is or whether it is online. What's important, as I think all my colleagues have said, is that a school is a self-evaluative institution, and how it does that is, I think, a matter for the school. The fact that it is not Ofsted or the Department's form is fairly irrelevant.

  Q44 Ian Mearns: Going back to Lord Sutherland's point about the greater autonomy for outstanding schools—I understand the thrust behind that—how do we then protect the interest of the schools that are not there yet? How do we maintain a framework of challenge and support at a local level for those other schools?

  Lord Sutherland: I think that is one of the reasons why inspection is important. Unless you know which schools they are, and unless you know and can help them to know the ways in which they are not performing to the level that we might hope, they are in difficulty. Inspection is one of the routes. I believe that national tests are another, but that is a different topic, just to throw a flame into the Committee. There are ways in which you can begin to adjust, and we all wait for the Government's next Bill on autonomy and the nature of schools and so on to see whether or not any of those ways are being incorporated into the planning for the whole academy movement. Clusters and partnership with other schools, for example, pay huge benefits. I don't think you can sit and say, "You have to take on x, y and z." You have to give incentives to the best schools to do that and make it easy for them to do it. You also have to explain to the parents, perhaps, why they are partnering with one school and not the posher one up the road.

  Bill Esterson: Clusters is one of the answers to the question I was about to ask.

  Lord Sutherland: I ticked the right box, did I?

  Q45 Bill Esterson: I think that is the point. Following on from the point about autonomy, I want to ask about encouraging good local practice and where that fits with a strong regulatory regime, and about how Ofsted makes sure that good local practice is properly shared and encouraged. Damian's question rightly pointed out the danger that, if there is too much regulation, it almost stifles the development of good practice. What is the answer and what is Ofsted's role in this?

  Lord Sutherland: May I contribute one sentence before passing this directly and deliberately to Mike? Inspecting local authorities was the right direction for some of that and, gosh, did he help pick up the consequences of that.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: In one or two cases, yes. The inspection of authorities helped enormously and the Local Government Association has recognised in the past that that has led to improvements in practice. I think that has generally been the case. On the proposition about autonomy and sharing, I will go back and give you a model—not the model, but a model—that we used in London Challenge. We took the very outstanding schools and, in particular, the outstanding leaders, and we created a cadre of consultant head teachers. There was money available to them, but by agreement they would, literally at the drop of a hat, move in either to support a new colleague who had been appointed to head teacher and was struggling or a school that was in difficulty. Latterly, we created the same thing for the primary sector as well. That cadre of people led to links being formed between schools, which persist to this day and which are to the benefit of all concerned, so there are models. Of course, some of the academies are not only choosing to be clusters, but are clusters by virtue of the fact that they have a sponsor that is a multi-sponsor. There is the Harris Federation, the United Church Schools Trust, ARK Schools and so on. Those are beginning to be created.

  Bill Esterson: But that's within groups of schools, isn't it? How do you do it from—

  Q46 Chair: I would love to explore this further. It is informative and enjoyable, but we are focusing on Ofsted and its role.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: In terms of that, I don't think that Ofsted has a particular role to play. The reports from Ofsted, however, should influence those people outside who are looking to create that sort of network, family, cluster or whatever you want to call it.

  David Sherlock: And Ofsted and other inspectorates publish good practice examples.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Exactly. I go back to the fact that a lot of it can come through. Not that long ago, Ofsted published a report on some of the best schools in the country and what made them good. They weren't all made good by exactly the same basket of factors, but they were outstanding and the reasons for that were clear. Obviously, two factors stand out—quality of leadership and quality of teaching. Equally, it comes back to a question I asked earlier about how they tackle particular groups of young people in their schools to raise their aspirations and performance.

  Q47 Ian Mearns: What would you recommend that we use instead of money as part of the school improvement process?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: The idea that you can have something for nothing doesn't wash. If you want a head teacher to come out, as we were, and give time and expertise to support someone, you weren't going to give them the fees that PWC or whatever might charge for the same function, but you had to recognise that they were often putting in an enormous number of hours per week in addition to their own role. The other advantage of this was that their deputies would step up, and that was a very important professional development opportunity for those deputies to act as heads. Some of them would spend a full month, two months or three months in the school almost full-time. There were benefits, but they simply acknowledged that they were being recognised—it wasn't large sums of money. Also, as consultant head teachers, they rather liked that role.

  Maurice Smith: May I add one comment about grades? An innate motivator for schools is that they want to get a better grade. The very nature of the inspection is that people want to do better.

  Q48 Chair: On the relationship between Ofsted and the public, can you tell me what it needs to do to improve its communication reputation, both with professions and with the public?

  Lord Sutherland: Well, there are two different groups that are the professions and the public. By and large, the public who are parents want to know, but they are dreadfully sorry if a head teacher seems terribly distressed because there is an Ofsted inspection. They are the sympathies that you have and that we have. The public, by and large, want to have an Ofsted that they can trust. This is one reason why I think it may be a mistake to put child care effectively under them, because there are a lot of unexploded bombs in there, and if they go off, as they might, Ofsted's reputation will suffer, which would be a great pity in relation to the schools and the work that it does in schools. In the profession, in my view, Ofsted is as good as its last inspection.

  Q49 Tessa Munt: I just want to ask you something that I don't quite understand, which is that I am not sure why independent and maintained schools aren't inspected in the same way. In terms of public perception, the public just assumes that Ofsted is Ofsted and that's it, but I am aware that there are significant differences in the way in which those two types of institution are inspected and how they might be compared.

  Lord Sutherland: One of my earliest tasks was to go to the relevant head teachers' conferences for private schools and effectively say to them, "If you're as good as you claim you are, why not help us by inviting in an Ofsted inspection team?" and I have to say that the lady who was president of the girls' day schools at the time did. She came through with a flying result—it was not fixed—and showed that they were quite capable of that independence. Since then they have gone on to try to set up their own system.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think that's the important point. Early on in Ofsted's creation, the schools that were represented by the associations—there were a number of them across the board—came together and asked if they could have a system that they effectively conducted. Now, the requirement upon them was twofold. One, they would follow the Ofsted framework; and two, their inspectors, who were very often either current or former head teachers or heads of departments in independent schools, were trained by Ofsted as well. Therefore, in that sense they were following exactly the same pattern as the maintained sector. The difference was that the school paid for the inspection and the people who were carrying it out were, to a large extent, familiar with the independent sector. The schools that were not part of associations continued to be inspected by Ofsted and still are to this day.

  Q50 Tessa Munt: I'm sorry, but could you say that again?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: The schools that are not part of formally recognised associations. There are about 2,500 independent schools and roughly half are members of associations. The other half are not and therefore unless Ofsted inspected them there would be no inspection.

  Q51 Ian Mearns: What's the inspection cycle for independent schools that are meant to be inspected by Ofsted?

  Q52 Tessa Munt: I'm sorry; I have a supplementary question. I did not hear exactly what you were saying. My understanding is that you do safety inspections, broadly. You do legal minimum standards.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: No. I am a governor of an independent school as well and I've been inspected.

  Q53 Tessa Munt: Yes, as opposed to that: you are measuring quality of education in the state sector and I believed you were measuring legal minimum standards and safety.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: No. Absolutely not. I can confirm from the time I was in Ofsted, and now as a governor of such a school, that there is substantial observation of teaching. There is substantial discussion of leadership. There is a substantial investigation of the development plan of the school and its self-evaluation. At the moment the school where I am a governor is working on its self-evaluation because it is expecting an inspection in due course. They are inspected roughly every two to three years.

  Q54 Ian Mearns: All of them?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: No, the ones that are in the association. Just as in the inspection of schools you have to check on certain legal requirements. Health and safety issues are part of a school inspection, as well as anything else. It is not the case that they are wildly different.

  Q55 Ian Mearns: Does anyone know what the inspection cycle is for the schools that are not part of the association?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I don't at this point in time. I'm sorry, no.

  Q56 Tessa Munt: I am sorry, gentlemen. May I just ask you something? I have a piece of paper here: "Submissions to the Education Committee: the role and performance of Ofsted". Under the heading, "The weight given to different factors within the inspection process" it states: "Ofsted inspections are designed for the particular service or sector inspected. Some of these, such as independent schools and children's homes, are defined by the need to ensure that providers are meeting legal requirements and minimum standards; others, such as schools and colleges, are more focused on evaluating quality."

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: That is not my personal experience of the inspection of independent schools, which are part of an association.

  Maurice Smith: I think I can help. I think that sentence, and I'm not familiar with it, refers to what used to be called the 'Boarding Regulations'. It refers to those independent schools that have residential accommodation. The residential element of an independent school has national minimum standards, as I explained before in terms of early years. Ofsted is the regulator in those circumstances. So those schools can be closed, for example, if there are not enough fire doors or whatever it happens to be. However, the education in independent schools is inspected by Ofsted—sometimes those things occur simultaneously—in the qualitative way that an ordinary school inspection is. The boarding bit was inherited from CSCI during the transfer. I think you will find that sentence refers to the boarding bit, which is governed by national minimum standards.

  Tessa Munt: Then I am much happier.

  Chair: Before I go back to the consistency and quality of inspectors, Craig will look at the weighting of inspection factors.

  Q57 Craig Whittaker: I am a little bit—tongue in cheek, I suppose is the right word—confused. I say that because we hear our panel of experts, some saying that Ofsted is quite complex and too large while others say that it should be doing more. We have heard David say that Ofsted should have a set of expectations, leading to an informed and intelligent debate. On the other hand, we hear Maurice saying that it should have a regulatory and policing role. We have also heard Lord Sutherland say that greater autonomy is great, and others saying that it is not. Let me take you on to the weighting of the inspection factors. One thing that we know on this panel, from evidence that has been submitted so far, is that it has become too complex. We have heard Nick Gibb say recently that we will have a much more streamlined inspection framework. May we have your views on whether you think the scope of the new inspection framework is a good thing or not? Are you concerned that some areas will be missed? I know we touched on this briefly earlier, but I would like to drill you down a little bit on it.

  Chair: Who would like to pick that up?

  Lord Sutherland: I will have a go. On weighting of inspection factors, if I were asked now to do something like what I did before, my approach would be to go back to square one and ask, "What are the objectives? What can we reasonably expect of schools, as a public and as politicians representing us?" The point about people leaving school essentially not numerate and literate is well below expectation that is reasonable. Set your expectations out, then have your ways of beginning to judge whether those are met, and on that basis devise an inspection system that will contribute. You just scrap the lot. Because of the pressure over the years to add new bits, folks keep wanting new bits in. Let's get back to what the reasonable expectations are at primary level, at reception level and at secondary level—set the objectives and then inspect essentially the outcomes. This is where I think national tests are important. Outcomes are important, and they are the best judgments we've got. The views of employers are important, and very helpful as well, but they are more anecdotal. Set your tests for acceptability of performance, and inspect on the crucial factors that lead to that, not on every damn thing that somebody thinks is interesting or they would like facts on.

  Q58 Chair: New framework? Are there going to be any costs of having a focus on the core issues?

  Maurice Smith: I thought the brief about weighting was to do with the weighting within an inspection. My view is that the higher the level of qualitative methodology—that is, more time spent in the classroom and less in the head teacher's office—the better. Then it is a matter of how much of that you can afford. If you want to talk about the weighting between different elements of Ofsted's portfolio, that is a very different question but I am happy to answer it.

  David Sherlock: As a sidelight on that, I think one thing that is unfortunate is the whole notion of limiting grades. That distorts the proper weighting that Maurice suggests, where it should be on the observation of teaching.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: If you are referring to the current framework, which has limiting judgments where if you get a judgment at grade x you cannot get better than that, I think that has not been a particularly good innovation, if I may call it that. I agree entirely with Lord Sutherland; I think we should go right back to square one. We should start again and really ask the key questions that he has raised. Then we should devise a framework that should look at the heart of what makes a good school with good outcomes for all its young people, and start from there. I think, however, that even when you have done that, there will always be the factor of time and cost. It will be about what you can afford, as opposed to what you would like to afford. That is writ large at this point in time.

  Q59 Craig Whittaker: I have two further questions. First, the previous Government wanted to introduce the school report cards proposal. What are the merits of that compared with the more focused Ofsted reports that are being proposed?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: The scorecard would rely heavily on the information obtained through the inspection, along with other available information, perhaps through the data collected by the Department about the school. In a sense, it was an idea about bringing together all the information about a school. The immediate difficulty was in trying to summate all of that into a single grade, even though the components were like chalk and cheese. Coming to an overall grade seemed to me to be very difficult, if not impossible, and potentially misleading.

  Maurice Smith: I think our education system—I am talking about schools on their own—is one of the most highly regulated and scrutinised in the world, partly through the public reporting. There is no necessity to add yet another layer on to that. It was an annual layer that would have told you what Ofsted reports told you, what test results told you and what you could learn at the school gate. I think that it was unnecessary and well dropped.

  Q60 Craig Whittaker: A final question to David. What are your views on the current post-16 framework and to what extent will the narrow inspection framework be appropriate for settings with more adult learners, such as colleges and work-based training?

  David Sherlock: The Common Inspection Framework was conceived for post-16 learners and then adopted for schools. It covers the basics that Lord Sutherland suggested: the quality of the outcomes for learners; the quality of the teaching and learning experience, which, as all our colleagues have said, is central to this process; the equipment and so forth that they have access to; learner support, which is particularly important where you have part-time students, as most adults are; and the leadership and management of the institution. Those five things seem to me to be pretty near as basic as you can get. It think it is right that the current inspection framework has had a few grace notes attached to it over the last decade, which could very easily be stripped away. But I think if you did go back to the fundamentals, you would arrive at something like those five basic characteristics. I certainly regarded it as extraordinarily helpful when the Common Inspection Framework was adopted for schools, because it cut back the number of questions and the same questions were used for self-assessment as were used for inspection. Again, that took away some of the mystery and threat from the whole process because there was a common agenda that schools and colleges knew would be discussed with the inspectors, and with which they had already engaged.

  Q61 Neil Carmichael: I just want to talk about the consistency and quality of inspections, which is really important. I have come across situations in which schools have used an Ofsted report to counter National Challenge information and vice versa. I know, therefore, that there is inconsistency. My first question is how we tackle that from the Ofsted angle. My second question is about the recruitment and retention of inspectors. My third question is about the changing role of Ofsted, which is an issue that has floated around this room throughout the day. How can we be sure that inspectors can meet the new challenges? There is obviously less emphasis on SEFs, because they will not be there, and there is less emphasis on targets and box-ticking. There will now be a need to make more judgments. How can we ensure that Ofsted inspectors move in that direction?

  Lord Sutherland: May I start on consistency? It is the most difficult problem over a large organisation and many judgments are being made annually, and it will continue to be a problem. So eternal vigilance is one thing. One practical element of eternal vigilance is having an adequate appeals procedure—one that is seen to work, and one in which those at the very top of Ofsted take some part and have a direct input. When I was in university business, one of the committees that I insisted on chairing was concerned with appeals against exam results. I learned more about my institution by chairing that committee than by almost any other activity. It was partly for me, but it was partly to insist to the whole community that this consistency was fundamental and that there had to be a way of justifying judgments. So, to take only your first question, that is what I would focus on particularly.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I agree entirely with that. I would add, however, that I have met with the same issue that you have, within the London context. Ofsted issued a report for a school, which was considerably positive, yet I had the school on my list—as did the Department—as being in National Challenge.

  Neil Carmichael: Precisely.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: That happened, for me, too frequently. While I was involved with London Challenge I met with the chief inspector to say: "This should not be happening."

  Q62 Chair: How can we fix it, then? This inquiry will result in a report that will be written by the Committee, which will go to the Government, and to which they will have to respond. Are there any recommendations that we should include?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Where you are making those policy decisions about something such as National Challenge, you must have—it is a banal phrase—a joined-up approach across the remaining bodies that will be involved. I can think of a number of schools that would wave the Ofsted report and basically say: "The door's there: go." Yet we knew that those schools were not doing particularly well—not necessarily for every student, but for significant groups within that school. That bothered me tremendously. There is an issue, and once a report is issued that is more positive than it should be, it becomes very difficult to deal with that situation and to get that school back to treating seriously the weaknesses that we know are there.

  Chair: We have limited time, and I want to get through as much material as we can.

  David Sherlock: I just wanted to say that I wonder whether consistency, or developing it, is compatible with contracting out large parts of the inspection process.

  Q63 Chair: I think that that leads into recruitment and retention.

  Maurice Smith: One comment is that Ofsted can't win here. I can remember the Daily Telegraph running a story saying: look at all these exam results at below floor level, and these schools are judged good by Ofsted. If Ofsted goes in with a set of exam results, they say that it is too data-driven. You have to take the balance of the two performance indicators—the Ofsted report and the exam results—and come to a judgment as a parent.

  Q64 Neil Carmichael: But the emphasis must be on judgment, mustn't it?

  Maurice Smith: It is a judgment. It's a qualitative judgment and that is what you don't get from test results.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: The drawing of that baseline for National Challenge of 30% was entirely and utterly arbitrary; it was not based on any analysis of where—

  Neil Carmichael: I am not supporting the system at all.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: But it couldn't be—at the end of the day it had to be a judgment. It had in that sense to have an arbitrary characteristic associated with it. But it did create this sort of anomaly.

  David Sherlock: But an inspectorate has to be run with the same rigour in terms of internal quality assurance as you expect of the providers that you are inspecting.

  Maurice Smith: On recruitment and retention, recruitment to the HMI role is still buoyant as far as I know—I am not close to it, but it remained buoyant all the time that I was in Ofsted. I understand that—although, again, I am not terribly close to it—recruitment to inspection roles in the three big inspection providers is relatively buoyant. One of them is represented here—you might want to ask him afterwards. In terms of recruitment, that is healthy.

  Retention is a really interesting issue. I bow to Stewart and Mike on this, but when I joined Ofsted, it was your final career move. The pinnacle of your career was to become an HMI. Yet after that time, in the late '90s and as we entered the 21st century, people used it as a career move. That was a really interesting development that we hadn't seen before. HMI was your final job for life—of course, with the exception of my two colleagues—it was the pinnacle. People then started to see it as a career step and thought, "After five years as an HMI, I will go on to be a Director of Education somewhere." Many people have done so.

  Q65 Neil Carmichael: Those are the answers to my questions, really. One other question I was going to ask is, if we are talking about autonomous schools—as we did before—we are looking at schools that will be in control of their own budget much more and will make decisions about the business model of the school much more and so forth. Will Ofsted take that on as a key measure, and how would it set about it? Because that is quite a different set of questions to the ones that you have normally asked in the past.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think that, with the extent of the further autonomy that academies currently can enjoy, there can't be a great deal of difference in terms of the budget that they have to manage. What is different, of course, is that they have some freedoms that they can exercise about length of day, whether they follow the national curriculum, the pay and conditions of teachers and so on. There are those sorts of differences. What will be necessary is that the inspectors—or inspection teams—in future will have to try to recruit people who have that experience. I think one of the things we had early on, Stewart, was that a number of schools would say, "But the inspection team doesn't contain anyone who understands us." In some cases they might have had a valid point, but not always. We need to have an inspectorate body that is carrying out these inspections that collectively represents the type of school and experience that we have in our system.

  Q66 Chair: Damian made the point earlier that he wasn't sure that consistency and rigour was easy to deliver when you've got Tribal, Serco and CfBT all going out individually. The rest of you did not comment on that.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think I am the one HMI who has the longest experience of this—from when there was no Ofsted and HMI inspector. I am sorry, even if you have a small body—as it was—you may not get the range of inconsistency, but the idea that you get total consistency simply was not the case.

  Lord Sutherland: It cannot, it will not, be perfect—even Japanese car manufacturers are withdrawing models at the moment—but it is a goal you must strive for. That is why you need an appeals system and probably internal monitoring of some kind to ensure that you get as close to it as you can. But I wouldn't be quite as negative as David seemed to be.

  David Sherlock: I question it. I am merely saying this is essentially contracting out the core business rather than the peripherals. Therefore I think it makes control inherently more difficult to achieve. Therefore when you are trying to develop consistency, it makes it more problematical. Certainly it was one of the things that we decided not to go with in ALI for exactly that reason—that you could actually have all the control routines and double checks internally, which we thought was helpful.

  Q67 Ian Mearns: I am coming back to where we began: the idea of a single inspectorate. There is a body of support within education and children's sectors for a single inspectorate, but only if it retains the expertise of its predecessors. This morning, we have heard Lord Sutherland say that he is disappointed with Ofsted—that it has inherited other roles and there are unexploded bombs; we have heard David say that other organisations may have been more focused; and we have heard Maurice highlight the lack of connectivity with health following the Laming inquiry. I mention all of that more for context for Mike because he missed some of that. Do you feel that, when inheriting functions from other organisations, the new Ofsted should have continued with the advice and guidance functions that they contained? What else do you think the new Ofsted lost and what do you feel it has gained by inheriting these other functions?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: In the period leading up to my retirement, we inherited—if that is the right word—the inspection of the child minders and early years, as a result of which we had to accept the staff from more than 150 different local authorities. They were transferred across—TUPE'd across—into Ofsted on the basis that their work, as local authority employees, was predominantly within that area. Their work was not always entirely in that area, but where it was more than 50% they were likely to be transferred across. That was not an easy exercise, as I recall only too well. There were 150-odd local authorities, whose staff all had different contractual terms and conditions—it was fun. It became clear that there were the beginnings of a feeling that there was a sort of class system amongst the inspectorates—Maurice will be able to say more on this—in which those coming across from one group were not seen as being as highly qualified, experienced or valued as another group. That led to some internal issues that we had to deal with as best we could. Latterly, and particularly in my work at the end of inspections in Hackney, I have to admit that my biggest worry was that I did not always feel that the people carrying out the inspections within certain parts of that broad local authority agenda had the necessary experience and expertise to do what they were being asked to do.

  David Sherlock: I think the things that happened in 2007 were an accidental by-blow of what happened in 2000, when we moved away from organising inspection by institution, to doing so by age group, which meant that you had several inspectorates operating in a single institution at the same time. I think that that was clumsy and cluttered. Mike and I certainly worked together very closely to deal with some of the practical issues, and I think we did so successfully. Nevertheless, it was a mess. That really was the motivation for the mergers in 2007.What I think was lost was the similarity of the inspectorate to the people it was serving, if I can put it that way. ALI was a non-departmental public body and its predecessor, was a company limited by guarantee. I would have preferred that ALI had stayed a company limited by guarantee, because most of the organisations we were dealing with were subject to company law. We were on a trading estate. The whole style of the organisation was about the adult world, the world of multiple occupations, globalisation, demographic change and so on. It seems to me that it is important to have that kind of identity between the quality assurance organisation and the people who are being quality assured. Ofsted and schools have it; Ofsted is an organ of the state, and so are most of the schools we are talking about. However, the wider Ofsted perhaps lost some of those benefits.

  Maurice Smith: It is a very complex debate. Lord Sutherland spoke to me when I was the chief inspector and this was happening, and he spoke eloquently in the House of Lords about it. I agree partly with David on this; it depends on where you start. If you start with the child, it seems to make a lot of sense. If you start with the institution—in other words, we inspect schools—it does not make much sense at all, really. The combo is really quite complex now. For example, Ofsted inspects child minders, yet it has no role whatsoever in universities. It seems to me to be a rather curious amalgam. That has occurred over 20 years, not just in 2001, when it quadrupled its work force overnight, as Mike mentioned, and it did not just occur with the new Ofsted in 2007. It occurred when it started inspecting initial teacher training, when it started inspecting funded nursery education and when it started inspecting local education authorities—gosh, that was a big jump into a place we hadn't been before. Ofsted is one of the longest standing—you can't call it a quango, it is a non-Ministerial government department. The average age for such bodies is eight years, and Ofsted must be getting close to its 20th anniversary. I don't hear any mention of its abolition. The reason is because its brand is so strong that when the Government wants to sort something out—like when they wanted to sort out early years—they give it to Ofsted. That's not always the case, but it often is, particularly in the child safeguarding world. In my career, the highest risk in any of this work with young people is the headlights of a child death. Ofsted has now faced that and it is a matter for you to judge how well it has faced it.

  Lord Sutherland: Just one additional point. While we have heard the very good and important views of those who are professionals in the business and who have had to organise this, please keep in mind the view of those outside—the public—for whom the brand is clear. My worry is that that will be confused in some way. Please also keep in mind the views of those in government, who know what Ofsted is doing.

  The last point is, in our society the role of schools is still so fundamental that it is important to dedicate to that particular set of institutions a tailor-made inspection system.

  Q68 Chair: So you are calling for a radical break-up of Ofsted?

  Lord Sutherland: I am sorry it has gone the way it has. I hope that after the Government have decided what they are going to do on the autonomy of schools, academies and so on, they think about how an Ofsted to serve that can be ensured for the future. I would say ensured for the future without many of the other tasks.  

  Q69 Chair: David suggested that, given the financial state of the nation, it might still be possible by combining back office, but having separate institutions with a separate focus delivering the inspection in the different environments. Is that a fair summary?

  David Sherlock: I was suggesting primarily that I thought the FE bit—the adult education bit in the broadest sense—belongs with the higher education structure, much as it already is in Scotland in many respects.

  Lord Sutherland: I suggested the back office route. If you're looking for savings, look for savings in an accounting context rather than in terms of perhaps reducing the quality of the operation.

  Q70 Chair: So in terms of recommendations?

  Maurice Smith: That is a value-for-money argument and perfectly acceptable. What Stewart has said is that if you look at it through institutional eyes, there is a very strong argument to be made for an inspectorate of schools, and I wouldn't disagree with that. If you look at it through the child's eyes, the child doesn't just go to school; it goes to the doctor's, and it may end up in the social care system.

  Q71 Chair: So what is your view, Maurice, between those?

  Maurice Smith: I think it is a balanced position. Ofsted was very successful as a schools inspectorate. As an organisation, on balance it was probably more successful as a schools inspectorate. However, it's probably also more successful in inspecting the things that other people used to inspect. If you take a holistic view of a child, which is often the word used, that child and its parents touch on all those services. If you go down that route, that is where you will end up. If you take an institutional view and say, "We want to inspect these institutions as part of the framework of our society," that's fine. You'll inspect schools, further education colleges and GPs. That is also fine. You just have to make a go of it.

  Lord Sutherland: I would disagree quite strongly, for the following reason: if you move away from the institution, you're talking about the child—very important; absolutely agreed—but the things that affect a child's life are the whole context of the society in which they live, not just health, although we've got that far, and not just social care, although we've got that far. If you look at the deprivation indices for our country, the deprivation rating for poor education will be matched in that same locality by health, housing, employment—everything. And you're into everything the minute you move from the institution.

  Maurice Smith: I do not disagree with Stewart.

  Lord Sutherland: I think the everything is the one that we haven't really tackled, because we assume schools can do it all. That has been one of the problems. It's not true that another little widget in the school will solve it; we need to look at the community.

  Maurice Smith: As I said earlier, we've never got to the health thing, because the vested interests in health are too strong.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: In the past 24 hours there is the classic example of the inquiry carried out by the sister of the young London boy who was stabbed. She wants another bit of the national curriculum, and she wants it to be inspected. Actually, schools can't solve that problem, because it is a much broader societal problem. Everything lands in the schools, and, like Stewart, I think that that is not good. It is not good for schools, and in some cases it takes their eye off their main function. A failure to fulfil that main function creates the very issues that we're talking about.

  David Sherlock: Even if we had a children's inspectorate, I don't think that's a justification for all of the adult work being rowed in. Last year's NIACE report, "Learning Through Life", made a very powerful case for looking again at the whole business of lifelong learning and the various kinds of service that should be given at various points in the life course.

  Q72 Chair: Before I bring Ian in, I shall abuse my position as Chair again. My view is that the break at 18-19 is enormously damaging. Perhaps we should be looking at 14-25 holistically and examining all the factors, whether that is done separately by institutions or particular organisations. The break at 18-19 is a huge issue. Although everything may not be working as well as we would like at the moment, the idea of reinforcing that adult-child separation may be to the detriment of the interested parties.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: That's not realistic either. The majority of schools and further education colleges are already working with young people aged 14-19 and beyond.

  David Sherlock: That is the point I was going to make. Having separate inspectorates does not necessarily mean that you break off the service in that sense. Colleges, training providers, and the rest, work with some 14-year-olds, and they are perfectly fine. It would be perfectly reasonable for them to carry on being inspected by the children's inspectorate, but I think that the main focus should be on the institution, because it is a heck of a lot easier to organise that way.

  Maurice Smith: As a nation we have jumped about all around this for the past 40 or 50 years. The argument of genericism versus specialism in social care goes back to 1970 and beyond. We have gone one way and the other way, and backwards and forwards. This is not unusual. The role of the chief inspector and Ofsted is to inspect and regulate as it is told by the Government, and I am sure that all of my colleagues here would say that that is our job. If you told me to inspect 100,000 child minders, I would inspect them in the time allowed to the quality standard that you want. That is the role of Ofsted. It is the role of Government to decide what Ofsted's for.

  Chair: The last question from Ian, and then we'll bring the session to a close.

  Q73 Ian Mearns: This is a quick deviation back to David's point. Family learning programmes are one of the best tools that I have seen used to promote social mobility. We don't use those programmes enough and we don't have enough invested in them. Back to business. Do you think it is right that Ofsted's judgments are used to develop Government policy? From now on in, if Ofsted judges a school outstanding, that gives that institution the freedom to go for academy status and a whole range of other independences. In the future, do you think that that is going to be a crucial factor in Ofsted's arrival at those judgments?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I sincerely hope not. I very much hope that the inspection teams do what the framework and the present system require of them and reach their conclusions. If a school is not outstanding, they should stick with that, assuming that that is supported by the evidence. I don't think that at any time they should be pushed into making unsubstantiated judgments for the benefit of another cause.

  Lord Sutherland: That wasn't your point, though, was it? You assume that they make their judgement, so the question is whether they should have the power to do something else.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: Well, that is a Government decision. That is not for Ofsted to determine.

  Q74 Ian Mearns: But conversely, a school might become an academy and, somewhere down the line, an Ofsted inspection might decide that it's no longer outstanding. Do you think that academy status should then be withdrawn?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I think that's the very interesting question.

  Damian Hinds: The criteria will be broader by then.

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: I do know that, when we were dealing with them in London, London Challenge and the people who were working with me on that were not allowed to work with the academies. The academies unit appointed their people separately to help. My argument was that, towards the end of my time with London Challenge, it was likely in the summer that, if not the majority, certainly 50% of the schools that were below the National Challenge line were academies, but London Challenge was seen as bearing the burden of guilt for that, when in fact it was not theirs at all.

  Maurice Smith: And, in the old academy system—if I may call it that—academies have gone into special measures. When I was at a senior level in Ofsted, but not a chief inspector, and one of the first academies was potentially going to go into special measures,[1] enormous lobbying took place to try and persuade the chief inspector that that shouldn't be the case, but he stood without fear or favour and made his call.

  Q75 Ian Mearns: The criteria are very different now, of course.

  David Sherlock: Lord Sutherland made the point earlier, when he said that it would be a terrible shame if Governments failed to listen to the information that the chief inspector and Ofsted are bringing from the field. I don't think that's the danger. That is absolutely right; evidence-based policy-making depends on having information and Ofsted is a provider of that. The difficulty is when there is a suspicion that Government policy is influencing inspection judgments. That's the danger, and it is a danger of position. That's what influences the debate about whether any inspectorate is appropriately located in relation to Government.

  Q76 Chair: Because autonomy—as we have discussed and I think there was universal agreement—gives tools, and it doesn't guarantee outcomes. At the moment, there appears to be a one-way track towards greater autonomy through becoming an academy. There doesn't appear to be any system for that to be reversed and that perhaps is less important—the aim of the Government is not that only outstanding schools should be academies, but they are just the first wave. The question here should probably be based on self-improvement capability. As long as the school is capable of improving, giving it greater autonomy and freedom to do so makes sense. Do you think that that autonomy might be required to be taken away from some academies? If so, would the natural trigger be an Ofsted inspection—perhaps one that said, "The self-improvement of this institution is too weak, and we don't have sufficient confidence in it or in giving them the powers and tools of autonomy alone, and the power to innovate, when we haven't got the people who'll do that; they need greater supervision"? Would that be the case or not?

  Sir Mike Tomlinson: My position is simple. I'm concerned for the young people in their schools and the education that they are or are not getting. If the academy is judged to be as you have described, I don't think you can sit back and allow it to continue because it is an academy and it has autonomy. You have to have some formal intervention. What form that takes is up for debate. That fact is that everyone, not least Parliament, has a duty and a responsibility to ensure, as far as it can, that every young person in this country is having education of the highest possible quality. If that young person is not, personally and morally, I can't see why you would stand on the sidelines. I couldn't do it.

  Lord Sutherland: I have two points. The first is that there are two different types of inspections—certainly in my day. One is the kind that come up every three years, or whatever it is, and that's evident. The other kind can be triggered by a complaint, a concern, or evidence that something is going wrong. The Government should be very ready to use that if evidence comes up, particularly in relation to schools that don't come under any other umbrella. The second point is—and I hope they are listening up there—that this is the kind of thing that should be thrashed out in the education Bill that comes before your House and mine over the next few months. What was lacking in July was the detail, of which this would be just one example.

  David Sherlock: The consequences are interesting, aren't they? I agree with both Mike and Lord Sutherland that the more you make institutions autonomous, the more diverse they become. In many ways, making organisations autonomous is a one-way street. It is very difficult to take them back into ownership—whose ownership?—in order to do something with them. Colleges, in many ways, are an analogous case. After incorporation in 1993, what we saw—and are still seeing—was a whole set of forced mergers, takeovers and so on, to deal with precisely the kind of issues we are discussing here. Those were either financial fragility or financial mismanagement, or academic mismanagement. If we go down that line, you are going to see takeovers, mergers, failures and closures. You are bound to. It goes with the territory. The result of ALI's work was the closure of 250 training providers, but they were private organisations and it "didn't matter"—if you like—in the sense of the state structure. It will matter in the case of academies.

  Maurice Smith: And that's why schools are different, whether they are autonomous or not, because the market can't just sort that out. If there is a disproportionate degree of closure in areas of socio-economic deprivation, youngsters won't go to school. That's where the Government and local government—at the moment—have a responsibility to provide the education to suit their age, ability and aptitude at compulsory school age.

  Chair: As you rightly say, we will be discussing these issues when the Bill comes forward. Thank you all very much for a tremendously useful and enjoyable session on Ofsted this morning.

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1   Witness correction: The academy was potentially going to go into special measures - no decision had actually yet been made at this stage. Back

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Prepared 17 April 2011