The role and performance of Ofsted - Education Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers 199-255)

Professor Chris Chapman, Dr John Dunford, Christine Ryan and Anastasia de Waal

24 November 2010

  Q199 Chair: Good morning to you all. Welcome to this evidence session on the role and performance of Ofsted. Before we start, I should declare on Dr John Dunford's behalf that he is an adviser to the Committee, and therefore that should be noted on the record. Are you all happy for us to use first names? We try and keep it relatively informal. The latest annual report from the Chief Inspector has come out, and it says—I think it is very much in tune with today's White Paper, so much of which seems to have been released to the press ahead of coming before Parliament—that too much teaching is still not good enough and does not deliver what we now expect of it, and that, in 50% of secondary schools and 43% of primary schools, teaching is no better than satisfactory. Is Ofsted well enough equipped, and does it have the quality of staff, to make judgments like that—judgments that we can rely on?

  Anastasia de Waal: One of the biggest problems that we have seen with Ofsted is that, as there has been less money—this is the most recent problem—inspections have become truncated. That has meant that it is actually very difficult for inspectors—they are very frustrated, I understand, in many cases—to gauge true quality. One of the problems with that is that it is very much a compliance model. In some ways, I find it deeply frustrating to hear Christine Gilbert say that many lessons and much teaching is very dull, when I feel that a large contributor to that has been that schools have felt under pressure to comply. That has probably had a rather dulling effect on their teaching. Hopefully, we can, I suppose, go forward to a model that is more sophisticated in understanding what makes for quality, that allows different models of teaching, and that enables teachers not to have to perform in a certain way when they're inspected, which probably makes them teach in—I would say—a duller way than normal.

  Christine Ryan: Our inspections have a much higher inspector tariff than is typical for Ofsted inspections. With the schools we inspect, it can go from a 10-day inspector tariff for the smaller schools to more than 35 days for the very largest schools. Even on that tariff, our schools, and certainly some of our inspectors, feel that it still does not allow them enough time actually in the classroom. The system we're running has that much higher tariff than Ofsted, and our inspectors and schools sometimes question whether there is sufficient evidence to make judgments about quality of teaching, because you don't see every teacher teach anymore. Under our previous frameworks, we used to see every teacher teach. That was quite a powerful piece of evidence. These days, we can't do that because we are inspecting more frequently. We were required to move inspection to every three years instead of every six, which has meant that we have had to make economies in the scale of inspection. We no longer see every teacher teach, but we do see a significantly greater portion of lessons than would typically be found on an Ofsted inspection. Whether it can still arrive at its judgments is a matter for Ofsted, as it uses a different framework and different criteria from us, so that is for Ofsted to decide. I simply say that our model is much richer in terms of observation, but we still find it to be a minimalist model for being secure about judgments on quality of teaching in large schools.

  Professor Chapman: I would comment on the variation in judgments by inspectors; the research suggests that there is a variation. That is problematic in itself, and is likely to become even more problematic when we have a situation where inspectors are observing only a few lessons, and only parts of lessons, as well. I think that there are issues that we need to address around observation at the classroom level.

  Q200 Ian Mearns: Inconsistencies?

  Professor Chapman: Inconsistency of inspection judgments, yes.

  Q201 Chair: But if fewer schools are being inspected less often, is there not an opportunity to increase quality, training and consistency among inspectors, so that where inspection does take place, it is likely to be of a higher and more consistent quality?

  Professor Chapman: That would seem to be a sensible option, yes.

  Q202 Chair: Do you see any indication that that is the likely direction of travel?

  Professor Chapman: With the current system that we have with our regional providers, I think it is a necessity rather than an option, so let's hope that policy makers do travel in that direction.

  Dr Dunford: My reading of the Chief Inspector's report this year was, as ever, that the cup was half full, but in the newspapers the next day, the cup was considerably less than half empty. There is something around the interpretation there. I was looking at an inspection report on a school the other day. It has 1,000 pupils. The inspectors observed 31 half-lessons—they only went in for half a lesson, 31 times—and were making a judgment about the quality of teaching. Now, I don't think that the general public should put their faith in 31 half-judgments once every five years, or whatever it is. For a start, we heard from the previous witnesses about inconsistency of inspections. I think all inspections ought to be led by an HMI; then there would be much more consistency.

  Q203 Chair: May I interrupt you at that point? I did it with the previous panel, so I'll do it with this one: is it the opinion of everybody on the panel that an HMI should lead every inspection? Does anybody disagree?

  Christine Ryan: Yes, it is about the quality of the inspector. HMIs generally tends to be more reliable because of the breadth of experience, but I have to say, even comparing HMIs now with HMIs that we might have used five years ago—we use HMIs in our inspections—they are not the same, because they have had different experiences. What they have been required to do within the inspectorate has been different, and they have different types of experience. I would hesitate ever to say that a particular designation by definition makes somebody perfect. You have to have rigorous systems for selection and decide what the criteria for good are.

  Dr Dunford: That was a yes, was it?

  Christine Ryan: No, it was not a yes. It's more complicated than that.

  Dr Dunford: My point is that the quality of teaching is best assured through good systems within the school itself. That can happen on a day-to-day, week-to-week or month-to-month basis. It is a much bigger and more important part of a quality assurance system than someone coming in once every few years and seeing a few half-lessons. It seems to me that a good inspection system—the inspection framework is moving towards that—is each inspection framework moving closer to a validation or assessment of the school's self-evaluation, particularly in relation to the quality of teaching.

  Q204 Pat Glass: Ofsted has a certain brand, and whether we disagree with it or not, it is highly regarded by many parents and, through the media, by the general public. If you could change things tomorrow, what would you do differently to improve Ofsted?

  Professor Chapman: If Ofsted's remit is around inspection for improvement, I would ensure that the inspection team had a significant ongoing relationship with the schools, post-inspection. That may not be possible in the current economic climate, and therefore you may have to think about a different model, but I suspect we may come to that.

  Anastasia de Waal: I would very much like to see much longer inspections—inspections that are able really to gauge what the quality was like. That would enable inspectors to move away from a very tick-box method, which they are having to use now partly because of time pressure. The reliance on data is also very symptomatic of the fact that they are not able to get a very good gauge themselves by being in schools.

  Dr Dunford: Twenty years ago, I remember undergoing inspection where 20 inspectors came in for a whole week in a big secondary school. I don't agree with the ongoing relationship, because I think you have to be clear about inspection and quality assurance on the one hand and school improvement on the other, and have a proper relationship between the two. While I think a lot of attention is given to getting the inspection system right, much less attention is paid to getting the school improvement system right and coherent. There are a number of things I could say about that.

  Q205 Pat Glass: What is the one thing you would change?

  Dr Dunford: I would improve the relationship between the accountability part of the inspection and what comes in to improve the school when things are going wrong.

  Q206 Chair: So a separate service. You want the improvement that Chris wants, not delivered by Ofsted but triggered by it, and coming in more effectively.

  Dr Dunford: Exactly, and done school to school, in a way that I think the current and most recent Secretaries of State have recognised is the way forward.

  Professor Chapman: Can I come back on that briefly? I said "If the premise is improving through inspection." I would endorse what John says if the premise is a blank canvas. I would be thinking of using Ofsted as an accountability and regulation system, and perhaps as a broker for identifying local school-to-school collaboration to support internal improvement. That is the model that I would be looking for.

  Q207 Pat Glass: Christine, do you want to come in?

  Christine Ryan: First of all, you have to define clearly what it is that you are expecting the inspectorate to do or to be. One of the things that is no longer clear is whether inspection is designed for improvement or to catch people out. There needs to be clarity about what you are asking Ofsted to do, and I don't think there is that clarity anymore. For any organisation to be successful, it needs to know what its purpose is and have very clear aims and objectives. I think those aren't clear at the moment.

  

  Q208 Pat Glass: All of you have said that, and it's come through in previous evidence, so should Ofsted be a regulatory inspection organisation and should someone else be doing the school improvement?

  Professor Chapman: Yes.

  Anastasia de Waal: I think that's a false dichotomy in some respects, because if inspection is working efficiently it will trigger improvement. If you're identifying strengths and weaknesses—strengths to be bolstered and weaknesses to be addressed—that in itself will help improvement. We have confusion in terms of what the purpose is because of malfunctions, not because there is a clarity deficit.

  Dr Dunford: There are two aspects to this. First of all, a good inspection does leave the school feeling that the inspection has helped it to improve, as a result of the conversations that have taken place, and the current framework actually does that better than previous ones. Secondly, there is the whole question of the improvement effect of Ofsted on the system as a whole, through the reports that it produces. Over the history of the inspectorate, there have been some superb reports. There were another two or three this year: one was called "Twelve outstanding secondary schools", and another, "Twenty outstanding primary schools". On every page there is a wealth of good practice and lessons for every school. Ofsted's taking its breadth of view of the system and condensing it down into that kind of report can have an immensely beneficial effect on the system, on top of what it can do for individual schools.

  Q209 Neil Carmichael: In an earlier session we touched on the idea that you might have a two-stage inspection, coming in and inspecting to see what the situation is and then returning some time later to see what's been done about the conclusions of that earlier inspection. In other words, you would inspect and follow up, possibly using the same team—in fact I would have thought almost certainly using the same team. What do you think of that idea, notwithstanding the obvious cost implications? Let's just explore the idea.

  Christine Ryan: Well, that's what we do, and that's our system at the moment. We find that it works very well on the compliance side, and I agree with Anastasia that it is a false dichotomy to keep talking about compliance as though it was separate from improvement. Although there are far too many regulations and they are far too complex and greatly in need of reform, they are there to establish minimum standards. They are not about remote and esoteric things; they are about quality of teaching, for example. So there isn't a separation. But what we do find beneficial is to make the initial visit, in which we make the compliance judgments, open up initial discussions with the school, and look at the areas where we think there might be gaps and at what the best practice is. Then we go back a month later and we see what improvement the school has made in that time on any compliance issues that it had, and in terms of providing more information for the things that will inform the next part of the inspection. Then we do a full-team inspection, and it is the same reporting inspector on each occasion. It works very well, in terms of helping schools to move on.

  Dr Dunford: What you described does, of course, happen when schools are not doing very well. Inspectors do go back at prescribed intervals to check on how they're doing. It seems to me that an inspection should empower schools to improve, and it is therefore not about, "Oh my goodness me, someone's coming to check on us again in six months' time." It is about leading the school to improve itself, and that empowerment should be a very important part of the inspection system.

  Anastasia de Waal: Absolutely. I think that a system that was supportive—if it was seen to be valuable in terms of improvement, schools would see it as supportive—would be very desired by schools. I think that there's perhaps been a misunderstanding about why schools don't like Ofsted. It is not that they don't like being scrutinised; they don't like doing things that they don't feel are an asset—unhelpful tick-box and form-filling exercises. If we were to see a system in which there was follow-through, that would probably make the inspection itself much more meaningful to schools. As I understand it, one of the reasons why schools prefer HMI in the main is that they feel they are getting additional advice as well as, "Have you fulfilled the criteria?" That is terribly important, and it is why we need to be looking at what it is that HMIs bring to the table that inspectors with less training and expertise, and crucially less confidence to say "How about trying this?", don't.

  Professor Chapman: Ofsted's major contribution to improvement—I agree it isn't a dichotomy—is in terms of diagnosing schools' strengths and weaknesses and identifying cases to improve. If we turn back to the evidence about a third of schools either partially or wholly implement the findings of inspection. So in the current situation inspectors come in; they go away and then it is left to the school's internal capacity to take on board or to generate their improvements. So a return visit or an ongoing relationship may well be a fruitful way forward.  

  Dr Dunford: Graham, there is another thing that Ofsted could do, which it does not do and I think is a failure on its part. It has the biggest and best database probably of any school system in the world and yet it does not seem to use that database sufficiently well to help the system improve. So you could easily get from that database a directory of excellent practice. The inspector would go into a school and find that the science department is not very good. They could then point to outstanding science departments in the area that the school can visit. That would seem a pretty obvious thing for Ofsted to do.

  Christine Ryan: Can I come in there? In the earlier session people talked about having a peer review system. A peer review system is operated by ISI. What is fundamental—and we all seem to be in agreement on this—is that inspection should add value. It should not be a sterile exercise where you just go in, decide whether they are compliant and come out again. Inspectors have vast amounts of experience. Within our system, the team inspectors are themselves current, serving practitioners. We deploy around a thousand of these a year to go into and inspect other schools. The exchange of information and the opportunity to see the most effective practice and to take it back into their own institutions—the sharing of best practice that that generates is phenomenal. The inspectors themselves frequently comment that it is the best professional development that they get, as well as the benefit to the sector as whole. If you want inspection to work and you want inspection to be valued, there needs to be an opportunity for dialogue with the school. There also needs to be an ability to recognise best practice, and for that best practice to be shared there needs to be some value added to the process.

  Q210 Chair: Could it fade away? If it really does work to help school improvement and, most importantly, self-evaluation and leadership confidence, and it seeds co-operation among institutions in the area so that they come and help each other out and it helps the mechanism, could the inspectorate just disappear over time? We have such an ecosystem of excellent self-evaluation from initial training all the way through to leadership training and mutual support and mutual examination that perhaps you don't need this big inspectorate.

  Christine Ryan: You have always got to have an ability to safeguard the practice and to make sure that things don't decline. One of the interesting things in the report was that something like 55% of the schools that were found to be outstanding the first time round were no longer outstanding on a revisit. That raises a lot of questions. It may raise questions about the validity of the initial judgment. It may raise questions about whether being rated outstanding generates complacency and therefore decline. Have key factors in the school changed? You always need to have a system there to do that check. But what inspection needs to do, as schools improve, is to become more sophisticated, to be more flexible, to adapt to the new realities and to make sure that it continues to act as an agent for driving improvement and not settle simply for something that makes sure nobody falls off the bottom.

  Anastasia de Waal: If inspection is useful in the sense of helping improvement and really allowing schools to self-evaluate in a true sense rather than to self-regulate—as we have seen quite often with the SEF—it is necessary, and I think schools desire it and it is very useful. On John's point about data, I think that Ofsted could add a lot of value. It is a very expensive organisation. It could put much more of those data to very good use in terms of best practice. But the caveat is that it needs to be able to recognise that diversity is allowed. If we are looking at best practice as in, "Are you complying to a particular way of teaching and a particular way of running schools?" that is not useful and I am worried that that would be the way forward. It has to be very clearly about inspectors recognising that different ways of teaching, different pedagogies and different ways of running schools, are going to be useful and then we would have rich data which we could all draw on usefully.

  Q211 Pat Glass: Finally, has Ofsted focused far too much on high achieving GCSEs? We would normally expect a school that had 75-85% five A-Cs to be judged outstanding, but if in that school 3-4% of children are getting no GCSEs whatsoever, and there are significant gaps between the most able and the least able learners in terms of outcomes, is that school truly outstanding? Have those things been missed by Ofsted?

  Dr Dunford: It is not the fault of Ofsted that the main accountability measure is a stupid measure. Five A-Cs just creates a perverse incentive to concentrate on the borderline. There are much better outcome measures that can be used in an intelligent accountability system.

  Q212 Pat Glass: Should Ofsted be looking at the children who are not achieving, as well as those who are?

  Dr Dunford: To be fair to Ofsted, it does look at that. It spends a lot of time looking at the data at the beginning. People felt that the inspections were far too data-driven, particularly under the last framework. I think that they still are, to a certain extent, but, to be fair, good inspectors would look beyond that.

  Anastasia de Waal: On that point, I think that to an extent it is the fault of the set-up that there is a dependence on data. It is back to this thing I keep saying about inspections being too short. Parents imagine that they are seeing the results data for themselves and that Ofsted is adding something else: it is looking at the school to see how it is doing. They then discover that actually Ofsted is also looking at the data. That does not add the value that I think parents feel that it does, which is why they have so much confidence in it. It is up to Ofsted to say, "We have the data. We will of course factor them in, but we're going to look beyond them," but that is not happening sufficiently.

  Q213 Pat Glass: So there is too much focus on the data and not enough on the professional dialogue.

  Anastasia de Waal: Definitely, and that is one of the reasons why we have seen too much emphasis on benchmark, borderline students. They will make the difference between one judgment or another. Ofsted could be remedying that situation rather than compounding it, as it does now.

  Q214 Bill Esterson: I just want to come back to something that John said about the comparison between the old inspection regime and Ofsted. Could we learn from things under the old regime that perhaps are missing in the Ofsted approach, that perhaps Ofsted could incorporate to improve the current system? Perhaps you could start, John.

  Dr Dunford: It depends on how old you are.

  Q215 Bill Esterson: I will leave the question entirely open to you.

  Dr Dunford: The inspection I was talking about was in my early days as a head teacher more than 25 years ago. It was still stressful. There were 20 people there for a week, and they were all over the place, but it felt like fellow professionals were coming in to help us improve. What happened is that prior to 1992 we moved to a situation in the formation of Ofsted where there was actually too little school inspection. Because school inspections were so big and took up so many resources, there were actually very few of them, but there were a lot of reports in those days on how the system as a whole was working. Post-1992, everything has been piled into inspecting individual schools, and actually there are too few reports on how the system is working—there are not enough resources put into that. If you look at the chief inspector's annual report yesterday, there is practically nothing in there that evaluates the effect of the 1,000 policies that have been thrown at schools in the past 20 years. I don't think that that has answered your question remotely. The balance has completely changed.

  Q216 Bill Esterson: You seem to be saying that there is a balance between the two approaches.

  Dr Dunford: And Ofsted ought to be doing both.

  Q217 Chair: Is there anything else, apart from longer inspections? Is there anything else that we have lost from the past that needs to be restored?

  Christine Ryan: Dialogue with the schools. This business of two days' notice—you have no opportunity to establish a dialogue with the school. We are fortunate: we are allowed to give five days' notice because of our peer review system. Even in that five days, you are able to have a dialogue about a lot of what I would call the housekeeping issues of inspection such as compliance, policies—that sort of thing. It gets it out of the way and frees up inspector time on the ground for actually inspecting the quality of education. I think that dialogue with the schools has gone. You don't have to go as far back as John was talking about. When I first started running inspections—Ofsted inspections then—I was managing teams of 15 on inspection. That first framework had some very big teams for secondary schools. There is a halfway house: I think the pendulum has swung too far for Ofsted. In fairness, that will be about budget. I run an inspectorate that is much smaller than that, and I know how much budget will impact the shape and nature of the inspection.

  Q218 Chair: Salvage from the past, Anastasia?

  Anastasia de Waal: One of the criticisms of HMI was that it was overly supportive of teachers—that was the very critical view—and that there was too much discretion exercised. The pendulum has swung so far the other way now, that I would disagree about the inconsistency between inspectors being a problem. I think it is more the consistency of the highly standardised way in which the regional inspection providers particularly are having to inspect, partly because of a lack of expertise, partly because of a lack of time and partly because of a lack of training.

  Q219 Chair: That is a response. If they are suspicious of the quality of their own staff, they will tend to bring in more of a tick-box approach in order to try to ensure they do not suffer the inconsistency.

  Anastasia de Waal: Exactly, which is obviously a problem with a system that is truncated to that extent and where there is not enough investment in inspectors, which is why schools prefer HMI. We want to see inspectors who are exercising a lot more judgment, because that is going to be a lot more helpful, and they are going to be able to gauge something that looks beyond something extremely standardised. Rather than consistency and inconsistency being the big issue, it is a lack of discretion being exercised by very professional, confident inspectors who, importantly, are ones we and Ofsted have confidence in.

  Q220 Chair: Just for clarity, you are not saying that we have inspectors like that now necessarily; you are saying that is what we ought to have in order to be able to give them that.

  Anastasia de Waal: That is what HMI is seen to be today to a much greater extent. Obviously, it is not homogenous but that is where I think there is seen to be a difference between the HMI inspector and the AI.

  Professor Chapman: Just to pick up on Christine's point about dialogue, teachers who say they will change their practice as a result of inspection and lesson observation do so as a result of quality feedback. What I hear anecdotally from teachers on masters courses, and see written in literature, is that the variation in the quality of the feedback that teachers are getting on their lesson performance when they are observed is huge.

  Q221 Ian Mearns: I come from a local authority background and was chair of the education committee in my borough. No one is mentioning local authority advisory services in this discussion. Is there a role for local authority advisory services in that dialogue? On the ground, going back 25 years ago, John, when you were inspected, you had the HMI coming in with a team, but there was always the local authority advisory service. The quality of those 25 years ago would be quite questionable around the country, but by and large they are much improved now.

  Dr Dunford: I would have to disagree with you, Ian. They were pretty mixed then. Nowadays, I'm afraid, that as far as secondary schools are concerned there is practically no expertise in local authorities—certainly as far as secondary school leadership is concerned. The job of local authorities now has become quite properly one of brokering and commissioning support from other schools which are doing this. The expertise for running schools lies in schools now, quite properly. There is a degree of expertise in primary, because primary head teachers will still get promoted into local authority roles. That does not happen in secondary schools. There is a difference between primary and secondary in relation to the local authority role.

  Q222 Ian Mearns: I must admit I was thinking more about primary. That is where a lot of my experience has been in the recent past, where a lot of the guidance and advice given by LEAs to the primary sector has been very good, but you are not necessarily getting that yourself.

  Dr Dunford: That is not the case in secondary.

  Anastasia de Waal: Just to add to that on primary schools. There is a problem in that in some cases local authorities swoop in when they gather that there is going to be an inspection in schools that they are worried about. They do a lot of work with the school. Sadly, what we are seeing less of is the follow-through afterwards with the support that is needed. That could be a very valuable experience.

  Q223 Ian Mearns: Equally disturbing can be when the local authority has not had a prior dialogue with Ofsted. It has a concern about the school but the school comes through with flying colours, much against the judgment of the local authority. That does happen a lot.

  Anastasia de Waal: That suggests, again, that the inspectorate is not getting a very clear idea of what is really going on in the school.

  Chair: Of course, the reverse also happens. Tessa.

  Q224 Tessa Munt: I would like to put a particular situation to you, which, I understand, is the case in one of the county councils in Sussex. They are just about to send in foundation primary and junior stage—private and state—inspectors into every single school and nursery. They are sending in three inspectors: one is to look at welfare and organisation; one is to look at learning and development; and the other is to look at the business. They are calling it supporting quality improvement. That local education authority is actually assessing each of those schools, and they are not looking at the ISI reports or the Ofsted reports. It strikes me that that demonstrates a lack of trust in the existing system for judgment. It is a fantastic waste of money, because everybody gets a nice glossy file and all the rest of it, and it is a massive duplication. What do you feel is the role of the local education authority?

  Dr Dunford: I am amazed, quite honestly, that a local authority can afford to do that in this day and age. They have Ofsted reports, reports from the school improvement partner, and the school's own self-evaluation, and they have all the data that they want in terms of outcomes, results, attendance and so on. The proper role for local authorities in this, as I said in answer to Ian's question, is to find out what is going on in schools—intervention in inverse proportion to success is still a pretty good mantra—leave the schools that are doing well on their own, and, in the other ones, broker and commission experts to help to put that right, which means getting people in from other schools.

  Q225 Tessa Munt: But they are demonstrating a lack of trust in the existing system. They are saying that their aim is to assess all schools and nurseries, private and state, for the level of support needed.

  Christine Ryan: But I would ask on what evidence they are basing that intervention, because, very often, what I see happening with these sorts of initiatives is that when you dig down and say, "Where's the evidence that indicates that that is actually necessary?" you come up dry. There is very little hard-edged evidence. There is quite a lot of soft or anecdotal data. I would ask where the evidence is, for example, that the independent schools in that county are in need of local authority support. They have very astute parents who vote with their feet and their cheque book apart from anything else. Where is the evidence that they can't rely on the inspections that are already done?

  Q226 Damian Hinds: Following on rather nicely from that, I have a question for Christine. Earlier, you mentioned the benefit of sharing best practice from your inspection system, and John was speaking about the system-wide improvements that we've had from Ofsted reporting on what is happening across the school system. In one of our earlier evidence sessions, Professor Tony Kelly said, quite memorably, "I am not sure good schools need to be inspected, but I think all schools need good schools to be inspected." He means, in other words, within the Ofsted regime. Yet, in the ISI evidence to the Committee, you say that wholly private provision should be organised separately. Why?

  Christine Ryan: Only private provision?

  Q227 Damian Hinds: For wholly private provision, inspections should be done separately. Doesn't that perpetuate the divide between state sector and private sector schooling and stand in the way of best practice?

  Christine Ryan: That is only if you assume that the best practice is only in the private sector.

  Q228 Damian Hinds: No. I don't think it does assume that.

  Christine Ryan: I don't make that assumption.

  Q229 Damian Hinds: I may not have been clear in the question. Why wouldn't you have all schools together sharing all best practice? It's absolutely the opposite of what you just said.

  Christine Ryan: No reason at all. The reports are public and anybody can access what is there as best practice. In our written response, it was in relation to what the role of Ofsted is in the private sector. I think it is a different situation where you have a system that uses no public money and is not publicly funded. It is a private commercial organisation, and I think that these schools are extremely diverse in their nature. That is one of the reasons that many independent schools—there are more than those inspected by ISI; there are two other independent inspectorates—and their collective associations have chosen their own form of inspection. They want something that is sufficiently flexible to recognise their diversity and to work with that. The national system, by definition, is going to focus on the very large majority of maintained schools. They are regulated under a different regulatory framework—the regulations for maintained schools are a different set from the independent school regulations. What I am arguing for is a system that is sensitive enough to understand the very different contexts in an independent school as opposed to those in a maintained school.

  Q230 Damian Hinds: Obviously, you have confidence in your schools, and rightly so. Parents vote with their feet and with their cheque books. But do you believe—I will be interested to hear the perspectives of the others in a moment—that there are things within your sector and membership group that more state schools could learn to make learning better facilitated through the inspection regime?

  Christine Ryan: Very often, a lot of independent schools have the opportunity and the freedom to do things, to experiment and to be innovative in a way that people in state schools do not. They don't have so much of an eye for league tables and the like. Many of these schools have opted out of this process—they don't declare their results and do alternative exams and so on. I think that learning can go in both directions. I wouldn't argue for a kind of apartheid, in which the two are isolated from each other, by any means.

  Q231 Damian Hinds: There is a sort of apartheid now in the sense that there is a lot of public policy pressure on the proportion of university entrants from the private sector versus the state sector. We have a situation in which social mobility has declined over time, and these issues are going to be important. What are the perspectives of the others on sharing, both ways, between the state sector and the private sector?

  Dr Dunford: Those statistics always fail to take account of the fact that independent schools are, per se, selective. There is good practice in independent schools and there is good practice in state schools, and I think it is part of the job of the inspectorate to draw out that good practice. They don't only do it through individual school inspections; they also do it through survey work. I would like to see them doing more survey work as a means of spreading good practice around the system, and surveying practice in independent schools, colleges and maintained schools, and bringing that together in papers on the teaching of history and so on. I think I am right in saying that the survey programme has to be negotiated every year between Ofsted and the Department for Education, which resources Ofsted to carry this out. Personally, I think that Ofsted should have more independence and freedom to decide what it wants to survey. Its degree of freedom is quite limited.

  Anastasia de Waal: In the climate that we are, in theory, going to see—of greater autonomy for schools—I think that, in many ways, the proof of the pudding as to whether Ofsted is working will be whether the independent sector will want to use it as an inspectorate. If it is able to gauge quality on a diverse level and if it is able to recognise good teaching, which might manifest itself in different ways and pedagogies and so on, it is doing the right thing. That is what we need to see for the state sector if there is to be greater autonomy, and it should then be translatable to the independent sector. I think that, at the moment, that is one of the things that is particularly problematic. Looking at the ISI as an example, it seems that the next inspections will enable that diversity to be much better gauged.

  Professor Chapman: Both sectors have much to learn from each other. They deal with a wide range of pupils from a range of different backgrounds and I would advocate a closer relationship between the state and independent sectors, especially in working with those students with special educational needs.

  Q232 Damian Hinds: The greater autonomy that we are going to see, on average, in the state sector has come up a couple of times. In that scenario, there is a danger, if we perceive the inspection frequency in inverse proportion to success, that things can go wrong. Apart from GCSE results, which might be quite a lagging indicator, what are the early warning systems that would allow people to know that something is amiss and that there needs to be some further intervention?

  Dr Dunford: The other thing that Ofsted looks at is parental complaint. There is a parental complaint process to Ofsted and it monitors the number of complaints it gets.

  Q233 Damian Hinds: Is that statistically valid? If you monitor complaints, that tells you nothing, because they are so lumpy.

  Dr Dunford: No, it absolutely isn't. But in the end it is the examination results—the outcomes—that will indicate whether inspectors need to come into the school, or it might be safeguarding issues.

  Christine Ryan: You are going into very dangerous territory if you are looking for remote indicators—if you are talking about never inspecting certain schools because they were, at one time, outstanding. Anything that relies on data collection should be handled with great caution. The mere fact of what you are collecting will influence how people manipulate and develop their process to meet those criteria. It then becomes about how you interpret it and about what data do not tell you, so using only data is risky. That sort of remote monitoring alone would not pick up, for example, many of the common safeguarding issues that we discover on inspection. You have got to think proportionately. Your inspection system must be sophisticated—it needs to be flexible, malleable and responsive to things on the ground. There is a grave danger in never inspecting any school.

  Q234 Chair: Can I just come back on that, Christine? Do the independent schools that you regulate spend more money overall—as a percentage of their turnover—on inspection than schools in the state sector do? Do you have any comparisons with how they do it?

  Christine Ryan: It is very difficult to get hold of information about what the state sector costs are for inspections. You can trawl through the annual report and the business plans, but it is very difficult to draw out, for any type of school, what the inspection has cost. Our schools have to pay full cost recovery for their inspection, and it varies according to the size of school and is done on a non-profit basis.

  Q235 Chair: Even though it is hard to draw out, do you have any sense of that? Yours is more of a market-based mechanism in a schools market, anyway, so that would give us an idea.

  Christine Ryan: Do I think that it is any more expensive? It probably is not overall. For certain sizes of school it will be—there is some sort of subsidy that we operate for very small schools for which the impact would be greater. It will vary according to size, but I suspect that overall the answer is no. But there are economies of scale with Ofsted. Part of the difficulty with Ofsted is that it is not designing for one kind of inspection; it has a very broad remit.

  Q236 Damian Hinds: It strikes me that, overall, Ofsted inspection is a very lumpy, lurching way to go about grading. You go from satisfactory to—suddenly—outstanding and, of course, everyone is chuffed to bits when that happens, but when it happens the other way, it is gutting. There is a relatively small number of gradations—and all this contributes to the pressure that schools feel, and, if some of our previous witnesses are to be believed, some of the evasive actions that they will take. Would it not be better to have a more subtly graded scale of achievement for schools—a balanced scorecard? Such a scale would take into account some sort of inspection—perhaps smaller and more frequent inspections—along with GCSE results, value-added results, parental survey results, perhaps, and a whole series of things that would come up with a numerical score, which could never change by more than two, three of four percentage points in a year. Instead of getting these lurches, you would get a single measure, which would take into account most of the things that we should care about.

  Christine Ryan: I would question the usefulness of a single measure. A school is a very complex organisation; it is not just an exam factory. You can have a situation under Ofsted's system of limiting judgments, for example, where if you have a major safeguarding failing, the whole of leadership and management is, therefore, deemed inadequate. That could be in a school where exam performance is excellent. So what are you telling a parent if you say, "This school is inadequate, because it has a safeguarding failing"? What are you telling a parent if you say the reverse—"This is outstanding"?

  Q237 Damian Hinds: Governments go to great lengths to start off with very sophisticated measures, which they then massively simplify into "Noddy" book versions. We talk about four categories within Ofsted—obviously there is lot more richness: there is five-plus, C-plus in GCSEs, as opposed to all the subtleties of value-added in different subjects, and so on. It is natural, because that is what people find easier to consume.

  Christine Ryan: But there is a halfway house.   

  Anastasia de Waal: One of the reasons in defence of a system that is simplified and made rather crude is that it is more democratic, in the sense that people who don't know about an education system—who don't necessarily understand what makes for good and bad—can understand whether the school is good. A lot of that is, in theory, about a very positive parental empowerment strategy. The difficulty is being solely reliant on that. Obviously, the biggest difficulty is being solely reliant not only on what can become a crude measure but on the measure to which we already have access—that goes back to data. We need it to be concertinaed, so that you can have a look at something that is boiled down into an admittedly fairly crude measure, but where you can actually get the detail as well. We have heard that one thing that was welcomed about the new Ofsted inspection reports is that they are not so lengthy. At the same time, we need to know the detail about the school. Is it specifically the positive elements around what is in the curriculum? Is it enough just to say there is a broad and balanced curriculum, or do we need to know what that actually entails? I think that you can have a balance, but you shouldn't scrimp on the detail, because that detail needs to be accessible particularly in coming up with those measures.

  Q238 Neil Carmichael: I was just reflecting on the fact that it is rather ironic that everybody is frightened of the inspections, but that the actual action taken to solve the problems is sometimes mealy mouthed, inadequate and hesitant. That is certainly my experience, and I picked that up from an earlier question of Ian's during your exchange about the role of local authorities and so forth. Just before I ask my question, I want to say how right you are not to worry about data. I have seen schools that have had a good or a bad inspection report that has completely challenged or at least contradicted national challenge information. Both are based on data; both draw completely different interpretations and allow for lengthy debate that has usually ended with some sort of compromise. So data are not sufficient. My question concerns the autonomy of schools towards which we are heading. We have to have an inspection regime that we can rely on to identify the schools that are failing; we can't inspect all schools all the time. What sort of accountability model should we see, which will interface between the school and the Department for Education? There are a lot of schools that clearly are not picked up quickly enough; I have seen two, in fact, in which there has to be a crisis before somebody actually spots that something needs to be done. That is not good enough. It is not good enough for the children, and it is not good enough for the parents.

  Chair: Question please, Neil.

  Neil Carmichael: I would like an answer to this simple question: what kind of accountability model do you think we should have to keep a tab on schools without relying on inspections?

  Chair: Does anyone want to pick that up? John, thank you very much. I am always grateful; I have never been more grateful than now.

  Dr Dunford: I have written a lot over the years about intelligent accountability and the need for more of it, and this is absolutely the core of the answer to your question. I have always found it much easier to describe what is not intelligent accountability—we have a heck of a lot of it in education—rather than what is intelligent accountability. For example, the balanced scorecard that Damian was talking about was floated by the previous Government, but Parliament quite rightly refused to pass it when it came up in May, because it had gone too far on this balance that you quite rightly say we need between complexity and understandability. There is a simple answer to every question and frankly it is usually wrong, because there always are complex issues, particularly in a place such as a school. So you need something that has a degree of complexity about it. We should focus on quality assurance here. What is going to assure quality? The answer to that is ongoing, good quality self-evaluation in the school itself, day by day and week by week. Then we need an external check on that, which might have to be a paper check for those who are not in a proportionate system to those who are doing pretty well. Actually, yes, there is a role for the local authority here. If it knows its local schools and the data from those schools, it can be in a position to broker some kind of external inspection and the right kind of support. But then you come back to the measures, and it is crucial to get them right; I don't think we've got them right. The point you alluded to was that a couple of years ago, when the national challenge started, any number of schools were told they were failing because they were below 30%. We're getting that again today, only it is now 35%. Frankly, those schools are not failing, which is often reflected in the fact that they've got a good Ofsted report. What's wrong there then is the way in which the measures are being used. You've got to have a good measure of the pupils' attainment and progress. That frankly isn't five As to Cs, but a different kind of measure, which is a detail that I won't go into now. But there is space there, if you get the measures right, for more intelligent accountability. You create a system in which schools are incentivised to have a good sense of direction.

  Q239 Chair: Anastasia, any thoughts on accountability?

  Anastasia de Waal: Yes. Intelligent accountability should definitely not be divorced from inspection. Inspection should be part of that intelligent accountability. If it is not, it is because it's failing. The important thing is that we need a cycle in terms of accountability. It shouldn't be a shock therapy—suddenly it happens, and then it goes away and everything carries on as normal, which is too often the case at the moment. We need to have a system that is supportive in terms of accountability, so accountability is not just about mistrust or checking up on compliance, but about supporting schools. Most importantly, we need to spend money on this. If we want schools to be good, particularly when we have a situation with greater autonomy, we need to know what they're doing, and in order to do so, we need to be able to look at that. That's going to be expensive and involve probably quite a lot of people. But it is a positive thing if it happens consistently rather than something out of the blue occasionally, which is the "not" part of everyday life.

  Chair: I think that brings us neatly to the relationship between Ofsted and the Department for Education.

  Q240 Ian Mearns: I think you've previously suggested that one of the by-products of the creation of Ofsted was the loss of the professional voice within the policy-making area within the Department. Will you offer any views on how the Department and Ofsted, or others, may remedy this, and why they should try to do so?

  Dr Dunford: I think it's absolutely right. Before the formation of Ofsted in 1992, the inspectorate was based in the Department. When civil servants were having policy discussions at the senior level, chief inspectors were involved in that, and at the middle level, staff inspectors were involved. Therefore, there was a professional voice, not just of a head teacher who knows about his school and locality, but of a senior HMI who knew about the voice right across the system. It seemed to me that that has been hugely lacking since 1992—the lack of the professional voice in the policy-making process. Now unlike Pauline Perry who gave you evidence, I wouldn't move the inspectorate back into the Department. What I would do, though, is to have a chief educational officer in the Department, rather like there is a chief medical officer in the Department of Health and a chief veterinary officer. That person will be the senior professional voice in the policy-making process with direct access to the Secretary of State, as the senior chief inspector used to have, and use evidence from Ofsted. Ofsted's role should then be to stand between the Government on the one hand and individual institutions on the other, reporting without fear or favour, on the performance of not only the institutions, but of Government policy, and feeding that back into the chief educational officer's advice.

  Q241 Ian Mearns: So you think evidence is important in creating education policy?

  Dr Dunford: Yes. I think more of it would be good.

  Chair: That is extraordinarily radical.

  Q242 Ian Mearns: Anastasia, I think you have written rather disparagingly that Ofsted is a Government lapdog that fears scrutinising or criticising Government policy sufficiently. What would you do to remedy that? For instance, do you think we should have a parliamentary Select Committee on education?

  Anastasia de Waal: As I put it so nuancedly, being a Government lapdog, I think the important thing is for there to be a distinction—a lack of which has been a problem—between Government policy and Ofsted. Where Ofsted became particularly problematic and where the relationship broke down, interestingly, is where it got too close and where Ofsted was about enforcing Government policy. That is not useful, not least because the Government should be enforcing policy if they want to, not the inspectorate, which in theory is looking at the quality of what schools are doing. [Interruption.]

  Chair: For the sake of Hansard, we will wait until the bell finishes.

  Anastasia de Waal: So what is very important is that Ofsted should have credibility in its own right, and not as part of the Department—on a compliance level and for ensuring that Government policy is fulfilled—particularly because, as we move into a climate of autonomy, that is going to be a redundant relationship anyway. We want to see an inspectorate that is not too friendly with the Department and is not afraid of it, but it is equally important that the Department does not have to take on board everything that Ofsted says. We need to have a relationship that is very different from the one we see now, so that the role of Ofsted will be about inspecting schools and gauging quality and the role of the Department will be about education policy. We hope that the richness of the data coming out of inspections will mean that there will be an inevitable overlap on agendas, and obviously there will be collaboration. But we need to be careful about the set-up between the two, which is one of the biggest flaws at the moment.

  Q243 Ian Mearns: That creates a problem for Ofsted in the current climate. We have just had a change of Government, and it is clear that there is very different thinking about governmental policy on education. On what basis should Ofsted offer criticism? Should that be of the previous Government's policy or of this Government's policy?

  Anastasia de Waal: Well, if Government policy is allowing greater autonomy, presumably what we want—as we would in any scenario, and this should have happened when there was much more Whitehall diktat over what schools did—is for Ofsted to look at schools on a school-by-school basis, asking how well the education service that schools are providing is delivering. If Ofsted does that, it will not be anything to do with Government policy, in terms of what the Government think is the 'correct' way forward—if they think there is a correct way forward—and that is where we have seen the problem. If we envisage autonomy that will really work, this is not only vital and it will happen organically, but, more importantly, it should have happened even in a climate where the Government were much more prescriptive.

  Q244 Ian Mearns: In your view, is it appropriate for the Government to base policies on Ofsted's judgments, for example, by allowing schools judged to be outstanding one week to apply for academy status? Is that an appropriate way forward?

  Professor Chapman: It is interesting to note in yesterday's report that a school that was judged as failing went to outstanding at the next inspection. It is not beyond the impossible to suggest that the reverse may be true. We probably need more sophisticated measures as to how we decide which schools are given greater freedoms.

  Q245 Chair: So when you partner an outstanding school with a weaker school, so that the weaker school can become an academy, the help may turn out to be the reverse way round.

  Christine Ryan: I would go back to what I said before. The report points out that 55% of previously outstanding schools were not outstanding when they were revisited. It would be a very dangerous strategy just to go on that basis.

  Dr Dunford: When you partner an outstanding school with a weak school, it is nearly always—in fact, it is always—the case that the outstanding school can learn.

  Professor Chapman: That is absolutely right. Our research on federations would suggest that where you federate a strong school with a weak school to improve achievement, they outperform a matched sample of non-federated schools. So, there are some positive insights to be learned from that.

  Chair: As long as they are federated and joined together, which one turns out to be the leader and which is the other one is less important.

  Q246 Nic Dakin: I went into a local secondary school in my constituency on Friday. It has just been inspected, and it got a very good inspection outcome. I said to the head, "Well done. How did it go?" He said, "Well, I was happy with the outcome, but the process was terrible. It was awful. It was very adversarial and very negative." Does inspection have to be like that? If it doesn't have to be like that, is that a description you recognise, and how can we make it not like that in the future?

  Christine Ryan: I think that we're back to the inconsistency issue. Certainly we don't expect inspections to be like that. Setting up a relationship is very important, but the inspection will still remain rigorous and at arm's length. The two things are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to be adversarial to make objective and rigorous judgments. Many individuals have spoken already about inconsistency of experience, and I think that that is the case. Some schools have very good Ofsted inspections and some have terrible experiences; it is about consistency.

  Anastasia de Waal: First, I think that it's a failure in the system if it's seen to be adversarial, because it shouldn't be. In theory, this is about working with professionals who care deeply about providing a good education. Secondly, if it is seen to be a daunting process—it is consistently seen to be very daunting—even for schools that come out very well, as opposed to those where there are skeletons in the closet, we need to become very worried. So, we need to move away from this idea of it being something that is done to the school—something that is problematic and does not help them, but works against them and tries to find problems—and into an arena that is about supporting and improving schools.

  Q247 Nic Dakin: So how would you change it? We had evidence from a college principal arguing for a different model. Is that the way forward?

  Anastasia de Waal: The main thing is making sure that the school understands that the inspectorate and the inspectors are going to understand the school. I think that that is where one of the main sources of frustration is, in that they feel that the inspectors have made their judgments, often on a false premise, even before they have walked into the school, and that they are not really getting a good understanding of some of the issues that the school faces, in particular the detail of the school's provision. That sets off a very bad relationship, which is too often why we see a very adversarial inspectorate, partly because it is frustrated time-wise and feels that it isn't able to take the look that it needs to, and also a very defensive school, because it feels that it is not able to give a clear picture.

  Professor Chapman: It is very clear that there is variation in the system, but it would be remiss of us not to reflect on the fact that schools deal with and manage the inspection process in very different ways. This can be linked to the school culture, or to the leadership capacity within the school. So the schools' own responses—their interpretation of the experience—might be very different, and I think that we just have to hold back a little.

  Dr Dunford: I accord with that view.

  Q248 Nic Dakin: Gerard Kelly, writing in The Times Educational Supplement, said that Ofsted has clearly lost the respect of the profession it seeks to regulate. Do you agree with that? Is that a good thing? Does it need to be changed? If it is to be changed, how would we change it?

  Christine Ryan: It depends on who you speak to and what their personal experience of inspection has been. Inspection by its very nature is going to be testing, but it doesn't have to be terrifying. People's personal responses vary greatly.

  Dr Dunford: And we're back to variety and inconsistency. When you talk about an Ofsted inspection, that inspection is actually very often being done by a subcontracted agency, and that seems to me to be part of the root of the problem. And I'm back to my point about all inspections being led by HMI for greater consistency.

  Christine Ryan: It's not easy to get hold of the quality assurance data on what's happened out there in Ofsted inspections. Quality assurance data on independent inspectorates is published—Ofsted publishes an annual report on the quality of our inspections. There is not an equivalent one that we can get hold of that tells us about the quality assurance arrangements in the contracted-out inspections.

  Q249 Nic Dakin: Do you think that contracting-out is part of the problem?

  Christine Ryan: Wherever you introduce opportunities for inconsistency, unless your systems are extremely tight and your quality assurance processes pretty much faultless, you're going to have difficulties.

  Q250 Chair: We have limited time, and I want to bring the session to a close. On a yes-no basis—however cruel that is—would the other panellists like to say whether they think we need to move back to a single organisation, so that we don't have these other organisations providing additional inspectors?

  Dr Dunford: Yes, and if we do HMI would once again be the zenith of your professional achievement.

  Anastasia de Waal: Yes, absolutely. We need to spend more money in order to do that.

  Professor Chapman: There isn't a weight of evidence on which to make a judgment, but experience and instinct would suggest yes.

  Q251 Craig Whittaker: Ofsted by its own reckoning now touches the highest ever number of people every day. Lord Sutherland, when he came to speak to us, said that he is disappointed that it has grown so big and has many other responsibilities. John, I think you said earlier that inspection should be about empowering the schools to improve themselves. We heard Lesley Davies say that we've lost the celebration of good practice. We hear words such as "not fit for purpose," "too big," and "cumbersome." If you had a blank piece of paper, what would your model look like?

  Dr Dunford: I would have an inspectorate solely based on education in schools and colleges, and I would do something different with the children's services part of Ofsted.

  Anastasia de Waal: I would also have an inspectorate focused on schools, with expert, professional inspectors who have sufficient time and sufficient expertise to focus on a particular thing—the education that is being provided.

  Professor Chapman: It a common theme, but, for schools and colleges, I would have a streamlined inspectorate that validates peer review at a local level. I would develop the concept of families of schools, which we have seen in the city challenges.

  Q252 Chair: What about Ofsted itself? Would you narrow its remit so that it goes back to being education only?

  Dr Dunford: Yes.

  Christine Ryan: It should be focused on education, and it should be about achievement and personal development underpinned by good curriculum, teaching, good governance, leadership and management. Its focus should be back where it started, which is on the quality of education in school and colleges.

  Q253 Craig Whittaker: So are you saying that the new, slim-line version, which is about to be released on us, is the right thing to do?

  Christine Ryan: The new framework looks promising. We need to see a little more detail on its content, but it certainly looks as if it is heading in the right direction in that it is a refocusing of the key elements of what schools should be all about.

  Dr Dunford: It should enable inspectors to get away from the tick-box approach.

  Anastasia de Waal: Equally, you don't want it boiled down to the lowest common denominator, which is why we look at those things. Many of the well-being outcomes are going to be outcomes of, for example, good leadership, good teaching, and so on. Hopefully, that will enable a holistic inspection agenda, albeit with a narrowed heading.

  Christine Ryan: One of the things that you must remember is that the primary shaper of inspection is the regulatory framework in which it operates. As we have in independent schools, you might have up to 400 regulations applying to a single institution. That puts a really big constraint on any flexibility that you have in your inspection framework. You can't look at inspection and changing the inspection model in isolation from the regulatory framework on which the inspection is based. Ofsted can only work against the regulation.

  Dr Dunford: Perhaps some of those things should be subject to audit, rather than inspection. Things such as safeguarding, for example.

  Q254 Chair: We have heard that there will be shorter inspections and very little notice, providing that the inspectors exist, for schools, therefore they're spending a lot of their time just doing basic compliance. They are literally wasting their time and the schools' time, and vastly reducing the quality of the inspection.

  Christine Ryan: But you can't change one fundamentally without having a look at the other.

  Q255 Craig Whittaker: Going back to my initial question, in which I asked what your model would look like, is Ofsted capable of delivering that?

  Christine Ryan: It had done it in the past. There is a great deal of expertise within Ofsted, which has undergone a massive amount of change and repeated change. That is the disturbing thing. It is very difficult for any organisation to make any real ground on improving its performance, when it is constantly dealing with externally imposed change.

  Anastasia de Waal: I am not sure that it has done that in the past, at least not in the way that I would envisage a successful system. I don't think that Ofsted has ever been fully successful. We need to see much more professionalism with the inspectors, and I think that, in many ways, schools are inspected by Ofsted management, not by professional inspectors. Ofsted isn't listening nearly enough to its own inspectors saying, for one thing, "We don't have enough time in schools." That is the real problem.

  Dr Dunford: The point that I would add is the point that I made before. Ofsted should have an important role in looking at the success of the system as a whole, and it should report on the Government's performance as much as on the performance of individual institutions. I hope that your report will focus on that, too.

  Professor Chapman: I think that the answer is yes, Ofsted can do it if it manages to re-establish and redefine its relationships with the professions.

  Chair: That is a good note on which to end. Thank you all very much for coming to give evidence this morning.


 
previous page contents


© Parliamentary copyright 2011
Prepared 17 April 2011