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.
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