Memorandum submitted by David Singleton
OBE, former HM Inspector, retired early from Ofsted in 2005 as
Deputy Director (Education)
The Purpose of Inspection:
This has not, and should not change: it is to provide expert judgements
on a range of services for: service users, decision-makers and
the public, in order to inform educational debate, provide assurance
to parents and others, and support continuous improvement in
services.
The impact of inspection on school improvement:
This remains in principle hard
to demonstrate, because so many other factors are involved and
therefore, for Ofsted and those who believe in it, uncomfortably
imponderable. Ofsted's attempts to report on its own contribution
to improvement have convinced few. Interestingly, this scepticism
is less widely shared abroad, where Ofsted is perceived in my
experience as the market leader in school evaluation.
The main reason for the move to Section 5 inspections
in 2005 (apart from the need to reduce the cost and burden on
schools of inspection) was to increase, and in the process make
more publicly visible, the impact of Ofsted on improvement. There
has been no obvious evidence of any such increase in impact. GCSE
and A level performance continues to improve, but not at a strikingly
accelerated rate; children's performance in the core subjects
at all levels continues to give cause for concern, as does the
stubborn gap between the highest and lowest performing students
and the correlation between that variability and social background.
There is little doubt that Ofsted has been one of the factors
contributing to a gradual rise in measurable school standards
over a decade and a half, but it is almost certainly still impossible
to disentangle its precise contribution from the other factors
involved. Overall, it would be difficult to argue with Michael
Barber's view that Ofsted's impact on school improvement lost
intensity and focus with the resignation of Chris Woodhead in
2000. It has never regained the same impetus.
The Performance of Ofsted in carrying out its
work: This has in one sense
been consistently good, at least so far as schools, FE and teacher
education are concerned. Ofsted is a can-do organisation. It has
repeatedly met apparently impossible targets, within its allocated
budget. The inspection cycles have all been completed to deadlines,
sometimes despite those deadlines being brought forward and in
spite of savings being required, and made. Ofsted publishes voluminously
on all areas of education and training, maintains one of the most
frequently visited websites in the world, and offers advice to
decision-makers on a vast range of issues.
Nevertheless, I have some misgivings. With regard
to school inspections, Ofsted has arguably lost sight, post 2005,
of the original strategic intentions of the reform which I led.
The purpose of Section 5 inspection was to promote more rapid
improvement in schools by improving the quality and incisiveness
of inspection, through a more equal partnership with the private
insopection providers, and by setting inspection in the context
of local intelligence about schools ("more intelligent accountability"),
focused on the Local Managing Inspector—a role that would
have provided a leadership opportunity for the most competent
HMI, but which was in the event never put in place. Ofsted has
almost completely lost sight of these intentions. Inspection has
become cheaper and less intrusive, but certainly not more incisive;
section 5 was never meant to be more than a reality check. To
be effective, it requires a hinterland of qualitative and statistical
information for inspectors to analyse and check against their
own perceptions. Ofsted has continued to work on performance statistics,
though the CVA methodology is open to question, and the recent
guidance has done much, by pegging qualitative judgement, to performance
data, to undermine the rationale for inspection itself. One head
teacher known to me sought to engage her lead inspector (and HMI)
in serious debate about the judgement of attainment in her school.
The response was: "I've got a little grid, which I have to
follow." That is asinine, but probably not uncommon. And
Ofsted has done nothing to construct networks of local intelligence.
At the same time, Ofsted has not in fact moved towards
a more collaborative relationship with the inspection providers.
Its approach is still determinedly regulatory, and the emphasis
has been almost entirely on the minutiae of text, in order to
achieve uniformity of product between schools. In one sense, this
is entirely appropriate: where inspectors see the same evidence,
they ought to make the same judgements, but they ought also to
recognise, and make clear in their reports, that no two schools
are the same. It has become all too clear that the "safe"
way to satisfy the regulator is to check consistency of text,
and that the easiest way to do this is to regurgitate the judgement
criteria. In this way, the Inspector's back is covered, and the
regulator is equally exempt from criticism, but what is lost
is the individuality of the school. All that can in fact be inferred
from school reports is that the school has met the criteria for
a particular grade, but if that is the case there is no point
in the text; one might has well just award the grade, with a gloss.
What it all amounts to is that Ofsted has mistaken
the true product of inspection. This is not merely a well-written
report, but the improvement generated by the inspection in the
school. To achieve any improvement, inspectors must feel free
to tell the school something it hasn't though of , something it
has ceased to notice or something it wishes to forget. Far more
of what is written in reports ought to consist of recommendations,
which should be detailed, specific and unequivocal (qualities
the official guidance has guarded against). There is no point
whatever in telling a school "improve mathematics".
It can be assumed that it will be attempting to do so; it may
not know how. If inspectors cannot give it some help, it is hard
to see what they add. The help would not of course be ex parte
advice and certainly not "coat-trailing". Rather, it
should be detailed diagmosis: "it is going wrong here."
Post-Woodhead, Ofsted has lacked the intellectual
leadership to sense that things were going subtly wrong and to
do something about it. There has been a confusion between hitting
targets and meeting objectives. This vitiates not only the day-to-day
inspection work, but also the many good practice publications
Ofsted issues. Many, like the two publications on outstanding
primary and secondary schools, are gracefully written, and have
a certain utility in drawing attention to what there is in the
field of education to celebrate, but they are not especially searching,
and they certainly offer something less than a blueprint; mostly,
again, they reorganise the inspection criteria; all one is left
with in the end is a somewhat unhelpful tautology: "this
is outstanding, because that's what outstanding means". Increasingly,
one needs to look to educational research, including practitioner
inquiry, to find practical means of moving from "good to
great" or even, to be more realistic of aspiring to be average.
The Consistency and Quality of Inspection Teams:
If I for a moment confine myself
to the teams employed by the regional inspection provider for
which I worked, I would say that the regulatory grip combined
with the very careful, fear-induced QA processes of the Company,
made them about as consistent as it was humanly possible to be.
That is, for the reasons set out above, they were consistently
not quite up to the job as envisaged in 2005. I now think that
we were unrealistic. Too many inspectors have been too long out
of schools for any purpose other than to inspect them. They—we—carry
little conviction with young teachers. Too many are not fully
up to date; they have little notion of the pressures on modern
teachers.
However, I think that the providers would themselves
say that their main problems have been with HM Inspectors, who
are not subject to the same disciplines as the regional inspection
providers (RISPs). When David Bell was HMCI, he realized very
clearly that HMI had, as a precondition to making the system work,
to be subject to the same disciplines as RISPs. His successors
have done little to follow that up. HMI's performance has ranged
from the outstanding to, in a small minority of cases, incompetent,
but the general difficulty for the RISPs has been HMI's lack of
accountability: missed deadlines, whimsical judgements, indifferent
writing were more common than one would have hoped. This again
points to a lack of leadership in the department.
The weight given to different factors in the inspection
process: I take the widespread view that
"safeguarding" has become too dominant, and has moved
the inspection process too far along the spectrum towards auditing.
I recently heard Ofsted referred to as "the schools regulator".
It was not intended to be that, and is not particularly well-adapted
to do the job, which is a significant and , I believe, unintended
extensiopn of its remit.
On a more detailed point, Ofsted gives inadequate
and insufficient attention to the management of the secondary
curriculum. Virtually no attention is given to important matters
such as the distribution of bonuses across the school. This is
largely a historical accident: while the National Curriculum continued
to be prescriptive in great detail, it could be argued that schools
had few important curricular decisions to make. Now, they have
many to make, with important implications for efficiency and equity.
This needs to be a focus of inspection.
Whether the inspection of all settings designed
to support children's learning and welfare is best undertaken
by a single inspectorate: This is a very
complex question, with arguments on both sides. I used to believe
that the answer to this was an unequivocal "yes", but
I do not believe that, for example, the rigour of post-16 inspection
has gained from the amalgamation of Ofsted and the ALI, and there
has been some public dissatisfaction, centred on Haringey, with
Ofsted's inspection of childcare. Ofsted was most effective when
its remit was restricted to small-scale, high quality operation
with a specific focus. There is a great deal to be gained, nationally,
from having an independent, small-scale inspectorate, focused
on school standards.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Ofsted should be broken up and reconstituted
as the Office for Standards in Schools (or possibly schools and
colleges). Its remit should be restricted to early years education
in schools, compulsory education, post-16 education in schools,
independent schools and local support for schools.
2. The obligation to inspect all schools should
be removed. Ofsted should comment annually on the quality
of education available to parents in each LA area, that is on
such issues as:
— educational
standards and quality;
— admissions
arrangements and the availability of school places;
— recruitment
and retention of teachers;
— the
quality of the professional support available to schools;
— the
quality of professional support available to children and parents;
— the
quality of information provided to parents;
— the
choice of specialisms locally available; and
— the
extent to which local skills needs are analysed and met.
The regular inspections should concentrate on:
— outliers:
schools which are weak, or outstanding, or improving rapidly;
and
— locally
significant themes, such as behaviour.
3. Ofsted should revert to its previous
intention to draw on the wealth of information locally available:
SIPs, LA inspectors, National Challenge advisers, SSAT
advisers and others visit schools regularly to collect data and
make professional judgements. Ofsted should draw upon this corpus
of knowledge.
4. The number of inspectors should be much
reduced. I do not believe it matters very much whether inspectors
are employed centrally or by contractors. What matters is that
they need to be very highly expert and therefore highly paid.
September 2010
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