The role and performance of Ofsted - Education Committee Contents


Memorandum submitted by the General Teaching Council for England

SUMMARY

—  The Select Committee is encouraged to consider the contribution of inspection to accountability in the round, and to bear in mind that there may be other accountability processes that may better serve some accountability objectives.

—  The Committee might usefully explore whose interests are captured and whose needs met by inspection in its current form, with reference to (a) the process, and (b) the nature and use of the data generated.

—  There is a strong value for money case for optimising the contribution of inspection to improvement, particularly in straitened times.

—  Knowledge transfer between schools and settings is more important in an environment characterised by more autonomy and diversity.

—  It is counter-productive to overburden inspection, requiring it to meet too many needs - this can obscure a sharp focus on the most important areas.

—  The value of inspection is maximised if it is structurally embedded in a sustained, on-going process of reflection, account-giving, innovation and improvement.

—  Inspection needs to continue to be proportionate, and greater emphasis might usefully be given to the 'permission to innovate' conferred by a school's "clean bill of health".

—  A reconsideration of inspection might usefully form part of a wider rebalancing of resources between quality assurance and quality improvement.

—  The GTC is concerned that the well-being of children and young people should continue to be a focus of school and teacher accountability, although care is needed to ensure that accountability in this regard is sensible.

—  Similarly, the GTC favours the continuation of an explicit emphasis on schools' contribution to the life chances of all pupils.

—  The question of whether there ought to be one or more inspectorates of children's services is to the GTC of lesser order than the credibility and expertise of inspection teams in every kind of setting.

—  If there continues to be one inspectorate responsible for children's services, it should be encouraged to realise the potential opportunities for cross-sector knowledge and learning.

INTRODUCTION

1. The General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) is the independent professional body for the teaching profession. Its main duties are to regulate the teaching profession and to advise the Secretary of State on a range of issues that concern teaching and learning. The Council acts in the public interest to contribute to raising the standards of teaching and learning.

2. On 2 June 2010, the Secretary of State announced his intention to legislate to abolish the GTCE during the next parliamentary session.

3. Inspection is one tool for accountability; professional regulation is another. The GTCE responds to this inquiry as part of the machinery of accountability at the present time. The advent of the GTCE led to teachers in England being held to account for the first time as professionals (as distinct from employees in a particular setting) for their competence as well as their conduct.

4. As a professional regulatory body for teaching the GTCE takes the view that accepting accountability for the impact of one's professional practice is one of the hallmarks of a profession, and that the willingness of practitioners in disciplines like teaching to accept this accountability is a public good. This is a theme that is reflected in the code of conduct and practice for teachers.

5. This response focuses on those inquiry questions to which the GTC's work in the area of accountability can make a contribution. The GTCE undertakes to send the Committee wider material on the future of accountability as it is produced.

6. The GTC would be happy to supplement this written submission with oral evidence if helpful to the Committee.

ACCOUNTABILITY IN CHILDREN'S SERVICES

7. Accountability should be the means by which legitimate stakeholders in an enterprise receive an account from the agents of that enterprise, of their actions. But it is only true accountability if the act of account giving enables stakeholders to take action: to seek redress if standards are unacceptable; to sanction; to influence future practice. The GTCE has used the following definition in its work on accountability:

"Accountability can be defined as the methods by which the actor may render an account (i.e. justify their actions and decisions) to the stakeholders and by which the stakeholders may hold the actor to account (i.e. impose sanctions or grant permissions)[176]"

8. Moving from wider children's services to a consideration of the work of schools, it is worth beginning by setting out the many ways in which schools are held to account for their work. Performance tables record their outcomes in statutory tests and public examinations. Governing bodies generally reflect the community of interest in a school in order that they can hold the leader to account for its work. They also review the performance of the head teacher annually. Teaching staff, and increasingly other staff, are subject to performance management. Teachers are registered with, and regulated by, the General Teaching Council for England. The Government currently sets out the curriculum framework (the non-statutory but widely implemented National Curriculum) and in recent years have also been active in promoting particular approaches to pedagogy (e.g. literacy and numeracy strategies, teaching of phonics). Schools are inspected against national criteria and inspection reports are published.

9. One important question for the Select Committee is whether legitimate stakeholders in education feel empowered by the range and means of accountability mechanisms acting on schools at the present time. These might include children and young people, parents and carers, teachers and other staff, other children's services, local communities, employers, wider society, and the government as funder and on behalf of the perceived interests of any of the other stakeholders. For some schools, financial or denominational sponsors are also important stakeholders. Do their priorities shape what is scrutinised? Does accountability help stakeholders to be more discerning about services? Do the right consequences flow from holding a service to account? Do things get better?

10. The GTCE hopes that the Select Committee will situate its work on inspection in the wider context of accountability. It may wish to consider:

—  What particular role within accountability should inspection play? What roles should other accountability processes play?

—  What should inspection look like, bearing in mind considerations of effectiveness and cost?

—  Is the model of inspection, and the use made of resulting evidence, consonant with aspirations held for schools as institutions of learning, and for teaching as a profession?

THE PURPOSE OF INSPECTION

11. Inspection should be one of the means by which the state assures itself about standards of education, on behalf of the citizen, among others. It can be fit for the purpose of providing a snapshot of performance within and across schools as sites of learning, with some caveats about inspection evidence as a source of comparative data. At its best, it has taken good account of the challenges individual schools face as well as the value they add; at its worst, it has said more about a school's intake than its outcomes.

12. It can be counterproductive if the state tries to drive every aspiration it has of schooling through inspection, or if it becomes the single device through which stakeholders have their say about what matters in education.

13. In its current form inspection is not embedded in any sustained, on-going improvement focused form of accountability and that is a weakness if inspection is to play a greater role in improvement.

14. Inspection can make a contribution to judgements about teaching quality but on its own it represents a fairly limited means of doing so, and there are other accountability mechanisms that have more to contribute in this regard, including performance management and professional accountability.

15. Inspection can provide parents with insights that help with their decisions about school preferences but evidence about the extent and nature of parents' use of reports suggests there may be better ways of helping parents to be discerning about schools. Ideally, accountability tools should help parents to be insightful and influential throughout their children's school careers, and not only when expressing a preference between schools.

THE IMPACT OF INSPECTION ON SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

16. In recent years OFSTED has presented research and evidence to support its assertions of the positive impact of inspections on school improvement. A constant theme of head teachers' perspectives is that inspection did not tell them what they did not know about the school's shortcomings but the external reinforcement gave them a mandate for more robust action to secure change. This may imply a need to revisit the leverage of school leaders in conveying urgency about improvement to their stakeholders.

17. If inspection continues to be a significant element of accountability for children's services, the GTCE recommends that every effort is made to maximise its contribution to improvement. There is a value for money case for doing this in a time of cuts, but there is also a strong case to be made about generating and disseminating knowledge about effective practice across the system at a time when provision is set to diversify and providers to become more autonomous. There is an opportunity to refocus Ofsted's school work in ways that strengthen its contribution to improvement, and these might include:

—  Increasing the emphasis on thematic reviews and improving the throughput of their messages to practitioners.

—  Stepping up the involvement of school leaders , thereby building capacity for critical friendship and supporting knowledge transfer within the profession - as well as demonstrating a level of trust in the professionalism of school leaders.

—  Engineering a better articulation between the episodic external inspection and a sustained process of improvement focussed critical friendship, such as school improvement partners (SIPs), at their best, have provided.

18. The form in which inspection findings are reported may also need revision if practice improvement is to be a primary function of inspection.

19. The GTCE suggests that the Select Committee might usefully consider how other accountability mechanisms such as performance management and professional registration might make more of a contribution to improvement. The existence of a range of accountability mechanisms might be portrayed as burdensome but it might be argued that multiple accountabilities can serve the public interest. For example, strong professional accountability can provide a protection for professionals and their service users where managers within settings apply pressure to act in ways that are unethical.

20. In its health reforms, the Coalition government is proposing to enhance the status and infrastructure around public health, so that there is a dual focus on keeping people healthy and treating people who are ill. The same rebalancing is needed in education, in order that more of our scarce resources are spent enabling the majority of schools to succeed. By implication, in data rich times it should be possible to spend less on identifying a minority of schools that do not meet expectations by targeting activity proportionately where problems are evident or anticipated.

21. The Committee may wish to explore the extent to which a 'clean bill of health' might serve as more of a 'licence to innovate' for schools that are demonstrably and consistently deemed effective.

THE WEIGHTING OF FACTORS IN THE INSPECTION PROCESS

22. In September 2010, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, wrote to HMCI Christine Gilbert setting out his intention to refocus school inspections on four themes:

—  The quality of teaching.

—  The effectiveness of leadership.

—  Pupil behaviour and safety.

—  Pupils' achievement.

23. The GTCE supports the Coalition government's view that the public interest in schools would be better served by inspections that focused on fewer, enduring characteristics of school 'health'. Where accountability is over-complicated there is a risk that the focus on the things that really matter is diluted. Furthermore, a regime focused too closely on contemporary government initiatives runs the risk of appearing less than independent.

24. Inspection should focus on what all schools need to do well, and what else they do should depend less on micro management from the centre and more on the priorities of legitimate stakeholders locally.

25. It is possible that there might be a high degree of consensus about what these characteristics might be. There are strong similarities between the Secretary of State's framework, above, and what the GTCE offers for consideration, on the strength of its work with parents, children and teachers about their expectations of schools and teachers:

—  What is the quality of teaching and learning in the school?

—  Are all pupils being supported to progress and achieve, in their academic and wider development?

—  Are all pupils safe, happy and engaged in school?

—  What is the quality of leadership and management in the school?

—  Are pupils, parents and other stakeholders appropriately involved in and consulted by the school?

26. References to all pupils are intended to continue what the GTCE believes has been a morally important emphasis on schools helping all to succeed. The new Equalities Act underlines the responsibility of public bodies like the Department for Education and the GTCE to promote greater equity in the frameworks we shape in which public services are delivered.

27. The GTCE continues to believe schools have a responsibility for pupils' well-being. The Code of Conduct for teaching captures this responsibility because extensive consultation with parents and other stakeholders confirms that this is a firm societal expectation of teachers and schools. This is not to imply that schools should be held solely responsible for well being, or to support the burdensome means by which schools are sometimes held to account for wider outcomes. At a time of far-reaching cuts in children's services it is more important than ever that schools, as a universal service, understand and meet their contribution to children's well-being, not least because the capacity of other, targeted services will be diminished.

28. The GTCE also places emphasis on the stake in the school held by legitimate stakeholders in its work, foremost among which are pupils and parents. The GTC's work on the future of accountability concludes that strong accountability to the centre has diminished the accountability of schools to local stakeholders - those to whom teachers rightly feel most responsible. The Coalition government has taken one route to addressing this deficit - free schools. The GTCE will propose that all schools might improve their accountability to pupils, parents and others if the onus of central or national accountability was reduced where schools were demonstrably in good health.

A SINGLE INSPECTORATE FOR ALL CHILDREN'S SETTINGS AND SERVICES

29. It is essential that inspection teams have the credibility and expertise to make judgements about practice in each setting, whether there is a single or multiple inspectorates. If there continues to be a single inspectorate for children's services, there are potential benefits to be realised, including:

—  Streamlining inspection of multi-disciplinary settings such as schools that are also children's centres.

—  Having the capacity to make judgements about services as they are experienced by children and families, e.g. the quality of co-ordination between services.

—  The potential to undertake thematic reviews across disciplines on topics such as the quality of consultation with children.

—  The opportunity to spread best practice or innovation across settings on topics such as successful engagement of excluded families.

30. It may be that while Ofsted has been absorbing and streamlining substantial areas of work, some of these benefits have not yet been fully exploited.

October 2010


176   Bovens (2005) "Public Accountability" in Ferlie, E., et al The Oxford Handbook of Public Management, Oxford: OUP Back


 
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Prepared 17 April 2011