Memorandum submitted by Mrs Carole Thomson
1. Ofsted should be focused only on key
educational issues and a minimal number of statutory policies
for schools.
2. Schools should be inspected only by persons
(HMI) with up to date and proven high quality educational experience.
It should continue with subject inspections only to identify and
disseminate good practice.
3. Inspection teams have not been of consistently
good quality and this has had an adverse effect on some schools.
In particular no secondary teacher should be the lead inspector
for primary or Special school—inspection teams (or vice
versa).
4. The inspection framework should remain
consistent over the longer term (certainly for more than one inspection
round). Since the establishment of Ofsted I have experienced inspection
in primary and secondary schools and no two inspection rounds
have been comparable with the previous one. Consequently I believe
that—parents have been making comparisons based on inspection
reports that are essentially unreliable.
5. Section 48 denominational inspection
of schools should not be Government funded.
6. Schools should be allowed to opt in to—Section
48—inspections if they find them beneficial. Churches should
provide funding if they believe they are important—for their
schools. It is particularly important, if retained, that it should
not be a separate, additional bureaucratic burden. (e.g. there
is a long separate self evaluation form used in Oxfordshire),
but re-assimilated in to the main inspection visit.
7. Governors should be acknowledged within
the inspection process as part of the school leadership team.
This has been inconsistently applied across previous inspection
frameworks.
Written by the Chair of a local authority Governors'
Association in a private capacity (i.e. based on more than 25
years experience as—a primary & secondary school governor)
but without direct consultation with our membership.
October 2010
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