To understand why education reform – and school improvement – is so hard it helps to get inside the mind of the officials who are supposed to be driving higher standards. This week Jonathan Slater, a former Department for Education permanent secretary, published a report for UCL Policy Lab that perfectly illustrates many senior officials’ poor understanding of schools and of accountability in particular.
Slater is, admirably, determined to improve educational outcomes for poorer children. But in my view he is also appallingly ignorant about how to actually achieve improvement. He repeats the call – from those anxious to cover up under-performance – to replace Ofsted inspections (other than for safeguarding) with a new ‘evaluation framework’.
He argues that removing Ofsted inspections would benefit both teacher retention and capacity, highlighting how some teachers believe that Ofsted has a negative impact on retention. But if Ofsted shines a light on teaching that is poor should we put the ‘morale’ of poor teachers ahead of outcomes for children? And if poor children, in particular, are suffering from inadequate teaching who benefits from covering that up?
Slater’s argument is a failure to recognise that inspection is a mechanism by which government checks that schools are providing the quality of education our children have a right to expect. The burden of inspection, which unions have been complaining about for decades, rests on two pillars. First, that government rightly expects schools to do what they are meant to do – autonomy for schools doesn’t mean they can abdicate responsibility. And second, that government imposes consequences on those who don’t meet expectations. These are pillars of government policy under past and present governments, but officials like Slater persistently fail to understand or support it.
For years, senior officials have prioritised appeasing the various stakeholder factions in the school sector, and so have convinced themselves that sector grumbles must be Ofsted’s fault. The inspection framework must be wrong, the process is too onerous, inspectors don’t smile enough – in short, any interpretation that deflects responsibility from government and the school sector. Officials almost wilfully disregard the painstakingly collected evidence that shows their analysis is wrong. They have allowed themselves to be captured by the sector – my regular meetings with permanent secretaries sometimes felt more like dealing with shop stewards – and rarely recognise the underlying dynamic: that accountability will always be resisted by producer interests.
Slater also fails to grasp that much of the value of inspection lies in its ability to measure the things that will not readily be captured by data. While he was permanent secretary, a large proportion of primary schools were largely ignoring the national curriculum requirements beyond those for English and mathematics; Key Stage 3 curriculum and teaching were often poor; gaming and distortion were rampant through the sector; political impartiality was under serious threat; PSHE was running out of control; and inspection was blind to all this, because around 20 years ago the DfE fell for the idea that test outcomes could carry all the weight of defining education quality, and stripped inspectors of the capacity to look properly at education itself.
The changes I made to inspection in 2019 actually directly linked inspection to an evidence-based conception of education quality (developed with input from many experts) – encompassing all children, not just those with or without special educational needs and/or disadvantaged – for the first time ever. In other words, exactly the robust evaluation framework that Slater advocates for. And for the first time in 15 years, inspectors were able to look under the bonnet and see whether the true quality of education matched the shiny results. Much of the time it did, but sometimes it didn’t. Yet I found that senior officials often defended the schools and academy trusts exposed by the revised inspection model, when they should have reinforced the message that schools needed to act with integrity in children’s interests, not just deploy every quick fix to get results up. National reputations have been made through just that willingness to sacrifice real education in favour of quick fixes. Some of the national leaders of education in Slater’s time were not well suited to lead real school transformation.
Sadly, my successor has been pressured into abandoning the 2019 inspection model, including the principle and platform of an evidence-informed definition of education quality. Nearly all real scrutiny of what is being taught has already been dropped, leaving only a cursory review of education quality. The rhetoric for parents around colour-coded scorecards is designed to conceal how little lies underneath. Government and the chief inspector must have hoped that this approach would placate the unions, who of course have scented blood with the many concessions already made and are doing their utmost to break accountability entirely through legal action.
Slater also believes that suspending inspections would encourage innovation, and draws a parallel with Michael Gove’s 2010 suspension of inspections for outstanding schools. But (as I know Gove now recognises) this was a policy that didn’t work. After inspection of formerly outstanding schools was reinstated, more than a decade later, the findings were dismal – in the first year, fewer than 20 per cent retained an outstanding rating. Instead of innovating, many schools had stagnated and become complacent.
So yes, there is scope for better and more coherent accountability in the school sector. But the first and most important step is for senior officials to recognise all that they have got wrong, over so many years, and advise ministers accordingly.
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