Counterblast
Shouldn't Ofsted be helping us to improve our
schools?
Geoff Barton
Click here for a print version of this article.
Good morning and a very warm welcome to King Edward VI
School. Our aim this morning is to give you a bracing mix of
provocative thinking and down-to-earth reality.
I'll reflect on Ofsted and what it's for, and by the end of my talk I'll
be posing five simple questions:
Question 1: Are schools better as a result of Ofsted?
Question 2: Is it worth the money?
Question 3: Are inspection standards and consistency good enough?
Question 4: Does it look at the right things?
Question 5: Shouldn't it help us to improve the profession?
I hope you'll enjoy a good-humoured but acerbic look at what
Ofsted does for us. Later our students will tell you how they
would run Ofsted if they were in charge – which one day we
imagine they will be. We'll look at some lessons to remind
ourselves of the complexity of the process of making judgements
about something so intangible and mystical as learning and
teaching. Then - after a chance to reflect on what we've seen
today – we'll give you lunch with students in our wonderful new
Bistro. It's part of our in-house catering service and contrary to
national stereotypes, we've seen the numbers of students eating a
hot, home-produced civilised lunch go through the roof. It's a
reminder of our need to keep thinking and rethinking beyond the
conventional.
But first to Ofsted.
Ofsted last visited us here at King Edward's in March 2006. A team
of five spent five days here and described us as a good school. We
half agreed, but thought they missed out on some essential
features of our work. We're not sure they'd spotted some of the
fundamental changes to ethos that had been put in place, the
change to a distinctive 3-session day of 100-minute lessons, and
the emphasis on active learning. We did all of those things
because we thought they had the capacity to transform a school at
risk of coasting.
Forgive the lack of modesty but according to our School
Improvement Partner – and he should know - if they arrived today
he says they would describe us as "outstanding". We're not
convinced that's right either. But we do have a lingering feeling
that Ofsted held up a mirror to ourselves which was a little
distorted: parts of ourselves we thoroughly recognised, but the big
chin, big nose and receding hairline struck us as exaggerated. In
other words, we felt it was a partial picture. And that would be
fine except Governments old and new have made Ofsted a very
high-stakes process. The mirror isn't just for our flattering
narcissistic purpose: it's also presented to an outside world which
is altogether less forgiving, More of that later.
So Ofsted said we're good and our School Improvement Partner
says we're outstanding. I'm not sure we're doing anything today
which we weren't doing 18 months ago and I'm not sure we're
doing anything now directly as a result of what Ofsted told us.
The essence of what Ofsted told us is that we take in students
beyond the average and send them out beyond the average. We
knew about the intake but disagreed – forgive the utilitarian
language here – about the outputs. We wanted the work we had
set in progress for improving attainment to be recognised. The
inspection team sometimes seemed hide-bound by the data that
showed progress that had been made, rather than was being
made. We think, in that sense, that they missed the subtlety of
significant underlying change.
And that, for us, is the problem – the restrictive and sometimes
distorted nature of the Ofsted focus. We're not convinced that
data actually tells you what's especially important about a school.
And we're especially not convinced when the data is retrospective.
So in my Counterblast this morning I want to reflect on Ofsted. We
know it's high profile – what you might call a well-known brand,
alongside M&S or Tesco. But we wonder if – unlike M&S and Tesco
– it's missed an opportunity to update itself, to reflect the
significant changes in school ambition, practice and leadership,
and whether it's looking just a little out of place in the modern
educational world.
Although Ofsted has reinvented itself a few times since its
inception – partly because of a political imperative and partly
because of the need to cut costs, isn't it still a bit like the uncle
from the 1970s who still insists on turning up at family gatherings
wearing his high heals and white one-piece suit. Hasn't he failed
somewhat to move with the times, to accept that the world around
him has changed pretty radically?
You'll see that I'm not arguing that we don't need Ofsted. Unlike
many of my colleagues and certainly many in the teacher
associations, I'm not suggesting it should be scrapped. But I do
wonder if it's suffering from drift, from doing things the way it's
always them, from a henchman approach to school improvement
which may now require something more subtle than henchmen.
Take the data about Ofsted. We know that in the year 2006-2007
they inspected 8,300 schools. We know that this was up on the
previous year's inspection rate of 6,129 schools. We know from
the gleeful trumpeting in the press that the number of "failing
schools" rose by 18%. In other words last year 246 schools were
placed in specials measures, compared to 208 schools in 2005-6.
This is 1.1% of all schools in special measures, up from 0.9% of
schools last year.
So how should we interpret that data?
- Are schools getting worse?
- Is Ofsted getting tougher?
- Are Headteachers packing their bags and retiring to the
calmer waters of consultancy and SIPdom as a result of the
high profile pressure of Ofsted?
Well, it's rather hard to tell because Ofsted has changed tack so
many times since its formation in 1992. 30% of its inspections are
now "low tariff" inspections - one day affairs carried about by a
lone inspector in a flak-jacket. How do they compare with the
more regular team inspections? Are standards the same?
And what about the historical perspective? Are Ofsted looking for
the same things that they were two or three years ago?
The Conservative's Shadow Junior Children's Minister Nick Gibb
suggests not. He says: "It is clear the new style Ofsted inspections
are picking up failure which in the past may have been left
unnoticed". And I suspect many of us have been part of old-style
inspections which – truth be told – we knew were a bit soft and
fluffy, a bit long on description but short on rigour.
Then under David Bell they were reinvented to give shorter notice
and more teeth. But are standards the same and do they help us
to know how we are doing?
We know that Ofsted costs a lot of money – currently £236 million
a year. It has a challenging target of its own to cut costs to £186
million by 2008/9. So – using their own criteria – do they
represent value for money? Has education improved as a result of
Ofsted?
John Dunford, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders believes that the Government and Ofsted are
"setting schools up for failure". He is – like many in the teaching
profession – incensed that Ofsted's definition of satisfactory
performance as unsatisfactory has been "both a distortion of the
English Language and a profoundly depressing judgement for
many heads".
It's the language of Kafka or Big Brother: "Teaching that is
generally satisfactory with little that is better merits a judgement
of unsatisfactory owing to a lack of aspiration in teaching."
It's that lack of continuity which has been confusing. This year
there's been more tweaking – a new duty to report on whether
school leaders are setting challenging targets to benefit lowest
attaining groups. There's more focus on evaluating behaviour.
Next year we'll be assessed on how well we are promoting
community cohesion. And so it goes on – the tinkering and
tweaking which may satisfy ministers that national expectations
are being reviewed but which make comparison from one year to
the next increasingly suspect.
Even Her Majesty's Chief Inspector acknowledged the problem
when she said earlier this year that changes in the way school
inspections were conducted made it difficult to compare year-onyear
progress and the situation before Labour took power in 1997.
All of this is reasonable in one sense of course. If a Government is
heavily investing money in education, it has the right to see how
well we're delivering. They have a right to make changes from one
year to the next. Ofsted gives them one way of making sure that
the things they say they want us to do are actually being done.
But we also know from practical experience that "less is more": if
in any walk of life we try to focus on too many things, spread
ourselves too thinly, then we'll end up doing lots of things to a
mediocre standard.
That's why Jim Collins' book Good to Great is so helpful. In
analysing the top multinational companies in the USA he shows us
that they concentrate with razorlike persistence on the things that
matter and they ignore the rest. Priority number one – get the
right people in the company; give them freedom to do well; avoid
distractions.
And that's at the heart of my criticism with Ofsted – its tendency
to distract us from our core purpose.
And here's where we start to get into controversial waters. The
Every Child Matters agenda is an important and compelling one.
The scandal of all the agencies who let down Victoria Climbie quite
rightly had to be addressed, and as a result we've seen a
significant channelling of effort into the restructuring and
integration of disparate council services.
Similarly the expectations of the school self-evaluation form and of
the Ofsted process itself give us frequent reminders of the need to
focus beyond the standards agenda. And yet, ultimately, it is on
the standards that we will be publicly judged. And that's the
danger – the apparent dichotomy between the ECM and standards
agenda; that the two things work in parallel rather than being
inextricably linked.
Take the summer's media frenzy about teenage gun culture, street
gangs and ASBO-defying yobbos. Some of that was a typical
August vacuum story – there's little to report so let's whip up
alarm about our out-of-control young people.
But for me there was also a very salutary reminder there of our
collective responsibilities as educators, administrators and
inspectors - that the most important role we can play in schools is
giving all youngsters a clutch of meaningful qualifications which
will open doors to take them away from the hope-sapping
wilderness of the streets. Through good teaching and effective
learning we raise aspirations and build self-esteem. And yet – even
here in deceptively leafy Bury St Edmunds around 40% of 16-yearolds
will leave school without 5 decent GCSEs including English
and Maths.
Now what is Ofsted doing to help us with that? What are
ministers, with their endless tinkering with national priorities and
shiny new initiatives, doing?
So paradoxically I'd be arguing that Ofsted should be sharpening
its bite in some key areas and backing off in others. Certainly tell
the story about the ethos of a school: effective learning will never
happen if the basics of behaviour, respect and courtesy aren't in
place. Report whether the curriculum as a whole is broad and
varied, whether students are being challenged. But look with
piercing and obsessive clarity at the basics of Maths and English –
the building blocks of learning. See that these are pervading the
school.
It was Ofsted after all who in their 2005 subject review of English
reminded us that some learners will hit a ceiling beyond which
their reading and especially writing will not develop if their
speaking and listening does not develop. It follows that one of the
most important whole-school themes a school should be paying
attention to is meaningful talk in every classroom: students
learning how to listen, how to frame questions, how to connect
ideas, how to structure their thoughts into a logical sequence.
Boys in particular will benefit massively in their writing by being
given space to rehearse in spoken language some of their ideas
first.
Like giving thinking time after asking a question, and not always
taking the answer from the same few eager girls with their hands
up, it's one of those essential micro-skills that all teachers should
have in their armoury.
Ofsted should be reminding us, time and again, what it is that
great teachers do to lift the expectations and performance of their
students to the next level.
Instead, too often it feels like an ongoing onslaught of criticism –
what they don't see rather than what they do.
I recently attended a fairly high profile seminar about succession
planning in the teaching profession. It gave dire warnings of the
crisis in headteacher recruitment and the cataclysm that awaits us.
Naive as ever, I asked how big the sample was for the research. It
transpired that twelve would-be Headteachers had been
interviewed – a reminder of the bankruptcy of so much so-called
educational research.
Ofsted meanwhile sees lots of lessons. They see what good and
great and mediocre and poor teachers do. They have the ability to
synthesise their observations into powerful recommendations.
Just as our students will tell us later that they can spot a good
teach at 100 metres, so Ofsted should be able to help us in
Training Schools and the Teaching and Development Agency to
find a way of nudging teachers up to the next level.
Ofsted could do this, but they can seem locked in the past.
Schools have changed – data for self-evaluation, Fischer Family
Trust, Raise Online, CVA, flightpaths and other measures of
quality. Most schools have taken the accountability challenge
seriously. We've grown up and don't need someone waving a big
stick. We've enjoyed the process of being treated as grown ups,
slugging off the paternalistic local authority teams and instead
working with school improvement partners.
The problem is that Ofsted hasn't always recognised how powerful
the School Improvement Partner can be in helping to lever a
school to the next level – it's a sign of how the profession is
starting to accept tough levels of accountability and system
change.
Meanwhile Ofsted has been plagued by concerns about
inconsistency. We need to know there's parity between inspection
teams and better quality control, and even from the top the
message isn't always reassuring.
Christine Gilbert's verdict on the past year, using Ofsted reports
from 2005-6, was not entirely helpful. She said: "The report card
for education has been increasingly encouraging over the past ten
years, but it is still not good enough". She reminded us that
education can "liberate and empower" children. So far so good.
She expressed her concern at the gap between the best and worst
school provision. Fair enough. And then she concluded: "More
needs to be done and swiftly". It's not the most constructive or
illuminating guidance.
Chris Keates of the NASUWT, who never knowing understates
anything, said she thought the Ofsted brand was increasingly
discredited, lamenting the Chief Inspector's "tired old story" and
the "fascination with failure". Mary Bousted of the Association of
Teachers and Lecturers says Ofsted is ripe for overhaul. She says
the inspection regime is "over-reliant on number-crunching, using
test data which is fundamentally unsound."
MPs have also expressed increasing concern about Ofsted as an
organisation. The Commons Education and Skills Select Committee
earlier this year described the organisation as overly complex and
bureaucratic. But they said something altogether more pertinent to
us: in looking at the light-touch inspections, they said they were
"not fully convinced of their effectiveness" and requested a fuller
evaluation of this approach to inspection. They also criticised the
lack of a graph or narrative to show what Ofsted's impact has
been over the years of its existence. And here's the nub of what
Committee Chair Barry Sheerman said to the Guardian:
"Other countries don't have a vast inspection system but many
seem to be doing just as well as ours. Spending on schools and
lots of other factors have increased – has that made the real
impact rather than Ofsted. Indeed what is the real value of
Ofsted?"
It's a fair question, given that Ofsted currently costs us £236
million a year.
There are legions of schools that feel they were hard done by
when Ofsted visited. As we've implied, our own team were
courteous and generally interested in our work, but they visited a
couple of weeks before the instruction went out to stop being so
hide-bound by contextual value-added data. It meant that they
looked at what had happened, rather than what was happening.
For some schools this has been disastrous. In 2005 Cockburn
College of Arts received a letter from then Schools Minister
congratulating them on their results. They were ninth in the table
of improving schools from key stage 2 to 3. This year it is on a
notice to improve. The inspectors – driven by data – hadn't taken
into account that the school had merged with another badly
performing school and that this had affected the results.
It raises particular alarms because the school was assessed by the
one-day 'drive thru' model, which places much more attention on
prior performance data because there is so little time in the day
for an inspector to visit lessons that would have any statistical
validity.
One worry is this slash and burn approach. The inspector or team
swoops in, makes quick-fire judgements, and then retreats in
haste. In some cases this leaves a school to pick up the pieces.
And it's the arbitrariness of the judgements that can cause worry.
As students will remind us later, in their presentation, we know
from Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating book "Blink" that students
make an initial judgement about a teacher's ability to teach within
two minutes. Research suggests that these early judgements are
around 95% accurate when compared to their evaluation of the
teacher teaching them for a whole term.
But we worry about the Ofsted blink approach. Since the Ofsted
light touch inspection nearly 50% of challenges made by schools
have been upheld – a figure that gives concern because we know
how volatile these judgements can prove in different communities.
The Association of School and College Lecturers estimates that
around 25 headteachers a year are dismissed by Governors - or
leave under a different name – because of a poor Ofsted report.
That's a bit of data the contextual value added approach doesn't
embrace – the P45.
So, to sum up, here are some questions to frame the day and help
us think about national policy on inspection.
Issue 1: Ofsted has a huge impact – in news-hungry local papers,
along the grapevines of community and in the decisions about
whether a school may get significant amounts of additional
funding. Are schools better as a result? Do the kinds of teachers
who inspired us as pupils get encouraged by the Ofsted regime? Is
innovation and risk-taking encouraged? Does achievement count
for just as much as attainment, or has Ofsted made us narrow our
conception of education, make us data-driven and produced a
tendency towards conveyor belt delivery of lessons rather than
high quality learning and teaching founded in what great teachers
do – talking, listening to students, going off at mad tangents,
sharing their passion for a subject? Does Ofsted actually
encourage a safe, homogenised form of teaching?
Issue 2: Ofsted costs a great deal. Is it worth the £236m per year
we spend on it? Do other countries spend less and get at least as
much or more? Is there enough recognition of the changing
culture of schools – our desire to be more autonomous, to
embrace intelligent accountability, to use data wisely and
judiciously, to achieve the very best for our students.
Some of the most improving schools have seen heavy investment.
Academies and specialist schools have seen considerable progress.
Would the money spent on Ofsted inspections have made a bigger
impact on school improvement if it went direct to the schools who
need it most?
Issue 3: Does Ofsted give us reassurance about standards and
consistency? The endlessly changing methodology, the tinkering
with what is being assessed, the number of complaints and the
high number of these that are upheld, the admission by Her
Majesty's Chief Inspector that it's hard to compare one year with
another – don't these mean that – at worst – the credibility of its
own moderation and quality control procedures are compromised
and – at best – that it misses an opportunity to give us a detached
view of whether English education is actually improving year on
year?
Issue 4: Does Ofsted look at the right things? Isn't the heavy
emphasis on using contextual value added data often negative,
because it doesn't take into full account the context of a school; it
places school leadership teams into a role of having to defend and
justify rather than celebrate; it's intrinsically negative? Can the
one-day inspections be any more than impressionistic – a risky
strategy when the public stakes are so high? Shouldn't it instead
tell a school's story, telling the public with absolute clarity about
standards of literacy and numeracy and leadership but not
deluding itself that it can give any meaningful guidance on the
catalogue of other issues, many of them dreamed up at the whim
of a fresh-faced minister. In other words, less is more: tell us how
good the essentials are and leave the detailed probing of a school
to the School Improvement Partner.
Issue 5: Shouldn't Ofsted help us to improve? If Ofsted looked at
the way teachers teach, at what constitutes good practice in the
way we lead our schools, deploy staff, and which innovations
make the real impact – couldn't it play a key role in helping us to
improve our schools? Couldn't it be involved in training staff,
building on the work of School Improvement Partners, taking a
constructive role in developing our professional expertise?
Wouldn't judgements have more credibility if they involved some
practising teachers more – for example through a series of 1-year
secondments or attachments whereby classroom teachers visit
other schools, observe lessons, and sharpen their understanding of
quality?
So those are the questions that form the basis of my counterblast
today – an affirmation that Ofsted isn't something that we should
scrap or sideline; but reconfiguring it as an agency that needs to
modernise itself and recognise that the world around it has
changed. It needs to make smarter use of data, hold less of a
distorting mirror up to schools, build on the work of School
Improvement Partners and give itself the ambition and ideal to
help improve schools.
Ofsted – welcome to the brave new world of school improvement:
done by us and not to us.
Geoff Barton is Headteacher at King Edward VI School, Suffolk, a 14-19 training school and one of NET's Leading Thinkers.
www.geoffbarton.co.uk |
