Improving Schools and Inspection

The Self-Inspecting School

Neil Ferguson, Peter Earley, Brian Fidler, Janet Ouston

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780761967279, 9780761967262
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

`This is an important book, not least because OfTED may well have changed English schools more substantially than any previous curriculum development or assessment development programme? - Mentoring & Tutoring

This book looks at the relationship between school inspection and school improvement. The authors show how heads have used inspectors? reports to put in place real school improvement. They deal with the contexts of inspection and comparisons are made with the Australian experience of school self-review. The book focuses on how schools have developed a culture of self-inspection.

The authors consider the system of OfSTED inspections and ask how beneficial inspection has been in encouraging schools to develop and improve. They suggest there is need for a change and that there are alternative approaches to school assessment and improvement, which could be more effective. They argue that the school?s own evaluation processes should play a greater part in the arrangements for inspection.

Improving Schools and Inspection will be essential reading for headteachers and other professionals engaged in dealing with inspections.

1

Inspection and self-inspection

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Previous generations of school teachers believed that they should be left alone to get on with the business of teaching behind the closed doors of their classrooms. Geer, for example, in a discussion about the attractions of teaching which was first published in the late 1960s, noted that there was still ‘something of the lonely eminence of the classroom’ and suggested that one of the advantages of membership of the teaching profession was that: ‘visibility of performance is low and few people believe we have learned as yet how to measure teaching ability’ (1968, p.7). It is difficult to see how a system that allowed so much personal and professional autonomy could combat inertia, encourage improvements or provide any guarantee that teachers would have appropriately high expectations of their pupils. However, that is a modern thought and one which is undoubtedly much influenced by the culture which has spawned the National Curriculum and its testing programme, the league tables of schools and, perhaps most significantly of all, the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) which has completed the external inspection of every state-controlled school in England and Wales¹ and, at the time of writing, is immersed in the first round of reinspections and about to introduce differentiated or ‘light touch’ inspections for a minority of schools.

The foreword to this book noted that the tradition of laissez-faire and dependence on teachers’ professional judgements in educational matters had survived into the 1980s and had become a contentious issue. It might be argued that the introduction of any reasonably rigorous system of review and evaluation which was designed to change teachers’ ‘lonely eminence’ and make schools more accountable was bound to have beneficial results. The main purpose of this book is to consider the system of OfSTED inspections and ask how beneficial it has been in encouraging schools to develop and improve. Has external inspection gone too far or not far enough? What are its advantages and disadvantages and are there alternative approaches to school assessment and improvement that might prove to be more effective? There might, for example, be benefits in the introduction of systems of school self-evaluation or drawbacks which are so significant that it would be best to continue the current arrangements. The system of external inspections that the Office for Standards in Education has introduced for schools is still being developed in the light of the experience of the first round of inspections, but is it time to ask whether a third round of inspections should follow the same pattern or begin to move in new directions? This book draws upon our research findings and discusses what we have learned about the current system and its operation. It concludes by making suggestions about the possible future development of school inspection in England and Wales.

OfSTED inspection

The Office for Standards in Education, headed by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI), was created as an independent, non-ministerial government department in September 1992. It was charged with the task of setting up a new system of school inspection and maintaining a sufficient number of qualified inspectors to fulfil the requirements of each inspection cycle. The Education (Schools) Act 1992 introduced a system of competitive bidding in which contracts for inspections could be awarded to registered inspectors or their employers. There are currently a large number of ‘contractors’ which are private businesses that recruit OfSTED-trained staff and compete for inspection contracts from the schedule of inspections which OfSTED has determined. This arrangement for the inspection of schools is very different from the arrangements for the inspection of other public services, such as prisons, probation and the social services (Mordaunt, 1999). Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), the professional arm of OfSTED, inspects independent schools, teacher training institutions, and groups outside the school system, but has a major responsibility for the quality assurance of inspection teams and their contractors. It also has a significant role to play in relation to schools that are failing to provide an adequate standard of education for their pupils and are said to have ‘serious weaknesses’ or to be in need of ‘special measures’ (OfSTED, 1999a).

Every inspection is led by a registered inspector (RgI) who is usually called ‘the lead inspector’ because RgIs also join inspection teams that they do not lead. Although all RgIs and team inspectors (with the exception of the lay inspectors) are qualified teachers, there is no requirement for them to have any recent experience in schools and inspectors may be retired teachers or teacher trainers or local education authority (LEA) advisers. The initial qualification for a team inspector is a taught course of about five days spread over a three-month period. There is also a requirement to study five preparatory units, plus around a dozen distance learning units, and to complete assignments which are assessed by the course tutor. Most trainee inspectors would require a period of two or three months to complete all of these requirements and prepare for the final examinations. Registered inspectors must first gain experience as a team inspector and then successfully complete an additional programme of training.

The 1992 Education Act which set out the changes to the inspection system made it compulsory for every inspection team to include a ‘lay’ inspector who is someone ‘without personal experience in the management of any school or the provision of education in any school’. Lay inspectors may now become registered inspectors and a small number have qualified as RgIs and take responsibility for leading inspection teams and writing the schools’ inspection reports. The notion of a category of inspector who (initially at least) has little knowledge of the processes that he or she is employed to observe, might seem odd to those who are not familiar with the recent history of education in England. Lay inspectors were probably created as a symbolic representation of the public interest and as a reminder from government to teachers and inspectors that they should not claim exclusive rights to the ownership of the education process. The fact that it is the school’s governing body – another group of lay individuals – and not the management team that is responsible for the school’s response to the inspection report also helps to underline this message.

The logic of inspection

The ‘Framework for Inspection’ established the criteria on which schools were to be judged and set out a code of practice governing the conduct of inspections. These criteria, unlike those of the HMI system which OfSTED inspections replaced, are defined in detail and published (together with information about how they will be assessed) in a series of inspection handbooks (OfSTED, 1994/5) that are available to anyone who wishes to purchase them. All the new requirements which had been introduced since the publication of the handbooks were summarised in August 1997 in booklet form and distributed to all inspectors (OfSTED, 1997a). A briefing containing some guidance on their implementation was sent to schools some months later (OfSTED, 1998d). This policy of ‘openness’ is characteristic of the OfSTED system and enables schools to take account of the inspection criteria, particularly in school development planning. The first round of inspections was completed for all schools in 1998 and there is now a general acceptance that a school that does well in an inspection is, by definition, a ‘good school’ and schools with good reports are keen to publicise this in their prospectus and increasingly in advertisements for new members of staff. Before the introduction of OfSTED inspections, a ‘good school’ was more likely to be one with a good reputation among parents and the local community but the reasons why the school had won this trust and support were not always clear.

The inspection of schools under the new OfSTED Framework began in September 1993 in secondary schools (inspections in primary schools and special schools began a year later) and arrangements were made for every school to be inspected on a four-year cycle. Since the first inspections were carried out, the Framework has been revised and updated and there have been a number of changes introduced. (The main ones are summarised in Table 1.1.) However, although there have been changes in inspection policy and practice, the cornerstones of the process – judgements about the quality of education provided by the school, the educational standards achieved by pupils, the efficiency with which financial and other resources are managed and the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils – have remained the same.

Table 1.1 OfSTED inspection since 1992

Education Act 1992	OfSTED inspection established on a four-year cycle
Autumn term 1993	The first secondary schools inspected
Autumn term 1994	The first primary and special schools inspected
April 1996	The first major revision of the inspection criteria
December 1996	The Secretary of State announced that OfSTED was moving to a six-year cycle for some schools, and a shorter period for others
March 1997	OfSTED announced that 650 secondary schools would be reinspected in the academic year 1997/8. These were schools that had been inspected in the first two years of inspection, between September 1993 and July 1995
September 1997	Reinspection of secondary schools started
September 1998	Reinspection of primary and special schools started
November 1998	Consultation Paper Proposals for a Differentiated System of School Inspections published
March 1999	Revised system announced to include differentiated or ‘light touch’ inspections for some schools
January 2000	Revised framework introduced and new inspection system commences

Changes to the inspection system have tracked the changes in schools as heads, governors and staff have reacted to a series of government interventions and Acts of Parliament designed to raise educational standards and make schools more accountable to parents and the community. These changes (e.g. a focus on literacy and numeracy, an increased emphasis on information and communications technology, the increasing importance of monitoring, target-setting and the school’s record of improvement, an emphasis on assessment) have had a considerable effect on the content of inspections. However, inspection is also a mechanism for delivering changes and ensuring that heads, governors and LEAs comply with new statutory requirements. As such, it reflects the values in which successive governments have placed their faith. Although school inspection is said to be ‘independent’, it is perhaps more appropriate, on occasions, to note its role as an arm of the state which has been created to ensure compliance.

The search for high standards through a market mechanism and competitive tendering is an important feature of the new inspection system and the publicity that attends a critical inspection report supposedly helps to empower the consumer as a force for change. So powerful are these forces for centrally induced changes that they cannot be ignored and the prospect of an impending inspection is sufficient to make teachers and heads feel apprehensive. The events of the period leading up to an inspection, the inspection week itself and the aftermath of inspection and the variety of evidence that inspectors collect during an inspection are briefly described in the next chapter. Teachers’ reactions to inspection and their effect on school development are discussed in some detail in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6.

This book is about the process of external inspection and its influence on school development and improvement, but it is also about ‘self-inspection. The latter is a concept that requires some further discussion and definition because there are senses in which (i) all schools, (ii) few schools and (iii) no schools at all in England and Wales are ‘self-inspecting’ institutions.

Self-inspection

The Office for Standards in Education has had such a potent influence in schools in England and Wales that some commentators have become concerned about its power to dominate teachers’ thinking and take charge of the education agenda. Cullingford (p. 59, 1999), for example, notes the emphasis that government places on the control of schools and suggests that ‘the most significant demonstration of the belief in measures of external control is the power invested in OfSTED’. However, it is not simply the mechanisms of inspection that cause concern but the fact that the discussion of education that takes place in schools and elsewhere increasingly employs a vocabulary and transmits values that are dominated by the ‘OfSTED discourse’. There is a new set of assumptions and a vocabulary to go with them. Few teachers now question that ‘teaching quality’, ‘improvement since the last inspection’, ‘value for money’, ‘pupil progress in lessons’, and ‘the identification of weaknesses and serious weaknesses’ can be assessed without undue difficulty, but these are big assumptions. It is too easy to overlook the fact that the judgements in inspection reports are judgements and that inferences made on the basis of classroom observations, the scrutiny of documents and pupils’ work, and discussions with school staff and governors (see Chapter 2) are capable of a variety of interpretations that depend on the frame of reference and previous experience of the individual inspector.

Teachers’ thinking is said to have been ‘colonised’ (Jeffrey and Woods, 1998; Lowe, 1998) by the OfSTED discourse and the way that teachers think about their work and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses is likely to have been influenced to a considerable extent by the Inspection Framework. The creation of an orthodoxy, and its power to influence the ways that schools judge themselves in the period between inspections, explains the sense in which all schools, or nearly all schools, might be said to be ‘self-inspecting’. OfSTED’s belief that no ‘orthodoxy’ exists has been supported by the Parliamentary Select Committee report on the work of OfSTED (House of Commons, 1999a) which declared:

We agree with those witnesses who told us that, at present, there is little danger that schools will use the Inspection Framework in such a way that it has become an ‘orthodoxy’. But the DfEE should not be complacent. We recommend that the DfEE keeps under review the ways in which schools use the Inspection Framework (paragraph 27).

OfSTED has also developed the systematic use of the Framework criteria for ‘self-evaluation’. The publication School Evaluation Matters (OfSTED, 1998a) points out that:

It is advantageous to base school self-evaluation on the same criteria as those used in all schools by inspectors. A common language has developed about the work of schools, expressed through the criteria. Teachers and governors know that the criteria reflect things that matter (paragraph 18).

This process of ‘self-evaluation’, it is suggested, should be conducted annually in the years between inspections and, when the time for an inspection arrives, the visiting inspectors can be expected to comment on its effectiveness in the inspection report. School self-evaluation, using the OfSTED criteria, is a form of ‘self-inspection’ and this description should, we believe, be used to distinguish the process from a variety of other self-evaluation methods that do not use the Framework criteria. This distinction is fur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• List of figures and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Inspection and self-inspection
• 2 The OfSTED approach: a perspective
• 3 Pre-inspection preparations and school development
• 4 The week of the inspection
• 5 Key issues for action: improvement after inspection?
• 6 The inspection of schools with new headteachers
• 7 OfSTED and the governing body
• 8 Improving inspection: the views of heads, inspectors and the Select Committee
• 9 ‘Failing’ schools and the inner city
• 10 Assisted school self-review in Victoria, Australia
• 11 OfSTED and school self-evaluation
• 12 The self-inspecting school and the future of inspection
• References
• Appendix: A summary of the data sources
• Index