Public Accounts Committee: Ofsted's inspection of schools (Transcript) from Jan 23
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Members present: Meg Hillier (Chair); Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown;
Chris Davies; Chris Evans; Shabana Mahmood; Nigel Mills; Layla
Moran; Anne Marie Morris; Bridget Phillipson; Anne-Marie Trevelyan.
Sir Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, Adrian Jenner,
Director of Parliamentary Relations, National Audit Office, Laura
Brackwell, Director, NAO, and Richard Brown, Treasury Officer of
Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance. Questions 1-160
Witnesses I: Amanda...Request free
trial
Members present: Meg Hillier (Chair); Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown; Chris Davies; Chris Evans; Shabana Mahmood; Nigel Mills; Layla Moran; Anne Marie Morris; Bridget Phillipson; Anne-Marie Trevelyan. Sir Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, Adrian Jenner, Director of Parliamentary Relations, National Audit Office, Laura Brackwell, Director, NAO, and Richard Brown, Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance. Questions 1-160 Witnesses I: Amanda Spielman, Chief Inspector, Ofsted. Examination of witness Witness: Amanda Spielman. Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 23 January 2019. We are here to question Amanda Spielman, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills—the title seems to grow every time you are in front of us. We are keen to talk about the work of Ofsted and some wider issues relating to the education system. Digging away at education has been a big theme of our Committee in the past few years. Of course, Ms Spielman appeared in front of us with the permanent secretary not that long ago. Since then we have had a Treasury minute, we have had a very detailed and thorough letter in response to that hearing—thank you—and of course you have published your annual report. You are also consulting on the inspection regime. A lot has happened since we last saw you—you have been very busy. We are keen to talk to you about your role in school effectiveness and how that is working, how the changes you are trying to implement are working, and how Ofsted and the Government are delivering good-quality schools for the children in them. I am going to ask Bridget Phillipson to kick off.
Amanda Spielman: Schools have a number of choices to make. Of course, they have a choice to make about how much to put into classroom teaching—into both teachers themselves and everything they use in the classroom. They now have a whole variety of support functions—both back-office support and various kinds of education support. Then, of course, there is the whole leadership piece and the piece around provision of wider education experiences—trips, enrichment, sports and so on—most of which carry a cost as well. The second part of your question was what we are doing to look at that. It is not currently in our brief to look at how schools spend their money, apart from two specific pieces: the use of the pupil premium and the use of the pupil sport premium.
Amanda Spielman: No. At the moment the financial monitoring of schools happens through the responsible bodies and, for academies, the contracts with Government. For academies, the responsibility flows through the academy trust. They are held accountable by the regional schools commissioners and their finances are scrutinised by the Education and Skills Funding Agency. The ESFA also now allocates money to local authorities, but local authorities are responsible for the scrutiny of community school spending. Obviously, this is something we have looked at. We saw the recommendation in the Report this morning, and that is absolutely possible. I said in my letter that we would be looking at some of this in a research project. We have a piece of work lined up this year—it will be based partly on school visits and partly on questionnaires to get a wide spread—to look at the decisions schools are taking and how they are taking them. There are two issues. One is looking at spending. That kind of work would involve full scrutiny of what schools do and how they do it. The other is the problem of attribution. To determine that something is not being provided by reason of a reduction in the school budget, you would have to look at all of their allocation to say whether they are prioritising intelligently and allocating their resource to the right things; assuming they are buying the right things or spending it on the kinds of stuff, are they paying the right amount for it, or are they contracting badly? Only by fully reviewing the whole allocation of resources and spending could you attribute the inadequacy in any kind of education standard to budget shortfalls. It is not something that you could just do at the margin; you would have to take into the inspection a very big area that doesn’t exist at the moment. That is absolutely possibly—some inspectorates do that—but essentially, as far as I can see, at this point it is a recommendation for the Department for Education to reconsider the scope of inspection rather than something that I can squeeze in at the margins of an existing framework and the way that we now work.
Amanda Spielman: That is an interesting question. Historically, we haven't emphasised giving parents financial reports on schools. The reporting on the education side— Bridget Phillipson: Sorry, I mean the financial impact then leading to outcomes for their children and how that impact feeds through to outcomes. Amanda Spielman: It will always be extremely hard to make attributions at an individual school level. There are many kinds of school spending at the moment—for example, spending on some of the programmes on building soft skills—for which the kind of research evaluations that exist so far do not give very much guidance on what is definitely a good use of money and what definitely is not. Thinking about the kinds of conclusions that we are likely to be able to draw, we would probably only in quite extreme cases be able to say at a school level, “Yes, this is definitely because of a reduction in budget.” Taking one step further back, as I wrote in my letter, we went through a very long period of substantial increases in school spending, during which it is not clear that results went up anything like to the same extent as the money went up. If we look at international comparisons, such as the one published by PISA in 2012, we see that above a certain level of spending—in PPP terms it is about $35,000 to $40,000 over a child’s entire school career—there is essentially no correlation between how much a national system spends on education and the outcome. For many years we have been far above that level. It is simply not axiomatic that a reduction in school spending will lead to an immediate fall in outcomes for the children in that school, any more than it is axiomatic that an increase in spend will drive improved outcomes.
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming— Chair: Welcome back. I will hand back to Bridget Phillipson.
Amanda Spielman: Quite a bit of work has happened in various places. The Education Endowment Foundation very helpfully drew together research on education support and the circumstances in which it is helpful. It has concluded that it has a low impact for high cost. I think it did its review in two stages. Initially it was essentially zero impact for high cost, then a couple of further studies led them to revise it to low impact for high cost—“low” meaning something like, I think, one month’s additional progress over the school career of a child receiving that kind of help. Sorry—I am not sure that it is over the school career, but it is a pretty small impact. There were a number of sources of that kind of evidence. In deciding what to put into our new draft framework, we have relied quite heavily on that evidence base and ensured that we draw on the existing literature on the kinds of educational activity and intervention that are most helpful. Can I just come back to the point you made about parents? We have done quite a lot of focus groups with parents, and survey work, and the question of money and how schools spend it did not come up once in any of those focus groups. What parents care about is behaviour and education standards, and that is why we are redesigning our reports to focus on the things that parents have told us matter most to them and that they want to read about.
Amanda Spielman: We used a consultancy that specialises in this work and we looked at focus groups all around the country—I think disproportionately in somewhat disadvantaged areas. I have just been passed a note—they included Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham. The focus was towards the lower end of the socioeconomic range, to ensure that we were addressing the parents who were least likely to find it easy to get information in other ways.
Amanda Spielman: I think parents assume that other people are overseeing the money side. I think most parents are probably by default reluctant to start poking through budgets and talking about exactly how much is spent on this and that. I think that is a reasonable expectation for parents.
Amanda Spielman: No. I don’t believe we have anything of that specificity in the inspection framework—my colleagues will correct me if I am wrong.
I think we all found that there was some concern about school funding at one of the recent elections we have had. Parents were telling me very openly that they couldn’t get the information out of the school. Does that concern you? Amanda Spielman: It does concern me. We have a somewhat piecemeal system, with some schools with a governing body overseen by a local authority, and others as part of academy structures. If they are stand-alone academies in a single trust, then the accounts for that academy would be just about that school. If they are part of a multi-academy trust, it is much less clear—
Amanda Spielman: I think some kind of account summary, so that parents can understand what resource their school gets and how it is spent is— Chair: It is taxpayers’ money in the end, of course; it is their own money. Ms Phillipson.
Amanda Spielman: Indeed. One of the things that is always most difficult is when you have something where public perception, and particularly parent perception of what is of value, does not necessarily sit with what objectively collected evidence suggests actually makes a difference at the end of the day. That is one of the things that is most difficult to reconcile in public policy.
Amanda Spielman: Absolutely, and what support staff do makes a difference. I think some of those studies show that an additional support body in the classroom doesn’t make a significant difference to outcomes, but support staff doing other things, such as helping families who have difficulty getting their children to school, may be more effective. It is still very much a work in progress. Again, looking at international comparisons—if you look across the TALIS comparisons, for example—we have unusually high levels of non-teaching staff in our schools. Over these years of very large budget increases, we have built up very substantial support staff. I think it is hard at the moment for heads to know what are the things that feel good for everybody but are not really contributing very much at the end of the day, and what are the things that are absolutely essential, without which the school would suffer. That is part of why being a head is so hard at the moment.
Amanda Spielman: At the moment, inspection does not interrogate people on the question of teacher workload. We have just published in draft a new inspection framework that does include, under leadership and management, a point about whether school leaders have regard to the workload of their staff. It is framed carefully—we do not want to drive wedges between leaders and teachers, and we know how the world can overreact to things we say—but we are proposing a step in that direction.
Amanda Spielman: We have a continuing strand of discussion with ESFA about information sharing and improving. With the responsibility for monitoring funding sitting with DFE and direct agencies, and the responsibility for education quality sitting with us, there is an interface, and it is a hard interface to manage. I want the connection across that interface to get better. We are having good discussions with ESFA. I hope the pieces of work we are doing this year on decisions that are being taken by schools around funding trade-offs, and the work we are doing on stuck schools—the schools that have been “requires improvement” for longest and have responded least to the various kinds of intervention—will be part of that productive discussion.
Amanda Spielman: Pupil premium is a difficult one, partly because looking at a slice of budget in isolation when you do not have the scope to look at allocation of resources in the whole budget is a slightly artificial conversation. I mentioned the Education Endowment Foundation, which has published quite a helpful toolkit. A lot of schools use that to try to make sure that they allocate the money in sensible ways. But all our inspectors can really do properly is look at the itemisation and see whether it is spent on things that are broadly consistent with what we know about good application. They cannot disaggregate and say, “This part of a child’s results is because the school is doing these things, and that part is from the core teaching.” The outcomes are the outcomes, and at the level of an inspection you can never attribute them to a particular piece of expenditure. We can do limited scrutiny when it is just that little piece in isolation.
Amanda Spielman: It is not pupil by pupil, no. The scale of your typical inspection of a good primary school may be one inspector for one day, up to a maximum of two inspectors for two days. In the context of that kind of inspection of the whole work of the school, you couldn’t possibly do pupil-by-pupil review.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan: The EEF has done quite a lot of work—I agree—but what about from an inspectorate perspective? Amanda Spielman: I do not believe we have enough in our evidence base from the kind of work we do to be able to draw conclusions.
Amanda Spielman: I don’t think there is any reason to think that the UK is dramatically different from other well-off, developed countries in western Europe. Most of the international statistics I have seen suggest that until very recently our teacher-to-pupil ratios are broadly similar to those in comparable countries; we do not have exceptionally high pupil-to-staff ratios. I haven’t said that support staff are not valuable. In the years where schools have built up their budgets, we have perhaps built up larger support staff than most countries have. The choices that schools face at the moment are about what kinds of support are most valuable. That is the choice for a typical school at the moment. Chair: I am sure we will come back to some of this.
Amanda Spielman: We have done a number of pieces of research. We have done some curriculum research in three stages looking at that. All the way through primary and secondary—from the beginning of key stage 2 onwards—we found things that gave us significant concern. Primaries are losing subjects that are not assessed at the end of key stage 2 at age 11; everything apart from English and maths tends to get squeezed. Our most recent piece of research suggests that subjects outside those areas are often quite poor quality. In key stage 3, there is a tendency—the intention is to continue the broad curriculum entitlement through to age 14, ahead of GCSE choices—to truncate that and to want to accelerate decisions about GCSEs and lose things like languages, the arts and practical subjects such as design and technology and so on, which children don’t necessarily take post-14. Pupils are not developing a sense of where their interests lie as well as building that body of knowledge of skills that was envisaged of the national curriculum—a real loss. If one takes a narrow, outcomes-based view, one can say, “Well, they’re still getting eight good GCSEs or whatever, so what does it matter?” My view is that that breadth really does matter. That expectation of a breadth of curriculum to age 14, with English and maths as well as sciences, humanities, arts, creative subjects and exercise, is there for a very good reason. We as Ofsted should be concerned and reporting on it if that is being lost.
Amanda Spielman: We have not yet changed our inspection framework, but our inspectors have of course been briefed on these reports. Probably about 15 years ago there was quite a widespread assumption that the curriculum was sorted out with the national curriculum and that inspection did not need to focus on it. It became a very small slice—one of 19 headings under leadership and management. Inspectors are now more aware of it and asking more questions, but the draft framework that we have just published has the rebalancing to bring this question of what is taught—the breadth and depth—back up to the right level, where we can properly look at it and which will link to the resource question. At the moment, the way people assume inspection can be framed means that we don’t see, for example, if a school that has offered a choice of three languages drops two of them. We don’t necessarily see if a choice of three performance subjects drops to one. The kinds of conversations we will be able to have are much more likely to pick that up and lead to us being able to report on losses.
Amanda Spielman: I have not seen any issues here that I can imagine being a detriment. The range of the performance measures that the Department has used over time and uses now are essentially designed to make sure that there is a broad and balanced curriculum through the period of compulsory education, and that there is a balance between making sure that the breadth of core curriculum is protected, but also leaving quite a lot of space for discretion and choice. We actually give children probably more choice than most countries. We have a very permissive education by default, at the level of the child, on the extent to which children get choices and the flexibility of pathways—in most places, people are channelled much more through the pathways they can take—and at the level of the school. We give more autonomy to schools to decide what they offer and what they don’t offer and how they do it. Having a handle on what choices are being made and how children are being influenced indirectly as well as directly is really important.
Amanda Spielman: It can, if it is done in the wrong way. If you are referring to the EBacc, expecting children to study a language to age 16 or to study history to age 16 as well as science and maths and your home language are things that are part of the standard expectation in pretty much every country in the world. Coming from the other end, for most people the idea that you should be able to opt out of a broad curriculum at the age of 14 is quite an odd one. I think the space we have within current performance measures for at least three subjects drawn from anywhere in the list of options gives a good balance of flexibility between the core and the optional area.
Amanda Spielman: I can only hypothesise on some of this. We know some of the influences here. It is a whole mixture of things. One is around children who, for whatever reason, genuinely struggle at school, notwithstanding the best efforts of the school. There are a few children who, for whatever reason, really struggle to cope in a school environment. We must always acknowledge that there are a small number of those. One is children who, for whatever reason, are excluded, which is never a desirable outcome but there are circumstances in which exclusion is the only course that a school can take and does so properly. But we have other reasons why children are dropping off school rolls, which I am very concerned about, one of which is where essentially the child is being indirectly sort of squeezed out through the back door—[Interruption.] Chair: Things are moving fast in Parliament. Sorry, we need to adjourn for a vote. Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming— Chair: Welcome back to the Public Accounts Committee on Wednesday 23 January. We were with Bridget Phillipson.
Amanda Spielman: Off-rolling is what is left when you have ruled out the legitimate reasons for a child to leave a school. We know there are cases where a school essentially says, “If you don’t want your child to go down the path to exclusion, sign this letter, which is you withdrawing the child on the basis that you’re going to home educate them.” In other cases, it may not even involve that. It is a child coming off a register for no good reason, where it is in the interests of the school that they should come off.
Amanda Spielman: We have very few powers. We can report and we can notify local authorities. We have analysed the pupil data we have at our disposal and published a blog on it. We identified 300 schools that looked possible. We risk assess, and this is a risk flag, but the timing of inspections and various other things mean we have inspected 16 so far. We reported one of those, where a significant number of children came off the roll on the same day for no good reason and the school could not even attempt to explain. We also reported another school, which was not on that original flag list; on inspection, because we have now started asking those kinds of questions, we surfaced and reported on the fact that there clearly was off-rolling happening at that school. That of itself sends a very clear signal that we are asking, looking and reporting, but it is then for the authority responsible for the school—the governing body and, behind it, the local authority if it is a community school; or the academy trust board and, behind that, the Department for Education through the RSCs—to act, not for Ofsted. We have no power beyond reporting.
Amanda Spielman: The analysis we did showed a skew towards schools with more disadvantaged intakes. I do not think we can conclude that this is an academy problem. There is evidence in various places. Our list of 300 included all kinds of schools. As it happens, of the two we have reported so far, one is an academy and the other is a community school.
Amanda Spielman: Given that we have only found two cases so far, it is simply too early for me to say. I do not want to speculate about places where we have seen a high level of movement but not yet had inspectors in asking the question. If I’m asked that question in a year or two’s time—
Amanda Spielman: It depends on how much we turn up. If we ask these questions diligently in inspections—
Amanda Spielman: We inspect about a quarter of secondary schools every year, so we will have a fair-sized sample by then.
Amanda Spielman: On off-rolling? Bridget Phillipson: On off-rolling in multi-academy trusts with the Department and the regional schools commissioners. Amanda Spielman: We are not treating off-rolling as an academy trust issue per se; we are treating it as a system issue. To the extent that any reason can clearly be defined, people typically attribute it to the pressures around reporting good numbers for the school, which is partly about the grades that the children who are in the school achieve and partly about the children you keep out of the calculation of the grades.
Amanda Spielman: We have communicated this to DFE, and I put it in my annual report to Parliament. We have made very clear that we see a problem in some quarters, and are pursuing it and reporting on it.
Amanda Spielman: It is a really interesting question about how best to reach parents. We do not have a direct line to parents, other than through the Parent View website that we operate and through our general complaints service. We try to make it possible for parents to feed back on schools in certain ways at any time—on our complaints site, for example, anybody can make a complaint about a school at any time—and the default expectation is that they will have exhausted local routes before they complain to us, but the reality is that we review everything that comes in through that mechanism. We have a waiver mechanism whereby for anything that looks serious, the regional director can waive the normal requirement to have gone through local routes and decide that we will look at the complaint. However, if we find that something looks fishy, we can, first, inspect, and secondly, report to the local authority or another responsible authority. Those are basically the only things that we can do.
Amanda Spielman: I don’t think it is driving it, but this is why in the new framework I want to make really clear that we want to be complementing the pressures that people perceive come from trying to achieve high reported data outcomes, to get a focus on integrity and make sure that we complement, not intensify, whatever pressure does come from the perceived need to achieve high results. I want to make sure that the schools that act properly and in the best interests of children know that that will be recognised and rewarded through inspection.
Amanda Spielman: Sorry, what kind of decision? Anne-Marie Trevelyan: I will give you an example: I have a wonderful young woman in one of my schools who has Down’s syndrome. She is never going to get great grades, but she is a fantastic part of the school; she has many skills in other areas, and she wants to stay on for A-level. The school is saying, “No, she needs to go to a special school.” She has never been in a special school. This child is part of the mainstream but will not achieve good grades in the traditional sense, and the school is saying, “We won’t keep her—we’ll find you somewhere else.” It has just deferred the responsibility to make a decision to the local council. Amanda Spielman: It is impossible for me to talk about an individual case— Anne-Marie Trevelyan: Absolutely, but it is a question of abdicating responsibility, having made a decision. It is absolutely on the grades question that the school is saying that it cannot support her. She has been in a mainstream school through all her education.
Amanda Spielman: The grades issue is very concerning—seeing children being weeded out halfway through A-level courses, for example—but from what you have said, I genuinely do not know enough about the situation. Up to age 16, the expectation is that a school should be able to provide for any child who walks through the door, apart from a tiny minority of children with very special needs. Post-16, the landscape fragments; not every post-16 provider, whether it is a school or a college, provides every kind of course suitable for every child. I do not believe that there is an obligation for an institution to provide courses for everybody at that point.
Amanda Spielman: I cannot say in this context— Chair: I think we are in danger of getting bogged down in one case. The general point that you have highlighted, Ms Spielman, is that sixth forms are competitive and there is a whole different landscape. Lots of children in a school are not allowed to continue to sixth form and some do not find anywhere. I should alert Committee members that we and Ms Spielman have been here for an hour, although obviously we have had votes, so we do need to step up the pace a bit. Ms Spielman, we know the general landscape, so if you keep your answers short and we keep our questions tight, hopefully we will not detain you too much longer.
Amanda Spielman: Sorry—the air conditioning behind me is quite noisy. Bridget Phillipson: I will speak up a bit. You have talked about stuck schools and the need to address the cycle of poor performance in that minority of schools. Is the work that the Department is doing and the initiatives it is bringing forward enough to resolve those difficulties? Amanda Spielman: It is impossible for me to say at the moment. I absolutely welcome the work that is being done in the opportunity areas. I think the co-ordination of many parts of Government is probably relevant here. What is interesting when we look at the stuck schools is that we have noticed more generally that in areas of high disadvantage, schools judged RI or inadequate are more likely to have a higher outcome for leadership and management than they do overall. That reflects the fact that their leadership is doing the best it can in difficult circumstances, and that is much more likely to be the case in stuck schools. We may often have leadership teams in schools who are genuinely doing everything they can that the education system currently knows how to do, but we may be dealing with wider social and economic problems. The reason I cannot say whether the Department for Education is doing the right things is that there may be things that the Department itself can never solve and that are about wider solutions. I think the opportunity areas are trying to bring in services. Something that perhaps we have not touched on sufficiently in what we have said so far is the importance of other services. Very clearly, one of the biggest pressures on schools at the moment is the disappearance or reduction of other kinds of support services outside the school, and the extent to which they feel that they are substituting.
Amanda Spielman: Non-statutory children’s services, for example, and mental health support services through CAMHS—those are the things that I hear most often.
Amanda Spielman: It is a slightly different thing. The support staff employed in the school do a range of things. There are some things for which schools have got into the habit of having and using support staff.
Amanda Spielman: It should also be a concern for us where things that may be medical needs are being dealt with without the right kind of clinical expertise. There are considerable dangers to non-experts finding themselves pushed towards diagnosis and therapy in schools without the expertise. Only last week there was an excellent piece, I think written by a CAMHS practitioner, in the Times Educational Supplement on the various ways in which excess demands get placed on CAMHS, partly by thresholds being set in the wrong place, too many people turning up for the service, and a lot of therapists’ time being spent explaining to teenagers that things that are making them feel depressed and sad are actually things that it is entirely rational for them to feel depressed or sad about. Something bad has happened in their life; they will feel better in due course, but they do not need clinical interventions. Similarly, some parents, this therapist reported, have become very adept at finding the words that will get their child up the queue. What we have at the moment is partly a shortfall, but also a misallocation of resources. How we get to having everybody in the system well enough co-ordinated that the heavy duty of resource goes to the children who really need it is one of the big challenges facing us all at the moment.
Amanda Spielman: I am not the Department, so I think that is a question you will have to save for when you have Jonathan Slater or—
Amanda Spielman: The Department for Education strategy is that Ofsted does the diagnosis and reports on education standards, and that support advice commissioning comes through the Department for Education. As things stand, notwithstanding that at various times in the past we have had a broader role, our role is simply what it is at the moment, and I have not been involved in the selection or decisions around these opportunity areas.
Amanda Spielman: That is a good point. I am informed that we do have someone as an observer on the opportunity area board, so you are pointing me at something that I can look to take an interest in.
Amanda Spielman: We should. Our ultimate goal is to see good things coming through and to be able to report on that. Chair: But it is still early days, I think.
I just want to be confident that we are understanding where the problems lie, and that there is some form of system that brings together the data that you hold and the data that others hold in order that the Department seeks to address the very problem that you have identified around those stuck schools. Amanda Spielman: I am afraid I simply have no insight into how the Department for Education compiles its prioritisation for this. Chair: Not good enough, I think, from our experience of the Department for Education. We do not expect you to comment on that. We have plenty that you can comment on.
It came as a real shock to the parents and the governing body that things could have shifted so significantly. What are you doing to try to make sure that we do not see such long periods of time for schools such as that, where all kinds of changes might happen and parents might not be fully aware of what is going on? Amanda Spielman: Absolutely. As you know, I have quite limited scope here, because an exemption from routine inspection was put into regulations back in 2010 or thereabouts, so I simply do not have the power to inspect outstanding schools as I do others. We include them in our risk assessment and we inspect where we have reason to have particular concerns. I have spoken about that publicly on a number of occasions, because I do not believe parents like it and I do not believe schools themselves like it very much. They perceive it as introducing unfairness among schools. This year we are increasing the number of outstanding schools we inspect; we are aiming to inspect up to the 10% maximum that we can. We are on track to do that. We have inspected and published reports on, I think, 72 so far this academic year. I should say that that is a risk-weighted sample—
Amanda Spielman: Yes, we would expect it to be high, but three quarters of schools have gone down in their judgment and about 30% of them have gone not just to “good”, but to “requires improvement”, so we see quite substantial movement when we can go in and inspect.
Amanda Spielman: Yes, it is partly on results and also partly on the age of the outstanding judgment.
Amanda Spielman: How many have gone that long? I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but that is about the longest, because schools that were just coming up for inspection when the exemption was put in would not have been inspected for about four years. So yes, we are on about 12 or 13 years for some schools.
Amanda Spielman: I believe it is a very unsatisfactory position and I am very uncomfortable about it but, as I say, I am constrained.
Amanda Spielman: I don’t believe we have any project that is specific to the north-east at the moment. I am trying to think about our research programme. It is something we can discuss with the team and consider whether there is something— Bridget Phillipson: Particularly the transition from primary to secondary. The vast majority of our primary schools— Amanda Spielman: No, I am aware of that apparent imbalance.
Amanda Spielman: Two things. First, there has been some fairly credible research done by people such as Professor Simon Burgess, which suggests that the London Challenge effect may actually have been substantially down to differences in populations and not really very much to do with education itself.
Amanda Spielman: Correspondingly, one thing that deserves more attention than perhaps it has had until now is the availability of staff. Secondary school is more dependent on specialist staff, and we know that the problems with teacher recruitment are very unevenly distributed around the country. There are potentially a number of areas that could be contributing that could be better understood.
Chair: You have a bid for your research budget, Ms Spielman—but no more money, I’m afraid. Amanda Spielman: My strategy and research director is sitting behind me. Chair: If you do that, you will have a fan in Ms Phillipson, at least while you are doing the research—it depends what the results are. Sir Geoffrey wanted to come in on a quick point.
Amanda Spielman: Just to be clear, we are not on a cycle at all. As the law stands, I cannot simply put outstanding schools into a cycle. My preference would be for outstanding schools to be inspected on the same cycles and for the risk adjustment to be factored in as we do for all schools.
Amanda Spielman: It comes down to making a lot of things balance. We have ups and downs in our workload for various reasons. For example, in FE and skills a number of mergers happened as part of the area reviews, and new URMs were issued; as a result, those institutions do not come up for three years. Various technical changes in the system give us a slightly bumpier work flow than you might imagine.
Amanda Spielman: We’re just coming up to a spending review, and I think we have a number of areas where the very long-standing desire of many Governments to reduce the amount that the system spends on assurance might bump up against the level of assurance that is needed in various areas. We are just at the beginnings of those discussions.
Amanda Spielman: To return to routines, we had a significant slice taken out of our budget to stop inspections of outstanding schools.
Amanda Spielman: Indeed.
Amanda Spielman: We can certainly do it through this year. This is the final year of our spending review settlement. Like most other parts of Government, we have no clear idea of what we will be working with in the years beyond.
Amanda Spielman: I’m not comfortable with it; I have said this quite clearly and publicly. There are a couple of reasons. First, inspection was originally contemplated when it was a stand-alone school and its governing body, and you could find out everything there was to know by just going along there. It is so different now. Chair: It’s obviously changed; we know it is a different landscape. Amanda Spielman: Multi-academy trust are not just administrative wrappers providing some financial, legal, monitoring and governance services; they are often completely vertically integrated organisations, where many of the education decisions on the curriculum, teaching and many of the things—
Amanda Spielman: In the first instance, we are pursuing an iteration of the batched model of inspection, which was the first attempt. I’m very sorry, I have forgotten the term for the iterated model that we are putting in. In the long term, I think it is absolutely essential that we ensure that accountability tracks the structures in which the world operates.
Amanda Spielman: For MATs, I want to understand the educational model that they operate, how they make it work and the extent to which that is controlled from the centre, so that I understand what decisions are going to be taken at the school.
Amanda Spielman: Not under our current proposals. There would be some MAT conversation, but no inspection of the MAT.
Amanda Spielman: I would like to have the power to inspect the MAT. There is an interesting parallel. Our closest analogue is the Netherlands inspectorate, which has just shifted to inspecting MATs entirely rather than inspecting at school level for schools in MATs. If the place that is responsible and accountable to Government is the multi-academy trust board, then without an assessment of the quality of work at that level it is very hard to say that there is a well-matched structure.
Amanda Spielman: I do find that very surprising. Coming back to something I said earlier, we have a system that is set up on a presumption of integrity—that we need to check people’s competence from time to time, but can fundamentally assume that they are doing things with the best of intentions and more or less responsibly. We are unfortunately seeing quite a few situations where that doesn’t apply. It has probably happened more than we have ever discussed in the local authority world. In some ways there are some good aspects to the academy regime: I think some of the bad stuff that happens surfaces rather faster than perhaps it did in the past. So I don’t take it as just saying these academy sponsors have done things they shouldn’t have.
Can I just be clear? You would like to investigate MATs as an inspectorate. Do you need more resource to do that? Amanda Spielman: I believe that if we had a strong model for inspecting MATs, just as any auditor of a branch operation involves some of the audit effort going to the centre and some on the branches, it would be possible to adjust the amount of work that is done at school level to make the overall burden no greater. And we could make sure there are better conversations, because it is quite hard trying to extract information from people who are removed from the place where the decisions actually get made. We could get better focus, better value for the public and better input for the trusts. Chair: Looking at governance in a multi-academy trust, a former governor at Whitehaven came and gave evidence to this Committee and said the governors had received very little information. They had a different name then—they weren’t really governors. The governors were at the centre of a nationwide MAT, so they were in Cornwall—I can’t remember all the areas, but in Cumbria they were getting partial information. It wasn’t really fit for purpose in relation to what was going on in the school. In your inspections, would you pick up that deficit in governance? Or, because it is an academy that is part of a multi-academy trust, is it that you can kind of give it a free pass under the current regime?
Amanda Spielman: We have to look to that trust board, which is part of the reason why simply looking at school level makes it hard to get a proper handle on governance.
Amanda Spielman: Yes, we couldn’t do that without a commission from the Department for Education.
Amanda Spielman: There are various kinds of work that we do without primary legislation, under commission from the Department for Education.
Amanda Spielman: I believe so.
Amanda Spielman: As also with our independent school work, for example, which we do under commission from the Department for Education.
Amanda Spielman: We have had something over 200 meetings with different stakeholders, including the unions and the heads’ associations—with a very wide range of stakeholders. With a number of them, including the unions and the heads’ associations and others, at the meeting we showed the draft handbooks and had some discussion. One of those meetings was with the Confederation of School Trusts, which is the umbrella body for the big MATs, so they were very much part of that wider stakeholder consultation.
Amanda Spielman: It did not give the context that it was exactly the same model that was applied for a number of the important stakeholders—
Amanda Spielman: As I said before, we don’t have the powers that we would like to have. We have the problems around the definition of a school, which are unquestionably being exploited in a number of quarters. Only last week, two of my very senior inspectors went to visit something that was previously a registered school and now is an unregistered establishment claiming to be offering only religious education, which I don’t think was the conclusion of the visit there. This is a real problem: people dance around the definition of what constitutes education; they dance around the hours. We also have our hands tied behind our back on what we can do once we get there. We are so constrained in what evidence we can take. Essentially, schools can walk the children out and they can lift up everything they have got in there and take it out and they can keep the records elsewhere.
Amanda Spielman: I believe that part of what we want is in the legislative pipeline, but there are still going to be some—
Amanda Spielman: Yes. Some of these places simply aren't safe. There are questions of physical safety. There are questions of academic quality. It is very unclear in many of these that there is a proper education, and there are questions around the protection from all kinds of child exploitation that we simply cannot be sure is there.
Amanda Spielman: Yes. It is a couple of months since I have got up to date on quite where things are.
Amanda Spielman: I don’t have any new information.
Amanda Spielman: Registered pupil referral units we inspect and are able to report on, but quite a lot of alternative provision is outside the definition of a school and does not require registration. They are the children typically with the greatest difficulties, who have struggled in mainstream education and who need the greatest expertise. I am very worried about children who go into unregistered provision in those circumstances.
Amanda Spielman: No, we don’t look at the terms on which people are hired.
Amanda Spielman: When we draw from a number of inspections some insight about problems, that is the kind of thing that generates an advice note about an emerging problem.
Amanda Spielman: I don’t have anything specific to say about hospital schools. They are a very specialised kind of provision for children who have significant complications. Chair: But you do inspect them. Amanda Spielman: We do inspect them. Chair: I know that, but I may take some of that offline with you separately, because I think we have some information that might be helpful.
Amanda Spielman: In every inspection, our inspectors have meetings with groups of pupils to talk to them about issues of concern to them. Every inspector has been a school leader in their time; it is a minimum requirement that they have five years of experience. Typically, there a meetings with a couple of smallish groups of pupils of different ages, to get a sense of the issues of concern to them, whether there is anything they feel under pressure about and whether there are things where they are uncomfortable with how they are handled. They are meetings at which things like bullying—the things that can go wrong and can make pupils unhappy or their lives difficult—can get to the surface. We try to make sure that that conversation surfaces anything that may be a source of pressure for that child.
Amanda Spielman: I am not involved in designing individual inspector conversations; I would have to write to you about that.
Amanda Spielman: No; this is a conversation with the inspector, and our inspectors are fully DBS checked. Chair: So the children could be on their own with an inspector without a familiar adult in the room. Amanda Spielman: I don’t believe a teacher is there, precisely because this is where children can express concerns about something that is going on in the school.
Amanda Spielman: That is why our inspectors— Chair: I know, but I just wanted to know the age range, that’s all. Amanda Spielman: Whatever the age range the school encompasses.
Amanda Spielman: I am trying to remember—when I have been in a primary school, I don’t recall children younger than six or seven. Chair: it would be very helpful if you could write to us with the detail, particularly to answer Ms Mahmood’s questions about the guidance you give to the line of questioning, or if there is no guidance, which would also be important to know.
Amanda Spielman: We spoke to a number of groups.
Amanda Spielman: No, not off the top of my head.
Amanda Spielman: I am happy to, but I have written back to many people who have written to me about this, so I can send you that letter as well.
Amanda Spielman: First, I have just been reminded that we have done a considerable amount of training with inspectors on faith issues more generally and how to approach sensitively. Shabana Mahmood: With respect, Ms Spielman, I am interested in the specifics that result from your comments. Chair: We did not actually warn Ms Spielman that we were going to ask for these specifics, but if you can write to us on that, that would be helpful.
Amanda Spielman: We spoke to a number of people. I cannot off the top of my head remember. We had several meetings about this that I attended myself. The concerns surfaced originally via schools about pressure emerging between different groups of parents. It was not about faith versus non-faith. It was about pressure—
Amanda Spielman: Yes, it is the expectation that all children, no matter what their faith background, should have a full education and a full childhood experience and grow up thoroughly prepared for life in modern Britain. When, for example, we hear from various quarters, as we do, about groups of parents wanting this and that taken out of the curriculum for girls, for example, you see cumulatively a significant risk of some children getting a dramatically narrowed experience. We have to be very careful about letting a well-meaning desire to be sensitive to parental preferences on any one issue to then accumulate into something that means that some children are getting substantially short-changed.
Amanda Spielman: I can think of at least three different examples in different faiths where there has been this kind of narrowing.
Amanda Spielman: I have been provided with some of that information privately, so I do not think I can disclose it. People have asked me to respect their confidence, but I know of a number of examples.
Chair: Can you give a generalised example? We are not asking for names and places. Amanda Spielman: Okay. With the three different cases I am talking about, the sensitive stuff is that parents have approached me to talk about pressure, essentially from religious community groups, for schools not to do things. I cannot name the schools where those parents have approached me.
Amanda Spielman: Haredi schools are a good example of where the girls’ experience has been shut down quite significantly. For example, following our inspection of Yesodey Hatorah, which is a fully funded state school, we reported a few months ago on the extremely limited education the girls were receiving. The books in the library were drastically redacted so they would not see many things that it would be absolutely normal for a teenager to see in a book available in a school in this country.
Amanda Spielman: I know that the hope in establishing that school was that it would contribute to broadening the education. What we saw when we inspected it did not make it clear that that hope had been fulfilled.
Amanda Spielman: A fairly small number. They mostly go to a seminary.
Amanda Spielman: Longer, yes. I am not sure, on the basis of what we saw, that we can say richer.
Amanda Spielman: I am sorry; where a parent has approached me in confidence to tell me about concerns, I simply cannot—I am thinking about two of these places— Shabana Mahmood: Without naming the school, the parent or the organisation— Chair: I hear what you are saying, Ms Spielman. Will you write to us? We reserve the right to write back to you to get more information, but we obviously do not want you to break a personal confidence. I did hope you might generalise, but if it is that specific that you feel you cannot, we hear what you say and we can pick it up elsewhere.
Amanda Spielman: We are not attempting to take anybody else’s authority. We have to apply the Equality Act, which sets a number of protected characteristics, of which religion is one but there are many others.
Amanda Spielman: I am sorry—may I answer, please? Shabana Mahmood: Of course. Amanda Spielman: What we see repeatedly, first of all, is the extension of religion to culture—people trying to expand a religious requirement or preference into a cultural requirement or preference. We see a creep around that, which can lead to the kind of shutting down we have talked about. We also see claims that the protection given to religion should get priority over all the other protected characteristics. For example, the arguments advanced by Haredi schools essentially say that religion should justify, in some respects, not having to have regard to all the other aspects of the Equality Act. We are saying that we are a public body to which the Equality Act and the public sector equality duty apply; we must, in inspecting, make sure that all those characteristics are given proper regard. We have to report where we see that the claims of one are being used to justify not having regard to others.
Amanda Spielman: The public sector equality duty does bind us. We have taken advice very carefully to make sure that our inspections cover exactly what they are absolutely required by law to inspect, and we have reviewed very carefully to make sure that there is no gold-plating whatever, and we are doing exactly what we are required to do.
Amanda Spielman: We do not say that. Every school in this country is entitled to set a uniform policy for its children. We do not say to any kind of child, by default, that you are entitled to look like your mum or your dad, come to that. It is perfectly possible that any kind of group of parents or any individual could say, “I always wear these kinds of clothes at home, so why can’t my six-year-old wear them?”
Amanda Spielman: My concern is that children at school should be free from the pressures that exist in many communities outside school. We know that some children are feeling pressurised to wear headscarves and that it can make children unhappy to be told that they are not good because they are not wearing a headscarf. This is something that is difficult and is, as you say, contested, but I don’t think that simply saying that children should be allowed to look like their mothers is the solution.
I want to go back to a point that you discussed with Ms Phillipson. You told us about the focus groups that you had. I think I am right in saying that in those focus groups and in other feedback you have not really had any parents raise issues about finances. We were a bit puzzled with that answer, because we can think of parents in our constituencies who have all raised issues about finances. How were those focus groups created? Was there an opportunity for parents to raise their concerns about school finances? Amanda Spielman: I only attended one of the focus groups myself, but my recollection is that the parents were given a great—the point of it was to explore what parents were really concerned about and wanted to know about their children’s schools, precisely to surface what it was that we could change.
Amanda Spielman: The one I attended must have been about a year ago. I honestly can’t remember the preamble, but it certainly wasn’t a shutting down. The whole point of the group was to open up and to get discussion and conversation, and to really get parents talking about what was a concern to them. A very large part of the group, as I remember, was allowing parents to range over absolutely anything that was of concern to them. I would be very surprised if we had all those focus groups and if there had been a substantial concern among those groups that hadn’t surfaced.
Amanda Spielman: I would be very happy to do that.
I wanted to go through a couple of quick points, so please could your answer be brief on these, and then I will ask Layla Moran to pick up. I am aware that you have been sitting in front of us for nearly two hours—apologies that the vote delayed us. Sir Geoffrey will be coming in briefly as well. In our last report about your work, we were very concerned that you hadn’t met your statutory reinspection target and it was misreported to Parliament. What assurances have you got that those controls that you introduced are now working and that you are meeting that statutory target? Amanda Spielman: It was a reporting control. The reasons why roughly two schools a year— Chair: We know the reasons why. I am asking where things are at now. Amanda Spielman: We used an external firm to do a review of our wider selection and scheduling, which has picked up a few things where there is room for improvement, but also gave us the reassurance that fundamentally it is well controlled. The particular wrinkle that was picked up was around some changes made to the annual report. We have no schools at the moment that are overdue on a statutory inspection, and as always we have a small handful of schools which are being inspected just beyond our framework targets. We give ourselves a tiny bit of flexibility—it is the fingers of one hand, in each region, and it is the schools which are subject to the main intervention.
Amanda Spielman: Indeed.
Amanda Spielman: I am. Chair:—that Parliament will be getting accurate information, and that problems have been smoothed out, and that if there is a problem you would know it and be able to explain it? Amanda Spielman: I would know it.
Amanda Spielman: It is not magic—
Amanda Spielman: We are planning to the envelope. Remember, an inspection is slightly bigger than the actual on-site piece, because it has got planning and writing up—
Amanda Spielman: I think we are working towards something which is a stronger conversation that has more value for the school. I think in terms of providing the assurance to Government and parents, it was fulfilling that function. I think what we are proposing is something that will have more value to the school as well, and be more welcome. It is essentially around making better use of inspector time. We have been able to replan and to think this model through to make the very best use of inspector time that we can, and to have that as one of the key planning drivers from the beginning. That is what is making it possible.
Amanda Spielman: It is phased. One of the most important things that came through from parents was their desire to have better questions to answer, so we are piloting sets of questions at the moment and we will expect to have those revisions in place for September when the new framework comes in. Then there are a series of pieces after that.
Amanda Spielman: It is not a brand new Parent View at that point, but the first piece of the change will be in place then.
Amanda Spielman: Around the inspector time in schools, it is by really looking at all the things inspectors spend their time on over the course of the year, and saying which things inspectors really need to do, and which things could be done better by back office teams. Some of that is coming by shifting responsibilities around. On HMI recruitment, the shortfall that was reported was driven off—the budget is constructed off planning assumptions, not the model that regional directors actually want to operate in terms of the mix between HMI and part-time OIs. We actually, in historical terms, are operating with rather a high proportion of HMIs. The planning assumptions reflected by predecessors are that every inspection should be led by an HMI, which historically has not been the case. We have relaxed that a bit, and regional directors can run the mix that they think is best. On the latest information I have, which is from, I think, Monday this week, seven of my eight regions say that they have all the HMIs they want. One says that it is below complement. Turnover has also dropped.
Amanda Spielman: We give our regional directors the budget and the flexibility to decide the staffing mix that they want for their work, so no, we don’t say, “You must have 14 HMIs.” We let them decide.
Amanda Spielman: My COO, who is a very experienced inspector himself, has a pretty thorough regular review programme with each of the regional directors about what they are doing and how they are doing. And we have quite a number of quality assurance checks of various kinds. I am pretty confident that, if corners were being cut or things were being stretched, those would pick it up very quickly.
Amanda Spielman: London, unsurprisingly, given that with Government pay scales it’s quite difficult to flex and London is the most expensive place to live. It is not easy for us, because 20 or 25 years ago HMI pay was set to be comparable to heads’ salaries and we are now well below that and obviously constrained from significantly increasing what we pay. But we do our very best to make it an interesting and attractive job. I am talking about the changes we have made over the last two years and the kinds of work we are building into HMI programmes. I am extremely pleased about the drop in turnover. For the year to December, we were down from a peak at the end of 2016 of just under 30% turnover; we are down to under 14%, so it has halved.
Amanda Spielman: Yes, but again, we have some flexibility between regions. This is not something that is a cause of enormous organisational anxiety. But we will be writing to you in April, as you requested.
Amanda Spielman: Off the top of my head, I don’t think we do. I have recently looked specifically at the analysis of social care, where we found the relationship to be weak, and I think you have received this morning a report from the NAO saying that there is relatively little relationship.
Amanda Spielman: That was on children’s services, but it is a finding across quite a lot of types of public service that the relationship between spend and quality is often weaker than people would expect. But the short answer is no, I don’t have anything looking at that.
When you are looking at the international comparison, are you using just those issues or do you actually have an in-depth look at what is going on in the other schools? You are very relaxed about the funding issues, if I may say so. Amanda Spielman: I am not relaxed, but equally I am being very careful about being pushed to a default position. It is very clear that we didn’t see that every year funding increases pushed results up, so I am being extremely cautious about going beyond what our evidence shows us. So far, in the context of the inspection framework we currently operate, it has not shown school standards declining.
Amanda Spielman: It may be partly because people have been extremely good at covering and filling gaps, which often works in the short term, not the long term. It may be because, as I have mentioned, the inspection frameworks of the last 15 years haven’t really looked at the breadth of what is on offer to see whether trade-offs are being made. I want us to be looking at that. So I cannot at the moment say why it is. I am not saying that there is nothing building up to come down the line. I am just saying that, on the evidence of the inspections that we have done to date and reported on, I cannot say that there is something that I can attribute to—
Amanda Spielman: The piece of research that we are going to be doing this year and we expect to report on towards the end of the year, on what choices the schools are making, will I think be extremely useful for a lot of people. I am looking forward to doing that. Chair: We will be interested in seeing that too.
Amanda Spielman: We summarise our findings. We highlight the particular areas. We probably used to put rather more on the county level than we now do, because, with academisation, so many more schools sit in structures that are not controlled by the local authority directly or indirectly that it feels important to attribute the responsibility for performance where the responsibility actually sits. I don’t want to be saying, “Gloucestershire is doing a terrible job.” Sorry—I’m not saying that I would say that, but I don’t want, hypothetically, to say that X county is doing a terrible job, when 85% of its schools are the responsibility of academy trusts and not of the levers that the local authority has. Increasingly, we need to be very careful about making local area generalisations about provision in any of the areas we inspect, unless it is clear that the local authority does have the predominant responsibility, and unless there are factors, such as for example the kind of work that was talked about in the north-east more generally, which might throw up things around clearly geographic factors.
Amanda Spielman: Indeed, but our fundamental obligation is to report at the level of the school. We used to do local authority-level inspections, which again were a Department for Education commission. They were discontinued a number of years ago—four or five years ago. I think that was one of the spending review savings that the Government found last time round, to discontinue those.
Amanda Spielman: I do inspect local authorities in the context of their children’s services. Also, we look at local area special needs and we are reporting on that. We are not terribly happy with what we are finding there, but we don’t inspect local authority education-related services. Chair: Thank you for that. Now, Layla Moran, who I know can be short and sharp. Layla Moran: I shall be. Chair: If you did not know already, Ms Moran was a teacher until she had the misfortune to get elected to Parliament. You two are the most expert people in the room in a sense, so you probably don’t need to go through the history and hinterland—we can assume it is known.
Amanda Spielman: That is perhaps the more interesting piece. The way the system comes together is not feeling that it is as much as the sum of its parts. We can see people working extremely hard in many quarters: we see incredibly conscientious people in schools, we see incredibly conscientious people in many kinds of support services, but we see too many places where the provision simply is not what it should be. What can be done? One of the answers that will always be put out is, are we funding specialist services sufficiently? The other thing, which to some extent is within my control and we absolutely pick up in the new framework, is around making sure schools really contemplate the provision they need for all children from the very beginning to minimise the kinds of accumulating problems that can come for children with special needs if the curriculum—what is taught and how it is taught—is not built to provide for that from the very beginning. A child who has not had the right education or attention from the beginning of primary school by the end of primary school cannot read very well, has developed behavioural problems or has lost their motivation. That is the child who becomes a more and more expensive consumer of every kind of service as they roll through. One of the big emphases in this framework is not SEND in the sense of box ticking and treating them as children apart who should not be contemplated, but the reverse—it is making sure that we think about all children from the very beginning and really plan and provide for them. That actually saves money, as in the context of social care. If you skimp on services for children in need—the pre-statutory interventions—problems accumulate and escalate and you end up spending more on the very expensive services for children in care.
Amanda Spielman: That is a very hard one for me to answer. Again, our inspections of local areas do not extend to scrutiny of the spending of the money. Layla Moran: Ah. Amanda Spielman: I think I am right in saying that. We will check, but I do not believe they do. I do not know why I am having a moment of doubt on that. Layla Moran: That’s fine—you can write to us.
Amanda Spielman: I will tell you in writing, but broadly, throughout the system, we have always assumed that looking at education quality is distinct from monitoring spending. This real interest in whether spending is actually achieving the intended results is relatively recent. Historically, financial monitoring has been a bit more about probity and accuracy, and a bit less about whether it is really value for what is being spent.
Amanda Spielman: It is very clear that the money flows very intensively, but the wider range of needs is absolutely recognised in schools, and schools put an immense amount of effort into providing. My concern is to make sure that everything about how we look at schools and how schools think about the curriculum encourages them to do that in ways that minimise the scale of the challenge. There is—
Amanda Spielman: So much of the resource is going on plans. In the current structure, an EHCP is the golden ticket, so there is a great deal of focus among parents to do anything to get a plan. That must, to some extent, mean attention is pulled away from those who fall just outside. That is one of the difficulties with having a very hard cut-off line—a plan or not a plan. But the schools I visit put an immense amount of effort into their work with all children, not just those with special needs. I see a very conscientious effort. What is not always clear—this is where the work of people like EEF and the evidence base are immensely valuable—is that that work is really well directed.
Amanda Spielman: Yes, and I think the range of outcomes in our local area SEND inspections highlights that. We have found some very good ones; we’ve also found a lot of very disappointing ones, where we have had to require a written statement of action.
Amanda Spielman: It is, which is why it was one of the main strands in our annual report this year. It was an area of serious concern.
Amanda Spielman: Our annual report is one of those strands, and it is widely read. We publish research, blogs and the annual report. We attempt to disseminate what we do as well as possible. We meet the various local government representative organisations regularly. Through the ILACS inspections, a lot of my inspectors are out regularly meeting DCSs and local authority staff. We have quite a lot of contact.
Amanda Spielman: I would not like to see it described as piecemeal; it is quite carefully layered to ensure that messages get out. If you give people blockbusters, it knocks them over and they tend not to take very much from it. Our experience suggests that a drip feed of smallish pieces of work, from which two or three important points can be absorbed and followed through on, is generally more helpful in influencing a system than a one-off, 500-page tome.
Amanda Spielman: The biggest message at the moment, first, is is that it is not all bad. We completed a full cycle of the SIF, which came in the wake of some of the really bad things that have happened in a lot of local authority areas. We were inspecting in the context of the whole world having greatly heightened awareness of the various ways children can be exploited. Some of the very bad things that were happening were going undiscussed, often for reasons of misplaced— Chair: Not that that is not important, but we are pushed for time. Amanda Spielman: The baseline that came out of that was pretty depressing, frankly, and quite discouraging. There have been quite a number of SIF re-inspections and a significant number of inspections over the first year of the new ILACS. It is not all movement in the right direction, but we have seen quite a few local authorities improve. We think self-awareness has substantially improved. Conversely, we have had a few go the other way, but we have significantly more improving than we have reducing. We have serious concerns about the impact of money in children’s services; it is a far greater squeeze than on schools. Understandably—it is a rational response in the short-term for local authorities to prioritise statutory services—we have very much seen what I think you have reported: more of the reduced budget is going on the statutory services. No local authority wants to find itself at the wrong end of the kinds of challenge that would undoubtedly multiply should they fail to deliver the statutory services, but it is potentially storing up problems for the future. Chair: I think the NAO Report lays it out very starkly.
Chair: A happy fantasy. Layla Moran: A happy fantasy. I want to understand whether there is a gradation—or do we not have that level of picture yet? Amanda Spielman: I don’t have that level of picture—from the evidence that I know of and have thought about—to be able to say which one. I’m so sorry.
Amanda Spielman: I am afraid that is going beyond anything that I feel that I have got the basis to say.
Amanda Spielman: No, we don’t have anything lined up at the moment. Layla Moran: We are going to move on to higher education. Amanda Spielman: Higher education? Chair: Further education. Amanda Spielman: I was going to say!
Amanda Spielman: We see huge challenges in FE—for example, in dealing with reduced budgets. We see recruitment challenges, and we see FE colleges that are unable to pay their staff at anything like the same levels as schools in the same area. When they are teaching different things, it is less of an issue, but when FE colleges need large groups of English and maths teachers, for example, then they really feel it, as anybody good that they get can be hired away by a school very easily. Unlike schools, FE college budgets are back, in real terms, where they were around 1990. The demands on colleges have not reduced. They are expected to provide an immense breadth of education, requiring various kinds of specialist facilities. Also, they probably have to be even more inclusive and cope with various kinds of complex needs, possibly to a greater extent than in the past, for children who might not have continued in education past 16. I think they have the toughest job at the moment of any part of the education system.
Amanda Spielman: This is an area where I genuinely think that it is hard to see how they can deliver what we expect of post-16 without an increase in the base funding rate.
Amanda Spielman: Then I would expect to see continued efforts to either slant FE provision towards the things that can be provided most cheaply, or that would attract most learners in, but that then would not necessarily match people properly with a sensible set of paths that fit with the local labour market and what actually provides real long-term life prospects. I would expect to see some clearer decline in quality of teaching. The inspections revealed the profile that we have in our FE outcomes last year, but because of the mergers I have talked about, I don’t think we can take the profile of inspection outcomes from last year as definitive statements. The area reviews have made the profile quite lumpy, and it is an area about which I am significantly concerned. Chair: The National Audit Office and the Committee have done some serious work on the sustainability of FE funding. It sounds like we are on much the same page on this.
Amanda Spielman: When you say the potential dilution— Layla Moran: We have seen a decline in the general quality of apprenticeships, which is obviously partly linked to FE providers being able to achieve that. What can you do to reverse that, other than what you have just said? Amanda Spielman: I am doing everything that I can to make sure that we look at the quality of all the new apprenticeships that are offered under the new arrangements. It was my initiative to start doing monitoring visits ahead of the first scheduled inspection. Happily, the DFE has now agreed to fund this for the next year, to continue that programme. We have said that we will visit in the first two years, but in fact that is heavily risk-adjusted, because some apprenticeships are being provided by established colleges that we inspect regularly, and we have every reason to assume, by default, that things will be well controlled. Conversely, we have many new people—in paper-based start-ups—and we are aiming to visit those people early and look at them thoroughly.
Amanda Spielman: We have added into our risk assessment criteria something relating to the size. I think we have explicitly drawn attention to commercial providers in our deferral policy.
Amanda Spielman: They couldn’t before. The inspection was deferred when we were told by the DFE that the sale to a third party was under way. They were not deferred when they proposed an internal re-organisation.
Amanda Spielman: I would hope not, but one of the important pieces of that is the sharing of risk information around the system. That is something that quite a lot has been going on—
Amanda Spielman: Indeed. The size is one aspect of that. One piece is about the absolute quality, and another is about substantial movements. In periods when there are huge fluctuations in a lot of providers, it is harder to spot the things that are genuine quality. I am very much hoping that the monitoring inspections will help to make sure that some of the potential sources of noise in the system get eliminated promptly. Risk assessment is hardest in a system with vast numbers of moving parts, but we take risk assessment and information sharing extremely seriously. I am endeavouring to make sure that we have good information from the rest of Government when there is any reason for concern about the integrity of any provider. Chair: When you appeared before us regarding Learndirect, we were horrified to learn about all those legal actions—you were sued for reports, and they tried to put injunctions on them. We were pleased to see that you won the Court of Appeal case against Durand Academy—I’ll wait for the legal letter naming them to arrive—on 21 December. Amanda Spielman: It was published on 21 December—the Friday before Christmas. It was a lovely Christmas present.
Amanda Spielman: We have to do that in many places: with apprenticeship providers, nurseries, and children’s homes. There are many areas of provision where people are increasingly challenging judgments. Yes, for a business where the source of income is the contract that will go if Ofsted issues a non-favourable report, it is understandable and sometimes frustrating when it is very clear in the case that people will throw everything that they can at trying to prevent that from sticking. I recently looked at the children’s homes statistics, because we are seeing increasing numbers of cases going to tribunal. That ties up our inspectors for sometimes very protracted periods—it can be weeks—in relation to something that was only a four-day inspection. One inspection at the beginning can end up taking weeks of court time. I think we win 96% of those cases.
Amanda Spielman: Overwhelmingly, it seems to me that it is the obvious reason. That does not mean that we can never make a mistake, but we have heavy-duty quality assurance processes built in before we ever publish a report, precisely to minimise unnecessary challenges in courts.
Amanda Spielman: We would have to write to you. Chair: If you could write to us—it is probably buried somewhere in the depths of the annual report.
Amanda Spielman: The number of cases that we have to deal with is going up quite substantially. I know that we have to do more enforcement work in the children’s home area—off the top of my head, that has gone up quite significantly.
Amanda Spielman: We have been doing some work on estimating the cost of inspectors’ time.
Amanda Spielman: Indeed, and there is so little downside to take out that kind of action.
Amanda Spielman: That was in the Court of Appeal; yes, they did. Chair: That’s satisfying. Layla Moran: As a final point, I would also be really interested in that data over time, if you have it—so not just where, but over time. Chair: Thank you very much indeed. I appreciate you having sat here for such a long time—we did not intend for it to be so long. We lose our rhythm slightly when the votes happen; that is democracy in action. Thank you for coming and for your very candid letter—we were pleased to receive it after our hearing. We are pleased with some of the things that you have said and that you seem to be keen on some of the things that we have said. In some ways, Ms Spielman, we are pointing in the same direction. We will disagree with you on others, and we will continue to challenge you. That is our job and your role. |