Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Morgan of Huyton Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

Long, long ago, when I first became one of Her Majesty’s inspectors, my lovely mentor used to say to me, “We always look for the growth points”. In the least successful school, there are always such growth points. Ofsted, sadly, has turned far more into a body that looks for the negative points—the things that are not going well—and for reasons to fail a school, rather than a body that encourages, develops, helps, listens and all the things that my noble friend has suggested.

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

I have a certain sympathy with this amendment, although there are question marks about how it is phrased. I have most sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, has just described. We have got into a muddle with the role of Ofsted, of SIPs, of the YPLA—or before that, of the department—and where support starts and ends and inspection starts and ends. Rather too many people are going into schools, particularly schools in trouble, without being clear about who is doing what.

I totally agree that Ofsted—or any inspection regime, in a sense—must have a lot more focus and not inspect the myriad things that it is inspecting at the moment. My personal experience is that you end up getting into a panic about whether the files are in order rather than rigorously checking and really improving education in the school. That cannot be right and has to be looked at.

However, we have to be clear that Ofsted, or whatever inspection regime there is in the future, must be accountable to the community and to parents in particular. I therefore differ from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in that I would not want to go back to the somewhat gooey regime in which data did not really matter. Data really matter. Without them, there is a real danger of groups of children in a school being missed and not progressed properly. By all means, let us add real intelligence to schools and give them real support, but let us not go back to the days when whole sections of kids could be left behind because we did not notice that they were not progressing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

I am sorry to intervene but I do not think that is right. What the noble Lord is talking about is what can be claimed to be the obsessions about narrow forms of data that dominate a lot of inspections at the moment and therefore dominate a lot of headlines. However, the intelligent use of data in terms of tracking individual pupils is something an inspector needs in addition to all the qualitative work that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, talked about. When schools are only just starting to get there on using data in an intelligent way, it would be a retrograde step to chuck that out and return to the rather blunter instruments of the public lists which do not do the more sophisticated work that I am talking about.

[Lord Lucas]

Yes, my Lords, I agree that, used internally, those sorts of data are wonderful. I recall how, 15 years ago, Greenhead College in Huddersfield was one of the pioneers of such data, and it made a great difference. Even the English department was enthusiastic about it because it helped the staff to be better teachers. In a dumb world, data are great, but you do not need to inspect on them. If you do, you turn something that is a helpful internal tool into a weapon of oppression. It is a matter of getting the balance between being inspected on enough data that happen to be produced by the system and not pressurising teachers into recording every single aspect of every single child at great length and in close detail. The amount of time people are spending on this means that it is not productive. The inspectorate should not be interested in data at that level except when diagnosing a school that is clearly going wrong.

I am concerned about my noble friend’s relaxed attitude to inspection, particularly of the free schools that will be coming through under this Bill. These creatures are going to need to be looked at very carefully. As I said earlier, the New Schools Network is clear about the need for inspection, and I am clear that if you are starting up a new enterprise and you want to be proud of it rather than be landed with nasty cases where things have gone wrong and you should have known about it, you need a good system of what I call inspection but my noble friend Lady Perry would call a relationship between inspectors and schools. You need something that allows someone in authority outside the school to say, “Hang on. Something is going wrong and we need to get in and help”. If you wait for data that appear late because you need a year or two’s data before you can see the trends, a newly formed free school could be heading for trouble. So I hope that over the next year or so I will be able to convince my noble friend that going back in time and picking out the virtues of the system of which my noble friend Lady Perry was such an eminent part will be a good model to pursue. Not only can we do that, but we can save the Government a great deal of money while getting there. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.