Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I am moving Amendment 76, which was tabled in the name of my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, at his request. The amendment would delete Clause 39, which we have just been debating in respect of the government amendments. As we have heard, the clause amends the current requirement under Section 5 of the Education Act 2005 for the chief inspector to inspect and report on every school. The clause provides for certain schools to be exempt from such inspections in future, as we have heard, subject to necessary regulations being approved by Parliament. I recognise that exempt schools may still be subject to inspections as part of the chief inspector’s surveys of general subjects and thematic reviews, but I remain concerned, as does my noble friend Lord Hunt, that this still leaves a potential gap in the inspection regime.

According to the Government, the aim is to introduce greater proportionality to the inspection system for schools and, in particular, to reduce the inspections for outstanding schools. The concerns about this are for two principal reasons. First, the open-ended nature of the clause would allow the Secretary of State to exempt other categories of schools, such as academies or free schools. We all know that Ministers have either been in a state of denial or embarrassed when academies have not done well in their Ofsted inspections. No doubt we will see the same phenomenon with free schools. Will the Minister confirm that the Government have no intention of seeking to exempt academies and free schools en bloc from regular inspections in future?

My second objection is to the principle of exempting outstanding schools per se. This flies in the face of the Government's approach to regulation in other sectors and the evidence is that not all outstanding schools will remain so. Indeed, of the 1,155 schools that have been judged outstanding by Ofsted, on subsequent inspection over 30 per cent had a reduced grading, including 58 that went from the top grade of outstanding to the third grade of satisfactory. Given that, I find it difficult to understand why outstanding schools should be exempted. Perhaps it is because the Government do not want to fund Ofsted to do these extra inspections properly and this is simply a way in which to reduce the cost. If that is the case, I would be delighted if the Minister was frank enough with your Lordships to say so.

The Government apparently believe that risks can be reduced, because Ofsted will develop a risk assessment approach, including a basket of indicators that flag up concerns. We have heard described very well by my noble friend Lady Morgan the risk-based approach being undertaken by Ofsted but, because the data that will inform that approach are likely to be gathered a number of years after a school inspection, there is a real risk of a school deteriorating and students suffering for some time before any intervention on that basis is triggered. For example, I would be concerned about the impact of a free school being established in an area where an outstanding school has a catchment area, attracting children who would otherwise enrol into that school, however outstanding it may be, and causing a sudden deterioration just because of a loss of funds.

There are all sorts of scenarios that are not just around a change of leadership. I remind the Minister of the debate that we had on Monday around admissions, when I put it to him that the fundamentals to which the Government have to have regard in a free market-based system of school improvement such as that which they are adopting are fair funding, fair admissions and inspection as a form of accountability. He replied:

“These are the three principles that we need to uphold”.—[Official Report, 24/10/11; col. 642.]

So he agrees—and yet, as with admissions, he is watering down inspections in the context of moving to a more market-based schools system.

I am grateful to the Government for reflecting on the debate in Committee. As we have heard from the Minister, the Government are now proposing that any move to exempt a category of school will be subject to the affirmative procedure. That is welcome, but, of course, this House only very rarely rejects such legislation. This really is our only chance to decide whether or not we are happy with some schools being exempted from inspection, potentially for ever.

I have also noted the intention to trial the new approach in schools where a new head teacher has been appointed, and the Minister has made it clear that Ofsted will adjust the risk-assessment process so that at least 5 per cent of outstanding schools will be inspected each year. As far as it goes, this is welcome too, but it does not go far enough.

I would contrast, as has my noble friend Lady Hughes of Stretford, what the Minister is currently proposing in education with what is happening in other sectors. Let me refer him to the NHS, as she has done. This summer, the health regulator CQC announced it was replacing its light-touch style with an annual inspection of each NHS and independent sector provider. As the CQC says:

“When people’s lives and well-being are at stake, the public don’t want to hear about light-touch regulation.”

That philosophy should surely apply as much to education and the teaching of our children—to the life chances of children—as it does, perhaps, to our death chances in the NHS. What is so different about children that we do not want to regulate and inspect their education? Indeed, let us look at this in a commercial context. Would a big retailer such as Marks & Spencer not quality-assure its best stores as much as its underperforming stores? I put it to your Lordships that Marks & Spencer would quality-assure every retail outlet that it has.

I find it extraordinary that Mr Gove, the Secretary of State, is seeking to exempt outstanding schools when he was recently so critical of the methodology used by Ofsted to rate outstanding schools. Only five weeks ago, at the National College for School Leadership, he voiced this concern. Yet now his Minister in your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, is seeking to exempt the very same schools from regular inspections. The public and parents surely have a right to know whether standards are being maintained or not. If the inspection system is to retain its credibility, regular inspections are essential for all schools.

Finally, I would simply say to the Minister, who I am afraid was floundering around about why he needs to proceed with this exemption—he has had to compromise and come up with all the whys and wherefores in making this all right—would it not just be easier to drop this and give way to common sense and have all schools inspected? I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I shall start with what I think is going to be my only line of agreement with the Government on this. To take the attitude that intervention in schools should reflect the risk of schools doing badly, and to say that we should intervene less when schools are successful, is absolutely right. As my noble friend has just said, that is a principle that was followed by the previous Labour Government, so I am with the Minister on that. We should not be constantly going in to excellent schools and getting in the way of them doing an excellent job; that is an absolute principle.

The second absolute principle is that inspection should be universal for all our schools. Does the Minister really think that one visit every five years is going to be a big burden on outstanding schools? One visit by Ofsted inspectors every five years; that is what happens at the moment, that is what the data say.

The reason for drafting this clause perplexes me. I am trying to think what motivates it because, to be honest, I never thought that the Tories would go soft on inspection, and that is what they have done with this clause. They fought hard to put Ofsted in the legislation, they fought hard to put it into schools, they have argued the case with head teachers and teachers, almost all of whom were opposed to inspection when it first started, and the Labour Government did the same. The political parties have been on the same side on this; we have thought that inspection was a necessary part of raising standards. So I am absolutely perplexed why the Tories, of all parties, should go back on this now. This is a principle, and you would have to come forward with some absolutely outstanding reasons why this principle should be broken. That principle is that in a devolved system, more than ever, every school should be inspected. Every parent has the right to know that the school which their child attends should be inspected. Every child should have a right to be reassured that the school which they attend should be inspected. That is an inalienable right and should be a fundamental structure of our school system.

The second question is: is doing that once every five years a terrible burden on schools? I do not think it is. To some extent, that is where the argument finishes. If you believe that those rights should not be given to parents and teachers, vote against this amendment. If you really believe that one inspection every five years is a terrible burden—do not forget that some children will have gone almost right the way through a secondary school in that time while there has never been an inspection, as they will have started in year 7 and might leave in year 11—then vote against this amendment.

I am going to be really helpful to the Minister here. I am going to warn him not to get into a position that I know I got into when I was a Minister. It is a great ministerial habit when you come up with an idea. Listening to the debate, I have to say that when the Minister responded to my friend Lady Hughes on the previous amendment it was the most troubled that I have heard him in the whole consideration of this Bill. I did not believe that he had convinced himself, let alone the House. What is happening now is that the Government have a policy but they are, in honesty, persuaded by the arguments against it. Rather than withdrawing that policy, they are seeking to put plaster in the holes and rearranging the bricks: “Well, let’s have greater risk assessment. Let's talk to the heads when they are new. Let’s do this, that or the other”. I can tell your Lordships that that is how the camel was invented, rather than the horse.

I remember when we ourselves got into exactly that position. You do not want to backtrack, because this is politics, so you start trying to plaster up the cracks. But what you end up with is so disastrous that in two years’ time you are asking, “Why weren’t we just brave enough to say that we got that wrong”?. I say to the Minister that he is at that point now. He should take a deep breath and protect himself from having to come to your Lordships’ House in two years’ time to answer many questions and queries about an inspection system that clearly will not work.

I have two more points to make. I really worry that the Minister may have constructed a terrible bureaucratic tangle in order to get out of the political difficulty that he is in. He will now have an army of Ofsted inspectors doing more risk assessments. They will have to weigh and measure the schools and collect the data. Now they will have to go and talk to every new head when he or she is appointed to a school—perhaps the Minister could tell us how many interviews that is going to be in a year—just to check their plans for that school. The Government would not have to do that if they backed this amendment. From the schools’ point of view, we are meant to be freeing them from this terrible burden of one inspection every five years, but what is the Minister putting in its place? He is making them provide more data. He has the local authority checking on them, so that it can refer back to Ofsted. He has the new heads having to talk to Ofsted and he has a third of them having to be inspected every five years. They will not know where they stand. I can assure the Minister that it would be easier for them and less of a burden if he would just say, “Once every five years, and that’s it”.

My last point is this, and to some extent it is the most important point for me. From the point of view of the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that they measure the standards of every single school in this country by the performance of the best. That is absolutely central to effective Ofsted inspection. If you say to your average Ofsted inspector—not the ones doing the one-off thematic reviews—who spends their time going into schools, “Thou shalt not be seeing any outstanding schools”, how do they know what outstanding looks like? When they go to the satisfactory school, it might be the best that they have seen for six months and they might think that that is outstanding. To help the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that, as part of their job, they see outstanding schools as part of their regular inspections.

To be helpful to the Minister, I think I know why he, or his colleagues—I am sure that it was his colleagues and not him—came up with this terrible idea: it is this idea of having a long list of freedoms which you can grant to schools to prove that the policy of granting freedoms to schools works. We saw it in the debate on admissions on Monday and we have seen it today. These are wrong freedoms, because they are freedoms that answer the political drive of the Government and they stand in the way of raising standards. This is the moment when the decision is made: go on and the camel will have several extra humps in two years’ time, I promise the Minister that. I passionately support this amendment, more than anything else in the Bill, and hope that noble Lords, having listened to this debate will vote to preserve universal inspection. I praise the Tories for bringing it in in 1988; I think it would be terrible if they voted to get rid of it now.

[Lord Quirk]

While the Minister is taking the deep breath that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has urged upon him, may I give him an extra couple of minutes of breathing time by saying what a difficult job he is going to have in offsetting the arguments presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight? Surely it is the outstanding schools that need to be inspected in order to have reports coming out showing what can be done in state sector, mainstream schools. Once every five years is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, nothing compared to the extra bureaucracy which we are threatened with in some kind of compensation for this. I hope that the Minister will bow to the wisdom that has been cast before him this afternoon.