Education (Exemption from School and Further Education Institutions Inspections) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2020

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, the arguments for and against this regulation are finely balanced—more finely balanced than some of my colleagues have suggested. When I was Minister for Schools, our principle of action was intervention in inverse proportion to success. There are so many problems that we have to confront in the education system and there is such a big problem still in the English education system of the long tail of chronic underperformance that the arguments for investing finite resources—and good inspectors are a finite resource—on schools that are clearly successful does not seem to be worth while on a cost-benefit basis.

Having said that, when I was Minister we inspected all schools and I can hardly complain that the present Government moved to a system where they exempted a whole category of schools from inspection. I supported that move at the time, as it was the direction of travel in which we were moving. It is not the case that you do just one or the other. You can tell pretty well from data what is happening to school in terms of standards. It sounds as if this decision is now firmly taken, but these things are constantly under review, particularly in this crisis.

However, I would have preferred it if we did not move to a wholesale system of devoting Ofsted resources to clearly successful and outstanding schools and did so only either when the data gave cause for concern or, crucially, where there are parental complaints. Parental complaints are always a good guide to when there are issues in a school that need external intervention. I simply say that to the Minister to bear in mind in the next iteration which will come with these regulations.

However, my bigger concern is that all this is beside the point at the moment. We are in the middle of a crisis, where no inspections are taking place, as the noble Baroness said. It is not the case that the school system will get back to normal, as we had all hoped, in a month or two; it now looks like it may not get back to normal for another year. Meanwhile, inspections closed down entirely in that period.

The issues at stake are significant and urgent. I will make some suggestions to the Minister. It is always important to understand what went wrong in the past and what we can get right in the future. In my view, a fundamental mistake was made in March and April in closing the school system down. Legally, all state schools were closed in March. That was a fundamental mistake. I am not just saying that in hindsight; I said it at the time. It might have been the case that some schools could not operate physically—although, as it happens, I think it was a mistake to close all schools physically in March and April—but there should have been the expectation that schooling would continue as near to normal online. That did not happen in the beginning.

The Government have corrected that now with the continuous learning provisions, which mean that where schools cannot continue physically there will be online learning, but at the moment Ofsted is playing virtually no part in this process at all. My concluding suggestion to the Minister is that Ofsted should play a part in this. It is producing some guidance, and I understand from reading the new regulations that have been issued that it is monitoring the performance of schools in online learning. However, I do not think that this is enough if we are to be in this situation for many months. I will make three specific suggestions to the Minister about what Ofsted should be doing over the coming months while we are still in the Covid-19 crisis.

First, Ofsted should be not just giving advice, but grading all schools by the quality of their online learning, a good deal of the assessment of which can, by definition, be done without needing to visit the school, although I think some visits to schools would be perfectly appropriate in this instance. Secondly, it should be highlighting best practice for the provision of online learning away from school, including best practice in use and provision of IT, and the provision of wi-fi where that is not available. Thirdly, it should be not only highlighting best practice, but naming the best schools in the country in provision of education during the coronavirus pandemic so that other schools can imitate them. In my experience of education, imitating the best is the best way of levelling up.