Education Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I wanted to speak to this group of amendments but not because I oppose any of them. In many ways, I can see the benefits in appropriate circumstances of parish councils being represented. Indeed, when I was the mayor of Frome, which was technically a parish council, we had nominations as a minor local authority on to governing bodies locally, so there is some precedent for it. I am certainly a strong advocate of the student voice in schools and see the benefit of students on governing bodies and similarly of staff local authority representation.

I wanted to take a couple of minutes to put it to the Committee, and particularly to the Minister for him to think about it, that we need to have a wider deeper debate about school governance. It is currently confused. I started a review of school governance that never quite concluded. Indeed, it was more difficult to get some agreement about the future of school governance than it was to get all the faith groups to agree about statutory sex and relationship education in our schools, so I do not underestimate the difficulty.

I certainly do not think that anyone in this Committee or elsewhere would want to give the message that the wonderful job that school governors do is being undervalued, when they are the largest group of volunteers working in our society. However, when people are essentially there as representatives rather than for the skills that they bring to challenge the school leadership, as you would when looking at the governance of organisations in other sectors, you have confusion between what an advisory body is, which is made up of representatives and stakeholders such as staff, students, parents and perhaps local authorities, and what a board of governance is, which is there to recruit and to really challenge the leadership of the school. I am afraid I do not believe that with 23,000-odd schools in this country, we have 23,000 excellent governing bodies that are properly challenging head teachers.

Indeed, most head teachers who I talk to tell me that their governing body is frankly a bit of an irritation. It is something that they have to work out how to manage, rather than something that properly supports and challenges them as leaders. That tells me that we clearly have a problem. The discussion, particularly by my noble friends Lord Touhig and Lady Howarth, on whether heads should serve on governing bodies is in turn a demonstration of that confusion, because points were rightly made about a conflict of interest and it probably being inappropriate for a chief executive to be a full member of the board if we were to use the suggested model from the third sector. The Government would be well served by looking at whether we can move to shared, more professionalised governing bodies, particularly as we see the emergence of clusters of schools, and proper councils or advisory bodies for each school.

That would be a significant and brave reform. However, academy sponsors tell me—I spoke to a leading one yesterday—that they strongly believe that the most important thing we did when introducing academies was to strengthen governance. It was not about autonomy as such, or about the freedom to pay teachers what they liked or about freedom in the curriculum being really important; it was about strong governance, and about getting sponsors in who appointed really good people for their skills in challenging heads and school leaders. It was about leaner, or smaller, numbers of governors, who could then gel as a group, much as the trustees of a charity or board of a private company might do. It is something that we urgently need to look at if we are to make the progress that the Minister and his colleagues in the ministerial team want to make in making every school a good school—and, in particular, in making sure that we attend to the biggest problem that we have with schools in this country. That is not how we fix failing schools and make them successful again—we have worked out how to do that. Our problem is how we stop average schools becoming failing schools. In the end, we do that by strengthening our governance arrangements.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I very much welcome the contribution of my noble friend Lord Knight, as he attempted to widen the debate. I was going to widen it but not quite as widely as he did, but I wanted to make the case for diversity on governing bodies. Although I support the amendments tabled in all noble Lords’ names, including those tabled by the Government, they go only so far. We very much welcome the fact that the Government have listened to the case made by colleagues of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, as she said, for there to be staff and local authority representatives on governing bodies. We made that case as well, and I am glad that it has been taken on board in part. However, the effect will be that a single local authority representative could be on each maintained school governing body, while at the moment there could be up to five local authority representatives on a typical community secondary school governing body.

In my experience, when I was chair of the governors of a secondary school for many years, the local authorities in my area used the opportunity to have a spread of places in order to bring diversity of community representation and people with different skills to the governing body. Governing bodies work best—and here I half-meet my noble friend—when there are strong, diverse voices from the community. What worries me about the legislation now is that it almost seems to want to curtail the spread of knowledge and skills. That might be something that the Minister can respond to, although I may have got that wrong. Diversity is very important.

The governors whom we have make up one of the largest volunteer forces in the country. We should be upskilling them, valuing them and making sure that they can make a greater contribution. Of course, if my noble friend Lord Griffiths was here he would say that we also need to take account of the fact that the ongoing work of being a governor is increasingly arduous and time-consuming, so we need to make sure that we have the support networks and the training to support it. It is a particular challenge for parent-governors who, with all their other responsibilities, as I know from my own experience, find being a governor particularly time-consuming and challenging.

I am anxious about what is to happen when the current governors, who are providing that spread of expertise, are told that they are going to be stood down. There seems to be a lack of a transitional plan. That might mean that it will be more difficult to recruit governors in future if the signal that is going out is that current local authority governors, or their range of skills, are not seen as the future. I hope the Minister can address the whole issue of diversity on governing bodies and how we are going to maintain that strong community voice so that it is not just the parents, teachers or head teachers who help to make the governing body strong but outside challenges and expertise.

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[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I would just like briefly to say that I have some sympathy with this set of amendments and in particular to draw attention to the fact that Clause 41 applies these provisions to colleges as Clause 39 applies them to schools. We are all very well aware of how important school leaders are and that a head and a college principal can make all the difference. When they move on to take another job or to retire, a school or a college can go downhill extremely quickly. One needs to have some form of trigger for an inspection in these circumstances; something equivalent to Amendment 114 put forward by my noble friend Lady Perry might be appropriate for colleges as well as for schools. Alternatively, if we move on to Clause 42—I think it is that clause, but it may be further on—local authorities are given the responsibility for taking action when schools are causing concern. They might well have the responsibility for triggering an inspection.

We all probably welcome the slightly more light-handed form of inspection outlined in Clause 40, but at the same time there are dangers with total exemption of the outstanding ones. We are aware that what is outstanding one year can fall very quickly.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I support the position of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in particular. Like him, I would take some persuading to support exempting schools.

I can understand the Government’s probable motivation: they believe that schools should be freed up from unnecessary burdens of inspection. The trend over the past few years has certainly been to lessen the burden of Ofsted inspections and the use of self-evaluation has been relatively successful in that regard. I am sure that the Government and the Minister would not for a second want anyone thinking that they do not think that schools should be accountable and that accountability is an important element of parental choice. Certainly, throughout our perennial debates on testing and tables as the drivers of choice—and I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for his reviews around SATS at primary level—the mantra trotted out was that parents should not only look at the test results and the ranking tables, because those were put together by newspapers and, anyway, the Government do not rank schools, but at Ofsted inspections and other sources of information. An Ofsted inspection is always in the line that you have to take when talking about these issues. Yet if a school becomes exempt, all you can rely on is that data.

As the Government move towards opening up and publishing more and more data about schools, a richer picture can perhaps be formed. However, if the Minister were to persuade me that through better, more rigorous and richer publishing of data, we could get to the point of exempting outstanding schools, he would have to further persuade me that there are satisfactory forms of data. The data should relate not only to the achievement of pupils, the quality of teaching and the quality of leadership—difficult as some of those proxies might be in data terms—but to behaviour and safety. Are there good proxies for child safety, the subject of the amendment that I support from the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley; are there good proxies for,

“the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils at the school”?

All these items should be covered in a chief inspector’s report on a school. The only way in which you could possibly justify exempting a school is by coming up with accurate proxies in data form for all of the measures that the Government say should be covered in an Ofsted report under Clause 40.

As I said earlier and as others have said during this debate, schools do go backwards—and sometimes they go backwards fairly quickly. People can be tempted and attracted by exempt schools. In some of the conversations that I have had with head teachers who are four or five years from retirement, they have said, “I have had my last Ofsted inspection so now I can do what I like”. That will free people up to innovate and to ignore the Schools Minister in the other place. When Nick Gibb goes on about synthetic phonics and prescribing what kind of text books to use, they can say, “Well, it does not really matter. I do not have to do that because I am not going to be inspected on it. As long as my results are all right and I carry on being outstanding, I can ignore Nick Gibb”. That is quite a persuasive argument but, in the end, it is not good enough and we need that accountability through inspection.

I want to meet the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, half way on her interesting amendment. When I talk to head teachers now about Ofsted—which they do not admire without criticism—they tell me that they would like a much greater feeling that the people doing the inspection are head teachers who are currently in the workforce. Their worry is that the people who come round are sometimes a little out-of-date in terms of what is going on. There is a lot to be gained from peer review—from heads inspecting other heads. One of the most successful forms of school improvement that we have at the moment is the national leaders of education, who perform that kind of peer review function in respect of school improvement.

There might be a middle way—I will not call it a third way because that may confuse people—of having lighter touch inspections, still as Ofsted inspections, but, by and large, being carried out by head teachers inspecting each other. They would not inspect schools that they know or have an association with, because that independence would have to be there. That might enable Ofsted to carry out its own burden of inspection in a relatively lean way in terms of cost, yet still give the accountability which parents and those of us who have to care about the spending of public money need. In the end, that is very important.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I shall not repeat all the arguments about why we should continue with inspection because they have been made fairly clearly and in some depth. I shall make two points. I certainly support all those arguments, and I am not an uncritical observer of Ofsted, having been on the receiving end of its investigations, both positive and negative, in a number of roles and having had both positive and negative levels of inspections.

I am most concerned, and I speak from my experience as well as from my general understanding of safeguarding, that safeguarding will not be regularly inspected. I sit as chair of a safeguarding board and as chair of a number of organisations that have safeguarding boards, and I advise organisations that need to develop their safeguarding boards. In those roles, one thing I find is that whereas many social services establishments are keen to develop their safeguarding and to report on it, there is a culture within schools not to report but to develop their own safeguarding plans, if they possibly can, and not necessarily to co-operate with the wider organisation, if they are part of it. I understand all that, and I understand why. Reporting on something that has happened in your school has consequences, certainly if you have to report it to the local authority and it does not react appropriately, but also if the thing develops and you find that you have gone to the outside world. I understand that, but we cannot possibly have a regime where there is no inspection of safeguarding and safeguarding procedures.

I say to the Minister that if the Government intend that to happen, they are on an extraordinarily dangerous path. When we last discussed Ofsted, I was so vehement about some of the issues that I got sent off by the Minister to see the chief inspector—I got sent to see the headmaster. This was because I was concerned about the level of expertise of the people inspecting these sorts of areas; I will come to that again when we come to talk about boarding school inspections. I hope that the Minister will take the seriousness of this to the others in his Government who are looking at it. I predicted when children’s services went into children’s trusts that unless those heads of service who came from the education stream rather than the social care stream were thoroughly educated and understood safeguarding, there would be difficulties. I do not have to run through the series of cases for noble Lords to know that that prediction was unhappily proven. I simply encourage the Minister to look at that.

My second point is about visitors. I absolutely understand what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, is getting at in this—she knows I have huge respect for her—but as a director and an assistant director of social services in the past, I had responsibility for implementing visitor schemes developed by a series of previous Governments, none of which were ever truly successful. If you talk, as I do, to head teachers—I also talk to people in social care—you find that they have real anxieties about any old body being able to come into their school. There would be issues about how the people are selected and whether they are going to be totally lax, and not know what they are looking for, or the kind of busybodies who get into organisations and institutions and drive those who are trying to run the place absolutely mad. There is the whole question of qualification: how they are trained in observation, what they are looking for and whether they have to be CRB checked. There is a whole issue about visitors, which you have to be absolutely clear about before you embark on that sort of path.

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[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I shall come back to the issue of the trigger and the risk assessment which lie at the core of many noble Lords’ concerns. There was broad agreement over, and a broad welcome for, a “lighter touch approach”, if I can call it that, though there remain various concerns about how that would be translated into action and what safeguards there would be in place.

I also recognise the concerns emerging from the Committee about exemption, and I will seek to address them by setting out some of the principles and intentions that underpin Clause 39. I will respond to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, as well as addressing the context within which the clause has been developed. I will also say something more about the safeguards that are provided both within and beyond its provisions, and try to respond to some of the questions that I have been asked.

What is driving this? We think that we have an opportunity to respond to the concerns of schools, to reduce central prescription, to avoid uniformity, to eliminate unnecessary burdens and to be more proportionate. Inspection reform has a contribution to make as part of the overall move that we are keen to encourage. Clause 39 will introduce a more proportionate and targeted approach to school inspection by enabling our highest performing schools to be released from the burden of routine inspection as long as they continue to perform well. I shall return to that issue in a moment.

The thinking behind that is so that Ofsted can focus its inspections on where most noble Lords agree they are most needed—that is, on those schools that are inadequate or satisfactory or coasting. I hesitate to say much about the evolution of inspection because so many members of this Committee were instrumental in its introduction. Regular inspection was introduced with the establishment of Ofsted in 1992, which means that by now schools have experienced at least three Ofsted inspections. Also—and this is part of an answer to my noble friend Lord Lucas and his concerns about information—there have been in that period huge advances in the availability and quality of performance information. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that we need to develop more—it is not always straightforward—but the provision of more information is part of our answer to the question of how we can know what is going on in schools.

Inspection has evolved over that time and become more differentiated, with longer intervals already between inspections for stronger performers. Most outstanding schools are now subject to a full inspection once every five years. It is worth making that point because of some of the perfectly proper questions that are being asked as to what are the safeguards and how do we know when schools can change quite quickly. We currently have a system where the schools about which members of the Committee are most concerned are subject to full inspection only once every five years. Our thinking is that, subject to safeguards, it is possible to take proportionality to the next logical step and to free those schools from routine fuller inspections.

I accept the fact that schools decline and can do so quite quickly, a point made by a number of noble Lords. Ofsted’s evidence shows that the majority of outstanding schools are able to maintain their effectiveness over time. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, used figures which are true in the way that they break down—what he said was absolutely accurate—but it is also true that 95 per cent of those schools were outstanding or good at their next inspection. Not all remain effective—I accept that point—and that is why we have been clear that exempt schools would not be free from accountability and that any exemption is conditional.

My noble friend Lady Sharp made the point that the safeguards are the key issue and perhaps I may say a few words about the approach that Ofsted is developing to risk assessment. All exempt schools would be subject to annual risk assessment by Ofsted, starting three years after the school’s latest inspection. Risk assessment is currently used to determine the frequency of inspection for individual schools. In future, it is proposed that an enhanced process would be used as a basis for determining whether an exempt school should be re-inspected. Her Majesty’s inspectors would consider a range of indicators. These include performance data; information on staff changes—the point was made about a school suddenly losing a head or a group of senior teachers—the outcome of any Ofsted survey inspection visits; complaints from parents; the views of local authorities; and any other available intelligence.

From September, Ofsted intends to take greater account of parents’ views in helping to decide whether a school should be inspected. One way in which we are going to do that is by having a questionnaire online, which parents will be able to complete at any time to give their views about their child’s school. I can confirm that the powers for Ofsted to consider parental complaints under Section 11A apply to exempt schools and that the arrangements for students to complain will apply to exempt colleges.

Local authorities—a theme to which we have returned a number of times in Committee—have an important role to play in representing the interests of parents and pupils. If they have concerns about any exempt school, including an academy, they will obviously be able to request an inspection, and any such request would have to be considered carefully. The implication of Amendments 114A and 112ZB is that Ofsted would lose its discretion over whether it should inspect in these circumstances. We are not sure that that would be right, because HMI should be able to consider the range of evidence in deciding what action to take.

Where Ofsted has concerns about an exempt school or college, it would have a range of options open to it, including arranging a short-targeted visit or a full re-inspection. Professional judgment by HMI needs to be at the heart of the new arrangements. We think that Ofsted should have the appropriate flexibility to act decisively, but in a proportionate manner. The same powers that allow the chief inspector to visit an exempt school to test out a concern also allow for exempt schools to be visited as part of focused inspections of curriculum subjects and particular themes, including outstanding provision and practice. We expect an increased focus on best practice visits in future, as well as more emphasis on sharing best practice by Ofsted through a variety of means. One question raised in the past is how schools will learn from outstanding practice, and this is one way in which we can help address that.

Some points have been raised about information. As I have said, we intend to give parents easier access to information and so, from next January, parents will be able to access data showing the progress of high, average and low-attaining pupils across a range of subjects. From June, they will have access to data down to individual pupil level in an anonymised form. I hope that that will help.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

In respect of information for parents, can the Minister clarify Clause 39(4)? It refers to charging schools for inspection. If parents have triggered an inspection using their current powers, is there any charge for that and, if not, how do we guard against Ofsted having a disincentive to inspect if, in its judgment, it feels it cannot afford it?

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[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I will write on the point of detail. I had this explained to me earlier. The difficulty is because an Ofsted category is not a statutory definition. That is the problem and why it is hard to put it in the Bill. I will make sure that I have got that right and I will write, but I believe that is the explanation.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

When the Minister writes, will he also clarify how, if it is difficult to pin it down in primary legislation, it would be possible in secondary legislation? Secondary legislation is still law, so you would still need a definition in law of what an outstanding school is.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I will get some clever person to write me something that will explain why that is the case.

The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, raised important points about faith schools. He will know better than me that it is a separate inspection process. Faith schools, including exempt schools, would continue to be subject under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005 to a separate inspection into their religious education. This can also cover spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and reports will be published. That is not a complete answer to the noble Lord’s concerns but it is another part of a possible reassurance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, asked me whether a cohort could pass through an outstanding school without any inspection. The absence of inspection does not mean that Ofsted will fail to pay attention to exempt schools. Currently outstanding schools have five years between inspections. The risk assessment would start at three years and be done annually but, if there were concerns before then, the whole point of the triggering process is that Ofsted would be able to look into them.

Overall, we think that a lot has changed in the past 20 years in terms of transparency and accountability. There is more information and the inspection system over those years has become increasingly proportionate. We have a large number of schools that are capable of evaluating their own performance and identifying and responding to their own improvement priorities. We are keen to focus inspection on those that need it most— underperforming and inadequate schools. I recognise the strength of feeling that has been raised.

There were a number of thoughtful suggestions, particular around the important question of the rigour of the risk assessment. I understand that Ofsted is due to publish its approach to risk assessment and I would like to use that as an opportunity to discuss these concerns further, to reflect on what has been said to me today and to raise them with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton. I hope that through that process—I will be happy to discuss it with noble Lords who have particular concerns and who have contributed to this debate—I can address some of the concerns that have been raised, reflect on them and then report back to noble Lords. I will certainly reflect on the mood of the Committee. I will listen to the advice that I have been given but in the mean time I ask my noble friend Lady Walmsley to withdraw her amendment.