Education Institutions: Autonomy and Accountability

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the appropriate balance between the autonomy and the accountability of educational institutions.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

My Lords, it was the French Prime Minister, François Mitterrand, who, on introducing reforms of education in France in the 1980s, declared that accountability had to be “le contrepart même”—the exact balance—to the autonomy of institutions in the education system. We need no persuasion today that the issue of accountability of schools and teachers, as well as the degree of autonomy that they should be allowed, is central to the future shape of our education system.

Rather than starting with the accountability side of the equation, I begin by asking how much freedom schools and teachers need if they are to accomplish all that they and we hope for our children’s education. There is plenty of evidence to show that granting freedom to professionals to do the job they are trained and motivated to do is the surest way to achieve high quality.

In his excellent book, Education, Education, Education, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, says rightly that,

“governors—and the headteachers and management teams they appoint and sustain—need to be unambiguously in control of their schools without managerial interference from local and national bureaucracies”.

This, he says, is the magic ingredient of the success of academies. I agree. It is the quality of leadership in a school which determines its success, which means good governors, a good head and a good management team.

Of course, as we have seen all too recently, there can be governors who are not capable of good governance, and heads and teachers who get it wrong, but this does not mean that the model is faulty. As Samuel Johnson said—in what is my favourite quote—it is,

“happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust”.

Through the huge expansion of academies and free schools, this Government have had the courage to trust schools and teachers. I rejoice in that.

We have at present possibly the best generation of teachers that we have ever enjoyed. They are well qualified and well educated, with strong support available from heads and senior staff for those who enter the profession for the first time. I pay tribute to the previous Government for the Teach First initiative, which has brought some outstanding young graduates into our schools. This Government have made teacher quality rightly central to their policies, and new entrants to the profession are of the highest quality, as are many of their older colleagues. It therefore makes absolute sense to trust their professionalism to the maximum extent.

Teachers, like doctors with their patients or other client-centred professionals, are more motivated to do the best for the pupils in their charge than to seek the approval of those above them in the hierarchy. We want them to feel that way, for that way quality of provision lies. However, as Mitterrand said, this freedom needs to be exactly balanced by accountability. The public who pay their taxes for public services, as well as the parents and students who benefit from the public service of education, have a right to know whether the provision offered is of good quality and appropriate for the needs of its recipients.

In achieving the delicate balance of accountability and autonomy, it is important that teachers and heads are not distracted from their prime self-motivation towards their pupils by the imposition of too much bureaucratic regulation. We need them to be looking into the classroom and the children in it, not looking out to the inspectors and regulators. Good schools and good teachers are not driven by their external regulators; they take them in their stride, recognising that if they behave with professional dedication to the task at hand, the results will be what the regulators seek. For this reason, I welcome and applaud the much needed changes which this Government have made in the two key tools of accountability: inspection and examinations.

Ofsted was set up for the best of reasons: to inspect every school often and thoroughly. Such a remit demanded a huge taskforce. By the time the excellent Sir Michael Wilshaw came into office as chief inspector, more than 2,000 people were involved in inspection, employed by private contractors, mainly part-time and often with scant educational know-how or even none at all. Quality control of their activity had therefore to resort to giving them a list of predetermined items in boxes to be ticked, rather than trusting informed, senior professional judgment. As a tool of accountability, Ofsted in this form far too often simply alienated teachers. More seriously, it could, especially for the less secure and inexperienced teachers, reduce their creativity to meeting the tick-box requirements, which might bear little relation to a broad education.

It is therefore with huge pleasure that I welcome the decision to trust future inspection mainly to the 400-plus HMI who are experienced, senior professionals whose judgment can be trusted, and to dispense with the contractors. HMI can judge the key index of a school and the experience of the pupils. This may or may not match the items in the box-ticking exercise, but it will go to the heart of whether the school is providing the pupils in its care with an education fit for the values of our society, and which allows every child and young person to achieve across the widest possible range of elements in and beyond the curriculum.

In my view, it is not possible to overestimate the value of this change. By applying the broad professional judgments that teachers accept and share, Ofsted can become a tool to reward good schools and good teachers for their creative ways of achieving the best possible outcomes for their pupils. It can also become a more developmental and less regulatory tool that will spread good practice and encourage those schools which are struggling to succeed in providing the high-quality education that other comparable schools have achieved.

Examination results are the second measure of accountability by which schools are rightly judged. This has not always been a reliable measure to use. When schools and their pupils were allowed a wide choice of subjects at GCSE, the results were hard to compare. Those schools, and there were many, which avoided basic English and maths, for example, might achieve good GCSE results overall, but when their performance including English and maths was measured, it was not so impressive. In one school, 100% of the students achieved five good GCSE grades, but only 45% included English and maths. The EBacc was therefore a much needed incentive for all schools to include these basic tools, and now the new standard allowing more choice at key stage 4 is an innovation that will raise true performance standards for all young people. The inclusion of high-quality technical and vocational qualifications that was announced last week will at last bring real quality to areas that are attractive to the many young people whose motivation is more practical than academic.

Finally, the long-debated issue of value added has been recognised in a simple and fair way by the planned introduction of progress 8 as a measure for secondary schools. This charts the progress from entry standards to GCSE performance and will be the measure of whether a school is achieving appropriately. At last, a school’s performance will be measured in relation to its own intake rather than against schools with very different pupil populations.

I am proud of our Government and the developments in both autonomy and accountability which are being introduced. Above all, I hope that through these changes the many excellent teachers who serve us so well in schools and colleges every day will find that their dedicated and creative work will flourish, and that they will welcome them.