Ofsted

Debate between Lindsay Roy and Rob Wilson

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard.

The Minister of State will be relieved to know that I will not be referring to recent press reports about Ofsted. I am not here today to attack its methods or to call for its abolition—far from it. While I have the odd reservation, I am a big fan of Sir Michael Wilshaw and of Ofsted’s work. The issue that I want to focus on is Ofsted’s monitoring of the performance of local authorities in driving up standards in education.

The policy context is that under this Government, more and more schools are being freed from local education authority control. Thanks to the free schools programme and the Government’s dramatic expansion of the academy model, parents, teachers and head teachers are being trusted with the task of driving up standards in the classroom, rather than spending their time answering to local councils. More than half of secondary schools are in the process of converting to academy status, and I am sure that more and more schools and parents will want to take advantage of the freedoms that such status offers.

I can understand why the Government have pursued this policy so vigorously, as the success of privately managed, publicly funded schools is a global phenomenon. The OECD reported in 2012 that

“In general, privately managed schools tend to have more autonomy, better resources, better school climate and better performance levels than publicly managed schools”.

However, local authorities continue to run nearly half of secondary schools, nearly 85% of all schools and, obviously, the vast majority of primary schools. The head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, said in a newspaper over the weekend that local authorities should continue to have a role “overseeing” free schools and academies. Local authorities will continue to be relevant and important to the standard of education delivered in Britain’s schools. However, that raises some key questions. How can parents and the public know what councils are actually doing to promote high standards in schools? How can the performance of local councils and their officials be assessed and judged? Are they doing the right things? Are they doing enough? Are they ambitious enough on behalf of their young people?

How can people hold local authorities to account? I would contest that that is not very easy. There are tables showing the performance of schools in a local authority’s catchment area, but those performance data can be affected by a number of other factors, such as the socio-economic characteristics of the intake. Issues with performance can also be masked by the performance of particular schools—I will say more about that a little later—including schools that are outside an authority’s control, and by the educational attainment of pupils from outside its catchment area. The questions therefore remain: how can people tell what local councils are doing to improve educational standards? Are they doing the right things? Is it enough, and are the people at the local education authority up to the job?

I was prompted to raise those questions today by the concerns that I and many of my constituents—and now also Ofsted—have about the performance of Reading borough council as the local education authority. I will not skirt around the issues or dress them up; I will just report them as they are. I hope that Reading LEA will listen carefully to my critique, which is based on the facts, and try to engage sensibly, rather than behaving in a knee-jerk, defensive and political way. I am willing to help it to reform and improve if it does the right things. At the end of the day, the key must be to improve the outcomes for children in LEA schools.

Reading has struggled for years to make consistent and long-lasting improvements to educational outcomes, thereby allowing many children to underachieve. Even at GCSE and A-level, for which the results are very good, its real performance has been masked by the excellent results from grammar schools, where around 90% of the children come from outside the borough. It strikes me that there must be something fundamentally wrong with an LEA that allows that level of educational underachievement to continue. Let me explain why.

Just before Christmas, the director of education, adult and children’s services at Reading borough council wrote to the head teachers and chairs of governors at all local schools, admitting that Reading’s key stage 2 results in reading, writing and mathematics had fallen behind those in almost all other areas of England, and were in the bottom five nationally. Reading LEA had the largest drop in the proportion of pupils reaching level 4 and above in the south-east region, and the third largest fall in performance in the country. The achievement of key groups, including some ethnic minority groups, those with special educational needs and those on free school meals, was also extremely poor according to the LEA’s director of education.

Inspection of local children’s centres has found them to be inadequate. In a damning judgment, Ofsted found children’s centres in east Reading to be “inadequate in all respects”, and is planning interventions to bring about improvements. To be inadequate in all respects takes some doing.

Earlier this year, the Minister wrote to Reading LEA, challenging it over the gap that has developed between rich and poor children’s performances, despite the huge Government investment through the pupil premium. Last year, the George Palmer primary school was removed from the LEA’s control and reopened as an academy due to its constant failure to improve its failing performance.

I have put my concerns in a letter to Sir Michael Wilshaw, and earlier this week spoke to Matthew Coffey, the Ofsted regional director. Ofsted has informed me that it was already concerned about Reading LEA’s performance because of the high exclusion rates in a number of schools; in fact, Reading was found to have the highest fixed-term exclusion rate of any local authority in England. The key stage 2 data confirmed Ofsted’s concerns, and on 5 October last year Mr Coffey wrote to the LEA expressing those concerns. Shockingly, Ofsted has told me that 5,000 of 13,000 pupils under Reading LEA control are at schools that are not considered even to be good. Surely a good school is the least that any parent and every child should have the right to expect. The situation suggests that Reading is an LEA that at best is allowing schools to drift, and at worst is failing to challenge inadequate standards properly.

Ofsted met with the LEA on 13 December, when it was made clear that if no improvement was seen, there was the option to carry out a focused inspection of the LEA. Although in reality it had little choice, I am pleased that Reading agreed to share tracking data for key stage 2 and targets for improvement. I also welcome Ofsted’s recent finding of improvement in Reading’s key stage 1 results. A further meeting to try to resolve some of the issues is due in March.

[Lindsay Roy (Glenrothes) (Lab)]

I endorse the hon. Gentleman’s aspiration for every youngster to have a good school. Given that the quality of learning and teaching is a fundamental factor in raising attainment and achievement in schools, how can Ofsted and the LEA monitor that quality, especially where there are non-qualified teachers?

[Mr Wilson]

As we all know, a debate on that subject is taking place this afternoon in the Chamber. Unqualified teachers have been used very successfully in both private and public sector schools for many years. I see no reason to try to change the current arrangements.

Let me explain the significance of the poor key stage 2 results I mentioned. Key stage 2 is an assessment of the attainment of primary school pupils. Although six of the eight secondary schools in Reading’s catchment area are now academies, only five out of the 31 primary schools are. Poor performance in primary schools means poor performance in the schools that Reading borough council runs. That suggests that the council, in its stewardship of the schools, is hindering progress, rather than fulfilling its legal duty to promote higher standards. Ofsted is concerned that the attainment gap between pupils receiving free school meals and the rest is getting bigger at primary school level, even though in secondary schools—most of which have left LEA control—the data are getting better and the gap is narrowing.

That situation must not be allowed to continue at the primary school level. I suggest that in the LEA there is a lack of ambition to challenge, and a lack of will and desire to take the decisions necessary to make real and lasting educational change. There is a culture in which failure in local schools is too easily accepted and excused. For a long time now, I have noticed a lack of aspiration for some groups of children, and a lack of will to challenge the notion that some children from difficult areas and chaotic homes are too challenging or damaged to be helped.

The LEA’s poor performance and attitude have forced me into a much more active role regarding local schools than I ever envisaged when I first became MP for Reading East. The local authority has termed that interference, but it would be a dereliction of my duty to my constituents not to intervene. Of course, I was conscious of Reading’s lack of consistent progress in schools when elected in 2005, but I could not immediately put my finger on the reason for it. When I did, the Government were resistant to making the necessary changes and to challenges to the educational orthodoxy.

That changed in 2010, when academies and university technical colleges got rocket boosters, free schools were introduced, changes were made to the curriculum, and help was made available to poorer pupils through the pupil premium—a policy on which I agreed with the Minister long before my party did. That gave me the tools to start bypassing an LEA that was at best coasting and at worst failing. It meant I was able to be a focal point for setting up a new UTC, which challenged other schools to up their game and LEAs to invest where there was inadequate performance.

The coming of that UTC encouraged the neighbouring LEA, Wokingham, to invest in Bulmershe school. Recently I helped another school from the neighbouring authority to get behind setting up a new free school for 11 to 16-year-olds. Maiden Erlegh free school will enable its mother school’s outstanding DNA—the standard that parents want for their children—to be delivered in my constituency. It was announced last week that it will open in 2015.

[Lindsay Roy]

Why does the hon. Gentleman think that there is a lack of aspiration in the local education authority?

[Mr Wilson]

Because, as I think I have explained, it is failing to take the necessary decisions to ensure that the gap between rich and poor local children is properly closed.

I am disappointed with Ofsted for not noticing what was happening, and for allowing Reading to bump along the bottom for so long, failing a whole generation of children. Ofsted should be a catalyst driving long-lasting change and improvement in local authorities’ performance, as it has been for many schools across the country. Local authorities have a legal duty to promote high standards in schools and among other providers, so that children and young people achieve well and fulfil their potential. It is welcome that Ofsted has restarted inspections of local authorities’ performance, but Ofsted will not inspect every local authority and will not undertake a fixed cycle of inspections; rather, inspections will be made where key indicators give rise to concern.

My questions for the Minister are these. Given that Reading LEA’s lacklustre performance has been apparent to us for many years, is he concerned that there are other LEAs across the country that are quietly failing to meet their responsibilities? Could they slip through the net like Reading? Will he commit to reviewing continually other Ofsted procedures for inspecting local authorities? Are those procedures sufficient and effective? Will he give a commitment that where Ofsted finds that a local authority is not doing enough to promote high standards, its recommendations will have real teeth and the situation will not simply be allowed to continue? With specific reference to Reading, will he give a commitment that he and his Department will keep a close interest in developments in Reading, and make it clear that if there is no developed and credible plan of action soon to improve performance radically in the LEA’s schools, they will ask Ofsted to carry out a full inspection of Reading LEA?

I am a huge supporter of this Government’s academy and free school policies—I believe that they will be seen as being among the signature achievements of this great reforming Government—but we must not turn a blind eye to the hugely important role played by local authorities. They must be subject to challenge, just like schools and teachers.