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

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as editor of the Good Schools Guide. I congratulate the Government on their decision to bring forward this regulation. In a system with a lot of leeway given to individual schools and multi-academy trusts, inspection is a crucial way of checking on problems and of spreading good practice. The inspection corps can do neither as well as they should unless they see outstanding schools regularly, because that keeps them up with best practice and gives them a yardstick against which to measure other similar schools that are not doing as well. It gives them a fund of experience and anecdote with which they can encourage schools that they are visiting that could be better schools.

I hope that, in time, the Government will consider moving back to the old—I mean very old—system of annual, informal visits from inspectors. Things move fast. The requirements and the interests of education are not best served by four-year intervals between inspections. We are coming up to a period now where schools will have been through the shock of Covid. In various ways, they will have had to have dealt with online learning. There may be a lot of learning and a lot of change to come from that. Not to have the benefit of an experienced inspector’s visit for four years is a great waste of that opportunity.

When the Government encounter things they would like schools to come up to speed on—for example, the exemptions under the Equalities Act or the proper inclusion of black history in the curriculum—again, four years is a long time for the country to wait before the Government know whether these things are being performed, carried out or taught in the way in which they would hope.

I also think that a system of light-touch inspections—just a day or half-a-day’s visit—would give parents much more confidence in how their school was going. It would mean that small wobbles in otherwise good schools were dealt with easily, informally and quickly without the whole weight of an inspection team descending on the school. We would need fewer big inspections, and I would hope overall it would be a cheaper system.