An Inspector Calls

Ofsted and Its Effect on School Standards

Cedric Cullingford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134986163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The UK government's education policy is based on the setting of targets, yet the fear and loathing that an Ofsted inspection can generate is widely known. This text critically assesses the role, impact and effect of the inspection body and dissects its usefulness.

Chapter One
^*An evaluation of evaluators: the Ofsted system of school inspection

Maurice Kogan and Margaret Maden

Origins and Status of The Research

Our evaluation of Ofsted was undertaken with the aid of a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust made to the Office for Standards in Inspection (Ofstin) for an independent review of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) system of school inspection. On the face of it, this might have placed our project straight into the category of adversarial evaluation. But we concluded it within the ethic and methods of quite traditional academic research, and it is for others to consider how far our findings were affected by our own policy preferences. We were in any case required by our terms of reference to make recommendations, supported by the findings of the study.

The research design consisted of a literature search of primary and secondary sources; questionnaires to samples of schools; case studies conducted largely through interviews in schools; national level interviews with teacher, subject, local authority, governor, parent and inspector associations; and financial analyses.

Salience of The Issues Arising from Ofsted

The activities and impact of Ofsted are a matter of high public interest. An index of this is the multiple references either to Ofsted or to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI) in the Times Educational Supplement. This is no doubt generated by the anxiety felt by the public at large on the question of standards achieved in schools, the prominence given to education and its standards by political leadership of both recent governments, and a vigorous policy of publication and publicity by Ofsted itself, including the particular stances taken by the HMCI on key educational issues of the day.

Ofsted dominates the thinking of most of those whom we have encountered in the schools, local authorities and professional associations. In this respect, both Ofsted and the political initiatives underpinning it have been highly successful although we critically examine the Ofsted claim that it will secure the improvement of schools through inspection.

Ofsted’s significance extends beyond education. It is a prime, if extreme, example of the way in which the post-welfare state regulates its relations with the key professions, and with client groups. Its prominence could be described in terms of the ending of the corporatist bargain with a public profession in which the State conferred resources, trust and legitimacy on practitioners and institutions to work with their clients in an altruistic and expert manner. Instead, the substantive content of education and the ways in which it is mediated to its client groups are regulated by state prescription through the national curriculum and other mandatory devices, and enforced to a large extent by inspection.

The importance of Ofsted should also be construed in terms of the total range of evaluative activities which schools now encounter. District auditors, the Audit Commission, local education authorities and the Health and Safety Executive are among those who have the duty to form judgements on different aspects of school performance. Ofsted is part of a system that has grown up to investigate performance in the interest of explicit public policies.

The Policy Context in England

Inspection is a tool of Government and management, and its nature is affected by the policies that it is meant to advance and reinforce. The wide changes in the public services have been identified as constituting new public management (Pollitt, 1993) in which several elements comprise a shopping basket for those who wish to modernize the public sectors of Western industrialized societies. They include cost cutting, disaggregating traditional bureaucratic organizations into separate agencies; separating the purchaser and provider functions; introduction of market and quasi-market mechanisms; requiring staff to work to performance targets, indicators and output objectives; performance related pay (PRP); and emphasis on service quality, standard setting and customer responsiveness.

A subset of changes has been called ‘the rise of the evaluative state’ (Neave, 1988; Henkel 1991a). This has involved the replacement or, as in the case of education, the strengthening of central controls by evaluation systems which go alongside the ex ante avocation of objectives, targets and plans in place of the ex post self-evaluation administered by the professional leadership of the service.

Some of these changes fit what has affected education and other public services. In education it is central government above all that has taken on the task of inferring consumer wishes and installing them in its own policies. On the face of it the creation of a national inspectorate with unprecedented powers to evaluate all aspects of education runs counter to the declared intention to release energies by decentralization. In other European countries the starting points have been different from those in the United Kingdom; there have been moves away from old-fashioned prescription towards varying degrees of self-evaluation or freedom but with outcome measurements.

Now, however, England stands out as sui generis in its modes and objectives of school inspection. The degree of externality, prestructuring of criteria and power of the system are in accord with successive governments’ declared intentions to raise educational standards and to extirpate those elements of the system that are identified as falling below nationally determined norms. The schools are thus evaluated through the agency of an institution of unprecedented power and resources, and on the basis of explicit assumptions of what constitutes school effectiveness and what will cause improvement. We next briefly discuss models of effectiveness within which we can locate Ofsted’s assumptions.

The Range of Models of School Effectiveness and Improvement

It has been observed that ‘in many ways our knowledge of what makes a good school greatly exceeds our knowledge of how to apply that knowledge in programmes of school improvement’. Increasingly, sophisticated and large amounts of school effectiveness research (especially in Europe, North America and Australia) do not appear to have been successfully transferred to the everyday business of how to make schools better, from whatever base or condition. Additionally Reynolds and Stoll (1996) observe that ‘school improvement scholars rarely base their school improvement strategies upon the knowledge of school effectiveness researchers’ … there are ‘two very distinctive intellectual traditions and histories’.

It is against this indeterminacy of knowledge that we have to place Ofsted’s apparent certainties.

Some of the factors likely to impair the transfer of school effectiveness research findings to school improvement practice are the relatively static ‘snapshot’ nature of researchers’ accounts and analyses of schools which often fail to include or express the dynamic nature of school change processes. There is also a frequent lack of school context, especially the organizational system of which the school is a component and from which exogenous support and/or constraints may operate. Additionally, there is often a failure to identify either priorities and sequences, or cause and effect, amongst the factors and characteristics associated with effective schools and there is a relative lack of significant-in-school variations such as sub-systems (eg, departments/subjects), classroom and teacher differences and the school’s history and culture.

The extent to which such variables and dynamics are fully considered in the Ofsted four-yearly cycle of inspection is at least debatable, as is its effectiveness as one among several mechanisms established by Government to secure school improvement. Such mechanisms include an underlying assumption that competition between schools in an education marketplace will contribute to an overall raising of standards and that more information about schools (league tables and Ofsted inspection reports) will not simply increase the public accountability of schools but will also galvanize them into behaving in ways which bring about faster, more prescribed and standardized forms of improvement. Government legislated in these ways not because of school effectiveness research; instead, the rhetoric was primarily about the benefits of choice and competition in solving the alleged or actual shortcomings of state schools.

The evidence implies that an understanding of the dynamics of school effectiveness is not the only important base upon which educational policy can be built if the ultimate objective is to improve pupils’ achievements. Speaking on behalf of the school effectiveness research community, David Reynolds (1998) has recently observed that ‘we have been instrumental in creating a quite widespread popular view that schools do not just make a difference but that they make all the difference. This is wrong’.

The focal point of a substantial field of research is the child’s achievement rather than that of the school. Accordingly these analyses identify those factors which need to be evaluated alongside and in relation to ‘school effect’. These include school system and structure issues, as in Goldstein and Sammons’ (1997) research on the ‘value-added’ effect of primary school on a child’s GCSE results and Goldstein’s analysis of the significant effects on academic performance of the number of primary schools a child attends. In a related field of investigation are the Scottish studies of how a non-selective system and the social composition of schools make a difference to pupil attainment levels.

More recent Scottish work has linked the raising of pupils’ achievement over the past three decades less to school effectiveness (and, therefore, differences between schools) than to larger structural issues. It is suggested that the five major contributory factors to better educational outcomes are:

1. the second generation effect of better educated parents (referred to as ‘rising educational capital’);
2. comprehensive secondary education (allowing the tapping into educational talent previously excluded from a full range of opportunities);
3. demographic decline of socially disadvantaged groups;
4. successful demonstration that educational demand can be stimulated via appropriate policy drives;
5. curricular reforms and assessment systems.

These findings are a salutory reminder that understanding the dynamics of school effectiveness is not the only important base upon which educational policy can be built if the ultimate objective is to improve pupils’ achievements.

In the Netherlands, school effectiveness research has distinguished itself by being ‘bottom up’ and especially concerned with classroom practice and conditions. In this sense, the English and US tradition has been more ‘whole school’ and, perhaps, more managerialist. The latter emphasis is reflected in Ofsted’s (1995) Framework for the Inspection of Schools, with a rather reductionist approach to related lines of enquiry, which stress the importance of a collegial ethos in schools or concepts such as the ‘intelligent school’ and ‘goodness’ in relation to school characteristics.

Among the effectiveness is Michael Fullan’s (1992) in Ontario, especially in relation to the Halton School improvement project, which emphasizes the central place of the teacher in any improvement project. Teacher rather than school is his critical focus: ‘change efforts have to have a focus and, above all, must have meaning for teachers, as it is they who have the chief responsibility to implement changes and make them work’.

MacBeath et al’s (1996) work demonstrates a distinctive Scottish approach to school improvement which is reflected in the policies of the Scottish Office Education and Industry Department (SOEID). The emphasis placed on a school self-review process is known as the SOEID ‘How Good is our School?’ procedure. This includes peer review as well as external monitoring elements, and builds on and articulates those research findings which focus on teachers and classrooms and on the need to enlist teachers’ commitment and trust.

A related issue on the improvement side of the school effectiveness improvement nexu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: some issues of inspection
• 1. An evaluation of evaluators: the Ofsted system of school inspection
• 2. An examination of Ofsted
• 3. Effects of Ofsted inspections on school performance
• 4. Improvement or control? A US view of English inspection
• 5. Is Ofsted helpful?
• 6. Inspection and education: the indivisibility of standards
• 7. Standards and school inspection: the rhetoric and the reality
• 8. Does Ofsted make a difference? Inspection issues and socially deprived schools
• 9. The Ofsted lay inspector: to what purpose?
• 10. Effects of Ofsted inspection on school development and staff morale
• 11. Ofsted, the Teacher Training Agency and initial teacher education: a case study
• 12. Conclusion – a modest proposal for the improvement of the school inspection system in England and Wales
• Index