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

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, with whom I strongly agree on some things and strongly disagree on others. I strongly disagree with his suggestion of further grading of schools, but strongly agree with his suggestion about the sharing of best practice.

It might seem strange that a Peer from a party that wants to abolish Ofsted should welcome a statutory instrument ending exemption from Ofsted inspection for some schools. I speak today to do just that, for the assumptions behind the exemption were an illustration of the deep faults and failure of the philosophy that has underpinned the operation of Ofsted, and, indeed, our entire education system, for decades. At the base was the assumption that schools were competing against each other in league tables, chiefly for exam results, but also for the Ofsted ratings that were closely related to them. Schools that managed to get those results, aided by their ability to perform and show themselves to the best advantage for a day or two, could clear the bar of outstanding and then be assumed to be in a special category, able to run off into the sunlit uplands away from Ofsted.

Meanwhile, their peers that did not do so faced the regular descent of the terrifying ordeal of the inspection. I speak as a former school governor, so I have some experience of this. The price of so-called failure was often the forced loss of local control, or at least the need to fight hard to fight it off. Moulsecoomb Primary School in Brighton, which I follow closely through my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, whose interest in the matter is obvious, conducted a poll in which 96% of respondents were opposed to forced academisation, yet still the push continued.

This ranking and testing has been and continues to be profoundly damaging, while also—as the statutory instrument implicitly acknowledges—failing to recognise that things can go wrong in a school very quickly. Parents have been encouraged to compete, to use their knees and elbows to get their child into a school based on this magic talisman of “outstanding”, which has very little meaning and often reflects the socioeconomic circumstance of the pupils.

Of course, as several other noble Lords have noted, Ofsted is an institution with its own problems. As the Accountability Commission noted, inspectors were being spread too thinly, judgments were often dubious and reporting unreliable. It is built on competition and is widely judged to be unfit for purpose.

What is needed instead is a co-operative, supportive, continuous process of local and regional sharing of best practice. Every school has great aspects that it can share with others. One might be strong in maths, another strong in sport, another great at supporting pupils in difficult circumstances. If we think about the current situation with Covid-19, each school will have its own particular problems, but many will also have identified solutions that could be—[Inaudible]—will recognise these widely varying and often quickly changing strengths and weaknesses.

Rather than anxiously scanning league tables and thinking about whether they can afford to move house, parents should be able to look as a matter of course to their local school, at the centre and part of their community, and see the children attend it. Those schools should be working together for the best results for every pupil in the area, not being pushed to expel or force out difficult pupils. This would be of great benefit, particularly to the most vulnerable.

The Minister said that schools would benefit from an updated picture of their performance. I respectfully suggest that every school knows its own strengths and weaknesses far better than any outside inspector—so, indeed, do teachers for individual pupils. They do not need an outside test to do that, which is why I take this opportunity to ask the Minister to consider cancelling the 2021 SATs in the light of Covid-19, as the More Than a Score campaign is asking, as well as introducing alternative assessment systems for GCSEs and A-levels next year in the difficult circumstances that we will clearly face.