Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the (a) adequacy of resources provided to local education authorities and Ofsted to monitor schools between Ofsted inspections and (b) the effectiveness of Ofsted boards of governors.

Schools that receive two or more successive overall Requires Improvement grades, and academies judged to require special measures which are not rebrokered to a new sponsor trust, normally receive a monitoring visit from Ofsted within 30 months following publication of the last Ofsted report. Ofsted also carries out risk assessments of schools which informs the timing of any inspection. This work is resourced from Ofsted’s overall financial settlement, agreed at Spending Review, and published in Ofsted’s Annual Report and Accounts.

The Department, through Regional School Commissioners, is responsible for oversight of academies; local authorities are responsible for oversight of maintained schools. For local authorities, the Department introduced a £50 million per year brokering and monitoring grant in November 2016, for two years. This grant has been allocated to local authorities since September 2017 to allow them to continue to monitor the performance of maintained schools, broker school improvement provision and intervene as appropriate.

Ofsted’s board reports directly to parliament, principally through Ofsted’s published annual performance report and Education Select Committee hearings. The effectiveness of the Chair is reviewed by the Permanent Secretary of the Department for Education on behalf of the Secretary of State, taking account of a range of views. As set out in Ofsted’s Corporate Governance Framework, the Chair of the Ofsted Board is responsible for assessing the performance of individual board members.