The regulation of schools, examination boards etc. raises some interesting issues. The state-provided education market (if you will excuse the word 'market') is highly imperfect. There are no price signals, it is hard for parents to shop around, and it is far from certain that their child will be taken by their first choice of school. Some form of regulation is clearly necessary.
But it is not possible to have highly intrusive systems which monitor the quality of education that is delivered to thousands or millions of pupils. Regulators such as Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) and its private sector counterparts therefore mainly report the outcome of inspections of individual schools. Parents can then (in theory if not in practice) choose whether to send their children to particular schools, and the national or local authorities can intervene if an individual school's standards are particularly worrying.
The weakness of this approach is that it relies heavily on parents' ability and willingness to choose a 'better' school for their children. Unfortunately it appears (including from OECD research) that parents are as much influenced by a school's social position than its exam results etc. 'Will my child be mixing with the right sort of other children?' It also appears that many schools tend to respond to competition not by improving teaching and learning but by better promotion and by positioning themselves so that they attract more middle class children. The result is that socially attractive state schools are heavily oversubscribed, and local house prices go through the roof. And of course such schools also attract more than their fair share of better teachers. Luckily, there are plenty of good teachers left to serve in other schools, but this is no thanks to the inspection system.
The Limitations of Inspection
Regulators/Inspectors are obviously reluctant to arrive in a school without warning, but, equally obviously, their presence - especially if teachers have had an opportunity to prepare for it - creates an artificial atmosphere. One pupil's tweet summarised the problem quite nicely:
I hate it when the [the inspectors are] in our school. All my teacher change from A to Z .
There was an interesting development in March 2014. Ofsted had previously generally given schools advance notice of often lengthy visits and evaluations, which allowed schools to put on their best face whilst also maximising the stress experienced by teaching staff. A review of this practice seemed likely to result in the more frequent use of shorter, more efficient monitoring visits.
One issue, which doesn't affect most other regulators, is that Ofsted often use currently-employed school Heads and other senior teachers to inspect other schools - and have on occasion asked such teachers to inspect schools situated close to (and so arguably in competition with) their own. This clearly leads to bias - or at least accusations of bias if the resultant inspection is less than highly complimentary.
Michael Gove, as education secretary in 2012, exempted 'outstanding' schools from being routinely inspected "to free them from bureaucracy". By 2019 this meant that some schools had gone for more than a decade without an Ofsted visit whilst some of those 'outstanding' schools, that had been inspected because of concerns, had been found to have deteriorated - as might have been expected given the absence of inspection. Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector, therefore lobbied the government to allow her to assess all schools, and this request was met in early 2020. (See also the NAO report - below.)
Follow this link for a discussion of regulatory capture and unannounced inspection.
Examinations
There was an interesting government/regulator interaction in the summer of 2012 when the exams regulator, acting as required by their statute, forced the English and Welsh exam bodies to tighten their standards, which had got too lax. The exam boards therefore awarded lower grades to those who had taken exams in the summer of 2012 than had been awarded to those who had taken similar exams a few months earlier, causing numerous complaints from those students who felt they had been disadvantaged - and there were just as strident complaints from schools which felt their reputations would suffer. To his credit, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, refused to intervene, respecting the independence of the regulator. His Welsh counterpart was weaker, and did require Welsh students' grades to be 'improved'.
It is important to be aware that (a small minority of) teachers under pressure will cheat so as to improve exam results.
It's not quite the same but ... I have to admit that I was amused to hear that at least one (non-UK) private school would allow only their brighter pupils to take their iGCSEs at the school. The rest were made to take the exam at a public exam centre, so sharply improving the school's reported results.
Accountability and Inspection
A 2018 PAC report criticised Ofsted for completing fewer inspections than planned. Almost 300 schools had not been inspected for 10 years. But the main target of the report seemed to be the Department for Education which had cut Ofsted's budget by 52% in real terms between 1999 and 2017, leaving parents and others with no independent assurance about many schools' effectiveness. Ofsted's Chief Inspector (i.e. Chief Exec) Caroline Spielman, made the strong point that it made sense to maintain quality rather than quantity: "It makes wonderful headlines when chief inspectors express opinions that aren't backed up by their evidence, but it doesn't make for such good decisions."
Here is NAO's summary of its report to the PAC in advance of the PAC report mentioned above. Note in particular the second sentence which makes it clear that Ofsted cannot now be regarded as an independent regulator given that DfE tells it how to do its job, and severely constrains its budget.
The Department for Education (the Department) plays an important part in whether the inspection of schools is value for money. The Department affects Ofsted’s funding, how it uses its resources and what it can inspect. The current inspection model, with some schools exempt from re-inspection, others subject to light-touch inspection and the average time between inspections rising, raises questions about whether there is enough independent assurance about schools’ effectiveness to meet the needs of parents, taxpayers and the Department itself. Although government has protected the overall schools budget, it has reduced Ofsted’s budget every year for over a decade while asking it to do more. We think that government needs to be clearer about how it sees Ofsted’s present and future inspection role in the school system as a whole, and resource it accordingly.
Ofsted provides valuable independent assurance about schools’ effectiveness and as such is a vital part of the school system. It has faced significant challenges in recent years, as its budget has reduced and it has struggled to retain staff and deploy enough contracted inspectors. The ultimate measure of the value for money of Ofsted’s inspection of schools is the impact it has on the quality of education, relative to the cost. Ofsted’s spending on school inspection has fallen significantly but it does not have reliable information on efficiency. It also has limited information on impact. Until Ofsted has better information it will be unable to demonstrate that its inspection of schools represents value for money.
Passion?
The Guardian carried this interesting report in 2018:
No chief inspector of schools got off to a stickier start than Amanda Spielman. The education select committee unsuccessfully opposed her appointment in 2016 because, it thought, she lacked not just teaching experience but “passion”.“It is not a job where you simply throw opinions around,” she told the MPs. When one committee member said the chief inspector should be “a crusader for high aspirations and standards”, she replied that “when you start crusading you can often lose track of … objectivity, honesty and integrity”. She does not regret that comment. “The last thing a chief inspector should be is a crusader,” she tells me when we meet at Ofsted’s headquarters in London. “I think the sector is pretty exhausted by an awful lot of crusader language.”
Yet crusading is precisely what critics now accuse her of. When Neena Lall, head of St Stephen’s, an east London primary school, banned girls under eight from wearing a hijab, Spielman leapt to her defence despite parents and community leaders forcing the ban’s reversal. Even more remarkably, she sent inspectors to the school to show solidarity. “School leaders,” she said subsequently, “must have the right to set school uniform policies … to promote cohesion … Ofsted will always back heads who take tough decisions in their pupils’ interests.” Spielman pointedly called on “others in government” to give similar backing. “Muscular liberalism”, she said, was needed “to tackle those who actively undermine fundamental British values”.
This is a nice example of how regulators are often forced to tread quite narrow lines, and will quickly be criticised if they step either side of them. In general, though, I think Ms Spielman was right when she cautioned against any regulator becoming a crusader - as her experience in East London maybe shows.