Children need the school inspectors back at work, and tougher than ever
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It has taken some time, but Labour has finally taken up the cause of the “ghost children”. It’s certainly a scandal. The idea of “home schooling” during lockdown was a cruel joke to those sharing one device per household, or to working single parents.
School closures sent a broader message: no one cares very much about children deemed “hard to reach”. Let them use laptops! When thousands didn’t properly come back to school, no one asked too many questions. Some 140,000 pupils were “severely absent” at the last count, twice the pre-lockdown level.
The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is now talking about this. In a speech earlier this week, she said she’d been moved by pupils telling her how lockdown inflicted pain upon schools and communities. There was the isolation, the lack of learning, the destruction of progress made in narrowing inequality. Let’s set aside the fact that Phillipson voted for the lockdowns while Keir Starmer called for them to be harder and longer. There is a dire need, now, of politicians willing to highlight the harm done – and the urgent need for repair.
Phillipson does seem quite serious. She wants a national register of children supposedly being home-schooled, something the Tories should have done long ago. She wants Ofsted, the school inspector, to monitor pupil absence. While this is already part of the process, it can be beefed up. In planning to strengthen Ofsted, rather than abolish it as some teaching unions want, she’s setting up an interesting test of Labour’s commitment to reform.
To much of the Left, Ofsted is the enemy. The suicide of a head teacher a year ago after her school was judged “inadequate” was taken by some as proof that inspections are cruel. Ofsted’s new boss, Sir Martyn Oliver, has this month halted school visits as his staff take webinar training on teacher mental health awareness and similar issues. His plan didn’t go well (the tech failed and most staff were unable to join) but he also seemed to concede a principle: that Ofsted was being too harsh. In fact, the details of the case reveal something worse.
Caversham Primary School, in Reading, had gone 13 years without an inspection under a Michael Gove policy that exempted schools once marked “outstanding” from repeat visits. When Ofsted eventually returned to Caversham, it found the education good but dangerous gaps in pupil safeguarding processes. It’s a serious issue: such rules are designed to protect those at risk of becoming “ghost children”. The school was judged “inadequate”. Its head teacher, Ruth Perry, was found dead before the verdict was published.
No one could deny that lessons need to be learnt from this tragedy. But which ones? It’s possible that the culture of Ofsted was rotten, but a survey by the National Audit Office found 84 per cent of headteachers saying the process had been fair – and teachers agreeing by almost two-to-one that the latest inspection raised standards. Most countries in the democratic world have some kind of schools inspectorate. But in almost no country are they so thinly staffed – and this is where the problem may lie.
Ofsted’s budget is now a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, relative to the schools budget. Getting through 5,000 schools a year means taking just two days for inspections. And when schools are found wanting (as one in four were last year) there’s no time or money for support or follow-up. Inspectors have no remit to offer advice or support. Their orders are to publish a brief report, keep moving and head on the next school.
So yes, Caversham primary was treated curtly. And the real scandal? So is every school. Inspectors will have about an hour, if that, to discuss what’s being done about persistent absences so the “ghost children” issue does risk being neglected. Ms Phillipson wants a list of pupil absences, which is published anyway. The harder part is to check if schools are liaising properly with parents and local authorities, doing everything they can for the “ghost children” – and getting them back to school.
This is what Ms Phillipson should be saying: that Labour will now beef up Ofsted. When it hits a problem school, the process needs to take longer. More remedies need to be suggested, support provided – and the next visit needs to be sooner. This will mean more resources: perhaps an inspector-to-schools ratio closer to that of Europe (about 18-to-1) than our current system (75-to-1).
The Conservatives had hoped that competition between schools would drive up standards. But how are parents to judge? Crude exam-result league tables are easily affected by private tutoring. Even then, schools can manipulate their place in such tables by encouraging students to take exams that they don’t really need. Ofsted knows to spot such practices, and call them out. It’s easy to game a league table, harder to game an inspection. Surveys show that, when parents choose schools, an Ofsted report is the most significant factor after location.
One recent mistake the Tories made was to place huge consequences on inspections without beefing up the actual process. That’s why headteachers are so fearful of a bad rating: it can mean being placed under control of an academy trust. So a dramatic change of management, culture, ownership – all after the verdict from a two-day visit. The consequences don’t match the resources behind the inspection.
Labour’s policy on education, like much else, is in flux. Starmer’s main idea is to start playing with the curriculum – which is a reform that the Tories unequivocally got right. His main contribution to the debate this week was to complain that British children are “smaller than Haitian children, fatter than the French and less happy than the Turks”. They’re also better-educated, relative to their international peers, than they were under Labour, as league tables attest. With far more in “outstanding” schools.
But Phillipson is sounding more like Gove in his reformist days. “It’s working-class kids who lose out when there is a failure to deliver high standards in our schools,” she said recently. “Standards is my story,” she said. In which case, a tougher and more generously funded Ofsted will have to be her policy. The unions won’t much like it. But if Phillipson is serious about “putting children first” (not always a given in education) she’ll know that there really is no alternative.
