SELF-EVALUATION AND INSPECTION: a consultation response

John MacBeath

As recently appointed HMCI David Bell has published new proposals on the future of inspection focusing on its relationship with schools and in particular on the future role for school self-evaluation.

The new proposals rest on a number or key considerations

  • A recognition of the need for change
  • Better value for money
  • A more integrated and coherent system
  • An acknowledgement of time and energy wastage in long advance notice
  • A better relationship with the teaching profession
  • A recognition of leading practice in schools’ own self-evaluation
  • Seeing schools as they really are

‘Build on success but make changes’

OFSTED has raised the profile of quality issues and importance of data and contributed to a dialogue about learning and teaching. It has helped to heighten an awareness of accountability. This contribution has, however, often been overshadowed by the means employed to challenge practice. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message “ is relevant to any new approach.

The use of media, and the tabloid press in particular, to convey bad news about schools and the teaching profession is a legacy which the new regime must work hard to counter.

Seeing schools as they really are

This is a sincerely held view of David Bell’s. It is a laudable and worthwhile. But it is also naïve in a context where inspections carry high stakes for schools and teachers and where the press for accountability overshadows the improvement motive. It also assumes that inspectors are able not only to ‘see’ schools as they are but are able to tell the story in ways that depict the complexity, vitality and dynamic of a school’s character. Snapshots are by nature limited by both frame and focus.

How schools ‘really are’ can be captured most truthfully by self-evaluation which is ongoing, embedded in the day-to-day life of classrooms and schools and involves the range of perspectives of those who make schools work.

Trust

“It is time to trust schools more’. This is an implicit acknowledgement of lack of trust in the profession which was so deeply damaging in the Woodhead era. Rebuilding trust takes a great deal of time. It cannot neither be mandated nor promised without attention to some residual flaws in the system. Trust has an intimate relationship with power and the use of power. Trust builds from a sense of reciprocity –what the Dutch researcher Van Leeuw calls the ‘me too-you too’ principle. Without this principle ‘calculative trust’ replaces “professional trust’. The former starts from a position of apprehension and a wary testing of the relationship. The latter starts from a position of professional respect in which there is a genuine sense of dialogue.

A new equilibrium in the power relationship between schools and OFSTED must start from the premise of professional trust and genuine dialogue.

Short notice

Short notice for inspections appears to be broadly welcomed by teachers and headteachers. Primarily this is relative to the longer notice which in the past has built up such a level of stress that teacher illness and absenteeism followed in its wake. With an extended period of notice schools were tempted to put in place a whole range of tactical measures, decoration and cosmetic face lifts, rehearsing and coaching pupils, rerunning successful lessons, and in extreme cases, ‘borrowing; teachers from other schools, and sending troublesome children off on external courses. Short notice has its own drawbacks – such as difficulty in planning parent meetings for example – and will not remove the apprehension that may occur as the window within the planning cycle looms closer. If it means schools being in a state where they are confident to receive inspectors at any time this is to be welcomed. If, however, their readiness is dominated by presentational issues it may prove inimical to the deeper purposes of the school.

There is a clear logic to short notice for an inspection visit as long as it does not imply a state of continuous high alert.

The three year cycle

While inspections are to be less extensive they are to be more frequent. This does not square easily with a cost saving that might divert funding to school self-evaluation. Nor will it be welcomed by teachers for whom inspection and the impending promise of inspection will be always on the horizon. Rather than conveying a message of confidence in schools’ capacity of rigorous self-evaluation it signals a lack of trust that self-evaluation is truly valued. .

The commitment to a three year cycle needs to be re-examined both in terms of value-for-money and in respect of the potential damage it may do to the building of a new relationship with schools.

The parent factor

‘Parents have had more information about schools than ever before’. This is true, but the nature of the information has been dubious and in many cases damaging. Our research, our ongoing contact with teachers and parents through conferences and workshops reveals an obsession with levels and grades that undermines parent-teacher dialogue and skews school choice.

There is clear evidence too that information and reporting policy has also served to widen the gap between the most knowledgeable and ambitious of parents and those with least reserves of social capital. Draining schools of those parents most likely to be supportive of their children also erodes the social capital of the school. ‘Special measures’ and ‘serious weakness’ fall most heavily on these disenfranchised schools

Inspection cannot compensate for flawed policy. It may, however, exacerbate its worst effects.

Reports to parents and school profiles

“There is a need to report sharply and intelligently to parents’ says the OFSTED consultation document. What is reported to parents and how it is reported does indeed hold the key to school quality, effectiveness and improvement. ‘Intelligent’ reporting seeks the balance between what is important to schools and what is important to parents, rather than both being locked into other political agendas. Issues that were in the past of interest and concern to parents have largely been submerged by a performance-dominated agenda. For parents, issues of care, enjoyment of learning, emotional security, supportive relationships, have had to give precedence to an overriding press for attainment. Parents often find themselves caught between a need to push their children to work harder while resenting the testing pressure that starts too early, fosters anxiety and in now unrelenting through the whole of their child’s school career.

Schools can change how they report to parents and the nature of the school-home dialogue but only in climate in which there is congruence between what schools, governments and parents value.

School profiles

‘By September 2005, we want schools to have a Profile that reflects the breadth and depth of what they do’ suggest David Miliband. .Many schools now have sophisticated brochures and websites presenting images of their school life in words pictures and assessment data. This kind of multi--media presentations provide a useful starting point for profiling and reporting to parents with a ‘sharper’ focus on what counts as ‘evidence’, contextualising and balancing assessment data with other data. Taking OFSTED s own four key elements of ‘standards’, ‘leadership’, ‘quality of education provided’. ‘moral and spiritual development’,

  • How children are learning and how the school supports children in evaluating their own learning across the whole range of the curriculum
  • Examples of changes in school practice through evidence-based inquiry into what teachers and pupils find most engaging and effective.
  • The evidence for moral and spiritual development through the range of the school’s activities
  • Opportunities for the exercise of leadership at all levels within the school with evidence as to outcomes of shared leadership

Profiles have the potential to reframe the way in which schools evaluate themselves and report on their successes and challenges. This cannot happen unless the high stakes consequences of inspection are removed and inspection reports cease to be seen as the ultimate arbiters of school quality.

Consideration of views of learners

There is mounting evidence that learners’ views are at the kernel of evaluation rather than an extra to be taken into account. Reluctance to consult pupils stems from a view that their insights are partial, subjective, sometimes intended to please and often without the vocabulary to express deeper insights. Experienced and prescient connoisseurs, it is argued, are better placed to get a whole, more disinterested picture. While this has a large degree of self-evident truth, research into pupil voice has demonstrated and the importance of purpose and climate. Leading-edge practice in self-evaluation shows that pupils have a keen sense of audience and understand the difference between a developmental and an accountability purpose. Where there is a climate of trust with their teachers they will give their honest opinions but will also temper what they reveal to an inspection team. Self-evaluation is greatly enhanced in a climate where pupils develop confidence that their views will be heard, and when they are equipped with a vocabulary and accessible tools with which to express their views. This takes time to build and is helped immeasurably by the support of an external critical friend.

Pupils can play an in important and integral role in school self-evaluation when there is a climate of trust and pupils see their contributions as for their teachers rather than for an external source.

Short sharp review

‘Lighter’ and shorter inspections are generally welcomed by teachers but there are inherent contradictions in the notion of ‘sharp’. There was a strength in inspections which provided a more complete picture with a wider focus than so-called ‘key’ areas. This new sharper emphasis seems to be reflect a policy which has narrowed the curriculum, marginalised important aspects of school life and is hard to reconcile with the rhetoric of teaching ‘centred upon the individual child’, where a “curriculum meets the needs of all learners’ and ‘all learners are effectively supported’. It is an important reminder of the’ collateral damage’ on the curriculum reported by external evaluators of the Literacy Strategy.

There was a telling phrase from a pupil interviewed in the 1995 school self-evaluation project

“I used to feel that this school cared about how well I was doing. Now I just think it cares about how well it’s doing” (MacBeath, 1999, p.55 ).

That this insight comes within a context of a school’s own self-evaluation conveys a powerful message. With the fine-tuning of self-evaluation which is able to hear the quiet voice these deeply important issues may be addressed . But nothing will change if self-evaluation is narrowly conceived and is bent to a set of pre-determined criteria. The premise of shorter sharper inspections is that schools engage in ‘rigorous’ self-evaluation. ‘Rigour’ is however, a mischievous word and needs to be understood in less mechanistic terms.

At the heart of both external and internal evaluation is concern for evidence. What counts as ‘evidence' in both of these contexts needs to be the examined with the ‘rigour’ that OFSTED advocates.

‘A focus on outcomes’

The singular emphasis on outcomes runs counter to a more learner-centred, needs-centred approach. Outcomes as currently conceived tell a small and sometimes misleading part of the story. They are embedded in a testing paradigm, a normative or comparative view of achievement and in their current form simply cannot reflect what matters to many young people, their parents other their teachers. The evidence is clear. What young people leaving school take with them is much more about the process of their learning than its measured outcomes. This is why governments are now interested in learning how to learn because this is what is most likely to serve young people well when school lessons are well behind them.

We must not abandon outcomes but develop a more critical appraisal of what they currently are and a more intelligent view of what they ought to be.

Accountability and improvement

Accountability and improvement have proved to be uneasy bedfellows. The call for ‘intelligent accountability’ is to be welcomed because it acknowledges the tension between formative and summative purposes. This tension is not resolved bur rather heightened in the following statement from David Miliband’s North of England speech:

‘To fulfil all of these requirements, the data upon which we base our accountability mechanisms must reflect our core educational purposes. They must be seen to be objective. And they must allow for clear and consistent comparison of performance between pupils and between institutions.’

While all teachers will assent to accountability as reflecting core educational purposes, these cannot be ‘objective’, ‘consistent ‘and ‘comparative between institutions’ without seriously distorting educational purposes.

Intelligent accountability grows from and is led by educational purposes. Unintelligent accountability imposes criteria constraining of, and antithetical to, educational purposes. The move from the latter to the former is perhaps the most significant challenge faced by DfES and OFSTED.

A question of resources

The new proposal rests on the premise that ‘resources are adequate’. With the potential for substantial financial savings on external inspection there is now an opportunity for resources to flow more into support for self-evaluation. Classrooms are better equipped than they ever have been and technology allows the collection, storing and retrieval of data much more efficiently than in the past. In schools with resident expertise or effective consultancy these data may be put to selective, critical and intelligent use. There is a danger that information-rich technology diverts attention from the very core of self-evaluation which lies in the day-to-day transaction in the classroom. There is now a wealth of experience of teacher-friendly tools, processes of consultation with pupils, pupil feedback on the quality of teaching, and other protocols which can inform and improve practice. These do not enjoy wider currency, on the one hand because of other pressures, and on the other hand because the key resources of time, support and collegial networking are at a premium.

Resources for self-evaluation need to be such that they help teachers focus on what really matters.

Who inspects?

There was a time when school inspectors were HMI. The move to contracted and registered inspectors changed assumptions as to who was competent to comment on school quality. The extension of inspection teams to lay inspectors broadened the concept further. While the quality of lay inspectors has been uneven this also holds true for OFSTED teams and for HMI and indeed, accounts for much of the adverse response to OFSTED and HMI visits. In all of this little thought has been given to the inclusion of classroom teachers. There are strong arguments for their inclusion in inspection teams as they can bring a particular expertise and credibility to the task. It is possible to envisage a time when teachers constitute a majority on an inspection team in a situation where improvement takes precedence over accountability. The argument for senior pupils to be part of the inspection team has been argued by a previous HMCI in Scotland after seeing evidence of the access that young people can get to their peers. They carry a ‘passport’ that allows them to gain entry with their peers in a trusting relationship and accessible language register

If inspection is to lose the unfortunate connotations of that term it may be helped by more radical thinking about the composition and expertise of ‘inspection’ teams.

Critical friends

There is no mention in the OFSTED consultation of critical friends. However, David Miliband in his North of England speech gives a central role to critical friends ‘building a new relationship with schools’.. Their role is envisaged as ‘to act as a critical friend to the school and be authorised to approve - on behalf of the LEA and DfES - the performance targets set by the Head and Governing Body of the school.’ Conveying approval on behalf of DfES or the LEA runs counter to what has been learned over many years about the role of critical friends and their contribution to school improvement. There are three essentials in the relation: one, that school feel free to choose their own critical friend: two, that he or she is there ‘for the school’ in a trusted but challenging relationship: three, that the focus of his/her work is broadly concerned with improvement and not constrained by targets and predetermined agendas. Critical friends cannot operate in a climate of trust when they are there to ‘approve’ practice on behalf of an external agency. By contrast, when it is for the school’s own benefit challenge is offered in a supportive context.

While consultant leaders is a forward looking initiative it will fail if more informed consideration is not given to the role, purpose. and appointment of critical friends