Summerhill School, June 2000
OUTLINE OF COMPLAINT
The outline of this complaint is as follows:
INTRODUCTION
1. OFSTED v SUMMERHILL: THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISPUTE
2. EVALUATION OF HMI’s CLAIMS AGAINST SUMMERHILL AS EVIDENCED IN THE INSPECTION REPORT FOR 1-5 MARCH 1999
(a) The claim that the Inspection Report does not pass judgement on Summerhill’s unique philosophy
(b) The validity of HMI’s process of inquiry and evidence base
(c) ‘Standards’, ‘attainment’ and ‘progress’: evaluation of Summerhill by reference to ‘national’ age-based norms
(i) Normative and ipsative comparisons: national testing
(ii) Criterial and intuitive judgements
(iii) Unexplicated judgements
(iv) Absence of construct validity
(v) Unwarranted generalisations
(vi) Lack of content validity
(vii) Bias
(d) Conclusion
3. EVALUATION OF SUMMERHILL: COMPLAINTS 4 AND 6 – ‘EFFICIENT AND SUITABLE INSTRUCTION’?
(a) Complaint 6
(b) Complaint 4
(c) Conclusions
REFERENCES
APPENDICES A - H
INTRODUCTION
1. The evidence on which this Complaint is based comes from a number of sources. The first of these is an Independent Inquiry Report produced by Professor Ian Cunningham and a team of experts from education, business, and psychology. The team comprised Drs Cunningham, Gray, Honey and Rosen, two boarding school headteachers, Colin Reid and Jill Horsburgh, and Stuart Ainsworth of Strathclyde University. The ‘Report of an Inquiry into Summerhill’ (January 2000; 29 pps) is based on a 17 fieldwork days at Summerhill in November/December 1999 (Appendix A; page references in this document are from ‘Report of an Inquiry into Summerhill School – Leiston, Suffolk’ http://www.selfmanagedlearning.org/Summerhill/RepMain.htm).
2. The second source is the ‘expert witness’ account of Professor Ian Stronach and his research team. That report was based on 24 days fieldwork in December 1999/ January 2000. The team included Professors MacDonald, Torrance and Kushner, and Dr Allan. They produced a 100 page re-appraisal of the HMI Inspection and a re-evaluation of the school in terms of educational processes and outcomes (Appendix B).
3. The third source is the ‘expert witness’ statement of Dr Alan Thomas, which examined the out-of-classroom learning of pupils at the school (Appendix C). In addition, the report draws on the witness statements of Goodsman, Warder, and Butterfield (Appendices D, E and F), and makes reference to the witness statements of MacBeath, Grenyer and Phipps.
4. The fourth piece of evidence is the HMI Inspection Report (and associated documentation) on Summerhill School, March 1999, which was based on a 3-day inspection by 8 inspectors led by HMI Philip Grenyer (Appendix G). The rest of the HMI team were Chris Gould, Tim Brand, [ADD THE REST]
5. Consequent to the above inspection the Secretary of State issued a number of complaints against the school. The school appealed and a Tribunal hearing in March 2000 ended with the withdrawal of the Complaints following a negotiated settlement, an agreement whose terms are recorded in Appendix H. This current document constitutes a formal Complaint against the Ofsted inspection process. It examines the Inspection Report which followed HMI’s full inspection of Summerhill in March 1999.The report also addresses the more general nature of Ofsted inspections, since HMI inspected the school (and determined that the school fails to provide efficient and suitable instruction) by reference to guidelines published by Ofsted. These principally are the Ofsted Framework, and in the case of independent schools, the relevant guidelines in Inspecting Independent Schools: a Framework (Ofsted, 1997) and Inspecting Independent Schools: HMI Methods and Procedures (Ofsted, 1996 reprint). In turn these documents derive from an Ofsted literature on the philosophy, procedures and practice of inspection (see references and fn 2 below).
6. In summary, Summerhill’s rebuttal of these complaints is as follows.
Complaint 2 was conceded by Counsel for the Secretary of State in the first day of the Tribunal hearing. In relation to Complaints 4 and 6, in particular, the school claims that it offers an alternative approach to education, consonant with the philosophy of A.S. Neill, the wishes of the parents, and subject to the agreement of the pupils in what is held to be the ‘oldest children’s democracy in the world’. That alternative approach is based on notions of freedom of choice for pupils, the equality of children and adults in a friendly and democratically governed ‘community’, and the conviction that such liberties enable pupils to establish an authentic sense of themselves out of which emerges an intrinsic motivation to learn. The school therefore disagrees with certain aspects of the models and outcomes of education, teaching, and learning explicit or implicit in the Ofsted Framework and offers its own alternatives.
7 In particular, it is the claim of Summerhill School that there are sound educational and philosophical reasons for rejecting the Respondent’s Complaints and Remedies, arising out of HMI’s evaluation of the school, particularly in so far as they seek to deny voluntary attendance at lessons, impose compulsory assessment, insist on national norms in relation to ‘efficient’ performance, or assert ‘education’ to be a continuous, linear and teacher-led progression through a specified curriculum. Additionally, the school claims that it offers an unusually effective personal and social education to its ‘community’, and that its academic results are in any case satisfactory, in terms of pupil and parental evaluation, as well as in terms of national averages.
8. In relation to Complaints 4 and 6, the School also wishes to identify flaws in the principle and practice of this inspection that make the subsequent Complaints by the Secretary of State invalid. Consequently, in accordance with Ofsted quality assurance procedures, we ask that the report be declared ‘null and void’ (Ofsted http:/www.ofsted.gov.uk/pubs/complain/content.htm: 2).
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9. This report has four main aims:
(1) The first aim is to clarify the nature of the educational issues involved in the disagreement identified immediately above. These issues concern differing educational philosophies, as well as notions of learning, teaching, assessment and development. They are important to clarify because Ofsted and Summerhill make very different assumptions about the nature of ‘education’. Further, these assumptions affect the interpretation of the requirement that Summerhill provide ‘efficient and suitable instruction’. The second aim is to examine in detail the sorts of claims made against Summerhill school by HMI’s Inspection Report (1-5 March 1999), and to consider the validity and force of these criticisms in the light of Ofsted criteria and in the light of evidence deriving from research into the school conducted for the purpose of this Report in the period December 1999 - February 2000.
(2) The third aim is to examine Summerhill’s counter-claims, in regard to the educational nature of its aims and the practical outcomes as perceived by the school, the pupils and parents. Their validity and force will be evaluated in the light of available evidence, and contrasted with Ofsted’s findings in the 1999 Inspection Report.
(3) The final aim is to offer an overall judgement on the nature of educational aspects of the dispute and therefore on the question of whether Summerhill fails to provide efficient and suitable instruction to is pupils. It is important to note that such a judgement is limited by the amount of evidence that has been gathered. Nevertheless evidence to enable a well-founded judgement in relation to the ‘security’ of the Ofsted judgement on Summerhill, and sufficient evidence on the nature and functioning of the school to enable an informed judgement of its worth. In particular, it is worth noting that the various external evaluations involved more than twice as much fieldwork as HMI undertook in their inspection, and were conducted by independent experts in education and educational research.
We emphasize that it is our intention as a School to offer this Complaint in as objective a manner as possible. In this we are fortunate, since two separate external evaluations of Summerhill have recently been conducted as a result of the Secretary of State’s issue of a Notice of Complaint. The Independent Inquiry Report by Professor Cunningham offered a counter-evaluation to that performed by HMI. In addition, Professor Stronach undertook a critical analysis of the HMI Inspection, as well as gathering data on school processes and outcomes. This Complaint is based largely on his findings, which have been altered only in so far as the School wanted to add to or subtract from his evidence and conclusions. In a similar way, this report has drawn greatly on the findings of Cunningham and his team, and on Thomas’ ‘expert witness’ statement. It is, therefore, a research-based analysis of the ‘security’ of the Ofsted verdict, drawing on much more evidence than the HMI team were able to draw, and offering a professional judgement against the inspection process that is also based on considerable expertise. We have adopted this strategy in order that this Complaint will be seen to be well-founded, disinterested, and undeniable.
1. OFSTED v SUMMERHILL: THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISPUTE
Ofsted and Summerhill are united in at least three things. They believe in the education of the whole child (cognitive, personal, social, moral, cultural etc). They aim for the realisation of the child’s ‘full potential’. They expect that a major outcome of such education should be the ‘active citizen’ participating constructively and productively in social, economic and cultural life[1]. But they see the realisation of these aims in diametrically opposed ways. What are the main differences?
(a) The Ofsted ‘Framework’ for the evaluation of schools is centred on teaching as the key intervention. It is preoccupied with instructional theory, based on the systematic teaching of knowledge and skills. It is teaching-centred in its focus:
(i) ‘Teaching is the major factor contributing to pupils’ attainment, progress and response’ (Ofsted 1995: 43, 71). Inspection should ‘concentrate particularly on the quality of teaching’ (Ofsted 1995: 1). Inspectors should ‘focus on teaching to explain why pupils achieve as they do’ (Ofsted 1998: 5). That priority is also clear in the document relating specifically to the inspection of independent schools (Ofsted 1997: 17)[2] where HMI are enjoined to evaluate quality in terms of the ‘extent to which teaching meets the needs of all pupils’.
(ii) The Ofsted ‘framework’ (Ofsted 1995) refers to the ‘quality of education’ (5.1) and immediately translates that into ‘the quality of teaching’ (5.1). The Education Act’s criterion of efficient and suitable ‘instruction’ is re-expressed as ‘efficient and suitable full-time education’ by the DfEE (letter, 29.12.97). The words ‘education’, ‘instruction’ and ‘teaching’ are thus used somewhat interchangeably.
(iii) Ofsted criteria offer 18 elements concerning teaching, formal curriculum and assessment, and 4 concerning personal, social, religious and cultural development (Ofsted 1997). It is also significant that Ofsted address ‘education’ - a matter of ‘standards’ and ‘quality’ - somewhat separately from issues of ‘development’ , which is used to express religious, moral, personal, social and cultural learning (Ofsted 1995, 1997).
(iv) The HMI involved in the inspection of Summerhill (March 1999) also believe that successful learning is essentially a matter of good teaching: ‘Where the teaching is particularly stimulating (...) good attitudes to learning are promoted’ (HMI Report 1999: 35). The HMI Report offered 11 sections on teaching and formal curriculum, and 3 on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (see 40 - 53).
(b) In contrast, the Summerhill model is child-centred in terms of learning and development. It prioritises the child’s current needs, and sees motivation to learn and subsequent learning as ‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’:
(i) ‘Education is much wider than school subjects’ (Neill 1945: 7)[3]
(ii) ‘Only through free, imaginative play can a child develop the skills needed for adulthood’ (Neill, cited in ‘A brief history of Summerhill’)
(iii) ‘Summerhill runs on the principle that if the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself’ (Neill, 13.1.72)
(iv) ‘One cannot teach anything of importance (...) to love, to have charity.’ (Neill 13.1.72)
(v) It is essential to allow children ‘to define who they are and what they want to be’ (Summerhill General Policy Statement)
(vi) The 4 aims of the school are: ‘to allow children freedom to grow emotionally; to give children power over their own lives; to give children the time to develop naturally; to create a happier childhood by removing fear and coercion by adults’ (‘A brief history of Summerhill’: 2)
(vii) Consequently, the school argues that it does not ‘agree with the inspectors’ judgements about provision because the beliefs that underlie their judgements are not ones that the school believes in.’
(c) The Ofsted model of educational progress is based on a progression of key stages. Learning is seen as continuous, linear, and progressive. Questions of pace, progress, and outcome are measured through comparison with other pupils, schools and educational systems:
(i) The Ofsted Framework identifies targets of attainment at key stages 2, 4 and 6. These concepts are central to the notion of progression embedded in the National Curriculum. They also connect with National Targets for Education and Training (Ofsted 1997: 4.1). The concepts of ‘attainment’ and ‘progress’ relate to comparisons with ‘national standards and expectations’ (1995: 43; 1997). Key indicators of attainment are typically expressed thus: ‘At the end of Key Stage 2: proportion of pupils attaining Level 4 or above in the specified subjects or attainment targets’ (Ofsted 1997: 13). The National Curriculum is used as a reference point.
(ii) The 1999 HMI Inspection Report on Summerhill stressed the need to ‘ensure that all pupils are fully engaged in study across a broad and balanced curriculum throughout their time in school’ (16); the Report, and the School Profile (called the Record of Evidence in the case of maintained schools) on which it was based, make frequent reference to failures to meet ‘national expectations’ or ‘standards’ (e.g. 22; 25; 27; 60; 62)
(d) The Summerhill model of educational development, on the other hand, is voluntary, discontinuous and transformative[4]. Pupils come to a realisation of themselves and their wants, and may only then become authentically-motivated, enthusiastic learners. Progress is valued as an individual rather than a comparative matter. Assessment criteria, therefore, are ipsative (referring to individual progress) rather than normative (comparing performance in relation to a relevant cohort).