How using headteachers as Ofsted inspectors puts accountability at risk

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/oct/18/headteachers-ofsted-inspectors-accountability

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Lack of distance and accusations of cosiness between inspectors and those being inspected have always been an issue in the regulation of public services. Setting the need to recruit individuals who understand their area and can communicate judgments with clarity and credibility against the need for inspectors to remain impartial and objective – which means stepping out of their role as practitioners and into the role of inspectors – has traditionally been a precarious balancing act.

In the period leading up to the appointment of Sir Michael Wilshaw in January 2012, Ofsted came in for a good deal of public criticism – that inspectors were out of touch, and that some had little idea of current practice in education, having been out of schools for far too long. This, and the need to justify the agency’s vast budget by making the link between school improvement and inspection a little less tenuous, prompted a consolidated drive to recruit more in-service heads from outstanding and good schools to act as part-time inspectors.

On the surface, the move to bring in practising heads did appear to have a number of advantages: their current role as leaders in outstanding and good schools would make them well placed to sit in judgment on their peers; their credibility could not be called into question, as was the case previously; and their ability to communicate should, in theory, make it much easier for them not only to convey their judgments but also to persuade schools that these were fair and unbiased – one of the key elements of a good inspector, according to research in the area.

But this innovation has been introduced against a background of change, prompted by a government drive to encourage as many schools as possible to convert to academy status, combined with a rise in the number of free schools and considerable cuts in the education support budgets of many local education authorities.

In many cases this has resulted in the lack of a middle tier of accountability, with many schools reporting directly to the education secretary, a move that, in practice, has rendered many schools unaccountable. These changes also went hand in hand with the introduction of a new inspection framework which Wilshaw himself declared to be “far tougher”, confirming the English schools inspection regime as one of the most high-stakes in Europe.

In the haste to introduce headteachers as inspectors into this regime, there appears to have been little heed paid to the known risks or to learn from the experiences of other countries, such as Sweden. Sweden now appoints legal and research professionals as inspectors, following a number of instances in which education professionals had become a little “too cosy” with schools being inspected. These risks are known to increase in high-stakes regimes, such as England’s, which have the power to effect school closure or takeover following negative judgments. This, combined with the lack of a middle tier of democratic accountability, leaves such a system open to abuses.

Research has also revealed that the identity of a strong and effective professional – such as that possessed by the head of an outstanding school – cannot just be shrugged off for a couple of days while carrying out inspection.

These identities are strong, and common sense would tend to indicate that an individual is much more likely to protect the interests of their full-time role, particularly if forced to choose between that and a part-time occupation. According to research into inspector training and development, a good part of the process is spent in persuading trainees to leave the “baggage” – their assumptions gained during a lifetime of teaching and headteaching – behind. That reflects just how strong these affiliations are.

In the field of compulsory education, the changes I have talked about have, in many cases, destroyed or eroded the boundaries that existed previously between schools and business interests, between accountability layers and layers of professional influence. In many cases, this erosion has resulted in power being concentrated in the hands of very few.

As research reports, any successful form of public-service regulation needs boundaries – firm boundaries between those subject to regulation and those tasked with carrying out the work. Any such system should be designed with this in mind. As the changes begin to bed in, we begin to see how a lack of consideration of these factors is capable of compromising and undermining the public and democratic accountability of our schools.

Jacqueline Baxter of the Open University is the author of An Independent Inspectorate? Addressing the Paradoxes of Educational Inspection in 2013