Public sector accountability

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Introduction

Three main forms of public sector accountability impact on schools in England: the use of performance tables, the inspection system, and markets and contestability.

Performance tables were introduced, it is claimed, to facilitate parental and pupil ‘choice’ as part of a national framework for school and teacher accountability. They are published annually.

The OFSTED inspection system is linked strongly to school and college self-evaluation and is designed to be proportionate to risk, with more frequent inspections for institutions that are perceived to be failing or coasting, and less frequent inspections for those institutions deemed to be outstanding or good. School and college inspections are of one or two days’ duration, with smaller inspection teams, and a shorter notice period before an inspection takes place.

Most schools are inspected on a three-year cycle, although schools causing concern and some schools judged to be satisfactory may be inspected more frequently. In preparation for inspections schools are expected to seek parents’ and pupils’ views of the school through the use of a questionnaire, which is followed by a brief letter to pupils from the inspectorate outlining the main findings of the inspection, and the distribution of the full inspection report to all parents.

The introduction of market mechanisms and contestability into public service provision is, it is claimed, designed to facilitate ‘choice’ for consumers and users of services, encourage public sector providers to compete for ‘customers’ and contracts, and, through the provider/commissioner separation of public sector services functions, facilitate the opening up of public sector services to competition from private sector companies. Choice for the consumer now appears to be central to the delivery of a modern public service. A belief that the private sector will deliver better quality services at less cost than the public sector, despite evidence to the contrary, has also seemingly taken hold.

The NASUWT Position

The NASUWT understands fully the need for schools to be accountable. The Union and its members are neither fearful of, nor would they object to, a system of effective school accountability.

Unfortunately, the universal, well-articulated, justified concerns of the NASUWT and its members about the present system are often dismissed as a fear of accountability rather than being recognised as an expression by committed professionals of a deep concern that the current system is counter-productive to the shared ambition to raise standards and provide an education service of the highest quality.

Performance league tables

The linchpin of the accountability regime is the annual league tables which encourage competition, discourage full collaboration, place schools under unacceptable pressure, cause teachers to teach to the tests and undermine their confidence in their own professional judgement. The tables feed a culture of focusing on the alleged failures of the system rather than the significant achievements of pupils and teachers: achievements which are secured despite the league tables, not because of them.

The high-stakes performance league tables, with the serious consequences for schools of perceived failure, make them at best cautious about using professional flexibility and at worst resistant, distorting and narrowing decisions about curriculum content and pedagogy.

The NASUWT believes that they are neither relevant nor effective and should be abolished.

Inspection

The OFSTED inspection system drives how teachers teach, how schools plan, promotes particular strategies and makes a pronouncement on some aspect of the education system on the basis of limited and insubstantial evidence. No-one, not even the Secretary of State, can make it revise its judgements.

Its seemingly unlimited powers to put schools into special measures and recommend their closure forces schools to conform to OFSTED’s model of teaching and learning. Even when the majority of schools reach the required high standards, the response is to raise the bar even higher. Satisfactory is no longer good enough. Schools maintaining consistently high standards are recategorised. The effect of regularly moving the goalposts to define what is satisfactory and unsatisfactory means that the information produced is increasingly unreliable and renders it impossible with any certainty to measure trends over time.

Short-notice inspections designed to remove the intense activity of preparation in the months before have resulted in too many schools placing themselves on a permanent war footing, waiting for the inspection notice.

OFSTED has led to unwieldy systems of self-evaluation, burgeoning bureaucracy, more meetings, excessive, unnecessary, and, in some cases, punitive monitoring of teachers.

A system of inspection is required that makes fair judgements based on objectively determined criteria, focuses on outcomes rather than processes, which helps schools to improve, has minimal workload and bureaucratic burdens and makes effective use of the data already available. Such a system enables, quality assures, and assists in raising standards. It should itself be subject to independent scrutiny.

Marketisation

Marketisation often equates to little more than privatisation, except that marketised approaches do not necessarily lead to public resources being sold or handed over to private interests.

Current marketisation policies include the promotion of competition between institutions through league tables; devolution and deregulation giving increased autonomy and more power to heads; purchaser/provider split, evidenced by the demise of the local authority (LA) and the LA selling of services to schools whilst having responsibility for maintaining high standards; promotion of a range of alternative providers; and academies, trusts, faith schools and opening up public services to commercial activity and sponsorship.

There is no evidence that these strategies are improving standards. As best they demonstrate only the same outcomes. At worst they are impacting negatively and are in danger of excluding and isolating the disadvantaged and vulnerable in society public services should be protecting.

The NASUWT believes that a blanket oppositional approach to any of these changes results in trade unions being sidelined and the whole debate about public services becoming negative, feeding the views of some that public services are in chaos, standards are low and clients are at risk. Instead a serious and measured debate is needed on what constitutes an appropriate role for the private sector in state education and indeed in other public services.