Zoe Williams states that the problem with Ofsted “is the fact that the entire culture – targets and terror, name and shame, compete and count – discourages what education thrives upon: trust, cooperation, participation” (The entire schools inspection culture is the problem, 20 October). As the union representing Ofsted inspectors, we would agree that education thrives upon trust, cooperation, participation, but dispute that the culture of inspection is one of targets and terror, name and shame, compete and count. Inspection plays a critical role in driving up standards in education. Inspectors are civil servants – politically impartial and appointed under authority of the crown – who work hard to ensure that inspections are conducted robustly and independently within the legal responsibilities laid down by parliament. That is why they believe passionately that Ofsted must inspect every institution without fear or favour, and must continue to guard against politicisation.
Driving up standards in education is rightly at the forefront of most political agenda but it can often be deeply divisive: like most public-sector organisations, Ofsted is neither perfect nor dysfunctional. It’s time to recognise the vital work undertaken every day by these dedicated, passionate public servants who work countless unpaid hours to deliver high-quality inspections in the interest of the nation’s children. Perhaps fingers also need to be pointed at politicians and commentators whose agendas are not progressed by a balanced and evidence-based debate.
Dave Penman
General secretary of the FDA, the union representing senior staff in Ofsted, including Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMI)
• Zoe Williams is right to identify that competition is the driving force behind Ofsted, but needs to place its creation in a historical context. In the 80s, the Tories had ambitions not just to privatise the provision of schools, the first stage of which was the introduction of the Local Management of Schools, but also to give each parent a monetary voucher to be spent in whichever school they chose. While the voucher system proved unworkable, the concept of a market was introduced though the notion of “parental choice”, which in turn required criteria upon which such choice could be made. These were introduced in the form of the common curriculum for all schools (except private ones), constant national testing and league tables, with Ofsted created to rate each school on a standardised scale.
As has been pointed out repeatedly by reputable academics ever since, the whole system is ruthlessly based on the demands of free-market economics at the expense of the educational wellbeing of our children. And it is to the eternal shame of Labour and the Liberal Democrats that they have complied in not just the perpetuation of such an iniquitous and damaging system but continue to advocate its expansion.
Colin Burke
Manchester
• Zoe Williams’ important and perceptive article highlights that “competition can only be fostered in a world of constant measurement”. True, but what is unfortunately not widely recognised is that Ofsted’s approach to measurement is fundamentally flawed. As a physicist and, until recently, a parent governor for my children’s primary school, I have been appalled at the level of statistical innumeracy at the core of Ofsted’s methods.
A key example is Ofsted’s Data Dashboard, which governors are expected to use to inform their decision-making. Remarkably, the dashboard provides no information at all on the statistical reliability of the data – schools are compared and ranked with no indication of the extent to which the variations can be explained by natural statistical fluctuations. Often, the year-to-year fluctuations within a single school are larger than the variation between so-called “similar” schools (and the methods behind identifying “similar” schools are far from robust and well-established).
We teach our first year physics undergraduates that to make a measurement without including an estimate of the error bars is, to quote Wolfgang Pauli slightly out of context, “not even wrong”. One can only imagine what the famously irascible Pauli would have made of Ofsted’s abuse of data.
Philip Moriarty
School of physics and astronomy, University of Nottingham
• Zoe Williams perfectly illustrates the fundamental flaw in so much of social policy – if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count. Or expressing the McNamara fallacy: you start by measuring what is valuable and end up only valuing what is measurable.
Rick Hall
Nottingham
• After 22 years of doubtful practice and constant moving of goalposts, it is time to abolish Ofsted and re-empower local authorities with local advisers and inspectors who understand the neighbourhood problems of difficult schools. Put the £70m released by ending Ofsted into a massive development of Sure Start centres, linking them to their local primary schools in order to promote language development. Over a few years this will help ensure that many more toddlers get the home support, parental interest and talking and listening skills that prepare them for making good progress in school.
Investment in the cultural as well as the physical development of the earliest years of life, through Sure Start centres, is a key to successful education for many children, and especially for those growing up in impoverished communities.
Professor Michael Bassey
Newark, Nottinghamshire
• As an ex-chief examiner and chair of an A-level board with 35 years of experience, I did not find this report surprising (Fears over poor marking as appeals for A-level and GCSE exams hit new high, 22 October) but Russell Hobby’s concern over inequities as to the ability of schools to challenge grades is disturbing. Boards do have rigorous systems to try to meet the required standards, and examiners are usually reasonably qualified and try their best but are bedevilled by restrictions of time and cost. For instance, a procedure whereby principal examiners and chiefs would laboriously go through all scripts on the borderline to make sure the grade was correct has long since been abandoned as too time consuming and expensive.
As the joint council said, most of the mark changes were “relatively small”, the vast majority of these appeals would have been covered by borderlining and schools would not have had to pay. At grade-setting meetings there is an elaborate procedure of checking scripts but not enough to time to really do it despite the appearances of so doing. Scripts that have been wrongly marked are flagged up and passed to a principal for remarking but these are only a tiny proportion of small samples so it is known that there must be others.
Marking is not an exact science in most subjects so re-marks are essential, but if the numbers are increasing it would seem the reason is more to do with time and expense than the markers and the procedures in themselves. A return to borderlining would mitigate against the observed inequities.
Susan Saunders Vosper
London
