Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I apologise if the wording of my amendment is not exact. It is merely there to bring up the subject of inspections and to make it clear that I want them to be regular, not just every five years or so. There is a good model of how this could be done. Every year, we are retiring a few thousand headmasters and deputy headmasters who have immense experience and the ability to judge a school pretty rapidly—the good ones. They know how to read a school, how a school works and what to look for. They have the ability to be immensely supportive and they are not that expensive because they have pensions. They have a commitment to the job and all they want is a reasonable return for the effort that they are putting in. If we were to say £300 a day, that might be a figure with some echoes—we do it for that. It should not surprise us that heads and others with a real vocation and dedication to helping other people are prepared to work and put in similar effort for a similar amount of money. You are not looking at a lot of money. You are looking at people whom parents and heads naturally trust. You are starting off on a pretty good basis if you are staffing your inspectorate with that sort of people. These people could go once a year into every school—and I do say "every school". What is the point of an inspectorate not visiting outstanding schools? How are inspectors ever going to learn what best practice is if they never go into the best schools? Part of the point of an inspectorate ought to be spreading good practice. They should be there to say, "This is what I saw the other day", or, "Why don’t you talk to him or her about that because they seem to be getting it right?". If all you are doing is going round the schools that are not performing well, all you can do is spread bad practice. To be an effective inspector, you need to be in touch with good practice and with what is going on in the world of good schools. A simple report to parents—a paragraph or so, to say that since the last inspection report things are progressing, this is particularly good, there is still a bit of trouble on that but, overall, we are happy—is what parents need to know that they can take a baseline from the previous Ofsted report, read through it, know that things have improved or are much as they were and take a reasonable decision. Most schools with a head who is open to ideas will benefit enormously from having someone such as that around. Once schools have come to trust the system, you would find that they were asking for extra days. When I was a governor of a college under the old FEFC system, we were looking to have these people in more often. We would say, "We’re not doing what we should do in biology. Let’s get the biology man around to give us an extra bit of help there". Schools, particularly primary schools, are little, isolated, lonely places. They want support and they want to have contact with people who can provide that support and good ideas. At the moment, all we have is the school improvement partner system, which is too low level and local. We would do much better if we moved to making that part of the inspection system. I think that we could run that bit of the inspection system for about £10 million a year and have a report on every school, every year. Over and above that, you obviously need a full inspection system. Every now and again, you need to go in and do the whole works. Even if you are quite generous on the budget and say that you will spend 10 man-days on average every five years, that will cost you only £20 million or so. Then you have the central system over that. There is an enormous obsession with data in the current central system. Collecting the data imposes immense burdens on schools. Teachers worry about measuring every aspect of every child’s performance because the school improvement partner or the inspector may pick them up on this or that, which is not constructive. You do not need to look at data on that level. Any mathematician will tell you that, apart from in pure mathematics, figures are always wrong. Figures do not provide value on their own; they provide value only in relation to what is happening on the ground. Inspections should be about the human aspect of schools: the quality of the teaching; the quality of the atmosphere; the staff; and the relationships in the school. They are things that numbers never throw any light on, although numbers can be useful in confirming what is happening. If we were to budget £50 million a year for Ofsted as a whole, that would be enough. We could then perhaps devote another £50 million to the same organisation, perhaps, if it was running well and was focused on supporting schools that were having a hard time, bringing them round and making them straight—if it was picking up schools that had scored four and setting them right—which needs a lot of concentrated help and advice very fast. That would still be half the current budget, but it would provide about 10 times the value. I beg to move.