Academies Bill [HL]

I support much of what my noble friend has said. It is desperately important to have proper monitoring of what is going on in these new and very innovative schools and to have feedback, not only to the schools—I will come to what my noble friend said about the positive nature of the feedback that is needed, which I agree with him about—but also to the Secretary of State. Ministers need to know how well the experiment is going and what adjustments are needed from time to time. I wholly agree with my noble friend that the current Ofsted system is not what is needed and not what we are asking for. It seems to have put everything into one rather unsatisfactory basket. Ofsted inspects for health and safety issues and can fail a school on the height of its security fence. That is not the professional judgment of educational experts. The people who should be doing the assessment of the school’s success and innovation should be people who were successful professional teachers who know what they are talking about. Popping in to see whether health and safety rules are being obeyed or whether security is being maintained is not what an educationalist should be doing. There should be a firm and distinct line between that kind of inspection and the professional judgments that my noble friend so well described. It is important that we have a cadre of people who are constantly in touch with schools. I say to my noble friend that we need more than simply a once-a-year report. Somebody should keep in touch with the school on a fairly regular basis and go in from time to time to be a shoulder on which the head can—one hopes not cry—pour out her or his ideas, thoughts and problems when they arise, and provide wisdom and judgment. As my noble friend said, they also need to be a sounding board so that the Secretary of State and Ministers can understand what is really happening in these innovative and exciting academies. I confess to a certain nostalgia. The kind of system that my noble friend described existed not only under the FEFC but in the long-ago days before the 1990s—indeed, up to 150 years before—when Her Majesty’s inspectors were deployed throughout the country on a geographical basis. Although local district inspectors worked nationally and immediately reported back to the centre—to Ministers and so on—providing that vital sounding board and information so that Ministers could know what was going on in the system, they were also each in charge of a group of schools that they inspected fully and fairly regularly over a period of time. That is a much more professional model. I do not wish to be nostalgic about the 1980s or the 1970s, or even the 1880s and 1890s, but there are lessons to be learnt from the way in which Her Majesty’s inspectorate worked before Ofsted was created that might very well fit the pattern of academies now and would get us away from this awful mechanical going in, ticking boxes and prejudging whether things are happening. Sometimes the joy of inspection is finding things that you had never thought of and never expected; they were not on the list of boxes that you had to tick but were happening and were successful in a rather wonderful way. A good inspector would go into a school to learn as well as to teach. A good inspector would go in to be told what was happening and not always to tell. Long, long ago, when I first became one of Her Majesty’s inspectors, my lovely mentor used to say to me, "We always look for the growth points". In the least successful school, there are always such growth points. Ofsted, sadly, has turned far more into a body that looks for the negative points—the things that are not going well—and for reasons to fail a school, rather than a body that encourages, develops, helps, listens and all the things that my noble friend has suggested.