In an editorial for the Journal of Health Services, Research and Policy in 2003, professor Onora O’Neill wrote on the question of trust: “We cannot have any accountability without some forms of trust… A quest for a trust-free world is based on fantasising that there can be an infinite regress of accountability.

“So the serious question is not whether some ways of achieving accountability are miraculously trust-free: none are. Rather we need to consider which forms of accountability are needed to support which relations of trust and which professional standards.”

After a decade of New Public Management as the narrative of public service reform, we sorely need a new narrative that puts trust in public services back at the centre of the relationship between public leaders and the state.

The infinite regress of accountability has failed us, and as Professor O’Neill states, we need to question what forms of accountability are needed to support which relations of trust and which professional standards.

The forms of accountability

Currently, the forms of accountability exist in complex relationships with each other - inspection, regulation and performance data.

But we tend, as a system, to want to focus on one of these. Currently, that focus is Ofsted and the school inspection system. Please do not get me wrong - Ofsted does need reform and chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver is entirely focused on the “what” and “how” of reform.

But we could reform Ofsted and still end up with forms of regulation and data accountability that are not optimal to relations of trust or indeed to helping us become the best system at getting better. So, we need to bring into view the whole system of accountability, not just pieces of it.

I think there is a fundamental question about whether the high-stakes nature of accountability is desirable or necessary. Accountability can be more intelligent, proportionate and compassionate.

The importance and the limits of regulation

The state must be able to act quickly on behalf of children, parents and the wider public to ensure the highest quality of education, safety and safeguarding, and enforce regularity and propriety in the use of public money. This seems to me self-evident.

However, the state does not need to exercise “blunt” regulation that always points towards some form of intervention.

The state should retain the power, ultimately, to intervene in the most serious cases of poor quality education or serious failures in safety and safeguarding. In these cases, the strong likelihood is a change in the governance of the school.

But the state can also pursue a regulatory strategy that promotes high-quality education through some softer levers that support the improvement of a school or a trust.

School improvement architecture

The Confederation of School Trusts (CST) has published a paper on what the school improvement architecture could look like. Especially in the case where a school receives a second judgment of “requires improvement”, the presumption should be testing the capacity of the body responsible for that school to improve it.

The act of regulation is complex, requiring specialist expertise. It requires consistency and the trust and confidence of the sector and the public.

To be absolutely clear, consistency and proportionality can only be achieved if regulation is done nationally. CST believes that intelligent and proportionate regulation should be the remit of a regulator that is independent of government. A bit like Ofqual.

But of course, there is a journey towards this endpoint. And we should pay attention to the journey.

A regulated sector will always find some regulatory decisions difficult. That is the nature of regulation. Where things are not right, we should work together to determine what needs to change - always with that endpoint in mind of an accountability system built on relational trust.

Professional accountability

There is one further form of accountability that is given insufficient attention in our current system - that is professional accountability to the people we serve.

I first wrote about this in a CST paper on Intelligent Systems of Accountability in 2021. The highest form of accountability is the individual’s professional accountability for the quality of their own work and to the people whom the profession serves.

Rather than accountability being perceived as something that is only externally imposed by the government, we could shift it in the direction of trust boards being ever more explicit and eloquent about their vision and the measures that will evidence success.

This will need to include the government’s performance measures but need not be constrained by them. In other words, this involves a move to measure what we value in our school or group of schools.

The trust as a protective structure

The exacting demands of the pandemic demonstrated the power that school trusts can have as protective structures. Trusts are, of course, their own legal entity and they are the employer. These are powerful levers for us.

The pressures of school inspection and external accountability can feel very hard and we have seen from data in the Wellbeing Index that some of the leaders in our school system feel stressed, anxious and lonely.

As trust leaders, we will never be able to mitigate all the stress of external accountability, but we can notice when our leaders are feeling the burden and put protections around them.

Although leading schools may feel very hard at the moment, teaching and leading continue to be one of the most important and rewarding jobs in society. Mobilising protective factors through the trust structure can help us retain our wonderful teachers and school leaders, and mitigate some of the impacts of the accountability system.

If we could harness a collective effort to secure good outcomes - alongside a shift in our accountability system towards an intelligent and compassionate system of accountability, underpinned by professional trust - we may finally have the conditions in the system to flourish.

Leora Cruddas is chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts

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