In Emma Seith’s article “What is the future of school inspection in Scotland?”, published last Friday, interim chief inspector Janie McManus talks about the school inspection system being “fundamentally reviewed”.
For a great many years, AHDS has been arguing for just that (though there is a strong likelihood we mean different things).
We want this review to:
- Simplify and streamline the inspection landscape.
- Take an intelligent and economical approach to providing assurance about quality.
- Move away from any “scores on the doors” forming part of any inspection reports.
What the Scottish education system absolutely does not need is more inspection. (And for those who suggest that it does, multiplying the budget of the inspectorate several times over is simply not tenable in the current budget landscape.)
Let’s start with what works well with inspections.
We have a system of school inspection that gets a broadly positive review from school leaders who have recently experienced it (aside from the huge additional workload and stress that inspection brings). They talk of fair, valuable and high-quality dialogue with inspectors.
As such, the comments that follow are not a reflection on the inspection teams who are out and about around Scotland delivering the current inspection model.
So, what are the problems?
The issue with including gradings in inspection reports is that they become a distraction that offers an easy route to simplistic and misleading assumptions about school performance. This has been talked about ad infinitum so I won’t go over the arguments again here, other than to say that AHDS agrees that gradings should not form part of inspection reporting.
Snapshot school inspections
Turning to the way the inspection system is organised, moment-in-time inspections on a sample basis have very limited value in ensuring quality or delivering improvement across the system. Schools not being inspected for the best part of two decades is a big gap in this model, but even with a generational cycle of inspections (an inspection every seven years in primary), there are huge periods of time between these measures of performance and the reports quickly go out of date.
Nurseries and nursery classes experience the opposite problem. They face inspections from the Care Inspectorate and HM Inspectorate of Education (HMIE), which both bring different expectations to inspections and different frameworks for establishments to navigate. Over-inspection is a very real issue. While work is ongoing to establish a shared inspection framework, this will not reduce the burden of such frequent inspections.
Meanwhile, we have a system that legally places the duty to ensure school quality and improvement with local authorities. What this means is that local authorities need to know their schools well, challenging them to improve and supporting them to do so. With that in mind, why on earth do we have an inspection system that ignores that local authority role and instead focuses on individual schools?
What might a better inspection approach look like?
If the goal of inspection is quality assurance and improvement, a far more effective model would be for HMIE to inspect the capacity of local authorities to know and support the improvement of their schools.
Local authorities are already responsible for supporting and improving schools. Rather than seeking to duplicate part of that function by inspecting a comparatively tiny number of schools each year, the inspectorate should seek to ensure that local authorities are discharging their duties as effectively as possible.
This respects the place of local authorities in our system and avoids unnecessary overlap between their work and that of HMIE. It would also remove the extremely high workload and pressure that goes with a school inspection, which can have a huge impact on school teams even if the report is positive.
While it might be outside the scope of the review, we would also like to see the quality assurance and inspection regime completely reimagined for early years. A primary school with a nursery class is expected to engage with inspections from Education Scotland and the Care Inspectorate as well as three self-evaluation frameworks; a nursery school has two inspectorates and two self-evaluation frameworks.
‘Huge burden’ on nurseries
This is a huge burden on leadership time in these establishments and must be addressed. The sector should be overseen by one inspectorate. If that means that local authority nursery schools and classes are overseen by a different inspectorate than other environments such as playgroups, private nurseries and childminders, then that is a complexity that should be managed at the system level rather than applying multiple scrutiny and evaluation systems to all.
Again, for local authority nurseries and nursery classes, inspection could be much more efficiently undertaken (and offer a bigger lever for improvement) if it focused on the local authority’s effectiveness in supporting, challenging and ensuring standards in these establishments.
Surely the education system, parents and pupils would be better served by an approach to inspection that avoids duplicating roles (with the Care Inspectorate and local authorities) and looks instead to ensure that those charged with ensuring quality and improvement are effectively discharging their duties?
Not only would this offer the opportunity for the activity of the inspectorate to have greater impact, it would also be cheaper to deliver.
Greg Dempster is general secretary of Scottish primary school leaders’ body AHDS
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