Cuts to Ofsted and longer gaps between inspections have increased the risk of schools gaming the system, the chief inspector has admitted.
Giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee this afternoon, Amanda Spielman also said she would like Ofsted to be able to carry out longer inspections of schools.
MPs questioned her about one-day inspections of schools that are rated ‘good’, which were introduced in September 2015.
Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: “What I’m hearing from this whole exchange we’ve been having is that your resources are being cut, inspections have been shortened, and the interval between inspections has been extended.
“So doesn’t that give rise to a regime where the school can game the system by doing things like having a narrower curriculum, not putting pupils in for the more challenging subjects, and isn’t this likely to give us a narrower and narrower education system?”
In response, Ms Spielman admitted that “there is that risk”.
However, she added: “We have various kinds of system that help us to pick up some of the things that schools may do that are undesirable from a parent point of view, from an education point of view, and from a safeguarding point of view, but they can’t pick up everything that happens.”
She told MPs that she was using Ofsted’s “considerable soft power” to tell schools it will be focusing more on the curriculum in the future.
Later, Sir Geoffrey asked whether “resource constraints [are] forcing you into a one-day inspection regime when you would rather be in a two-day inspection regime more often”.
Ms Spielman responded that, “without a doubt, we would prefer to be able to do more longer inspections where we can do more to satisfy the desire for the conversation that contributes to improvement, to the desires of teachers and the desire of parents”.
Committee chair Meg Hillier also raised concerns about the “rife” use of misleading statistics by schools to paint themselves in a good light to parents.
She said: “It’s quite shocking, isn’t it, that our education system manages to do cod statistics quite a lot of the time”.
She said: “Schools present their data in incredibly poor ways: statistically not valid, poor comparators. Anyone who doesn’t understand numbers would perhaps not realise the lies that come through because the statistics are presented very badly.”
DfE permanent secretary Jonathan Slater said that Advertising Standards Authority regulations “apply to schools as much as any other organisation”.
Julia Kinniburgh, the DfE’s director of accountability, curriculum and qualifications, added that the DfE had been trying to promote its performance tables more widely.
