Plans for Ofsted to use a “league table” of schools’ tutoring efforts as part of its inspection work have “died”, Tes has been told.
Earlier this year, former education secretary Nadhim Zahawi wrote to headteachers about a plan for parents in England to be given access to data revealing how their school is using the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), and said the data would also be shared with the schools’ inspection watchdog.
At the time, the Department for Education said it would work with Ofsted “over the coming months on the best use of that data”, without revealing full details.
But Sandra Hayes, a senior inspector for Ofsted, told Tes that these plans had now “died” with the exit of the former education secretary, and an Ofsted spokesperson has confirmed that there are now no plans to use the data.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he was “very pleased” that the plans appeared to have been shelved, but said it would be a good thing if the “de facto league table” was “jettisoned at the same time”.
Mr Zahawi said in May that it was his intention to publish the data of each school’s involvement this autumn.
And the DfE told Tes this week that it still planned to publish this in due course, and that guidance stated that it “will be available to Ofsted to enhance transparency”.
The announcement of the so-called league table was met with anger from the school community at the time of its release, with Mr Barton saying it “smacked of political grandstanding designed to distract from the mess the government has made of the National Tutoring Programme”.
One headteacher described it as the education secretary “resorting to bullying”.
Now, Mr Barton has said that the plans to publish a league table “adds insult to injury” at a time when adoption of the NTP is “constrained” by its rules.
“The take-up of NTP is constrained by the fact that the government insists that schools must top-up tutoring by 40 per cent from their own budgets,” Mr Barton said.
“At a time when school budgets are extremely hard-pressed, this requirement is not only nonsensical but inequitable as it is most likely to be a barrier in schools facing the greatest financial challenges. To then publish a league table simply adds insult to injury,” he added.
‘A blunt tool’
There are only two references to “tutoring” in the current Ofsted school inspection handbook, including one that says that inspectors will consider “information about use of tutoring in the school” in preparation for an inspection.
Another states: “Where the school is directly deploying tutors to support education recovery from the pandemic, inspectors will consider how this supports the aims of the school curriculum, rather than evaluate the quality of the tutoring.
“Use of tutors will be integrated into the evaluation of both the quality of education and leadership and management and will not be inspected separately.”
However, Ofsted is completing an assessment of tutoring in schools separately.
The first part of this, released last month, found that the tutoring that pupils were receiving was “strong” in over half of the 63 schools visited, but that in a minority, it was “haphazard and poorly planned”.
Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said it was right that Ofsted had no plans to police tutoring.
“The accountability lever is a blunt tool, more often than not driving compliance instead of quality. We need more insight, not more inspection, if we are to succeed in improving quality and impact of tutoring,” he said.
“Ofsted has provided some valuable insight on how tutoring is being used in schools through their thematic review work. This is a low-stakes and high-value activity that can help inform improvements across the system.”
Earlier this month, Mr Barton wrote to schools minister Nick Gibb warning him that catch-up cash allocated to schools would go “unspent” unless rules were changed so that schools no longer had to subsidise tutoring sessions from their own budgets.
But the minister has backed the existing subsidy policy in a written response to the union, seen by Tes.
