Layer 227 . . . Flawed Ofsted Fails Inspections

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Today's post is going to consist solely of a reprint of an article in today's Guardian, by Polly Curtis, the paper's excellent education editor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/23/flawed-ofsted-fails-inspections


Ofsted fails barrage of inspections

Schools watchdog mauled as critics bite back at 'wasteful' bureaucracy

Ofsted is facing a crisis in public confidence as it comes under a series of attacks on its authority this week, with the watchdog accused of being "flawed, wasteful and failing".

The children's services inspectorate will be criticised today by service heads in every local authority in the country, headteachers' leaders and in a damning forthcoming report by MPs on the government's school accountability system.

Its new inspection regime is accused of forcing social work departments to focus on passing inspections instead of looking after children, giving good schools mediocre ratings on routine technical matters – such as fences not being high enough – and more claims that sub-contracted inspectors are not fit for the job.

Pressure further intensifies on the watchdog as a former chief inspector of Ofsted, Sir Mike Tomlinson, today suggests it is struggling after a major expansion two years ago to include responsibility for inspecting children's services as well as schools and childcare.

The attacks come as Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector at Ofsted, prepares to publish the watchdog's own annual report tomorrow after arguably the most difficult year in its history, during which it has been battered by accusations of failings in the Baby Peter case and struggled with its controversial new inspection regimes.

Tomlinson, a respected government adviser who led Ofsted between 2000 and 2002, today raises new questions about Ofsted's ability to fulfil its role. "The question needs to be asked and answered as to whether Ofsted has the appropriate skills and experience to carry out its agenda," he told the Guardian. "Inspection systems that rely too heavily on data and tick-box systems is not what we need. I worry we are heading that way."

The 2007 expansion of Ofsted made it the biggest regulator in England and since then it has introduced new inspection methods for schools and local authorities.

A document drawn up by the Association of Directors of Children's Services, which represents the head of children's departments in English local authorities, claims that new annual performance profiles being developed by Ofsted are "not fit for purpose". Separately schools have expressed concerns about the new school inspection regime under which they cannot be rated good if their exam results are low – regardless of their social context. They can also be marked down on routine matters of safety.

Lawnswood school in Leeds, a rapidly improving school with a good reputation, was penalised after a survey suggested that 1.3% of parents reported their child did not "feel safe" there. A second school was judged to be inadequate because inspectors said the fence around the playground was low enough for children to be abducted and another failed because inspectors were offered coffee before they were asked for identification.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said schools felt they were being "caught out" in inspections. "It's brought in a climate of great anxiety because you don't know whether the inspector will trick you on safeguarding."

A report from a powerful committee of MPs, to be published shortly, also criticises Ofsted for having insufficiently trained inspectors and for relying too much on exam data in their inspection of schools.

Barry Sheerman, chair of the children, schools and families select committee, said schools in challenging areas felt "aggrieved" that even when they were doing well against the odds, they could be failed for low GCSE results.

A spokesman for Ofsted said: "We are disappointed to hear the ADCS criticisms but have to say that their views just don't accord with what we are being told by directors and frontline social workers who have actually experienced our children's services inspections. The feedback we are getting is much more positive."

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Oxzen commented on CiF -

Excellent article, Polly. This sums it all up very well  - incompetent contractors, inadequately trained inspectors, training that forces inspectors to focus on data and 'technical' issues rather than actual schools and their teachers & pupils, a ridiculous grading system, and a climate of fear and loathing.

Add to that an inspections culture that turns the school's attention away from legitimate operational matters and forces them to spend huge amounts of time preparing themselves and their staff for inspections, including a heavy year-round focus on preparations for tests, rather than on real education and learning how to learn, and you have what we have - an unfair, impoverished and illegitimate system that often has very little to offer either the most able pupils or the less able, beyond preparation for tests.

Thank goodness the highly respected Mike Tomlinson is prepared to speak up against our abysmal system - "Inspection systems that rely too heavily on data and tick-box systems is not what we need" - but some of his comments are a little 'light touch'. "I worry we are heading that way", says Mr T, whereas in fact he probably knows we're already well up shit creek.

It'll be a huge and long-term effort to change our system of accountability towards the professional Finland/Denmark model, and the current leadership of Ofsted doesn't seem to have either the inclination or the capacity to do that job. It's all a very far cry from the days when HMI was led by and consisted largely of respected professionals with a vast amount of experience and understanding of schools, pedagogy, the curriculum, management, leadership, teachers and children.

I've lost count of the number of people I know who did Ofsted training but gave up on the work because of the way in which they were expected to carry out inspections, leaving the system to be operated mainly by those of a lesser calibre who are blatantly only doing it for the salary.

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Other comments:

@feline1973

Well I imagine this lambasting will produce a "no sh*t, Sherlock!" response in most of us.
It's from the same Nu-Labour stable-of-spin and bureaucratic lunacy that tried to tackle NHS waiting lists, and now means that you can't book an appointment with your GP more than 2 days in advance because otherwise it makes their waiting-times statistics look bad.
The government response will probably be to set up an new Inspectorate of Inspectorates Watchdog Watching Department, a quango of ex-public school Knights of the Realm who all earn £174k a year for turning up for a 2 hour committee meeting once a month (which features a one hour luncheon costing more than my annual salary).


@takeastepback

Ofsted is one of those ideas that sounds great in theory (inspect, assess, praise good, point out areas for improvement, drive up standards) but in practice drives all the wrong behaviours.

Many of my family are teachers (though not myself) and the stories of inspection times are comical. Inspectors failing teachers/schools without often visiting classrooms and spending time on seeing what is happening. Being in the wrong area is enough for them to fail and if the inspector doesn't like the school mangement then you are failed. One relative then moved from a failed school to a nice school in a middle class area and suddenly she was assessed as outstanding - and still had never actually seen an inspector - boxes were ticked though. Another had her school failed even for RE (which is difficult apparently) because a candle wasn't lit ffs!! We asked other kids do they light a candle in your assembly? No was the answer but it didn't matter, they wanted to fail the school because the headmistress had pissed them off - teaching was good in a deprived area but no matter.


@Tehillim

Labour's obsession with simple quantifiable targets has badly skewed the provision of basic services such as health and education, as the providers inevitably ask themselves how best to meet the targets, rather than how to meet the requirements of those under their care. Tick boxes don't won't for anyone other than administrators.


@Kerrygold

The Audit Commission could equally be in the dock. Organisations spend thousands preparing for inspection, and even more on mock inspections. The whole inspection and auditing regime is one big con, designed to provide a nice cushy job for people who can't compete in the real world. And isn't Christine Gilbert married to one of the MPs caught fiddling his expenses?Hardly a ringing endorsement of her judgement.

@Ranong

I enjoyed two Ofsted inspections as a Secondary Head.

The first was led by a failed middle-manager from a neighbouring school who'd become an inspector after realising no Head would appoint him to a Deputy Headship.

The second was lead by a pompous rural Catholic who had never been in a muti-ethnic school before. The poor guy was out of his depth.

If OFSTED can only attract the failed and the second-rate middle-managers as lead inspectors, no one should be surprised if they can't cope.

On the other hand, incompetence does not account fully for the smug pomposity that my colleagues endured.

@ Laplante

Ofsted was flawed from the very beginning. A failed teacher, Chris "Bonehead" Woodhead was its first head and he gleefully set about alienating the teaching profession at the behest of his tory masters. His inspectorate did not consist of experts in the field of education, but often people from business: the teaching profession sighed in vain for the days of Her Majesty's Inspectors of School. These were wise old birds who had had successful careers in teaching and could offer sound judgements tempered with good advice.

Ofsted has too great a remit these days and has been far too political from the start. It was set up so that governments could exercise greater political control over education and the ways in which teachers worked. It really has been a poor effort as is reflected by present low standards in education and the poverty of the modern curriculum. This is no reflection on schools, pupils or their teachers. Everybody in education deserves better. Educators simply have to work in a poorly thought out system and are always aware of the need to watch their backs as non-expert Ofsted people descend upon them. Schools find inspections scary simply because they are often quite arbitrary and with a low level of competence.


@ juliusmalema

As a foreigner who has come to work in uk schools i have to say that the things schools in this country have to do to please ofsted amount to a joke. you can only laugh or cry. the schools that do well say, "do this x, y and z please, we know it makes no sense but it has to be done to please ofsted. then we can get on with what we really need to do." i have worked at schools with good ofsted results that were truly terrible, because everything is done to please ofsed and not benefit the children. and vice versa. it's like orwell's grim prophecies have come in through the back door.

@ redbigbill

Readers should be reminded that Ofsted and it's first boss, the obnoxious right wing Woodhead (who given his way would have privatised every education establishment in the country) are both inventions of Tory Governments.
It was useless then and Labour have just turned it into a massive, money wasting quango with jobs for the boys and bureaucracy run riot.

@ IKnowSomethingcThis

I too have first-hand experience of Ofsted inspection in a childcare setting, and of an extended complaints process. Some (not all) of Ofsted's inspectors are incompetent and they react extremely vindictively to criticism, which, I suspect, is why so many people give Ofsted itself only positive feedback: it's called self-preservation !

@ stucathome

Like many other NuLab ideas Ofsted is a joke.

I was fortunate enough to go to a fee-paying school where teachers were employed exactly to do that, i.e. teach

A box-ticking culture will deter the most gifted from joining the education system, turning schools into education factories, rather than a place which encourages ideas as much as book learning.

@ feline1973

-     @ Juleusmalema -  you can only laugh or cry. the schools that do well say, "do this x, y and z please, we know it makes no sense but it has to be done to please oftsted. then we can get on with whatt we really need to do."

Well this is the thing - you can not ONLY laugh or cry, you can tell people to get stuffed, refuse to be numbered, stamped, filed, indexed, brief, debriefed, or have you trousers removed.

The problem is that a large proportion of "teachers" are bureacratic busy bodies themselves, who enjoy bullying children and bossing them about and making them "conform",
and behave like spineless fools when asked to conform themsleves.

What they SHOULD so when an Ofsted nitwit tries to get them to do something ridiculous is tell them to get stuffed, and make sure there's a camera crew there to film it so that it can be shown on Panorama and thus not only achieve something for the education system, but also entertain and enrage the chattering classes.

WHAT'S DIFFICULT?

@ surferboy

As a teacher I have been through 2 OFSTED inspections, including one of the new ones. I teach in a relatively successful secondary that is the 2nd choice in a reasonable catchment area, once the brightest students have been creamed off by 3 Grammers and 2 Roman Catholic schools. As a staff we work very hard to provide for all of our students (we're above average in numbers for free school meals; SEN etc) and have a successful G&T; Extra curricular and Social Development provision. Under the old criteria we were a good school with outstanding features - stuff we knew that we should do. However, under the new standards we are now 'satisfactory'. Morale has plummeted due to us being unable to achieve the standards that they expect with the type of students we attract. We work very hard so that they achieve (for them) good results but this is not good enough apparantly. How someone who has not taught for the past 16 years can observe lessons within my department and after 20 mins say how 'good' they were annoys me.

@ yonsoc

Managers in my social work department plan in advance how to hoodwink inspection. They cook the books, lie and try everything to throw the inspectors off the scent. I know that my local authority told my partner to CHANGE her report on the state of children's homes to something more positive. She refused.

@ Ajay100

"There is not enough money in the world to make me want to be a headteacher." said a senior Ofsted inspector in an interview during a primary school inspection under the new framework.

"Bad luck," said a second senior inspector, "If we had come in July , before the new framework was introduced in September, the issues facing your school would not have been highlighted."

Both of these comments, intended to make me feel better, were not helpful. One can understand the weighting attached to aspects of inspection following the criticism directed at Ofsted over safeguarding. This next comment is not an attempt to pass any blame, but should it not be Social Services that are scrutinised rather than increase the pressure on schools and the inspection framework?

The Ofsted framework has always been flawed by the mechanical way in which limiting judgements automatically downgrade outcomes in other aspects of the inspection process. The new framework is offered as a partnership approach between inspectors and schools. In theory this is a positive change to inspection however, in practice it remains dependent upon the lead inspector, their guide to senior inspectors, and the interpretation of the new Ofsted schedule. Ofsted themselves are subject to proof readers and have to write within a range of vocabulary that supports their outcomes.

There needs to be an immediate revision of the present Inspection schedule and there needs to be a way to minimise any inconsistencies amongst the teams.

"I was damned if an attractive blond bimbo in a difficult London Primary school was going to be judged as outstanding. That would mean she would have been better than me when I was a head. So I gave her a good." said a lead inspector. I am pleased to say this was reported and the lead inspector, is no longer working for Ofsted.

Inspection needs to move away from a weighting on pupil results. School data is complex. Just because pupil outcomes are below national outcomes it does not mean that the school is inadequate.

"The data suggests that this school can be no better than average. It would make it very difficult for me to write my report if any of you judge lessons to be good or outstanding." said a lead inspector to the rest of the team. This lead inspector no longer works for Ofsted.

Inspecting teams need to work together with schools and its leaders within a supportive framework. Finland has no inspection framework and they are seen to be leading the way in educational provision. Education in this country needs to look at the best of excellent practice and provision in the rest of Europe and look at ways to improve. Ofsted . . . . try harder to be better at understanding schools and the pressures they face.

@ ljrushton

Isn't it amazing how Mr Tomlinson and Mr Woodhead both failed to point out the errors of Ofsted while they where still collecting their fat pay checks. I wonder if the Ofsted spokesperson quoted in the article will come clean and speak out after he has finished receiving his pieces of silver. It would be nice for all three to be in an enclosed room with all the teachers whose hard work and careers they have damaged and caused untold unnecessary stress to and all the parents of children whose education they have wrecked while carrying out their sordid dirty work.

@ Ghostworld

Ofsted may well have been a Tory idea.... But it has mutated under Labour ( sorry, New Labour ) into something far more inept

@ rubberneck

OFSTED- Squeezing the joy, fun and humanity out of education and replacing it with DATA !
New Labour in a nutshell. Stalinist control freaks.


@ solocontrotutti

The tick box culture is a real problem. It corrupts education with the BTEC non examined qualifications being a primary example. Almost no external verification and the teacher sets the assignment, marks it and then selects which one goes for what external verification there is and with a management breathing on your necks for results - integrity becomes the first victim of the process.

The Oftsed session guide lines are imbecilic with so many criterion that it becomes a nit picking pedant's charter. Anyone going through the observation process almost by default endures a litany of minor faults (the clock was wrong , the whiteboard wasn't clean enough etc etc)

The result is a slow corrupting of the education process and innovation and flexibility is the second victim of the process.

Management become obsessed with stats and funding is thrown at achieving those stats. So if you are a borderline pass you will get all the funding whilst if you are almst certain non pass you will get a vocational qual' whilst the good pass will get ignored. Personalisation is the third victim of the tick box culture.

Organisations are also reluctant to enforce discipline because (particularly in the FE sector) retention is a funded component. Good behaviour and a positive environment is the fourth victim of the tick box culture.

The whole sector becomes more conservative with teachers wanting to steer clear of problem groups because there is very little room for making allowances for the level of learner being observed and tick boxed. Why get a three with a large challenging group when you could get a 1 with a smaller more middle class group. Diversity and differentiation is the fifth victim of the Ofsted culture.

The simple fact is - you can't tick box complexity!
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Layer 210 . . . Education, Equality, Transformation and Alexander

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There were two columns in the Guardian yesterday that were worth reading on the subject of education.

Firstly, in the Response column, Warwick Mansell, author of “Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing”, wrote a piece under the heading,

Targets are not the way to make schools accountable
Sats tests cause pupils great harm and the information they provide is often of little use

Peter Preston, in discussing the Cambridge primary review, repeated misconceptions which regularly feature in the debate about whether the current system of holding schools – and other public services – to account is working effectively (In praise of targets, 19 October).

First, he said that "around a fifth of all children moving on to secondary education at 11 remain fundamentally illiterate". In 2009, 20% did indeed fail to reach the government's "expected" level – level 4 – in English tests. But most of those achieved level 3, which has been defined, for reading, by the people who set the tests, as "pupils read a range of texts fluently and accurately". Level 4 was originally set at what the average pupil would achieve.

Second, Preston suggested that parents would be worse off if they "didn't know exactly what was going on" through the Sats tests. But this overlooks whether the information provided by the Sats is actually of much use. A report by Ofsted last year said schools could boost their pupils' performance in the maths tests without building underlying problem-solving ability, partly because the tests do not assess it well.

The English tests have been criticised for a mechanistic mark scheme which can overlook and marginalise imaginative writing. And the science tests were abandoned last year following widespread complaints from scientists that they sidelined practical science work.

More fundamentally, most of the difference between schools' Sats results is the product of pupils' backgrounds, while the artificial quality of the results generated after months of teaching to the test is reflected in many secondary schools' decisions to re-test pupils when they receive them.

Third, he implied that those – such as the authors of the primary review – who criticise this system simply want a return to the past and to do away with accountability. But the review was clear that it was not a question of whether there should be accountability, but of which type.

The targets/league tables/high-stakes testing system is widely disliked by teachers. But it is also letting pupils down. And while the "cerebral leader writers on the Times" may like it, other intelligent, disinterested people – including scientific and mathematical organisations and exam boards – have serious reservations about it: the government's was the only one of 52 submissions to a parliamentary investigation two years ago which backed it.

Read the rest of this piece here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/23/cambridge-review-sats-targets

The quality of some of the comments on CiF after the article is enough to make anyone despair, but thankfully Warwick Mansell came back at them with this:

It's not the fact that children are tested, but the tests-plus-accountability system: the league tables, targets, Ofsted inspections, performance pay system which rests on the tests and says that the be-all-and-end-all for a school is its test scores.

Some schools clearly do resist this pressure, but for others it can and does lead to a narrowing of the curriculum so that non-tested subjects are marginalised, a narrowing of the school experience in the tested subjects towards months of revision/test practice in the run-up to the tests - official survey data suggests the typical school spends 10 hours a week on test preparation in the four month run-up to the KS2 tests - and a reminder to all children that they are being judged only in terms of test performance over a few days.

Here is some evidence on the downsides, taken from my website www.educationbynumbers.org

I'm not a parent myself, but I would say the best way that people can react to this system is not to obsess about the test levels, and the league table scores.

The evidence below is a set of selected quotations from evidence submissions given by various organisations to the 2007 Children, Schools and Families investigation into testing.
- Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education: The continual testing and practising for tests has resulted in a narrow and impoverished mathematics curriculum, and poor quality teaching of that curriculum.
- Institute of Educational Assessors: We may be churning out individuals who can pass tests and who can achieve good results to a given, known test but who cannot necessarily apply their knowledge and skills to other situations, hence the concern from employers about skill levels among young people.
- The Royal Society: It is clear that aspects of our current assessment system are holding back students and teachers performance and creativity, contributing to a declining popularity in the physical sciences and mathematics and inadequate recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects.
- Hampshire County Council: The assessment regime has become enormously burdensome for schools. National Curriculum (NC) tests have now expanded out of all proportion to their usefulness. It also calls for a more humane system.
- General Teaching Council: Tests are used for too many purposes and this compromises their reliability and validity. The tests can depress pupils motivation and increase anxiety. They do not adequately serve the interests of parents or pupils and they lead to a narrowed curriculum and encourage ‘teaching to the test.
- Institute of Physics: We believe that current assessment arrangements are promoting too narrow a range of skills and understanding, principally there is too great an emphasis on testing students ability to recall facts. This leads to a situation where there is insufficient teaching for understanding or creativity, with accompanying negative effects on students motivation and enjoyment.
- Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment: We believe the current testing system is limited in measurement of childrens performance across the National Curriculum programmes of study.
- Campaign for Science and Engineering: We do not doubt that students appear to work harder at school than those of ten or fifteen years ago, but too much of this extra effort appears to have been devoted to the narrow and unremitting demands of national tests.
- The Wellcome Trust: Primary teachers felt that national tests had a negative effect on childrens enjoyment of science, because of the increasing tendency to ‘teach to the test. An over-emphasis on curriculum content and pressure to prepare for national tests were felt to reduce opportunities for investigative work and lead to science frequently being taught as a collection of facts.
- Institute for Public Policy Research: The current national tests do not provide highly reliable or valid measures at the level of the individual pupil...The current assessment and accountability framework can impact on valuable elements of assessment such as assessment for learning. This can happen through narrow and shallow learning, questions-spotting and risk-averse teaching.
- Association of School and College Leaders: Assessment in Britain requires a radical review. In England, young people take externally set and marked examinations at the ages of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18. The system is at breaking point as more and more examinations have been added to an already over-examined system.
- Mathematical Association: Coaching for the test, now occupying inflated teaching time and effort in almost all schools for which we have information at each Key Stage, is not constructive: short term ‘teaching how to is no substitute for longterm teaching of understanding and relationship within and beyond mathematics part of a broad and balanced curriculum.

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Meanwhile, on the Leaders page (Comment & Debate), Lynsey Hanley, author of “Estates: An Intimate  History”, wrote this piece -

Equality, not education, is the key to individual transformation

Political parties fail to understand or address the root causes of the country's failing education system

Reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's comments on the "extraordinarily anxious and in many ways oppressive climate in education at every level" that has been created in the 20 years or so since the imposition of the national curriculum, made me wonder yet again about the wisdom of the competing parties' plans for education: whether Labour's lowering of the starting age and expansion of the academies programme, or Tory proposals for parents to open their own state-funded "free schools". Politicians on both sides talk of education as the key to individual and social transformation – as Michael Gove put in his conference speech, "the opportunity to choose [one's] own destiny" – but none properly address the link between education and social segregation.

It comes down to economics: what you're worth, in other words. Those who are valued the least think the least of themselves and others. Those who are valued the most think well of themselves and award themselves, as they are rewarded, with education and mobility to attractive, affluent areas largely untroubled by the difficulties experienced by people in poorer ones.

This week, figures released by the University and College Union have shown the extent to which Britain is polarised by access to education, money, safe surroundings or their lack. Dividing the data available on qualifications by parliamentary constituency allows you to see the vast discrepancies between areas. In Bootle, for instance, you're far more likely to have no GCSEs than to have a degree, whereas in much of the south-east the opposite holds true. Areas are becoming less like each other, and less easily averaged out, over time.

Schools without banding and lotteries for places – though these practices are becoming more common – become microcosms of the area in which they operate. Successful schools are those where staff and students feel as though they can take charge of the raw materials of life and shape something good out of it; the less successful are those which struggle to find evidence that such a thing is possible. As an adult, the difference between being seen and unseen often comes down to how well you're able to articulate what the matter is.

The affluent and highly educated concentrate themselves in areas such as Sheffield Hallam and Richmond, gathering so much power that they can afford to pretend that power is irrelevant; poor and low-educated communities are so stymied by the imbalance that they come to believe they have no power.

Attempts made by the mainstream British political parties to interpret the needs of the "white working class" – and, as is the government's current strategy, to throw money at the symptoms of malaise rather than to address the causes – is a classic example of how social stratification leads to the warping and splitting of common values. A deep lack of entitlement and confidence felt by working-class people, structured in large part by a combination of powerlessness, poverty and snobbery directed towards them by those who are better off, ought not to be confused with the entitlement to "Britishness" that's often invoked by the same individuals.

Starting school at four, or attending a spanking new academy with no social mix, won't alter this relationship between perception and experience because neither proposal has equality, the healer of divisions both real and imagined, as its driving motivation.

Read the rest of it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/22/schools-reform-equality-failure

I'd be interested to know what readers think of the comments on CiF about these two articles. Forget about MoveAnyMountain though – it's understood that MAM is a raving long-winded neanderthal.

oxzen@yahoo.co.uk

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In today's paper have a look at this -

Ed Balls accused of 'lashing out wildly' at primary school review findings
• Head of review says Labour does not listen
• Growing anger among teachers at response

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/24/primary-schools-edballs

It's by Polly Curtis, the education editor.

The man behind a major inquiry into primary education today accuses Ed Balls and his ministers of "lashing out wildly" and dismissing his review findings without properly reading it.

Robin Alexander, head of the Cambridge review of primary schools, said the Labour government refused to "listen, engage and learn" from independent advice in its "micro-managed" system.

Writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free website, he sets out how the government's response to the review betrayed the fact that ministers had not properly read it, setting out inaccuracies in how both they and their Conservative shadows described it.

Alexander's intervention comes amid growing anger in schools and teacher groups about the government's dismissal of the review. It also comes after a tumultuous week in which Balls was accused of being a "bit of a bully" by Barry Sheerman, the chair of the Commons committee for children, schools and families, after he appointed Maggie Atkinson to the role of children's commissioner. He also faced heavy criticism at the national children and adult services conference in Harrogate.

The Cambridge review, the biggest inquiry into primary education in 40 years, was published last week after a three-year process which produced 31 interim reports, 28 surveys and thousands of submissions.

In a 600-word document it concluded that schools are in "good heart … highly valued by children and parents and in general doing a good job," but condemned the centralisation of the system under Labour and how the curriculum had shrunk to a narrow focus on the 3Rs.
t suggested schools should replace formal teaching with play-based learning until a child turns six and that national curriculum tests – Sats – should be replaced with improved end-of-primary tests.

The Cambridge review received support from every teaching union, agency and school support group but the government – led by the schools minister, Vernon Coaker – accused the review of being "out of date" and failing to acknowledge programmes that were under way to review testing, special educational needs and maths teaching.

Today, Alexander writes that after the government "instantly dismissed" the inquiry, "the review's email in-boxes [were] overflowing with messages not just about the findings that the press focused on – starting age, testing, centralisation – but with expressions of spluttering outrage shading into quiet despair at last week's statement."

"Nobody expects ministers to have the time to read every massive report that lands on their desks, not overnight anyway," he concludes. "But serious questions must now be asked about the advice on which the government's response was based, the advisers who provided the minister with such a hopeless script, and the wisdom of approaching a general election as the government which refuses to listen, engage and learn."

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said it had received a letter from Alexander about the issues raised in the article and would respond in due course.

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Robin Alexander's piece is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/24/cambridge-review-primary-education

The government's instant dismissal of the final report of the Cambridge Primary Review has become as a big a story as the report itself. The review's email inboxes are overflowing with messages not just about the findings that the press focused on – starting age, testing, centralisation – but also with expressions of spluttering outrage shading into quiet despair at last week's statement from schools minister Vernon Coaker.

Coaker said that by virtue of having started three years ago, the report was out-of-date. What a strange and desperate ploy. One would have thought that this testifies to its depth and thoroughness, especially as when pressed this week by the select committee to explain, Ed Balls wrongly claimed that the report had ignored the Williams maths inquiry (mentioned on pages 38, 46, 49, 433 and 436), the "expert group" on assessment (seven mentions) and the Lamb special educational needs review (the report argues for an SEN review with a broader and different remit).

That was not all the minister got wrong. Like many others, he (and, in this matter, the Conservatives) misrepresented as a bid to raise the school starting age our proposal that the government's early years foundation stage should be extended to age six, thus confusing curriculum (which is what the EYFS is about) with organisational structure. Although we said that, in light of international evidence, the starting age needs to be discussed, that was as far as we went. Get the early years curriculum right, we argued, and school starting age is no longer an issue.

Hopefully this will be another nail in the coffin of the sinister Ed Balls and the execrable New Labour hierarchy.
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Layer 97 “We Have To Take Responsibility.”

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Under this headline the head of Ofsted, the chief inspector of children’s service, one Christine Gilbert, says to the Guardian’s Polly Curtis, "I think that if the grades that we gave last December gave a false assurance we have to take some responsibility for that. I'm absolutely not washing my hands of it."

Really? Obviously taking ‘some’ responsibility doesn’t include resignation, as far as Ms Gilbert is concerned. This woman is married to New Labour’s employment minister, Tony McNulty, and she’s clearly not about to make herself unemployed.

It’s not the New Labour way for anyone who’s sitting where the buck stops to actually resign, even when, like Ms Gilbert, they’ve been happily running an organization whose very modus operandi encourages schools and local authorities to spend millions of pounds and waste thousands of officer hours creating paper smokescreens of ‘data’ to cover up the fact that they’re doing a shit job and letting down hundreds of thousands of children who deserve to have a good life and a positive experience of school.

Under Ms Gilbert’s regime Ofsted inspections of schools, for instance, have been reduced to a wretched 2 days by 2-3 inspectors, who clearly only have time to seek out supporting evidence for the hypothesis they’ve already constructed after scrutinizing the data and the statements the school’s put together on its Self Evaluation Form.

The whole wretched Ofsted way of doing things seems to be coming under public scrutiny, at long last, and praise be to the Guardian for following through with this aspect of the Baby P story, which includes a lead article on the front page of today’s paper under the headline, “We failed over Haringey - Ofsted head”.

In the course of her Guardian interview Ms Gilbert "sets out the tactics managers at Haringey employed to present a data-perfect image of their work. They claimed they had assessed children promptly when files revealed that those assessments were in fact incomplete. The same files showed that such assessments of children were routinely and wrongly done with their parent or guardian in the room. It wasn't until inspectors began pulling children's files from the office shelves in the town hall that they realised the extent of the deceit."

Well, duh!

Thanks to the Baby P case Ofsted’s complacency and stupidity and its methods of inspection have finally come to light. Personally I don’t really give a damn whether or not this particular bureaucrat gets her comeuppance, but I care very much whether or not the system that’s been so dire and counterproductive in terms of children’s welfare and wellbeing is finally nailed and put to rights.

The Guardian again:

“The head of Ofsted has acknowledged that local councils whose child protection agencies have been rated "good" by the agency could in fact be systematically failing children because the assessment method used by inspectors was open to manipulation.”

“In her first major interview since the verdict on Baby P's death was returned, Christine Gilbert admitted to failings in Ofsted's oversight of Haringey council, acknowledging that officials in the local authority where Baby P died were able to "hide behind" false data last year to earn themselves a good rating from inspectors just weeks after his death.”

And who’s responsible for the local authority being able to hide behind false data? Ms Gilbert by any chance?

“Gilbert promised that Ofsted would overhaul inspections of child protection services in recognition that mistakes were made in the monitoring of Haringey council.”

Is this by any chance what’s called shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? After the baby died.

"I think that the processes that we're proposing will be better than the processes that we had," said Ms Gilbert.

Well that’s good. Too late, but good. And not hard to achieve, either, because the processes Ofsted had, AND STILL HAS, thanks to Ms Gilbert failing to notice, are shit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/06/ofsted-baby-p-inspector-chief
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/06/ofsted-child-protection

This story has also been picked up by the Telegraph, which quotes from the Guardian interview under the headline,

Head of Ofsted Christine Gilbert admits failings over death of Baby P

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/baby-p/3569941/Head-of-Ofsted-Christine-Gilbert-admits-failings-over-death-of-Baby-P.html

And the BBC on its main homepage today:

Baby P authority 'misled Ofsted'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7769126.stm

6.15pm latest news:

The lead story on the Radio 4 main evening news was - Ofsted.
Incredibly Christine Gilbert is reported as having written to all local authorities asking them to 'check' whether they've given Ofsted bogus information! Imagine - "Please tell us whether you've been telling us porkies". What an unbelievable shambles.

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Ms Gilbert has been described as ‘steely’, ‘candid’, ‘calm', ‘collected', with “not a hair of her sharp blond bob out of place”. Blond, eh? I defy anyone to look at her photo on page 41 of today’s paper and not agree that she’s the spitting image of a blond Nessa from Gavin & Stacey. Tidy.

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And talking of Gav and Stace, I have say I’ve become a real fan of the programme. I love the cleverness of its two writers, James Corden (Smithy) and Ruth Jones (Nessa), in creating a series in which the lead parts are not those whose names appear in the title, but the two ‘supporting’ roles, the best friends of Gav and Stace.

Gav is just a boring nice guy, and Stace is simply a dimwit, but the overweight Smithy and big Nessa are just wonderful. It reminds me of the clever Mr Stoppard who outrageously based a play on Hamlet but created lead roles for what were supposed to be supporting bit-parts - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (are Dead).

The point being that ‘minor’ characters can be as cracked, outrageous and funny as the writer wants them to be, whilst the ‘main’ characters pursue their serious, boring and tragic lives.

This week's episode contained one of the funniest scenes ever in a sitcom, where the rest of the family (plus Smithy and Ness) are all sitting down to breakfast whilst Gav and Stace proceed to have avery noisy shag in the bedroom above the kitchen. Nobody says a word about what they can all very clearly hear, of course, but Stacey's mum jumps up, turns on some loud music and starts a very energetic exercise routine to distract then all from what they're hearing.

There's also a fabulous scene where Smithy is taking part in a strenuous semi-naked workout in the bedroom that Uncle Bryn (the wonderful Rob Brydon) has converted into a gym. Attracted by the homoerotic grunts and yells coming from the room ("Oh yes! Smithy - harder! harder! That's it!") Gavin is baffled and appalled by the whole business, especially Smithy being topless.

11.00pm Stop Press: Gavin and Stacey wins its category in the 2008 British Comedy awards.

[Angus Deayton, hosting the awards in the absence of Russell Brand, was nasty, snide, bitchy, irritating, up his own arse and completely unfunny.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_&_Stacey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern

Have a look at these sites for the essence of R & G Are Dead - Tom Stoppard at his witty best:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100519/quotes

NB White Cat - the references to life in a box.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_&_Guildenstern_Are_Dead

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Very good article by John Harris in the Guardian today, on Harriet Harman:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/dec/06/harriet-harman-labour-deputy-interview

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I've just discovered the Robert Peston 'blog' on the BBC website. The man's a phenomenon. Today's blog alone has generated 259 responses at the time of writing. (5.25pm)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/12/how_much_will_taxpayers_financ.html
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