WEDNESDAY 2 DECEMBER 1998

PROFESSOR JOHN MACBEATH, PROFESSOR PETER MORTIMORE AND PROFESSOR HARVEY GOLDSTEIN

  176. Good morning. Welcome to this phase of our inquiry into the work of OFSTED. We are very grateful that our witnesses have found the time to come this morning and also to provide us with written evidence. For the record, it would be helpful and for the public here if our three witnesses could introduce themselves at the outset.

  (Professor MacBeath) Professor John MacBeath from the University of Strathclyde. My familiarity with the system would be the amount of work we are now doing in England, particularly in connection with Professor Peter Mortimore at the Institute of Education.
  (Professor Mortimore) Peter Mortimore from the Institute of Education, University of London. As well as being a colleague of John MacBeath's on a large project in Scotland, I have been involved in education for the last 30 or so years.
  (Professor Goldstein) Professor Harvey Goldstein, Institute of Education, University of London. I am an education statistician and my concern is research methodology.

  177. Thank you very much. What I would like to invite you to do is very briefly, each of you, to make an opening statement, with an emphasis on brief. May I stimulate that statement by quoting OFSTED's Corporate Plan which notes that its purpose: "is to improve standards of achievement and quality of education through regular independent inspection, public reporting and informed advice . . . In short to encourage improvement through inspection." That is from the 1997 Corporate Plan. How should we evaluate OFSTED's contribution to improving standards and achievement? How do we assess the success of that?
  (Professor MacBeath) I think the corporate statement "improvement through inspection" is one that we should look at, and look very hard, for the kind of evidence that schools have actually been helped to improve. I would put the emphasis on the capacity of schools to become more rigorous self-evaluating organisations. I would put the emphasis on self-evaluation as the cornerstone of any system: a self-evaluation system which is rigorous, systematic, reliable and valid, with the added value of the OFSTED external inspection being to look at how good is the school at evaluating itself? How rigorous is its evidence? That is what the role of OFSTED should be and that is the role they have not played. They have not played a role in actually meeting that mission statement of theirs, of "improvement through inspection".
  (Professor Mortimore) I think the real problem of OFSTED is not to do with regulation—any complex system needs regulation—nor is it to do with inspection of schools, which has a long and honourable tradition. It is simply that when the statute was drafted, there was insufficient accountability built into it. Your Committee brought this out when it interviewed Mrs Rassaby on 15 July. It did not matter before but under current rule it does matter. Frankly, in my judgment, OFSTED has lost the confidence of many in the system which it is supposed to serve. The conduct of school inspections varies too much and is too punitive. Reliability and validity, (directly answering your question), are not there. It is the capacity of OFSTED to improve through inspection, actually to evaluate in a way that is objective and reliable, which is a problem. Schools serving disadvantaged areas are particularly subject to unfair judgment. The LEA work is fraught with problems and the inspection of teacher education has been a major problem. As well as that, if I can just add. Some of the pronouncements of the Chief Inspector on particular topics like class size, resources, research, failing teachers, as well as his attacks on individuals, has brought OFSTED into disrepute and taxpayers' money is being wasted. My last point is that the agenda that the Chief Inspector has set out, on behalf of OFSTED, seemingly defends the interests of pupils and their parents and implies that most other people working in the system do not have those interests at heart. I want very much to put on record that, in my judgment and experience over many years, most people in the education system have that aim equally as much as or more so than OFSTED. The problem is that the strident tone and the mischievous implication that other people are not working for children in education is causing grave damage. Frankly, it is harming the improvement efforts of the nation and of the Government.
  (Professor Goldstein) May I take up the issue of informed advice. Clearly good advice should be based on sound, well-informed evidence. I think there is a problem with OFSTED on this. In terms of research OFSTED does its own research, commissions research—some of it quite good research—and it uses this in order to inform its own policy. However, if you look at some of the research that OFSTED has done; some of the commentaries that OFSTED, in particular the Chief Inspector, has made on existing research; I think there are many weaknesses. Professor Mortimore and myself wrote a critique of some of the research they did on reading two or three years ago. The situation is that there is very little good research expertise in OFSTED. The problem seems to be that OFSTED, as a body, does not recognise its limitations when it comes to research; and in particular when it comes to evaluating quality of research, commenting on research, and actually using it to inform its own policy. In one of the submissions that I put round I did make some positive recommendations for ways in which OFSTED's own research activity and its use of research could be improved.

  178. May I ask about the research that we have available in this country to guide us with our inquiry into OFSTED because social scientists inevitably—as they are also citizens—have their own value judgments about subjects they are studying. I guess this Committee is interested too in pursuing what hard and decent evidence and data we have to help us with our task. One notes that research and polemic get mixed up. Perhaps, Professor Goldstein, you could help us with this. Do you think that we have enough objective based research data in this country for us to pursue this inquiry?
  (Professor Goldstein) That is too general a question to answer in a few minutes. One of the key things about OFSTED and its inspections is that it is, in my view, possible to have some kind of objective valuation of how good OFSTED's judgments are. At the moment there has not been any serious or proper research evaluation of the quality and success of OFSTED's judgments of teachers in schools. It is possible to do this. There are objective data: for example, in the form of value added test scores of examination results, which people would generally agree are reasonably objective and could be used when set against OFSTED's judgments to make some statement about how well OFSTED is doing. That is just one little bit of research which is feasible. In fact, I am at the moment, talking to one or two local authorities with a view to attempting to do this. I could go on for the rest of the day about the kinds of research and the sorts of research which would be needed to make evaluations of other aspects of what OFSTED is doing, but I think it would be more helpful if we could focus on one or two specific issues. I have mentioned the one, which is the actual final inspectors' judgments. Are there any other particular things about OFSTED you would like me to concentrate on?

  179. My colleagues will come on to questions. Peter Mortimore, what do you reckon about the research at the moment? I am not just talking about OFSTED's own research. I am talking about the research community.
  (Professor Mortimore) Absolutely. However, you would not expect a researcher to say that there is enough research. Obviously it is in our interests to say many more studies need to be done.