Rod Liddle says that Ofsted’s attempt to rank schools according to their SATS scores is, like so many of its other ideas, not just unhelpful but counterproductive
Fancy a job as head of Ofsted? The post apparently pays not far short of half a million quid per year, and I can’t imagine that there’s much work involved. The problem, I suppose, is that one never knows precisely what they’re looking for when these unelected sinecures at quangocratic bureaucracies are up for grabs, so it’s bloody difficult to prepare for the interview. What qualifies Catherine Ashton, for example, to be the foreign minister for the continent of Europe? She’s worked for CND and the National Council for One Parent Families (why do they have a national council?) and has also been involved in teaching social workers to be more politically correct, which I admit must require a certain breadth of imagination.
But how you hop from there to being a trade commissioner and then to being the person responsible for the EU’s relations with the real world mystifies me. I have always assumed that the procedure for getting one of these jobs involves the ability to spout meaningless drivel, an unquestioning readiness to do as you’re told by idiots, and having your soul sucked out of your skull via a plastic straw inserted in the left nostril. Fair enough, I can do all of that for half a million quid. Who needs a soul?
I am assuming that the Ofsted job will soon be up for grabs because Britain’s biggest regulator, and arguably its most useless (in what you have to say is a very strong field), is not looking too pukka at the moment. It has been kicked from pillar to post in a report from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services as being ‘flawed, wasteful and failing’. Ofsted has been responsible for children’s services for a couple of years and one assumes that the various directors of children’s services (who they?) are not entirely happy with this arrangement and wish that it would cease, so perhaps their report was in any case a little parti pris. But even if you put that to one side, Ofsted has been hammered by its former chief executive Mike Tomlinson, and by schools and by teachers for its bovine box-ticking stupidity, its failure to see the bigger picture.
The present boss of Ofsted is Christine Gilbert, who is also Mrs Tony McNulty. Tony, you will remember, is the Labour MP for Harrow East who was forced to resign from the government over the expenses for his ‘second home’, which happened to be his parents’ home very close to his (and Christine’s) own home and where, if we’re honest, he didn’t stay that often.
As I say, Tony is the MP for Harrow East, but my guess is that he will not be the MP for Harrow East by this time next year, given that he has a majority of a little over 4,000 and he is one of the less charismatic representatives of the government and has, further, incurred local opprobrium. By this time next year, then, we might be paying out unemployment benefits to both Tony and Christine, but don’t worry too much about that because it will represent an absolutely enormous cost-saving to the exchequer, all things considered. Not far short of clearing the national debt.
I ought to confess that I have a problem, a personal problem, with Ofsted. At the moment the Liddle family is house-hunting, and every time I find a fabulous home we could happily live in, my wife squirrels herself away in her attic office, tapping away at her laptop, and reports back that we can’t possibly move there because the local school is only 231. I start tearing my hair out and saying well, for Christ’s sake, what do you want the local school to be, and she says ‘250 or above, minimum’.
This is down to Ofsted — but also partly down to this ludicrous notion of ‘choice’ we have been offered over where we send the kids to school. Those figures — 231 and 250 — are SATS test scores and they are the means by which many middle-class parents judge what school they should send their kids to. The flawed notion — encouraged by Ofsted — being that your child will do better in his or her SATS tests if he or she goes to a school where the average SATS test score is high. The obvious (I would have thought) rejoinder to this is that your child will get a low SATS test score if he or she is a moron with lime jelly for a brain, regardless of how good the school is.
And as a corollary, that the average SATS test score for a school is more a reflection of local affluence, or the lack of it, than the ability of the teachers. And this is how schools are deemed to ‘fail’; no matter how good a school, how copiously it attempts to ramrod a vestige of sentience into its pupils, if its exam test scores are poor it will not be rated officially ‘good’ and therefore the more affluent parents will not send their horrible little children to it. And so we have an inevitable spiral of decline.
Worse still, Ofsted is accused of not seeing the wood for the trees. Schools which are otherwise excellent get marked down because the perimeter fence is not quite enough, or — as has been reported by a school in Leeds — a tiny minority of pupils did not ‘feel safe’ there. The Ofsted inspectors — too often failed teachers — have their checklist of stuff upon which a school is judged to be successful or otherwise, and if the tick does not go in the requisite box then the school is in trouble. A lovely little Church of England primary that my two sons attended was marked down because it did not do enough to ‘improve pupils’ understanding of multicultural Britain’. I suspect there are an awful lot of parents who would take this supposed condemnation as a valediction of their local school and queue up to send their kids to it. The kiddies will understand about the vibrant diversity of multicultural Britain soon enough, one suspects.
In other words, Ofsted has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end, as is so often the case with well-intentioned state bureaucracies, as is so often the case with league tables, targets and what have you. Scrap Ofsted and you could provide another 5,000 teachers for our schools, one for every secondary school in the country, at a cost of a staggering £207 million per year.
Offer ends in:
