Education Committee
Oral evidence: The work of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), HC 539
Tuesday 7 January 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 7 January 2025.
Members present: Helen Hayes (Chair); Jess Asato; Mrs Sureena Brackenridge; Amanda Martin; Darren Paffey; Manuela Perteghella; Mark Sewards; Patrick Spencer.
Questions 1 - 34
Witnesses
I: Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Ofsted; Lee Owston, National Director for Education, Ofsted; Yvette Stanley, National Director for Regulation and Social Care, Ofsted.
Witnesses: Sir Martyn Oliver, Lee Owston and Yvette Stanley.
Chair: We now begin public proceedings of the Education Select Committee. Good morning, everyone. It is good to see you all here today. Our meeting today is an accountability hearing on the work of Ofsted. Before I ask our witnesses to introduce themselves, I am going to invite members of the Committee to put on record any interests that they would like to declare.
Manuela Perteghella: As a former school governor, I had experience of an Ofsted inspection in October 2021.
Mrs Brackenridge: As a former teacher and school leader, I also have experience of a few Ofsted inspections.
Darren Paffey: As a former cabinet member at Southampton City Council, I cannot remember when or how many but I certainly have a number of ILACS and other inspection experiences.
Amanda Martin: As a teacher of 24 years and a school governor of three schools, I have had nine Ofsted experiences.
Mark Sewards: As a maths teacher, I have had Ofsted experiences too.
Q1 Chair: Sir Martyn, can I ask you to introduce yourself and the colleagues who are with you here today?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Happy new year. I am Martyn Oliver, the chief inspector at Ofsted.
Yvette Stanley: My name is Yvette Stanley. I am Ofsted’s national director for early years regulation and social care. I joined Ofsted in 2018 after 30 years in children’s services. I stopped counting at about 100 Ofsted inspections.
Lee Owston: Good morning. I am Lee Owston. I am Ofsted’s national director for education.
Q2 Chair: I am going to start our questioning this morning with some questions about Ofsted’s response to the Ruth Perry prevention of future deaths report. Sir Martyn, in your response to the prevention of future deaths report following the inquest into the death of Ruth Perry, you said, “Such tragedies should never happen again and no one should feel as Ruth did.” Can you give the Committee a brief introduction to the measures that you have taken to ensure that this is the case?
Sir Martyn Oliver: At the beginning of my tenure on 1 January last year, my immediate reaction was to meet with Ruth’s sister and representatives of the family and the school. Then I responded in full, accepting all the recommendations from the coroner and went subsequently on to publish that response. I have quite a detailed response to the actions we have taken that I placed online. I think that that was around about March last year, but I can go through very briefly some of those actions against some of the areas.
The coroner made seven clear recommendations. The seventh was more directed at the Department for Education. On the six areas, I can go into as much detail as you want, Chair, but obviously I do not want to repeat what has been online for the best part of a year anyway. The first of the queries that the coroner raised was about two hypothetical schools, school A and school B, with school A being good in all aspects but failing in safeguarding and then a school that has systemic failings across the board, and both being judged as, under a single word judgment, “inadequate.” My predecessor had already put in place changes prior to the inquest about going back quickly, returning to schools to inspect them. We then made changes immediately around the response, but subsequently, since then, we made a commitment to look again at how we deal with those schools.
In September, I charged Lee with updating the handbook on our inspections. Should we get to a school now that is good in all aspects but has safeguarding concerns, and we are confident as an inspectorate that that school has the capacity to deal with those safeguarding concerns, we can suspend, pause the inspection, monitor that school for up to and no longer than three months, keeping an enduring relationship with it, and then return and complete the inspection. I was assured that that was a wise decision to take, because it takes roughly around three months to produce an “inadequate” report. By having an enduring relationship with a school that we are confident has the capacity to deal with those concerns, we were confident that the schools are tackling those safeguarding concerns immediately, instantly, rather than waiting months for the report to appear.
We put some safeguards in place to make sure that the Department for Education, local authority and children’s safeguarding board were aware of the suspend and return, and to insist that the school communicated to parents that we had suspended our inspection. That way everyone openly and transparently knew it was taking place. We anticipated that we would not use that at all, or no more than one to less than one handful of times a year. Since September, we have one current case where we have suspended and paused it. If I look at that case and think about that school, without naming it, it was a wise decision. I will give you an example of that school, if I may.
I shall not describe the school too closely because that would identify it, but it was a new leadership team who were clearly turning around the school. It was clear from our evidence that they had the capacity. It was clearly good in all aspects, but it was dealing with an historical backlog of safeguarding issues that it had recognised. It knew what it was doing. It knew how to clear them all. It just had not cleared all of them. It gives us concern that they are not cleared, but we have confidence in that leadership. We now have a relationship with that school and we expect to return to it imminently, later this month. I would expect, from the work that we have done in monitoring it, that that school will get “good” in safeguarding and therefore be “good” overall.
That was a really positive recommendation that we took action prior to the coroner, around the coroner and subsequently further again. That is a sensible thing to do and we are still maintaining standards, because safeguarding is not an administrative task. It is a serious undertaking. It is a serious duty on providers and that is a sensible response. That is the first of those.
The second one—I will be try to be a little quicker—is an almost complete absence of training or published policy on signs of distress and how to deal with distress. When I started in January, I immediately paused inspections and then worked with an external agency called Mental Health First Aid England, so we had independent expertise that subsequently has actually joined one of our external reference groups to continue to challenge us, along with other professionals who are well known in the system, such as Sinéad Mc Brearty, who supports education leaders.
We put in place training for all our inspectors and I would not allow any of our inspectors to start inspecting until they had been through that training. I committed that every inspector would go through that by March and that was completed. Every inspector has gone through training. All of our requirements now require this to be a part of their core training. I have built it into work, which I am sure I will get on to later, in our Ofsted Academy, which is continuously developing the training of inspectors.
We now have a whole raft of measures. Alongside the training, we have a provider helpline where providers can call, rather than speak to the inspection team. Our independent report from Dame Christine Gilbert, which no doubt we will come on to later, talked about a power imbalance and recognising the power imbalance between the inspectorate and those being inspected. Rather than just raising a concern from the school to the inspector, which can sometimes be difficult, we now have an independent senior member of staff that the school can contact during an inspection and a whole host of other measures that we have put in place.
I hope that we will come on to this also later. While those sorts of changes were responses to this, in order to make systemic changes, alongside the seismic changes I made last year, there are more seismic changes to come this year. The changes I am proposing to make this year will further reduce the pressure and the way that we go about our inspection methodology, which would be more proportionate and fairer. I know that, in a high‑performing system, high accountability is a core part of this, but we have to do it in a way that is proportionate, fair and transparent. Our proposals can deliver all this and raise standards at the same time. There is more I can say on that but, for brevity, I will keep on going, if that is okay, Chair.
The third was an absence of a clear path to raise concerns during an inspection if these cannot be resolved directly with the lead inspector. Again, we now have provider helplines in the centre. I have created a series of hubs. My predecessors made some very clever decisions. Going back two predecessors, they decided to regionalise Ofsted and create eight regions, which are coterminous with the Government’s regions, which is a wise thing to do. I noticed, on joining Ofsted, that a lot of our work has fallen into very regional ways of working and I was worried that we were getting a fracture between regional variation and consistency in our practice. I have put in place over the last year a series of central hubs which look at one Ofsted across the whole of England and are central controls.
We have a central hub now that looks at complaints and provider concerns during an inspection to make sure we are consistent in the way that we are managing all of those. We have also improved the way that people can raise complaints to our independent complaints adjudicator, ICASO, that we have been working with for a number of years. You can raise those complaints earlier and more quickly now. Lastly on that one, we have even introduced an external reference group to look at complaints and we invite random and alternate external references. Recently, Lee, we had trade union representatives on a complaints panel and we took a sample of complaints. Do you want to quickly talk about that?
Lee Owston: I chaired our external complaints panel as a trial. We invited trade union representation and headteachers not associated with the examples of complaints that we shared. This is all to be more transparent in the processes that we undertake when a provider complains. Overwhelmingly, the feedback from those trial external complaints panels was positive. On that basis, we are looking to roll out those panels almost monthly from this month, so that I, Yvette or our delegates can host those events and show people, through using live cases that have closed, exactly the detail that we go through, not taking for granted what people have put forward as part of their complaints but rigorously going through the evidence and then formulating a response back.
Sir Martyn Oliver: I was really heartened when external people were joining that panel and saying that they were quite taken aback by the sheer level of detail that we go into in checking our consistency in the complaints. Again without taking too long in the two-hour session, I have even introduced steps to make sure that, if we have complaints, a totally separate inspection team from a totally separate region comes in to inspect the school, so we can further demonstrate independence, openness and transparency in the way we work. We have done an awful lot on that one.
The next one was regarding the confidentiality requirement after an inspection. My predecessor made changes to clarify upon that immediately, even before the inquest took place. We have made it absolutely rock-solid clear that people can contact whoever they need, whether it is their support network, a health professional, other people in the school or governing bodies. It is writ large and clear in a handbook from now on going forward. We made that change last year.
Next year, we have some thoughts about how we can improve upon that in methodology, as you know, Chair, from when we met prior to Christmas. I will do my best to talk about the proposed plan, but it is not yet live and public. I will tell this Committee as much as I can but, as I said to you then, I am also happy to come back when we do go live with that report and answer questions on that in more detail, should I not be able to answer any today.
The next one was timescales to report publication. We had already committed to making sure that reports are out in 30 working days. We track that now: 95% of school reports hit the 30‑working‑day target; 2% of them fall outside because we are gathering additional evidence, doing evidence-based reviews for more complex reasons or dealing with a complaint about the inspection and going through that before we publish. Then there are 3% that have fallen late, but even those that fall late might be because we have fallen either side of a term and we do not publish during holidays, because that is not fair for the workload of people who are receiving the reports to work during a holiday. Sometimes that might delay the day that we publish on, but we do not have many that miss the date of publication.
The next one was no learning review of these matters. The way the coroner had written it, I presumed that the coroner had meant that there is no learning review of those five points. Not only did I commit to a learning review but I thought it was better to do an independent learning review. Alongside the Big Listen that I talked about to the predecessor Committee on my appointment, which I conducted in March, the chair and I appointed an independent expert to lead a learning review of the way that Ofsted worked in Caversham. That work was undertaken by Dame Christine Gilbert and we learned a lot from her report, which is a challenging report for us to read but nonetheless very useful in helping us think about the responses that we made.
The very last one was about the Secretary of State and support for school leaders. That was mostly aimed at the Department for Education but we are doing what we can. We have an external reference group focused entirely on provider wellbeing. We are looking at signposting to leaders where they can get support. When we phone a school and notify it of an inspection, we make sure we know who the responsible body is. Who looks after the leader? Who can support and guide them? We are doing all we can on that matter but without crossing the line, because of course it is the responsible body’s job to look after the providers and not ours.
We took it seriously. I took it very seriously. We responded in full. We have completed all of those actions but even then I know that they are not enough and further reform is needed beyond what I did last year. That will come via a new framework that we are proposing later this month.
Q3 Chair: Can I press a bit on the individuals who were involved, either directly in the inspection of Caversham Primary School or in overseeing that process and that inspection? What action have you taken to review the actions of those individuals? What is the relationship between those actions, that very personal accountability for the people who were directly involved in that process and in overseeing that process, and the wider issue of culture change that is needed at Ofsted? What action have you taken to make sure that there is accountability at that level? You have the same people working in the organisation. How are you ensuring that there is culture change?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Culture comes from leadership and so I am making sure that we are focusing on all of our inspections being delivered with professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect. I am really heartened that I have heard lots of feedback from the system on how they have seen that that has made a difference in the last 12 months to inspection and yet we still maintained strong accountability, because the percentage of “good” and “outstanding” has not changed since I have taken over in charge of Ofsted. It is about changing the culture from the top and being quite clear about all the systems, some of which I have described, about how people go about working.
Regarding the actual individual inspectors, there was one HMI who undertook the inspection and two Ofsted inspectors. One of those Ofsted inspectors was under training and no longer works for Ofsted. Another one has not been deployed at this moment but could be deployed at a later date. The other HMI has not resumed on any inspection. This is a public Committee. This person carried out an inspection against the framework in the way that the framework was written. There was no suggestion that they did a bad job or did anything wrong whatsoever. It was the framework that they delivered and it is for Ofsted to respond. It is Ofsted’s responsibility, not the responsibility of that individual.
I have a duty to that individual to protect them and their wellbeing, because they have some quite considerable concerns in their work. I am supporting that individual in their employment at Ofsted, but I am not placing them out on inspection, because they are vulnerable. I need to make sure I support that member of staff as well.
Q4 Chair: I want to press you a little bit more. It is difficult for organisations faced with the scale of challenge and change that is needed sometimes to see what is wanting when there is a prevailing culture within the organisation within which everybody has already been working. I understand that you have a duty of care to employees in Ofsted, as you have to the schools and organisations that you are inspecting. Are you absolutely confident that that culture change is taking place and that you do not have, for want of a better word, an old guard of inspectors who really do not see quite what the problem is?
Sir Martyn Oliver: No. I am absolutely confident in that case. The HMIs, His Majesty’s inspectors, or the social care regulatory inspectors or early years regulatory inspectors, the cadre of inspectors who are employed by Ofsted, are expert professionals who are doing this day in, day out. It is difficult to explain in isolation from any one question. We have put the Ofsted Academy in place. What do I mean by that? A few minutes ago I described that we have regions and training took place in regions. While Yvette is in charge and the national director for anything to do with children’s services and social care would direct the training, it was delivered by the region. Lee is the same for education and it was delivered by the region.
I detect that it led to some regional variance. Sometimes they would deliver the message with complete fidelity and sometimes they would put their own regional spin on it to try to make it fit their region and people. We are a national organisation. If you come up against people like me, in my old job I had three regions that my organisation covered. You could tell the difference between one region sometimes and another region. We needed to work nationally. The Ofsted Academy now covers all eight regions and makes sure that the training delivered from Yvette and Lee is delivered with fidelity, so I can be sure that our full-time employed staff are getting the message and they are getting the message every week.
We have gone from training once or twice a year to weekly training, because of the way that we deploy and notify inspections on Mondays. If you want I can talk about that further on. All that makes a difference because I can now get training happening all the time. That is where the culture change is coming, along with the national hubs, stopping conversations happening at a regional level but having national consistency hubs checking on how we do all these things. That is delivering the change.
It is perhaps worth knowing that the vast majority of Ofsted’s workforce are not employed by Ofsted. They are contracted because they work in early years settings, schools and colleges. They are out there in the system. The vast majority, thousands of our staff, are actually employed working in schools right now. My ambition is to make sure we become even more of a peer-led review system, of the system but by the system, for parents and children, in raising standards.
For all the issues and serious challenges that we have had, we have thousands—and I mean thousands—of people who want to become Ofsted inspectors. In just a period of November to December we had something like 1,000 or 1,500 people make a request to become an Ofsted inspector. People want to work with us because they can see the value of our organisation if we work proportionately, with sensitivity, in holding the system to account. The vast majority of people in the system want to be held accountable. They just want it to be done fairly.
Q5 Chair: You have talked about the six national hubs. One of those national hubs will be a complaints against Ofsted hub. They will be led by regional directors. Can I ask why you have been resistant to a fully independent complaints process? We see a pattern of different organisations across different sectors, which have hit up against really significant problems but have resisted putting in place a truly independent complaints process, essentially giving their own homework more marks than it deserves. You have talked about consistency but that is different to what the prevailing standard is that is used to assess complaints. Independence is important for that reason. Look at the Church of England this week, which has been in exactly that situation of resisting, failing to put in place independence in its complaints process and ultimately running into really big problems.
You have a problem, because of the Caversham inspection and other examples that have arisen, of trust and confidence of the profession. Independence in the complaints process can be really important in establishing and rebuilding trust and confidence. Why is it that you have chosen to run with a process that is internally held and managed, albeit that it has some components to it that sit outside the organisation?
Sir Martyn Oliver: It is a challenge. Ofsted for a long time—I do not know the exact date but I can get it—has worked with an independent complaints adjudicator, ICASO, where people can make a complaint to ICASO, entirely independent of us. I get a report from it, making sure that we have gone through our complaints procedure. Have we taken this seriously? Have we fulfilled our duty to go through that? Every time that it receives a report, it writes back to me, either saying, “We have found that you have adhered to your complaints procedure,” or saying, “You have failed your complaints procedure.” We have to undertake a learning review of any failings that we make against that. We have, and have had for quite some time now, ICASO as an entirely independent organisation.
In terms of inspection, that becomes really difficult. Who inspects the inspectorate? Who inspects the inspectorate of the inspectorate? Where does it ever end? We undertake evidence gathering, inspect with evidence, gather the evidence and then review it. This complaints against Ofsted hub that we talk about nationally, the one you refer to, has a panel of experts now, not just local or regional people who are occasionally doing it. Now it is a national panel. I have trained experts from across the country who now form a part of this hub. They are checking the evidence against the handbook that either Yvette or Lee has written to make sure that it has been delivered and that we can gather and judge that evidence.
Then we do quite a lot of gathering additional evidence or evidence-based reviews—EBRs, or GAEs as we call them in Ofsted—against our work. We are doing them increasingly so we are challenging ourselves all the time. You might then ask, “Why did you not get somebody completely independent to do that?” Somebody will have to go back and inspect the school, because it is a point-in-time inspection. The evidence was gathered at that point and that is the evidence that was found. You could not make a judgment unless you sent a separate team, another version of Ofsted, back into that school to undertake that evidence again, because it would only be relying upon the evidence that we found. Basically, you are committing the school, or the early years childminder or children’s home, to a complete separate inspection. It has to be about us finding the evidence, gathering the evidence and then making sure that that evidence meets the framework.
Going forward, there are ways to try to break that fourth wall. We have learned a lot from different types of inspection. One thing that I can say today about our consultation is that we have right now the EIF—the education inspection framework—which covers all of education. Then we have a social care common inspection framework and an ILACS inspection, which you mentioned, Darren, that cover children’s services and social care. The EIF covers everything from early years to childminders, nurseries and schools. It is one common framework across. We have discovered, from our Big Listen and our work, that we need frameworks that are more representative of the areas in which we inspect.
We shall be consulting on an early years framework, which will work for both childminders and groups delivering early years. We will consult on schools and education in schools, skills and an independent initial teacher education framework. There is nuance in that.
One thing that we learned in further education frameworks is that we often have a nominee. We ask someone who is in the college—often because they are very large organisations—to come and join and be a regular part of the Ofsted inspection. It breaks that difference between being done to and done with. We think that there is something in that, so we are proposing to consult on whether that is a good idea going forward, again to increase that transparency.
Q6 Chair: I am going to move on because of time at this point. I would just ask really quickly whether, having established this new process and the new hub, you are committed to continually reviewing the relationship between that process and the trust and confidence in your organisation and in the profession, and to making further changes in the future if needed.
Sir Martyn Oliver: Absolutely, which is why we then take a sample of the work of that hub to the group that Lee mentioned a few moments ago. We invite system leaders and trade union representatives to come and look at the work, the complaint, how we have handled the complaints and our complaints process, and then to check that we have actually adhered and it was a fair process. That is the one where we took great feedback from people saying that they could not believe the lengths that we went to.
We are committed to being open and transparent. We are even thinking about the way we gather evidence and how we make that open and transparent. We do not want anything to be kept secret, but of course some aspects of our work deal with often very challenging whistleblowing or safeguarding concerns where we have to keep things separately aside for the protection of either a child or a member of staff who might be abused. We are very committed to being open and transparent in that and keeping a review of the way that we work on complaints. It is an area we take seriously.
Q7 Manuela Perteghella: Sir Martyn, you touched upon timescale for publication of reports. In response to the coroner’s report, Ofsted said that it would use the Big Listen to consult school leaders and parents on the length of time it takes to publish an inspection report, but there was no mention of this issue in the Big Listen questionnaire. Why was this omitted and what consultations have you had with schools and parents on the current timescale between inspection and publishing of reports?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I shall definitely answer the question. We asked the Big Listen about the timescale and notice for going in and inspecting. On the timescale of reports, a lot of that is down to our resource and capacity. We have committed to 30 days, so we try to get all of our reports out within 30 working days. We cannot go a great deal more quickly than that, not just because of capacity but because we seriously undertake consistency training.
For example, last thing every Friday I will sit on a group, which either Lee or Yvette runs, where we look at all the reports that have come in that week from across the country. We are doing hundreds. We look at the most controversial reports, ones where “inadequate” judgments might be given, ones that are high profile, or ones where from risk assessment the outcome might be different to the one that you might presume. You do not go in with a fixed view on inspection but, if you have data that is very bad and get a very good report, you want to ask yourself what evidence was found on inspection. We will then check that every week. We have to run through those processes to make sure that we are consistent and doing a good job.
We think we can get those reports out in 30 days or less, and that is what I said. We have 95% of our inspections hitting that deadline. We have 2% that fall outside of that deadline because we get a complaint about the inspection. We take that seriously and will not publish it until we get to that end point. We have 3% where we have missed our deadline. That is for all sorts of reasons, whether that is our fault, in which case we have just been tardy and have got a mistake there, which we have to get better at, or because it has fallen at the end of one half term or term, and we are reporting at the back end of another and have just missed a day or so in reporting.
We think that 30 days is reasonable, remembering that that is 30 days to publication, but that is not 30 days for the school to see the report, if we are talking about a school. It might get the report in the draft format within a week, so we are faster now in making sure that they see that report. In the case of Caversham, when we had concerns about the report, it just got delayed, delayed and then delayed again. It pushed it back to an unacceptable length of time, but we have checks and balances now to make sure we are watching that, so we do not have leaders who are sitting there with a report that is hanging over them and not going out in public.
Q8 Mrs Brackenridge: Dame Christine Gilbert’s first recommendation is that Ofsted should continue to address the coroner’s concerns and this Committee’s recommendations with a sense of urgency. Are you confident that you have addressed each of the coroner’s concerns and each recommendation made by this Committee in its Ofsted report?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I am confident that we have addressed the concerns to the best of our ability against the framework that we have. It is a good framework that is, on the whole, well respected by the system. There was much that we want to maintain going forward. A more nuanced framework could better talk to the difference between a childminder, who might be someone who has two children in their front room, a nursery, with a hundred or so children in it, a single-form entry primary school, a secondary such as the one I used to be the headteacher of, with 2,200 children in it, an FE college, which might have thousands and thousands of learners, and a training provider, which might have five or six doing an apprenticeship.
When we have a framework that has that nuance, where we have built into the framework the methodology and the lessons that you are referring to from this Committee, from Dame Christine Gilbert and from preventing future deaths, that methodology and the new framework will deliver a more proportionate and respectful system and yet still raise standards. Ofsted has an important role for parents to hold the system to account and to raise standards across the system. I think that we can do this. Hopefully our consultation later this month will demonstrate to people that it can be achieved.
Q9 Mrs Brackenridge: How will you measure the success of the changes that you have implemented?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I have been measuring them, whether it is anecdotally in feedback, talking to system leaders or by looking at how we take feedback. Every time we undertake an inspection we ask for people to provide feedback on inspections. It is a figure that people have not trusted in the past, but it is one that is completed by a significant number of inspections. We do between 15,000 and 20,000 inspections a year; we will do 500 next week, for example. About half of the people we undertake will reply to their post-inspection survey and tell us how it has gone, but those figures have returned to pre-pandemic levels already because of the changes that we have made.
I am in this really very difficult scenario right now, where I have been told that urgent reform was required and I’ve worked at absolute breakneck speed for the last 12 months to make the change. Then I have been told by some that the changes have had massive impact and that therefore I now do not need to rush any further change. By others I am told that I still need to carry on with the pace of change. In the world of politicians, if I have one half saying, “You are going too fast,” and one half saying, “You are going too slow,” I have to think I am probably about right.
Q10 Mrs Brackenridge: How will you communicate the successes with stakeholders and are there proposed timescales for this?
Sir Martyn Oliver: From Dame Christine Gilbert’s review, she was concerned that all the actions, whether it is the coroner’s report, this predecessor Committee’s report or the Big Listen, needed to be open and transparent in one simple place. We took all of the actions from everything and we made them into 132 actions. We have completed a significant number of those and actually made those public now. We had a board meeting in December where my chair and my board approved it and then in December we published our Big Listen action monitoring report, where we now tell everyone the progress we are making against preventing future deaths, this Committee and the Big Listen as we go forward. Most people will see the vast majority of changes come via the new methodology and the new framework. That will see the vast majority of the 132 then in action.
We are being held accountable by our open and transparent board. The Committee will know that the longstanding chair, who is in her second term, has decided to step down and we will soon be advertising for a new chair of the board. I am sure that that person will want to make sure that they are again challenging us and holding us openly and transparently to account. We can think about the way that the board then works going forward and the way that we then show all of our data. I want to be clear that we have clear key performance metrics that we can then share in our annual report and accounts and then in our annual review, which is laid in front of Parliament every single year. I expect both of those documents to be useful. Of course now—after the election delaying me coming here—I will hopefully be back into a regular rhythm of coming here and being held accountable by you on those actions. You will be able to clearly see the progress that I make or do not.
Chair: I look forward to that in about six months’ time.
Sir Martyn Oliver: So do I.
Q11 Patrick Spencer: The Alternative Big Listen, which ran at the same time as Ofsted’s consultation, found that 91% of respondents do not consider Ofsted to be fit for purpose. We have obviously spent a lot of this hearing talking about the sad case of Ruth Perry. Is there anything else that you think is driving this underlying distrust of Ofsted within the sector?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Historically, a series of changes have been made, which my predecessor spoke really well about, which have led to this being a really difficult moment in time. Without going on too long, let us look. We had an historical abeyance of “outstanding” school inspections that were put in place. That meant that, since that came along, every school that was outstanding sat on that judgment for an awful long time. When I was a headteacher, I got “outstanding” in 2012 and the school was not inspected until last year, so nearly 12 years before that school gets inspected again. It is a similar case with Caversham, which had been an outstanding school and then not inspected for an awful long time.
When you are a headteacher sitting on an “outstanding” judgment, or a new headteacher inheriting an “outstanding” judgment, there is a lot of pressure on you. You have not experienced Ofsted inspections. You have not experienced that regular scrutiny and then it comes along. If you then do not maintain your “outstanding,” there is a very good chance that people would put a complaint in against Ofsted. Now you have the “outstanding” people who might be complaining about Ofsted.
You then have the usual. We regularly get complaints when we hold people accountable and say that they are inadequate. They often complain. We get people who are requiring improvement who are complaining because previously, until it has been recently dropped, if your school had two “requiring improvement” judgments it was subject to a potential termination warning notice as accountability.
Of our four judgments—“outstanding,” “good,” “requiring improvement” and “inadequate”—three suddenly had a level of accountability that was really high. The current Government have a view on whether it was disproportionate or not, but it meant that there was an awful lot of challenge. There was an awful lot happening on the back of an Ofsted inspection.
I like to remind people that, in terms of Ofsted, what happens if you get an “inadequate” judgment is that we will just turn up and monitor you more regularly. We are not the regulator of schools; we are the inspectorate. We regulate early years and in children services and social care, but in schools the Department for Education is the regulator. It is the regulator that uses the Ofsted judgment and then decides it will take action on the back of that. That is where a lot of the pressure and stress comes from.
It is entirely right and it should be a requirement that we need a coherent accountability system, which is the inspectorate and the regulator, being clear, so I am looking forward to hearing about the Department for Education’s work with its RISE teams and the work it has going forward. I think that our methodology will deliver higher and rising standards, removing the single-word judgment, as simple a judgment as it is. Low information and high stakes is the position. We can move to high information and more proportionate stakes and still raise accountability and tell parents very clearly the performance of schools. That is what I hope to consult on.
Q12 Patrick Spencer: To follow up quickly on that, your differentiation between a regulator and an inspector kind of skewered my second question, but can you take this moment now and this opportunity to explain how important Ofsted is, an inspectorate is and a regulator is for the quality of education in this country and the long-term outcomes for children in schools in this country?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Our work is vital. Many people who are completing the Alternative Big Listen or going on to social media might deliver a good education and good services. They might feel that it is an unnecessary burden to have Ofsted come along and inspect them because they are good people doing good work. It is difficult in education. I have been in it for 30 years and have had nearly 100 Ofsted inspections as a headteacher and a senior leader in my time. You have people trying their level best, foster carers trying their level best and people looking after children’s homes trying their level best. It is really hard to be told, when you are trying your best in difficult circumstances, that you are not doing a good enough job.
Clearly it is very emotive, but our role is essential, because there are things that people do not see, which even I, through all the experience that I had in the system, did not to get to see until I took this job. You see a child in secure accommodation who is sleeping on a dirty mattress on the floor with a broken sink and a broken window. You see footage of an illegal school. You see the conditions of children working in them. You go into a maintained school and you see complete fracture between the local authority, the governing body and the leaders in the community, and children getting an awful deal. You go into a secondary school that is an academy and you see the headteacher of the academy and the trust at complete loggerheads with each other and children having an appalling time, with unacceptable standards of education.
When you see all those things, you realise the importance of our work. You also realise the importance of our work by our very presence, the very fact that we exist, have a framework and say to people, “These are the standards in education, children’s services and skills that you must adhere to and it is unacceptable for children, young people or adults who are in apprenticeships to experience education, children’s services or skills of a lesser value.” You then see the importance of our work. It is vital.
High-performing systems have high levels of accountability, but I think that we can do this in a way that is fairer, more transparent, more proportionate and more supportive. That is what I will, hopefully, consult on, with the help of Lee for education. Then later—probably aiming for April 2026 and there are good reasons for that—in children’s services, we can do the same. I think that we can still raise standards across the board, but thank you. It is a vital role that we carry out.
Q13 Mark Sewards: Thank you for your answers so far. I particularly appreciate your last answer to Patrick about the purpose of Ofsted and why we do it. To follow up on something that Patrick was asking about, he talked about the fact that 91% of respondents said that Ofsted was not fit for purpose. In your response, you talked about the level of scrutiny that comes with three of those four one-word Ofsted judgments. Is it primarily down to that? Is that why 91% of people say that it is not fit for purpose?
Sir Martyn Oliver: No. I have no idea about the Alternative Big Listen because they never bothered to share, to write to me, or to tell me any of their findings. I have no idea of the methodology or the number of people. I know from our research—it was over 30,000 people, independent research that took place, which is nationally representative, verified, all made public and transparent—that we have different levels of trust in the system.
It is really interesting. In Yvette’s work, in children’s services, we have some of the worst outcomes following inspections. We have more local authorities that are inadequate or inconsistent in area SEND, or requiring improvement under ILACS inspections or the social care common inspection framework, and yet they have the greatest level of trust in the judgments that we make. Then you go into further education, where we have quite a high number of good and outstanding performers. They have relatively high levels of trust. It is then less in early years and even less in schools.
You have to look at all the additional things that come alongside it, whether it is the regulatory accountability on termination, termination, termination, which has already been dropped because of the double RI standard and the proposals that might come forward from the RISE teams on “inadequate” judgments that we might make in the future, or the transparency in the way that the framework works. For example, at the moment the framework describes a good school. If you are not a good school, you might be outstanding. You meet all the good requirements and there are some elements of outstanding. If you are neither of those, the next conversation is, “Let us look at inadequate,” because there are no criteria for requiring improvement.
If you are a headteacher, sitting in your school and thinking you are running a good school, but the inspectorate is like, “You have some judgments here, but it might not be good. Let us turn now to inadequate,” can you imagine your heartrate as a headteacher now? “What do you mean, inadequate? Where has this come from? Now you are discussing the ‘inadequate’ criteria.” “Right, it is not inadequate. Therefore it is absent. It is neither one nor the other. It therefore must require improvement and be the blank one.”
I do not think that that is clear enough. That is opaque. We need to find a way to make sure that leaders can ask themselves, “Can I clearly see whether I am doing what I need to do?” I have also been really clear. I said this, I think, to the predecessor Committee on my appointment. I was really concerned as the chief inspector. I am not saying my predecessors have ever done this at all, but I was concerned to make sure that I could not be accused of coming into the role and just imposing my whims on the system. Thinking that there are 90,000 to 95,000 people who we inspect and regulate, I did not want that to be just on the latest thing that Martyn Oliver thinks should happen to all of them.
The Big Listen was a big part of finding that out, but also making sure, as I said, that how we inspect and what we should inspect should be a part of the system. I can look at the statutory guidance of the Department for Education on attendance, for example; the non-statutory guidance on behaviour; the teachers professional standards; Keeping Children Safe in Education; or the special educational needs code of practice, a legal requirement. I named just a few of those documents and then said to Lee, “I want you to write a framework that tells leaders out there, ‘This is your statutory, non-statutory or legal duty.’ I want you to hold people to account for doing what they are supposed to do.” That is what Lee has written for me and that is what I am going to consult on.
People will see that it is very proportionate and says, “This is your job. This is what you are expected to do.” It is not going to denude your flexibility as an individual to run a different school. We should celebrate difference but it will also not overstep and it will not create a burden. It is all of those changes. They will address some of the questions about culture. They will address concerns about consistency and workload. It is bringing it all across in a new way of working that still raises standards.
I think that the Secretary of State wrote to headteachers at the very beginning of September when she said that she is going to remove the single-word judgment in schools. I will not prattle on too long; I will let you ask questions. There was a reason why it was schools only first. She said quite clearly in this letter to headteachers, “Be clear that this will not be a soft option.” There will still be high levels of accountability, but it will be more nuanced and lean into the complexity, and present it, I hope, in a way where parents can make real quick determinations about the quality of provision for their child, which is, ultimately, Ofsted’s job.
Q14 Mark Sewards: You mentioned the Big Listen. I am just going to turn back to that because I know that Patrick referenced it as well. It has run into some criticism. Some people have said that it asked too many leading questions and some have even suggested that it was wrong not to ask people directly about their opinions on one-word Ofsted judgments. How were the questions selected for the Big Listen and do you think the criticism about the one-word Ofsted judgment questions is fair?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I want to work openly and transparently. This was me. I decided to do the Big Listen. No one told me I had to do the Big Listen. I chose to go out and do a public consultation. Ofsted is an independent organisation, but I try to be clear about what I mean and what the law means about the independence of Ofsted. We are independent of Government, held accountable directly to Parliament via this Committee, not to the Secretary of State in the Department for Education, because we cannot be told by the Secretary of State, or by any of you, what we should find when we go and inspect somewhere. We will write the framework, go and inspect, and find a judgment. The Secretary of State can request and demand that I go and inspect somewhere, but she cannot tell me what I shall find when I go there. Ofsted’s independence is rooted in the evidence that we find. One of my very long-serving, old-standing predecessors, David Bell, I think, said that. Our independence is in the evidence that we find and that part is utterly crucial.
In the Big Listen, we wrote questions. Although I am a Crown appointment and not a civil servant, everybody else who is an employee, everyone here, everyone behind me, everyone else in Ofsted, is a civil servant. We are a non-departmental public body[1]. We must not thwart the policy of Government. In the case of schools, we could not drop the single-word judgment, because the school system, the Government, had interventions based upon the single-word judgment. It would have been completely irresponsible of a non-departmental public body to say, despite the DfE having the systems in place for terminating schools if they are inadequate, in special measures, requiring significant improvement or requiring improvement, that I am going to change that grade. It would place the Department for Education into disarray.
Once the Secretary of State decided to remove that judgment, we could remove that judgment, because we are working in tandem. That isn’t not being independent. We will still find what we find on the ground. Here is the other example. In early years, we could not remove the single-word judgment, because, for example—now in a totally different Department of Government—you get child tax credits if you send your child to a good or outstanding provider. It requires that unpicking of the child tax credits into a new way of working, without the single-word judgment, before we can drop it. In further education, the contract to deliver training is based upon being good or outstanding. If we had then unilaterally dropped that, we would have placed the FE skills sector into complete disarray.
We cannot ask questions that are thwarting Government policy, but we opened text boxes. There were open text boxes against every single question. I suppose in a way I find it amusing. People are saying, “You did not ask a single question about the one-word judgment in the Big Listen,” but look at the Big Listen response. The one-word judgment is heavily criticised. It came through loud and clear, and we reported on it. We did not ask it, because it would have been completely irresponsible of us to do so with the Government of the time, and yet the answer we got was that people have a problem with the one-word judgment.
Fortuitously, the moment that came out it also happened that a general election had taken place. A Government came in with a manifesto to remove that judgment and fortunately, I suppose, for the Government, the findings of the Big Listen backed up the decision to remove the one-word judgment. Even parents themselves said they found it not to be as appropriate as they wanted it to be in describing their child’s school or early years setting. I would refute that it was not an open and transparent process. The very fact that we did it was a demonstration of being open and transparent in the first place.
Mark Sewards: I have follow-ups, but, in the interests of time, I will leave it there, Chair.
Q15 Mrs Brackenridge: Single-word judgments in schools are to be replaced from September with school report cards. Can you tell us how these report cards will be developed and what consultation work will be undertaken?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I will do my best to describe this without fettering my future consultation. I am hoping to release that later this month. As I said, I apologise if that is an unacceptable answer, but I will be very happy to return and take scrutiny on that consultation. We will undertake a Government consultation. We will make sure that we meet not the minimum but a proper standard of Government consultation, for example a 12-week consultation period. It will not be a fait accompli.
We shall present information to the system that talks across education, so not children’s services and social care. That will come later—April 2026 is my best guess at the moment—with Yvette. This is just education and the work of Lee, so from early years through to further education, initial teacher training and education, independent schools and so on. It will present a proposed model for each of those areas. It will ask questions about those proposals and whether people think that the way of reporting is clear. We will make a very special effort to hear not just from providers but from children and parents. Lee and I will be working flat out, from the end of this month through until March, up and down the country, talking to as many groups as possible about that work.
What can I tell you now? We want to move from low information and high accountability to high-quality information with proportionate accountability. The biggest challenge is how you take into context the work of schools and settings. I chose to work, in the vast majority of my 30 years, in schools in really difficult circumstances with very high levels of pupil premium and special educational needs, in areas that were described or could be described as being left behind, with disadvantaged children, vulnerable children and so on and so forth. You want to make sure that you do not have a postcode lottery where you are accepting lower standards for children because of where they go to school or where they go to an early years setting, so you have to have high stakes there. You have to have high levels of accountability, but you want to recognise that people are doing difficult work.
I promise I will come back to it but, just for a second, I am flipping to children’s social care here. Yvette and I went to a children’s home conference. Yvette and I were sat on the stage and were facing questions from the audience. They were telling us that, in some children’s homes, they were avoiding taking the most vulnerable children because they did not want Ofsted to come along and rate them “inadequate.” To us, that is heartbreaking and utter nonsense. Ofsted should want providers to take the most vulnerable children. We should recognise where they take the most vulnerable children and proportionately hold them to account. We should not expect them to have lower standards, but neither should we create a system where they avoid having them in the first place and off-roll them or refuse to take them.
That was a really upsetting moment for both of us that we tackled there and then, and Lee and I, in education, are making sure that that is the same. We will make sure, in this new framework, that we can do two things: we can recognise the context in which people work and still have high standards. You can do that by separating out some of the judgments. Right now, we only have four. The first one is the quality of education, which, in essence, looks at the curriculum, the quality of the teaching of that curriculum and the outcomes that children get. Because all those three really important areas are wrapped into one single-word judgment, it allows no nuance.
We go into schools where they get dreadful outcomes but the leaders are doing great work on the curriculum and developing their teachers. It is not lesson observations or any nonsense that was written in the press from anything anybody has been talking about for ages. That is just silliness. We would never go back to that. It is about then separating it out and saying, “You can, as a leader, have a really good clear curriculum, which might be brought in or developed elsewhere, or it might be your own, and it might have really high standards, the very best of the EIF developed by my predecessor, which was important in raising standards in this country.” It is an important part of our work and we would be daft to drop that. We can then say, “How well are you developing your teachers and supporting them to do their job, as leaders?” Then we can say, “What are your outcomes like for your school?”
The beauty of a report card is that you can have one judgment that says, “That is not good enough and that bit is very good.” You can be both because you are not held by one single-word summary judgment trying to describe it all. That is how we can avoid, in the famous phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectation and still recognise the context in which people work. I am really looking forward to, Lee, you describing that work to the system later this month when we go out to consultation. That is how this Government and Ofsted will hold the system to higher levels of account than ever before, while still removing that single word.
Q16 Mrs Brackenridge: I appreciate that you are limited in terms of what you can share because we are pre-consultation, but it has been said that report cards will have separate criteria for safeguarding and inclusion. What other measures would you like to see included in the report cards? What can you share?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Let us see whether we can build one right now and put it together. I did this. Interestingly, I went to an executive meeting of one of the very large leadership trade unions and sat in front of 50 or 60 of them, and we did this same exercise. When I started the job, I had two clear priorities. One was what we do and I wanted to make sure that we focused on vulnerable and disadvantaged children. I do not think that we have talked about it enough in the past and since the pandemic.
That is one of the things I meant to say, Patrick. The changes that have happened in the past and all of the difficulty that has resulted post‑pandemic, on top of the single-word judgments and all the complexity of the accountability system, is where a lot of the stress of the system has come from, as well as the changing services. When I was a headteacher, I had a social worker, an educational psychologist and a school-based nurse. I had all these things around me. None of those three are in that school anymore. Things have changed and we have to recognise that those changes are there, and so my next part is focusing on vulnerable and on bringing together the best systems.
This is one of those moments where you just have to say something that is incredibly obvious now. It is so obvious that no one seems to have focused on it for ages. Ofsted inspects 90,000 to 95,000 people and we report on the performance of each individual. What we do not think enough about is the journey of a child in an area. As a parent, your child is born and, Yvette, you will talk about perhaps even pre-birth children’s services getting involved into that. They then might access early years provision. They might go into care and then be under the auspices of children’s services. They might go into foster care. They go into an early years setting. They go into an infants, a juniors, a primary. They go into a secondary school. They might access special or alternative provision. They might go into further education. They might go into secure accommodation.
Ofsted is there. If you think of the most vulnerable children in England, we are there across all of them, from pre-birth all the way through even into adulthood. Ofsted has a duty to say to parents, “What is it like to be a child growing up in an area accessing all of these services?” We did this award‑winning piece of work on childcare oases and deserts. Here is an unbelievably obvious thing that I wrote in my annual report that I sent to all of you in December. If you look at our most disadvantaged areas educationally in the country, they are early years deserts. If you look at where the higher suspensions take place, they are often registered alternative provision deserts. If you look at special schools with some of the worst outcomes for SEND children, there are often special school deserts.
It is Ofsted’s job—our independence shines here—to say that we can see performance educationally, so standards of behaviour, attendance, and mental health and wellbeing, and all the services that are either there or not there around them. We should say what it is like to be a child in that setting and what it is like to be a child in that area. My two jobs were vulnerable children and area insights. A report card can lean into both of those. Going back to your original question, I have now waffled on so much I can barely remember what it was, so apologies.
Mrs Brackenridge: It was about safeguarding and inclusion.
Sir Martyn Oliver: Would we all agree that it always starts with leadership and governance, and you should look at leadership and governance in a setting? Perhaps on a report card we would start with leadership and governance. That should be reviewed. How well are the governors supporting leaders? How well are leaders supporting staff? How well are all of them supporting the children in their setting? There is one.
Then the curriculum is important. How well teachers are being developed and trained to deliver that curriculum is important and the outcomes that children get are important. Do we think behaviour is important? Yes. Do we think that attendance is important? Look post-pandemic at the difficulties on attendance. Now we look at behaviour and attitudes, and behaviour and attendance get lumped together as one. It is important to say, “What is behaviour like? What is the behaviour like in the school setting and in lessons?” There is behaviour for learning and behaviour in and around in the setting.
Then you have attendance. It is important that we talk about those and recognise, in terms of attendance, that sometimes the systems and the things that are affecting schools’ attendance are not entirely in the school’s gift. It might be the absence of other systems supporting those children all around them. It is not just raw data. It is about, “Are you aware, as leaders, of the issues of attendance? Are you taking effective action and is it having an impact?” Again, it is being proportionate and looking at that.
Then you might want to say, “How well are children being personally developed?” That is important. Then, because it is my pet project—and this is the one bit where I stand guilty right now of saying, “The chief inspector is determining something”—disadvantaged children matter. I am a firm believer that, if settings get it right for disadvantaged and vulnerable children, they get it right for everyone. I have never seen any setting do a really bang-up job for the most difficult and vulnerable children and do awfully for everyone else. It just does not happen, so we should focus on inclusion and disadvantage.
We have a duty here, even though we are independent, to support Government in their ambitions for special educational needs children, because the system does not work right now. It is a lose-lose situation. It is broken. Far too many of the most vulnerable children are not getting good enough quality. We can direct schools to be more inclusive and reward those ones who are doing the difficult job.
What have we done? We have talked about leadership and governance, curriculum, developing teaching, looking at the outcomes, behaviour, attendance, personal development and inclusion. Across all of those, we are starting to build the complexity and nuance that people can talk about in the report card. I just need to make sure that it does not drive workload and it is proportionate.
Lastly, on safeguarding, safeguarding should be separate and not a part of leadership and management as it is right now, for the reasons we talked about when I was addressing the Chair’s first questions. Also, because safeguarding is very much a met/not met judgment, it is very difficult to say safeguarding is outstanding. Even in outstanding settings where good things are happening, bad people can still exist and bad things can still happen. We have seen that, sadly, in far too many cases across all the remits in which we work. It is nonsense to try to judge anything other than met/not met.
We can be clear; we can take the really difficult tome, Keeping Children Safe in Education, which is an inch and a bit thick, and that is a difficult job. Every year it is updated. If you are a standalone primary headteacher, you have to try to get through that every year. Even though it summarises what is different, it is still a big requirement. I have tasked Lee with explaining in the new framework what are the key aspects of that against which we will hold people to account.
It is going to be unbelievably obvious what we will inspect on. I do not expect anyone to fail safeguarding, because I do not want any children to be unsafe anywhere. Again, Lee, with that way of working we can help the system without overstepping the role. We are not a school improvement body; we are a school inspectorate, but we can improve the system by being clear on what those core aspects are. That is the level of consultation we will go into. We can describe the system and ask people, “Are we right in what we try to capture; are we proportionate; and does it still work to parents?” We need to raise standards and make sure that parents can see information.
Mark, going back to your question about trust, if you go around all your constituencies, how many banners are outside providers that say, “Our Ofsted rating is this”? How many people in your constituencies celebrate Ofsted judgments in your local newspapers? We get thousands and thousands of letters. I get far more letters about how well we are doing, or messages or text messages—I have had lots today and yesterday—even for coming here, telling me about the job that we are doing, the transformation that we are making and that we do compliance.
I am not being complacent. One inspection that does not go well sends shockwaves through the system. It has a fear factor for people waiting for the dreaded phone call from the inspectorate. I have to try to get over that line but still hold people to account for unacceptable levels, and that bit of it will always exist. I do not know how you can possibly get away from that without removing any level of accountability whatsoever.
Q17 Mark Sewards: Not on that topic, but just on the education inspection framework, we know it is going to have to be reformed to facilitate report cards. How long do you estimate it will take to inspect all schools under a new system?
Lee Owston: We are coming to the end of the current cycle of inspections, which is across a five-year period. Of course, we will be looking to see what that means for a renewed inspection framework. There is difficulty—as Martyn has already mentioned in previous answers—about how much funding we are given and the timescale we can commit to in terms of the volumes of work, but we would want to ensure across all our education provision that parents had timely information about the quality of education and care that their children are receiving, whatever that setting or provider may be, from early years all the way through to further education and skills.
What I cannot commit to today is what those timescales will look like. Of course there are some providers that have more vulnerable children than others. Would we want to inspect those more frequently than other places? It is a question that we need to ask in terms of our spending review commitments, which we know are coming up, what we can commit to and what we can then do as inspection volumes for the future. Currently our position is determined as at least once in the duration of a child’s journey through their school provision.
Yvette Stanley: It is probably worth my coming in there, Lee, on early years. Currently, for the registered provision—so for the youngest children—they get their first inspection after they have registered with us within 30 months. We have not seen them without children. Ideally we would like to bring that forward. Lee and I have worked together on an inspection regime that has the regulatory spine that Martyn talks about at the heart of it. We would like to bring that forward. Their window is longer than schools’. It is currently six years and we think for the youngest children that is too long. Part of the thinking that we are doing together as a team is to make sure that we have the proportionate response to the separate bits, but, as Lee has alluded to, the spending review will play a part in that.
Lee Owston: Of course, it is risk‑based in terms of who needs inspection the most. We have emergency procedures; Martyn mentioned the Secretary of State directing us in cases, but equally if we have concerns we can inspect without notice. For those schools that need inspection the most in terms of supporting improvement, those that we would say are at “requires improvements” in some of the aspects, or “inadequate,” obviously receive more inspections through their monitoring activities. There is a proportionate approach depending on how we have evaluated their provision.
Sir Martyn Oliver: The Act says that we must inspect within the six-year cycle. We currently manage a four-year cycle, without denuding our ability to have a spending review conversation and take on the serious challenges of public finances and the fact that Ofsted—like every other Government Department—commits to a zero-based budget review of our work to make sure we are doing more with less, as we have done for years.
We will hopefully be leaning into the Labour manifesto commitment to provide £45 million for Ofsted reform going forward—that was music to our ears, of course—to hold the system to account. We recognise that in the system we should not be first in line for receiving money. If you gave me a choice I would always put it on the frontline services that are delivering for children, because we do not deliver; we inspect those that deliver. I just want to be really clear on that.
We will have completed an inspection against the EIF, which was a spending review commitment from 2021, by July this year. That took five years or so to complete. If we were to work in exactly the same timeframe we would beat the six-year deadline, but it would not be six years and it would not be four; it would be somewhere in between. That would be our best guess, but if we have a poor spending review decision then my only choice as the chief inspector is to either lengthen the period between inspections or reduce the size of the team.
There is not much else you can do. For years—my predecessor talked about this really articulately to this Committee—we have often deprioritised the systems that keep children safe to focus on the actual act of inspecting. For example, in your world you require a new system to help support how we monitor notifications. In children’s services if something happens providers have to notify us. Yvette desperately needs a new system and I must not deprioritise that, because at some point I will be irresponsibly not keeping children safe if I have not done my duty there. It is a difficult balancing act, but Treasury and the Department for Education work well with us and we will be continuing those really tough conversations in the coming months.
Q18 Mark Sewards: That is brilliant. We will see what the outcome of the spending review is. Just very briefly, once the report card system has come in schools will be inspected. Will all schools retain their one-word judgments until they have been inspected under the new regime?
Sir Martyn Oliver: No school loses its judgment, but when its judgment then happens and takes place it is given a new judgment, which is its latest. On the report card, Ofsted has a framework but the report card is the Department for Education’s report card. It is our framework. We will inspect, but our inspections are a point in time, whether it is every few months, every four years or whatever that period is. The Department for Education holds information on those providers annually, or sometimes has even more regular information, for example on attendance. I have no idea; that is for the Department for Education. It can choose to add far more detail to that framework that we have and make an even more nuanced report card. There is much more that can come, but that is a question for the Secretary of State.
Q19 Mark Sewards: That is right, but they will retain their one-word judgments, essentially, until the new report card system.
Sir Martyn Oliver: We will not remove people’s judgments.
Mark Sewards: That is fine. Thank you very much.
Q20 Amanda Martin: I am going to cover multi-academy trusts. Before I talk about Government pledges, timing and challenges, I just want to take a brief step back because I am aware of timings. It is linked to you talking around the learning from things that have happened previously. Prior to October 2023, there were summary evaluations done, which were in conjunction and agreement with the Department and with the trusts. Obviously these were stopped. They did not result in grading but they did result in exploring quality, giving recommendations, and a supportive element. On the take-up and the success of those, did you judge them a success? I understand they were stopped so you could continue the statutory ones, but what learning did you get from that that has possibly fed into the potential good practice and the changes in the new framework? Was it a success and was there some learning to take?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Yes, multi-academy trust summary evaluations, or MATSEs, as they are referred to in the system. In my old role I am still the largest trust to have ever undertaken a MATSE, so I can tell you it from both sides on this one. It was a voluntary exercise, so I volunteered. I was asked and I said, “Yes, I will undertake it.” They looked at all the inspections. When I said I have had 100 inspections, I would have had 12 or 15 inspections in a 12-month window. They then took all the learning from those inspections, looked at all the things they found that were systemic across each of those inspections, and looked at all the other schools and their predecessor judgments. They then had a conversation in the centre.
There is an awful lot that we can learn from that going forward, but it was an unfunded piece of work. It is a luxury that Ofsted cannot afford to do and it is something that did not have legislation behind it. The Labour Party and the Government have made a commitment in their manifesto to launch a consultation into MAT inspections. My answer has always been—it was on appointment at this Committee and it still is now—that Ofsted should look at all groups and all responsible bodies running education, children’s services and skills everywhere.
My desire would be that it is not just multi-academy trusts, but everyone who is responsible. In the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that is going through Parliament’s Second Reading this week, we are really pleased to see that we have a chance to look at those responsible for running children’s homes. I would say the same across all groups, whether it is diocesan groups, maintained groups or multi-academy groups. We should look wherever anyone is responsible and we should hold them accountable for the decisions that they are making.
We have undertaken a public piece of research. My director of insights, who is behind me in the audience, is now working with independent groups and people who are joining it to start to look at governance and patterns of governance. We will work with the system. We will work with recognised bodies, for example the Confederation of School Trusts, and trade union representatives, especially for leadership organisations. We will develop a framework, whether it is just for MATs or for wider groups, which looks at the way we work.
I have to say that I have thought about what this might look like. In designing the framework with its complexity and nuance I have tried to think about what that may be in the future, but it is something that we want to consult on. I have a lot of work to do in our organisation to try to employ more inspectors who have experience, like I do, as chief executives, executive leaders and headteachers working in such groups, so that we can match our expertise to the expertise of the people in the system. It is a good, worthwhile exercise, because no one should be able to hide anywhere in any shadow and not be within the view of the inspector and regulator where they are responsible for children. We should hold them to account.
Q21 Amanda Martin: Just on that, actually, one of the first questions would be when we expect the first multi-academy trust inspection might take place. Before you answer that I would like to think about what the biggest challenges for Ofsted are when it comes to inspecting multi‑academy trusts. You have thought about that in the framework, but what steps have you taken to mitigate those challenges?
Sir Martyn Oliver: First of all, it will require an Act. We will need a legal basis. A voluntary MATSE will not cut it. That is not going to be appropriate, so my timeframe is back over to you, when it goes in front of the House and when it passes through you. Whether it would come here first or go straight to the House, that is not my area of expertise; I will leave that to others. I shall be beholden upon that Act and what you decide for our ability to deliver it. Ofsted will independently go and deliver the Act. We will find what we find. No one will tell us what we will find, but we will adhere to the law that you pass on how we should go about performing that piece of work.
What did we learn? There is a saying is that success has many parents but failure is an orphan. I am definitely one of the original people who said this: the school is the trust and the trust is the school. In my old organisation when people asked, “What is it like to work for the trust?,” I would say, “What do you mean? The school is the trust and the trust is the school.” It is indivisible. It is nonsense to think you can inspect the school and the trust as separate entities.
Let us go back to Sureena’s question. Amanda, let us say that you have a trust with 20 schools in it, and let us say that in those 20 schools we pick one aspect, such as the curriculum or attendance. Let us say in 20 occasions out of 20 we find that attendance or the curriculum was not being well run in those individual schools. There is a chance that it is then worthwhile having a conversation with the central body and saying, “Look, you have a systemic issue here across all your schools where this same problem is coming up time and time again. As an organisation, what are you doing to support those individual schools in those matters there?” What it should not be is an additional burden for one part of the system that another part of the system does not face. I am conscious of that.
My whole life is equity and fairness, whether it is vulnerable children or otherwise. What really upsets me is when it is just not fair. Having a system where maintained schools have a different type of inspection from trusts bothers me a lot. Making sure that we do not suddenly say that we are going to inspect the trust as if it exists but school inspections are something else, also bothers me. I have done 41 or 42 schools and I do not think parents gave an absolute jot about the trust; all they cared about was their child’s primary or their child’s secondary. We need to make sure that parents know what it is like to go to that school.
We will manage all of that. Hopefully I will get a chance to try to influence what the law looks like as you pass it in Parliament and we will get a chance to test it from the research we shall present, the conversations we will have with the system, and the best learning that takes place. I still think it is right that every group—children’s homes, nurseries, secure accommodation, foster care agencies, schools, trusts and maintained dioceses—should be responsible to us and, therefore, ultimately to Parliament for the work that they do, because they receive billions of taxpayers’ money in total. It is right that they should account for it.
Q22 Jess Asato: The Government have said they will introduce annual safeguarding reviews for every school in England. What discussions have you had with the Department about whether Ofsted or another body will be carrying out these reviews?
Sir Martyn Oliver: They are not very advanced conversations. At the end of the day it has been a very busy period, between me starting in January and all the reforms. I have not even touched the surface on the number of changes that I have made to Ofsted in the last 12 months or am about to make in the next 12 months. Let us give a moment to the Secretary of State here and the fact that she has had a very busy period since July through to December. Trying to deliver an entire manifesto on the basis of just an autumn is probably not very wise.
We have not had a great deal of discussions but we have been clear that it is a sensible thing to do to have a separate safeguarding judgment, in which case Ofsted can and will carry on holding schools accountable, as we do now under the EIF. We will do that separately under the report card if that is what comes out of the consultation. The consultation is not a fait accompli. We will listen to the feedback; we will take on board challenge and criticism; and, based upon that, we will make changes where we need to.
We will continue to hold people to account for keeping children safe. It is a critical job that we do. That can last for as long as it requires. If there is then a requirement to produce annual safeguarding, we can quite easily decouple that from our inspection framework and move it into that annual piece of work, whether that piece of work is ours or whether it belongs to anyone else.
My opinion, which I have not had any in-depth conversation with the Secretary of State about, would be this. Ofsted is independent, as we talked about with Mark. Even a local authority children’s safeguarding board—remembering that local authorities have maintained schools and relationships with all of their schools—could not have that level of independence that Ofsted has in saying, “We will make a judgment on safeguarding, whether it is effective or not,” because they really would be marking their own homework. It would be the organisation responsible for children’s safeguarding in the local authority that is then asking how well children are being kept safe in their own local authority.
There has to be a level of independence and we have the expertise. There is the expertise that I have, that Lee has, and that your huge army has. There is a vast array of expertise in His Majesty’s inspectors. Yvette, you have a lot of experience as a director of children’s services, as well as all the social workers you have who have worked on children’s safeguarding boards. Together we can provide something that is really, really robust.
Here is an interesting fact. I mentioned the £45 million in the Labour manifesto. If we were to send an Ofsted inspection team into every school every single year, guess how much it would cost: £45 million a year. I have no idea whether that is how the figure from the manifesto came about, but it is really expensive. In a tightening of public finances, it is right that we ask ourselves, “Is this the best spending of the money?”
If you asked me now, “Do you think children’s safeguarding in schools is the burning bush?” my answer would be no. We do not see safeguarding as the biggest issue in schools. I would say that serving the needs of special educational needs children is a much bigger issue in schools than looking at annual safeguarding. We have quite robust systems in place now. Bad things happen, and I am not sure that they still would not, even in an annual safeguarding review. I am looking forward to the conversation when it comes. We will have a challenging conversation and, ultimately, we will make sure we adhere to the law.
Q23 Amanda Martin: You touched on the Ofsted Academy in your overview of the one to six recommendations. The predecessor Committee’s inquiry into Ofsted’s work heard concerns around the lack of relevant expertise among inspectors. I have two questions around that. First, how will the proposed academy improve this? Secondly, do you intend to implement the previous Committee’s recommendations that Ofsted publish data on inspectors’ expertise and ensure that, at a minimum, the leader always has experience of the relevant type of school they are inspecting?
Sir Martyn Oliver: Yes to almost everything you just said, but no in one aspect. I will try to describe that. The Ofsted Academy was to make sure that, rather than eight regions, we had central fidelity to Yvette and Lee’s direction as the national directors of policy on the way that that training takes place.
Quite a number of you on here say you have previously been teachers. You remember that you had PPA time of 10%. I used to give my staff 12.5% of PPA time, not 10%. I was trying to think to myself, “My inspectors are really busy. They work long hours. It is a difficult week, inspecting. I am really conscious of their workload, not just the workload of leaders, but of the staff and the consequence it has on them.” I wanted to think about how I can develop our own version of PPA time inside.
You train HMIs far more regularly, but for inspectors you basically have two big events in the year, one at the start in September and one in January. Well, that is a bit like inset days. In schools you are lurching from one inset day, a term may go by, and then you have another. I did not like that when I used to run schools, so I used to disaggregate inset days. It was five a year; I used to keep two, disaggregate three, and turn it into weekly training of two hours. We know that the way children learn is through continual repetition of information and revisiting it, and then building upon that going forward. Well, the same happens for adults. I wanted them to be training all of the time.
This is the beauty of a Monday notification, which has made a big difference to the system. It is a fairly obvious thing to do. Again, it came from my experience. It actually came from the headteacher who took over from me a large, then outstanding school—it is a good school now—in Wakefield, with 2,200 children. He used to live in Sheffield and drive all the way to Wakefield, and he used to put his suit in the car on a Monday and not take it out of his car until the Wednesday night, just in case he had the phone call from Ofsted. He was doing that for years, because as an outstanding legacy school he was waiting for an inspection. It is just ridiculous. By doing a Monday notification I can make sure that people know by Monday afternoon if we are coming that week, for a routine inspection, not an emergency one. We will go whenever we feel we need to for those, or for monitoring inspections when it is an enduring relationship. That is different.
By having that level of relationship we knew that a Monday notification would mean a Tuesday and Wednesday inspection; Thursday was to write the report and to deal with it; and then Friday would create free time for them to start focusing on training and consistency. The Ofsted Academy can do an awful lot there to really focus on complaints, consistency and all of the work.
On top of that, we can then look at the expertise. One of the recommendations from the predecessor Committee was to look at the expertise. I had already decided to do this. Thankfully the Select Committee’s recommendations chimed with a lot of things I said in my pre-appointment hearing. For example, I talked about the Big Listen and the recommendation was to do the Big Listen.
I also said that we would have a look at the expertise of inspectors. I have launched a large survey across all our employed staff, and then I shall do the same across all our Ofsted inspectors. Remember, a couple of thousand of them are working in schools and early years providers right now. We will look at their expertise and then I will endeavour to match their expertise against settings, so a special school against special school expertise. That is a real ambition I have.
I would hate to denude the lead inspector by saying they would have that experience. His Majesty’s inspectors, the lead Ofsted inspectors, are going into as many as 30 or 35 settings a year. They develop an incredible bank of expertise. I do not think it is necessary to say that the lead inspector should come from the setting that is being inspected. It would be ideal if they did, but it is essential that I move towards a system where people on the team come from the setting. To do that overnight would be unrealistic; changing my workforce that quickly would be unachievable, but it is a commitment that I have and I will report on it.
I created two external reference groups. One is on insights and evidence for education, and the other is on insights and evidence for social care. Experts such as John Jerrim and Dr Sam Sims have written about this problem. John is on that reference group. I deliberately did that because I said, “I want to make sure that you are getting the information from us, as academics, where you can hold us to account and to our level of openness and transparency.” If they can show me something that we can do better then I should not be defensive about it; I should say, “Just tell me and I will do better.” That is the way I intend to work.
Q24 Darren Paffey: Let us turn to special educational needs, which you have rightly identified as the most pressing issue on all fronts at the moment. You said a moment ago that Ofsted should want any of the settings that you are inspecting to be taking the most vulnerable children, and that you should be judging that accordingly. The predecessor Committee found that that is not the case and that Ofsted does not sufficiently take account of the challenges that are currently being faced. With respect to the new inclusion criterion that you are going to introduce, could you say a bit about how you envisage that working, to ensure that Ofsted does properly account for that in early years, in schools and in other settings too?
Sir Martyn Oliver: I will invite Yvette and Lee to come in on this point as well. What is meant by inclusion or disadvantage is a really contested point. Even on SEND, people conflate children with an education, health and care plan with those who have been identified as school action, K code or SEND, and suddenly people no longer know what we are actually talking about. My director of insights went out and conducted a piece of research, and it was won by Dez Holmes, who was at Research in Practice and is now part of the National Children’s Bureau. They are conducting a piece of research on what we mean by “disadvantaged”.
Now, I deliberately used the word “vulnerable” when I started in the role, because I did not want people to fall into the trap of thinking “disadvantaged” purely meant pupil premium. It could be anything. I am really concerned about the sheer number of young carers in the system. The point that you made about early years really bothers me.
In truth, you could describe anybody who is not at a good level of development at the age of five as potentially disadvantaged. But we know from EEF, Sutton Trust, EPI and others that the real comorbidity is of being socially and economically disadvantaged and not being at a good level of development, or being socially and economically disadvantaged and being a young carer. It always comes back to that. Being socially and economically disadvantaged is a huge part of that. We want to look at inclusion, capturing all of those aspects.
I had a text message on Sunday night from a primary headteacher who has written an article in one of the trade press, asking, “Have you read my article?” He sent me a direct message, so I read it. In it he described what you are describing, Darren. The primary school headteacher said he had—I will try to remember this—eight children on an education, health and care plan in one class. I did not look at his school, but if he has a class of 30 children and eight of them have an EHCP it might be that they are all going to perform exceptionally well, or it might be that eight children all miss the expected standard. It can have a huge impact.
He was saying, “I have taken these eight children in my school. If I now do not get the expected standard because I have taken these eight children and their needs will not allow them to help me get that standard because they are working below the standard, I should not be penalised by it. What are you going to do about that?” We had a conversation and he was really thankful for the plans. I said, “We want to recognise in inclusion that you are doing that piece of work, but we are about raising standards. At the same time I can still say your outcome for everybody else is X, but your work on inclusion is Y. X and Y do not have to be the same.” That is the beauty of a report card and not having a single-word judgment. That is the complexity. That is the nuance that we can get into.
Do you want us to touch further on special education needs and area SEND? Do you want to talk about that?
Chair: If you are happy to wrap your question up with this section, Mark, and allow Sir Martyn to talk about area inspections now and then come in with any follow-ups that you would like to ask, then that is fine.
Sir Martyn Oliver: Do you want to talk about area SEND inspections, Yvette?
Yvette Stanley: I can. Lee may also want to chip in. Martyn has also talked about area insights. Something that Lee and I are really conscious of is that we can have a situation where all of the schools we have recently visited are outstanding, they have children with SEND, and then the locality is not making progress and there are real challenges. We need to strengthen the inclusion issue in the core school inspection framework, and Lee is, but also join the dots across those things.
Local authorities are struggling with the concept of them being held to account for the breadth of the education system—some of which they have influence over, but not directly—but also, very particularly, the health economy. We also think that a report card can hold the right people to account for the right things. You will see in many of the SEND reports—and I know predecessor Committees and yours have raised these—concerns about the access to CAMHS, the assessment by health of children with specific needs without the assessment getting the right support, et cetera.
Martyn has also talked about the team around the school and the ability of a school to get those right support services for children. We think about a combination of starting with the EIF—and you will see that very, very soon—but then also refreshing our SEND, so we are taking stock at the minute. We then need to think about how that system refreshes to join those dots more effectively.
Lee Owston: One of the criticisms we often receive, as Yvette mentioned, is, “How can you be so positive about SEND on your individual school inspections yet local areas have systemic failings?” as one of our judgment areas. That is because, from my experience as one of His Majesty’s inspectors, which I forgot to mention in my bio at the beginning, the vast majority of headteachers want to do the absolute best for the children in their care, including those with SEND. We are increasingly seeing headteachers doing everything they can, including using their own education budget to fund speech and language therapy, for example, for the youngest children, which is actually part of health and a health budget. What we do on individual inspection is credit where headteachers are going above and beyond and doing everything they can, while in our local area inspection rightly saying, “But that is not right, is it?” because they are doing things that they should not have to do within the wider system to account for—we all know it—a lack of funding in terms of SEND.
Martyn and Yvette are right; we will try to ensure that, moving forward, the inclusion aspect of the report card gets underneath this, including that best start in life, because all the data tells us that once those gaps emerge from the age of three they do not narrow. In fact, they widen as children move across education. I am delighted that the Secretary of State is prioritising early education and getting it right at the first steps. Of course, we will continue to review our approach to area SEND to get that nuance that we expect across our education provision too.
Sir Martyn Oliver: If you go back to Sureena’s question about a report card, you can easily imagine a report card for area SEND where you say, “Let us look at education, health, care, and the leadership of all of those systems coming together.” I suspect that we would find systemic failings in health. As our inspectorate, we can report on the individual and then we can report on systemic failings. That is where our independence comes in, because at that point I will stand up and ask Government, “What are you doing about this? You cannot have 153 local authorities with the vast majority of them failing and not say this is now a systemic issue for England. That is over to you. You now have to take some responsibility in how we sort this out.”
We have completed 38 area SEND inspections so far. We have had 12 systemic failings for area SEND, 16 have been inconsistent and 10 have been typically positive. That is 38 out of 153 local authorities, with 12 systemic failings and 16 inconsistent practice. There are only seven out of the 38 that are typically positive and outstanding in their ILACS. That means that, as a nation, we are saying that at the moment local authorities are really failing to deliver across the system, and yet we know that we have very experienced, well-committed, excellent directors of children’s services who are out there trying their level best. We have to be really careful. Ofsted can cause all sorts of unintended consequences.
It is worth touching upon this quickly, Chair. If you look at unregistered and illegal children’s homes, for example, it would be quite easy for Ofsted to just say, “We will hold everyone to account who uses them,” but we need to bear in mind that often—not always—local authorities have been to a court to get permission to place a child in one of those settings, and to make sure we do not create a situation where the local authority will have no oversight of those children. What is the alternative—that they go homeless? If there is literally nowhere to place them, it is Ofsted’s job to say there is insufficient registered provision in this area for the demand that is being placed.
Again, whether that is a local authority issue, or that is an issue for Government and Ofsted is calling it out, that is where our independence will stand strong. That is where our new report cards in ILACS, in the SCCIF and in area SEND can get stronger and have more bite, and yet be fair to those people on the ground and not cause unintended consequences for the children out there.
Q25 Manuela Perteghella: According to Ofsted’s most recent report, as you mentioned, there are inconsistencies and weaknesses across local area partnerships in their delivery of services for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. Can you elaborate more on those? You have touched on some—health, access to CAMHS and so on—but could you elaborate on those?
Lee Owston: It is just because of the complex nature of that work. It is not only local authority in terms of education and care, but there are integrated care boards in terms of health. How do those two entities interact with each other and then, through inspection, how do we hold those entities to account and not, as Martyn said, disproportionately hold one of them more to account than another, particularly where we know challenges exist?
There is something about joint commissioning and how those two bodies work together. There is something about governance and oversight. Although we are still in the process of reviewing how we approach area SEND, after about 18 months of this inspection framework, there is something about a report card that would allow us to get the same nuance but would be better able to direct us to where improvement is needed and where the strengths exist.
Yvette Stanley: One thing that we are really mindful of is that we are going to local authorities and saying, “You do not have the right continuum of offer.” We are saying to health that the assessment waiting lists and delivery are very poor. The same local authority is in a recovery conversation with the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to recover and reduce its spend on SEND in the next five years, so what is its priority—reducing spend or improving services?
Of course, one can spend one’s money better, but those two things in parallel really stick in the craw of local authorities. We are getting the grief of that on our local inspector. We can take that. We are trying to find a method of reporting that, as Martyn says, more fairly reflects that, but that is the national systemic issue that has to be addressed.
Sir Martyn Oliver: Of the seven where I said we saw both typically positive and outstanding or good ILACS inspections, what did we notice? We noticed that their partnership working was the best in the country. Again, I go back to what I said about area insights. We want to encourage partnership working. We want to encourage parts of the system talking to each other, supporting each other and helping each other, because we know that every time they do that we get the best provision for children in England. That is the part where Ofsted can help to nudge the system in that direction.
Q26 Manuela Perteghella: On partnership working, a very small number of area SEND inspections were positive. Is there a way for them to share their best practice with others?
Sir Martyn Oliver: They do share through the ADCS group and the way that they work in Solace and all the other groups. Because there are only 153 local authorities, it is a very tight network of directors of children’s services. Across all the groups that exist and the 90,000 to 95,000 people to hold accountable, I must have seen nearly 100 of the 153 DCSs in person in the last year. We have long conversations.
Another huge part of Amanda’s question around the Ofsted Academy is that one of the things that we can do with a report card is to be the conduit to say where we find the best practice. Rather than Ofsted writing up that best practice, my proposal would be to say to providers—we will not and cannot make them—“If you want to share your best practice that we find nationally, then through our Ofsted Academy it can be the best practice function library where we can point one part of the country to the other and hold the very best practice for people to learn from.” That is another big part of the work. If you are going to check people’s consistency you might as well celebrate the outstanding and work that way as well.
Again, it is a really important part of Ofsted not crossing the line of telling people how to improve. We are saying we have seen great practice, we are letting the system talk to itself, and we are just a conduit to help. We are of the system, by the system, for parents and children. I am really clear on not crossing that line.
Q27 Darren Paffey: Back on unregistered children’s homes, which you just mentioned, we have the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which proposes to give Ofsted the power to fine those who operate unregistered children’s homes. What is your view on whether those powers go far enough to help Ofsted deal with the problem of unregistered children’s homes?
Yvette Stanley: We have obviously been working very closely with DfE officials, helping them refine their thinking and the powers that we have asked for. We think they are really helpful. We have a tiny team working together looking at the investigation and prosecution of homes. Three years ago when we started doing that and funded it we were anticipating 300 a year. We are well in excess of 1,000, and that was validated in the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s recent report, which she and Martyn agreed that she would undertake.
We have done a lot to strengthen our approach, issuing warning letters and working with local authorities, which sometimes inadvertently use an unregistered children’s home. We inform them. We inform all local authorities. We are on our third criminal investigation; only one of them has reached the threshold for prosecution, and that is coming into court. What we have learned is that this takes an extraordinary amount of time. Where, as Martyn says, 65% of these children are placed by the court, it is hard to tackle a criminal prosecution because essentially it is the state versus the state. That avenue is costly and time consuming, and we focused our energy on moving the children and working with local authorities to get them to a better place. We do think that fining as another tool may also help in this system.
Going back to what Martyn says, there is a systemic issue of having the right number of places for children in the right place. Going back to the children on DoLS, of whom there are an extraordinary number, there has been a commensurate reduction in inpatient mental health care for children with the increase of children who are now placed on DoLS in the community. What the system collectively—health, education and care—has not done is to commission good, local community-based provision for those children. Bespoke placement without the line of sight is not the right option. We think that the fines are part of it, but we have to do all those things, including holding local authorities to account for their oversight, for using them very, very rarely and for moving the children on as swiftly as they can.
Q28 Darren Paffey: Are you saying they are a tool that will help you, but in the wider context of sufficiency and capacity?
Yvette Stanley: We need all those things in our response.
Darren Paffey: That is helpful, thank you.
Sir Martyn Oliver: In the annual review we talked about 25% of children’s homes, for example, in the north-west, but that far outstrips demand. There are far more children in London and far fewer homes, and yet there are far more homes and far fewer children in the north-west. It is moving children from one part of the country to the other, which then places further pressure on the use of unregistered provision. We have to get that bit right. Ofsted has a duty here. Obviously we never identify where children’s homes are on reports, but we have that information and we need to start using that work far more.
We also know that roughly 80% of children’s homes are privately owned, and that over a quarter of all homes are owned by the 10 largest group operators. We do not have any problem, and nor does the system, with profit being made by people in the system. We have a huge problem, though, with profiteering. Equally, we want to have a say and call that out. We would welcome any aspect of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that focuses on that.
Yvette Stanley: It is group ownership and the opportunity to work with local areas to turn down children’s homes. In 2021-22 we had 2,500 children’s homes. We now have 3,500. Are they run by the right people and meeting the right needs in the right places? The planning changes. There are a whole range of things in the Bill that we really welcome.
Sir Martyn Oliver: If you go to the context, say you place in the north‑west. I will choose two areas, Blackpool and Knowsley. We are doing good work in both areas, but you look at the educational outcomes and the early years deserts that exist in those areas, and what do we do? We place more children who are the most vulnerable there, in children’s homes, in exactly the places that are facing these biggest challenges. Frankly, that is the definition of madness and Ofsted needs to call it out.
Q29 Darren Paffey: On registered children’s homes, we have an almost comparable problem to schools accepting more SEND children and then being penalised by the inspection and the judgment system. The independent review of children’s social care found that there are registered homes where they can meet their needs, but they are reluctant to do so because they think there is going to be a negative impact on their Ofsted rating. What is your response to that? How do we get past that impasse? That is not good, primarily for the children, but also for the system more widely.
Sir Martyn Oliver: No, it is not. Yvette and I went to the national children’s home conference, sat on the stage, took questions and tackled these problems straight on. Yvette will carry on the sentence for me here. We have to be careful; yes, we must never allow people to use Ofsted as an excuse not to take vulnerable children, but neither must we allow vulnerable children to be placed in settings where they do not have the skillset to look after them.
I have to say that sometimes people conflate those two. They will say to us, “We can’t take the most vulnerable children,” but they actually do not have the skillset in their regulatory manager—the person in charge—to meet the needs of the children that they are taking on. We have a duty there to still raise standards and call out that practice, but we definitely do not want people to avoid it just because of us. Avoiding it because they cannot meet their needs is bad, but good, if you understand me. Avoiding it because of us is unacceptable.
Yvette Stanley: We have been tackling that perception head on. If you look at the grade profile, those with the most complex needs have the same outcomes in terms of grade profile, but it is a perception and it is a real one. Homes say to the local authority, “We are worried about Ofsted.” What they say to us is, “We do not have the staff to meet their needs.” There is a workforce issue.
Going back to the children in unregistered children’s homes, the level of complexity and need, particularly for mental health services, is causing some of this perception. Can we meet the needs of these children? The home might not be able to on its own, but wrapping those services might.
I am really optimistic as well in the Bill about the new type of children’s home that is between secure and a standard children’s home, not that there is a standard children’s home. We are absolutely up for registering that and working with CQC to wrap the right support around those children. If the continuum of offer changes then so will the confidence of the sector to take them.
I am still doing work with all my inspectors to make sure that, when they are talking about the challenges of meeting individual children, it is done in a strengths-based way in what the setting is doing, not colluding with the concept that these children are too difficult to support.
Sir Martyn Oliver: I do not want to over-represent our position or the confidence here, because we still have a problem, Darren. We have to deal with this. If I try to accurately describe what the directors of children’s services would say to Yvette and me, when they take the most complex children and the most vulnerable, then, if Ofsted turn up and we see complex children with very vulnerable needs, they say, “Well, these children are displaying difficulties. What you cannot see are the children we have worked with for years and years and years, and now they might have left our setting as a result of this enduring work we have done with them.” You somehow need to inspect the product at the end of all that great work, rather than that moment in time of the inspection.
That is a challenge for us. That is a genuine piece of work. We have to do more work and more thinking. How can we go into a setting and say, “Yes, we can see this is not right, but we can see that you understand it”? How much faith do we take that it will get better for this child years from now, as opposed to what we are seeing today? There is more that we need to do. There are more challenges that we need to have with each other. I do not want to give you the impression that we have an answer to that. That is a difficult part of our job, but I am determined to try to find an answer.
Darren Paffey: Thank you. We will pick that up in six months.
Q30 Jess Asato: I know we are really short of time, so I have two very quick questions. Inspections of supported accommodation providers were postponed from April until September 2024 due to the high volume of registration applications. How many providers has Ofsted inspected so far?
Yvette Stanley: We have inspected half a dozen. We expect to do 50 by March. We have continued to focus on the registrations, because they have children there and we have not seen them. We are keeping that careful balance.
If you are asking what we are finding, we are finding a level of complexity. Supported accommodation was never meant to be for every 16 and 17-year-old. There will be some children whose needs are so complex that they probably need enduring care. One of the examples Martyn gave earlier was a child placed in supported accommodation whose needs fast outstripped what supported accommodation could realistically provide, and it was an absolutely rubbish piece of provision as well. There is still work to do about children’s homes, fostering and the sorts of homes that we are talking about, the whole continuum, but it is a really important step forward for Ofsted in having that line of sight of the whole continuum of offer. We will be joining the dots and making lots of comments on that in the future.
Sir Martyn Oliver: We expect to do 500 a year once we have gotten over the registration, but that is our priority first.
Q31 Jess Asato: The proposed frequency of supported accommodation inspections has been criticised. Why are inspections of supported accommodation less frequent than those of children’s homes, especially when serious weaknesses are found?
Yvette Stanley: If serious weaknesses are found and there are regulatory concerns, we can get in at any point in time. We did not stop doing that even during covid. We had our boots on the ground and we were looking at the needs of children the whole time. Supported accommodation is supposedly for children who are ready and able for independence, so we proposed something that is proportionate to that.
We are probably conflating two issues. If we are seeing that the wrong children are there or the wrong providers are making the provision, then that is a matter of us holding the local authority to account for the placement. That is a matter of us holding that provider for taking children that it is not equipped to take. We are conflating a number of issues there. As we inspect more and as we regulate more we will be able to provide our insights on those more systemic problems and help the policymakers make the right decisions for the continuum of care.
Sir Martyn Oliver: I must very quickly say that I am very proud of the framework that Yvette’s team developed for supported accommodation, because it involved so many children who are care experienced and care leavers. They helped us to design this framework. A really interesting point is that we gave them a choice on a continuum. We said, “Should we do no-notice inspections, one day, two days, or up to two weeks?” We gave them a line and every care leaver said no notice. Providers obviously need some notice to make sure that they are there when we turn up, but it is an interesting difference between the provider and those that we inspect for, parents and children. Our job is to try to find the balance but to raise standards for all.
Q32 Jess Asato: I am sure some of those children also told you that their conditions can fluctuate while they are in that supported accommodation as well, so they may be independent at the start but perhaps things happen where their independence is challenged.
Yvette Stanley: Absolutely, the children’s journey is not a continuum, is it? There will be crises and how you respond to those crises, which gets back to the complexity issue as well. Obviously, because we are the regulator, we can go in at any time, be it for whistleblowing concerns or complaints from children. We will look at the patterns in them, particularly if we get our new system to look at the notifications more comprehensively, so I absolutely take your point. Of course, as we are refreshing all our frameworks, it is an opportunity to look at frequencies. Some of those come back to spending review considerations.
Q33 Chair: You have spoken quite a bit this morning about the very inconsistent level of performance across local authorities’ children’s services departments and the unacceptably high number of local authorities that are not performing well enough in relation to the children they are responsible for at the moment. We have seen in recent weeks the conviction in the murder of Sara Sharif, which is the latest in a series of appallingly tragic cases of children who have died at the hands of people who should have been protecting them. Can you say something about the role of Ofsted in what we all want to see, which is the prevention of those tragedies and any similar tragedies happening again in the future?
Yvette Stanley: When I started in 2018 we inherited an appalling profile of local authorities. While I robustly hold them to account—and we have a standard distribution profile so we are still holding them robustly to account—I take my hat off to the improvements that they have made over time. This is from consistent leadership, a focus on children, proper models, and giving social workers enough time to do the job well.
We are now at the place where we have 31 outstanding local authorities. That was the number we had in inadequacy in 2018, so it has been a real turnaround, but we all know that bad things happen to children. We can plot through our inspections the creation of the containing environment for social workers to do the best work, where those basics mean that some of these things are less likely to happen.
Surrey was sitting on a judgment of inadequacy for 10 years. It had a very experienced DCS come round and take the turnaround, and then sadly they passed and Rachael Wardell took up the mantle. We judged it as requiring improvement to be good. I will not stand here and say it did not have difficulties. It had struggles around all sorts of things.
What I am optimistic about in the Bill is around some of the systemic issues that local authorities need help with to support that, such as the unique identifier. We have children turning up in all sorts of places and people cannot join the dots. That will be really important. The multiagency child protection teams will have health, education and police colleagues speaking the same language to join the dots.
That does not change what is going on out there in health and the wider police. We work very closely with our partner police inspectorate and we still occasionally see victim blaming in the police. I am really pleased that we are working with Manchester local authorities to look at work with the police. We have just joined Andy Cooke on his child protection inspection of Manchester Police. We at Ofsted are joining the dots with our partner inspectors to look at those partnership arrangements.
I am hopeful that there are many measures in the Bill that will help address the system issues. I cannot comment on Sara Sharif as the review is ongoing, but we can look at cases like Daniel Pelka and Arthur Labinjo‑Hughes. Covid, elective home education–we are really, really pleased with elective home education—taking your children out of sight, disguised compliance and all of those issues mean there will be a very small number of parents who avoid the line of sight. The more the multiagency partnership can wrap around schools and wrap around local authorities, the more chance we have of spotting those one‑in‑a‑million cases that require the judgment of Solomon and the best information sharing across the partnership.
Q34 Chair: Just finally, we have spoken a lot about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which we will be debating tomorrow in the House of Commons at Second Reading. You have mentioned some things that you welcome in the Bill. You have also made some comments that imply a lack of engagement and that there might be views you have that have not been expressed or been taken on board. Have you asked for specific powers that are additional to your current powers that are not in the Bill? Is there anything you would like to tell the Committee about the Bill ahead of the Second Reading tomorrow?
Sir Martyn Oliver: We are hopeful that the Bill will give us greater powers to go into illegal schools, but the burden and threshold for prosecution and the resource base required to do that is still really difficult.
Lee Owston: We largely welcome what the Bill is putting forward. We have campaigned long and hard for many of the measures, for nine years or more. Martyn is right about the fine detail. Yes, we would like a warrant to do our unregistered schools work so we can gather evidence and have more successful prosecutions, but to go through that process and to secure a warrant to be able to do it requires extra resource and cost. Of course, we look forward to having more conversations about unregistered alternative provision, which does not get as much of a mention in the Bill. It is 20,000 unregistered AP that we would need to have greater oversight of too.
Yvette Stanley: On the social care side, I came and talked to the predecessor Committee about Hesley. I still worry about our ambitions for national minimum standards of care. What does that say to children? I would like us to think about being more ambitious in our standards of care. Across SEND and social care reform for children with complex disabilities, there needs to be more join-up between health and social care, as well as between CQC and Ofsted. We do inspect alongside CQC. There is more work to be done to get the right standards and the right environment for those children to thrive.
Chair: Thank you very much for giving your evidence this morning. We look forward to our ongoing relationship of accountability. That brings our proceedings to an end this morning. Thank you.
[1] Ofsted would like to clarify for the Committee that Sir Martyn Oliver misspoke and that Ofsted is a non-ministerial department.