Good grades must not come at the expense of a real education
Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman talks to Matthew Taylor about how the inspectorate can engender a strategic shift in schools so that good grades do not come at the expense of a real education
Follow Amanda Spielman on Twitter @amanda_spielman
Taylor: Ofsted has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. What are your thoughts on the evolution of the organisation over that period?
Spielman: We worked up a corporate strategy and pulled together a few bits and pieces for the 25th birthday, and as we looked back at old strategies we noticed that the idea of being a force for improvement has recurred fairly regularly. There is a surprising amount of consistency. Although superficially things have changed quite a lot at different points, deep down the thing that really drives inspectors, that makes people want to work here, has not changed very much.
Over my 15 years in education, a very large part of the conversation has been around structures. The academy model in particular, and the shift away from local authority control towards multi-academy trusts, has been huge. And it still is; we’re in a partially completed transition and it’s not entirely clear quite what will happen as policy evolves. The other part of the conversation has been around the substance and what happens in the classroom, but this hasn’t had as much airtime in the past few years. What really happens and is it what was intended? Is it what adds up to a really fantastic education for every child?
Taylor: You raised these issues in your recent speech at the Festival of Education, from which people seemed to take the message that we’ve got to go back to what schooling is really about, that it isn’t just about exams and grades.
Spielman: We’ve had a qualification-based system in this country for over 100 years. And that can sometimes take us away from remembering that a qualification and a grade — they’re not bad things at all, a few people have said I’m anti-testing and I’m not — are the reflections of education, not the education itself. It is quite easy to get a little too far into what it is that will get the child the grade, rather than thinking about how much history we want them to know. We lose sight of the fact that the curriculum is the thing that defines what it is we want people to come out of school knowing, and able to do in the wider sense. I’m trying to get this focus not just on grade outcomes, but on the substance that should be there. That is part of what having an inspectorate should mean.
Taylor: Implicit in that is a suggestion that there may be better and worse ways to achieve the same outcomes. So you could look at two schools achieving the same grades and outcomes, but there would be one school that was doing it in a way that was richer than another school.
Spielman: Absolutely. You now have an immensely full flow of data coming out of schools in test results, in all the other information that’s captured. What we can do is to look at the ‘how’. How is this school achieving that and what are the wider pieces; the stuff that data and test results don’t necessarily pick up? Does it add up to a full education that fulfils what the school sets out to deliver? Does it stack up with the grades you see coming out of it; does it look like the real deal?
Taylor: So how does Ofsted then speak to that idea of a richer notion of education? Because the tendency is to think that your role is there to identify when things are going wrong and intervene. You’re suggesting that part of your role is also about saying to schools that are doing perfectly well that they are not doing so in the most ambitious and richest way possible.
Spielman: We’ve never formed our judgements just off the back of results data from a school. We do have that flexibility to look at a similar set of grades and say: one school is reflecting something you’d really want and the other one is all about finding the easiest set of qualifications or giving people the most possible help with coursework. Our inspectors are all teachers with leadership experience in schools, so during an inspection they should be able to kick the tyres enough to get a sense of where a school is on the spectrum from full education through to thinned out. Inspection, at the end of the day, is human judgement about whether the pieces are coming together to make something that’s as good as it should be.
Taylor: I’m aware that a broad strategic shift is actually accomplished through small, incremental changes, but it does seem to me that the strategic shift that you’re describing is quite profound. Because while in any system there will be brilliant people who make things work regardless of the system, if one talks about the average, my experience as a governor is that permissible gaming is rife. When I say permissible I don’t mean egregious cheating, I just mean governing body meetings where a lot of time is spent discussing the kinds of interventions that enable people to avoid falling into certain categories, and not a great deal of it is about the things you think schools should be talking about: what is our mission, what is our purpose, do we know that our children are really loving learning?
Spielman: Coming out of school loving learning is not what I see as the system goal because education is 14 years for most children; you should learn a lot in that time. So when people say that our goal is to create a love of learning, that should be a side effect of educating really well; it’s not the goal in itself. But you are absolutely right, conversations can very quickly slide into the data and how are we going to get the data better? I would like the conversation in every staffroom and every governing body meeting to be about the education, not about the data.
Taylor: And how do you bring that change about?
Spielman: There’s no explicit change to the inspection work yet. At our inspection conferences we’ve talked about curriculum and we’ve started our inspectors thinking more about curriculum, but that’s it. The next new framework won’t be introduced until 2019. But we’ve had something like 40 survey visits to schools, and of course I’ve been talking about it publicly. A lot of people have told me that there is already a knock-on effect and that schools are starting to talk about this. I was with somebody who is director of primary at one of the big multi-academy trusts only last week and she said that this is what our schools ought to be talking about and they’re starting to do so. So this is one of the ways in which Ofsted influences the system that stops far short of giving a judgement and saying, this is good, this is outstanding. If we have this ability to get people talking about and discussing the things that really get to the heart of education, I genuinely believe that’s got system value in itself.
Taylor: How important in this conversation is the way we undertake assessment itself? Arguably, the way in which we assess pupils is done in a way that leads to a focus on successful completion of the assessment task, rather than the broader knowledge of the field.
Spielman: Sometimes we ask the same test to serve a lot of different purposes in the system. GCSEs were originally just about providing curriculum and end-stage measurement for individual children. They are now also used as tokens in performance tables and accountability measurement for schools, which is a very different thing. Assessment is right for its purpose and when you have multiple purposes you always have some trade-offs. So you have to understand the trade-offs and make sure that you make the right ones. The worst thing is if you design a test for one purpose and use it for another, because then you will definitely end up with a world bent out of shape. So the new GCSEs, for example — and I spent five years as the chair of Ofqual, so I’ve been pretty closely involved with them — I genuinely think they have been designed with a clearer recognition of what they’re going to be used for and will get less bent out of shape than previous iterations.
Taylor: Is it implicit in your vision that we need to slightly loosen the relationship between the way in which we assess pupils’ attainment and the way in which we assess schools’ performance? That GCSEs for secondary schools, as you say, do both things at once and that’s what raises the stakes so much on that particular moment. So, for example, school governing meetings focus so much more on that year group than the rest of the school.
Spielman: There are pros and cons. It is genuinely difficult and this is why I think Ofsted’s role is important as a counterbalance, because we know that we are quite a powerful lever on school behaviour. My hope is that we can provide the right balance in the system to make sure that the overall weight of incentives on the school helps to keep people focused on the real interests of children. Schools are only as valuable as the children they turn out.
Taylor: If one were slightly turning down the volume of exams and grades as the ultimate determinant of whether or not a school is successful, what are the things you would want to turn the volume up on?
Spielman: The curriculum, the substance of education. It’s what you learn that really matters. There’s a piece of research I’ve quoted a couple of times that really made me think hard a few years ago, at the height of the equivalence boom. Everybody was saying, this is how you help disadvantaged children; if they do this qualification and that qualification and get really good GCSE points then they can go into further education and Bob’s your uncle. Well, the research used data from the British longitudinal study and captured information on people’s subject choices at age 14 and related those to the whole life course. It showed that subject choice was extraordinarily important to how successful people had been in life. And, yes, I know that the information will have flowed through most directly in financial terms and I accept that incomes aren’t a total proxy for everything, but, nevertheless, after controlling for childhood family income and socio-economic background and so on, the choices that people made at 14 were powerful predictors of their futures. People who at that age had taken the humanities, the languages, the hard sciences — what are characterised as the EBacc [English Baccalaureate] subjects — were the ones who had the advantage.
There was an old-fashioned school of British essentialism that came from the 19th century, the idea that it doesn’t matter what you study, just as long as you study some things really in depth, that will prepare you to do anything in life. That’s how we ended up regarding classics as being as good a training as anything else, and why we were so late to start educating significant numbers of people in science and technology. But if you look at research, it says the essentialist model doesn’t actually hold, so there are dangers in giving everybody totally free choice and saying it doesn’t matter. Actually, there is a core set of subjects that do give people the best choice. A curriculum that is really well designed, with the right core, and the right enrichment and extra-curricular pieces on top — so that people not only get this core of real learning, but can use it and have the interest and appetite to go on developing — that is educational nirvana.
Amanda Spielman is Chief inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills, OFSTED
