Departments and semi-autonomous organisations used by the government to influence and control the education sector have proliferated in recent years. The following reports examine some of these structures and their relationship to government and schools.
On this page: Ofsted | QCA | ContinYou
Ofsted
Inspection, Inspection, Inspection!
Government micro-management has systematically seeped into the classroom, altering the priorities of schools and teachers. This thorough analysis of the government's primary policy enforcer explains how this happened. Ofsted, officially the champion of parents and children, has been co-opted to bully schools into conforming to bureaucratic instruction and punish teachers who refuse to follow restrictive government education policies.
Having cast a dark shadow over the state sector, Ofsted has turned its gaze towards the independent sector. The result has been an attempt to standardise teaching across Britain and make all teachers beholden to the whims of Whitehall rather than their professional expertise and love of learning.
The government refers to the QCA as an independent watchdog for the examination and curriculum system. When claims that either the curriculum or exams are falling in standards are heard, the QCA's ability to guard standards is the main line of defence that the government deploys. However, a 'guardian of standards' is an inappropriate description of what the QCA actually does.
The QCA was established in 1997 to oversee the government's National Curriculum and to establish regulatory guidelines for the examining boards. It reports directly to ministers and the education secretary appoints its board with huge leeway allowed for ministerial discretion. Therefore, the QCA is, in reality, neither independent of government appointment nor of the government's agenda.
This lack of independence came to the fore in October 2002 when it became clear that the new exam system had dramatically underestimated the increase in grades brought on by the move to the modular AS/A2 A-levels. The government allegedly pressured the QCA to ensure that results were kept at the same level as the previous year. In other words, the grades awarded to individual students were to be changed to satisfy a demand from the government for the statistics to add up. The heads of the exam boards subsequently said that they would prefer to work with a truly independent QCA accountable to parliament, rather than to ministers.
The problem of having an exam regulator that is also the enforcer of government changes to the curriculum, is that it systematically ignores the shifts in curriculum standards brought about by its own work in other areas. This issue is simply discounted from analysis by the QCA's own independent panel which has claimed that there is no point in examining whether standards have been maintained because the curriculum has been altered to such an extent: 'Over the longer term, it makes little sense in many subjects to ask whether examination standards have been maintained since the subjects themselves have changed so much.'
Essentially, this argues that no two exams can ever be compared so long as they have different assessment criteria or a different curriculum. The implication is that it is impossible to actually have objective knowledge of standards at all, so there is no point in even looking for them. Therefore, safeguarding standards is impossible. In fact, however, so long as both a past exam and a current exam are measured against criteria which are kept both constant and independent, comparative assessment is possible. There are, of course, many criteria upon which to judge an exam - for example, whether they indicate aptitude for further study in that subject, or proficiency at a certain skill. The QCA does not have any criteria like that upon which to judge examination standards. Instead, the system's main measure of success is whether more students are achieving grades suitable for university entrance. This means that there is a pressure towards students getting better grades but no countervailing system to ensure that the standards those grades represent remain strong.
This report describes how ContinYou, a charity that receives most of its funding from the government, has absorbed the Resource Unit for Supplementary and Mother Tongue Schools, which has produced a 'Quality Framework'. This framework has been used in a trial inspection of supplementary schools in six London boroughs. As might be expected, it encourages a high level of bureaucracy. To achieve the 'gold standard', a supplementary school must conduct an 'evaluation' to compare itself with other schools; must be able to show it has policies on public liability, child protection, health and safety and equal opportunities; and have a committee that meets at least once a term and keeps minutes.
These paper targets, which have nothing to do with the quality of teaching, are reminiscent of the bureaucratic straightjacket that Ofsted has used to control full-time schools, to damaging effect. If the ContinYou exercise is intended to bring supplementary schools under the control of Ofsted, or to establish ContinYou as the inspection agency for supplementary schools, it would threaten the spontaneity and diversity which are the strengths of the supplementary school sector.
The Civitas Review essay places this urge to control supplementary schools with the ever-present desire on the part of government to control everything:
'This government, like most governments, regards the voluntary and charitable sector as something to be, if not absorbed or incorporated, at least organised. Governments look out over chaos and wish to regularise and bring order. They do not like the random, transient, associative nature of civil society… Government regulation would bring a premature end to a new and exciting development in civil society. We should do all that we can to make sure this does not happen.'
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