Sleight Of Hand

Maybe you've been wondering why OFSTED can report that everything's ducky in most of the nation's schools even when anecdotal evidence indicates they're accerlerating downhill ? Wonder no more:

A radical overhaul of the school inspection system, making it harder for teachers to disguise their failings, was announced yesterday by David Bell, the head of Ofsted.

Instead of being given two months' notice of an inspection - time usually spent on extensive cosmetic preparation and writing meaningless documents, Mr Bell said - schools will now be told on a Friday to expect the inspectors on the Monday.

Two months notice ? That's enough time to bury any number of bodies. So, this sounds like a Good but, as ever, that's not quite the whole story.

To make the process less intrusive and burdensome for schools and teachers, the size of the inspection teams will be slashed - saving £10 million a year on Ofsted's budget of £70 million - and the inspectors will stay for one or two days instead of a week.

Instead of inspecting everything from the state of the lavatories to the religious content of assemblies, they will "focus on what really matters" - the effectiveness of the school's management and the quality of the teaching.

So anything less than unburied bodies stinking up the class room and Beardy-Weirdey is home free. But who cares anyway ?

The interval between inspections will be halved from six years to three, enabling Ofsted to monitor schools more closely and giving parents more up-to-date information about the quality of their children's education.

"Inspection will be more rigorous and the inspectors' reports will be briefer and easier to read," Mr Bell said. "This is Ofsted consolidating its role as the parents' champion."

Well, yeah, but without REAL school choice it hardly matters. Everyone knows which are the dive schools just as surely as everyone knows the good ones. But, as long as education is effectively run as a cartel it hardly matters. Without the discipline of the market we're stuck with people who say things like this:

The National Association of Head Teachers said it was concerned about the demand for "higher and higher standards" and the poor quality of many inspection teams.

Everyone knows continuous improvement is impossible, that's why the Ford Mondeo looks so much like the Cortina did back in the day. That's even before considering the irony in the self-same people demanding 'higher and higher standards' at OFSTED. Apparently, OFSTED aren't part of Big Education's happy-clappy commune.