When in parliament, Jim Knight served as schools minister for three years in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown administrations. It is this experience that made the now Lord Knight of Weymouth an ideal candidate to chair the Beyond Ofsted inquiry set up by the National Education Union (NEU) in March.
The inquiry – sponsored by the NEU but vowed to be independent – aims to develop “a set of principles for underpinning a better inspection system and proposals for an alternative approach”. It was set up amid widespread anger about the school inspection system in England prompted by the death of head teacher Ruth Perry, who took her own life after Ofsted judged her school “inadequate” over safeguarding concerns.
While focused on school inspections, Knight says the inquiry will have broader significance when it reports its findings in November.
Since losing his South Dorset parliamentary seat and entering the House of Lords in 2010, Knight has held several roles including chair emeritus of the Digital Poverty Alliance and is currently chair of a multi-academy trust.
What interested you in chairing the inquiry?
I chair a multi-academy trust. We've had 14 Ofsted inspections of schools in the trust in the last 12 months, so I have quite a lot of experience of Ofsted.
In my mind, I have a strong sense that the quality of the inspections themselves were really inconsistent and that there is a problem that we could do with looking at.
Once I checked that I was going to be properly independent – and get some good people on an advisory board to help me – I was happy to do it.
The review was launched weeks after the sad death of Ruth Perry. How has it influenced the inquiry?
It changed what I thought the report would end up doing. I thought we would collect the evidence and make the case for change on the basis that there is enough of a problem.
Following Ruth's sad death…the Sky Newsinterviewer is not challenging me over whether there's a problem, she wants to know what we should do about it. Then you kind of know, actually, this report has changed. We now need to set out a roadmap for change, and answer the questions about what's better, what could we do differently, what's beyond the current model of Ofsted into a new, better Ofsted. That's what we've now been focusing on.
What has your research found so far?
We have now gathered huge amounts of evidence of the effect on the workforce and the stresses on teachers, head teachers and governors, but also issues around safeguarding where you get real inconsistencies from one inspection team to another. There are particular problems around special educational needs and disabilities, and alternative provision – inspection teams are too often not having the expertise and experience in those areas to properly make an informed inspection.
I've been getting evidence from other jurisdictions. I've got a great team of academics from the Institute of Education helping me and an advisory board too and we are trying to learn from what works around the world which might be Wales, Canada or New Zealand. We're trying to draw the map pretty wide, and are coming up with some interesting thoughts as a result.
Do you think there is still a need for an inspectorate?
I do but I think you have to unpack that. You've got inspection and accountability functions. Is there a need for inspection and should those findings – I don't like the word judgments because it has got implications of being on trial – be used for accountability purposes?
For the inspection team, as well as those beinginspected, the ante is upped massively and there's a danger that people game the process, or skew their behaviour, to ensure that they do well on accountability, rather than using inspection as a way of driving improvement.
The second function of inspection to unpack is about achieving compliance and a minimum set of standards. That's particularly important in safeguarding. There's a need in all settings to ensure that children are safe. Having a compliance regime with inspection to ensure that all children are safe in the various settings that they're in is critically important. I don't speak to anyone who disagrees with that.
Is there a role for national standards in education?
There is a difference probably between the quality of education and compliance and a minister's or chief inspector's own view about what should be taught and how. That starts to get into difficult territory, in terms of undermining professionals. I'm not saying that they're totally invalid, but I do think we've got to be much more careful because we have got very different communities, very different contexts. For example, Andy Burnham, the mayor in Greater Manchester, has introduced the Manchester baccalaureate. He has a different vision for what the curriculum should cover in his locality, how it meets the aspirations of the young people in his area and the needs of his local economy. It's a different vision to that of Nick Gibb [schools minister]. Who is to say who's right? So, yeah, having national standards which are then policed by Ofsted and assessed as to how well they're being implemented, may not serve certain communities well.
Is the current regime having an impact on recruitment of teachers?
We are struggling to retain and recruit teachers, childminders, youth workers – across the children's workforce, we have a real problem in being understaffed, and we're in a kind of vicious spiral. We know that trusting professionals is a part of reversing that vicious spiral. If we get inspection wrong, we undermine that trust because we're saying, we're going to judge you on some national standards rather than looking at how you know the kids in your class, in your community in your setting based on your professional judgments.
Labour has said it will scrap one-word judgments if it wins the next election. Do you agree with that?
I don't want to get too involved in anticipating what the inquiry is going to say. But you know, right from the outset, I've said I don't think that summing up someone's leadership or the entirety of what a school does with a single word is appropriate. I've struggled to think of a school that doesn't have some things that require improvement and at the same time have some things that are outstanding practice. We should be encouraging parents and others to look at more than a single word. They should be looking across half a dozen different measures at least. That kind of possibility for parents is within touching distance – they can say, ‘I know my child, the things that I'm looking for in a provider of education, in a school, so I'm going to set the priorities on a dashboard or whatever’, that will show people data on a range of different factors that will help them find the right fit for their child.
Is there anything emerging as to what an alternative system might be like?
Data dashboards or report cards on their own are dangerous in that you're only valuing what you can measure easily. They are valuable in conjunction with a commentary from someone with expertise around improvement in that setting in school or otherwise.
I think there is a question to be answered as to whether Ofsted is being asked to do too much with too little in terms of resource. I was talking to the head of a very large multi-academy trust who described inspection teams being led by assistant head teachers inspecting settings with very experienced people. That's a bit of a mismatch.
There are some key questions emerging: can we reduce the overall quantity of inspection? Are Ofsted the right people to inspect safeguarding or should another body do it? There's also a question in my mind around the quality of governance. If you have really strong governance with good processes, challenging the leadership to ensure that there is the right capacity for school improvement in the organisation, then I think it's very unlikely that you will have problems and don't need the same pace of inspection.
How might a different approach work in practice?
Ruth Perry's case was about a school that's doing very well by its pupils, academically and holistically, but unfortunately, had some areas that needed to be improved from a safeguarding perspective. And, essentially, that trumped everything else.
The sense I get is, first, that obviously shouldn't have happened, and, second, we need a more sophisticated and sensitive system for teasing out the strengths and areas that need to be improved.
I was struck by a conversation with Harry Hislop, who until recently was the chief inspector in the Republic of Ireland. They have a system where if an inspection finds problems with safeguarding, they will write a report for the school and return three weeks later to see how the school has responded to those findings. Both reports are published together, so that you can see that there was a problem and how the school is starting to tackle that, which feels fairer.
Do you think the inquiry will have lessons across all of Ofsted's remits?
I've heard the same sort of frustrations from people outside of schools, essentially wanting a review of all of Ofsted's work rather than just school inspection. Whatever we say will be looked at by people in other settings. It will depend what our findings are whether it's going to be appropriate for those other settings. In terms of the critique, that the quality is inconsistent, that the organisation is overstretched, that as a former chief inspector said to me, our problem is that it's lost the trust of the profession. That feels like a consistent picture to me, and that's one the new chief inspector Martin Oliver is going to have to address with great urgency.
Do you think Ofsted should be rebranded or is it more fundamental than that?
There are some things it does that we should question whether it should carry on doing so. And that's just in schools. A rebranding maybe. But a rebranding that's a different lipstick on the same pig isn't going to fool anyone. It has to be something…to rebuild trust in the process and the system, if it's called Ofsted or something else.
LORD JIM KNIGHT CV
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Mar 2023: Chair, independent review of Ofsted
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Sept 2021: Made chair of academy chain E-ACT
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June 2010: Appointed a life peer
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June 2009 – May 2010: Minister for regional affairs
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May 2006 – June 2009: Schools minister
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June 2001 – May 2010: Labour MP for South Dorset
