An influential group of trusts is urging Ofsted to split governance from its leadership judgment, saying the current system is masking sector-wide weaknesses.
The Queen Street Group’s annual report, published today, said “many” CEOs in its network of 35 trusts believe “governance across the system is not consistently strong enough to bear the demands placed upon it”.
Inspectors’ decisions on a school’s governance are rolled into their ‘leadership and management’ sub-judgement. But QSG members believe the two should be split.
“Weak governance is often carried by leaders,” the report said. “This problem is masked by incorporating governance within the judgement on leadership, so these need to be separated.”
This comes after Ofsted scrapped single-phrase headline grades for a school’s overall effectiveness earlier this month.
Until new report cards take effect next September, schools will continue to be rated from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ for the four sub-judgments, including ‘leadership and management’.
Recruitment might not keep up with improvement
OSG chair Steve Taylor said CEOs “were reflecting that when a school goes through a period of rapid improvement, for example, that it’s not necessarily [the case] that you’ll recruit governors at the same speed as you’ll be able to improve provision”.
Two-thirds of school or trust governing boards had at least one vacancy in 2022, a six-year high.
The Labour government also pledged in the build-up to the election to introduce trust inspections. Ofsted currently conducts summary evaluations of trusts, batch-inspecting some of their schools but does not look at the workings of central teams.
But the QSG report warned “much work remains to be done on developing appropriate” MAT inspections.
Its members had reported a “mixed response” to summary evaluations, with some inspectors having a “lack of understanding of how trusts operate”. Finance directors also witnessed a “wide inconsistency of approach by different inspection teams”.
Safeguarding checks would ‘burden schools’
QSG also revealed that most of its members “do not advocate separate annual safeguarding” checks, another planned Labour reform.
“These would increase burdens on schools. The trust sets the safeguarding policy and monitors its effectiveness. This is where inspection should focus.”
Elsewhere in the report, QSG noted the Department for Education’s academy commissioners, called regional directors, “are making judgements on whether trusts need to improve and whether they have the capacity to take on new schools”.
But there “needed to be greater consistency of approach” and “greater transparency in how such processes work”.
Asbestos may be next big issue
Although QSG members say they have seen improvements in areas of concern involving regions group and Ofsted, following talks with lead inspector Sir Martyn Oliver and senior DfE official John Edwards.
During meetings of QSG’s estates group, leaders also predicted that “asbestos may be the next issue to hit the headlines”. But they are concerned last year’s RAAC crisis will “exacerbate the shortfall in condition funding”.
They also believe current building bulletins, which detail how a school should be designed and laid out, are “now out-of-date as we are using schools and spaces differently following the pandemic”.
Creative Education Trust estates director Jon Ward, who chairs the QSG group, explained: “Some schools face new challenges in meeting space requirements for bigger intakes, or requiring more smaller spaces say for intervention particularly where greater numbers of children with SEND are evident.”
