I have been reading a letter sent by Ofsted
to Norfolk County Council, regarding a monitoring visit in October 2016,
following an earlier finding of ‘inadequate’. I struggled to get to grips with much
of the contents of this missive, which may make sense to those in Norfolk, to
whom it is addressed, but which largely passed me by. Statements such as
“…managers have not been sufficiently strategic in their approach to
transforming the way that the authority operates” give me a headache. I have
the mental picture of something which looks like a tyre pressure gauge, but
measuring units of ‘strategic intent’. Where one would plug it in is anybody’s
guess. And I don’t like the idea that a few managers can ‘transform’ services
if only they try harder. Transformation is not something that is easy to do. I
wonder when was the last time the people from Ofsted ‘transformed’ anything? Come
to think of it how many of us have ever transformed anything? Most of us just
go to work and do our best. I also didn’t like the frequent references to
‘performance management’ (or more accurately its ‘under-development’) which
seems to assume that we might have an understanding of what under-developed
performance management looks like. I don’t.
And I don’t expect that many people working
for Norfolk Children’s Services will be pleased to read the inspector’s comment
that there are difficulties recruiting “high calibre managers and staff”. At
the very least that’s dispiriting. If you don’t have the skin of a rhino it is just
insulting.
But what really concerns me about this
letter is its macho tone. It is peppered with aggressive phrases, including frequent
use of the word ‘robust’. By far the worst and creepiest sentences are the
following: “Leaders have not been ruthless enough in pursuing improvement at all levels” and “The local
authority is not sufficiently ruthless or ambitious in tracking and chasing
progress….” Oh dear, I now have the mental image of kicking down doors and
shining bright lights in people’s eyes while slapping them around the face. ‘Ruthless’
indeed!
Encouraging macho management should not be
a part of Ofsted’s brief. There is absolutely no evidence at all that
improvement is brought about by tough guys. On the contrary, acting like a
rugby scrum on steroids is likely to be counter-productive at best and at worst
destructive. The challenge of improvement in children’s services is not how to
take names and kick arse, but how to engage with the people who deliver very
complex services to help them try to understand what is causing poor quality and
how to remedy it. Putting the frighteners on people who are struggling to do
their best is not likely to win many hearts and minds. It is likely to increase
the number of unfilled vacancies.
