I wasn’t very impressed with Ofsted’s chief
inspector Amanda Spielmann's evidence to the House of Commons Education Committee yesterday.
Pressed on whether Ofsted should be split
to create a separate inspectorate to focus on children’s social care, she said
no. And that was about all she said. Her arguments against the split seemed to
amount to nothing more than the claim that having two inspectorates would be more
complicated than having one.
There is an account of the event in Children and Young People Now and, if you have nothing better to do, you can watch it
all on Parliamentary video (they get to the split or not to split question
about 11 minutes in).
I make no secret of the fact that I am an unreformed
splitter when it comes to Ofsted.
Children’s social care, including child
protection, is a very specialised subject and poses issues for inspectors which
are very different from those posed by schools. It is now more than 10 years
since Ofsted took over children’s social care inspection, and in my view all
the evidence points to the organisation’s ineffectiveness at creating and
sustaining an improvement agenda.
Too frequently Ofsted’s reports on children’s
social care are formulaic and judgemental without providing proper analysis and
insight. Ofsted is evasive and vague about its social care inspection methodology
and there seems to be little or no expertise in the organisation about safety
or management.
All of which suggests to me that some seismic
shake-up is long overdue.
