Albert Einstein is apocryphally quoted as saying, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
One wonders what Einstein might have made of the government’s legislation on trust inspection, announced yesterday.
He might, I suspect, have been as interested in the policy rationale as in the detail of the legislation itself - because it is there that we find the all-important why of trust inspection.
So what problem is this legislation seeking to solve?
Trust-level inspections
Pleasingly, the government’s articulation of the problem is now in a better place. The central tenet is that government currently has limited ability to intervene at the level of the trust itself.
Where a trust is failing to meet its obligations or deliver sufficient educational quality, the main lever for change sits at school level - typically through rebrokering individual schools away from the trust.
The government argues that stronger powers to intervene at trust level would allow it to address concerns where poor performance exists at scale across a trust, particularly where decisions made by the trust affect the performance of its schools.
To do that, it says, it needs better insight into trusts, and, on that basis, trust inspection is presented as a solution.
School trust growth
This goes some way towards the clear rationale for trust inspection that we called for in our autumn policy paper on inspecting school groups, and we welcome the government’s clarity on this.
It is something that advocates of trust inspection can support and sceptics can at least understand.
The secretary of state’s comments also offered a strong and welcome indication that the government sees the benefits of school trusts and supports the sector’s continued growth. That reassurance matters: it suggests trust inspection is intended to strengthen the sector, not undermine it.
Risks for Ofsted and the DfE
But risks remain.
Thought needs to be given to the unintended consequences of foregrounding trusts in the accountability system. What, beyond the schools themselves, is it meaningful to inspect in a trust?
One unintended consequence of trust inspection could be to harden the idea of “the trust” as something separate from its schools - an arena of adult interest, rather than a lens on children’s experiences.
That would feel out of step with what many in the sector have worked hard to establish: that the school is the trust, and the trust is the school.
Care will be needed to ensure that inspection does not pull focus away from improving outcomes for children.
Strategic coherence needed
A coherent regulatory strategy is required that sets out how accountability, inspection, intervention and support fit together.
While last year’s accountability consultation moved in that direction, more work is needed - especially with the addition of a new inspection regime.
Government must also resist the familiar kitchen-sink tendency.
Ofsted already faces constant pressure to inspect particular issues; trust inspection risks the same fate, adding burden to trusts and, therefore, to schools. Ministers and Ofsted will need to be disciplined about what trust inspection is for - and what it is not for.
There are some concerns remaining about the rationale that government has offered. It is said that trust inspection will identify and spread good practice and inform trusts’ improvement efforts.
These aspirations are intuitively appealing, but not uncontroversial.
School improvement
American theorist W Edwards Deming was clear that inspection may play a secondary role but it cannot be relied upon to create quality. The government should be careful not to overstate the improvement benefits of an inspection system that hasn’t yet been created.
Perhaps most problematically, trust inspection is intended to recognise trusts’ wider system roles, including collaboration through initiatives such as Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) and work with local partners on special educational needs and disabilities support.
The Confederation of School Trusts has long argued that trusts play a civic role.
But inspecting against this is fraught with risk. Being judged negatively for partnership failures that originate elsewhere would feel hard to justify.
The role of RISE
As for RISE, while referencing it may align inspection with current priorities, inspection frameworks must outlast individual ministers and governments. RISE may feel very new, but we do not yet know whether it is having its intended effect. Tying inspection too closely to potentially transient policy priorities carries obvious risk.
Rather than starting with a list of what we think is important, trust inspection must build from a clear and focused understanding of the problem it is trying to solve.
This is all the more important because the legislation is deliberately broad, giving ministers and Ofsted considerable leeway over the eventual scope, model and framework. Flexibility can be a strength, but it must not create space for fuzzy thinking.
Inspection is high-stakes and creates a real burden in schools. There is little capacity in the system for getting it wrong.
The legislative amendment to bring forward trust inspection is a starting point on a long road of careful work ahead. While it is welcome that the government’s articulation of the case for trust inspection is improving, more work is needed to ensure that it is as strong a foundation as possible to set off from.
As Einstein might have observed, without clarity on the problem to be solved, designing the solution becomes much harder.
Steve Rollett is the deputy CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts
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