1, Fundamentally overhaul Ofsted
We spend around £160m every year to tell us that 89% of everything is fine (Ofsted, 2023) and to occasionally blunder upon schools that have been giving poor service for years. Let’s stop that. Teams of 20 based in each of the nine government regions could do at least as good a job for a fraction of the cost.
Let us concentrate on improving the poorest of our schools and bringing them up to the standard of the rest.
Ofsted looks at the wrong things and is at the centre of the incoherence in our school system. To change this we must…
2, Address the national priorities
We have an £11.4bn investment gap in our school building condition needs (DfE, 2021) which gets worse when we factor in the estimated £150m and counting reportedly spent on removing crumbling concrete.
At the same time, we are wrestling with workforce recruitment and retention issues everywhere. We need to make working in schools an attractive career proposition for people who want or need to work flexibly or part-time.
We have shortages in many essential para-professional domains, particularly those that support children and young people with additional needs – our SEN continuum is all but broken.
The disadvantage gap was closing pre-Covid but only very slowly. Post-Covid it has worsened. We also have an unprecedented level of fixed-term and permanent exclusions.
All this and the Magic Money Tree money has already been stripped bare.
We have a series of very real and immediate national priorities that we must address holistically. Let’s identify them as the national priorities and address them with the necessary infrastructure and necessary intent. Key to this is:
3, Create 300 strategic authorities
Having 300 strategic authorities in England, each responsible for around 80 schools, would mean they can take responsibility for the doing of the work to address the national priorities as partners with government.
These authorities would be responsible for school standards, buildings maintenance and improvement, health, safety and welfare, workforce development, leadership succession and pipeline and so on. Co-ordinated working with a clear set of priorities would focus time, effort, and resource in the right areas, allowing us to:
4, Let schools innovate
To solve key issues of the day like recruitment, retention, flexible and part-time working and filling essential skills gaps we need to focus our full attention on them. The best way to do this is to allow strategic authorities and their schools to innovate in workforce design, professional development, succession and pipeline planning and flexibility of working.
If the entire system is focused on these areas, new and effective models will quickly emerge and will make the sector a desirable option for professionals of all types. Key to perceptions of professional success and reward are feeling connected and feeling that you are making a difference, so:
5, Put schools at the heart of their communities
We must turn on its head the movements of recent years that have taken schools further and further away from the communities they serve. In some, draconian approaches have led to community alienation, in others it has simply been the custom and practice to separate the two.
Schools are significant community assets, often the most significant public realm in the locality. We must do more with this resource to open opportunities, galvanise community activism, extend opportunities, and restore trust and confidence.
Our society is blighted by loneliness and disconnection. We already have beating hearts of community energisation under our control. We should put it to the best possible use. Community cafés, free broadband, toddlers, and pensioner groups, baking clubs, making clubs – we should be doing whatever it takes. One very simple way of doing so is:
6, Care for our environment
Our schools account for many millions of square hectares of land in the country. We are not yet putting it to best use in the fight against climate change or in modelling the use of land for our communities. For example, we should be investing en-masse in sustainable urban drainage schemes to help manage our water challenges, we should be planting to aid our environment, to support biodiversity in our localities and to beautify our places and spaces naturally, we should be investing in renewable energies at scale and in a co-ordinated manner.
Final thoughts
Without Big Ideas, where are we going? How are we going to get there? When will that be? We have done what we have done for the past 30-some years and we have got where we have got. The case for change is clear. We should act quickly.
Mark Wilson is CEO of the Wellspring Academy Trust and a National Leader of Education. The Wellspring Academy Trust comprises 31 schools spanning South, West and North Yorkshire, Humberside, and Lincolnshire. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/mark-wilson
Further information & resources
- DfE: Condition of school buildings survey, 2021: https://tinyurl.com/3e53tx8m
- Ofsted: Annual Report 2022/23: Education, children’s services and skills, 2023: gov.uk/government/publications/ofsted-annual-report-202223-education-childrens-services-and-skills