DfE lacks effective procedures and insight into schools, watchdog claims
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Version 0 of 1. The Department for Education lacks basic knowledge about how schools operate and is unable to measure how effective its interventions are in helping troubled schools, according to a critical report published by a parliamentary watchdog. Margaret Hodge, chair of the House of Commons’ public accounts committee, said the report on school oversight and intervention revealed a rudderless department lacking effective procedures or insight. “The Department for Education has focused on increasing schools’ autonomy but it has done so without a proper strategy for overseeing the system. Its light touch approach means that problems in some schools can go undetected until serious damage has been done,” Hodge said. “Confusion about the roles and responsibilities of the department, the Education Funding Agency, local authorities and academy sponsors has allowed some schools to fall through gaps in the system, meaning failure can go unnoticed.” The PAC report is the second damaging critique of the DfE’s efforts to reform schools in the space of a week, following the education committee’s tepid report on the role of academies and free schools in raising education standards. The report recommends that the DfE set itself clear guidlelines on when to intervene in schools, commission research in the most effective means of intervention, and create independent measures to rate academy sponsors able to improve troubled schools. According to Hodge, the DfE relies too heavily on whistleblowers to identify significant risks of failure in schools, such as in safeguarding arrangements, financial integrity or governance. “We hope that the department will respond to our recommendations fully in order to reduce the likelihood of further unforeseen school scandals, like the Trojan horse affair in Birmingham,” Hodge said. The DfE pushed back against the report, saying it did not reflect the real picture in England’s classrooms. “We have already intervened in more than 1,000 schools over the past four years, pairing them up with excellent sponsors to give pupils the best chances. That compares with the years and even decades of neglect many schools suffered under local authority control,” a DfE spokesperson said. “There are 41 local authority schools that have been in special measures for more than 18 months, compared to just nine academies. In fact, 54 local authorities have never issued any warning notices to schools that are letting pupils down, whereas we do not hesitate to take swift action on underperformance.” Labour shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said Labour planned to create directors of schools standards to check schools at a local level. “The events in schools in Birmingham reveal the weakness in government policy and the failure to prevent radical agendas playing out in our schools. Instead of taking decisive action to prevent a repeat, ministers have ruled out tough action,” Hunt said. The report is published after education secretary Nicky Morgan told parliament on Thursday: “I’m confident that if the events we witnessed in Birmingham were repeated again today, they would be identified and dealt with more quickly and in a far more effective way.” |