Further written evidence to be reported to the House
Education and Skills Bill
12:00 pm
Christine Ryan: Well, I think there are two things here. One is that a lot of the thrust of the proposals repeats the desire to create a single unified strand of registration, regulation and inspection. Now of course that will only occur—if the proposals are put in place—for independent schools inspected by Ofsted, which have only 20 per cent of the pupils educated in independent schools. The vast majority of them will still be inspected by the ISI. So even if the proposals come in, you will not have a single unified strand of registration, regulation and inspection; you will still have a division across two bodies. One of the thrusts of these proposals reflects the desire to create a unified body, but that will not occur, because they will still be inspected either by ISI, or by the Focus Learning Trust, or any other approved inspectorate that comes forward in the future.
Why does it matter which body is acting as the regulator? At the moment, of course, as an inspectorate, we liaise with and have very good links with the independent schools team in the Department. One of the very important functions that we carry out is to check on regulatory compliance of independent schools. The regulations—as is the nature of the beast—are often open to some interpretation. If a school challenges whether or not regulatory compliance is there or not and we want to be sure, we can go to the Department and we agree a decision on interpretation, say, of regulations on a particular matter.
That link and that contact with the Department works very smoothly—it has a dedicated team who know our system very well. Ofsted is already having to cope with a very large number of changes from the other duties it has taken on. If this transfer happens now, we are concerned about the loss of that communication. We often deal with problems that are happening in real time—while inspections are going on, perhaps. It is crucial that you are able to liaise properly with the regulator, so that you are giving correct information to schools and that you are supporting inspectors who are out in the field.