Almost quarter of a century ago, the New Labour government’s ‘Best Value’ legislation came into effect. Its themes are all very topical again, but it’s work that happened as a result of it that I’d like to draw the lessons from today.
The best-value legislation meant that local authorities and other prescribed public bodies had to “make arrangements to secure continuous improvement in the way in which its functions are exercised, having regard to a combination of economy, efficiency and effectiveness”.
I was working in the civil legal advice sector then, and we needed to show that we – advice services of all shapes and sizes – were providing ‘best value’ for the funding we were given or risk losing it.
To facilitate that, I led a project to develop a balanced scorecard so that local authorities and other funders could see what they, communities and the general public were getting for their money. The stakes were high, and there was a lot of nervousness across the sector.
I gathered all the relevant representative bodies together. For the best part of a year, a very small team of us worked with this bigger group to take the idea from a blank piece of paper to a balanced scorecard that almost everyone could sign up to.
I am using the phrase ‘best part’ in a very particular way. During that project, I often questioned what had become of my so-called career. I really hadn’t joined the legal advice profession to work on service measures; it’s the only job I’ve done which I didn’t feel passionate about!
In hindsight, however, the truth is that I’ve had cause to use the knowledge from that exercise in every role I’ve had since.
The end result was commended as “innovative, intelligent and practical” by the then Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, which provided a significant amount of funding for the advice sector.
But rest easy.: this isn’t the point where I present you with a fully-fledged scorecard for schools. The work we did in the nineties, and for a different sector, would not in any way be relevant to schools today.
Giving Ofsted more power is the opposite of what schools need
What is relevant is the proof that a profession can come up with useful measures for itself if it is given the space to put its minds to it. We do not need regulators, inspectorates or funders telling us how to do it: we have the ability to craft a balanced scorecard ourselves, if that is what the times require.
Giving the job to Ofsted runs counter to everything we’ve learned over the past decade. Focusing more and more on one dimension of accountability is dangerous, and giving the inspectorate more power is the precise opposite of what the sector needs.
It certainly isn’t the intelligent accountability championed by Professor Onora O’Neill in the Reith Lectures of 2002, which are very much worth revisiting.
Inspection, scrutiny and audit are only one part of the complex web of accountability public services are subjected to. Others include legal frameworks, professional accountability, organisational governance and culture, accountability to stakeholders, democratic and social accountability, and the media.
They interlink, informing each other, but together they need to remain balanced and proportionate.
Inspectors of course could look at an agreed published scorecard before arriving at the school; it might even help shape the focus of the inspection. But I’ve not seen any argument justifying it being the output of inspection. This approach is deeply flawed in terms of the web of accountability and will not end well.
If Ofsted don’t see that yet, it is possibly because they can’t; they aren’t looking at the bigger picture. Their entire focus is inspection: that is the job they have been given to do.
But there’s no reason for policy makers not to see it, and there’s still time for government to put its money where its mouth is and trust the profession to come up with a solution that really works for everyone.
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