NAHT welcomes the Government’s aims to ensure that young people have every possible opportunity to receive high-quality education and training.
We are concerned however that, whilst the Bill contains many positive clauses to increase access and participation, it is also littered with heavy-handed, unnecessary and unhelpful new measures, the costs of which cannot simply be measured in monetary terms alone.
The Government claims that the overwhelming majority of the Bill’s content is ‘revenue-neutral’ or may even involve savings to the tax-payer. NAHT contends that in too many instances ‘revenue-neutral’ simply means more work for schools for no extra money!
The following examples typify this approach:
Local Authority Warning Notices
The Government asserts that ‘the extension of powers to issue warning notices to schools should result in net savings of £9 million a year, which will arise from catching schools earlier before they are placed in special measures’.
NAHT believes that the real price of the extension of these powers – particularly plans to issue warning notices for non compliance with the teachers’ pay and conditions document, will be the loss of schools’ ability to work flexibly and creatively without fear of reprisal, the erosion of existing good practice in grievance procedure and potentially irreparable damage to industrial relations.
Complaints
The Bill introduces a new system for dealing with unresolved complaints against schools using the Local Government Ombudsman referred to as the Local Commissioner.
The Government estimates that the Local Commissioner will deal with approximately 2200 per year at a cost of approx £750 per complaint. These figures are based on the number of complaints received by the Secretary of State / DCSF in a given year.
This is, the NAHT believes, a serious under-estimation.
Whilst the Government is keen to stress that the new Commissioner will only tackle those complaints that have been through the appropriate channels first, the very presence of the Commissioner will, we believe, result in an increase in the number of parents who, refusing to accept the outcome of existing complaints procedures, will want to take their complaint to the Commissioner. We also anticipate an increase in the number of petty, ill-founded yet time-consuming complaints (or more appropriately criticisms) incorrectly submitted to the Commissioner and so ‘bounced back’ for the school to deal with.
The Bill states that all complaints must be investigated, reports produced, meetings held and this takes hours of school leaders’ time.
However, beyond the hours of additional administration, the most worrying potential cost of this new system is the damage that can be done to a school leader’s reputation if they are regularly drawn into protracted, vexatious or malicious complaints.
Ofsted interim statements
The Government claims that the introduction of the proposed new Ofsted Interim Report or Health Check will deliver savings of around £4.5 million – a figure based on the reduction in the inspection interval for some schools and the attendant reduction in the amount of school leadership time given over to inspections.
NAHT is already on the record of expressing the view that Ofsted inspections are already too data focused and data driven. Inevitably, the interim check will consist of primarily a performance data analysis. This measure sees schools reduced to numerical calculations and for that reason we believe that the cash savings will be at the expense of the reputations of those schools and school leaders in challenging circumstances, where data alone provides insufficient information on which to make a judgment.
Mick Brookes, General Secretary, comments:
"It has been clearly documented that one of the reasons that senior staff are not stepping up for the top job is because of the sheer volume of administrative duties required as part of the compliance/evidence based culture foisted onto schools. The new Bill threatens another deluge of paperwork that will force senior staff further and further from their core task of leading teaching and learning. This will negatively affect standards of achievement unless there is stricter regulation to limit this modern day curse that appears to affect all public services."
Press Office, Brighton Centre
01273 323026
Mick Brookes, NAHT General Secretary
Mobile: 07976 919353
Brighton Thistle Hotel: 01273 206700
Brighton Centre: 01273 323026
Kathryn James, Senior Assistant Secretary
Policy, Politics, Education
Mobile: 07968 587116
Lesley Gannon,
Assistant Secretary
Policy, Politics, Education
Mobile: 07590 771744
