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Is Ofsted working?
by Daniel on 19 Nov, 2008 in
It's been a few years since I helped on an inspection visit from the then-ALI. Since then, performance statistics have become far more important, with class and one-to-one observations taking more of a back seat. Given the forthcoming introduction of star ratings and recent criticisms of Ofsted's school inspections as pointless, what's the purpose of Ofsted inspections nowadays? Does anyone find them useful?
Also: If you're looking for provider ratings on the Employment Zones, you could do worse than looking at their star ratings (pdf). The big story is that Reed in Partnership's results are absolutely atrocious and Working Links' are surprisingly good. I may publish some brief analysis of the results to see what I can make of them.
Also also: Ofsted staff, I know you subscribe to the newswire! Now's your chance to tell people what you really think.
Star ratings are only for DWP programmes, so Ofsted is still the arbiter of quality in LSC-funded provisions. Given FAM covering the administrative / paperwork side of things, and star ratings covering most of the other aspects of provision quality, it's difficult to see that Ofsted will still be coming into welfare-to-work provisions in a few years. We're still in a transition now though, and as you point out they've only done star ratings for a small subset of provisions. When are you updating the contracts database?
Hi Holmwood,
Good points. I'm still working on cleaning up the DWP contracts database - it's in terrible shape. I should be there shortly though, maybe even by the end of this week (As I've been saying for the past few weeks).
I am afraid the star ratings do not offer much insight into actual underlying performance.
The organisations are scored on performance against their contractual targets. These will have been derived from their performance offer in their original tenders - possibly renegotiated in the meantime. But those targets may vary wildly between areas and not necessarily in any sort of relation to local labour market conditions.
Unless DWP provide the targets alongside the table, it is impossible to use the star ratings for any sort of meaningful comparison. You cannot look at this table and conclude in any reliable way that one organisation is better or worse than another at helping long-term unemployed people find and keep work.
It is, of course, imperative that we move towards more open and transparent contracting. Performance on programmes must be out in the public domain and future contracting decisions must take account of an organisation's track record. Unfortunately, these star ratings are not, as they stand, a step in that direction.
Thanks for the response w2w. I agree that contracts and performance should be as transparent as possible. I suspect it's a far more important step than Flexible New Deal or any other whizzy model. How can public services be in any way accountable when their performance, payments, and contractual conditions are kept secret because of 'commercial confidentiality'? There isn't even a reliable list of who holds which contracts, for goodness' sake. Hopefully what I'm doing here will increase the transparency of welfare-to-work provision.
With regard to the usefulness of star ratings, I don't have personal experience of EZ target setting. I wasn't aware of the individual negotiations, but that does indeed mess with the validity of the results. Unfortunately, it also messes with the validity of Ofsted reports just as much, since they're based on performance against contractual targets as well.
I wonder if 'local labour market conditions' aren't something of an excuse for a lot of providers. Some of the highest performers have been in the most deprived areas of the country. The housing and childcare traps in London and the supply-side issues in rural ex-industrial areas (i.e. old mining towns) are the most obvious issues. However, if you have a proper competition for contracts based on prices and performance, then in theory at least the contracts will reflect the actual difficulty of local delivery. Do EZs in the same area ever have different targets? That would be wacky.
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