Ofsted: a case study in the progressive deterioration of control
how control inevitably degrades over time
In January this year, Ruth Perry (the head teacher of Caversham Primary School) took her own life after an Ofsted inspection of her school. The Ofsted report, published after her death, downgraded the school from Outstanding (the highest grade) to Inadequate (the lowest grade). Her death has sparked an avalanche of criticism of the Ofsted school ratings system. However, most of the criticism has focused on the specifics of Ofsted’s approach and its ineffectiveness but misses out on a larger problem. The Ofsted rating system and its failures are simply a specific instance of the failure of all modern control, specifically the codified, legible and simplified control that dominates the world we live in.
The most obvious criticism that should be made of Ofsted is that there is very little evidence that it helps parents in choosing between schools. As a recent study shows,
parents who choose a “good” secondary school for their child will not leave with appreciably better outcomes than a parent who selects an “inadequate” school. The one exception to this is an Outstanding judgment, which does predict future academic outcomes – though only if the inspection was conducted within the last five years.
This is no different from the record of the CQC in the NHS, of which a 2018 report concluded that
a resource-intensive and very high profile system of inspection and rating does not seem to have had more than quite small and mixed effects on available performance indicators in areas such as A&E, and maternity services, or on general practice prescribing.
The lifecycle of codified systems: initial success, then progressive deterioration
However, concluding that CQC or Ofsted inspections were always ineffective would be a mistake. There is a lifecycle to all control systems in the modern world, from a humble application form to the NHS. In the initial period, when Goodhart’s Law has not yet kicked in, and those being controlled have not yet adapted to the system of control, the inspection regime is effective. But sooner or later, the system deteriorates into a state of chronic dysfunctionality as the system adapts to align itself to the control process at the expense of the actual function it is supposed to deliver. For example, a school would optimise its results under the codified control process of Ofsted rather than optimising the true quality of education.
Over time, the control process becomes more and more procedural, codified and complex. It also becomes divorced from the original aims and the needs of its consumers (parents in the case of Ofsted). For example, Caversham Primary School was downgraded “despite providing a good education” due to “failings in training, record-keeping and checks on staff.”. The public Ofsted report provides more details:
records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor. Some staff have not had the necessary training to be able to record concerns accurately using the school’s online system. However, staff know how to identify concerns about pupils and to report these to the appropriate leader.
What is being evaluated is the codification and recording of the control process at the school, not the outcomes themselves. This is a common problem of modern control in the computerised era and one of the critical signs of a dysfunctional modern control process. What is being criticised here is not that the system does not deliver a good outcome but that the system does not record the delivery of the outcome in adequate detail. If you want to know why so much work today involves meaningless tick-box exercises, here is your answer. This is also why there is such a temptation to falsify data in such situations.
Even stating that something is a tick-box exercise is simply stating the obvious. All attempts at conforming to a legible and codified system of control are, by definition, tick-box exercises. You will fail the inspection if you don’t tick the right boxes. Inspectors in such situations have no option but to view things through the lens of the categories the codified process has given them. What you see at Ofsted is simply an example of the inbuilt dysfunctionality and perversity of all such systems of control. The absurdity of the exercise is shown by how the school got upgraded to ‘Good’ a couple of months after the previous inspection when, presumably, the school had learnt to tick the right boxes (in this case, better “safeguarding”).
The controller is also being controlled
It’s worth emphasising that Ofsted is not to blame here. Apart from the adaptation of the system, another reason for this growth in complexity (directly relevant to the downgrading of Caversham Primary School) is that Ofsted, the controller, is itself being inspected and evaluated. In particular,
it’s no surprise that in some of these inspections of previously Outstanding schools, one focus has been what measures are in place to keep children safe: Ofsted has been facing pressure to do more about preventing sexual assault in schools, and in October, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse found the regulator “did not do enough” to identify serious child weaknesses in some educational settings.
The control process of the controller becomes more complex partly because there are layers of control. Every layer becomes more complex, and more layers are added over time. None of this would surprise anyone with any knowledge of the Soviet system, where the KGB itself spent an extraordinary amount of resources monitoring the monitors to no avail.
Reforms add more complexity and make things worse
Whenever the absurdity of the system becomes visible, we call out for the system to be reformed. But further “reforms” to the process only make the process more complex, inefficient and costly without any improvement in effectiveness. The same is true for Ofsted and ideas for reforming its inspection process. Labour advocates for a move “from a single-grade system to a report card system for each school, which would replace grades with more detailed information about school performance”, an approach similar to that already followed in Wales where “Estyn, which looks after inspections in Wales, has replaced a single overall grade with an overview of findings focusing on a school’s strengths and areas for development and a separate report summary for parents”. In the wake of Ruth Perry’s death, Ofsted itself has made changes to the system to deliver ‘greater clarity’, i.e. a more precise description of what needs to be done to tick the right boxes. However, more complex control cannot solve the problem of faulty control. The dysfunctionality arises from an excessively codified and rigid system, and it cannot be resolved by adding even more “code” into the mix.
A lot of the decline in productivity and economic malaise in the developed world today is a result of precisely the deterioration in control over time that I have outlined above. From the 80s to the 2000s, such “Soviet” control was implemented wholesale in the capitalist West, aided by computerisation and the growing ability to control via software and data. This explosion in codified control has been called many things - an audit explosion, a tyranny of metrics. Like all such control projects, it succeeded at first and then failed. We are now well into the failure mode of all the systems that served us well in the 20th century. The only technically feasible solution (apart from systemic collapse) is to grow new systems to replace the old.
Given your awareness of the systemic problems with codified systems, I would think you would be more interested in reducing/eliminating barriers of entry for entrepreneurial initiatives, including funding that allows private initiatives to compete on an equal footing with government ones. In the US there have been many states passing Educational Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) that allow the funding to follow the child in K12 education, with very few restrictions on how the funds are spent - in essence we are moving towards parental satisfaction as the only form of accountability. As a consequence, thousands of new entrepreneurial initiatives in education are coming into being with remarkable freedom from traditional structures and accountability systems. In a more market oriented system, as particular codified systems ossify and suffer from Goodhart's Law, new ones can constantly arise that are more aligned, in this case, with the actual lifelong well-being of the child.