Parental Fingers on the Inspection Trigger

On April Fools’ Day we reported that the schools’ inspector Ofsted was considering giving parents the right to tell them directly what they thought of their children’s schools.  The teaching unions seemed to think it was a joke in bad taste but Ofsted, true to its word, has now launched Parent View on its attractively redesigned website.  Well worth a visit.

“By sharing your views, you’ll be helping your child’s school to improve. You will also be able to see what other parents have said about your child’s school. Or, if you want to, view the results for any school in England”.

A dozen simple questions

You simply log in and give the name of your child’s school, confirm that your child attends that school and then answer 11 graded questions (strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree and don’t know).  The questions cover the same territory as the paper questionnaires that are distributed to parents in the week of an inspection asking for parents’ perceptions in a range of areas: how happy and safe your child seems and how well they are looked after; their progress; the amount of homework they are given; how bullying is handled by the school; how children in the school behave; how good the teaching is; how the school is managed and how well parental concerns are handled.  The twelfth and final question (and one we at MAC  always like to see in surveys) is whether or not you would recommend the school to other parents.  Just a simple yes or no on that one which is a pity since there are degress of readiness to recommend – it is not a black and white choice.

It would be interesting to have heard that debates which led to a special definition of “bullying” being added to the site when there is no definition of some of the other equally vague and subjective terms such “this school is well-led and managed” or “my child receives appropriate homework for their age”.  But there is  nothing wrong with a subjective responses on these sorts of questions as long as the feedback is used intelligently.

Dare to be free?

I did find myself wanting to tell them more and qualify some of my answers and it is slightly frustrating to have only the blunt instrument of the graded marking to respond to the questions.  How do I tell them that I think the teaching in History is exemplary whilst I know the teaching of French is most definitely not?  And how do I tell them that although they have responded to most of my concerns quickly and efficiently I am still feeling disgruntled by the fact that after years of complaints from many parents French is still being taught in exactly the same way?  A bit of free text somewhere on the form would not go amiss – but I suspect this may be where Ofsted conceded to the unions’ anxieties about those mad, bad parents saying nasty, dangerous things.  Remember Chris “Cassandra” Keates of the NASUWT?  She’s the one who said that a survey like this would be

“Open to abuse and manipulation and would therefore be an inappropriate and unreliable mechanism for triggering something as serious as inspection.”

Feedback, insight, foresight – keeping the Inspectors from the door

Well, you can be sure that if a  school is in the doldrums or heading that way, parents will soon pick it up and be only too keen to use the Ofsted website to have their voices heard. And bearing in mind that it was almost impossible to do this in the past unless you happened to live next door to the Secretary of State for Schools, this mechanism is surely to be welcomed.  If giving parents a voice means triggering questions and even an inspection, then so be it.  Isn’t that the point of the whole thing? Any sensible school will be encouraging parents to fill it in and update their views regularly and will be incorporating this feedback from parents into its normal feedback and insight processes long before the sort of problems arise that would trigger a call from the Inspectors.

The pros and cons of anonymity

The site makes it clear that all feedback is anonymous so there is no way for schools to know who it is that is commenting.   Overall I can see the benefits of this from the point of view of a parent but past experience makes me worry that schools may use this as a way of dismissing views they do not like: the “Yeah, well, we know who THAT is”  or “Oh it’s just an organised campaign” responses that we all too often hear  (subtext: Dismiss, as you were).   But as a governor I can see that there might be times when it would be useful to be able to analyse the data in some ways: do the parents of children in reception have a stronger sense that their child is being looked after than those with children in Year 6?  Still, there is plenty of time and room for developing this sort of sophistication.

So congratulations to Ofsted for what we will assume to be phase one of their new website.  And an extra bonus mark for sticking to its guns on its plan to use information from parents to trigger inspections despite the knee-jerk resistance of the unions.  Let’s watch this space to find out how appropriate and reliable this mechanism proves to be.

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive public service organisations.  Feel free to contact us to discuss the opportunities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

November’s Newsletter: No downturn here – M-A-C blogging team’s creative outputs breaks all records

10 posts since 30th September represents an all-time record as M-A-C engages with the issues and causes dear to our collective and individual hearts.

Our first ever post back in 2003 was about our central interest – user involvement. A theme echoed in this month’s output with Andrew’s post Engagement isn’t enough. Two posts later, we were taking a look at Ann Abraham’s approach to her then quite new job as Health Ombudsman. Complaints and the way they are managed and treated and what they mean for the organisations trying to deal with them are another abiding interest – see the piece on 24th looking at how common themes can emerge from different surveys of the complainant/ customer experience.

It is not all about the familiar themes – since 2003 we have broadened our interests to embrace two new areas – Policy Governance and parental involvement in schools. In the case of the model developed by John and Miriam Carver, Policy Governance® has taken a while to get off the ground in the UK. Most of the work and case histories reflected US practice and we have not had a good UK example of how this approach to corporate governance can help organisations here. Now the Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have led the way for others to follow. Val Moore reported on this on 27th October.

Finally, Caroline Millar reports on how the new models of participation – involvement, engagement – are impacting schools, parents and teachers. Her piece focuses on the consultation on complaint handling in schools and how parental problems are handled (or not).

We call ourselves a consultancy that specialises in the user interest. What keeps us interested and involved and in business, is how that interest can manifest itself in so many different contexts while the principles underlying best practice can be so similar. Different diagnoses, different solutions but underpinning them all are the common questions – what do users think of this? Has anyone asked them? Has anyone listened? Has anyone done anything with what they have heard? What happens when people have a problem? Easy really.

The final question that comes up when looking back over 5 years – has anything changed?  Well Andrew inspired us all with a 2006 look at what the NHS will be like by 2015. We are almost halfway there and what has come true? Well the Department of Health seems to see things the Andrew Craig way. Allowing people to pay for their drugs was something Andrew took a look at in March this year when he pointed out that ‘topping up’ was something that Beveridge seemed to have explicitly anticipated when he wrote about the State leaving “room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual”.  As far as the management ethos of the NHS as a whole is concerned, we will wait and see how PG will change all that.

In the meantime, it is still worth repeating a little Olympic-flavoured M-A-C joke from 28th November 2006 -

A parable of NHS reforms

(Elements are borrowed from several sources and sexed up a bit by us)

An NHS rowing team raced against a Japanese team. There were eight people in each team, of similar fitness, but the Japanese team won by a mile. How could this have happened asked John Reid? Top NHS management established a committee of analysts, which reported that the Japanese had seven rowers and one captain, whereas the NHS has seven captains and one rower. The experts called for restructuring of the NHS team. The new team comprised four captains, two service managers, and a director who also did the rowing. After a second lost race to the Japanese, the single rower was dismissed on the grounds of incompetence, and the management team received a bonus for strong leadership. A new NHS boat is currently being designed , but is reported to be running behind delivery schedule due to IT problems.

Let us see what has changed by the Olympic year of 2012 assuming we have not had to make a choice before then between funding bread and circuses or the NHS.

Complaint Data – common themes confirmed in different surveys

It gets a little dispiriting if you work with complaints and complainants to see the same old messages emerge in survey after survey as the years go by. If I was a complainant, I would be tempted to be very rude to the next person who wanted me to complete a survey about the experience I had with my complaint. The questionnaires or the questioner have a little spiel along the lines of “your experiences will help us greatly in improving the way we handle complaints”. Really? There seems to be little sign of that.

The National Audit Office has taken a look at complaint handling in both health and social care services in anticipation of the creation of a single complaints system in 2009. Our friends at the Customer Care Alliance and Surveylab have just published their annual look at the complainant experience across a variety of markets and providers based on a survey done during July, August and September 2008. 10,102 responses were received from a random sample of UK consumers and some 230 of them had their most serious problem with health care services.

The findings from the two surveys cannot be compared directly but some interesting common themes emerged – the same reason came top in the list of reasons why many did not bother to complain. Namely, the perception was that nothing would change as a result of voicing that complaint. The NAO survey which focussed exclusively on health and social care services asked more detailed questions about both the informal and formal processes. Young people were especially likely to drop the matter at the mention of a formal process. The people who persisted – this came through with the health care problems – were those who were looking after or complaining on behalf of someone else and there is an interesting suggestion with the social care data that readiness to voice dissatisfaction was linked to whether or not part at least of the service had been paid for. Class and age played their usual part in readiness to voice with ABC1s and 35-54 year olds the more likely to take the problem up.

Social care service problems are most often triggered by a social worker or home help and this personal flavour to the problem explains why people with a problem with for example the bad standard of treatment, worried about the effect of making a complaint, not wanting to damage a continuing relationship with the service provider.

What did complainants want? The CCA survey asked directly whether revenge would be nice. 7% of men said yes to that compared to only 1% of women. That same survey confirmed that what people wanted overwhelmingly was an apology (46%), an explanation (57%), and an assurance that the problem would not be repeated (40%). One of the most telling pieces of data in this study (the NAO did not ask the question) was that 54% of the people who were dissatisfied, shared that experience with friends/ colleagues.

Ministers despair that people do not believe what they are told about the health service. As we have said before, we listen to and more importantly believe our friends more when it comes to service experience. Service reputation lags well behind the public announcements – the speeches, the ads – because private user information (the wisdom of the crowd) discounts these official messages in favour of their word of mouth sources.

We will await the lessons from the early adopters programme for the new combined health and social care complaint handling arrangements and how well local providers put in place their own arrangements within the Making Experiences Count framework. The main pitfall to avoid when building new organisations is to push complaint handling to the back of the process building queue. This overlooks the fact that good complaint handling is an vital resource for users who have been dissatisfied by some aspect of the fledgling organisation’s service delivery. Bad first impression plus bad problem resolution equals poor reputation straight after launch – revisit our thoughts on who gets believed.

In the meantime,  service process designers and commissioners need to look out for the user who is ABC1, 35-54 years old, responsible for someone else’s care. Lives in London and the South East and has lots of friends. Your reputation rests in their hands. Sort them out quickly with an apology and an explanation and just as most of those users do not want revenge, avoid giving any impression that vulnerable users still in the system will suffer for being cheeky and complaining. Worth perhaps repeating that stunning bit of data from the UK Customer Care study showing the rewards of good complaint handling that satisfies your users.