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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s see a “Parent Opinion” website

A new consultation on school inspections has raised the question of how much attention the inspection body Ofsted should pay to the views of parents.

“We…. intend to take greater account of parents’ views in helping us to decide when a school should be inspected. We are currently considering new ways in which parents’ views about a school will be gathered regularly and not just at the time when it is inspected. We propose to gather parents’ views by inviting them to answer a range of questions about their children’s school via Ofsted’s website. These findings will be considered as part of the risk awareness process.”

Hold on a minute – did they say listening to the views of parents would become “part of the risk awareness process”.   Time to sit up and listen.  Here is a government body appearing to embrace the idea that the users of a public service might have something really important to tell them about that service.  This is not about going through the motions of listening for the sake of it but because they recognise that there is a real risk in failing to do so.  And they want to do it “regularly”!  Better and better.

Parent Opinion Website

Although we think the use of structured questions to parents proposed in the consultation document will be useful for inspectors in deciding whether to carry out an inspection, it would make sense to complement this with an independent “Parent Opinion” website along the lines of the well-established Patient Opinion website which invites individual stories both good and bad and allows health organisations to respond and to tell people what they have done as a result of the feedback.  They sign up healthcare providers to subscribe to the service and take the information on board as part of their patient-centred quality processes as well as providing a response to the individual.

James Munro of Patient Opinion describes it appeal:

“At Patient Opinion we’ve learned a lot about how people want to give their feedback to health services, and what they expect to see. First, while many people may want to give critical feedback, they don’t necessarily want to “make a complaint”.  This seems to be a distinction the health service struggles to grasp.  Second, people want to know that they can be honest, without fear of being identified. They want to say both what was good, and what could be better. We’ve learnt that this honesty, and the mix of feedback that results, is important to both patients and staff.  Third, people want to know that their feedback was heard – and by whom. And finally, they want to see that giving feedback can, at least sometimes, make a difference”.

It is easy to see how this could work for parents and schools.

Making OFSTED aware

When my daughters’ school started to fail in a huge number of different ways, it was the parents, particularly those who had been around for a while, who saw what was happening.  We set up a Parent Forum to try to channel parents’ concerns into the management of the school.  Parent governors struggled to make themselves heard at governors meetings by senior management and the local authority but to no avail. Eventually one parent sneaked off to phone Ofsted to ask them when they were next due in the school.  She was told that because the last inspection which had taken place several years earlier had shown that all was well, they were not planning to come back for another three years.  Thanks to her courage and persistence the inspectors turned up a few months later and set the ball rolling for major change.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply have gone on-line and given voice to our anxieties knowing that someone somewhere was listening?  Well, we parents might think so but the teaching unions feel otherwise.

Teacher resistance – same old, same old

In response to the consultation Christine Blower of the NUT has said;

“The ability for parents to complain directly to Ofsted is already in place and has been very rarely used, which shows that parents are generally very supportive of their children’s schools”.

Two classics here:  first, the implication that because no-one can find their way their way through a labyrinthine and intimidating process it means that everyone is happy (rather than reflecting how hard it is to complain) and secondly, the assumption that parents who complain are not “supportive” of their children’s schools – when in fact the complete opposite can often be the case.

She goes on:

“Parents will not want to be involved in triggering early inspections. To offer such an opportunity is unnecessary. What is important for parents is that they have a voice in schools and that their views are taken seriously. It’s not clear therefore why parents, who may have quite legitimate questions to which they seek answers, would choose this route.”

I wonder how Ms Blower knows what parents feel about triggering early inspections.  I am not aware that the NUT spends much time talking to parents.  Of course no-one wants their school publicly damned by inspectors but that does not mean they don’t sometimes welcome an inspection.  It may not seem a “necessary opportunity” in the teachers’ eyes but in the absence of any other form of influence, it may feel very necessary to parents.

Cut back on the parent voice

It would be great to think that there are good and effective routes within all schools for raising concerns and sharing them with others but the simple fact is that that although there are many examples of excellent practice, it is certainly not universal.  Hardly any schools have parent councils; new Trust schools, Academies and Free schools can get away with even fewer parents on governing bodies that maintained schools and complaints policies, as we have discussed before on this blog, are both bureaucratic and feeble.  An open and easily accessible on-line forum could provide schools with an effective means of hearing what parents have to say-  removing many of the practical, social and emotional barriers that stop so many parents challenging their school or even just making their voices heard: the meetings at children’s bedtimes, the other parents who speaker louder and longer, the childhood memories of being intimidated by teachers.

No hiding place

And then of course there is the usual reaction of public service professionals to the idea of allowing service users to express their views on the service in a public forum, a reaction we have seen before in health.  Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT union, said:

“To hold schools to account on the basis of chat room and internet gossip trivialises public accountability and the work of schools.  Such a system would be open to abuse and manipulation and would therefore be an inappropriate and unreliable mechanism for triggering something as serious as inspection.”

No-one is suggesting that the on-line collection of data about pupil and parent views and experiences would be the sole way in which a judgement would be made about a school.  But as one of a range of ways of testing the quality and impact of what you are doing, its value cannot be denied.   It is insulting to parents  to think that they are not capable of putting forward rational and balanced perspectives.  Of course there will be some nastiness, some nutters, some fruity language but isn’t it about time professionals stopped being so squeamish about this sort of thing?  Ignoring cross people only makes them crosser and the internet and social networking are out there whether the teachers and doctors like it or not.  And while we are at it, why not have a similar website for the students?

Websites like Patient Opinion have demonstrated that the vast majority of people are careful about what they write and most of the organisations that engage with people through the website find the experience and the data they gather useful.  In fact the schools might be surprised to find, as Patient Opinion does, that they receive a significant amount of positive and useful feedback.  Some schools might even welcome it as a way of keep their finger on the pulse of their parents’ opinions.

 

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive  health, care and education organisations.

 

 

All right Guv’nor?

Having recently become a school governor again after a four year break, I have just stumbled across a report on school governance to which I contributed so long ago I can’t even remember what I said or whether it was sensible.  The Twentieth Century School: Implications and challenges for governing bodies was the result of a valiant attempt by the then Schools Minister, Jim Knight , to try to get a grip on school governance.    You can see where he was coming from.  With schools taking on greater “autonomy” to spend public money (a trend which has taken on a new impetus under the new government) there is an urgent need to strengthen governing bodies both in terms of their make-up and their skills.

They’re 21st century schools Jim, but not as you knew them

Disappointingly, Mr Knight (now Lord Jim) was reshuffled into another post before this piece of work was completed and I would like to think that if he had seen it through he would have come out with something a bit tougher.  But perhaps we should console ourselves with the fact that the newly austere Education Department has stuck a big yellow and red sticker on it on their website saying “Important” rather than one of its tantalising “This page may not reflect government policy” stickers (reserved, rather worryingly, for publications on issues such as how to prevent homophobic bullying.)

Haven’t we heard this somewhere before?

Perhaps the reason it has received the Seal of Gove is because it doesn’t really say much.  There was, to put it mildly, some difficulty in achieving a consensus in the meeting I attended so what is left is pretty much what you would expect:

Governing bodies need to be clear about their purpose and follow a defined set of principles for good governance of schools;

There needs to be more clarity concerning the strategic management role of the governing body and the day to day management role of headteachers to ensure that neither party crosses over into each other’s role;

The principle of stakeholder representation on governing bodies is essential but needs to be balanced against a requirement that all governing bodies have the necessary skills to carry out their tasks;

Improvements to the training for governing body chairs, new governors and governing body clerks needs to be made to clarify the points above.

“lack of time and other commitments, lack of publicity around the role and awareness of opportunities for involvement, lack of confidence and alienation from the education system and additionally some governing bodies were reluctant to take on potential governors who were not already known to them”.

Training, training, training?  Is it the answer?

But the report does not try to address why this might be or how it could be changed other than suggesting (yawn, yawn) that governors undergo training.  It is convenient to imagine that simply by sending people off on a couple of two-hour training sessions this will somehow address the fundamental confusions that lie at the heart of school governance.

All a training course might do is make you slightly better able to manage the inherent lack of clarity that faces you as a governor – what it cannot do is create clarity of structure where there it is lacking.  And there is little in the report to help.  Where do you draw the line between “strategic guidance” and “operational involvement”?  The report does not say. Should head teachers have voting rights as members of the governing body?  The committee could not decide.  Should staff governors have the right to vote when their boss doesn’t?  It’s a bit complicated.  Should training be compulsory or not? Perhaps it should, then again maybe not. Should chairs of governing bodies, or even governors themselves be paid?  Well, there are differences of opinion.  A study of the principles of Policy Governance® and some clarification about Ends and Means might be a good starting point.

No freedom without responsibility

The race towards “liberating” schools was initiated under the Labour Government and the baton has been taken up enthusiastically by the current government.  Academies, Trust schools and New Model Free Schools are all removing education from local government control and theoretically at least putting power into the hands of “the schools”.  Contrary to the populist idea that more power is being handed to headteachers, what is actually happening here is that more power (and more responsibility) is being put into the hands of school governors.  Who those governors are, how they understand their role and how effective they are has never mattered more.

New structures need forms of accountability

As the report suggests, partnerships and federations may well be the answer, especially if this can be seen as a way of creating a smaller number of governing bodies made up of people who are better equipped to handle the job.  But this approach will only make sense if new ways are found to ensure that individual schools are properly accountable to pupils, parents and their wider communities. The MAC line on this is set out on pages 29 and 30 of the report – and yes, I think it does still make sense:

Governing bodies need to focus on the outcomes and outputs not the processes. They need take action and be accountable to the owners, including parents, for the decisions they make.

Governance structures which include consultation, Parent and Pupil Councils, the better use of parent experience data and improved partnership working lie at the heart of getting accountability and parental involvement right.  Like all other public services, schools need to get their heads around what accountability means in practice.

The Moore Adamson Craig Partnership supports user and public participation,  trains lay representatives and develops responsive  health, care and education organisations.

The Gove School of Parental Involvement: late, lite or non-existent

The golden rule of public consultation is that you don’t waste your time and that of your consultees by consulting on an issue on which you have already made up your mind. It’s not just we at MAC that say this: it was enshrined in the previous government’s code of practice on consultation a couple of years ago as its very first criterion for public consultation exercises:

Formal consultation should take place at a stage when there is scope to influence the policy outcomes

GoGo Gove Gov

A lesson in how not to do it

Three “outstanding” schools in Solihull are to be fast-tracked into Academies.  Earlier this week at a public meeting, parents, teachers and others met to discuss this change of status.  If you want to develop a plan for how NOT to consult, look no further than this press release from the Anti-Academies Alliance:

“Free” schools: free choice for parents?

I used to teach in Kilquhanity,  a real “Free School” set up in 1941 by the visionary Scottish educationalist John Aitkenhead.   His view of Freedom was simple:  ”You are free to jump into the water, but you are not free to stay dry”.  We all need to need to take his advice and think hard about the consequences of our choices.

I was reminded of this today when I heard Paul Carter, Leader of Kent County Council (and one of the Conservatives own), telling the BBC that ordinary state schools will lose out as more “Free” schools and Academies are set up.  Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove rushed into the Today programme studios to tell us all that Paul Carter was fully behind the Conservatives plans but he was not entirely convincing.  No matter how you do the sums (and Mr Gove did try), it is hard to see how we are going to be in a position to create the extra capacity that the Choice agenda requires against a background of reduced spending.

A few years ago as a governor in my daughters’  failing state primary I could see that things were seriously wrong but, despite the fact that all the parent governors had concerns, we were not listened to by the local authority.  We set up a Parent Council to try to find a constructive way of channelling parental anxieties but again we were ignored.  It was small satisfaction to know that when Ofsted finally arrived and gave the school a damning report, the issues they raised almost exactly mirrored the fifteen key issues which the Parent Council had identified and raised repeatedly with the school management over a three year period.  The good news is that now, two years on, we are no longer in Special Measures and we have a well-run and happy school with a strong and effective Parent Council in place.

But something has been puzzling the new Head.  Whenever we talk about the bad old days she asks us why on earth we did not just take our children out of the school.  The answers are interesting:  because it is our local school, because our other children had attended the school and we felt it was “our” school, because our children had friends there and, perhaps most important of all, because we did not want to simply walk away from a failing school and leave other people’s children to their fate – we had a strong sense that the school could be better and we wanted to help to make it happen.  Many of us had invested our time and energy in the school for many years and we were not willing  going to give upon it just yet.

Reading the manifestos of the three main parties, I am struck by the fact that all of them equate parental choice and involvement with parents wanting to move their children out of existing schools and into new schools and maybe even run those schools themselves. But what if parents don’t actually want a new school let alone one they have to run it themselves?  What if they just want their existing school to be better?  A recent MORI poll found that 62% of those polled thought that local authorities were the best people to run schools.  Only 5% thought parents should be running schools whereas a third thought parents should not be running schools.

Politicians are right to say that people want to make a difference to their communities.  But people have strong loyalties to local institutions.  There may be parents who are desperate to set up new schools in their own image for their offspring but many more of us want to stick with our local community schools that have served our families and communities for years and simply be allowed to contribute to making them better.  It is not a lot to ask and it is surely a better way to spend our money.

No progress without parents

Booked your holiday yet?

If you have children in school you may want to cancel your plans and set aside some quality time to be involved in a quick consultation this August.  This week the Conservative Party announced that if they get into power after the next election they will pass legislation which will allow many schools to become Academies by September of this year.  Talk about hitting the ground running!  “Unless we act now our children will lose out in the global race for knowledge.” panted Michael Gove hotfoot from the glassy classrooms of Mossbourne Academy in Hackney.

Sometimes it feels as if, in the quest for education reform, we and our children have got caught up in a the great caucus race in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  You remember:  all participants have to run in circles until  an arbitrary end is called and everyone is declared a winner; Alice has to give prizes to them all, and being declared a winner too she is solemnly awarded back her own thimble.  Sounds like the way education reforms work to me!

If they win the election Mr Gove expects a new Education Act to become law by the end of July.  Stop and catch your breath Michael.   Didn’t you say something a few weeks ago about the importance of involving parents in decision-making in schools?  I assume you would want them to be involved in a decision which will “free” their child’s schools from “political control” and allow them to” take over” other schools not to mention totally change their governance and accountability arrangements.  I trust you will be following the widely recognised good practice guidelines for public consultation: twelve weeks minimum and ideally not over a holiday period.  Mmmm, not sure 31 days in August (including a bank holiday) quite fits the bill but  I know heads and governors are always looking for more to do in the summer holidays.

Progressive or just depressing?

So if this is what the Conservatives are planning to do to help our benighted children keep up to speed in the global race, what are other lot up to? February saw the launch of the Progressive Education Network with a suitably schooly presentation at the House of Commons: many, many teachers sitting neatly in rows – a few recalcitrant trouble-makers chatting at the back – while a string of other teachers (and teachers turned politicians – eek!) demonstrated their enthusiasm for our schools as they are.  Their launch document set out their stall:  ”It is our conviction that what is needed now is to deepen the partnership between schools, government and local communities, not to put it aside and replace it with a complete change of direction.”

It is good to know that politicians and teachers are kissing and making up (or at least some of them are) but I can’t help thinking they don’t really want “local communities” or parents anywhere near this special relationship.  In the first forty-five minutes of this inaugural meeting the word “parent” was not mentioned.  A quick speed read of the 12 page closely- typed manifesto revealed that the”P” word did not appear once so I grabbed the mike and asked them where parents were in their thinking.  The bad boys at the back pricked up their ears ready for a fight – but it was not to be.  There was much nodding and smiling at me and some thinly veiled irritation that a parent had found her way past security and into the staffroom.  I don’t know if they had been forwarned that one of us (Them?) had got in but the party line seemed to be that schools were now terribly good at involving parents – we only had to look at the Building Schools for the Future programme to see just how good.  Then they went back to talking about how much schools and teachers are valued by their communities.  It was tempting to ask them how they knew but I think I might have been given a detention.

It is depressing to see that something proudly calling itself “progressive” should be so unthinkingly reinforcing the outdated notion that public services should continue to be controlled by politicians and professionals even in the face of increasing evidence that educational attainment depends more than anything else on getting families involved in their children’s lives at school.  The recent Marmot Strategic Review of Health Inequalities Post 2010, states that “evidence on the most important factors influencing educational attainment suggest that it is families, rather than schools that have the most influence.  Closer links between schools, the family and local communities are needed”.   Certainly we need to find the right  balance between politicians and professionals but there is a third leg to this stool that schools ignore at their peril.

It is great if it really is the case that “communities” (students, parents and local people) are being allowed to have a say in what their new school buildings look like but this matters far less than how they get involved in what goes on inside those buildings and what their children bring with them when they come home.

A consultation post-script

A fourteen year old child I know well was recently asked, as part of a school-wide exercise,  to come up with a name for their new dining room (recently built as part of Building Schools for the Future).  Here is her response:

Suggested name for the dining hall:  ”Dining Hall”

Reason for suggesting the name:  ”So people know what it is and don’t get confused looking for a place with a silly name.  Everyone will call it the dining hall anyway”.

I doubt she will be winning the £50 voucher but look forward nonetheless to hearing the outcome of this particular consultation exercise.

Parent power – just another piece of populist spin?

A few weeks ago Gordon Brown declared that he wanted to make schools more accountable to parents. The National Union of Teachers spat back that this was just a bit of “populist spin”.  After all, they argued in their press release, “Schools already work with parents and governors to ensure that information is fully available to the local community”.  As my kids would say, “Yeh, sure.”

Some sorts of information, it would appear, are rather more available to parents than others however.  My daughters’ school is currently being run by one of the government’s newest beasts, the Interim Executive Board, an unelected and apparently entirely unaccountable group of “experienced educationalists” which replaced the governing body when the school went into Special Measures a year ago.  It took the Parent Forum seven months to get our lovely shiny IEB to agree to “publish” its minutes. Publish in this context means sticking them on a notice board inside the school where parents seldom tread and refusing to put them on the school website.  And funnily enough, despite massive changes taking place in the school every week, the minutes say little more than the date of the meeting and who was there and are posted approximately six weeks after the event.

Now they are setting up a “shadow governing body” for an unlimited timespan.  At last, we thought, a chance for parents to stand to be elected as governors and have some say in what it going on.  We had been promised elections a few months ago, but now we are told that the new governing body will be made up of the same old “experienced educationalists” plus three hand-picked new members: a parent, a member of staff and someone from the local community.  No elected trouble-makers here please.

But this worrying lack of stakeholder accountability extends well beyond Schools Causing Concern, such as ours where some might argue you need emergency measures to deal with emergency situations.  In her column last week in the Education Guardian, Fiona Millar describes how, despite massive protests from parents and other local people in the London Borough of Camden, the local authority has decided to go ahead with an Academy run by a “preferred sponsor” (preferred by the local authority that is).  What worries her is that the legislation around Academies means that their governing bodies can be entirely dominated by the sponsor, whether it be a creationist accountancy firm or a used car salesman with a side interest in selling cigarettes to young women in developing countries.

She writes: “Meanwhile, the academies experiment is still being rolled out with a vengeance, and is making a nonsense of local community empowerment. The wholly controlled governing bodies put in place by the sponsors are often fronts for more shadowy charitable trusts that make the real decisions – such as appointment of the head – from headquarters that are often hundreds of miles from the schools they control.”

The Conservatives have been a bit vague so far about what sort of schools they want to have in the future but they seem to be quite taken with the idea of parents running schools themselves following what is described attractively as a Swedish model.  A recent MORI poll however suggests that this is not really what most parents want.  Only 11% of parents thought parents themselves were the best people to run schools preferring local authorities (39%) or teachers (32%).  7% said they would definitely get involved in setting up a school if they could.  Another 36% said they might help.  A reality check based on our own experience and other research reminds us that the good intentions expressed in a questionnaire are not a reliable guide to who will actually turn up on the night.  But if they did build the school and the people came, how accountable would this small band be to everyone else in the local community?

Whose schools are they anyway?

“Text cloud” for this post below, created by www.wordle.net

Whose service?

There has been a whole lot of very interesting debate over the last few years about who the health service belongs to but what I’d really like to know is, who does the education service belongs to?  I recently contributed to a government review of governance in schools (supposed to be published in October 2008 but still eagerly awaited).  I was there to put forward the case for parental involvement but met with a depressingly familiar reaction from the teaching professionals:  just who do these parents think they are ?

Who’s baking, who’s being heard?

Most schools will tell you they work hard to involve parents.  But scratch below the surface and you will find that many are adhering to a conveniently self-serving model of parental involvement where in fact parents do most of the work.  An “involved” parent is one who gets their child to school on time, helps with homework, encourages respect for teachers, bakes cakes for Parent Teacher Association events and turns up to parent evenings i.e a parent who is seen but not heard.  Have a look at the average home school agreement and you will get the message “parents and their children must….(do what the school says)” , “the school will…(do what it likes)”.

But the government is now seeking to give parents much greater influence in what happens in schools.  Since May 2007 all schools have had a duty to take account of the views of parents and are encouraged to set up Parent Councils to help them to do so.   They even produced a useful, if poorly publicised, toolkit to help them to do it. But as yet, there has been no research into how many schools have set up Parent Councils or similar parent-led bodies or what, if anything, their impact has been.  Are schools really beginning to take account of parental views or is it still the case that teacher (or the local authority) knows best?

Whose Views?

Some people argue that having parents on governing bodies ticks the box as far as parental involvement in decision-making is concerned.  This might work if anyone was at all clear about the role of parent governors. They are elected, but what is their role: to represent the forty or so parents who voted for them, to represent all parents, or simply to be themselves?  Do they really know what other parents think and if so, how?  Does the presence of parent governors mean that schools are absolved of their responsibility to find out for themselves what the generality of parents think or want?  And we should not forget that many schools struggle to find any parents who are willing or able to sit on their governing body at all (and having spent four years as a governor myself I could suggest a few reasons why that might be).

Who’s Sorry Now?

Over the past three and a half years I have been closely involved in setting up and running a parent-led Forum at my daughters’ school.  We had some successes but overall we felt that no-one appeared to be interested in our experiences or those of our children and that the school saw no real reason to respond to our concerns.  Last February we asked parents to identify the top ten areas where we felt things needed to improve.  They were all the same things we had been complaining about since the Forum’s very first meeting. Once again the school ignored us.  A few days later the Ofsted inspectors arrived and wrote a damning report which (surprise, surprise) identified all the same failings that the parents had been rabbitting on about for years (plus a few more that we could feel but not quite put our unprofessional fingers on).

When a school is in “Special Measures” it can seek the Secretary of State’s permission to get rid of the governing body (in many schools the only place where parents can have their voices heard on matters of strategy) and replace it with something called an Interim Executive Board (IEB).  This is what has happened in my daughters’ school  and in our case the chair and the majority of the membership was made up of paid staff from the local authority – the very local authority that had got us into this mess in the first place.  There is no requirement to include parents on the IEB or even for it to listen to parents and yet the IEB has all the same powers as a properly constituted governing body.  They can change pretty much anything they like and even, as in my daughters’ school, appoint a new Head Teacher without consulting anyone.

In whose name?

Anyone who knows anything about what happens when a school “fails” its OFSTED inspection, will tell you that what follows is a period of huge stress and anxiety for everyone involved – including parents - and yet at this very time when major change is taking place, parents can be effectively cut out of the process.   Our Parent Forum had to ask numerous times over a period of several months before the IEB even agreed to publish its minutes and we have not seen them yet although it is almost a year since the governing body was taken over and then disbanded.  We have also been asking to see a plan for the future of our school – what is going to change? why? when? and how will we know whether the raft of changes and new initiatives has made a difference?  No sign of that yet either although according to the school it was drawn up last July and they have been working to it since then.

The government is talking about streamlining governance arrangements in schools which probably means small governing bodies with people appointed for their skills rather than being elected by staff or parents. Pretty much like our IEB.  In governance terms this makes a lot of sense, creating small focussed and professional bodies with the skills to run these important institutions properly.  But our experience of such a body shows that little importance seems to be put on hearing the voice of parents – which is strange. These days, a skill set that does not include the techniques of gathering and acting on user and stakeholder opinion can be dismissed as dangerously introverted and incomplete. It is an old-fashioned management concept that refuses to share power and sees the participative approach as a threat to the quality of decision-making.

Whose Schools? (See where we started)

One way to address this might be to make Parent Councils or similar bodies compulsory in all schools and require governing bodies to listen to them.  Properly run and resourced Parent Councils, perhaps with their own dedicated staff, would foster new dialogues between parents and school senior managers and governors.  Institutional changes aside, we need to bring about a change in the culture of our schools and local authorities so that they understand that they are running schools for the benefit of children, their families and wider society and that they will only succeed in doing this when they by working in meaningful partnership with parents and carers and hearing what they say.

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.

July Newsletter: New Look, Same Passions

Our passions remains the same but we have clothed our mix of news and views in new clothes knitted together with WordPress which Dan Wardle of Surveylab our adviser in these matters assures us will bring the blog into the world of Web 2.0.

On www.publicinvolvement.org.uk recently…

A MP has asked why we are all so miserable? Are we becoming a nation of miserabilists never happier than when whingeing? We take a look at the latest Annual Report from the Financial Services Ombudsman for some facts and figures on the nation’s complaint behaviour in the markets he covers. The principle of being fair to consumers is all the rage in regulatory circles and we look at the new laws banning unfair practices backed by new OFT research that tells us that ‘consumer detriment’ costs us as consumers over £6billion pounds a year. We join up our learning on complaints with our thinking on user engagement and ask – are they linked?. Can the complainant become the engaged user for the longer term?

Finally just to keep give you a chance to tell us your experience, there is a mini-survey for parents of school age children to complete about what they did when they had a problem with the children’s school.

Have a good summer.