Handover threat to councils that fail their pupils

Teams are carrying out a series of targeted inspections of schools in towns or cities where large numbers of pupils do not have access to a good education.

The education watchdog is to visit schools in six “underperforming” education authority areas over the next few weeks.

It was announced yesterday that teams were already inspecting schools in Derby – where fewer than half of primary pupils get a good education.

Ofsted would not say whether any of the other five areas are in Yorkshire but the region does have the highest proportion of children in the country who do not go to a school which is good or better. It is understood that about 10 per cent of schools in each area will face an inspection during a condensed one-week visit.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, told the North of England Education conference, in Sheffield, yesterday, that schools inspected would be asked whether they were being supported and challenged by their local councils.

“Where we find evidence that the local authority is not demonstrating effective leadership we will inspect it,” he added.

A new framework, in place from April, will allow Ofsted to inspect the school improvement functions of any local authority where there are concerns that the statutory duty to improve school standards is not being met.

Sir Michael warned that Ofsted would report such failure to the Department for Education.

He criticised councils who have failed to use their available powers to challenge poor performing schools – such as serving warning notices or replacing governing bodies.

Before his conference speech he also suggested that if councils fail to act when schools are under-performing, an academy sponsor or another local authority could be drafted in to take over school improvement but added the power to order this would lie with the Education Secretary.

David Simmonds, chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said: “Local authorities want to be able to intervene more quickly in under-performing schools but we are prevented from doing so as a result of decades of reforms to give schools greater independence and reduce what was perceived as council interference.”

Sir Michael dismissed this claim as “tosh and nonsense”, however, and criticised councils which were not willing to work with academies or hold them to account.

He said local authorities had a responsibility to ensure all children in their area receive a decent standard of education, regardless of the school they attend.

Last year Ofsted scrapped the satisfactory inspection rating and replaced it with “requires improvement”, meaning that only a good or outstanding rating is now deemed good enough.

In his first annual report last year he warned there were “stark inequalities” between the level of good schools in different parts of the country. Yesterday he said: “It cannot be right that in local authorities with the same demographics, the same sort of population, and the same levels of deprivation, parents have such widely varying opportunities of finding a good school.

“In some it is over 90 per cent, in others it is just over 40 per cent. This cannot continue.”