ABSTRACT
Part and parcel of the new managerialist restructuring of the education system (which incorporates and expands upon the core principles of Taylorism) is the inspection system managed by OFSTED. Quintessentially, effectiveness and efficiency underpin the OFSTED rationale – technical matters about how best to improve‘standards’.TheEducation(Schools)Act1992establishedthearrangements for independent inspections (on a four-yearly basis) by registered inspectors to be trained by, and responsible to, OFSTED. Teams of inspectors, which include lay inspectors, are designed to provide ‘regular and rigorous inspection under the watchful eye of the new and powerful Chief Inspector for Schools’. The arrangements for the conduct of inspections are detailed in the Handbook for the Inspection of Schools. The ‘Framework’ contained therein and the 1992 Act have established a public set of criteria about effectiveness. Whilst I accept Butterfield’s point that the criteria go beyond the issue of ‘standards’, the Framework embodied in the Handbook is underpinned by the achievement of ‘procedural objectivity’ (Eisner 1991), which is designed to eliminate the scope for personal judgement. Indeed, the managerialist rationale means not simply that we cannot measure, for example, whether ‘quality of life’ has improved, but that any consideration of ‘quality of life’ per se is disavowed. Such issues are consistently played down by OFSTED (despite nebulous references to pupils’ spiritual development and school ethos). In short, why-questions are consistently eschewed. As discussed in Chapter 2, qua performance indicators, SATs grossly distort reality because of their reductionism, by-passing the cognitive processes by which children learn. To recapitulate Ball’s (1990) point, the parameters of OFSTED operate within the input-output logic of the commodity form and thus displace and exclude other criteria of judgement.
