Speaking to The TES Scotland during a Dunblane conference on new community schools, Gordon Jeyes, director of children’s services with Stirling, said HMI had yet to become fully engaged in social inclusion and did not seem to realise that the policy “is broader than equal opportunities or special educational needs”.

A senior official from another Scottish authority who did not wish to be named said some delegates felt HMI was “behind the times”. Inspectors were accused of failing to recognise that a multidisciplinary approach to inspections was needed at all levels if the twin objectives of social inclusion and raising attainment are to be achieved.

Mr Jeyes said HMI would miss the point if it tried “to collapse a potentially radical community action agenda into a mildly progressive agenda emphasising co-ordinated service provision and professional collaboration”.

Gill Robinson, chief inspector with responsibility for new community schools, pledged that the expertise of other disciplines would be used in cluster-wide inspections. “Joint training is needed to bring the different professional strands together. For example, work-shadowing gets straight to the heart of another person’s job. A major challenge is to monitor collectively. It is very important that all partners agree on how to measure what has been achieved.”

Future inspections of new community schools would allow extra time to explore other aspects of the school’s work, Ms Robinson said.

Future challenges include developing a sense of ownership, reducing professional barriers, planning for local needs and monitoring individual and overall effectiveness.

Bill Alexander, head of children’s services in Highland, who presented a workshop on quality assurance and local outcome agreements, told The TES Scotland: “In applying quality assurance to these schools, you can’t just look at them without looking at how they are addressing both social inclusion and educational attainment, which has to be from a multidisciplinary perspective. In discussions with HMI locally, we have found a lot of common ground in recognising that.”

Highland is one of three authorities piloting multidisciplinary approaches to quality assurance.

The conference, organised by Stirling New Community Schools, had earlier heard Cathy Jamieson, Education Minister, say that new community schools had demonstrated that people could work together across traditional boundaries. Extending the programme, Ms Jamieson said, “will further improve the provision of integrated health education, family support and education services”.

‘There is a lot of money being invested in Gaelic, but no money going into Urdu, Punjabi and Chinese. We are not doing enough for them’