A significant number of Scottish schools are going a decade or more without being inspected - and some schools have not had an inspector call for 13 years, a Tes Scotland investigation reveals.
Critics of the inspection process have suggested that inspection reports are irrelevant after five years and that high-performing schools could even take legal action if they felt their reputation was tainted by an outdated report from another era.
However, Education Scotland - where Graeme Logan recently took over as interim chief inspector - pointed out that local authorities and the schools themselves were also responsible for maintaining standards between inspection reports.
Tes Scotland looked at the last time inspection reports were published for over 500 primaries and secondaries in a diverse range of councils: Glasgow, Falkirk, Highland, Moray and Shetland. There are 2,034 primaries and 359 secondaries in Scotland in total.
Overall, the figures for the five councils show that 15 per cent of primaries had not had an inspection report published for a decade or more (67 out of 436). Three secondaries had not been inspected for a decade - St Paul’s High in Glasgow, and Mallaig High and Dingwall Academy in Highland.
The school that had not been inspected for the longest was Canna Primary in Highland, which had an inspection report dating back to 2002. The school was mothballed for three years until it reopened in 2014, when two families moved to the National Trust-owned island.
Two schools had inspection reports dating back to 2004: Whiteinch Primary in Glasgow and Staffin Primary in Highland.
‘A serious concern’
Overall, the frequency of inspection has dropped by more than 50 per cent, from 362 inspections in 2008-09 to 161 in 2016-17. Last year, just 19 secondaries were inspected, while in 2008-09 some 61 secondaries were inspected.
Conservative shadow education secretary Liz Smith said the frequency of inspection was “a serious concern”.
Responding to the Tes Scotland findings, Keir Bloomer - education committee convener at Scotland’s national academy of science and letters, the Royal Society of Edinburgh - called for the role of the inspectorate to be reviewed and for Education Scotland - which has also been criticised for over-inspection in recent times - to remove any reports more than five years old from its website. He said the information could be “actively misleading”; this call was echoed by primary school leaders’ body the AHDS.
A “much-improved school with an outdated, damning report” could take Education Scotland to court to have the report taken down, Mr Bloomer suggested.
An Education Scotland spokeswoman said that, in Scotland, there is a three-level approach to evaluating and improving education. Schools have a responsibility to evaluate their performance, local authorities have statutory duties around quality improvement and reporting, and the third level is inspection.
She said that schools were inspected on “a proportionate basis and not on a cyclical basis” and that schools were selected for inspection based on a representative sample, or on risk.
She added: “The Scottish new standards and evaluation framework as specified within the National Improvement Framework and Improvement Plan will set expectations on the focus and frequency of school inspection carried out by Education Scotland in future.”
This is an edited version of an article in the 8 September edition of Tes Scotland. Subscribers can read the full story here. To subscribe, click here. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here. Tes Scotland magazine is available at all good newsagents.
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