In the early 1980s I carried out a detailed assessment of the state of inspection and advice in local authorities in England and Wales. The resulting evidence tended to confirm the conclusions of Rhodes’ classic 1951 research on the role of inspection in public life: that “inspection continues to flourish largely because nobody has seriously explored - and certainly not in any systematic way - either the limits or the alternatives”.

Office for Standards in Education inspections are themselves based on little systematic evidence of efficacy or cost-effectiveness. As Kenneth Clarke’s baby, OFSTED was nurtured with impressive zeal within a tight timescale, rapidly producing detailed criteria and implementing training programmes. It is none the less already some 40 per cent behind schedule and will need to call on the depleted force of Her Majesty’s Inspectors.

It is arguable that OFSTED’s performance has been commendable given its time constraints. Plus points have been the high quality of the registered inspectors, a training programme as good as might be expected from a week’s course, and inspection delivery that manages to be professional and courteous. The document Framework for Inspection has the considerable virtue of offering schools, for the first time, a coherent blueprint for standardised institutional assessment.

But there are undeniable weaknesses. Headteachers are critical of documentation overload and the inspections are felt to be over-stressful and time-consuming. Qualities of inspection teams vary, especially between ad hoc and local authority teams .

There are obvious shortcomings in the training. For instance, primary teachers might well fell their professionalism compromised when they hear that it takes two days to turn a secondary teacheradviser into a qualified primary inspector. Cumulative judgments are being made upon the most limited of experience and training, with virtually no supervision, second opinion, or quality assurance. Small schools in particular are being over-inspected.

More serious is the larger question of whether OFSTED is value for money. My own follow-up of five recent inspections showed two schools highly commended; one left traumatised, but satisfactory; one with a mixed report which identified some serious departmental weaknesses (but was celebrated in the local press exclusively for its successes) and one showed cause for concern.

Only in the last was there any evidence of the school learning something it didn’t know, with significant follow-up likely to lead to real change. This confirms research presented by Research and Information on State Education in June, that governors learn little new information from inspections. Moreover, the cost of inspecting the smaller school would have paid for an extra teacher for a year; the large-school inspection would have paid for two or three teachers.

We might also ask whether inspection might in fact be damaging to the service as a whole: overvaluing aspects such as administrative order, risk-free control, and neatness; tending to confirm schools in maintaining a passable but uninspiring status quo. The schools that we urgently need to know more about are those that generate excitement, rethink their role as institutions, take risks and develop high-achieving, self-motivated pupils excited by learning. In what respects does inspection convincingly identify these schools? Does it tell us anything about how schools become like that?

The dilemma is how to manage cost-effective public accountability in a way that goes beyond just policing the system. The task is not insuperable.

I would first require schools to audit their own affairs as part of their development plan. There would be an annual requirement for a public statement as to how this is done with evidence of modifications made as a consequence of internal analysis. Each school would also have to produce evidence of external scrutiny of curriculum departments, school management, philosophy and ethos. For many years, my own school has successfully employed consultants, including registered inspectors, for this purpose.

Every two years, representatives of the staff and governors would present the evidence of these internal and external audits to a small panel of assessors. Evidence of pupils’ achievements would also be required, as would confidential evidence from parents and the LEA. Short on-site panel visits would be an option.

This procedure would to some extent resemble the old Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education accreditation process, and indeed would be an accreditation process, the arrangements sustaining a continuity of audit and inspection that involves the school in self-assessment all the time, not just once in four years.

Any school which failed to convince would be followed up with an OFSTED-style inspection either at departmental level or as a whole school. Such a system would be much more cost-effective, with savings going back into school budgets. The accrediting teams would offer benchmarks against which schools could assess their performance, and encourage public analysis - on the lines of the recent OFSTED document, Improving Schools - of those schools whose thinking seems to be taking us into new territory.

All this would be sharper, more informative, more constructive and much cheaper than current practice - closer, in fact, to the way go-ahead business management teams use outside consultants.

It would also have the great benefit of shifting responsibility back to schools - something we shall have to do sooner or later one step on the road to understanding that all of us, children and teachers alike, tend to do better when we do things for ourselves rather than have things done to us.

Dr David Winkley is headteacher of Grove School, Handsworth and director of the National Primary Centre.