School Oversight in England and Wales

Abstract

The position concerning oversight of schools in England and Wales, and evaluative oversight in particular, is a very complex one. A national force of some 500 inspectors, known as Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), inspects schools, colleges of further and higher education, and local education authorities. This corps of HMI co-exists with the advisory staffs of more than 100 local education authorities (LEAs), who outnumber HMI by more than four to one but have a remit both less clearly defined and less stable. HMI exist to advise the Secretary of State for Education and Science, and are accordingly civil servants, conducting their formal inspections in order to be able to speak with authority of the condition of the service in the country. Local advisers, sometimes called inspectors, exist primarily to advise schools as well as the education officers who administer the local authorities and the local councillors who direct their policy. The iniluence of HMI on government policy, like their access to the processes of policy formation, is hidden in the confidentiality that pertains to all civil service work. The iniluence of LEA advisers on local policy varies from the moderately significant to nothing, but advisory staff play a major part in enabling LEAs to adjust and accommodate to the now extensive interventions of central government in the work of LEAs and their schools. However, there are no statutory or formal links between HMI and LEA advisory staffs. HMI have no powers of enforcement over the work of LEAs, while their local iniluence may depend on their skill in perceiving the variations between LEAs in the functions and status of the advisory staffs. It is customary to describe the two services as complementary, but prior to my own recent study (Pearce, 1986) no published work has tried to characterise the two groups at the same time. To understand this dual provision it is necessary to go back a little. In effect, the country had no systematic education service before this century. Elementary schools originated as church establishments which secured government grants from 1833 onwards, but they were unevenly distributed until after 1870, when the Education Act created the system of locally elected School Boards. After a proper system of local government developed in the 1880s it came into conflict with the Boards, and these were absorbed into new Local Education Authorities (LEAs) by the 1902 Education Act, which had powers to maintain secondary schools. These had until then been solely private or charitable affairs, but the new LEAs were slow to exercise their powers. HMI had originated as an elite, peripatetic group of formidable figures who descended on schools, tested the children, and decided on the level of grant to be paid. From 1862 onward they had done this under the narrow terms of the Board of Education's Revised Code, whose educational effects long outlived its replacement in 1904. The LEAs had