Inspectors shun primary schools

THE GOVERNMENT'S scheme to allow private groups to carry out school inspections is failing to attract enough inspectors for primary schools.

Of the 2,312 inspection team leaders who have applied for training, only 631 have applied for primary. The rest want to lead secondary-school inspections.

Since primary schools outnumber secondary schools by nearly five to one, the figures are the wrong way round, and present a problem for the new Office for Standards in Education which is charged with the task of setting up the teams.

The Chief Inspector for Schools, Professor Stewart Sutherland, has declined to set a target for the numbers required, but the teams will need to inspect more than 100 of the 19,000 primary schools in England each week if they are to achieve the Government's aim of inspecting each school every four years.

The new scheme is due to begin in secondary schools next autumn and in primary schools the following year.

Professor Sutherland has said that 200 team leaders will be needed by next September to inspect the first 1,000 of the 3,900 secondary schools.

Before then, the prospective team leaders are being sent on 10-day training courses where they will be assessed. They will then go on inspections with members of Her Majesty's Inspectorate on which they will be assessed again before being rejected or accepted as registered inspectors or team leaders. The successful inspectors will go on to recruit others before putting in tenders to schools.

Professor Eric Bolton of the London Institute of Education, Senior Chief HMI until last year, said he was not surprised by the figures.

'For historical reasons the people in education who tended to move on to something bigger such as inspection were in secondary schools.'

'Teachers in primary schools have not felt the same confidence about taking an overview of the national scene. Every national committee I have ever sat on has had difficulty recruiting somebody from primary schools,' he said.

Norman Thomas, former chief HMI for primary schools, said: 'The numbers are clearly very unbalanced. You would have to be very wary about having a secondary specialist leading a primary team.

'You might get away with it at the top end of the primary school but it's a very different kettle of fish when you get to the infants.'

A spokesman for the Office for Standards in Education agreed that there was 'a disparity between people who were applying for secondary and primary in the initial batch. At the moment we don't see it as a problem.'

He said applications were still coming in. The office had been concentrating mainly on the secondary work because that would begin first.

If it felt later that there would not be enough primary inspectors, another advertising campaign would be considered.

So far 1,000 people have been accepted on to training courses for team leaders or registered inspectors. Around 1,800 applications are still being processed.