Author Archives: HM Government

The Queen has appointed Suzanne Avery as a Church Commissioner.

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I am pleased to host this event, here at the British Residence, anticipating this Wednesday’s International Women’s Day. We are due to hear from our guest speaker, watch a couple of short videos, and hold a short panel discussion. You will then have earned the chance to mingle over some drinks and snacks.

Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, on 27 February addressed an audience of 350 key policy makers at a reception at the Foreign Office in London, ahead of International Women’s Day. The UK’s chosen theme this year is leadership and empowerment. He announced a new Special Envoy for Gender Equality, Joanna Roper. Joanna will spearhead the UK’s efforts to deliver a coherent international approach to ensuring the rights of women and girls, working closely with Whitehall departments, civil society, academics, and other governments.

The Foreign Secretary spoke of his personal commitment to addressing gender inequality in all its forms. He argued in particular that unequal access to education, itself flowing from gender prejudice and discrimination was a major barrier to women’s empowerment. Speaking at the event, the Foreign Secretary said:

The sombre truth is that today 61 million girls between the ages of 6 and 14 do not have the chance to go to school. They have the same right to an education as anyone else – and at least as much potential and ability – but too many girls in too many countries endure the supreme injustice of being denied the opportunity to attend school.

If you want to increase prosperity; stabilise population growth; improve child nutrition; and reduce child marriage, the single most effective remedy is to ensure that all girls go to school.

I hope that every national leader will wake up to the benefits – and the essential justice – of educating the daughters of their country just as surely as they educate their sons.

Justine Greening, Minister for Women and Equalities, described the continuing efforts to promote gender equality in the UK. We now have record numbers of women in work, and we have more women than ever before on the boards of the UK’s top companies. By marrying up the domestic and international aspects, she said, we can showcase UK leadership in this field giving us greater credibility to encourage like-minded partners around the world.

Here in Zambia, it is important to stress that addressing these issues is not only the morally right thing to do. It makes economic sense too. Estimates indicate that up to $28 trillion could be added to the global economy if women took their equal place in the economy. Addressing inequality is not a “nice to have”, or an “add on” to our core work; it is firmly in the UK national interest – and in Zambia’s – and so is central to good policy and programming. Empowering women and girls improves peace and stability, good governance, economic growth and poverty reduction.

The relevant Global Goal for Sustainable Development is Goal 5, to ‘achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’. This contains targets to end harmful practices such as Violence Against Women and Girls, Female Genital Mutilation, and Child and Early Forced Marriage. The UK played an instrumental role in advocating for, and achieving this goal and targets. We are now committed to playing our part in ensuring that the commitments made to the SDGs are delivered upon.

Through UKAid we are backing this aspiration with practical support. For example, in 5 years to March 2016, UKAid:

• Supported 5.3 million girls in primary and lower secondary education;
• Helped to save the lives of 103,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth;
• Improved access to financial services for over 36 million women.

In Zambia, the UK is proud to work in partnership with the government, civil society and business, to support women reach their potential, thrive in business and politics, and take their place as leaders who champion Zambia’s development.

We work with the Ministry of Gender to improve women’s leadership in politics and the public sector, and to challenge attitudes and behaviours that limit women’s development. We also work with the private sector to increase opportunities for women to get decent jobs, to thrive as entrepreneurs with increased access to finance and business know-how.

This collective effort is starting to pay off. The 2016 election saw an increase in the number of women elected as MPs and Councillors, and we are joined this evening by women who have demonstrated leadership in public service, business and voluntary sectors.

Whilst much has been achieved, and tonight is an opportunity for us to come together and celebrate this great progress, there is still much more to be done. Almost half of Zambian women have experienced violence in their lifetime; high rates of child marriage and teenage pregnancy contribute to high dropout levels in secondary education; women are less likely to own land; and they find it harder to get access to finance. When women are able to overcome these barriers, they are still so often met with the message that certain careers are not for them, that their role is in the home, and that they cannot be successful in their ambitions.

The women here this evening are testament to the fact that this is not the case, and serve as great role models for the next generation of girls who will have a vital role to play in securing Zambia’s equitable economic development.

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Waste firm Associated Waste Management Ltd has been fined £125,000 for causing odour pollution at its sites in Leeds and Bradford.

The company was sentenced at Leeds Crown Court on 6 March 2017 after previously admitting two environmental offences relating to its waste transfer facilities in Gelderd Road, Leeds and Canal Road, Bradford.

The Environment Agency prosecuted the company following repeated odour problems that had a detrimental effect on local residents.

Austin Stoton, prosecuting for the Environment Agency, told the court that AWM’s Leeds site caused repeated odour problems between June 2012 and October 2013. During this time, Environment Agency officers carried out around 75 odour assessments, and most of them recorded smells that were likely to cause offence to human senses.

In October 2013 the Environment Agency suspended the company’s permit for the Leeds facility, preventing it from bringing any more waste onto the site until it had made improvements to its odour management plan. This new plan was approved that month and the permit was reinstated.

In the same year, between March and July, AWM’s Bradford site was also the cause of odour issues. These prompted local residents to complain on 49 separate dates.

One resident had complained that the odour was so bad that it had made him feel sick. He also said that if there was a smell present, he couldn’t open windows and his family couldn’t spend time in the garden. Another resident said at the time that he and his family had found it virtually impossible to have any enjoyment from their garden.

An inspection visit in March 2013 revealed that the company was not closing the shutters on a tipping shed used by bin wagons, which allowed the smell of rotting waste to leave the site.

In July, the Environment Agency served an enforcement notice on the firm that required it to improve its odour management plan for the site. The company’s first revision of this document, submitted in August, was rejected as inadequate and it wasn’t until October that a new plan was approved.

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said after the hearing:

Waste sites like those managed by AWM can have a detrimental impact on local communities if they are not managed properly. That’s why it is vital that operators adhere to environmental regulations and the conditions on their environmental permits.

In this case, AWM failed to maintain high standards of odour management at its facilities in Leeds and Bradford, and local residents suffered as a result. We hope today’s outcome demonstrates that odour pollution is not acceptable and that the Environment Agency will take action against businesses that fail to adhere to permitting rules.

In mitigation, the company told the court that it had relied upon an external company that had approached it regarding odour suppression equipment, which had not worked.

AWM was fined £75,000 for the Leeds offence, and £50,000 for the Bradford offence. It was also ordered to pay £75,000 in legal costs.

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Two years ago, Ofsted said it would start testing inspection reliability. This was, in part, a response to sector voices, who quite reasonably thought we should know how consistent inspection judgements are. All our inspectors are thoroughly and repeatedly trained, and all our inspections are quality-assured, giving us some confidence that what are ultimately human judgements are made properly and consistently. Yet nothing beats hard evidence from a well designed trial.

At the same time, our short inspection framework was being developed. We did not want to miss the opportunity to evaluate this new type of inspection from the start. The study was therefore designed to answer a single question: were the decisions about whether short inspections should or should not convert to full inspections being made consistently by different inspectors? There were many more questions that could have been asked, but the study was a first step towards a more evidence-based approach to the development of inspection.

Today, I am pleased to set out the findings in this commentary, based on the full report, which is published today.

The basic design of the study was a comparison of the outcomes from 2 inspectors carrying out a short inspection of the same school independently, on the same day. So what did we learn?

First, it appears we are breaking new ground here. Some reliability studies have been done before, but they were usually looking at specific parts of inspection, such as lesson observation. They have not looked at the whole inspection process from start to finish. Our report contributes new findings to the research literature.

Secondly, carrying out this study was surprisingly difficult. The complexities included:

• getting the balance right between the live inspection and the study goal

• identifying ways to minimise bias and cross-contamination of inspector evidence gathering and thinking

• ensuring that inspectors and participating schools were fully prepared for simultaneous parallel inspections

• achieving a large enough sample of participating schools

Thirdly, and most importantly for everyone who is inspected, the study provides a welcome positive view of inspector consistency in the particular context studied. Of the 24 short inspections in our sample, inspectors agreed on the outcome in 22 cases. This indicates a high rate of agreement (92%) between these inspectors about the conversion decision.

Furthermore, in 1 of the 2 cases of disagreement, the disagreement was at the good/outstanding borderline and was resolved by the full inspection: 1 inspector’s view was that conversion was unnecessary as the school remained good; the other had opted for conversion to collect further evidence to see if an outstanding judgement was justified. The outcome of the full inspection was that the school remained good. So in only 1 out of 24 cases might the final judgement have been different between the 2 inspectors, as both decided to convert to a full inspection for opposing reasons. Despite this, the outcome at the full inspection was that this school also remained good.

There are, of course, limitations to a small-scale exploratory study like this that need to be taken into account. The findings cannot be extrapolated across other types of inspections or all types of institution. For instance, the study looked only at short inspections of primary schools in a certain size range and it had a relatively small sample. Yet, as an initial attempt at evaluating reliability, these findings should provide some reassurance that the purpose of the short inspection model is being met and that inspectors made consistent judgements.

I suspect that, despite this encouraging result, most comment will be about the 2 cases where inspectors arrived at different decisions. We all know that there is low education system tolerance of variability in marking in exams. (See: ‘The reliability programme: final report of the policy advisory group’, Burslem, S. (2011). Coventry: Ofqual)

It is likely that this is the case with inspection, because of its high-stakes nature and, in particular, the consequences that can follow from a poor inspection outcome.

The imperative is rightly on Ofsted to ensure that our judgements are as reliable as possible. But a medical analogy may be helpful here: many kinds of clinical testing give both false positive results (where someone doesn’t actually have the condition, but appears to) and false negatives (where someone has the condition but is not picked up by the test). Perfectly reliable tests are the exception, not the rule.

Turning back to education and social care, we know that inspection is a process based on human judgement to interpret and complement available data. We know a great deal about human judgement, and can work to minimise the impact of the limitations resulting from the various kinds of bias in human judgement, but we are unlikely ever to reach a position where perfect consistency can be guaranteed.

For one thing, we would not want to over-simplify inspection in the pursuit of consistency. A tick-box approach, for instance, might lead to improved reliability but would be a mechanistic approach to inspection that would almost certainly undermine its validity. We need some degree of professional judgement to reflect the complexity and variety of institutions we inspect. This may well lead to experts disagreeing at times. It does not necessarily mean that 1 inspector or the other is wrong or that they made mistakes, as there are likely to be multiple decisions made on the areas to evaluate that can lead to legitimately different views.

So how can we increase reliability while recognising that inspectors cannot be clones?

The short inspection process attempts to do just that, as any disagreement between inspectors can be resolved once the short inspection converts to a full inspection. In the 2 cases in our sample where inspectors did not agree on the short inspection outcome, the follow-up inspection activity led to both schools remaining good. This is a small amount of evidence to suggest that the safety net at the end of the short inspection adds an extra layer of security to the final judgement. As such, it is likely that the conversion process is another mechanism that allows us to protect schools from the risk of unreliable inspector judgements. It certainly appears to be more secure than past attempts at light-touch inspection frameworks.

Of course, there are a number of assumptions here. While I have confidence that inspection frameworks, inspector training and quality assurance procedures mitigate the risks of inconsistency, we need to study the inspection judgements themselves, as well as the decisions around the conversion of short inspections.

As I have already mentioned, this study is just a first step towards a continuing programme of research into inspection. We should routinely be looking at issues of consistency and reliability. And even more importantly, we should be looking at the validity of inspection: is inspection succeeding in measuring what it is intended to measure? This is not an easy question, in part because validity is not an absolute: it depends on the purpose of the inspection.

We are beginning to shape up what this research programme should look like. But this is not a quick hit in which everything is sorted at once: rather, it will be a steady process in which questions are addressed systematically. Some of this may come through work on components of inspection rather than inspection in its entirety.

And as part of that process, we will continue to work with outside academics and other experts, as well as those at the receiving end of inspection, to help shape the approach we take. It is really valuable to have the right level of challenge in this kind of work, as well as specialist expertise.

And finally, in this context, I am very grateful to our own staff who have worked hard on this study, especially Alan Passingham and Matthew Purves. I am also extremely grateful to the members of our expert advisory panel, whose helpful advice contributed a great deal to the project. The panel has included, at various points: Professor Robert Coe, Dr Melanie Ehren, Lesley Duff, Dr Iftikhar Hussain, Danielle Mason, Stefano Pozzi, Rebecca Allen, Sam Freedman and Jonathan Simons. We are very much looking forward to continuing to work with these and others as we develop this work in the future.

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