Amendment 48: Education (Scotland) Bill: Stage 3
Amendment 48, which hangs with amendment 51, would place a clear duty on the chief inspector to include in their annual report an account of how Scottish schools are actually performing. In essence, the provision is about performance and not only process. It is not enough to say that inspections took place or that frameworks were adhered to; parents, teachers, local authorities and those in the Parliament want and deserve to know what the inspections revealed. What is working and what is not? Where is progress being made and where is it not? Without that level of reporting, inspection risks becoming a closed system. It would be a ritual rather than a mechanism for improvement, and I think that we have all agreed that continual improvement is the whole basis of the inspection system.
Amendment 48 seeks to anchor the chief inspector’s report in substance by requiring it to present an honest, accessible and evidence-based assessment of performance across the school system in the preceding financial year. It is a necessary correction to what has too often been an overly descriptive, opaque and self-referential reporting process. We must remember that the chief inspector will occupy a privileged position because they will have access to school-level data, trends, thematic reviews and direct evidence of what is happening in classrooms across the country. Such insight must not sit in files; it must be brought to the Parliament publicly, clearly and with a view to continual improvement.