By Tash Shifrin
23 July 2009
Public bodies charged with carrying out crucial policies must challenge the government if they believe the tasks they have been set are impossible, MPs have said.
The Commons children, schools and families select committee made the recommendation in a report on last year’s Sats fiasco, when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and contractor ETS failed to mark the school tests on time. This led to the scrapping of tests for 14-year-olds and delays to the primary school league tables.
The call for quango chiefs to stand up to ministers came less than a week after MPs probing the collapse of a college building programme, run by the Learning and Skills Council, demanded an urgent review of the way arm’s-length agencies operate right across government.
In its July 23 report, the committee noted ministers’ argument that it would be inappropriate for them to be directly involved in administering Sats. This could lead to suspicion that the government was influencing the results on which its schools policy was judged, ministers said.
But the MPs said the government should ‘revisit the conduct of its relationships with its delivery agencies’. The Department for Children, Schools and Families had ‘involved itself too much in the detail of delivery, placing undue constraints on the executive decision-making abilities of its agency, QCA’.
They added: ‘We recommend that the leadership of government agencies should be more prepared to stand up to the government when it considers that directions from the government to the agency are unreasonable or incapable of performance.’
Mechanisms to allow quango chiefs to make such a challenge must be put in place, the MPs said.
But they added: ‘This should never be used as a means to hold the government to ransom or to impede the execution of legitimate public policy.’
Nansi Ellis, head of education policy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘We agree with the select committee that the exam bodies should be given greater independence to make decisions, freed from the DCSF’s stranglehold.
‘The current testing system has failed students, parents and teachers. National testing at all key stages should be scrapped, and replaced by teacher assessment.’
In evidence to the committee, former QCA chief executive Ken Boston – who resigned in the wake of the 2008 fiasco – said his ‘greatest regret’ was not telling ministers he faced an impossible task after the tests collapsed in 2004 and came close to failing again in subsequent years.
23 July 2009
Public bodies charged with carrying out crucial policies must challenge the government if they believe the tasks they have been set are impossible, MPs have said.
The Commons children, schools and families select committee made the recommendation in a report on last year’s Sats fiasco, when the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and contractor ETS failed to mark the school tests on time. This led to the scrapping of tests for 14-year-olds and delays to the primary school league tables.
The call for quango chiefs to stand up to ministers came less than a week after MPs probing the collapse of a college building programme, run by the Learning and Skills Council, demanded an urgent review of the way arm’s-length agencies operate right across government.
In its July 23 report, the committee noted ministers’ argument that it would be inappropriate for them to be directly involved in administering Sats. This could lead to suspicion that the government was influencing the results on which its schools policy was judged, ministers said.
But the MPs said the government should ‘revisit the conduct of its relationships with its delivery agencies’. The Department for Children, Schools and Families had ‘involved itself too much in the detail of delivery, placing undue constraints on the executive decision-making abilities of its agency, QCA’.
They added: ‘We recommend that the leadership of government agencies should be more prepared to stand up to the government when it considers that directions from the government to the agency are unreasonable or incapable of performance.’
Mechanisms to allow quango chiefs to make such a challenge must be put in place, the MPs said.
But they added: ‘This should never be used as a means to hold the government to ransom or to impede the execution of legitimate public policy.’
Nansi Ellis, head of education policy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: ‘We agree with the select committee that the exam bodies should be given greater independence to make decisions, freed from the DCSF’s stranglehold.
‘The current testing system has failed students, parents and teachers. National testing at all key stages should be scrapped, and replaced by teacher assessment.’
In evidence to the committee, former QCA chief executive Ken Boston – who resigned in the wake of the 2008 fiasco – said his ‘greatest regret’ was not telling ministers he faced an impossible task after the tests collapsed in 2004 and came close to failing again in subsequent years.
