Dr John Dunford: Creativity concerns

Ministers have been warned that attempts to hold schools to account for their performance are leading to excessive red tape and stifling creativity.

Speaking to ePolitix.com, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association says it is time for the government to adopt policies based on "intelligent accountability".

Dr John Dunford says that current levels of regulation are leaving schools spending "far too much time filling out forms and going through the processes of accountability".

"We want to see a reduction in the number of lines of accountability, we want to see more intelligent measurement of schools, and we want to see more confidence placed in the professional judgments of teachers so that we reduce the number of external exams and rely more on teacher assessment," he says.

"We want the government to be much clearer about the purposes of national testing and to use a sampling method to monitor the performance of the national system instead of aggregating the test results of millions of young people."

Dr Dunford warned that over-accountability "is the antithesis of creativity and I think schools have been forced into being too cautious as a result".

"I think they have also spent far too much time filling out forms and going through the processes of accountability," he adds.

The SHA chief cites the government's support for league tables as one example of "unintelligent accountability".

He warns they "invite schools to focus on a performance of a narrow range of pupils".

"League tables create a perverse incentive for schools to concentrate on grades C/D borderline and schools get no credit for raising a grade B to a grade A," he said.

"This cannot be right and we need much more intelligent measurement of school performance in order to have intelligent accountability."