Introduction

First: I must say thank you to the President for that kind introduction and thanks also to the College of Teachers for this honour and for inviting me to give tonight’s lecture. 

I’m honoured: partly because I’m in very distinguished company. But also because I’m not – and never have been - a teacher. 

I do, though, come from a family of teachers. Father worked in FE and HE (and in so-called retirement teaches adult education classes – teachers never retire, you know). My mother taught secondary, primary and special needs education. My brother is a special needs expert and my sister teaches in a village primary. And that’s not to mention various members of my wider family. 

So, as you can see, there’s never been any shortage of people to tell me when I’ve got it wrong. 

So, in a sense, education was the family business. Having a perverse streak, I decided to be different and joined the BBC as a graduate news trainee. I then spent a decade as a BBC Political Correspondent. 

Little did I realise then that education would get me after all. In 1989, having watched the Education Reform Bill passing through Parliament, I became gripped by it. 

It was going to be ‘year zero’. A national curriculum, national testing, local management of schools. All controversial ‘firsts’ in the English education system. 

And there was one theme underpinning all these changes: accountability.

As you’ll see from my title tonight, this is my theme. How has accountability changed in education? What effect has it had on media coverage of schools? And how has that coverage, in turn, affected the public perception of education? More of that in just a moment. First, I would just briefly like to say thank you to the many people in education who have made it possible for reporters like me to do their job. Head teachers and teachers who let me into their schools with camera crews – and who only occasionally asked if they could have make-up before doing the interview! And academics who agreed to sum up their ten-year research project in a soundbite of all of 15 seconds. 

Accountability Theme 

So, to rapidly raise the tone, on to my theme: ‘Good News and Bad News: accountability in education’.

You’ll be relieved to hear that I don’t intend to give a blow-by-blow account of the growth in accountability in education. 

Instead I want to offer an analysis of how this new culture of accountability has dramatically changed the reporting of education. 

Specifically, I want to talk about how this has shaped the sort of stories the media is interested in, the way they are treated, and how this – in turn - has affected the public’s perception of the quality of schools. 

History of change 

As I have mentioned, my period covering education, since 1989, has coincided with huge changes in accountability. 

Broadly, in England (although not necessarily the rest of the United Kingdom), we have moved from a school system that was highly autonomous but not particularly accountable, to one that is now centrally-directed in key respects but also heavily accountable to government, to parents and to the wider public. 

This perhaps requires a little explanation. When I say schools were highly autonomous before the late 1980s, I refer to their freedom to teach what they wished and how they wished. In other respects – control over budgets, buildings, and admissions – they were, of course, not at all autonomous. 

On the curriculum and assessment, though, they were largely unconstrained and teachers could use their professional expertise to decide what and how to teach, and how to monitor progress. 

In primary schools (apart from the few areas where the 11 Plus survived) external testing was largely unknown, the National Curriculum did not exist, and no-one had yet invented the literacy and numeracy strategies which, for better or for worse, tell teachers how to organise their classroom furniture and conduct their lessons, almost minute-by-minute. 

In secondary schools, the examination syllabuses at 16 and 18 did provide an external framework. But, again, there was no national curriculum from 11 to 16 and no external testing at 14 and 17. 

In the past, political parties did not regard what happened in the classroom as part of their remit: now they believe in telling teachers which type of phonics to use and what proportion of children to put into ability sets. 

They haven’t (yet) expressed a view on which colour of chalk to use. 

This increase in central direction was partly because successive governments were no longer willing to leave the curriculum as a ‘secret garden’ to which only teachers held the key. 

But it was also part of a desire to create a quasi-market in state education. You could not have a market unless the consumers - the parents - had some common benchmarks against which to measure the performance of individual schools. 

So, outcomes were measured and published. The theory was that pupils would follow results, and money would follow pupils. 

Later, the 1992 Education Act – which grew out of John Major’s hobby-horse ‘the Citizens Charter’ - brought further accountability measures, namely:

• the creation of Ofsted to replace the old HMI and LEA inspectorates, with the radical departure of a ‘lay’ member on each team and a pre-inspection meeting with parents;
• and the publication of performance tables of examination results. Now, of course, successive governments have always insisted these are not ‘league tables’, but – how can I put it -- they are delivered to journalists in a way that makes it relatively easy to produce hierarchical lists.

Finally, the other big accountability change came with the election of the Labour government in 1997 and the setting of high-profile national targets for everything from examination and test results to truancy and exclusion rates.

This had a significant effect on the reporting of issues relating to standards. So if pass rates were too low this was not just about holding schools to account, but was also about holding government to account. Thus a whole new raft of media stories was launched along the lines of: ‘the government has again failed to meet its targets for (fill in the blank).’ 

This is perhaps a rare example of a government deliberately and knowingly making a stick for its own back! 

So, in short, we went from high autonomy and low accountability to the opposite: low autonomy and high accountability. 

I merely wonder if, as we have progressed from one extreme to the other, it might be more logical for schools to have more equally balanced levels of BOTH autonomy and accountability. 

Consumerism 

Meanwhile, as these changes worked through, the language also changed as this quasi-market ushered in a consumer-based approach to education. 

Parents did not quite become ‘clients’, but it was a close-run thing. Politicians talked about ‘parent power’, about ‘choice’ and about the requirement for the necessary information to inform that choice. 

The current White Paper plans to extend this further with federations of Trust Schools creating – in Tony Blair’s words - ‘brands’ of schools, each offering something distinctive to the consumer. 

One logical outcome of this would be to pursue the reforms to the extent of the Swedish ‘school choice’ model, where any provider – local authority, voluntary sector or for-profit commercial company – can bid for public funds to run schools. 

It was noticeable that the Prime Minister’s introduction to the White Paper in October referred to the Swedish model, although in the end there was no provision for commercial companies running Trusts as a for-profit operation. 

This may explain the apparent gap between the big rhetoric of the White Paper and its rather less radical reality. 

Of course, if you have a market in school providers, and greater choice for parents and pupils as consumers, then it’s perhaps no surprise that we now have WHICH? Magazine style guides to schools, newspaper supplements with league tables, comparative performances, and the rest. 

How this has changed media coverage

Not surprisingly, these changes in accountability have changed the way education is reported.

Indeed, unless we have very good long-term memories, they have changed things more than we perhaps realise. You need only look back through the newspaper archives to see what a transformation there has been in media reporting of education. 

In the past some of the staples of the education news story were:

• pronouncements of the National Union of Teachers
• activities of the Schools Council
• ministerial speeches
• official inquiries

In short, it was about policy handed down from on high, by either the politicians or the profession.

Today, government announcements do still get coverage. But the NUT, and the other unions, tend to appear in a reactive mode. On television, in particular, there are fewer union leaders and politicians, and many more classroom teachers, head teachers, pupils and, especially, parents. 

The new staples of the education news diet are:

• Exam and test results
• Truancy and exclusions figures
• Discipline
• League Tables
• Ofsted reports

And examples of parental or pupil frustration (legal challenges, anger over school choice, problems with exam papers and marking…these could be characterised, collectively, as areas of consumer dissatisfaction). 

A few years ago, as a result of focus group work into what TV audiences wanted, the BBC even coined a new phrase ‘personally useful news’. This covered issues such as hospitals, schools, and personal finance which directly affected people’s daily lives. 

The feedback we received from audience focus groups was that they did not just want to be told what governments were announcing; they wanted us to explain how it would change their lives and the services they used. 

This certainly had an effect on the reporting of education – although to an extent these changes reflected similar changes that were happening elsewhere in the media. 

There were now more case studies (individual pupils, parents and schools) to illustrate how national changes would affect people like the viewer or the listener or reader. 

Every story had to be illustrated by a case study of an individual school. Grassroots voices were heard far more, explaining how policy would affect things on the ground. 

Perhaps the biggest change has been in the reporting of exam results and league tables. 

Reporting exam results and league tables 

Some newspapers started to publish league tables because they were ideologically in favour of them. Now, most do it simply because they sell papers and readers seem to want them – whether we approve of that or not. 

The BBC is not driven by commercial concerns but it, too, tries to deliver what (as far as it can tell) the public is interested in. 

Interactive news, and the rise of the viewers and listeners’ email forum, gives us some idea of what people are interested in. 

So, too do the story-by-story audience figures for BBC News Online. Although a medium that is still young, online news is growing very fast. 

For the education news pages alone (a tiny portion of the entire news website), the number of ‘unique users’ each day (that is the number of individuals who click on at least one page) varies from about 10,000 on a quiet Sunday in August, to around 360,000. 

Guess which story attracted that audience peak? Yes, the August exam results. 

 The other measure we use is a count of the number of ‘page views’ (that is the number of unique users multiplied by the number of pages they click on). 

On the education news pages alone, the peak is well over 1.1 million a day! 

Now, if you don’t like league tables (and they have clearly had an effect on the way schools are run, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad), you might not want to know this. But, the peaks for both ‘unique users’ and ‘page views’ tend to coincide with exam and test results and league tables. They are popular! 

Last year, the tables came out on January 13^th. On that day, the BBC news education website had over 200,000 unique users and over a million page views. On a single day. 

That is almost three times the average number of users and over 5 times the average number of ‘hits’. 

The league tables continue to get ‘hits’ all year round, although there are some interesting seasonal highs and lows. For example, they dip in February and they rise sharply again in the Autumn when the new school choice/ open day season gets started. 

This suggests that many users of the website do find this information ‘personally useful’.

And it’s not just league tables that have changed the media coverage of education. 

Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ certainly raised its profile in the news agenda. 

National targets, school choice, Ofsted reports: all these have meant that we now get different types of news stories, and different treatments, about education. 

There is undoubtedly an obsession with standards and their variation over time and between schools, and between types of schools.

 It was not always so. 

As I was writing this lecture, I began wondering just when this change came about. Had the summer exam results days always been big news, with an annual round of navel-gazing as we wonder aloud whether rising pass-rates mean, perversely, lower standards? 

These days, it is always a story; not least because August is otherwise a quiet time for news. 

It is such a perennial set-piece of our reporting today that it is hard to remember whether there was ever a time when publication of A levels and GCSEs, on the two middle Thursdays in August, failed to make front-page, and bulletin-topping, news.

I checked with some of those – former journalists and exam board officers – whose memories go further back than mine. (I’d like to say a special thank you here to John Izbicki formerly of the Telegraph, Tim Devlin once of The Times, and George Turnbull previously of the AEB and later AQA exam boards). I also went back through the education stories in The Times – right back to 1950. 

What was immediately clear was the complete absence of stories about the annual publication of exam results. 

The O Level and the CSE results merited hardly a mention at all until their disappearance in 1988. 

A level results, which have been around since 1950, were also largely anonymous. The main interest here, only from the early 1980s, was in the grades required to get into top universities. 

There was, however, an occasional burst of interest in trends in standards. This was mostly related to the debate, which raged in the 1970s, over the growth of comprehensive schools. 

In the second series of the Black Papers in 1970, Professor Arthur Pollard looked at O and A Levels and used changing trends to argue that standards were dropping because of the emergence of comprehensive schools. 

This, I think, sowed the seed for the later fascination with analysing exam statistics for political purposes. 

Examination reform was another factor that provoked more critical coverage of standards, as pressure built for the introduction of the GCSE. 

Of course, there was one obvious reason for the lack of interest in year-on-year exam results before the GCSE arrived: the exams were then  norm-referenced. In other words, more or less the same proportion of candidates passed at the various grades each year. 

It was not quite a quota, but pass-rates varied very little until the criterion-referenced approach took over from the late 1980s and pass-rates began to rise year on year. 

There was one kind of league table, though, which did appear regularly in The Times: the Norrington Table for Oxford colleges and the Tomkins table for their Cambridge equivalents. 

That apart, coverage was remarkably sparse. Searching The Times for any article with the words ‘GCE’ and ‘results’ produced just 3 articles from 1950 to 1970. 

Broadening the search to cover anything with the words ‘exam’ and ‘results’ in the body of text found only 38 articles, but most of these were about the Cambridge Tripos or Law Society results. 

Broadening the period from 1950 to 1985 produced a little more coverage – but not much. Fewer than 100 articles were found over this 35 year period, using a variety of different search terms around the words: schools, exams, results, GCE, O and A levels. 

There was nothing at all at the time of the publication of the exam results. 

The first significant flutter of interest in the annual exam results did not come until the mid 80’s. In 1985 there was concern that long-running industrial action by teachers might have depressed results. But the exam boards said there had been no effect. 

In 1988 the first year of the GCSE results did cause a bit of a stir but only because of the teething problems of the new exam, not because of concerns over falling standards. 

However, about this time, there was beginning to be some pressure from the media for league tables of A level results. 

John Izbicki, education correspondent at The Telegraph until 1985, recalls that he was consistently urged to produce tables of the leading independent schools but refused to do so, arguing they would not be fair. 

Eventually, one of his successors did so and this, I believe, forced the Independent Schools Council to start publishing results. 

So, it seems you have to wait until 1990, before anything resembling the current furore over results begins to emerge. 

That summer – in the first of the headlines that have since become common – the Sunday Times story was headlined: ‘Public school heads attack government over “easy” A Level exams’. 

Interesting to note that the first doubts about exams getting easier came – not from journalistic commentators – but from independent school head teachers. 

August 1992 brought the first newspaper exam league tables. It was still voluntary for schools to release their results that summer, but it became compulsory from the following year. 

Then, in 1993, we start to get the contradictory headlines which have become characteristic on results day. The Times had ‘High pass rate takes the gloss off A Level success’. 

You have to wonder what a low pass rate would have done! 

Of course, there was no let up from those concerned about a general lowering of standards even when – unusually – the pass-rate went down, as it did at Maths GCSE in 1998. 

Then we had the headlines ‘Drop in basic results mars GCSE results’.

So, it did become a case of ‘results up, standards must be down’ or ‘results down, standards must also be down’. 

But August is August, and there has to be a story. 

From 1998 until very recently (when I detect a slight change in the tone of reporting) the theme was very much: results are up, doubts grow over standards. 

One academic study took a closer look at this phenomenon. 

University of Nottingham study 

It was conducted by Roger Murphy and Paul Warmington of the University of Nottingham. They studied both newspaper and broadcast coverage of the 2003 exam results. 

The largest category of print headlines fell under the heading of ‘falling standards’. This did not always mean that the headline said standards were falling, but it raised the question.

 As for the rest, about 20% of the headlines were celebratory, referring to the success of schools or individual pupils. A further 10% related to advice on clearing, retakes etc. 

Amongst the broadcast items: one-third led with ‘record pass rate headlines’. However just over a third (36%) flagged up the debate about falling standards, although – as the authors of the study put it – ‘these were usually phrased with greater editorial distance than their print equivalents’ and were ‘often in the interrogative form’ or pinned to particular lobbyist groups (such as the Institute of Directors). 

The authors of this study argue that the ‘falling standards’ issue is a popular one because it falls neatly into two contrasting positions: “have standards gone up or gone down?” 

Broadcast news - with its habit of achieving balancing views within a report – tends to, sometimes unconsciously, shape news in this way even more so than print. 

Sometimes these headlines are such an over-simplification that they leave readers with a misleading impression. 

For example, in 2003, one broadsheet newspaper (The Times) had a headline: ‘Another rise in passes and top grades – soon it will become the examination that no student ever fails’. 

While an oversimplification, that headline could be justified by the very high pass-rates, up in the 90%s. However, as far as I can recall, I don’t think the exam boards ever said they could envisage a time when there would be a 100% pass rates.

 But this headline was misread by many people. It was interpreted – innocently – as ‘everyone gets an A Level’. Which, of course, is quite a different matter from everyone sitting an A Level getting a pass. After all, only about half the age cohort even attempt A levels. 

Indeed, if the school system is working properly, it will not be pushing pupils into A levels, particularly A2s, just to see them fail. 

So should we be getting so excited at high pass rates? The problem, of course, is that on results day we only have pass-rates as a proportion of applicants. We do not get, until much later, the more significant statistics: the proportion of the age cohort getting passes. 

But that sort of sophistication gets lost in the headlines. 

 Overall Murphy and Warmington concluded that media coverage of the exam results was ‘predictable, simplistic, and ritualistic’. 

However, one might ask: how else should it be done? 

Should the exam results be ignored as a news story? We know from the ‘hits’ on BBC News Online, that there is huge public interest in them. 

Should the results be published uncritically, with no reflection of the views of those who doubt the value of the exams? Wouldn’t that risk making the media sound like a Soviet-style Pravda newssheet, with headlines along the lines of ‘another year of record harvests’? 

Certainly, we should remember that for the individuals getting their results, this is often the culmination of two years hard work. Is it fair to immediately question the value of the currency before the ink is dry on their certificates? 

As a reporter, I have tried to vary the approach. Looking, for example, for trends in the popularity of subjects. 

But editors would argue – with some justification – that the top-line of the story (to use a journalistic phrase) is: how many passed? is this more or less than previous years? why the change? 

I think these are legitimate questions. What matters is how accurate, and full and fair – how contextualised, if you like - the answers are. 

Accountability on the TV screen 

I’d like now to turn to another form of accountability: the images of schools as seen on television. Much of this would equally apply to newspaper photographs – but I’ll stick to what I know best. 

We all know that, in any visual medium, words are important, but pictures are crucial. 

It is still a common complaint from those who work in education that TV news focuses only on what is bad not on what is good in schools. 

This is, I think, is only partially fair. 

Certainly, we do focus on areas where things are not going smoothly or as planned. I think this is justified. It is the media’s role to highlight these areas and ask questions about them, particularly if we are talking about publicly-funded, democratically-accountable bodies. 

However, in image terms, we actually tend to focus almost exclusively on what is positive. 

This is partly because of the difficulty of access to schools where things are going wrong, partly because of the inevitable artificiality of much filming in schools, and partly because we are very wary of showing individual pupils misbehaving or underperforming on TV. 

The classrooms we show are always ordered, quiet, and disciplined. 

That’s partly because only the confident and able head teachers and teachers are usually willing to let our cameras in at the very short notice on which we operate. 

It’s also because in a two minute long report, you cannot have anything too distracting going on or you will fail to convey the news story. 

Also, unlike in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, where people being filmed have time to forget about the presence of the cameras, in news shooting you are in and out very quickly and the pupils are acutely aware of your presence. 

You cannot be sure that any acting-up that occurs wasn’t put on for the benefit of the cameras. 

I could have broadcast any amount of kids pulling faces, mock fighting, etc after we have filmed in corridors or playgrounds: but I have never done so, as it would not be fair. I cannot be sure these things would have happened if we had not been there.

Indeed when I film in a classroom I always tell the pupils first that the only chance they have of being on TV is if they avoid looking at the camera and avoid doing anything silly. 

At the end of the lessons, the teachers often ask if I could come back next period as the kids have never been so attentive and focussed on their work. 

So, while the report is focussing on problems in the system, what you actually see going on in schools is well behaved children in ordered classrooms. 

I don’t see any fair alternative to this. But sometimes I wonder whether, in doing so, we actually do a disservice to teachers, because we under-play the difficulties they face with low-level, but hard to control, indiscipline. 

Has it been good for education? 

So, to return to my theme: has this increase in accountability – and the effects it has had on pushing reporting down a more consumerist route – been good news or bad news for education? 

Most people would, I think, admit that League tables have had some perverse effects. Like anything statistical, they can be manipulated. When you measure things, you tend to change individuals’ – and organisations’ – behaviour. 

After all, the latest league table innovation – the requirement for the % A-C’s to include Maths and English – is intended to change schools’ behaviour. 

So, we see, performance tables are as much a tool of policy implementation as of consumer choice. 

Some schools have found great success through GNVQs and courses that offer very generous equivalences in GCSE terms. 

As last week’s Times Educational Supplement reported, thousands of students are being guided away from academic subjects and qualifications into vocational qualifications which are worth more in league table weightings. 

Sometimes these choices are the right ones for the pupils, but sometimes – it would appear – as John Dunford has said -- that ‘league tables are skewing the curriculum’. 

If that is so, the cart is pulling the horse. 

League tables also seem to have encouraged schools to target borderline C/D grade pupils, because of the crucial 5 A-Cs criterion. While that is fine in itself: shouldn’t they also be targeting pupils who are borderline D/Es or B/Cs. 

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that league tables have affected the willingness of schools to admit some pupils into Sixth Forms or have limited their choice of subjects out of concerns about the impact on league table position. 

There have been attempts to create fairer value-added tables, but it is the raw statistics that get most attention, mainly because they are easier to understand. 

Another negative and positive aspect of the high levels of accountability, via both league tables and Ofsted reports, is the effect it is having on head teacher turnover and recruitment. 

As last week’s National Audit Office report highlighted, the biggest factor in turning round a poor school is changing the head teacher. If accountability measures have highlighted failure, and helped to ensure children do not remain being taught at failing schools for years, then that would be seen by many as a positive. 

On the other hand, as the report also showed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find senior teachers willing to take on the role of head teacher. 

It is not the money: challenging primary headships are being advertised at up to £90,000, and the secondary equivalent at over £100,000. Rather it is the football-manager like accountability, and the sheer size of the job, that is making recruitment hard. The pressures of league table and Ofsted performance, it has been argued, do not help and are seen as a negative side of accountability. 

One final word on the National Audit Office report: it led to headlines saying there are 1 million children in ‘poorly-performing’ schools. Detailed reading of the report can justify that conclusion. But the ‘poorly-performing’ definition was based on the government’s and Ofsted’s own criteria. 

It was precisely because the government had set the bar relatively high (compared to the past) that so many schools were caught below it. 

It may be right for Ofsted to say that ‘satisfactory’ is not good enough – but do the public recognise the varying definitions of ‘under-performing’, ‘coasting’ etc when we in the media (in the interests of simplicity and comprehensibility tend to lump them together as simply ‘failing’). 

So was the NAO report an example of good accountability: showing that no under-performance would be tolerated? 

Or of bad accountability: creating a harsh and exaggerated sense of crisis in the school system? 

In true BBC fashion, I leave it to you to make up your own mind.

Conclusion 

 However, to bring my remarks to a conclusion:  by and large, I think, few would turn the clock back to the days when parents could get little hard information on how local schools were doing. 

My impression is that parents take league tables (and the reporting of league tables) with the requisite pinch of salt. They know about the relative contexts of different schools in their area and they also value other judgements such as Ofsted reports. 

Broadly I think the greater media attention on schools has been good for education, although we do have to be very careful that when we look at the problem areas, we should not give the impression that the whole system is failing. 

Otherwise we give an impression that is out of kilter with parents’ own experiences. Some years back, a study at Exeter University showed that while most parents thought general standards of education were declining, they thought things were fine at their children’s own school. 

While other factors may have been at work here, this might suggest a difference between what people see for themselves and what they see in the media. 

But where things are going badly wrong, the media should ask why. The Ridings school is often cited as an example of a media frenzy destroying a school. That is unfair, in my opinion. 

That school was already in serious trouble before it came to wider public attention. Pupils there had been failed year after year. It was only the action of the teachers’ union there that brought it to the public’s attention. The media merely followed. 

Under this spotlight, it was given a new leadership and things did improve. The nature of the area, and the community involved, meant it was unlikely to have received the remedial measures it required without a media fuss bringing it to national political attention. 

Having said that, it is true that there are no easy answers to schools like this one, which are seen as bottom of the pile, when surrounded by grammar schools and church schools.

The Ridings still has problems. These may have been accentuated by league tables, since parents who have the knowledge to compare schools in the area make use of their right to state a preference to go elsewhere. 

The greater public accountability for schools has been uncomfortable at times for many who work in education. It has not always been for the best. But overall it has brought greater political attention to the state of ordinary schools. The Times would no longer give more attention to the league tables of Oxford and Cambridge colleges than to schools. 

Political attention brings resources (which are welcome) and initiatives (not always so welcome). But the worst thing of all is for problems to be ignored. 

Accountability has opened up schools to the public gaze. They do not just see the bad things. As I have tried to show, they also see orderly, well-taught classes.

One great gain of this media attention is that if head teachers say they do not have the resources to do the job, the public tends to believe them. They have seen the evidence in their newspapers and on their TV screens. 

I find it interesting here to compare schools with universities. If there is a story about, say, staff shortages, discipline, inadequate budgets, or dilapidated buildings, you can always find a head teacher and a school willing to appear in the media. They know it may not help their school but it is good for schools generally. 

By contrast, you can very rarely find a vice chancellor that takes the same view. They are more likely to say: ‘yes, I agree it is a problem…but why don’t you try the university down the road...their problems are much worse than ours’. 

I think it may be no coincidence that the public tends to agree that schools need more money and that teachers should be reasonably paid, whereas there seems to be far less public support for universities’ equally heartfelt complaints about the need for more cash. 

That may be why the pay of lecturers has fallen behind others in the public sector and why the universities, often reluctantly, felt they had to accept ‘top-up’ fees because they could not see the political process delivering them enough money out of taxation to fund expansion. 

So, accountability can be bad news but it can also be good news if it ensures better attention, and responses, to your problems. 

That is why, on the whole I believe that – despite the discomforts along the way – greater accountability and the consequent media attention it has brought has mostly (with some exceptions) been better for schools than in the days when they were largely ignored.

 

This lecture may also be downloaded as a PDF.