§ Mr. DunnTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Science if, pursuant to the answer to the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell) of 26 July,Official Report, column 154–55, he will publish in the Official Report the number of years it would take Her Majesty's inspectorate of schools to undertake a thorough formal inspection leading to the publication of a report, for each school in the maintained system.
§ Mrs. RumboldIt is not possible to provide an answer in exactly the form requested since many factors, some of which are impossible to quantify, come into play. As explained to the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), the inspectorate does not in any case set out to inspect and produce a report on every school on a regular basis, as there are some 23,000 schools and only about 50 schools inspectors.
However, using a simple mathematical model incorporating the new streamlined inspection procedures which Her Majesty's inspectorate has recently introduced, it would theoretically take around 100 years to produce a report on every school in the maintained sector with present manpower levels. But that figure is based on the artificial assumption that schools are available for inspection for 52 weeks in the year, and takes no account of the many priorities that determine Her Majesty's inspectorate inspection programme, mainly to do with Government policy needs, that are in no way based on a presumption that every school in the land will be formally and regularly inspected.
Realistically, Her Majesty's inspectorate seeks to inspect fully a sufficiently wide and representative sample of schools in order that sound and cost-efficient judgments may be made about the state of education nationally, and that professional advice based on the findings of these inspections may be provided to the Secretary of State and others who need to know.
In addition, as has been made clear, those full inspections are supplemented by thousands of visits to schools each year which do not result in issued reports. On average, each primary school in England receives an Her Majesty's inspectorate visit every six years and each secondary school every two years. These visits are just as important a part of the inspectorate's intelligence gathering functions as are those inspections which lead to published reports.