6.1 We believe that public services will improve most when professionals feel free to do what they believe is right, and are properly accountable for the results. Schools should evidently be accountable for achieving a minimum level of performance because tax-payers have a right to expect that their money will be used effectively to educate pupils and equip them to take their place in society. But in recent years schools have suffered from a compliance regime which drove them to meet a bewildering array of centrally-imposed government targets. Schools should, instead, be accountable to parents, pupils and communities for how well they perform.

6.2 In creating a more autonomous school system, we will reduce duties, requirements and guidance on all schools, and make sure that every school can, over time, enjoy the freedoms that Academies currently have. We will dismantle the apparatus of central control and bureaucratic compliance. We will instead make direct accountability more meaningful, making much more information about schools available in standardised formats to enable parents and others to assess and compare their performance. And, through freeing up the system, we will increase parents’ ability to make meaningful choices about where to send their children to school.

6.3 In future:

  • Parents, governors and the public will have access to much more information about every school and how it performs. 
  • Performance tables will set out our high expectations – every pupil should have a broad education and a firm grip of the basics.
  • We will use attainment and progress measures to create a more sophisticated minimum expectation for all schools.
  • Ofsted will refocus inspection on schools’ core educational purpose, and will release outstanding schools from all routine inspection.
  • We will help governing bodies to benefit from the skills of their local community in holding schools to account.