Schools 'need ombudsman' to restore faith in education

Parents need an independent ombudsman, if their faith in exams and the schools system is to be restored, according to the man who led the official inquiry into last summer's A-level fiasco.

Mike Tomlinson, the former head of Ofsted, the Government's schools watchdog, said he had been inundated with letters from parents, teachers and students mistrustful of the framework for appeals relating to admissions, exclusions and exams. In an interview with The Independent, he said: "They feel their problems are dealt with by the people who created the problem. There seems to something missing – people have nowhere to go."

Mr Tomlinson said the mistrust shown by parents covered a wide range of issues – including exam appeals, school admissions and exclusions.

"Parents don't have anywhere to go with their concerns – other than the school, or the education authority, or the exam board that they have concerns about," he said.

"It does suggest to me we need to think about what we need to put in place and how it should operate, so that parents have a way to someone outside that bit of the system they're complaining about – someone they can feel will look at it in a dispassionate manner.

"We live in a society which, more than ever, wants answers and wants to be reassured that the answer they have has been honestly and openly given.

"My experiences over the last two years [as chief schools inspector and head of the A-level inquiry] makes me feel this is a question that needs some attention to be paid to it."

Mr Tomlinson, who is due to give an address on Monday at the North of England education conference – traditionally designed to set the agenda for the school year ahead – also acknowledged he could not give "a 100 per cent guarantee" that this year's exams would be free of trouble.

He said the recruitment of enough examiners to mark the estimated 24 million papers in GCSE, A-level and AS-level "remains the key test".

"I can't say I'm 100 per cent confident until we've got them in the bag," he said. "What I do believe is that with the financial support of up to £6m for marking promised by Charles Clarke [the Secretary of State for Education], that gives us the best chance of succeeding."

Mr Tomlinson said he would use his address to warn the Government it was failing to deliver on its promise to reduce bureaucracy in schools.

"I do think we haven't really cracked the question of reducing the levels of bureaucracy and the multitude of initiatives from government. These two are absorbing a lot of energy at various levels which might be better spent on the crucial task of managing our schools."

Another task was to improve recruitment and retention levels in the teaching profession, he added.

"My wish for 2003 would be that we can make progress in respect of these two fundamental issues," he said.

Mr Tomlinson's New Year message will include an exhortation to ministers to allow more "risk-taking and innovation" in schools.

"Clearly the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools have both now hit a bit of a plateau," he added, "and we have to realise that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution."

Figures last year showed that – despite significant improvements in standards in the first two years of the strategy – the percentage of pupils reaching the required standard in English for 11-year-olds had remained the same for two years at 75 per cent. The figure for maths had gone up one point to 73 per cent.

"It means we've got to have a mechanism for getting back into our schools risk-taking and innovation – trying things to improve standards and see if they work," he said.

He warned that some schools would succeed but an element of failure would have to be tolerated.