Our job is to be tough

Committee chairman, Barry Sheerman

Mr Woodhead said he was accountable to the prime minister.

The government's view was that Ofsted, as a non-ministerial government department, was directly accountable to Parliament - meaning in practice through the education select committee.

Now the committee says: "There is inevitably a certain tension between the independence with which Parliament has endowed Ofsted and the expectation that there should be robust mechanisms by which public servants are held to account."

Non-educationists

It feels its limited time and resources mean it is not able to fully investigate "even the most important issues or complaints".

"We recommend that Her Majesty's chief inspector of schools should be made accountable to a board," it says.

And the committee says that, until that happens, it wants more resources and recognition of its role.

How the board would be made up is not spelled out, but in an earlier report the committee suggested it should have six to eight members, drawn mostly from outside the education world.

Row over race

The committee also heard from Chris Woodhead on various controversial pronouncements of his, such as the suggestion that A-levels needed to be more demanding.

"We recommend that Ofsted should put in place procedures to check carefully its public comments on contentious matters to ensure that they are not ambiguous," its report says.

It also considered Mr Woodhead's row with the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Gurbux Singh, over research for the commission which found there was "an urgent need" for school inspectors to be better trained on race equality.

Ofsted dismissed it as flawed.

At the select committee hearing, Mr Woodhead said he had not met the researchers because he was busy and felt that other colleagues were the best people to answer their questions.

The committee's report says that, as a result, Mr Woodhead "laid himself open to the criticism that he did not consider the subject to be particularly important and thereby compromised his ability to object to any subsequent criticism" of Ofsted.

'Creative tension'

On the issue of race equality itself, the committee says it notes that Ofsted's guidance to inspectors has been revised.

"We expect Ofsted inspection reports to include adverse comment on schools which fail to collect basic information needed to address race equality issues," it says.

The committee says it intends to hold a public confirmation hearing on the appointment by the education secretary of Mike Tomlinson as Mr Woodhead's successor.

The committee's Labour chairman, Barry Sheerman, denied that the report was about not liking Chris Woodhead.

There had been a great deal of agreement between them, he said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

But this latest meeting had been to do with complaints about the chief inspector going outside his remit.

It was good for democracy for the committee to be "quite nasty" to ministers and the chief inspector when necessary.

"Our job is to be tough."

Ofsted declined to comment on the report.

Drawing a line

The shadow education secretary, Theresa May, said it was vital that Ofsted remained "an independent and rigorous inspection regime".

"We would be opposed to any attempt to use the select committee as a back door way to water down inspections or as a means of political interference," she said.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, called it a "fitting epitaph" for the Woodhead era.

"We support the concept of an independent board which will make Ofsted more accountable," he said.

Nigel de Gruchy, general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, said: "Under Chris Woodhead it was external inspection for everyone except for Ofsted and himself.

"I very much hope that the new chief inspector, Mike Tomlinson, will pay more respect to others who just might have a helpful, critical comment to make about himself and the organisation he now runs."

The Liberal Democrats' education spokesman, Phil Willis, said Chris Woodhead had single-handedly convinced the cross-party committee that a management board was needed to oversee Ofsted.