Ofsted: Less than popular with teachers

"I think there are genuine concerns there," she said, while stressing that she and Ofsted had striven to make her office function independently.

The government is aware of the issue and is minded to make her office completely independent from its third year.

"Ofsted will then have a more worthwhile complaints procedure," she said.

Only six cases

Elaine Rassaby started work in July 1998 and was re-appointed for a second year this summer.

She says in her first annual report that she was surprised to have been asked to review only six cases.

They arose from 170 complaints to Ofsted out of 4,520 school inspections (3.76% of the complaints) and 121 complaints about 7,245 nursery inspections (1.67%) during the year.

She told BBC News Online that the process of complaining was "very tiring, very burdensome" for teachers, and only prolonged the "bad experience" of being inspected.

And things may be changing: she currently has six cases ongoing this year already.

But this meant the cases she had dealt with were not particularly bad examples.

"I do think that running complaints is so difficult and teachers are very put off by that," she said.

Important complaints unpublicised

"I'm not convinced that the complaints that I have received are necessarily the most important. Many complainants will raise important issues and feel that they can't pursue them.

"I would hope that Ofsted would begin to monitor its complaint work and to feed back publicly. I don't think this goes on in a systematic way at present."

A possible way to expand her role would be to look at types of complaint, she said. But it might be better to preserve it as a case reviewer - in effect a final appeal process.

It was often said that Ofsted took the inspector's side, for instance, especially over complaints about conduct.

But in one case where there had been a series of strong complaints about one inspector, Ofsted had taken the matter very seriously, partially upheld them and threatened to strike off the inspector involved.

"So I think Ofsted is concerned about allegations against inspectors. It has the statutory duty to see that there is an effective inspection service and complaints provide an important source of information about how that is working.

"The chief inspector can't really afford to have rum inspectors," she said.

But she has no "overview of trends". She cannot say how many allegations against inspectors were upheld - that is not part of her remit.

"Now, that's an important question which Ofsted should be looking at."

Series of complaints

The hardest complaints to deal with are those about alleged bad conduct by an inspector - often a case of one person's word against another, where there was no evidence either way.

In her fifth case, the director of education at an unnamed authority had pulled together a bundle of complaints involving one inspector and said to Ofsted: "There, you have problem."

The adjudicator discovered that Ofsted had done its own review - concluding that the inspector was "competent and effective" - but had not told the authority that it had done this or what the outcome was.

In a complex cross-complaint arising from this, the inspector had said that an education adviser at the authority had "behaved inappropriately" during an inspection.

During the exchange on this the adviser had been told by Ofsted that if the allegation were true, the chief inspector, Chris Woodhead, would have taken a very dim view of it.

Ms Rassaby said in her report that this was "inappropriate and implicitly threatening".

She told BBC News Online that Ofsted had used the "wrong tone" on what was an unproven allegation and she hoped such a thing would not happen again: "It's not the way an even-handed approach works."

But she said Mr Woodhead had not attempted to influence her work and she had not met him since her appointment.

"I have nothing to do with him, he has rightly not interfered in anything I have done," she said.

How the complaints procedure works

If a school has a complaint about its inspection it should:

• Discuss it with the registered inspector
• Discuss it with the inspection contractor
• Phone Ofsted's helpline: 02 07 421 6680
• Write to Ofsted
• Ask for an internal Ofsted review