THE AGENCY responsible for inspecting Scotland’s schools has been given top marks for its own performance by parents and teachers, writes Grant Smith, education reporter.

HM Inspectorate of Education sends teams into classrooms to check on pupils’ attainment, the quality of learning and teaching and the effectiveness of management.

Its reports are meant to let parents know how well or how badly their child’s school is doing and encourage staff to fix problems and drive up standards.

It ordered research into how its inspections and the resulting reports were being regarded.

Senior chief inspector Graham Donaldson said it had found “high levels of satisfaction with our work.”

When parents were asked if they found the reports helpful, 98% of them said yes.

Some 67% of head teachers said they found the inspection process very good in terms of helpfulness to their school, with another 20% classing it as good, while only 7% described it as fair and 5% as unsatisfactory.

Other teachers were also positive about inspections, with 41% describing them as very good, the same percentage as good, and only 13% as fair and 5% as unsatisfactory.

The results contrast with a complaint made by Scotland’s biggest teaching union, the EIS, at its annual meeting in Perth earlier this month.

Delegates backed a motion that inspections placed extra demands on teachers and called for a campaign to keep the workload down to a manageable level.

The inspectorate, which has an annual budget of £15 million, has been an arms-length agency of the Scottish Executive since 2001.

Before that it was part of the education department. It has a regional office in Dundee.

It was set a target of inspecting every secondary school by 2008 and every primary and special school by 2009. Mr Donaldson said it remained on course to achieve that.

During 2007-08 it will inspect 380 nurseries, 235 primary schools, 50 secondary schools and at least six council education departments.

Mr Donaldson cautioned that retirements and other staff departures from the inspectorate were having an impact on workload pressures that would have to be addressed.