I’m A Self-Assessment Evangelist: The Water Companies’ Sewage Scandal Reminds me of the inherent risks

I finally caught up on Channel 4’s Dirty Business, a docudrama following the timeline of the ongoing sewage scandal. One scene sets the tone for what follows. Two retired men, an ex-detective and a former professor, ask why the fish are dying in a river local to them. Amongst other things, what they uncover over the next 10 years is a system known as “operator self-monitoring,” in place since 2009, under which water companies have been largely responsible for reporting their own environmental breaches. A government commitment to change remains unactioned. The results, without effective scrutiny, were predictable.

It made me pause and think about the relevance of that outcome for the education sector. Not because self-assessment is inherently suspect, but because the docudrama raises a valid question:

What happens when self-assessment shifts from being a tool for improvement to being a primary mechanism of accountability?

Self-assessment has a strong evidence base when it’s done well. Research consistently shows that practitioners who reflect systematically on their own performance develop more quickly, make better decisions under pressure, and are more likely to sustain improvements over time. In education specifically, the argument for self-assessment rests on something that some in the water industry may have forgotten, which is that the process is meant to be honest, not reassuring, and requires internal governance that is curious enough to check the reliability of what is reported when the stakes are high.

The self-assessment report and quality improvement plan (or their equivalent) remain central to how schools, training providers, universities and colleges understand their own performance, and rightly so. Alongside learners and employers, nobody is better placed than those inside an organisation to know where provision is working, where it is fragile, and what is getting in the way. Done rigorously, self-assessment converts daily professional experience into evidence. It turns gut feeling into a structured enquiry.

But the water industry’s experience points to a structural risk to reflect on, particularly when we see calls to reduce regulatory oversight. When self-assessment is the dominant accountability mechanism rather than one part of a wider ecosystem, it can drift from honest scrutiny into something closer to reputation management. Judgements might soften; strengths receive careful attention; weaknesses receive careful wording. What an organisation says about itself starts to reflect what it can defend rather than what is happening on the ground. To some extent, we already experience this.

There is a long-established idea in organisational learning that what an organisation says it does and what it actually does aren’t always the same thing. It is hard to stay curious about something you know well. The gap between the two narrows when scrutiny is genuine and widens when it is performative. Strong self-assessment collapses that gap. Weak self-assessment widens it while generating paperwork that suggests otherwise.

The current inspection framework makes this explicit. Under the Leadership and Governance evaluation area, inspectors consider whether leaders have an accurate and honest understanding of their organisation’s strengths and weaknesses, and whether self-assessment drives improvement rather than simply presenting a favourable picture. It asks not whether an organisation has assessed itself, but whether that assessment can be trusted. Removing the need to submit an annual self assessment report to Ofsted is a nod to the importance of the rigour of the process being owned by the provider, rather than undertaken purely to meet an externally imposed deadline.

Peer review, observation by colleagues from other organisations, and critical friend relationships with organisations like ours exist not to compensate for weak self-assessment but to sharpen it. They introduce the kind of friction that prevents any organisation, however well-intentioned, from becoming its own most sympathetic audience.

The government’s response to the water industry scandal was to promise MOT-style checks and unannounced inspections to restore public trust. Education already has versions of both. The more interesting question is what providers themselves choose to do in between: whether self-assessment is treated as a rigorous professional discipline or as a document that comes to life purely in an inspection window.

Independent scrutiny is not bureaucratic overhead. It is a civic safeguard, and its value is most visible when it is absent. Self-assessment in education works best when it is one voice in a wider conversation, tested against evidence from outside the organisation as well as within it. The culture that makes that possible is built over time, through the decisions leaders make about how honest they are prepared to be, not just with inspectors, but with themselves.

By Lou Doyle, Co-Founder and Director at the SDN Mesma Group