It may be surprising to many that His Majesty’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, speaking on BBC television, endorsed the outcome of an Ofsted inspection that directly led, according to her family, to a headteacher taking her own life. But the place established by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills in English education governance arrangements has been beset with controversy and negativity since it began inspecting schools in 1993.
Some of this, of course, reflects the fact that an external review of any institution such as a school will sometimes bring a much-needed critique of its failings and, therefore, how provision for children needs to be improved.
The problem is that Ofsted itself has never been responsible for the outcomes of its work, either in the school it has inspected or more specifically on the headteachers, teachers, support staff and indeed the children and young people there. It has been for others in English education governance structures to do that – local authorities, DfE officials and more recently and most likely now, Multi-Academy Trusts.
But the structural muddle that has developed in these arrangements in more recent years and the inconsistencies in ‘raising standards’ – the annual game of ‘productivity improvement’ in annual student outcomes that, despite the grandstanding of ministers and officials alike, has little effect now on society as a whole – has handed the central role to Ofsted.
Ofsted has always ‘steered at a distance’, that is, created certain expectations and behaviours in those it may eventually inspect. But so pervasive is its role now in schooling that, even while physically absent for most schools’ lives, the expectation of its possible visits completely shapes the way headteachers and their senior staff think and exercise their role – negatively so, as Greany and Higham found in their major study. So much so that many schools’ ongoing evaluation of their own work and progress, including in their governance reports, uses the same headings as an Ofsted inspection report. Schools continue to do this despite the abolition of a requirement to do so in 2012.
The introduction in 2019 of a new inspection handbook, the document that sets out the evidence sought by Ofsted while inspecting, provides a good case study. The development of a new inspection framework that reflected the recently implemented ‘knowledge-based’ national curriculum from 2014 (which, incidentally, academies are largely not required to teach) had been long anticipated. While still incorporating the obligatory ‘productivity assessments’ of student outcomes, it included assessment for the first time of the state of the school curriculum. The new focus was to be on ‘curriculum intent’, a focus on what is taught, the reasoning for it, and of course its impact. The result was that, during the school year of its introduction (2019/20), all the schools of my acquaintance and involvement – and probably therefore many more – spent their training days and professional development time changing the way they saw, described and presented their work externally, doing what Ofsted said they should.
For their pain, schools are still issued with one overall grade after an inspection – which may be clear, as the Secretary of State said recently, but is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the entirety of the school’s work – and a four-page (now fairly bland) report. There is no publicly agreed methodology for moving from the evidence assembled during an inspection to this overall grade, but it does depend on the professional experience and intuition of the inspectors. I have heard the word ‘cuspy’ used by inspectors several times and, of course, the inconsistencies between inspections have become a professional trope.
Ofsted had explained on their website the extensive consultation exercise they undertook before they published this new framework, but even assuming there had been some discussion between Ofsted and DfE officials, and even with ministers, what was published and introduced in 2019 is now in fact the permitted way that state schools may help form and develop all our young people by the age of 18. This is completely unacceptable in a democracy – surely a wide public discussion on what our young people should be learning would have been appropriate. This is not just a narrowly focused professional matter. Bear in mind also that neither Ofsted nor the DfE are led by educationists.
Ofsted’s role and place need curtailing and changing. It may need to be replaced by something completely different, such as a peer review-based system.
The specifics of Caversham Primary must however also be considered here. As a school formerly found to be ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, it had not been inspected for ten years, incredible as that may seem to parents and outsiders. Since then, the requirements for keeping children safe had changed – rightly – but it is now decreed that if the arrangements for keeping children safe are inadequate, then the school as a whole must be inadequate (and hence its senior staff). This is more than a technical matter, however – what had been happening over the previous ten years about child safety through governance or external agencies, for example? And who now will put this right? This is much worse than just a muddle, and now a much-respected headteacher has taken her own life.
There is nothing here to be self-satisfied about. Change is absolutely needed now.
Schooling in a Democracy by Richard Riddell is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £24.99.
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