Life Based Learning ™
Delivering subject content through nine life themes
Empowering teachers and schools
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has called for a “transformative shift” in school inspections, moving away from high-stakes, top-down accountability and “punitive control” to a system that “combines high standards with an approach that empowers schools and teachers to innovate and excel”. The IPPR joins others who have called for an end to single-word judgements by Ofsted. Criticism of England’s schools inspectorate has been intense in the last year, in part as a result of the suicide of a headteacher in January following an ‘inadequate’ judgement. Our view at Life-Based Learning is that it is indeed time to radically overhaul our quality-assurance processes and adopt a system rooted in the principle of empowering teachers and schools so that we support and challenge rather than undermine them.
The IPPR’s report – called Improvement through empowerment: Helping our teachers and schools be the best they can be – is critical of single-word judgements, which it says are unreliable and “heavily dependent on which inspector turns up at the school gates”.
It points out that overly simplistic inspection judgements often trigger abrupt changes to management, fuelling a “football-manager culture”. It also says that the current system leads to headteachers chasing ‘outstanding’ grades, even if that comes at the expense of responding to their community’s needs.
In the second main section – Empowering schools – the IPPR puts forward the idea of narrative-driven reports, split into two – an accessible parent-friendly version and a technical improvement report aimed at school leaders and the regulator (the secretary of state via regional directors). It also proposes a new, three-tier response involving either ‘school-led development’, ‘enhanced support’ or ‘immediate action’, with inspection judgements no longer acting as an automatic trigger for intervention.
The report does not call for the abolition of Ofsted. It describes the inspectorate as a crucial source of information about what is going on in schools. Instead, its role would be focused on contributing to the evidence base, providing parents with information on local schools and working with the regulator to promote school improvement.
The first main section of the report is called Empowering teachers. It describes skilled teachers as “our best hope for improving schools” – in particular, raising achievement and closing the growing gap in attainment between poorer pupils and their peers – and proposes a new system which empowers schools and teachers to innovate, making use of their experience and expertise. Describing the current approach to professional development as “woefully inadequate”, it calls on government to commit to a “world-class” entitlement to teacher training.
The IPPR describes itself as “the UK’s pre-eminent progressive think tank”. It publishes about fifty reports a year on topics ranging from public services and communities to energy and climate change.
A football-manager culture, driven by one-dimensional judgements dominates our education system. Today’s report charts a path to a future in which high standards are combined with a supportive and empowering infrastructure that helps teachers and schools to be the best they can be.
Loic Menzies, IPPR report author, visiting fellow at Sheffield Institute of Education and former teacher
In blogs such as Ofsted under the microscope and A testing regime that impoverishes education we have argued that a high-stakes system of accountability for schools and an obsession with quantifiable targets like SAT results lead to skewed priorities and create perverse incentives. The result is the impoverishment of children’s education.
In our blog Alternatives to Ofsted we discussed various ideas around how quality assurance of schools’ work might be done differently
Some sort of collaborative system, then, that helps schools to improve and grow. A healthy combination of robust self-evaluation and let’s call them ‘challenge partners’ who work closely with individual schools, taking time to find out about the context in which the school operates and really uncovering the work the school does. And, as others have said, little but often, removing the fear factor so that quality assurance becomes something to be valued rather than dreaded.
from our blog Alternatives to Ofsted
Image at the head of this article by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
