Delivering subject content through nine life themes
Ofsted has lost the trust of the teaching profession and increasingly of parents, and there needs to be “an immediate pause of routine inspections” to allow time to reset and regain the trust of the profession. This is the damning conclusion of Beyond Ofsted, a six-month inquiry established to come up with a set of principles for a better school inspection system and proposals for an alternative approach. Meanwhile, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has called in the last week for “fundamental reform” of the inspectorate, describing Ofsted inspections as having “a damaging, sometimes dangerous, impact upon staff mental health and wellbeing”.
Beyond Ofsted: An inquiry into the future of school inspection was chaired by Lord Knight, a former schools minister in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The inquiry’s starting point was a belief that the current inspection system is outdated and needs to be fundamentally changed. (It is worth noting in the interests of balance that the inquiry was sponsored by the National Education Union, no fans of Ofsted.)
A key recommendation in the final report is that schools should conduct their own self-evaluations – called School Performance Reviews (SPRs) – working with an external school improvement partner (SIP) to deliver on an agreed action plan. SIPs would be experienced in school leadership and improvement and would include serving headteachers.
The purposes of the SPRs would be to enhance schools’ capacity for self-improvement and to provide information to stakeholders. They would not be the means by which a school would be held accountable by the Department for Education (DfE) or by Ofsted.
The role of inspectors would change, focusing on governance of and capacity for, school improvement. Inspectors would no longer routinely inspect teaching practice and pupil outcomes.
Research for the inquiry was carried out by University College London Institute of Education. It surveyed more than 6,000 teachers from both primary and secondary schools.
The survey found that 92% of teachers said that Ofsted is not a reliable and trusted arbiter of school standards. Almost two-thirds (62%) of teachers did not think that the outcome of their most recent inspection accurately reflected their school, including 58% of respondents from school rated either Good or Outstanding.
It’s created a culture of fear in our schools, and if anybody thinks that fear is the basis for sustained improvement, rather than support, then I think they’ve got it completely wrong.
Lord Knight, quoted on the BBC website
The NAHT, meanwhile, was responding to the publication of the latest Ofsted annual report (2022–23), the last with the current chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, at the helm. The union said that Ofsted appears to be “in denial about the growing consensus across the education sector that, as an inspectorate, it needs fundamental reform. We do not recognise the picture being painted of schools being largely positive about the inspection process – our evidence tells a very different story.”
It described single-word judgements as “neither fair nor consistent” and said that its latest survey found that 85% of members were either ‘unconfident’ or ‘very unconfident’ in Ofsted. Spielman writes in the introduction to the annual report that “within the limits of government policy, which gives Ofsted only a diagnostic role, [Ofsted has] reframed the inspection process with professional dialogue at its centre, to make it valuable and valued at the receiving end [our italics]”.
The Beyond Ofsted report states that there is now an opportunity for “transformational change”. Our recent blog Empowering teachers and schools highlighted a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) which 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 image at the head of this article is from the official X feed of the Beyond Ofsted inquiry.
