OFSTED – REBIRTH OR RELAPSE
Its been a rather torrid year for Ofsted. The suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, which the Coroner’s report said Ofsted had contributed to, opened the floodgates of smouldering resentment It was accompanied with a flurry of reports critical of Ofsted and its work. The independent learning review said that Ofsted appeared to be defensive and complacent after Ruth Perry’s death, was critical of the Ofsted Board and governance and of the pressure on inspectors to ‘chase volume at the expense of inspection quality’. The Select Committee’s on Ofsted reported that in relation to the perception of teachers ‘Ofsted has lost trust and credibility among many in the teaching profession’.
The NEA commissioned report ‘Beyond Ofsted’ highlighted the negative view most teachers have of Ofsted with a common perception that Ofsted is an ‘interrogative, destructive process and a political tool’, designed to evaluate schools not to improve standards in education, but to fulfil a political purpose. This report was critical of Ofsted’s impact, schools in disadvantaged schools being much more likely to have a negative report, and, more fundamentally, in the assumptions which direct its practice, Ofsted identifies what it sees as effective practice and disseminates this to inspectors and schools. Schools prepare for inspections by ensuring that Ofsted sees what it wants to see even if this is not its usual practice. This does not necessarily produce improvement, does not allow for any debate and discussion as to what effective learning is but creates a context in which schools and inspectors are complicit in creating an illusion the aim of which for the school is not a dialogue aimed at school improvement but in achieving a badge of excellence to support marketing.
In an attempt to head off the growing tsunami of criticism which was threatening to destroy the last vestiges of legitimacy the inspectorate had amongst the teaching profession Ofsted, started its ‘big conversation’ with interested parties and on the back of this introduced yet another revision of its framework and practices. These have been, in general, been well received but do they provide the basis for the fundamental change in Ofsted as driver for school improvement teachers are calling for and will it enable Ofsted to regain its legitimacy amongst the teaching profession?
The much praised decision to finish the single overall grading will certainly help in reducing simplistic comparisons between schools but Ofsted will still grade the four sub-judgements and schools will continue to be put into a category of concern if any judgement is inadequate. Pausing the inspection where there are safeguarding issues giving schools time to rectify these before completing the inspection will help to end the process of automatically failing schools who fall foul of the increasingly complex safeguarding regulations. The inspection of safeguarding has always been a contentious area for Ofsted and has always run the risk of becoming a bureaucratic exercise in checking policies and procedural issues. The time constrained inspection of safeguarding requires a more extensive and detailed review. In ungraded inspections ‘deep dives’ into individual subjects will be replaced by investigations of groups of subjects which may be welcomed by many although it should be remembered that one of the more positive moves in recent Ofsted revision was a move away from an exclusive concern with literacy and numeracy and a more detailed review of other individual subjects. Any move away from this and back a narrow inspection curriculum focus is to be regretted. Schools will now receive notice of inspection on Monday which means there will be an extra 2 days a week when schools do not have to dread the phone call. This is to ‘reduce stress and anxiety’, itself a recognition of the damage Ofsted does to teacher wellbeing.
The changes in Ofsted are the latest episode in the long history of revisions and additions to the Ofsted framework. These have either been politically motivated or in response to criticism and serious concerns. What has not happened is a thorough rethink about what inspection is for, what school improvement means, how improvement comes about and how it can be measured and how the UK can align itself with most many other educational systems in giving a significant role to self-evaluation. The political forces which have forced schools to embrace a sometimes ruthless marketisation, have marginalised teacher professionalism and deformed evaluation and improvement into a system of accountability designed to support the market value of the successful and victimise those who do not conform to Ofsted and their political masters current view of what success is. We may thank Ofsted for removing some unacceptable features of inspection but unless we engage in a fundamental discussion about evaluation and improvement and the role of professionals, we will inevitably be in the future discussing Ofsted’s relapse into an unacceptable and destructive regime.