Amanda Spielman, former Ofsted chief inspector, is set to become a Conservative peer. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is elevating Spielman – who served as head of Ofsted between 2017 and 2023 – to the House of Lords for her outstanding record in improving school standards.
Spielman’s peerage is richly deserved. She helped ensure that Tory education reforms, which saw the share of children in Good or Outstanding schools rise from 66 per cent to 86 per cent between 2010 and 2018, were maintained.
Throughout her tenure, Spielman’s enduring focus was on the curriculum. Too often, as she outlined early in her time at Ofsted, teachers were leaving pupils ‘with a hollowed out and flimsy understanding’. Spielman wanted schools to return to first principles: to focus on what they wanted to achieve and what the basic requirements of this were.
To put this into place, Spielman spearheaded a new education inspection framework that shifted the focus from abstract metrics to a closer assessment of the concrete substance of education, curriculum breadth, and teacher involvement. Despite the Covid pandemic – which saw her term extended two years to allow her to oversee the new regime’s rollout – standards continued to rise.
As well as promoting a knowledge-rich curriculum, Spielman also applied her tenaciousness to often-overlooked areas, such as children being failed by poor-quality home-schooling, and whether religious schools were not preparing their pupils properly for Britain in the 21st century. A mathematician by background, she was resolutely data-led.
Since leaving the role, Spielman has criticised Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson for dismantling school freedoms and her closeness to the education unions. Despite ‘little evidence that micro-managing individual school improvement from the centre of government is effective’, she argues, Phillipson’s policies aim to ‘cut the autonomy of schools…right back’ despite it clearly being ‘a contributor to system success’.
As Badenoch ‘wants serious people who know how things work so they can make a real contribution to the House of Lords’, as one senior Tory put it to me, Spielman’s elevation is a no-brainer. She ‘is a brilliant thinker with a wealth of knowledge’. She ‘will be a huge asset to Parliament’.
Yet her elevation is likely to be controversial. Throughout her tenure, Spielman found herself a target for union criticism. Her appointment was opposed on the grounds that she lacked experience – despite her being a founding member of the successful Ark Schools multi-academy trust, and having served as Head of Ofqual, the exams regulator, for five years.
Sadly, the last year of Spielman’s tenure was overshadowed by the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry. Perry killed herself while waiting for an Ofsted report downgrading her school from outstanding to inadequate. Education unions called for inspections to be halted, which Spielman rejected. A coroner’s inquest ruled the inspection played a role in Perry’s death.
But this appalling tragedy should not overshadow Spielman’s long record of public service. It should not be weaponised by those with a long-standing opposition desire to see inspections watered down. Avoiding tough conversation cannot be put ahead of improving our schools. Yet one fears Phillipson is doing exactly that by replacing Ofsted’s one-word judgements with a nebulous new ‘report-card’.
In opposing Labour’s regressive agenda, Spielman is showing the same unwavering commitment to improving our schools that has defined her career for two decades. Her elevation to the Lords is not only a boon for a Conservative party low on talent, but a long-overdue recognition of a determined public servant, and a victory for anyone who wants England’s schools to be the best in the world.
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