If relationships between Ofsted and schools are already frayed, then we may officially be about to reach the end of the rope. Headteachers are now threatening to quit as part-time inspectors unless Ofsted delays and revises its changes to how schools and colleges are graded in England. Ofsted relies on around 900 part-time inspectors, who are mostly serving headteachers and senior leaders, to assist its 300 officers in carrying out thousands of inspections each year.
The new Ofsted ‘report card’, set to be brought in this September, is a rushed botch job which promises semantic tweaks rather than actual reform. Ofsted was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this achieves the exact opposite. Rather than a single-word judgement, schools will now be graded on nine areas, with each being ranked as either causing concern, attention needed, secure, strong, or exemplary. By broadening the assessment criteria, the process will become more complex, more onerous, more demanding: once again, schools must demonstrate more and more with less and less time.
By taking away academies’ freedoms, Labour is embodying the worst of the Left
Currently, inspectors are usually only in schools for one or two days, which is nowhere near enough time to make a trustworthy, holistic and contextualised judgement about a school. Before 2005, inspectors were there for at least a week, in teams of up to fifteen people; now, on average, there are around four.
Reforming Ofsted was one of Labour’s key manifesto promises, and it’s easy to see why the government is reluctant to make yet another U-turn. Yet steamrollering ahead with these proposals would be a disaster: not just for teacher workload and our worrying teacher recruitment crisis, but also for the government itself. Why? Because it perpetuates this (ever-more-credible) narrative that Labour cannot be trusted with schools.
Education was one of the few success stories that Labour inherited. Schools face significant challenges, but in the last decade England had climbed up international league tables, was ranked fourth in the world for reading, and boasted 86 per cent of schools ranked as either ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’, an increase of 18 percent. Yet rather than capitalise on this positive momentum, Labour has made a series of increasingly incoherent decisions that seem to validate their critics’ accusations that they prioritise ideology over pragmatism.
For example, take the clumsy top-down directives, like the decision to cut the Latin Excellence Programme mid-year, or the indecision around whether to cut funding for BTECs. Then there’s the state over-reach, like limiting branded uniform items or mandating free breakfasts and tooth-brushing lessons for all primary school pupils. Labour has also continually promised to prioritise diversifying the curriculum and making it more ‘accessible’ when teachers across the land are screaming instead to look at more urgent issues like attendance and struggling staff levels.
With the teacher shortage now at crisis point, an ambitious recruitment drive would have been an open goal for Labour. Yet where are the promised 6,500 extra teachers the government said they would recruit using the money raised by adding VAT to private school fees? Of course, this was never going to happen overnight, but we are almost a year into Keir Starmer’s time in office and we still have no idea how Labour plan to reach such a pitifully small target (last year, 13,000 fewer teachers were hired than required, and each year 40,000 teachers leave the profession).
In fact, Labour may have actually made the situation worse, as Bridget Phillipson wants to change the law so that all teachers have, or are working towards, qualified teacher status (QTS). We need to protect against cheap, exploited labour, but this new stipulation may discourage outstanding outsiders from joining the profession (especially career-changers looking to make a move later in life). QTS is also no gold-plated guarantee of good teaching, and the last thing schools need is more barriers to entry.
There is also the thinly-veiled vendetta against academies. By taking away academies’ freedoms (such as not being constrained by the national curriculum or being able to set their own pay scales), Labour is embodying the worst of the Left: its tendency towards command-and-control, justifying centralising everything in the name of ‘fairness’.
I am a floating voter, and last summer I was genuinely hopeful that a new government may bring a new sense of focus and direction for schools: the revolving door of education secretaries (seven in four years) had left the sector with a feeling of inertia and malaise, a yearning for a new education ‘champion’. Yet Phillipson’s determination to fix everything that isn’t broken – and yet ignore a crucial part of the system that is (Ofsted) – is yet another timely reminder that we should be careful what we wish for.
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