In defence of Ofsted

When it comes to Ofsted, people often like to trot out the old adage that ‘you don’t grow a pig by weighing it.’ Others might rebuttal that you grow the pig by measuring its progress and making necessary adjustments to its diet, hence the need for inspections. However, a new report by Beyond Ofsted, an National Education Union-funded inquiry, is now suggesting that the pig will grow best if we allow it to self-evaluate its weight instead. 

There is no doubt that radical reform is needed. Trust between schools and Ofsted has completely broken down; too many schools operate in a culture of fear because inspections have become more punitive than supportive; the current process demoralises teachers, who are already in worryingly short supply and are leaving in droves; meanwhile the fate of a school can hinge on a subjective, single-word judgement that is rarely a meaningful representation of reality for parents. This toxic relationship came to a head last year when a headteacher took her own life after being told that Ofsted would downgrade her primary from Outstanding to Inadequate; many (wrongly) held Ofsted responsible for her death, and the tragedy became a lightning rod for the intense anger in the teaching profession around the unnecessary stress Ofsted causes.

The Beyond Ofsted report has many sensible suggestions and addresses most of these concerns. It talks about the need for a system that develops teachers’ expertise rather than focusing on compliance; the need for an inspectorate that is fully independent of government, and therefore does not have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous political whims; and the need for a more nuanced report card rather than a headline judgement. 

Yet its recommendations are not so much about adapting Ofsted than sidelining it altogether. The report suggests that each school should conduct its own self-evaluation, so that ‘accountability will be principally to parents and the wider community.’ Safeguarding audits will be conducted annually by a separate body, and eventually the local authority (although I am not sure how they are expected to have the time, money or resources to do this). The report then concludes that Ofsted should be ‘removed from direct contact with schools and reformed to operate at the level of school group-level governance’. They also suggest an ‘immediate pause to routine inspections’, although parents and governing bodies can still request one if concerns are raised.

There are two key problems with this proposal. The first is that not all parents and communities are engaged with their local schools, and willing or able to hold them accountable. Schools in wealthy areas with well-educated, heavily-involved parents may well be held to high standards, but what about schools like my Teach First one, where I was lucky if I got 50 per cent turnout at parents’ evening? This proposal vastly overestimates how much choice parents have over where they send their children to school, and how invested they are in the result. Parents in England can select up to six secondary schools when applying in Year 6, and yet research suggests that 35 per cent of families name just one school; for white British families, this goes up to 41 per cent. This will partly be down to indifference, but also realisation that parental choice is a myth: the best schools are vastly oversubscribed, and ultimately state school places are assigned by catchment areas and a postcode lottery which means that the best schools are often in affluent areas anyway.

The second problem is that – whisper it – Ofsted needs more time in schools, not less. Currently, inspectors are only in schools for one or two days; before 2005, they were there for at least a week. Schools normally only get a day’s notice; before 2005 they got two months’. Previously six or seven inspectors would visit a school, whereas now it may only be one or two. Over the years, Ofsted has also moved away from its core evaluation of teaching and academic rigour and now makes critical judgements in dozens of peripheral areas where expectations are ever higher. All this means in practice is that schools have to demonstrate more and more with less and less time, which inevitably reduces something which should be holistic and contextualised into a mere tick-box, regulatory exercise.

There is no doubt that we need to re-evaluate Ofsted’s role, which has become less about rigour and more about over-reaching. Ofsted was initially established to provide independent judgements to assist leaders, governors and teachers in determining priorities for development, and it was up to schools to consider the inspection findings. Nowadays this limited but valuable purpose has been corrupted and overblown, but I do not believe we should disregard the value of its original intention. Schools need to be held accountable, but parents do not have the power to do this if they cannot actually decide where their children go to school. We may not want Ofsted, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need it.