To think criticisms of the new Ofsted ratings are self-serving?

🤔 Education massively improved under the Labour government of 97-10.

Thewholeplaceglitters

Do you remember when the education minster said that the majority of schools should be better than average?

A statistical impossibility, yet this is what schools and teachers have to deal with.

Schools absolutely need to be accountable. They get public money and are responsible for children. They do a really crucial job and accountability within that (as well as a continued drive to improve) is key.

However, a system which is more likely to hand ‘outstanding’ judgements to schools in wealthy catchments is heavily flawed. As is the current system of coming in, making a judgement then disappearing. It doesn’t help schools improve and the judgements create competition between schools which is unhealthy and unhelpful. All schools should be good. Inspections should focus on safeguarding being effective, then on what a school does well and where it can improve. Single word judgements (however many of them there are) and colour coding are unnecessary.

I don't think anyone disputes that safeguarding is incredibly important, which is why shoving it in with Ofsted every 4 years and tying it to an incredibly high stakes outcome is really, really unhelpful.

But the system that contributed to Ruth Perry's suicide was inhumane. Cruel. And if there is any doubt about this, it should be remembered that when the inadequate Ofsted report was published, it noted that the leadership had changed since the report due to the death of the headteacher and then went on to talk about breakfast club.

Excellent post

I don't see why teaching should be treated any differently, or more leniently. Like for any other area of management, if the oversight part is causing stress that's having an effect on your mental health, then perhaps it's not for you. I can't imagine a governor of a prison saying they shouldn't be inspected because they find it too stressful

Somethings that you may not know or care about ofsted.

when it took over from HMI it was about ranking schools not about helping them improve.
It has changed its criteria many times, often to the detriment of the education system.
It changed satisfactory to requires improvement, suddenly ok was not ok.
At one point the majority of inspectors knew nothing about education and were from outside of the education sector.
At one point it cared more about the paperwork than the actual school, it was possible to get outstanding by proving the paperwork alone.
It has changed from a five day visit to a 2 day visit to a five day visit (if the grading was likely to change)
It has never been an independent inspectorate.
It was used to push schools into becoming academies.
It used to grade individual teachers on one lesson, one lesson in five years could determine your grade as a teacher.
Your school can and is graded on what 11 - 16 yr olds think of it.
Schools can lose marks for pupil's having poor attendance.

Just as the final kicker,
Ofsted failed its own inspection

100%

Children's Social Care (literally inspected by Ofsted), Adult Services, Police Force, Fire Service, Ambulance Service..

I’ll have a look. I don’t think it was reasonable at all Giraffe. But I have also worked in a school that had a slipshod approach to safeguarding and that had equally tragic and life changing consequences.

I used to work in school improvement. I was sent into schools deemed by OFSTED to be failing so repeatedly saw the aftermath of poor inspections. In some cases harsh judgments were fair. But was wasn’t fair was that the organisation that claimed to raise standards did absolutely nothing to raise standards and, as previously mentioned, the consequences of their judgment made the job of actually improving things so much harder.
In some cases the judgement was unfair but there is no contextual nuance. Inspections don’t take account of highly complex contexts and account for the impact of factors known to affect outcomes such as prosperity, parental education level, ethnicity etc. They reward schools for being lucky with their intake.
This doesn’t mean that school inspections are wrong. But OFSTED has failed for decades and should be abolished.
A new organisation that is capable of raising standards and remains responsible for schools until standards have been raised would be a start. It’s very easy to pass judgement. The challenge is in improving things. That is what raises standards and improves lives.
Additionally, OFSTED has eroded trust. I cannot believe that parents still read and give any credence to OFSTED reports. Sensible parents would totally ignore the reports and go and visit the school and make up your own mind. An OFSTED report we’ll likely be no less flawed than your own opinion.

You need to look into what happened and what changes have been made since then to prevent it from happening again if you think that what happened to Ruth Perry was entirely reasonable.

The coroner's report was damning.

Any regulated industry has unannounced audits with very public consequences.

I don't see why teaching should be treated any differently, or more leniently. Like for any other area of management, if the oversight part is causing stress that's having an effect on your mental health, then perhaps it's not for you. I can't imagine a governor of a prison saying they shouldn't be inspected because they find it too stressful.

Yes, there may be a tricky child which throws a curve ball.

It's got nothing to do with a 'tricky' child throwing a curve ball. Tell me you know nothing about schools without telling me you know nothing about schools...

The aim of inspections should be to help and improve schools. Otherwise what is the point of them? 30,000 people quit teaching last year. Do you think that saying 'Suck it up or recognise that maybe it's not for you' is going to cut it? It's not about being lenient. It's about seriously considering the purpose of the inspections and the effect they actually have on schools.

Putting schools in competition with each other is not healthy either. Imo schools should go back into local authority control, with local teams working in close partnership with their local school and supporting them to make improvements.

The original inspectorate report isn’t available from the school Ruth Perry was headteacher at but I do remember there were some pretty damning failings, including staff not having relevant DBS checks.

I am genuinely sorry she felt so desperate and it’s awful. The problem is we can’t not hold people accountable because it might trigger mental health problems, including severe ones.

I have often felt that it is unfair to name social workers who made the wrong decisions about children who are subsequently seriously harmed or killed but that continues to happen.

External inspections are the norm in most spheres of work which involves the public. Schools, hospital, prisons, every single restaurant or cafe, care homes. Others have mentioned financial regulators, police inspections, fire inspections etc.

Most have a published report.

Most are very stressful for those involved , and where the judgement is poor, can be career ending/impacting.

I don't see why teaching should be treated any differently, or more leniently. Like for any other area of management, if the oversight part is causing stress that's having an effect on your mental health, then perhaps it's not for you. I can't imagine a governor of a prison saying they shouldn't be inspected because they find it too stressful.

Yes, there may be a tricky child which throws a curve ball. Equally, a difficult prisoner, or patient, or unexpectedly vomiting customer! If the problem is that Ofsted seem to want perfection irrespective of what is going on, then that needs dealing with (the same as for any other inspection type), but as a parent I want external oversight, and I want to be able to read the published report, just like I could with my local hospital, or prison.

Yes i agree, it's pretty much the same. We have OFSTED looming, we have been given loads of extra work but TBH it's stuff that should be done anyway, it's good to be assessed to keep us on our toes, its easy to let things slide, its kids futures in our hands, and we dont want education going down the pan again as it did when Labour was last in.

JandamiHash · Today 19:45

I find it a bit alarming how so many people would happily seem to have a reduced or non existent inspection process

I find it a bit alarming to hear people make proclamations about how schools should be run and inspected when they know absolutely sod all about the reality of the situation in schools.

Also, these people rarely think beyond the result of the inspection. They just seem to assume that inspections are inherently helpful, because they believe that 'requires improvement' means that improvement will be achieved, that the school will be sorted out. In reality, a bad Ofsted report is just as likely to lead to falling rolls and even poorer recruitment and retention of teachers than is normal at the moment. How is that going to help students?

Sorry should have been a bit clearer.

Nobody on this thread but I’ve met people who feel it is pointless, or they want a softly softly approach (I used to work with child protection services) there was always a lot of pushback from many people about inspections. And always attempts to paint a better picture than it was. The desperation to avoid accountability in public services IME is rife and inspectorates have to have what might seem nonsensical or “fault seeking” methods but that because these services have too many piss takers and when you work with children it’s not acceptable

I find it a bit alarming how so many people would happily seem to have a reduced or non existent inspection process

Where ?
Which people ?
Certainly no-one on this thread, and no teacher, TA, Nursery Practioner, FE staff, or indeed parent I have ever met.

Who are these people who are supposed to have said this @JandamiHash ?

Exactly

There was an inquiry and the outcome was the Ofsted contributed to Ruth Perry's suicide.

If you read all the details, it was abundantly clear what was inside her head because she talked about it and wrote about it.

Absolutely this. The new version does nothing helpful.

Now I don’t know a great deal about Ruth Perry’s life but as a general rule I do not like it when the narrative is “X died by suicide and the reason is Y”. We don’t know what other factors were at play - or rather we have a very limited knowledge because nobody was inside their head. But blame is always attributed and I thinks it’s SO unfair to point and say “You! Your fault…I think”. Same happened with Caroline Flack. People who weren’t terribly impressed that she assaulted her boyfriend, and spoke out about DV in a different way to what we’re used to, got the blame. When actually even watching that documentary painted a picture along a woman who’d been troubled her whole life

Yes?

No one has said they want a non-existent inspection process.