If your child's school is OFSTED rated "outstanding"...

[Dacadactyl]

can you see why OFSTED have rated it so? Are you and your children happy with the school?

I've just seen some stuff on here that's made me wonder about it (high staff turnover in some schools, poor behaviour etc) because it is not my experience of the schools my children attend.

Is my experience of having kids in these schools typical, or do some of you dislike your child's "outstanding school"? And why?

Also, if you are a teacher at an "outstanding " school, are you happy teaching there?

My 2 oldest went to ‘outstanding’ primary which has just been downgraded to ‘good’. My youngest goes there and it is still as amazing as it always was. Great teachers and was brilliant with my SEN child and also my academic child. Apart from great staff (which tend to stay as they are well supported) parent input is key. If you have a school where parents are actively involved in their children, it bodes well. Not only is the fundraising beneficial but we always have a rota for helpers for group reading/ swimming/craft mornings etc. A lot of the time nice parents equal nice kids (not always but often).

The OFSTED framework has changed, so grading criteria has changed

My DDs school was outstanding. It hadn’t been inspected for a decade. In that time they had a change of head, SENCO left and wasn’t replaced for ages and various other issues.
In hindsight, I’d go for a good school striving to improve than an outstanding one that is resting on its laurels.

DD is at an outstanding school (it's been outstanding for ten years). DS went to a "good" school. You can certainly tell the difference - better communication with parents at DD's school and it just seems better run. Very happy with it.

Outstanding primary. Head is good. School is nurturing. It's great at helping less academic kids, but doesn't seem to stretch those that are at the top end of classes.

Agree! A whole lot can change in 12 years!!

I agree with Ofsted that my children's secondary school is Outstanding. It's not perfect of course and there is the occasional niggle but overall there is a very high standard of teaching, lots of extracurricular activities, very good pastoral care, and on the odd occasion I have needed to raise a concern it's been very quickly and effectively dealt with. The received wisdom locally however is that it is a great school for bright kids but that the provision for less academically able children isn't great. It's non selective, but the local demographics mean it's kind of self selecting and i think it's probably quite a nice school to teach in. I've always taken the great results with a pinch of salt, assuming that the bulk of the intake are bright anyway so it's relatively easy for the teachers to get good results from them. And to a degree it's true, but on one afternoon when I was very bored I read all the details on the government website about our school and all the others in our area and actually the data suggests that the demographics aren't quite as different as I imagined and the group of children designated as those with the lowest achievement on admission make extremely good progress, well above the local and national average. So on this occasion, yes, I think Ofsted has got it right and the standard of teaching is genuinely excellent.
However, I always felt that our village primary school was absolutely off the scale brilliant, but it never managed more than a Good from Ofsted. Part of that is because the wonderful Head was not someone who puts much store by Ofsted and was a bit unconventional but it's also because the inspecting system seems to be set up for bigger schools. For example the attainment at SATs in a school which typically has 4-10 pupils in year 6 is going to be far more heavily influenced by the ability of individual children and reflect the teaching standards less accurately than in say a 2 form entry primary.
So Ofsted certainly doesn't tell the whole story. I do think the reports are useful though, but you need to read the whole thing, not just look at the headlines and to combine with other sources of information.

My DS school is rated outstanding. Last inspected 9 years ago with a different head. Although the current head was deputy then. The school is still local authority so I've had to get them involved for major safeguarding issues relating to my child.
I can't stand the hand, he is awful. The children given good enough work. They had no pegs in any classroom and coats are thrown under tables. So so many issues. I'm looking at other schools currenfly

The reason im asking is because it could well be that not every child is making the same amount of progress as mine in their outstanding schools, or that big problems are occurring and being overlooked etc

so why and what are you asking? Why do you care about other people’s children ( daily mail)

A couple of years ago, when my then school was rated outstanding, most of the staff resigned, including me

We were living in a ar zone - knives, attack dogs, drugs, etc. I couldn't collect my toddler from the on site nursery one day because of police incident tape. ANother day myself and another teacher deterred a knife attack on the head by getting out our phones and filming the boy with the knife, who backed off when he saw us. I could go on, and list 10 or so extremely violent incidents, even a gun.

The slt did nothing except spin the schools reputation. I once even saw the head tell the police to get the scene of crime tape out of the school entrance after a stabbing, because it wasn't the right look. A stabbed boy ws expelled and the expulsion back dated to the day before, so SLT could claim the victim was not associated with the school

We naively assumed OFSTED would help us and force some changes - but they were well and truly taken in. They graded us outstanding, and most of us resigned

When I first started teaching, I worked in a school that was graded outstanding and it was well and truly the worst school I had ever set foot in. The SLT were awful and were focused on making sure the school appeared outstanding rather than supporting staff in ensuring the children were making good progress. They pulled the wool over Ofsted's eyes. The school I work at now is far superior but is rated 'good.' I would take any Ofsted report with a pinch of salt and won't be using them to decide which school to send my child to.

I'm asking whether parents on here whose kids are at outstanding schools generally like the school and can see why it's graded as such. I wonder whether my experience is typical in that I think the schools are great too.

I suppose i also wanted to get a feel for (having read some horror stories on here) whether teachers are being spat on, assaulted and lessons being disrupted in outstanding schools too? It just wouldn't happen in DDs school without some serious consequences for the perpetrator.

I dont particularly care about other people's children, certainly not as much as my own. But I do think it's a crime that not every child is being educated to the level that mine are, in the happy and calm environments that mine are. Not sure why you think asking about it means I'm the Daily Mail?

Eldest is at long standing secondary school - I think since 2000s. I can see why it's outstanding. It's a comp in a mixed area but gets consistently high results, great extra curriculum and excellent SEN support (my daughter has ASC). They recently did a parent survey and broadly parents were very happy but they produced an action plan for those areas where they felt they had development. Being open about challenges is a sign of a good school.

I moved my kids from the local outstanding primary during the pandemic - bullying head who lied about provision during the pandemic. I subsequently found out that they were very selective about the kids with Sen that they took on so they could have a less challenging intake. Staff terrified but turned it on for ofsted

I’m pretty happy. I’m an ex senior teacher and I’m well aware of how dire the funding crisis is, so I think in light of how significant the budget cuts have been (almost 100k for our small school) they are doing an outstanding job.
They are due ofsted at some point soon and haven’t been inspected for over a decade. I think it’s likely they’ll be downgraded. They’ve had a number of children with very very significant additional needs who have since moved on to special schools locally. One of my own children should really be in SEN provision but almost certainly won’t end up there. In my experience ofsted aren’t very good at considering the impact of SEN on data and progress data. We also have a fair few ‘wealthy’ families who live in tiny flats and had a very hard pandemic. Again, there is no measure of that. Another reason they’ll probably be downgraded is that their absence rate is too high. Likely down to have pollution rates at the worst the scale goes and so many asthmatic children.

I have taught in “outstanding” schools that lie and/or emotionally abuse less able children in an attempt to get results (I left very quickly after making a complaint about a more senior teacher bullying children, now I think I’d tell the parents). I’ve also taught in schools at a ‘needs improvement’ school where I would happily send my children. They had lots of overseas teachers who just didn’t ‘play the game’ but were amazing with very vulnerable children none of whom spoke English on entry. Very high mobility.

All in all, I view ofsted ratings as largely irrelevant and just feel for teachers still being subject to this system.

This is so true.

Dd used to go to an outstanding school, but it was in a great area where parents wanted to be involved in the school and in their children’s education. It was a great place because of that. The school community was fantastic, lots of movie nights, things like that for the families.

We then had to move across the county, dd is now in a completely opposite, failing school. There’s no PTA, the parents here are usually fighting outside the gates and smoking weed. The school will never be good or outstanding because of the shithole it’s in. In the heads words when I naively asked about PTA when we joined were, “most parents think the school is out to get them.”

But there are outstanding schools in shit areas with mainly deprived cohorts.

While I totally understand that motivated parents make it easier for schools, I'm also wondering how they still manage to accelerate progress and deal with bad behaviour in ways that other schools dont?

The quick answer is that there is a huge amount of variation within each ‘Ofsted grade’ band - and equally, there will be variation between the experiences of different pupils / families within a single school.

There is, at least in the last iteration of Ofsted inspection standards, a very strong inverse correlation between Ofsted grades and % of children on Pupil Premium. If a school has low PP - either because it is selective in some way, or because it is in a more economically prosperous area - it us MUCH more likely to also have an Outstanding grade. Equally, a very high %PP is very strongly correlated with RI/Special Measures.

It will be interesting to see how the latest inspection criteria, as well as the re-inspection of historic Outstanding schools and the explicit agenda to decrease the overall % of schools rated Outstanding, affect this correlation. At least the weakening of the link between raw attainment and Ofsted grade in the new criteria increases the focus on teaching / progress rather than eg getting good results through covert or overt selection.

@cantkeepawayforever thank you. DDs school is selective to some degree, in that it is a Church school. However the number of pupils for whom the school receives PP funding is in line with the national average.

The proportion of children with SEN is above the national average.

The advantage many Outstanding schools have - over and above their on average more socio-economically advantaged intakes - is that they tend to have more engaged and more supportive parent bodies, who may well have sought out and applied to the area / school on the basis of the Ofsted grade.

This means that, for example, they are (on average) more likely to have parents who support homework, read with their child, support disciplinary action, see education as important, have high aspirations. So there is - and again I stress this is on average - over time a positive spiral, where the grade itself attracts a group of children and their families who are more likely to do things that maintain its Outstanding status.

Interestingly, I know no ‘historical Outstanding’ schools that have maintained their grade on recent re-inspection, and instead have been graded ‘Good’ - which seems from the perspective of an interested educational observer pretty fair, as in general those schools inspected under very old and less stringent criteria seemed extremely similar to those regularly inspected ‘good’ schools serving similar areas.

I would support, btw, à simplifying of the Ofsted gradings to simply ‘Meets standard’ and ‘Requires improvement’. The narrative of inspections already contains details of which areas a school does well, and where they could improve, and could also identify whether these areas are urgent, or whether eg a school’s practice in an area is potentially an exemplar fir other schools to learn from.

My child’s outstanding school has a very strong SLT with emphasis on bringing all the children up in core subjects. From what I understand this is not standard across all schools in my area.

There is a massive high school near me, in a deprived area, that was reinspected at end of 2021 and maintained its outstanding grade which was given 8 years prior, I think. Not sure whether that was before the framework changed though.

Two high schools near me have retained outstanding ratings recently. Both inspected last term for the first time in a decade

OP, I would, in all honesty, wait to see what happens on reinspection. Your school’s report is so old as to be essentially meaningless - think about how old the Y6s whose results informed that judgement now are! I am glad that you are happy with your school and the way it is run - is this true of all parents, including those of the most highly SEN pupils? And how do parents who have been excluded by any Church attendance criteria- often unintentionally (or intentionally) biased against children from more chaotic families, migrants, families who speak languages other than English, or from families with 1 or more child with SEN that affects behaviour, families who rely on 3 or 4 jobs, families within which there is substance abuse etc etc - feel about the school? How many of those who live around the school cannot attend it due to the Church selection?

My sons school is outstanding and it is amazing, happy kids, happy staff, happy parents.

@cantkeepawayforever that's what I'm trying to find out on here really. An earlier poster said that her kids school was lovely in lots of ways, but for her SEN child, it wasn't.

From my perspective, baeed on my children, they truly are at outstanding schools and they thrive at them. OFSTED could say whatever they wanted and it wouldn't matter to me, because for MY kids they are great schools. However, according to OFSTED, SEN children perform exceptionally well.

There is no Church attendance criteria, the children just have to be baptised.