First headteacher refuses to be Ofsteded in boycott

[noblegiraffe]

There has been talk on twitter over the weekend of a boycott of Ofsted in protest at its ridiculous system of stressful high-stakes inspections and public shaming, following the suicide of a headteacher in January after her outstanding primary was downgraded to inadequate.

This morning the first brave headteacher has put her head above the parapet. Ofsted called to notify of an inspection tomorrow and the head said no.

twitter.com/florascooper/status/1637760884243066881?s=46&t=vKGM6xpoeW3wdlaVVVagQA

She is calling for people to come to the school tomorrow morning to support the boycott (details on twitter).

I hope this becomes the catalyst for a serious review and reform of the inspection system.

Is there any evidence that it's false?

Flossing / playground scrap was definitely from the family

Yes, that was my own impression but I didn't want to assume

In the same way I don't want to assume anything about just how much objectivity the family can manage while going through a tragedy - as said, it'll doubtless all be considered at the inquest

I genuinely don’t know, @cantkeepawayforever . I’m guessing only OFSTED know.

But it doesn’t seem to me to be a minor point of no real concern, tbh. I’m obviously not claiming the member of staff in question was up to anything untoward when overseas , but the point is that they could have been. Background checks are pretty paramount no matter where somebody has been.

HTs have next to no accountability. Refusing to allow OFSTED entry removes probably the only way they can currently be held to account.

A headteacher is dead, and Ofsted, whose report likely contributed to that death dropped a note about that death into that same report, above a line above breakfast clubs.

I don't think headteachers objecting to Ofsted here are 'using someone else's grief' to try to dodge accountability or point score, as you seem to be suggesting.

I think they are rightly fucking outraged.

And I think that it is pretty clear that this head's initial refusal wasn't some cynical and calculated political manoeuvring, given how it panned out.

The newsletter on the school website got me. Said it had been a tough week in the wake of the ‘historical Ofsted report’ being released. No mention of the deceased but that they were working on the points mentioned and concerns from the report.

Now I know there was a safeguarding concern in the report, but it depends on the context etc. I haven’t read the report, I got as far as the line where they mention her death and got upset at the fact they hadn’t publicly responded to it (at that point! This was Saturday) and decided not to go further. From what I can gather the deceased has been head there for a number of years and was well respected.

In my 13 year teaching career I have experienced 5 Ofsted inspections and all of them have been awful! My first I was hauled over the coals by the head afterwards who basically blamed me for our ‘satisfactory’ grading! (I was an NQT and barely taught because it was my NQT time) my last four inspections have been gruelling and intense and for three days solid I have worked 18 hour days, stopping only to eat, sleep and go to the toilet.

The most recent inspection was my first with a child of my own and I didn’t see my DC for nearly 3 days!! What kind of a life is that?

Then for a team to come in and basically on everything you’ve worked hard on at the expense of a normal routine in the time it takes for the inspection is quite frankly insulting!

With safeguarding checks, leaving that to a 4 year cycle of inspections is not the way to ensure that practice is effective. It is the way to ensure that failures in systems become embedded. If the goal is accountability for heads, then the system works I suppose. If the goal is ensuring that good systems are in place, more frequent monitoring and guidance is required. A good Trust or LA should do that themselves. We have very frequent safeguarding audits and have strengthened our practice as a result. Then Ofsted is a rubber stamp on that. In our inspection we talked frankly about the improvements we'd made. However, it does rely on the Trust and LA being proactive, so I can see the argument that there should be regular safeguarding audits by a central body (for consistency), separate to the other areas of inspection. That said, personal development and PSHE are so strongly linked to safeguarding.

I think some of it is motivated by self interest, giraffe. They may well genuinely be appalled too. Only they know what the real motivation is.

But as things stand, one of the few things that can remove a corrupt or incompetent HT is a poor OFSTED. What else can? Not much.

HTs have a huge amount of power over both staff (and children, of course.) They can refuse to give references, effectively ending a career, or give a poor one (fairly or otherwise) they can coerce, force, bully. Of course, most don’t. But some do.

And some DO ignore safeguarding. I was appointed with no background checks at all, not even a cursory glance at my passport to ensure I was who I said I was. To say that could have gone badly wrong is a bit of an understatement!

OFSTED are behind a lot of toxic shit and as has been rightly pointed out they often don’t see what they really should. But barricading the doors to schools is asking for more trouble. Someone prone to being corrupt could have a field day with that!

The point is, as far as I understand it, is that all the school needed to do to be ‘compliant’ was to write a risk assessment on a piece of paper (rather than ‘be aware of it and manage the risk accordingly’, which may well have been done, just not documented).

Is the risk lowered by the documentation being on paper? No. Would the report have been different had the documentation been on paper but never referred to in practice? Yes.

The text of the report says clearly that children were not put at risk, which in Ofsted speak means ‘the risk mitigation measure was in place but not documented’. Is that really worth an automatic fail?

A good Trust or LA should do that themselves.

Was the school a stand alone MAT or a LA school or part of a wider trust? There may well be no wider Trust or LA to refer to or provide oversight - an obvious fault in the Government’s academisation programme, ie a failure of Government policy.

I think some of it is motivated by self interest, giraffe.

But if, as you seem to think, it's motivated by a desire to dodge accountability, why are HTs calling for reform rather than abolition?

Has this been posted yet, currently on BBC website

'Brutal'
Speaking to Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio 5 Livee_, one caller said her mother, who was the head of a school in Plymouth, took her own life eight years ago after an Ofsted inspection, during a week when building work was being carried out and the school was not running "normal lessons".
She said: "About two weeks later my mother took her life because the school went from outstanding to inadequate due to this inspection.
"She felt like she had let everyone down. It's ruined my life I'd just turned 18 when it happened - she's not there and she should be here - I just blame Ofsted."
She described inspections as "brutal".

"Records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor" - this is the key bit, I think. This isn't about risk assessments for staff with gaps in employment, or flossing. This is use of CPOMS (or equivalent).

Every call I have seen is for more, more frequent, light touch oversight - annual safeguarding checks, frequent supportive and collaborative visits etc.

This is not schools dodging accountability. It is saying that 4 yearly, short, high stakes, punitive inspections by non-experts, driven by Government policy, is not a suitable accountability programme for something as important as education.

is not a suitable accountability programme for something as important as education.

It's certainly not suitable for something as important as safeguarding.

I’m not a teacher, just a parent. I am 100% in support of all schools boycotting Ofsted - tbh I wondered why this wasn’t done in preference to teachers’ strikes. That and refusing to administer SATS in primary schools. Just seems to me that the problem is workload - outrageous pressure from a government agenda to document you can produce “results” In a certain way. So prone to distortion and commonly misunderstood by parents and the community.

The HT of the school in Newbury announced she wasn’t letting OFSTED in, called for people to support the school in doing this and then asked them not to show up after all. That’s not calling for reform!

The point is, as far as I understand it, is that all the school needed to do to be ‘compliant’ was to write a risk assessment on a piece of paper (rather than ‘be aware of it and manage the risk accordingly’, which may well have been done, just not documented)

Not sure, cantkeepawayforever; I agree bits of paper can be given undue weight, but a key sentence is that "Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures"

Obviously I wasn't there so won't be claiming I know what was happening, but to me that suggests rather more than just a lack of documentation

It’s called protest! Heads have been politely called for reform for decades!

It's a maintained school.

You’re wrong. I have worked in schools where 3 different Heads have been removed by the governors supported by the Local authority. It happens more than you think.

Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures

The thing is, I have seen almost identical
language used to mean ‘oops, the inspector completely mis-identified the the role of a person they saw on site and thus their role in safeguarding, and then refused to acknowledge their mistake’. So I would never feel completely confident that generalised ‘statement bank’ sentences of this type are underpinned by a strong body of robust and worrying evidence.

@Soontobe60 I’m sure, which is equally wrong if unjustified.

However, I do think we have to be mindful of the fact that governors are volunteers, and not really accountable to anybody either.

I don’t think any of the positions here are actually particularly far apart. I think we all agree OFSTED (or its equivalent) need to be reformed, even if exactly what that reform looks like is a topic on which we differ.

However I do think it is somewhat misguided for this particular case to champion suspension of OFSTED inspections. I think what’s made me so uneasy is that the trigger point for all this is safeguarding. So we have an utterly tragic situation where someone has taken their life because of an OFSTED judgement, and that OFSTED judgement was made because of safeguarding. Nothing I am about to say is trying to dismiss that tragedy. But if we go down the route of not reporting safeguarding failures or of sweeping them under the carpet with a sort of ‘well the rest is all really good’ attitude, well, it is that sort of thinking that allowed horrific abuse to go unchallenged for decades, with consequences even more devastating than this particular tragedy. I’m thinking here Bryn Estyn, Soham, the various grooming gangs around the country, etc.

Once we embrace the idea that safeguarding (or lack of it) is not to be made public, we deny abuse and that’s a very, very dangerous road to go down.

I have seen almost identical language used to mean ‘oops, the inspector completely mis-identified the the role of a person they saw on site and thus their role in safeguarding, and then refused to acknowledge their mistake’

That's obviously a disgrace, but surely it would fall under the kind of thing that can be challlenged?
This can't be done with more subjective "opinions" but it certainly can if they get actual facts wrong - for example if they mistook an NQT for a leader and so didn't get the responses they were looking for

However I do think it is somewhat misguided for this particular case to champion suspension of OFSTED inspections.

A headteacher has died.

I think quibbling over whether the Ofsted outcome was valid or not is besides the point, tbh.

I was a teacher for 15 years. I went through 5 ofsted inspections - all had outcomes of good or outstanding. All of them were brutal processes, some of the inspectors were amazing individuals who were capable, insightful and supportive others were appalling. I was lucky and was trained by some fantastic leaders to stand up to inspectors and question them which I have done repeatedly over the years, for example when refusing to allow an inspector to observe a woman who had recently lost her husband and had just been diagnosed with cancer. Incidentally, you can pull staff out of the line of fire in situations like this- the inspector implied we were hiding something and was abrasive and tried to force the situation.

I now work in a different environment, I frequently support teams to manage ‘inspection’ visits for a variety of different professional areas one of which is Ofsted. We are also audited frequently.

No other professional body inspections run in the same way as Ofsted. No others are as intrusive, brutal or as damaging. Other professionals that I work with have been shocked when they experience just how draconian Ofsted can be and when they see the implications, requirements and processes. No other area changes the goalposts so frequently and no other area produces reports that are as thin, lacking in detail and without solid, clear underpinning evidence of conclusions. Or indeed clear guidance on how to improve.

As many people have said - schools need inspections but they do not need the current Ofsted process. But parents deserve far better reports to base their decisions on. Staff need frequent effective support and continuous improvement. Pupils need to learn in an environment where their needs are always prioritised rather than schools focusing on what they think Ofsted want (which happens, perfectly understandably, all the time).