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.

Virtually all my friends are in professional roles outside teaching, where they are monitored or audited by outside organisations etc. They are all, to a man/woman, horrified by what they hear about OFSTED. Their own professional inspections/competency checks are nothing like ours, and they're appalled at the priorities and the tactics of OFSTED.

Again, teachers are not against being inspected, nor do they expect to be coaxed through an inspection.

@withgraceinmyheart the alternative would be highlighting areas of improvement and providing help and support to achieve them. Why the 'inadequate' label is needed I do not know. Would we label a child 'inadequate' and then provide no support? Absolutely not.

If schools were offered ongoing supports rather than these drastic one-off no-warning inspections it would make for far less hostility and adversity.

Totally agree.

Well it used to be that the local authorities would have inspectors who would work more closely with schools, but in the capacity of a critical friend. This would seem to be more productive, I think, and would mitigate the sense of fear that so many are reporting on the thread. I also think that 18 months is too long to wait, if there are serious concerns. I'd want to be going back to check within 6 months.

I agree with this too

Sorry to rant on here, but I outlined yesterday that I was employed by a head who didn’t take up my previous references or complete a DBS on me (not my doing - I gave the required documents in some three months before I started.) I was unsupervised with students for some three weeks before anyone realised! I could have been anyone!

I also worked for a HT who ‘promoted’ his wife from science teacher (MPS) to senior management and also employed their three sons in various roles around the school.

HTs have very little accountability. There are some shocking stories out there, and many of them are from teachers. There is very little to stop HTs from employing friends and family members - and yes, criminals, too.

OFSTED are decidedly not perfect and I am not going to claim that they are some sort of clean slate, unprejudiced presence in a school, but they are absolutely right to grade a school that could have had some very sinister characters indeed working in it inadequate. That is very worrying indeed.

A HT really, REALLY should not need ‘support’ in ‘check out this persons references and do a DBS on them’!

We have a teaching recruitment crisis and a headteacher one. Hundreds of schools are without a permanent headteacher because they can’t be recruited. Whatever you think they are paid, the stress and responsibility is too great.

That is a problem. A permanent head who needs some support, advice and guidance and a “critical friend” is far better than no head or a stream of temporary ones.

Does anyone, apart from Ofstead themselves, actually know if these inspectors have a teaching qualification and a background in teaching within a school environment?

Again, maybe I am being naive but surely a failure of safer recruitment would in the past be an LEA issue. HR and recruitment is a specialised, highly trained area of expertise which rightly should be dealt with by professionals in recruitment. Headteachers and others should be recruiting from a pool of candidates that has been sifted by HR services and meets safer recruitment standards, HTs in my min at least are not where the buck should stop for recruitment decisions - it's an HR role. Same as contracts, maintenance service contracts, health and safety inspections, no-one person has all these skills. It's an academy or LEA role to oversee these tasks and support the HT. The head teacher is there to manage learning, teaching and support staff and the wider vision for the school. Not the minutiae of all the other jobs. It's not manageable for one person to have all those skills.

I agree that it should be urgent and safeguarding failures followed up.

I don’t agree that they shouldn’t be given ‘inadequate’. Imo this the most important thing to get right.

Tbh if someone was putting my kids at risk of harm I wouldn’t want a ‘critical friend’ approach. Children die because of safeguarding failures.

It’s more complicated with foreign nationals. There isn’t a specific reference or form to get. Keeping children safe has a variety of suggestions for gaining information and it can be very, very difficult. Of course she should have followed it up. I don’t think it means she should be publicity humiliated and stressed to the point she kills herself. The system is broken if that is the only way out she saw for herself.

Would it make sense for the safeguarding to be monitored and have regular interaction with a professional body specifically set up for that in each local authority and then that LA be audited and monitored by a national body?

I'm not sure that would work out any better in the end; with bureaucracies being what they are it could easily turn into "different faces/same or worse outcome"

What seems to be preferred is inspections without the "accusatory" element, though it's hard to see how even that would work. If a school's failing in safeguarding then clearly someone's got to say it, and at that point others will join the dots and blame those with the overall responsibility

There are an awful lot of people with DBS certificates who haven’t been caught yet. Any documentation is only as good as the information printed upon it is it not?

Well yes of course - but you’re not honestly saying that the DBS process shouldn’t be adhered to?

Of course you’ll get some worrying characters in schools who have gone under the radar. But a school that hasn’t bothered to do the minimum in background checks is probably not going to have the ‘it could happen here’ attitude either.

Yes - she did do the DBS check, I understand. And then the country of origin didn't have the records. I don't know what you do after that, and yes she should have known. But there was a clean DBS check, from what I've read.

People saying that an inadequate school would be reinspected within 18 months, the original school was inadequate and hadn’t been inspected for 13 years. For how many of those years was safeguarding an issue? No one knows. Anyone bringing up Soham should be horrified that safeguarding is tied to Ofsted who come infrequently - 4 years is the normal cycle.

Teachers want reform of inspections. Safeguarding should be a yearly check. Any gaps in employment/DBS can be identified and rectified in a timely fashion, instead of being picked up 4 years later.

If the story is correct, both things were done regarding this person what she didn't do was make circle on the country that the person originally came from.

I've just employed someone who is an immigrant. I didn't check with his home country's government either. I'm going to have to check whether we should have.

When new heads are appointed, they have a lot to learn. Their local authority or Academy trust is responsible for ensuring that they have CPD. Clearly something went wrong, but it wasn't at the level of not checking references or not getting a DBS check

what she didn't do was make CHECKS IN the country that the person originally came from.
Sorry

Interesting point.

A local nursery to me got rated down to inadequate. One of the reasons was that the staff did not have adequate training or knowledge on county lines. This was not a secondary school but a nursery for up to 4 year olds!

www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/10-top-tips-reporting-suicide/

Please don’t. The fact that someone tragically ended their life can’t be reduced to a single cause.

Apart anything else, it’s pitting this persons safety against the safety of the children she was safeguarding. Both of those things matter. You can’t avoid challenging safeguarding failures because the person responsible might end their life. We need accountability.

Talking to my DD's school (recently Ofsteded) they found the process a lot more supportive than expected. I suspect it relies a lot on the individual inspector. The main focus seemed to be safeguarding (rightly so IMO).

I think it should be more cooperative and it shouldn't be so long between visits either. Especially for schools formerly outstanding, there's such a long time between inspections that there's the potential for things to go badly wrong. Maybe more frequent, more cooperative visits, backed up with resources if changes are needed, would help. Of course this would require investment in education.

The main problem is that budgets have been cut to the bone and there aren't enough staff or resources to run a school properly, at the same time as ever more ridiculous targets are set.

I wish people - not just teachers - would start standing up and saying 'these targets simply aren't achievable with the budgets we have and if you want us to safeguard properly too' - of course no-one wants to admit that, but it's true.

The scandal over sexualisation of children via RSE from outside organisations - some of which is truly horrendous and clearly falls foul of the 'abuse' definition in KCSIE - is a symptom of this: schools outsourcing things they should be doing in house.

A lot of targets also seem to be plucked out of thin air - I've never established whether the 97% attendance aim is actually evidenced based or achievable for an average child. My completely healthy child who nevertheless catches loads of bugs in school is often below that target. I really feel for those with medical conditions who simply can never hope to meet it.

All the wasted time chasing up children with attendance below the target who are just off sick and catching lots of bugs. And maybe that does affect education - but what are they doing about it? Air filtration and ventilation in schools to reduce the spread of disease? Forget it.

Can I ask what story you’ve read?

Ive only seen the report itself which identifies multiple safeguarding failures, nor one isolated incident.

www.cavershamprimary.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10242325-Caversham-Primary-Sc-109778-final-PDF.pdf