Outstanding OFSTED result.

[OfstedOhDear]

My DC school has recently been awarded outstanding following their latest OFSTED inspection.
Obviously this is brilliant, the academy chain who took over the failing school that it was have really turned it around.

I have a slight problem with it though.

On inspection day, several amazing teachers were shipped in, replacing less inspirational ones.
Because the school is a chain, several school's worth of teachers are all employed under the same umbrella, so apparently this is fine, they can move teachers around different schools.

On inspection day, my DC came home saying that it had been a fantastic day as the new teachers were so enthusiastic and brilliant at getting information across, even the more difficult children who are usually quite disruptive were listening well.

In reality, the school has a high turnover of supply teachers, they have several teachers who are as inspiring as a tea towel, some who clearly don't want to be there (and I don't blame them, I wouldn't be a teacher for £millions.)

AIBU to think that the outstanding result has been gained by being dishonest?
If every school had a bank of maybe 200 teachers to handpick the best from, isn't it likely that most schools would do well?

Like many other people have already said, the grade for teaching and learning is made up of much more than just what inspectors see teachers doing on the 1.5 days of observation. It's impossible to get an outstanding or even a good grade if the raw data for attainment isn't there, for a start. The inspectors will speak to several groups of kids away from any teachers, as well as speaking to kids in lessons, and you don't want to rely on teenagers not to dob you in about anything strange or unusual happening. The same applies to the oft-rumoured "sending the naughty kids away on field trips" that regularly comes up when Ofsted call. But it might be worth raising with Ofsted - if nothing else they can feed it into their regional intelligence and make sure that the inspectors who go into that academy chain next time know what questions to ask.

"Bussing in teachers for the day isn't going to have any impact at all on the attainment data."

So why are they doing it?

Actually, why inspect classes at all if it doesn't matter?

"So why are they doing it?"

No idea. It strikes me a such an incredibly high risk strategy that I would wonder if there's been some sort of misunderstanding. Apart from anything else, it would be a bit difficult to organise at one day's notice.......

Obviously you want the lessons OFSTED see to be as good as possible, but if the kids are saying "Hello, Mr X, we haven't seen you for AGES" and "No, we were doing castles last lesson, not Nazis" in every classroom..............