AIBU or is new Ofsted framework?

[PimmsOfCourse]

I know a few schools which were outstanding and have been downgraded to good or lower.
This is from my local rag. One of the top performing schools in the country got downgraded. It seems ridiculous. I don't have (or have had) children at this school but I am wondering why Ofsted who according to this head haven't followed their own criteria are doing this.
Ofsted downgrades Outstanding schools

I think it is ridiculous to have one grading system for all schools. Schools should be graded according to their cohort.

I don't mean poor schools should be expected in some areas but what some schools achieve is far more than their Ofsted or results seem to show.

An example I taught a young women in an FE college, she had arrived in Britain aged 14 with no English and only ever having seen a black person on TV.

She was put into the local school where white children were a minority, which is only relevant in that it must have been a huge culture shock.

At 16 she passed 10 GCSEs but failed English language, so on paper the school wasn't very good but IMHO the school and the student must have worked hard to get those grades. But that work doesn't show in any measure.

Why are they moving the goalposts so much?

If they didn't move the goalposts they went seek to exist. I guess the question is have their goalposts improved education

Ofsted is a plague in schools to be honest. Having worked in schools with grades from special measures (as was) to outstanding I can’t say there was any particular correlation between quality and grade. One outstanding school was amazing, the other verbally abused children routinely to get better written examples of work. Disgusting. The school I’d most have wanted my own children to go to was satisfactory (now would be ‘needs improvement’).

There are ever changing goal posts which seem to me to only serve to waste most of SLT’s time (I was one) and don’t benefit the teachers, support staff or most importantly the children. Ofsted inspectors should be mentors to head teachers and should be serving head teachers or only recently retired ….some have almost no teaching experience. It’s a ridiculous state of affairs.
My advice is to take any ofsted grade with an ocean of salt, meet the head teacher and staff and see if they are the kind of people you want your child to spend most of their day learning from. Anything else is a distraction from that question.

Many of the "Outstanding" secondaries around my LA have had a fall from grace at some point, usually over safeguarding/ bullying/ policy type issues. If you have the means to get a place (pay to live in catchment, play with the system for non-standard catchments) then you're probably driven to value education and to some extent the results will occur. They can be very complacent schools and brush issues under the carpet. If you're bright and get on well socially, you'll glide through but the minority needing more support get let down.

I often found that "failing" schools with catchments with complex needs functioned better. The results might not be glowing, but they put more into dealing with issues and lifting each child up. Most of those I experienced prior to 2010 have changed identity now and become swallowed up by MATs. It doesn't solve the complexities of their catchments though.

DS’s grammar school has also been downgraded to good this year. Reading the report, the only recommendation is that some of the assessments didn’t fit perfectly with the teaching which, given the chaos of the last few years is surely understandable! It’s such a shame for the teachers is it is an outstanding school.

This! They have to justify their existence and what better way than to constantly change the inspection framework?!

@BogRollBOGOF totally agree. DS moved from an outstanding primary who wouldn't believe he was being bullied, where he was near on suicidal; to a RI who nurtured, loved and supported him - and it changed his life.

@PimmsOfCourse i was surprised that you weren’t actually near me, I clicked on your link expecting to see the school local to me on it.

YANBU.

My school has recently been awarded good. The local school to me, with fantastic exam results, is apparently inadequate.

Both these judgements are ones I disagree with.