Ofsted needs to be abolished (Trigger warning)

[MrsMurphyIWish]

Watched this heartbreaking story today:

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001k4r9

A headteacher took her own life as her school was rated inadequate. The pressures Ofsted creates are immense. Last week Ofsted were on strike Wednesday so decided to break protocol and rang schools Friday to conduct inspections on Monday - some schools were off for snow but that wasn’t a good enough reasons and even if the messages were picked up, that meant school staff would have worries over the weekend - some even going into school. Then there were schools who complained as these schools were given “extra notice”. Ofsted has created such a toxic work environment.

How has it come to this? A teacher who dedicated their life to education feels that a one word judgement meant life wasn’t worth living?

My children’s school dropped to inadequate following an ofsted inspection last year. At the time, immediately post pandemic, the head had just resigned, having previously been off sick for 6 months or so with stress. The school, still reeling from the pandemic, had been being run by the deputy head, who was part time, and also supposed to be teaching a class. The reason for the ofsted inadequate was also leadership and safeguarding - lack of paperwork. Which wasn’t a surprise since there wasn’t really any leadership. What we needed was a head. But then the ofsted inadequate rating happened, and the school was told to become an academy. Which took about 9 months, during which time they couldn’t recruit for a head because it was in the interim phase. Now we are an academy, and we finally have a permanent head, and honestly? I don’t see much difference. Because there wasn’t really much wrong to start with except the paperwork. But the school has been through a year of turmoil, and has been slapped with an ‘inadequate’ rating - all in the name of improving….the paperwork.

@cantkeepawayforever , so pleased that the inspector took that into consideration, where I am getting some pupils into school is an achievement in itself , not through health issues but because of family priorities
I wish parents would look beyond their report
The worst school I worked in couldn't give a shit about the children, the head ran it like a business, staff and pupils left in droves
It got outstanding, horrible, toxic and a very unhappy environment to be

The flip side to this tragic event however is when the Ofsted report is 'Good'/'Outstanding' out rolls the bunting and banners and even more common is that families move homes to benefit from this calibre of school. There are many contributors to the whole culture of Ofsted hating/worshiping.

My dealings this month with OFSTED have left me so stressed I couldn't sleep and crying in the middle of the night to my husband that they'd all be better off with my life insurance.

It's been the worst month of my life. I hate them.

Breath it out!

I think it inspects too many things in one go.

Safeguarding is really important and best practice changes frequently so a different safeguarding thing should be in place annually as thats when kcsie changes and it should be supportive.

I'm not sure what the rest should look like.

Some very thoughtful comments on here. I agree an overall less than perfect rating makes a school the one to avoid in the area even though it might be doing a generally decent job so maybe ratings for individual areas rather than overall would help.

In my experience some of the comments made by Ofsted are nit-picking and totally unnecessary.

The key questions should be:

Is the school educating to a decent standard - do the kids achieve well compared with their abilities at entry
Is it following the law (eg safeguarding)
Is it following its own policies and procedures properly (eg anti-bullying, given so many schools seem not to be able to deal with bullying)

and as a pp said, I'd also add a category for staff wellbeing to stop some awful SMTs bullying their staff.

My son's childminder had an excellent rating. She was good, but it was quite tedious how worried she was about maintaining her rating and how she would have a go at parents if she thought we were doing anything that would affect her rating.

I posted this yesterday in staffroom - but it hasn't had the traffic. Thank you for also posting.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_staffroom/4764916-head-took-her-own-life-shared?reply=124704683

Another reason I am so glad to out of teaching, only been 12 weeks or so but my physical and mental health so much better already.

A basic check of ‘is this school, in the context of its community, providing a decent standard of education and care?’ with a brief of ‘carry on if you are’ and ‘instant access to all necessary support and development if you aren’t’ should be sufficient
Agree with this
Is this school doing the right thing for the children in its care? If that's making sure they have an amazing set of vocational options and improving literacy Vs forcing children to sit an MFL GCSE when they're struggling with English then great. If you've got a high prior attaining cohort and you're letting them twiddle their thumbs then that's not good enough.

I think Ofsted should be two grades: satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Then within unsatisfactory there'd be two judgements: one where the inspectors feel the school can improve with some lighter touch support and one like special measures where there's concerns about SLT's capacity to improve the school.

There is clearly something not quite right with the fear ofsted generates in schools. I don’t know the sector but have enough friends who are teachers to see the worry in them. But, I also think the concept of inspections and a degree of scrutiny is probably important. I don’t understand how some schools have gone over a decade without any form of inspection. That just seems to raise the stakes massively as a good chance there will be a downgrade for previously outstanding schools. So much must depend on the individual inspector/team. Our nursery manager was telling me about their last inspection and she said it was genuinely helpful and the inspector was lovely with their conversations focused on best practice in a supportive way. So, clearly some inspectors can do an inspection in a more light-touch, developmental way without creating the fear. Sadly, there seem to be lots of teachers who have experienced the opposite.

Exactly, or you could be inspected in the week before the summer holidays or the two days before Christmas. You are expected to drop your Christmas parties or whatever and make up some lessons to teach so they can be observed. My 7 year olds were expected to talk in detail, to a man they'd never met, about history lessons they'd had before the summer holidays, even though it was October. One of the children hadn't even been there for them as he'd been off himself on a term-time holiday! Their not being able to talk about it was part of the reason we went down to RI. Ofsted also wouldn't accept seeing physical evidence that something was in place (e.g. look in the children's books and see), they wanted to see a bit of paper that talked checks that had been undertaken. The whole process is bonkers.

It’s important to have some scrutiny though there needs to be a review of how and when that happens.

On the when, I know of a secondary school still dining off their outstanding ofsted from 2009. 14 years ago! There will be others in similar situation and no wonder some of these schools go from outstanding to inadequate when they haven’t been looked at by ofsted for all that time.

DDs nursery was closed by Ofsted. (8 years ago) Honestly... it was like a boiling frog situation. The parents were so used to the issues (a part of the building was unsafe, and there was paperwork issues, but the hands on staff were brilliant) that we had stopped seeing them. It reopened a month later, after some building work, a new manager and new procedures and it was miles better instantly.

If there are failures, there needs to be assistance to help them rectify not just a rating. Knowing a school is "inadequate" just scares parents rather than helps the school.

I worked in a school once where the head was in tears for 3 days straight during the inspection.

It was downgraded but only to good. The pressure is immense and it's all bollocks anyway.

In our local newspaper there was an article recently listing the "best" schools in the county. It was just schools apparently Outstanding... but many from 5+ years ago. One was local to me... it has amongst the worst Progress and GCSE results in the area.

God this is so awful - I have so much respect and admiration for teachers. What a broken system.

I like the idea of moving safeguarding paperwork check somewhere else - maybe a coordinator at the council who's sole job is to support schools with that?

If nothing else could they could shift the language into more positive phrases:

Outstanding
Good
Undergoing improvement
Receiving support

I agree. I lost all time and respect that I might have had for them after the Baby P thing, they found the LA good or outstanding and then when asked by government to go back and reassess suddenly downgraded them

I dont work in a school but do work for a LA and I know from our own inspectiions and inspections of other LA that they're not fit for purpose, so I take no notice of what they find in schools or other institutions either.

We had an inspection last year and it was horrendous. A few of us cried. I felt humiliated by the main woman in charge by how she spoke to me. I felt absolutely inadequate and that I was obviously no good. And I wasn’t even observed for a full lesson before they wandered back out of my class. I hated every second of it. It makes my stomach churn at the thought of inspections and I know I’m a good teacher. They just like to make you doubt yourself.

I worked in a school that was subject to many inspections of various kinds. Ofsted is a toxic, bullying organisation.

I'm at a university where they've introduced Ofsted inspections because of degree apprenticeships. It's been eye opening. They couldn't care less about the quality of the subject being taught. All they wanted to know was if they could tick the boxes on their form. Finding out about the cutting edge research the students do was a waste of their time, they just want to make sure adult students are learning British values and being taught maths and English at a much lower level than they study. The lecturers genuinely had to incorporate basic maths into an engineering masters degree

How utterly heartbreaking for that Head and her family.

Ofsted is bullshit. The inspectors I came across hadn’t taught for years - they wouldn’t have known how to handle some of the classes I taught, I know that for a fact!

This is 100% true - we got marked down by Ofsted because they came on Sports Day and they complained that the (Reception) children waiting for their turn to race weren’t doing any learning. I am not joking. It was 2 hours on a morning, the children were learning about sportsmanship and turn-taking, they were exercising, they were having fun & making memories with their parents present - and Ofsted still found cause for complaint. The joyless, miserable bastards.
I left teaching that summer to have my DC, having lost all respect for Ofsted. I’ll never go back.

Completely agree. Ofsted is an organisation that has outlived its usefulness and unfortunately has become too detached from the reality of schools. Instead of helping schools and staff they are intent on catching them out and often quickly conclude a school is ‘unsafe’ or ‘failing’ on one time fleetingly quick observations. Scrap Ofsted.

Ofsted should not be judging teaching at all imo. Some of the things they are looking for (or schools believe they are looking for) are actively detrimental to long-term learning.

For example, I was told by an Ofsted inspector that no activity in class should take more than 15 minutes. But my year 9s needs to practise doing electricity calculations, and a set of increasingly difficult questions will take them 30 minutes. So should I cut down the activity to 15 minutes to please an inspector, knowing that to do so would be detrimental to the kids? Or set it as a homework task so that the kids don't have access to expert help if they get stuck?

Another example: when I am introducing neutralisation reactions with yr 7 they to complete a practical and get a set of results. But they don't know how to use any of the equipment. So I go through the task literally one step at a time with all the children following each instruction with me. After 20 minutes we have one set of results and there has been no extension or challenge. But they know how to use the equipment correctly and safely, and after another 15 mins they've all got at least 10 excellent results, some have completed extension work. They all know how to use the equipment and will be able to apply that to next week's lesson when they use the same kit to do a different experiment. If anyone saw the first half it would be written up as terrible teaching, but if they saw the second half it would be written up as fab. Should I do the practical as I know it is best for the children and hope Ofsted / slt arrive in the second half of the lesson?

It isn't possible to judge long-term learning by observing half a lesson (or even a week of lessons tbh), so Ofsted shouldn't be doing that. Safeguarding inspections, checking for signs of bullying, discrimination etc - fine. Come in unannounced once or twice a year and you'll be able to see that easily.

I think this is a sensible approach, and one I've heard before.
The pressure involved in achieving and then maintaining an Outstanding rating must be even more awful that the average inspection. Not fair on any of the staff.

Anecdotally, this system is very similar to CQC inspections that don't take into account the people being looked after at the setting, but focus on the systems and paperwork and box ticking. Already over-worked staff are required to pull even more hours out of their behinds to get things in the state the inspector wants on a particular day (which might differ from what they wanted last time they or a colleague visited). And bullying inspectors seems to be the norm too.

Retired several years ago but remember the stress the announcement of an Ofsted visit produced. The laminating machines were red hot and TAs were putting up displays worthy of a John Lewis window. The inspectors were very pleasant, although my view of them as a waste of space was reinforced when one of them asked how I would extend a PE lesson for the more able in a Year 1 class. I asked for suggestions and he laughingly admitted he had never taught Primary school children. The school subsequently got an outstanding as the new head was an ex-inspector who knew exactly which buttons to press. Ironically the school intake and ethos had really changed and I wouldn’t have sent my children there.