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?

We had a local nursery make a formal complaint and the MP was involved after they marked them inadequate but the report completely contradicted its self. Anyway they were reinspected a few months later and are now good with some outstanding. It's all personal opinion on what good is (I know paperwork is something different and mandatory) but this inspector seems to want them to fail and had a personal connection to some of the management.

What's awful is a bet the inspector never lost sleep over it. The staff were devastated and work bloody hard.

What I hate about ofsted is nothing to do with how the staff feel but more that it's all so fake. Everyone works extra hard and covers up safeguarding concerns to impress ofstead and so a real rating doesn't always happen. Ours is rated good because in reality half of what ofsted said was bs and the school is much worse because the school went out of their way for that inspection.

This is an awful thing to have happened, It’s not the first time and probably won’t be the last. Decent HTs are understandably devastated by bad inspections and ‘safeguarding issues’ are always a useful stick with which to beat schools. Of course safeguarding is important, but a school can fail an inspection for very minor paperwork issues, best resolved by support and advice, not with public humiliation.

OFSTED is a pernicious, fault-finding organisation full of people who haven’t taught for years. Unless you are a UK teacher, you really can’t understand the horror, (especially if, like at our school, you have a HT who is obsessed with OFSTED and who likes to use the threat of their imminent appearance to torment staff!)

I have been through many inspections and they were all awful. There surely has to be a better way!

Also live locally and the school has always been in high regard and people even moved area to get their kids in.
The thing that stood out to me was when Ruth Perrys sister was speaking on the news, saying that Ruth was told that she wasn't allowed to even discuss the situation with her family. The irony is that she obviously really cared about the school, its staff and pupils and that passion caused her that much distress that lead to her actions. The reasons given for the poor Ofsted report including flossing as sexual abuse and a fight in the playground as child on child as abuse are beyond me. Exactly how qualified that these inspectors??!!!
RIP Ruth Perry.

This school is very local to me. It is absolutely heart breaking.

It's one of those schools that is put on a pedestal by local people - The Best School - outstanding, oversubscribed with an expensive catchment, lots of high achievers.

I do wonder if the fact it has such a reputation played into the head teacher's tragic decision. It can't be easy to be the person seen as taking a school from such perceived heights to such perceived failure.

Its all senseless, as the Ofsted report contains so many positives and areas with Good ratings, yet the overall headline is Inadequate. It's a good school!! Yet the head teacher is driven to this....

Something is very wrong in the way schools are being judged.

This! It can be so fake. My primary school was awful for faking it. Hiding away the badly behaved kids, warning us about things not to mention...
I remember a teacher coming up with a plan to make himself look good for ofsted. He would ask the class a question and if we didn't know the answer we'd raise our left hand, if we did know we'd raise our right. If we all raised left hand the teacher would say wow you're all so brilliant of course the answer is

Why did they have to prep for an inspection? Why weren’t all those things routinely done!?

You know when i was a kid,schools weren't prisons. They weren't locked, they werent gated. Some kids went home for lunch and then walked back again. All the kids knew it was not allowed to leave school otherwise without permission
Very very occasionally a child did run away, but you know what, the blame was very squarely laid at the kids school, thwere was no question that the school were to blame for a kid who is old enoughto know better (5+) absonding.

OFSTED are a proper evil organisation. I remember being rated "satisfactory" by then back in the day (back when that was a rating) and beating myself up for months after because I'd previously been rated good and outstanding in a previous inspection. I remember unloading all of this on my HODs lap after months of ruminating on it and she just laughed and said "they pull it out of their arses!" And then reminded me that I had been observed with bottom set year eight on a Friday period five when I got this rating so it was actually a miracle that no one had died. Since then I've tried to always remember it's nonsense.

here are some ways Ofsted disadvantages students-

children can't be taught out of their year group, for example, a refugee child arriving in year 11 with no English, would clearly benefit from being taught in year 10, however, they would still be a year 11 child, so their GCSE results would count, and would be zero, so for ofsted reasons, forced into year 11, fails everything except maths, and counts as getting a grade. So better outcome for ofsted, worse for child

Children in care, children with cancer, children with applications in to other places which might not be successful for a few months down the line - less likely to be accepted into sixth form, as they might damage retention percentages, so turning them away looks better for ofsted, but worse for the children

Time wasted on harassing parents with children out of school for reasonable reasons that dont quite fit the school absence policy - for example, forces children away to see their Dad on the only week he will be in the UK this year. We have to prove we have threatened them with further action, waste of time for us, stress for the parent, but looks better for ofsted.

EBacc - restricting children's choices at GCSE, forcing a modern langauge and a humanity on everyone, whether suitable or not, because it is a measure ofsted looks at, but it s benefit the child.

Target grades, invented by some silly goverment formula, don't take individual circumstances into consideration, so children chosen for interventions based on how close they are to their target grade - why? Because ofsted want to see everyone meet their target grade - so children who would RERALLY benefit from intervention, becasue they have so much more potential than their target grade suggests, or because they are so much underachieving, don't get the time and resources allocated. Again, it is all about how it looks to ofsted, not what individual children need. I have had a preverbal child functioning at around age 18 months with a minimum target grade of 5 at GCSE. I have had children with degenerative brain diseases with target grades from before the disease happened. I have had genius children with target grades based on how they were doing when they couldn't speak any English, 4 years earlier.

I have had an ofsted inspector mark me down because I didn't have the homosexual students in my class marked on my register, and I wasn't teaching percentages in a way inclusive to homosexuals

We have had an inspector base a "Deep dive" on a randomly chosen ethnic origin, of which we had exactly one representative in the school.

I could go on and on and on

All you need to know though, is ofsted inspection results have been shown to be very little more than random.

It is utterly meaningless, schools jump through the most ridiculous hoops based on what ofsted currently favours, and doesn't want to see.

Remember when ofsted suddenly turned against text books, and they all got dumped, now schools are crying out for them

I feel so sorry for the head mistress that died . It was such a sad story.
No job is worth losing your life over.
Ofsted sound awful.

Why did they have to prep for an inspection? Why weren’t all those things routinely done!?

I haven't done a written lesson plan in over 5 years. I do it all in my head now, because I'm experienced and capable. But I'd have to do written ones for an inspection.

The lessons I normally teach are great for long term learning, but not for Ofsted snapshot judgements, so I'd have to completely re-do all of my lesson plans and resources for all of the lessons if my school were being inspected.

My classroom is clean and usually tidy, but I don't have displays up because I usually spend spare time doing something useful for children's learning. So I'd have to get that sorted if I were being inspected. Plus the other minor maintenance jobs that need doing (eg new batteries in the clock, new lightbulb etc).

Someone explained this above.

planning - I can plan a lot of maths lessons in a minute or two. I know I’ll model the method on the board, I know which misconceptions are likely and will highlight them. I’ll find a textbook page, job done. I’ve been teaching a long time so don’t need it scripted. If ofsted were coming in, my school would expect me to write this plan out to full 2 a4 pages, including identifying target students, saying what learning comes before/after, writing down the support I’ll offer to SEN and pupil premium and so and so on. I’d have to do that for each of my 4-6 lessons that day. All of which takes rather longer than ‘column addition? Lovely, I know what I’ll do.’

marking - in an ideal world, yes, every single question a child answers and every word they write would be marked. In reality, this is extremely time consuming and really only beneficial if it’s done within a couple of days of the work being done. Ideally you do it each evening after the kids have gone. However, if you don’t for any reason, the work is still in the book and ofsted will question why it isn’t marked. The answer ‘I didn’t have time as I had a migraine/my gran died/I went to the cinema that night, and marking it 3 weeks later is pointless’ won’t cut it, so you end up going back and catching up if you know ofsted are coming it (or parents evening is coming up!)

At a recent inspection, the year 3 children were asked what they had learnt about protected characteristics. They had no idea what they were. Now, if the inspector had asked about treating everyone fairly or not discriminating against people, about not judging based on being a boy or a girl etc then the children could, and would have explained all they knew. But we were pulled up for not teaching 6 year olds about protected characteristics when the children couldn't even pronounce the words!

Ofsted: a kid flossing is over-sexualisation, school is failing on safeguarding!

Also Ofsted: schools buying in SRE packages that teach kids about sexual practices such as anal sex - totally fine and nothing to do with us.

You're right results aren't everything, a lot of the time parents have the measure of a school. Parents know if they have happy children. In my experience the schools who are always 'inspection ready' are the worst ones for the children as nothing is child centred. Everything is geared towards the inspection, whenever it may be.

Also, we have had secondary teachers come in and observe nursery. They may as well be different professions, the pedagogy is completely different. So yes, at times the inspectors don't have a clue.

It is completely fake - our village school gave 5 disruptive pupils the week off when inspectors were in!

I have had an ofsted inspector mark me down because I didn't have the homosexual students in my class marked on my register, and I wasn't teaching percentages in a way inclusive to homosexuals

Er, what??

There's so much to that story, though. She took over as headteacher just after the school was awarded outstanding. When inspected now, the staff didn't know about effective safe guarding, they didn't step in when children were at risk, they weren't even aware of their weaknesses, and their were gaps in employment records which could gave left children at risk.
This is all pretty basic stuff and she inherited an outstanding grade so the systems must have been in place at the start of her employment.

It's awful that anyone lives under so much stress that they think suicide is the answer and there's so much pressure on a couple of days visit, but ofsted isn't in the wrong to point out risks to children and say the present set up is inadequate.

It's awful that anyone lives under so much stress that they think suicide is the answer and there's so much pressure on a couple of days visit, but ofsted isn't in the wrong to point out risks to children and say the present set up is inadequate

Sounds a pretty balanced response to this tragedy to me, and as so often I expect there's more to this than we know

Of course it's harsh to award an almost automatic "inadequate" over a bit of record keeping, but it's not as if this is an unknown thing so why not make damned sure something you know they're going to prioritise is watertight?

Also, as you say, the report suggests there was rather more to it than just a bit of paperwork

Absolutely @ENTnightmare - sometimes they don't. But other times it's actually helpful having someone from the outside come in and give their perspective. That's not something I think we should lose if/when Ofsted is reformed.

I think it is reasonable for someone trained in inspection and coaching, with a wide experience of education (of all types), to be involved in the monitoring of schools. That’s the HMI model, and IME they’re pretty good and balanced.

It’s not reasonable to involve ‘non education’ inspectors in the current inspection framework, though it would be worth including eg child protection professionals in annual light touch safeguarding-type monitoring / advisory visits.

Too many ‘additional inspectors’ are ‘not that great teachers/ leaders in schools’, who combine inspection with their own work. They are, ime, the most likely to pull up ‘different from my place’ as ‘wrong’, and impose a layer if ‘what I would expect’ on top of the framework OR over-interpret a single piece of evidence through inexperience or poor training in inspection.

Pupils are not at risk from playground dancing.

Ofsted is so pernicious because of outside forces - many imposed on us because of the government’s own making.

Gaps in record keeping? Maybe the school couldn’t employ a permanent safeguarding team due to cuts?

At the moment I only feel in barely control of my own classes - I can’t be responsible for 2000 pupil’s progress in school - let alone what each of those are bringing into school every day.