The fight back against OFSTED has begun - support needed

[wantmorenow]

Just saw this and it seems genuine and if so then bloody marvellous. Let's hope this is the rallying call to changes with immediate effect. This has been posted today. A Headteacher has refused access to Ofsted tomorrow, I assume in the wake of the coverage of Ruth Perry's death.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4765105-ofsted-needs-to-be-abolished-trigger-warning?page=1

www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4765712-ofsted-needs-to-be-abolished-further-details

twitter.com/FloraSCooper/status/1637760884243066881

I've just had the call.
I've refused entry.
This is an interesting phone call.
Doing this for everyone for our school staff everywhere!

School asking for support in person tomorrow 8am if local.

I lived in France from 1996 - 1998 and Australia from 1999 - 2001. I had to get checks from both when I applied for a teaching job in 2019. Took from Easter to mid August to get them sorted.

Then the school should not have hired this individual!

It shows astonishing poor and reckless judgment

@Lovelyveg82 totally agree. How can they have anyone in who hasn't been background checked?? Remember that monster caretaker Ian Huntley? That's what can happen when checks aren't done properly

The very notion that a school would hire a foreigner and not do the appropriate checks, even if that does mean delay, will be indicative of a general laissez faire attitude to safeguarding.

and goodness knows what else.

@ImNotAsThinkAsYouDrunkIAm it is perturbing that you don’t seem to regard the hiring of a person without doing sufficient checks as not something serious. And yet you are a teacher 😧

1. I’m not a teacher and never said I was
2. I’m talking about what was reported in the news
3. They didn’t hire anyone. It was, reportedly, a visitor to the school.

You don’t need to a DBS check let alone an International check to “visit” a school

You do if employed or on an exchange.

you were talking about what you’d read “on the news” but with no source.

Safeguarding is about so much more than DBS checks and it's there to keep children safe. Proper reporting of concerns means that if an outside agency become involved there is a clear picture of what's been happening. Proper reporting also means that patterns can be identified that in the past were missed, again often resulting in action being taken.

I said it earlier, everyone in schools knows that if you fail on safeguarding in Ofsted you can't get a Good. It doesn't mean Inadequate, it could be Requires Improvement. The difference between RI and Inadequate is that if you're RI it isn't automatic forced academisation. (Although as said above, the trusts don't really have the capacity to deal with that at the moment).
A school can turn around from an RI judgement in a year. Significant improvements can be seen within 6-8 weeks of the inspection. The really sad about reading this Ofsted report is that there was a lot they were doing well. Clearly a school that children liked to be in. Although safeguarding is really significant, it actually doesn't take long to put the right processes in place if it's not working properly.

So, I know of schools that started their safeguarding failures as soon as Ofsted arrived. They had a visitors policy in place and didn't follow it. That policy would also cover visitors to the school who weren't DBS checked.

@Richhandcream

Safeguarding is about so much more than DBS checks and it's there to keep children safe.

indeed. And a school that doesn’t do the legal checks is likely to be rather lapse about the overall approach to safe guarding

Incorrect

**4.3 Ofsted
**ofsted have provided NCC with written confirmation that all Ofsted staff who would visit a school have been through a DBS ‘Enhanced with barred list information’ check. They have also confirmed that all approved additional inspectors have also been through a DBS ‘Enhanced with barred list information’ check. Ofsted provide a list of all approved additional inspectors at: www.gov.uk/search?q=additional+inspectors
Schools can regard this note as constituting ‘written notification’ that Ofsted staff have been subject to relevant checks, as NCC holds the ‘written notification’ from Ofsted.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Like all safeguarding policies schools should monitor and evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of this guidance on a regular basis.

It was in The Times. And you’re right, I’m sorry, it wasn’t a visitor. It was a parent helping a child with reading, but I’ve just double checked the article and they were indeed helping in an ‘employed’ capacity, my mistake.

”an incident in which a parent was employed at the school to help a child who was struggling with English. She says the parent had been checked through the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) but a separate check on police records from the parent’s country of birth could not be made, and the school did not do a further risk assessment.”

I stand by my opinion that that doesn’t mean the whole school deserves an inadequate rating regardless of everything else about it that was good.

And I stand by my opinion that a school that is lax on the legal checks re someone having unsupervised access to a child, is extremely concerning and serious and warrants a poor rating.

I also would suggest it indicates a general lax attitude to safeguarding if something so important was neglected

Not incorrect. (I've been working in schools in a senior advisory capacity for a very long time).
If the visitors policy says that all visitors should be signed in and wear a lanyard... and Ofsted arrive and this doesn't happen - it's a safeguarding fail. It doesn't matter if they are DBS checked, it doesn't matter if everyone knows who they are. Many schools now use a tablet for registration, where the visitor is recorded as DBS checked or not. It takes a photo, which is printed for their lanyard.
Failures in safeguarding are often quite simple things that people have got casual about. Office staff panicking and not processing the inspectors properly. Staff failing to log concerns on the system within the required timescales. Failure to annually review the Child Protection Policy and have it approved by governors. Simple things that add up.

Oh I thought you meant in terms of DBS

but picking up your point… hell yes a school should be failed if it does not bother to follow the safeguarding policy re visitors. And ofsted is a visitor.

It also shows a pretty appalling reception and management

lanyard... and Ofsted arrive and this doesn't happen - it's a safeguarding fail.

yes. Yes. Yes.

you don’t seem to think that is fair

i think it is very fair

No idea how you got that impression. It's very fair for schools to get RI if their safeguarding is inadequate as far as I'm concerned.

They could have got round the problem by doing a risk assessment stating that the child would not be left alone at any point with the unvetted parent. That wouldn’t have been great, but they would probably have got away with it without being downgraded.

Schools do need monitoring. We have a couple of local secondary schools that have underperformed for several years now. Some of the primaries are outstanding and so oversubscribed.

What ways would you have schools being held to account @wantmorenow ? The vast majority of us in lots of occupations are held to account for our work standards, it's common practice.

Perhaps it's an individual thing rather than blame OFSTED for her suicide. Many schools face a drop in standards but few would deem it worth taking a life for. Things can be turned around.

Indeed. If this is true then it should fail.

Schools do need monitoring. We have a couple of local secondary schools that have underperformed for several years now. Some of the primaries are outstanding and so oversubscribed.

But what makes you think that the inadequate schools are the ones that get rated inadequate by Ofsted and the outstanding ones are the ones that get rated outstanding? That's certainly not been my experience. The system only works if Ofsted are looking for the right things (you know - the things that actually benefit children) and if they are nationally consistent at finding them. Neither of which is the case, from what I can see.

So sick and tired of non-teachers assuming that when teachers criticise Ofsted we mean that there shouldn't be any appraisal or accountability (because teachers are lazy and don't want to be made to do our job properly, unlike people in proper jobs 'in the real world' obviously ).

So how about teachers come up with a workable alternative then instead of the head teacher of a school posting she would 'not let Ofsted in' and random Twitter posts about protests outside the school etc. I mean seriously, she needs to step back and think (about more than her strange Twitter posts).

So teachers/leaders/union come up with something better then. However, schools do need to be held accountable. Safeguarding is paramount and a school that doesn't safeguard should fail (Ian Huntley types will prey on children if not checked).

The 2 local schools that are rated inadequate are also described by parents as awful. The head of one left after a few months stating it was a lost cause and the teaching staff didn't want change. Can only speak of these locally but parents are aware and unhappy at how poor they are. Our children deserve better than that.

The school has 12% more boys than girls on roll, wonder why that is.

Could be huge number of reasons, usually down to birth rates in different years.

Local school has a larger ratio of boys than girls. Simply more boys born in the catchment area than girls. It's an oversubscribed highly thought of school.

So I really wouldn't think the ratio is to do with parents of girls refusing to send their children there.