Goodbye one word OfSted judgements .....

[Mischance]

Hooray!
They were always a nonsense and I am glad the new government has taken swift action.

All we need now is proper support for struggling schools ... I will keep hoping ...

Personally I am suspicious that it is a tactic to neutralise the inevitable accusations in a few years time that MC parents priced out of private are buying up best houses near Outstanding schools and less affluent children are therefore losing out further. If there are no Outstanding schools, where will the MC parents buy?

Agreed. Seems like they're using this poor woman's fate as an excuse rather than a justification.

My friend put the following options on her child's school application form

1. Ofsted outstanding school vaguely close to home
2. Ofsted good school very close to home
3. Some other school

She was assigned School 2.
After her DC had been there for a year or so, she said that she was very glad that she'd not got School 1. Having found out more about the schools she thought School 2 was a much better fit for her DC but she was blinded by the Ofsted rating into thinking that School 1 "must" be better".

It would have been much better for her if she'd found out more about the schools before applying rather than just using Ofsted.

I went to school in the 80's and don't remember any inspections. Ofsted started in 1992, but obviously schools must've had some sort of quality measuring tool before Ofsted. Not sure what it was though.

Yes, but many schools were terrible in the 1980s. Bullying was rife. Teachers routinely humiliated students, and many teens left without any qualifications.

I think inspections were more localised?
(However, that comes from reading memoirs of a school inspector)

A mate that started teacher training in 1986 said that one of their older mentors back then had never had a single inspection!

That's not to say they were a bad teacher, but it does show how things have changed!

One of the problems which is not addressed is that OFSTED refuse to take responsibility when they make blatant errors. I worked in a Key Stage 3 school and our inspection team refused to accept that we did not have any Key Stage 4 students and were going to fail us because of our lack of Key Stage 4 data. It was only on the final day they realised that we actually didn’t have any Key Stage 4 students but this was only after they had told the head and the chair of governors that we were going to be put in special measures. A quick look at the previous report would have solved it but they weren’t interested.
There is also the issue of conflict of interest. Before the inspection began, the head was given a card from one of the inspectors highlighting his private consultancy company offering to ‘sort out failing schools like yours.’
The whole system is unfit for purpose.

Think a lot of teachers would agree with you! In my first and last Ofsted, there was a line in the report that was just straight up wrong, however as it worked in our favour no one was going to correct it. Tbh after swerving it for years by moving schools a couple of times, when I actually got ofsted it seemed a right farce.

Yup not fit for purpose sums it up.

And must be a very expensive machine to keep running compared to when the lea as was was repsonsible.

Disagree with this. LEA inspectors had their faults too, which led to whole regions with sub-standard schools.

Ofsted is a good thing in principle - it just needs to be refined.

I disagree. Any parents who rely on the single-word Ofsted judgement for choosing a school are being very foolish. A school could miss out on "outstanding" and become merely "good" because of some minor shortfall that is totally irrelevant to your own child. I know of a school where in one inspection they just missed out on "outstanding" and the head teacher made every staff member's life an absolute misery in pursuit of retifying the shortfall and the place became an hideous place for teachers and students alike - they got their "outstanding" at the next inspection but everyone was miserable and numerous families moved their children to the nearby "good" school that was a fun and stimiulating place to be. Some of the most vibrant and interesting places providing the best environment for their children were found to be "Requires Improvement" at their last inspection and responded with creativity and energy.

Schools are still going to be inspected and graded but they will get a score on 4 different areas which is much more sensible than having a single word covering every possible aspect of a school.

I think better support for mental health will prevent future deaths, not changing the 'one-word' rating, but what do I know.

Perhaps not a lot - maybe look a bit more into why the one word decisions on schools are damaging. Listen to headteachers and people from within education if you'd like to know more.

DC get one number/letter grade for their exams. I was a teacher for over 20 years and never minded 1 word assessment. It's easier for parents to compare.

I worked for an education dept in the 80s. No, they didn’t inspect schools. They had subject advisers but schools routinely failed many pupils. They were not held to account by anyone. Just closed if they became unviable. So Heads and teachers more or less did what they wanted and there was no national curriculum either. There was a need to improve schools and they hadn’t done it themselves.

Ofsted was forced to rate a school inadequate if if failed safeguarding. The school at Reading did. That clearly devastated the head but there are safeguarding procedures drummed into every school! Having listened to Amanda Spielman yesterday, she refuted other chains made by the coroner and it appears the coroner didn’t speak to the Ofsted inspectors! She also said lack of money impinged on inspections and the inspectors needed more time. However there’s no nice way of giving bad news.

When I’ve worked in education and subsequently been a governor, I’ve seen how good heads and slt know every inch of their school. They should never be surprised at an ofsted judgement as they have so much data and info. They see everything. So I think parents have a right to see a report and maybe one word doesn’t help the school or ultimately parents. However some heads don’t have a clue and focus on the wrong things. Or are oblivious to the issues the schooL has. They do need to improve for the sake of dc.

I do not think ofsted are there to coach a head though. They need self evaluation and then get support from their mat or LA. Ofsted will always move onto the next school. Heads who are confident in their school tend to be apprehensive but not scared. They will know how to put things right even if they haven’t quite achieved it. Ofsted should spend more time teasing this out as it shows the likely upwards trend of the school. If a head knows the challenges, they can address them. When Ofsted come at the beginning of this journey, it’s worse for the school. Thoughts and actions might not be in place. However parents need to know this.

Well, most parents look at what schools are local enough to be feasible - maybe only one or two rurally, 4 or so in a city. Then ask around and look at reports and whether it's oversubscribed etc.

Basically, you're usually comparing two or three schools and that's not really hard.

I work for Estyn (Welsh Ofsted). We haven’t had one-word judgements as long as I’ve worked here. Ours is most definitely a better system. Even so, I’m unconvinced that having an inspection body which employs non-teachers (even recently-left teachers) is the right way forward for any education system.

Unless they’re all taking their own lives as a result, it’s just a change (albeit a needed one) that’s being attached to this one incident as though it actually has any bearing on the serious decision to end one’s life.

I’m sure the current grading system can be damaging, but suicide is caused by more than just a bad result. To link the two as this campaign has done is simplifying what is often years of psychological and environmental circumstances which couple together in a terrible way.

One of our current local schools got graded as unsatisfactory but if you actually read the ofsted report the report sounded better than other schools’ reports in the local area that got good. I think it’ll be a good thing

Obviously getting rid of the one / two word judgement is a step in the right direction, but it is such a tiny, baby step it doesn't do what is needed, other than make a headline one day.

To the pp who said schools weren't inspected in the 80s - of course they were. We had HMI before OFSTED.

To the posters trotting out the suggestion that teachers don't want any system of accountability, that is just rubbish. No teacher thinks there shouldn't be checks in place. Of course there should. But schools should be inspected on what they are doing not on how many hundreds of hours they have wasted over the previous term, learning how to jump through OFSTED's ever changing hoops, which have nothing to do with teaching, or developing children and teens holistically.

Often when a school has a very bad Ofsted result, the Head and/or the Chair of Governors resign and either retire or move elsewhere. In RP's case, she was heavily invested in the school and the village - it was her own childhood school, she was a pillar of the local community and I think her own children had gone there too - so she had more to lose than many heads. But her case was just the tip of a very deep iceberg of unhappiness with the system - and it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

It’s not the media and me saying it, the coroner’s investigation concluded that the Ofsted inspection directly contributed to Ruth Perry’s death. The coroner’s prevention of future deaths report said that Ofsted needed to change in order to prevent future deaths.

People can pretend all they like that this is Labour bowing to the unions or teachers not wanting to be held accountable or whatever, but a legal process found Ofsted contributed to her death and that not enough weight was put on teachers’ wellbeing during the process.

The recent Ofsted survey found only 38% of parents want to retain single word judgements so posters claiming that this is going against what parents want or need are also not backed by evidence.

I agree - a school knows when they're about to be ranked as inadequate etc. It's never a surprise.