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 ...

Most parents don't realise (or don't want to know?) that the things Ofsted and therefore, schools, are interested in measuring, have little overlap with the things that most parents are interested in knowing.

Judge a school by how it does with students who find school hard or are struggling in some non-academic related way. Ask about them. That could be your child at some point.

I think it was the right decision and having seen the behaviour of a Head whose school got the equivalent of good instead of outstanding (different system), that one word absolutely is sufficient for someone to end their life over. What a waste.

An inadequate Ofsted is career ending and a lot of senior teachers - their job is pretty much all they think about.

Imagine someone in another industry having to spend the rest of their career with every person they met knowing they'd been branded "inadequate".

It's hard to think of a parallel except people in charge of major engineering disasters, and they're not normally blamed alone.

Even David Cameron got his job back! He's introduced as "former PM" or "former Foreign Secretary" or "member of the House of Lords", not "architect of Brexit". How many life chances did he blight?!

Only if they don't bother to read the report

Of course it’s not true.

As people have pointed out, some Outstanding schools haven’t been done for years because they were exempt (so the previous government could say, ‘oh look-the number of good or outstanding schools has really increased under our amazing government!).

No head teacher would be allowed to repeatedly delay an inspection because they ‘know it’s crap’. I don’t think the poster who made that spurious claim has been back! If they do, a link to the school in question would obviously clarify things.

Most parents don't realise (or don't want to know?) that the things Ofsted and therefore, schools, are interested in measuring, have little overlap with the things that most parents are interested in knowing.

I agree substantially with this. But it is important to realise that these things are often only important to the school because they are important to OfSted - schools have no choice but to place importance on them, even if they know they might be irrelevant to good quality education.

Most parents just want to send their children to the best school available.

Do they want to read a detailed Ofsted report? No. Do they just want a summary? Yes.

Why? Because they know a detailed Ofsted report is unlikely to resemble anything their child will experience anyway.

Besides, how many MNs would be happy to look around and send their child to a school that's just been labelled as 'inadequate'?! It served a blunt purpose and was annoyingly effective for the school, hence the change. Now their failures will be lost within walls of text, much to the apparent delight of teachers and SLT.

I think there are very few people in education delighted about anything right now!

But we absolutely must not lose any more head teachers. There are very few good ones as it is.

The point was the one word grade was not actually useful. I'm just a parent these days (left teaching over 10 years ago) and that one word wasn't all that useful in comparing schools.

I honestly thought that the Inadequate due to Safeguarding that RPs school got was something serious like employing g staff with no DBS. Paperwork should be in a completely different category.

I’ve never worked in an inadequate school but I can honestly say I preferred the RI school I was sent to when the Trust I worked for took it over to the outstanding school I came from. Wouldn’t have hesitated to recommend it to local parents.

It’s difficult cos ‘working in a school’ is the best way to know what it’s like - and obviously that’s not feasible for parents. If ofsted could provide a sense of ‘what is this school like’ that would be really helpful. As in, you may or may not want to send your child to a very academic focused school depending on their character. I have interviewed at schools where i knew from walking in the door that I wasn’t going to be a good fit, but that doesn’t mean they were bad schools, just not for me. Hard for parents to make that kind of judgement currently.

I think some posters are missing the point that the one word grades are being replaced with report cards. Parents won't have to trawl through detailed Ofsted reports unless they want to - much like now.

it seems like a very sensible change to me. It will allow parents to see a school's strengths and weaknesses much more easily, rather than assuming, for example, a "requires improvement" school is poor at everything.

By the way, I did send my child to a requires improvement school by choice back in 2012. (A school just down the road from Caversham Primary actually.) Those of us with children with SEN are used to having to dig a bit deeper to find support for our children. That school served him very well indeed (and is now rated Good).

I hope that the ending of one word inspections will have an impact on the narrative around school ratings in local communities. By which I mean the whole circus of house prices correlated to school ratings and the behaviours of sharp elbowed parents, becoming religious or renting a house in catchment so that their DC don't have to mix with poor children.

And don't get me started on "Congratulations X for getting into Y outstanding school #proud" posts on social media. When all it actually means they lived in the right catchment.

Besides, how many MNs would be happy to look around and send their child to a school that's just been labelled as 'inadequate'?! It served a blunt purpose and was annoyingly effective for the school, hence the change. Now their failures will be lost within walls of text, much to the apparent delight of teachers and SLT.

You don’t appear to know what you are talking about.

This year, schools will continue to be graded from inadequate to outstanding in 4 different areas. The difference is that there won’t be an overarching single word judgement given.

From September 2025 schools will have a report card. Again this will be presented in a way that is easy for parents to understand. They are trialling various options at the moment.

No one is working towards hiding school failures behind a wall of text and that was not the purpose of this change.

The grading of ‘inadequate’ wasn’t just something for parents, it triggered a whole cascade of changes, including compulsory academisation. The DfE will still be able to intervene when a school is performing well below what is acceptable. They won’t be confused by a wall of text either.

@batt3nb3rg you clearly have no idea. This is what people are trying to explain if only the public would listen.

OFSTED is nothing like "a bad review at work.
You are spouting absolute rubbish.

Listen to @noblegiraffe @BirdFeederFun and most of the posts that follow yours. People who actually know what they are talking about.

What are they going to replace it with? A traffic light system? A score out of ten? A letter grade A-F? How will the replacement be any different?

noblegiraffe has answered that in her 11.40 post

A report card-like any article on the changes will tell you.

lost within walls of text

What makes you think a report card will be anything like this?!

From the 2022 inadequate published report for Caversham Primary:

"The arrangements for safeguarding are not effective.

Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures. They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As a result records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions are poor.

Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential risks to pupils.

Some staff have not had the necessary training to be able to record concerns accurately using the schools online system. However, staff know how to identify concerns about pupils and to report these to the appropriate leader.

The pastoral support provided for pupils is a strength and they appreciate this level of care."

Yes paperwork is 'just paperwork' but if there is a concern raised about a pupil and you don't have records of all the previous concerns, what referrals and action were taken, and it's just in the head of the safeguarding lead who hopefully remembers but also might be off sick or could get hit by a bus... then you're a bit stuck.

Yes paperwork is 'just paperwork' but if there is a concern raised about a pupil and you don't have records of all the previous concerns, what referrals and action were taken, and it's just in the head of the safeguarding lead who hopefully remembers but also might be off sick or could get hit by a bus... then you're a bit stuck.

Except safeguarding training tells you to 'report to the DSL', not to start looking up what other concerns have been raised.

@NewName24 I'm thinking more along the lines of the DSL isn't available - if they're there, and they remember what has gone on with a child, then it can work. But if a minor concern is raised, which usually wouldn't meet a threshold but it's part of a pattern of previous other minor concerns, you need records to have been appropriately kept to say this was happening at the same time last year, XYZ has been flagged before by a number of different support staff, parents were spoken to and said two different contradictory things at different times... Even here is a record of every time we've tried to refer it and have challenged the local authority at not picking it up. It's to protect you as well and show you've been doing your job and trying to safeguard the child.

If a system is scattergun, and records are kept in multiple places, or not at all, people who may need to cover or even the DSL themselves can't find them, that's when things can fall through the gaps.

"If a system is scattergun, and records are kept in multiple places, or not at all, people who may need to cover or even the DSL themselves can't find them, that's when things can fall through the gaps."

@givemushypeasachance obviously this is true generally, but there is no evidence that this was the case at this school. Ofsted uses stock phrases in its reports which can make things sound worse than they are.

Every year, every member of staff from the Head to the Cleaner needs to have a safeguarding training refresh, and record of that training needs to be in the register. If those records aren't complete then it can result in the paragraph "Some staff have not had the necessary training ..." and if the Head or CoG didn't know about it, or tries to defend it then it can result in the paragraph: "Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures ..."

The "required employment checks ..." paragraph probably wasn't as obvious as a missed DBS. It is usually that a staff member has worked abroad some time in the last few years, in which case extra checks need to be made.

The Ofsted commentary would be the same if it was one member of staff or 20, so it's difficult for a parent to understand the seriousness.

In any case, nobody is arguing that there weren't issues with safeguarding records - only that it didn't warrant an otherwise good school being given an overall judgement of "Inadequate". It is too blunt a tool.

@off2thevet yes the full evidence written by the inspectors wasn't even considered by the coroner, as the coroner said they weren't going to look at whether it was appropriate or not for the school to be judged inadequate.

It's interesting that the coroner could judge that the head inspector had been bullying to RP, when the only two people in those meetings were the inspector and her. She felt bullied, plainly, and told friends and family that after the inspection. But how can you judge as a matter of fact a year later that the inspector behaved inappropriately when no one else was there? The coroner said he was "rude and intimidating" to her. Based on what, other than people saying third hand, a year later, having experienced the tragic death of their relative/friend, that RP came out of the meeting and told them XYZ happened?

It seems like inquests are carried out in a different way from other court cases where I don't think you can have findings of fact like that.

Or, they know to go to the DSL so the DSL in the course of the conversation says 'can you pop this on CPOMS' and the staff member says 'ok'.

@givemushypeasachance Thats correct about the inquest. Some of it was based on second hand evidence. The school was inadequate on safeguarding and all schools knew the consequence of this. It might be best for everyone to remember why we have safeguarding and that paperwork isn’t the same as training and scrupulous record keeping. You don’t just pass on a concern and forget about it. From now on parents will have to dig deep into reports to get info.

I don't care if some parents won't read the whole report. They can then make ill informed judgments but it's their choice. Distilling a complex organisation into one word for dumb lazy parents was always going to be a terrible strategy.

The most important thing is that it clears out all the unnecessary stress on teachers so it can concentrate on teaching children well.