Why would there be an issue with an 'outstanding' school?

[MacMac123]

Hi, long term lurker and occasional poster!
Just a question.
Why do some people have issues when a school is said to be outstanding, as in it might not be? Ie, on another topic, someone has said 'and don't even get me started on 'outstanding' schools' as though that would be a debate in itself.
Why?
Are ofsted thought to not get things right? What would be problem/issue be!?

We rejected our local "outstanding" secondary because, although the results are stellar, the whole place felt very one-dimensional.

And when a fellow parent asked the Head what their next priority for improvement was, he said "We've got the results now. All we need to do is make the lessons interesting."

Also, the Head was very proud of the fact that he personally visited every classroom every single day, to make sure teaching was up to scratch. I decided that I really wouldn't want my child to go to a place where the management had so little trust in its staff to do a decent job.

Ha, think it was my comment that started this.

Everything that was said above! I also know of outstanding schools that massage their figures - it's far more common than people realise!

If you do trust Ofsted ratings to be objective and impartial (and there have been a few conflicts of interest that make me wonder) remember that the framework keeps changing all the time yet Outstanding schools are only judged every five years unless they have converted to academy status. So a 'good' school judged in 2013 may well be as good - now - as an 'outstanding' school judged in 2008.

junkfoodaddict - this doesn't surprised me at all. To expand on our experience with an outstanding school - simple things such communication with parents is very bad. When I asked how can I support our DD at home, again, no proper answer (to be fair, this happened during Y1 only). Volunteering as a parent, I witnessed teacher calling at a small child..'Oii, I told you....' don't think using 'Oii' is very appropriate. A bike trip with a group of children didn't also automatically mean carrying a First Aid box.

Was shocked recently on a visit to an outstanding school (very recent inspection- this academic year). The learning environment was scruffy, barely any children's work in display, not much around to support learning (on a learning wall in year 6 there was one a4 piece of paper with the teaches handwritten list of vocab).

The kids were obviously happy, staff knew their stuff, results great BUT I just couldn't picture my dd on those classrooms. I wouldn't want to be in those rooms every day!! I was so surprised it was possible to get outstanding with the rooms as they were. The school I teach at is good and he book corners, organisation of resources, displays and learning support in walls was a hundred times better. I'd rather have my dd at a good school with bright, stimulating classrooms personally.

The outstanding school we went to see with disabled DD had a shocking attitude towards her. basically told us that she would have to have at least one TA and that was all the adjustments they'd make. Instead she now goes to a Good school which was in special measures 7 years ago who spoke to her as a human being, considered ways to make the school more accessible before we even visited and have adapted themselves to meet the needs of various children.

I think outstanding schools can sometimes be complacent because they know they will be full no matter what.

Dd's school were very keen to get their Outstanding, but the attendance record was in their way. They made life very unpleasant for those children (including dd) who had longterm health conditions and were often off school or in hospital; there was a strong suggestion that they would be happier if those children were moved to another school.

Her next school had a reputation for very good pastoral care- so of course parents of children with problems applied out of catchment and even appealed to get in. Result= less pretty statistics than they might otherwise have achieved, but a school where everybody felt supported and welcomed.

Our school is outstanding and has quite a few SN children in it who from what I can see have been extremely well supported. Our school is Catholic though.

I have been told to steer clear of anything below out standing by several teacher friends, as its so easy to impress the inspectors, if they cant even do that for one days prepared visit then there really are problems. I wouldn't touch any school myself below outstanding, however once you get to the outstanding, take it with a pinch of salt anyway, and then decide which one as a good match for you and your family.

'its so easy to impress the inspectors'?!?!?!

You're obviously no teacher.

It certainly isn't easy to impress inspectors. And a lot of the rating isn't based on the one/two days they are in school, but on the stuff which precedes it - the paperwork, the results, the paperwork, the questionnaires, the paperwork... They have made their mind up before they arrive on site and it would take a lot to change their minds.

I have been told to steer clear of anything below out standing by several teacher friends

This seems like all kinds of nuts. What on earth is wrong with a 'Good' school? Or even one that Ofsted doesn't think it's good, if that would happen to suit your child. DD attends a 'Good' school, which I actually chose when it was supposedly 'Satisfactory' as I could see it was good. She's doing brilliantly, both socially and academically. The nearest 'Outstanding' school, which we'd probably have got a place in, would not have suited her at all - vast, impersonal, formal and seemed incredibly dull-feeling when we looked round.

I wouldn't advise a parent to only look at 'Outstanding' schools at all. Actually, I'd advise them to go and look at the schools they have a realistic chance of getting into BEFORE they read the Ofsted report. They might be quite surprised.

My neighbour works at an outstanding school. She has always said that she wouldn't send a child of hers there. At her school (I appreciate that this is not always the case) academic achievement is king. If your child wants to do things they are not particularly good at - join a choir say, or art club, then they can't - they select on ability. If they require emotional or social support, or has special educational needs, the provision is virtually non-existent and most such children are managed out of the school as quickly as possible.

Obviously these things are carefully hidden from OFSTED.

This is for a primary school, incidentally.

Depending on the school sometimes the pressure on results means that parents tutor a great deal. It just becomes 'the done thing'. I'd love it if Ofsted posted % of pupils tutored. To me, an outstanding school would be one that gets great results without parents tutoring.

I can hear that lots of people are very cross about Ofsted.

I'm a bit mystified.

It may be far from perfect.

It may be that some schools are rated better than they ought to be, and others are rated worse.

It may be that the process itself is philosophically too narrow.

It may look at the wrong numbers, in the wrong way.

BUT

I would not want to have to choose a school without access to some expert opinion that was independent of the school. What I can glean from an open day visit is dramatically more limited than what Ofsted can find out via the inspection process. So the function that Ofsted fulfils for me as a parent is incredibly important. And in the end, I'd quite like an opinion: I don't want hemming and hawing, I want to know, overall, how good is this school in the view of the expert? I may choose not to follow their opinion, but I want to hear it.

I tell you what, I'd bloody love there to be an Ofsted for lawyers and plumbers too. Picking one by myself has been a nightmare.

Am I really alone in feeling like this?

home I totally see what you are saying. I had to base my decision based wholy on the ofsted report as I needed to get the forms back ASAP after rejecting the first allocation.

Luckily the chance I took paid off but I should have gone to visit the school first.

However I did not base the rejection of the first school on ofsted alone. I based it on feed back from friends and local people who's children went there and the problems they had.

One thing that has surprised me though is two so called outstanding schools locally are now in special measures.

Our outstanding school recently dropped required improvement. The parents could have told them so, they were lazy and complacent. Now they seemed to have pulled up their socks.

In my sons year (now left) we estimated that a third of the kids had been tutored. Suddenly the SATS don't look as impressive new!

Home- I think that the detailed comments by Ofsted in their report are far more useful than the overall grade, which I think is basically useless. I also think that the amount the grading seems to constantly change means it is still very hard to compare schools. My mother, who is a teacher, could guess when various schools we were looking at had been inspected by the comments in them because she knew the fad that had been passed through, even in the last few years.

I agree that Ofsted has a potentially useful function, and I found the comments (but not the grade) useful. However, I am not sure how much of what they report on translates to how good the school is to be a pupil at.

Elf - My mum is a teacher and she'd dramatically disagree with the idea that you should steer clear of anything less than outstanding. She also thinks that a lot of outstanding schools are massaging figures and/or coasting (since many of them will not have been inspected for quite some time now, with a paper interim assessment more recently).

Agree about relying on the comments rather than the grade - I think that gives you a much better idea of whether the school is a good fit for your child (which is much more important than whether it's supposedly outstanding or not).

Gosh - jolly interesting question & responses. Wow!

In terms of being impressed by 'outstanding' - agree with many posters - read the full report (on all the schools your considering - outstanding or otherwise) & look at when they were inspected. Older inspections can be so out of date as not to apply any longer - especially if the school has high turnover of staff.

My tick list (knowing what I know now is):

Check out run of KS2 SATs results (not just what appears in the prospectus). Unfortunately last year's result will not be publically available until Dec which is too late for prospective applicants. Nonetheless if for the last 5-6 years they've been fairly consistent (maybe one bad year) - that bodes well.

Check out Parentview survey on your prospective schools.

Visit the school - don't just listen to the 'spin' at presentations get a sense of the 'vibe' of the place. Remember they're putting their best face forward for you - but don't be shy to ask them questions that concern you.

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Thanks to those teachers posting what I think many parents (regardless of school OFSTED inspection score) have suspected - there is a certain amount of 'gaming' of KS1 SATs results going on because so much depends on the Value Added score.

Penguin - I think the comments and the grade go together, to be honest - in that the comments are the rationale for the grade.

I just had a look at a report for a random school (Bevendean in Bristol, in this case) and that's the way it seems to work: got a 2 overall, because it got a 2 on the four underlying measures. The summary explains the main rationale for the 2 score overall and for the four measures, and then the detailed section set out the rationale more fully.

Huitre - for me, the reason the comments are helpful is precisely because they give the rationale for the overall grade. That approach prevents the kind of wishy-washy rubbish I got in my house purchase survey, for example, which was full of statements designed to limit liability but at no point said "this place is broadly fine, we found no significant defects" or "don't touch it with a bargepole, there are four major problems"

My daughter goes to an outstanding primary - I would say 7 out of 10 parents have employed outside tuition by year 5 if not long before.

I disagree actually Home. A school can fail to be 'outstanding' for a lot of reasons (especially now with the new regime) which are fairly administrative and yet have comments that read almost identically to a school which made outstanding. If I handed you the pile of reports carried out on schools near me, it would be very tough to guess which were outstanding and which were good if I blanked out the grades and the sub-grades. The sub-set scores don't mean much in my opinion either.

Also, it goes through fads. I think a few years ago community interaction was one of those (IIRC) - so reports would go on and on about it. But a report from a few years earlier or later would mention it far less and the overall grade would be impacted.

I think that all those grades can only be truly useful if you have Ofsted's full scoring matrix. Otherwise it is very much like a house purchase survey, but with a grade attached where you have no real way of knowing whether they have heavily weighted the same things you would value in a school.

I agree that the function Ofsted fulfils is important - after all, it is the only judgment available about a school, unless you go and canvas the opinions of the pupils, teachers and parents yourself.
Unfortunately, Ofsted doesn't just judge schools, it drives what they do. Many schools are the way they are BECAUSE of Ofsted's criteria. And if, like me, you think that those criteria are the wrong ones, then our schools are focusing on the wrong things. Then when Ofsted (political cameleons as they of course are) change their criteria, schools will follow suit, moving on to the next set of ludicrous measuring and hoop-jumping exercises. To me, a school rated outstanding is probably one which cares more about the box-ticking than the kids.

My children go to an outstanding school. They have also been to a good one. And a satisfactory one.

They had the same excellent experience at all three, because they were the same school.