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!?

Penguins, I'm intrigued - can you post any examples?

Whome, I agree that Ofsted drives what schools do, and that what Ofsted does is fairly driven by the government of the day (I would say not completely, it has its own agenda too).

The advantage of that is, we can vote the buggers out and elect a new lot, who can install new inspectors who are more reflective of the general will of the people. Arguably, that's exactly what happened (not that I much like the result, I sit on the soft left).

If Ofsted were completely independent, ie it got guaranteed income and no possibility of governmental interference, then the problem simply becomes one of technocrats with no accountability. They could set the rules, change the marking scheme etc, at whim, and we'd have no say. These are generic problems of governance for public functions - as true in health or transport as in education.

I guess a truly free-market Tory approach would be to set some basic standards for inspectorates and have multiple competing providers carry out inspections. The problems with that approach are pretty clear too (it would be analogous to the big four auditors, for example).

Maybe the next interesting question is: what would better actually look like? Can we come up with a fairly well-fleshed out alternative model that addresses Ofsted's shortcomings? Because much as it's fun to moan...

"To me, a school rated outstanding is probably one which cares more about the box-ticking than the kids."

What a completely ridiculous statement.

While there may be much wrong with the way in which OFSTED assesses schools, and while there may even be some schools which only care about 'box-ticking', to suggest that if a school gets an 'outstanding' grade it is likely not to care about the children is the height of prejudicial nonsense, as is the statement by an earlier poster that the children at a local Outstanding school are like little robots.

Running through this thread is a kind of sentimental reverse snobbery, the type of 'diamond in the rough' mentality that we see played out in soppy films. It is possible to be good at paperwork and care about children at the same time, you know. It is possible to have a rich and creative curriculum, a large number of children with special needs, a varied intake and excellent results. Not all Outstanding schools are soulless boot camps - I'd be very surprised if many of them are.

Under the current OFSTED framework, progress as well as attainment is measured, across all groups of pupils, so you can't decide not to bother about certain children. And headline KS2 data doesn't tell you about the progress children make.

If you live where I do, you won't get a choice of primary school anyway as they're all oversubscribed.

I agree as a parent it's useful to have an independent view of the school. However, I'm not sure that Ofsted reports are really very useful to parents under the current framework for a number of reasons.

First off, Ofsted at the moment is pretty much solely focussed on results in Maths and English. Which of course are important, but not exclusively.

They have made their mind up before they arrive on site and it would take a lot to change their minds. Having been through it recently, this in spades - it seems to me the inspector looks at the results, makes a judgement and the visit (which for a small school could well be 1 inspector for 1 1/2 school days - the final half day being spent feeding back) is about gathering evidence to support what they have already decided

The other issue is that the framework keeps changing so a new Good is not the same as an old Good! It's like comparing apples and pears.

My dcs' school was rated outstanding until very recently (now Good). It's a lovely school. What impresses me is how much they focus on the child as an individual - I've got 1 high achiever, 1 in the middle of his class, 1 with (mild) SN who has needed a lot of support and I really do feel that they have all been supported in the right way to fulfil their potential. And it's FUN! (although the Ofsted inspector dismissed that as "periphery")

What I do think is good under the current Ofsted regime is the focus on all children making good progress. Much better than just focussing on the % that achieve Level 4s and 5s imho.

Can we come up with a fairly well-fleshed out alternative model that addresses Ofsted's shortcomings?

A good start would be looking at a wider definition of success I guess.

Home - I can't really post examples without outing myself.

I'm not against Outstanding schools. Many that we looked at were outstanding. It's just that I don't think being outstanding in itself tells you much you need to know.

In terms of making Ofsted better, well a lot of it would be financially difficult. But they could start with a consistent grading pattern that stays static for at least a cycle or so of inspections, so that parents could compare reports knowing that the schools were being graded against the same criteria.

Shoe, on this notion of minds being made up before inspection...

• Given schools are fairly complicated places, I think it's absolutely good and right for the inspectorate to collate a lot of information before the visit itself, to start to build a picture. When people call it "paperwork", it sounds unimportant and irritating, but I'm sure that there's tons of stuff that the inspectorate needs to know that is best captured on paper, not through a visit: context, such as the % of pupils speaking English as a second language; "churn" rates for both teachers and pupils; financial health of the school; etc etc. Obviously, academic results will be an important component, but far from the only one
• I also think it's helpful for the inspector to develop a point of view on the school before arriving. For a start, I think it's pretty much inevitable if they've read the materials, so it might as well be done consciously and explicitly as ingoing hypotheses to test. And if the evidence pre-visit is compelling in telling a story about the school, I would expect that a visit would have to unearth something even more compelling to alter that narrative
• Finally, I think it's important not to over-weight the visit vs the data / paperwork. As humans, we are prone to a strong cognitive bias towards the tangible, the anecdote and the immediate. The bias is very helpful in making some kinds of decisions, but here the risk is that for example we see one very inspirational lesson and ignore the fact that the children's attainment as a whole is not as good as it should be.

Wider definition of success sounds interesting: are you talking about reframing the scale ("what defines outstanding"), the scope ("science should be in as well as English and Maths"), or both?

Thanks anyway Penguin

I like consistent grading for a cycle, and would add "if there's a change to the grading system, think through how the change affects the way a school would be scored, and then provide guidance on how to read across from the old to the new system". Needs to strike a balance between consistency / comparability and staying relevant / incorporating important new insights eg the new focus on progress of all children that Shoe mentioned

Mine have been (between them) to two different Outstandings and a Good.

By far the happiest experience has been at the 'Good' school, followed by the huge, grim-looking Outstanding one, and trailed miserably by the small, local, airy, spacious Outstanding school.

For us the key difference was how they handled bullying, and frankly that's very hard to gauge from Ofsted reports.

At School 3, the best bet for a bullied child was to leave.

Yes, I agree with that very strongly.

Especially near me there is a cluster of outstanding schools who were all graded under the 'old' system and a handful of good ones who've had their inspections in the last calendar year. Since so much of what constitutes good and outstanding has shifted, that doesn't necessarily mean that the outstanding schools are better (even within the limited scope of 'better' for the purposes of Ofsted). Many of those Outstanding schools might be good when next graded, and many of those good schools may have achieved outstanding under the old regime.

I also think that Ofsted need to be a bit fairer in their inspection timings. The old system - where you knew months and months in advance and all staff had a breakdown - was rubbish. But equally the new system is unfair because it keeps staff on tenterhooks for so long (I know teachers who are scared to take down a wall display after school if they can't put the new one up the same day in case Ofsted announce they are coming and they have to fit that in with all the other prep. When we were looking round schools, a head who was due an inspection said "Can I take your phone number and if Ofsted suddenly arrive I'll have to cancel new parent tours and reschedule"). and is then so brutally sudden. I know a school who were inspected the week before the Christmas holidays. All the planned fun activities that the rest of the schools nearby were doing had to be dropped so that they could go back into 'proper' lessons, otherwise they would have been given poor teaching marks. I don't know how you balance those two things, but something isn't right currently.

The way this is solved elsewhere is by having anonymous or unannounced inspections, but both of those would go down like a lead balloon, I think!

That quote in the op sounds a bit like one of mine.
It's very naive for someone to read a piece of paper and go "yes they say its outstanding, it's going to be outstanding for my individual child"
It may, or it may not so you need to look at it with an open mind to see if its suitable for your child.

the % of pupils speaking English as a second language

See, that's an interesting one. Our school has a lot of children who speak English as a second language. But, mainly, they are children who also arrive at school speaking fluent English. On paper it looks like maybe those children would need a lot of extra help but it is actually maybe 10 children per class who speak English as a second language, 8 or 9 of whom have been born and brought up in the UK. Their home language may well be Urdu or whatever, but they speak English as well as any of the other children. Then there will be one or two per class who have arrived from another country relatively recently and do need a lot of help initially. And of those one or two per class, they can be quite different in their circumstances - one child may have arrived from Romania or Poland with a parent who also speaks little English, can't eg read the letters home or help with reading, and obviously needs a lot of help. Another may have arrived from France or Germany speaking practically no English but has a parent who speaks excellent English and is employed by an English company (which in itself helps because that parent knows plenty of English people to ask when they don't understand something about the system).

We get a lot of American children, too, who have English as a first language. As a consequence of their system, some come into Y1 every year having received almost no formal schooling or exposure to phonics. I know of one child who joined Reception nearly at the end of the year and is still playing catch up to some extent at the start of Y2. Those children need a lot more help initially than the ones who have been watching CBeebies attentively over the past four years and attending nursery with other English-speaking children etc but just happen to speak a different language at home! They don't appear in the stats, though.

Huitre, surely children who were born and brought up in the UK and speak fluent English but Urdu at home are classed as bilingual, not children speaking English as a second language?

You seem to be making a general point that statistics can't tell you anything about a school, because individual details matter too much. I profoundly disagree with that sentiment. Numbers can't tell you everything, but they can tell you a great deal, and I'd always rather have them than not have them. Of course they need to be used carefully, but so does every other human tool.

I think they are classed as children whose first language is not English. Which is true. It isn't. It doesn't stop them arriving at school as near to fluent as to be indistinguishable from, say, my child whose main exposure to another language is on holiday for a few weeks a year.

I do think details matter, yes. And I also think that some people (I don't mean people on this thread who seem to be fairly sensible and capable of reading the stats for themselves and drawing their own conclusions) just look at the numbers and don't consider what might be behind them, thus drawing conclusions that can be quite removed from what's really happening.

Home - they are practically unannounced now aren't they though. It's just that, because everyone knows when they are 'due' an inspection, they then spend from that date until it happens waiting nervously for the 'two working days' of notice that they are coming.

I think the thing about English as a foreign language/American children, etc illustrates a point quite well. Which is that Ofsted inspections can be a useful source of information for parents looking at a school. But they can never be the whole picture. So whilst I totally agree that I would rather have information than not have it, it does illustrate that attitudes like I see round here of "Oh God, I would never apply for X school because it is good and not outstanding" may be discounting schools which are just as good, or better, than the ones that make the cut. And many of those are well educated, sensible parents. Which in turn puts massive and unfair pressure on the teachers to maintain/gain outstanding status and affords it far too much focus within their work.

I spent two solids hours looking at Raiseonline last night. You can break the figures down as much as you like, turn them into pretty bar graphs, stick green and blue blobs all over them, but it's still only going to give you a limited picture of the school.

And that is all Ofsted really care about, not the children's actual experience in the school and the impact it will have on their future education and lives.

So, local outstanding school down the road, which has amazing results, value added etc looks wonderful on paper. This doesn't tell you that I know of three parents who removed children because of bullying; that I know of two children now at our school who were strongly discouraged to apply to the outstanding school due to their SENs; that the parents moan non stop about the amount of testing; that all school play rehearsals took place after school and at weekends because the school could not spare time during the school day; that they don't have many trips because it gets in the way of curriculum stuff; that they didn't enter a local sport event as it was in the way of curriculum stuff; that all parents employ tutors from easter year 4...

Ofsted, data, dashboard etc only show you how the children at the school are performing in maths, reading and writing. That is not how I personally would judge my children's school.

Huitre, I'm not sure you're right, actually. ONS refers to main language spoken. It is a self-reported statistic, as is the accompanying statistic about the numbers saying they spoke English well or very well. Assuming that's the source statistic used by Ofsted (I'm not sure it is, it might be the school's own assessment of who speaks English, or some other source in which case the point is moot), then for your argument to hold, you'd need to demonstrate that for a particular school, Ofsted looked at the first statistic about main language, obtusely misinterpreted this to read that a school had high levels of non-English speakers and did not look at the second statistic about whether people spoke English well or very well.

On your other point: yes, parents might over-interpret a judgement. But the alternatives aren't more palatable. If there's no judgement, parents make the decision based solely on their own gut feel plus any interpretation of the data they can manage. That's just as open to bias - perhaps a parent on an open day overhears kids in the playground talking Urdu and concludes that "lots of kids at this school don't speak English, I'm not sending my child there".

Penguins - I don't see any solution to that, I'm afraid. Either you provide parents with information and they use it to make a judgement, or you don't, and they make the judgement without the information. If Ofsted provided reports that didn't have an overall grade for the school (or indeed any grade), how is that better? It's just more confusing for a parent. Realistically, not every parent is going to read every report in a really considered way, and not every parent is going to be able to interpret a report accurately, so it's incumbent on Ofsted to help them come to a judgement in my view. Yes, such systems bring pressures, but I'm not sure how a system without that pressure on schools to achieve and maintain an outstanding rating is better. Surely such a system would just encourage complacency among schools?

sitting this: "Ofsted, data, dashboard etc only show you how the children at the school are performing in maths, reading and writing" is factually incorrect.

Ofsted rates a school across four areas:

1. academic achievement (progress and attainment, with "particular consideration" of progress by the lowest attaining pupils" - a good thing, in my view. This includes the infamous reference to "reading, writing, communication and mathematical skills" but also explicitly refers to "quality of ... work in a range of subjects"
2. quality of teaching
3. behaviour and safety of pupils
4. quality of leadership and management

Most of the concerns you raised about a Gradgrind approach should be picked up through areas 3 and 4. Complaints from parents about the ethos should be picked up by Parent View.

The implementation may not work as you would want it to, but the process is wider ranging than you assert.

God no, singersgirl. Sentimental, reverse snobbish or pro-diamond-in-the-rough is exactly the opposite of what I am. I am all in favour of academic rigour and in making sure teachers are doing a good job.
Having spent 10 years teaching in a private school, I am simply finding it very hard to get used to the level of bureaucracy and data in state schools these days. It is driven by a desire to please Ofsted, and it takes up far too much of teachers' time and energy. That is why it does not do the students any favours. I don't think that is in any way a 'ridiculous statement'.

Another issue, which I don't think has been mentioned yet, is that the achievement and progress stats focus mainly on the previous year 6.

This is perhaps inevitable, as these are the most recent externally moderated results, but it can be misleading, especially in a small village school. A few children at one end of the scale can make a significant difference to the average for that class.

So part of the Ofsted rating is down to luck, or rather timing. A school inspected in 2013 might get a different rating compared to the same school, with exactly the same staff, in 2012.

Children whose first/home language is not English are classed as EAL learners.

My apologies if I'm wrong about that! Obviously I thought I was right!

Children who speak English as a second language are classed as EAL (English as an Additional Language) they were previously classed as ESL as you said Huitre but never as bilingual.

Home - I know this is what it says, but the reality is that they see the Raiseonline data, and dashboard and then work from there.

I was told by the Ofsted inspector (repeatedly in fact!) that the fact that the exceeding expectations on the dashboard was too low in one subject meant that it was more than his job was worth to rate teaching as good, regardless of what he saw in the school, In any area, across any keystage.

And that, because we had a level 3 in teaching, he could not give a level 1 in safety/pastural areas, regardless of what he saw in school - so we got a 2 despite the fact that he found no faults, praised it highly in the actual wording, and said we'd had the best parent response he'd ever seen.

He told me outright that they were purely interested in progress in writing, reading and maths - and not just expected progress, but better than expected progress.

That is my point, you see. regardless of what Ofsted are saying they measure, in reality they are only currently interested in progress levels in these areas. That was made absolutely clear by the inspector, and by every local authority training course I've been in since.

And that is why, if you are not, as a parent, only concerned about this aspect of your child's education, then you have to look beyond the report.

EAL, of course. Sorry. Wrong terminology.