Where do the dynamic teachers want to work?

[Island67]

My friend and I were talking about how, in cities, you see a lot of outstanding schools (I know ofsted isn’t always the best indicator! But it’s one indicator), and you see less outstanding schools in towns or the countryside. Not that they don’t exist there obviously - there just aren’t as many clusters. We were discussing my friend wondered if cities attract the dynamic teachers.

I thought that maybe local schools either get competitive with each other, or collaborate with each other, and that’s why you find clusters of them in some neighbourhoods (for example in London: Blackheath, Muswell Hill, etc).

What do you all reckon?

Teachers don't really influence the outcome of an ofsted report tbh. Not all teachers are observed by inspectors when they visit and even if they are, the inspectors don't stay in the room for very long.

Ofsted grades are more to do with data/admin, book scrutinies and the culture created by management. Some supposedly Outstanding schools haven't been inspected for over ten years so it's not an accurate label.

@SausageFrog

Teachers don't really influence the outcome of an ofsted report tbh. Not all teachers are observed by inspectors when they visit and even if they are, the inspectors don't stay in the room for very long.

Ofsted grades are more to do with data/admin, book scrutinies and the culture created by management. Some supposedly Outstanding schools haven't been inspected for over ten years so it's not an accurate label.

All of this really.

The assumption is that if the results are good then the teaching must be good.

Dynamic teachers aren’t one homogeneous group of people who all want the same thing.

Some want quiet leafy schools, others want something really challenging. Ofsted results have nothing to do with dynamic teachers.

I live in a city which has very few outstanding schools. The area I come from in Cornwall is mostly rural, but most of the schools are outstanding. I think it's more likely to do with the wealth of the local area.

Unfortunately so much to do with the wealth of the area. The neighbourhoods you’ve listed are all very expensive. As a previous poster has commented, wealthy rural locations generally have Outstanding schools as well. It’s all to do with social engineering. Teachers are not what’s outstanding, it’s the children who have full tummies, are read to every night thanks to parents not working shift work, and who gain ‘cultural capital’ that make good leaners. Put the worst teachers with these pupils, and outcomes will always be good. Outstanding reports increase the cost of living in that catchment area, and so the circle continues.

Have you looked at when these outstanding schools were last inspected. In my area there isn't a single one that has been inspected in the last decade and in some cases it's 15 years since they were awarded outstanding! So the chances are very few if any of the teachers, dynamic or otherwise, are still there.

I live in a small coastal town and teach at a outstanding school. We were last inspected just before covid and had an extra (no-judgement, voluntary trial) ofsted this year. The judgement had nothing to do with how dynamic the teachers are.

A few years ago my children's school had an Ofsted when I was a Governor. They were found to be Outstanding in everything except Administration. So Good overall. The staff and Governors put a lot of effort putting the the paperwork in order, but knew it probably wasn't enough beforehand.

All the teachers were wonderful. The parents were supportive. The school was too small for results to matter (Yr 6 was less than 10 children usually, sometimes as small as 6... That was all the children in the area of that age).

The nearby nursery was closed down... The individual workers were found to be good and caring, but the building wasn't up to standard and again, administration. The parents worked together to improve the building, new manager with more experience found and it reopened.

Ofsted look at different things to parents.
My advice for parents is to look at Progress scores, read the actual Ofsted report not the grading (look at safeguarding section for example) and to be realistic. I would be wary on schools rated inadequate though. And an undersubscribed school near too oversubscribed schools, but more to find out why.

Having been a teacher since 2004 and done many Ofsted inspections in all it’s different guises and I can tell you with great certainty that teachers have very little input to the outcome of a judgement and very few lessons are often seen in these new short inspections.

Usually, Ofsted come with a pre-conceived idea based on the data (and in particular, value-added) and visit very few classes now as a result and instead have meetings with lots of people to explain their paperwork.

Reasons for past inspections being a Good and not outstanding in past schools I have been in:

There was a small gap (even though no human could get through it and was about .06 miles from the school itself) in one of the fences that hadn’t been fixed so failed on safeguarding.

Received outstanding in all areas but because English results were not quite as high in terms of improvement over Maths (even though they had improved), downgraded to Good again (and this was because of the exam debacle, which changed grade boundaries massively between March and June, where the High Court deemed it unlawful but the Ofsted inspectors said, quote, ‘We don’t follow those rulings’

Another occasion the reason for a Good outcome was given as, we had 4 outstanding and 1 good judgement (in administration) but that means we have to be Good overall apparently.

Don’t forget, OP, that until very recently, some Outstanding schools were going 13 years without having been inspected and there would be staff there who had never been in an inspection, so no idea if they are ‘dynamic’ or not etc.

Ofsted inspections are just a game of cat and mouse with the cat changing the rules and goalposts each time they come.

I've worked in schools in special measures. We were bloody dynamic and had to be, because it's really hard work keeping 32 children with you through a lesson when they've come in with all sorts of incidents/issues behind them. Not to mention their disillusion with education. I now work in an outstanding school with some of the top results in the country. I wouldn't describe all the teachers as 'dynamic'.

When I worked in a rural school before, the inspector openly said that she had no reason not to give the school outstanding but that she "didn't want to give another outstanding to a school in an area like this" so she was going to bring back a team the next day and find a reason.

In that area, the "Good" schools outperform the "Outstanding" ones every single year, despite near identical entrants in Reception.

Ofsted judgements are barely worth the paper they are written on.

Yep all of the above. Its all such a con and yet haS become what parents look for in a school. It doesn't tell you anything useful about a school really! Certainly nothing about how dynamic the school is or how good the teachers are...

I'm going to say that teachig in outstanding schools is sometimes very poor and leadership can have huge unjustified egos be complacent, especially where a school has been outstanding for a long time without inspection.

As PP said, schools that get top results always have a high proportion of parents who are doing a lot of the work for them. From a strong PTA, regular reading at home, through high numbers of students getting home tuition.