Ofsted clarification to inspectors about marking

[kesstrel]

Ofsted have issued new guidance to inspectors, telling them not to judge schools on their marking. Will SLT pay attention?

"please do not report on marking practice, or make judgements on it, other than whether it follows the school’s assessment policy. Also, please do not seek to attribute the degree of progress that pupils have made to marking that you consider to be either effective or ineffective. When reporting, please do not make recommendations for improvement that involve marking, other than when the school’s marking/assessment policy is not being followed by a substantial proportion of teachers; this will then be an issue for the leadership and management to resolve."

You can access the PDF via the link:

t.co/xWKdAGMgjF

I actually have quite a lot of time for Sean Hartford, he seems to genuinely want to ensure Ofsted are judging the right things and not getting teachers to do timewasting bollocks because 'Ofsted want to see it'.

Try telling that to Ofsted inspectors in practice!! I can assure as a 'this week survivor' of Ofsted they were very keen to judge progress based on marking. All staff follow our policy but they wanted an argument about it nevertheless!! Needless to say we came out on top

Sean Harford just retweeted this

Incidentally Jo, he tweets quite regularly asking schools to let him know if there are inspectors not following the guidelines. If it comes up in the report you should flag it up with him.

We are expecting O. Marking policy has gone nuts. Primary SEN school.

The children cannot read what we write. It looks nice but is honestly quite a waste of time.

(Obv lots of verbal feedback).