What do school staff think when their school goes down from Ofsted Good to Requires Improvement?

[MontyBowJangles]

Just wondering how badly morale is affected? Do most teachers take it to heart/seriously or are they just too busy trying to keep their heads above water to get worked up about it?

At my old secondary school one of the teachers left and moved up North to become an inspector for Ofsted. About 12 years later the school had an inspection and were given an ‘Outstanding’ rating. Guess who the lead inspector was?

One of the downsides of a school being rated RI is that local parents stop wanting to send their kids there. So the pushy parents look at the Ofsted rating and think ‘no way is my child going to a RI school’ and do everything they can to get their child to an Outsanding school or grammar school. You read it on MN all the time. Look at the school pages on here, they are full of parents wanting to know how to get their child into the ‘best’ schools.

What happens then is that the school cohort changes, the more academic kids go elsewhere, school exam results drop, school roll isn’t full so school gets less funding - etc etc. It’s a vicious circle.

I think teachers definitely take it to heart. I'm on a teaching facebook group and there was a post about going into RI and the effect it had on staff health. Lots of posters were in agreement. When we went through this, nearly everyone was having trouble sleeping at night. Only couple of people said that they didn't care. Our results were awful that year so then Ofsted come in and look for anything they think might have contributed to those bad results. Some people say they have an agenda to turn all schools into academies.

A major effect on staff at RI schools can be the intensive monitoring by SLT and the LA which is sometimes contradictory and inconsistent.

Results data are a complete nonsense. I am involved with a very small rural school where year cohorts can be as small as 3. So....if one child's dog dies and they are under par on the day of SATs and "fails", then the stats tell everyone that 30% of the children are failing. What bollocks is this?

OfSted inspections are very stressful for staff and governors; all that stress for something that is essentially pointless. The inspectors wing in for a day and expect to witness the normal functioning of the school and make a profound judgement that could affect the future of the school - by means of the process described above by ninjawarriorsocks.

The best thing the OP can do for the school in question is to write to the head to say how happy you are with the school (and get others to do the same) - outline what you value about it - things that are unlikely to carry weight with OfSted, but which are exactly the things that parents care about. Ask how you can help. The vital thing at the moment is to maintain morale amongst staff and parents.

How lovely it would be if the old system came back where a LA inspector would pop in now and again, and if problems were found, would actually set about finding help to improve things.

Incidentally OfSted are just changing their parameters to give more emphasis on the quality of school life rather than just data - would that they had worked out that this would be a good thing a long time ago.

@Mishappening I wonder how they judge quality of school life? I know there's a huge emphasis on work life balance but how will they tell? Will staff be absolutely truthful? I doubt it for fear of repercussions from slt.

Well I guess they can look at the richness of the curriculum - activities etc. At our school they are out and about and have visiting speakers all the time - lambing live at a nearby farm, a disabled Olympian coming in to talk to them, baking bread for local lunches for old people, creating batik panels based on the seasons, science club etc. etc. etc. The list is endless. The learning is based around these sorts of activities very successfully.

They can also observe behaviour and the values of the school which are very clear in lessons and at playtimes.

Oh yes I get that for pupils, but they're also judging staff morale and wellbeing.

It’s all a farce. Inspections are not really worth the paper they’re written on. The behaviour one is daft. A school can get a “good” on that because on the day they visit the kids have been primed or bribed with chocolate or whatever so behaviour in classrooms and in corridors can seem good. But if they had invisibility powers and went in totally unannounced it would be a completely different story. The only thing that would give a realistic idea of behaviour is a CCTV system which inspectors could ask to see a sample of at any time of the school year. But that’s too costly and no doubt someone would whinge about human rights/privacy or whatever.

Sorry haven't been back here for a while.

Thank you all so so much for your posts - they've been really helpful and insightful (and a bit shocking!).

Spoke to some teachers and the head today and they do seem a bit down I will write an email and encourage other parents to do the same...but what to write without it looking super arse-lickey/cringey?!

@Mishappening our school does loads of those sorts of activities you mentioned, learning is based around play and fun and it's worked extremely well for a decade. I don't know a single parent who is unhappy with the school.

There is a site called I think Parent Voice and you may have been asked to contribute to this as part of the OfSted process - you may be able to put comments on there still.

I do not think a message needs to cringey - you could just say something along the lines of: following the OfSted assessment, I just wanted to say that I am very happy with how the school is working for my child/ren and am happy to support the staff team in any way that might be appropriate etc. etc.

Oh yeah I left a gushing/glowing report on ParentView! The Head wasn't sure how much Ofsted actually pay attention to them though?

Thanks for the pointer for the email

My old school was satifactory (old regime), then good. Inspection framework changed - next Ofsted we were told that although we had made progress, the goal posts had changed so we were now RI. WTF??? Ofsted judgements aren't worth the paper they're written on.