Missed the opportunity: making matters worse
In part one of a two-part series, Headrest feel compelled to respond to Ofsted's latest Report Card proposals. Headrest team members Ros McMullen and Julie Price-Grimshaw outline their disappointment with the proposals that make it clear the inspectorate have simply not listened.
In our book ‘Beyond Belief’ (John Catt 2025) published only last Friday we refer to how the current school inspection system has created poor practice, has been counter-productive to school improvement and has negatively impacted on the recruitment, retention and well-being of school leaders, particularly in the areas where they are most needed.
It is hard to remember a time when one could engage in school improvement activity without constantly keeping an eye on the current Ofsted framework, and the problem with these frameworks is that each one seeks to re-dress the poor practice caused by the previous iteration. (Beyond Belief p140)
Our contention is that the implementation of each new framework, together with the high stakes nature of inspection itself has led to massive distortion and damage.
At Headrest we are acutely aware of the damage caused by a punitive inspection system, particularly the impact on headteacher’s professional and personal lives. Over recent years we have taken calls from countless headteachers in extreme distress as a direct result of Ofsted.
Following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, the subsequent Coroner’s report and the Gilbert review, we were hopeful that school inspection would change with a resolve to design a system that is effective in aiding school improvement, fair and mindful of its impact on school leaders. OFSTED launched ‘The Big Listen’ last year and we were told, unequivocally, that they would consider all responses very carefully.
It did seem that a new government, an immediate announcement of dispensing with the overall grading of schools, and the excellent Gilbert Review was an indication that the opportunity to fundamentally review the system was going to take place.
Concerns that OFSTED’s own ‘Big Listen’ may not be asking the right questions and was too ‘closed’ in seeking responses were troubling, and the notion that once again OFSTED were going to be left to devise their own changes began to erode our hope.
The barely credible assertion of HMCI that he had not heard of ‘The Alternative Big Listen’ further damaged his own credibility. However, the urgency of the need to address the problems, together with confidence in new political leadership kept glimmers alive.
The under-lying assumption that school standards cannot improve without an inspection system designed to drive the system has been allowed to continue for too long unchallenged, and it has been distressing to see the Secretary of State swallow and repeat this.
No-one at Headrest wants to see the end of inspection; rather what is desperately needed is a system recalibrated to remove fear and stress, to value and use the expertise of school leaders as those who deliver rising standards and are committed to so doing. Instead of this, on February 3rd we saw the launch of Ofsted’s consultation on a new inspection framework which showed that the inspectorate has not listened.
The big mistake was to allow OFSTED, an organisation whose own credibility has been so damaged, to work on devising the changes, and so none of this should be surprising; what is so deeply depressing is the apparent acceptance of this as a way forward by the government.
Aside from dispensing with the ‘summary’ grade, little has changed: what we have is essentially a colour-coded reincarnation of previous frameworks.
The new ‘toolkit’, presented as a new approach to transparency, is essentially little more than a set of grade descriptors, which have always been included in inspection handbooks.
The descriptors include some statements that are vague and open to personal interpretation. Overall, there is no increase in transparency; this is merely a set of criteria in a colour-coded landscape chart as opposed to a bulleted list in an inspection handbook.
The time pressures on inspections, together with the inconsistency of application, have been pivotal to what is now accepted by all those involved in running schools (and most of those involved in inspecting them) that assigning ‘grades’ is unhelpful and damaging. It is, therefore, baffling to see this practice increasing!
One of the most ridiculous aspects is that a new grade of ‘exemplary’ has been introduced ‘to raise standards further’. It is absurd to imagine that inventing a new category will have any meaningful impact on thousands of schools struggling with a plethora of serious and significant challenges on a daily basis.
It is also lamentable that the only grade category eligible for moderation will be the ‘exemplary’ category when we have seen, over many years, that inconsistency in assigning all grades by OFSTED inspections has been rife.
The proposal is that we will have five grade categories and between nine and eleven aspects that will be judged using these grades requiring the gathering and close scrutiny of a great deal of evidence and yet the timescale for inspections remains at two days.
This means that the efforts in schools will once again be focused entirely disproportionately on ‘preparing for OFSTED’ – a practice which we know deflects efforts away from deep and sustained school improvement.
Two-day inspections result in what OFSTED themselves refer to as a ‘point in time judgement’ and we all know how quickly schools can change.
The claim that they are useful to parents is one that we at Headrest dispute: most parents believe that the useful information on schools is from the local community, school results, experience of friends and family, and it is now widely known that OFSTED ‘point in time judgements’, together with the bland formulaic nature of reports, tell them very little.
Ultimately parents want to know their children are safe (which is why safeguarding audits decoupled from inspection is to be welcomed), happy, achieving and helped onto their next phase of education or employment.
What concerns us most is the potential of the new framework to place headteachers under more pressure than ever before.
The toolkit’s emphasis on leadership is clear to see. One would expect numerous references to leadership in the section on leadership and management; however, there are many references to ‘leaders’ in every other section. ‘Leaders have an accurate, informed understanding of the quality of teaching… Leaders support teachers to have a secure knowledge and understanding of the curriculum… Leaders make sure that pupils are making secure progress across the curriculum…’
In all, the word ‘leaders’ appears over 200 times, far more than can be seen in the current grade descriptors.
Make no mistake, the proposals show that the pressure on leaders has been well and truly ramped up.
The tragedy of this is that it comes at a time when increasing pressure and stress on school leaders is a truly dreadful notion. The day-to-day challenges that school leaders face is unprecedented: at Headrest, we regularly work to support headteachers who are at, or beyond, breaking point.
We speak daily to heads who have had to leave a job that they loved due to the unbearable increase in stress. Within 24 hours of these new proposals from OFSTED being launched, several headteachers have taken to social media to state that they will be taking early retirement as a direct result of the proposed new framework.
Perhaps there is no statement that summarises OFSTED’s attitude towards headteachers than the following, which features in an explanation for the grade descriptor of ‘strong’:
‘Leaders are working above and beyond the legal and professional standards expected of them’.
Here at Headrest, we are supporting a constant stream of headteachers who are working ‘above and beyond’ expectations on a daily basis. The relentless pressure of the job means that it is often all-consuming and dominates every aspect of their lives.
In spite of ‘working above and beyond’, many find themselves being heavily criticised or even humiliated by OFSTED. The terrible tragedy of Ruth Perry is only the tip of the iceberg and so many of us hoped that the legacy of this awful tragedy would be an opportunity seized to recalibrate the system.
Those of us who have led schools know what is needed to deliver constant system improvement:
- Recognising, valuing and developing great teachers
- Encouraging headteachers and leaders to be confident and collaborative leaders of their communities
- Ensuring that all the services to support and protect children and families work together to promote high aspirations and achievement
These current proposals either mitigate against these things or ignore them completely.
In ‘Beyond Belief’ we make it clear that the current inspection system is draining us of the most important resources we need:
Inspections themselves carry such high stakes for headteachers’ careers, for school recruitment (both students and staff) and for access to everything that enables school improvement and autonomy. Indeed, even when an Ofsted report is complimentary about the leadership of the headteacher, the pernicious impact of an unfavourable overall judgment has frequently led to the head quietly leaving, and the system losing a good school leader; the unattractiveness of headship, the difficulty in recruiting headteachers and the loss of talent in the system demonstrates that we have the balance between accountability and capacity-building wrong. At a time when we need to make the profession attractive, teachers and headteachers find that inspection, and the impact of inspection, is the primary reason for not entering the profession and for leaving the profession. This is simply unsustainable and morally wrong. (‘Beyond Belief’ p140)
Leaving the discredited OFSTED organisation to devise these proposals was a mistake; but if government allow them to move forward it is not just a missed opportunity, but also a calamitous political miscalculation and deeply disappointing.
We expected and deserve better.
(Ros is a former principal and CEO. Julie is a former HMI. In part 2 (tomorrow), fellow Headrest member Pete Crockett, reflects further on this massive missed opportunity.)
'Beyond Belief: Why school accountability is broken and how to fix it' is available to buy now. It features insights and reflections from over 30 educators on how to fix the broken accountability system so that it is intelligent, robust and humane.
