Ofsted are dropping one-word judgments.
As a senior leader of a secondary school in Cambridgeshire, I am pleased that the decision has been made.
The idea that the sprawling, infinitely complicated ecosystem of a school can be judged in a single word has been so obviously useless to educators, for so long, that they will openly admit that it tells parents precisely nothing about what is actually happening inside any establishment.
It doesn’t tell them what their child will be studying, what pastoral care they may receive, what type of community they are joining, or what the values of the school are.
My personal experiences of Ofsted have shown me its fundamental flaws.
Several years ago, two local secondary schools in which I previously worked were inspected in the same summer term. One was graded Outstanding and the other Requires Improvement. The subsequent summer’s GCSE results showed that the latter school had significantly outperformed the former and yet due to its grading, the Outstanding school became the lead of a newly-formed Multi-Academy Trust with annual funding approaching £30 million.
The RI school, on the other hand, spent the next few years fending off takeover attempts.
This year, both schools have been re-inspected and the judgements have switched.
It goes to show: single-word judgements are likely to change in the short to medium term but they can be the sole basis for long-term funding and plans.
Then there is the inspection in practice. It is harrowing for teachers – firstly, because of the complete unpredictability and the rarely spoken knowledge that you can do very little to influence the outcome.
You do not know when it is coming – at my previous school we waited 12 years between inspections and went from Outstanding to Requires Improvement. And when it does come, you do not know what it will focus on.
You are called at midday the day before and given guidance on areas the inspectors want to look at, but this can change at any time and you are expected to be ready. Consequently, teachers spend hundreds of hours preparing for any and every eventuality, and this work is repeated every term to ensure it is up to date.
At the end of this, you know that an inspection will come down to a one-word, subjective judgement made by one complicated, nuanced, unique lead inspector on one day, based on a generic set of guidelines that can be interpreted differently every time you read them.
At best, the judgement has no impact on students but at worst, it has a detrimental one: teachers are forced to spend months, even years, trying to second guess the inspection rather than focusing on students.
For school leaders like me, this judgement defines your school, your career, your staff and your community for years to come. Outstanding schools will attract better teachers and house prices will rise, forcing out disadvantaged families – when my previous school was rated Outstanding, this fact was mentioned in every estate agent advert for the area and house prices rose accordingly.
The opposite will happen for Inadequate schools, perpetuating wealthy students receiving better teaching and making more progress than their disadvantaged peers.
One-word judgements are also devoid of context and in this information vacuum, the very real implication is that the school leaders are to blame – leaders who dedicate their entire adult lives to helping children against a context of funding cuts, the surging cost of living, Covid, poverty, drastic reductions in healthcare and early years help.
An inadequate school is the outcome of multiple internal and external factors, many beyond the schools’ control. The performance of one particular cohort of students that may constitute a tiny proportion of the student body, and not be reflective of overall student success. Teacher retention and morale is often observed in the context of pay cuts and increased workload. The performance of one subject is not reflective of the performance of a school as a whole.
The personal toll was made horrifyingly apparent with the suicide of Ruth Perry and there are countless other examples of the personal cost of such a system. I personally turned down a promotion, actually choosing a demotion – with all the subsequent financial implications – due to the pressure of an inspection I knew was due in the next year.
Is it any surprise that, after spending 30 years sacrificing family, evenings and weekends only to be very publicly told they have failed, many of our most fantastic and experienced educators have decided it’s not worth it?
I have absolutely had doubts about staying in my profession, and continue to now. I know there is not a correlation between how hard I work, the impact I’ve actually had on students’ lives and how effective I am, and an Ofsted rating.
Teacher absence is endemic and when teachers leave the profession, students no longer have the skilled, experienced educators who are happy and willing to make the sacrifices to help them. Supply teachers and lesson covers do their best but students do not get the continuity they deserve.
If I’m being honest, while I am in favour of the outcome, my flare of interest in the scrapping of single-word judgements quickly extinguished as I returned to preparing for the upcoming term.
It’s a nice analogy of the relationship between Ofsted and teaching: publicly available headlines generate a lot of attention while the actual work of educating carries on regardless and is often unheeded by parents and the government.
If today’s announcement is the first step towards a fundamental overhaul of how we assess education – one based on long-term partnership between schools, leaders and government, with the common aim of improving the lives of children together – then it could be the start of a genuinely pivotal turning point for our country.
The new assessment framework, released last summer under the previous government, awards Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate over four subcategories: quality of education, behaviour, leadership and personal development.
The focus is on the right things and enables different judgements for different areas of the school: for example, a RI school may still have student outcomes that are Good.
Yet what could, and indeed should be happening, is discussion about how these link to wider societal conditions. How will the new Labour government work with schools to address failings? How can Ofsted work with individual schools, in partnership, to address issues identified?
We also will still have to wait until next September and the introduction of a ‘Report Cards’ system to really see how change is being implemented. But if we can get this right, the benefits to teachers, parents, students and ultimately society could be immeasurable.
Let’s hope that removing one-word judgements is just the first welcome change on the road to building an education system that allows all children to thrive. A system that is funded, respected and effective will be the bedrock of any successful society.
The current inspection system does not support this. It simply adds to the societal failings that schools are striving to address.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
Share your views in the comments below.
