Hinchingbrooke had an Ofsted inspection in November 2021. We received the final inspection report on Tuesday 4 January, and it confirmed that in Ofsted’s terms, the school remains ‘Good’. We were pleased to have the endorsement. As this inspection was my fifth as a Headteacher I thought it was worthwhile to pause and reflect on the Ofsted school inspection process. Here are some thoughts…
The Good
I think it is right and proper that on a regular basis there is objective external evaluation of the standard of education provided by a school. Self-evaluation is important, but it risks bias, or the perception of bias – when we carry out self-evaluation as school leaders, we are essentially ‘marking our own homework’, after all. And it’s certainly harder to be objective about the place that many of us would probably call our second home. State schools are funded by tax-payers’ money, so we absolutely should be publicly accountable for the standard of education we provide; regular external evaluation is one obvious way of holding a school to account.
The 2019 inspection framework, under which schools are inspected, is the best one yet. It places the emphasis squarely where it should have always been: on the curriculum a school provides, and how effectively it implements it. Although it’s too early to be sure, it feels like the days of tick-box, data-drenched inspections may be behind us. Fingers crossed.
For the first time, too, during the creation of the 2019 inspection framework, Ofsted engaged seriously with educational research; we know this because they published a document entitled ‘Education inspection framework, Overview of research’ in the spring of 2019 – i.e. before the new framework came into force – and I think you can feel the research sitting behind the words in the inspection handbook. I like both the fact that Ofsted used research and the interpretations they made of it – for example, their emphasis on powerful knowledge.
An inspection can also provide both a platform for school improvement, and an important recognition of the progress a school has made and what it is doing well. For many schools, this recognition is a real fillip, whilst a negative judgement can act as a wake-up call where a school is coasting. There are lots of caveats around this point, but I make it because I remember still the great sense of satisfaction at a previous school when we were judged ‘Good’ for the first time in the school’s history.
I think that may be it, for The Good.
The Bad
The Lead Inspector that a school is assigned for an inspection can ‘make or break’ it. As a Headteacher, I have had five lead inspectors to date: I thought two of them were ‘spot on’, one was okay and fair enough, one was a tad on the harsh side of fair, and one was painfully unreasonable. The point I’m making is that an external evaluation process that should always be objective and fair can be hugely influenced by the character and the ‘style’ of the lead inspector; that feels like a bit of a lottery to me, which can’t be right. It’s not just me that feels this way; ‘Who was your lead inspector?’ is a frequent question in schools when school leaders are discussing an inspection.
Ofsted’s over-emphasis on data over many years, especially examination results and league tables, has risked schools being judged to a significant degree on the prior attainment of their intake. By this, I mean that if a school’s student population is comparatively more able on entry, they are far more likely to ‘achieve’ good or better examination results. So, students who join Year 7 having attained highly at the end of the Primary phase will usually go on to do well in the GCSE and equivalent examinations five years later. Students with high prior attainment also tend to make more progress than those with low prior attainment – this is a double whammy for schools that serve challenging catchment areas: their students are likely to both make less progress AND do less well than their peers from more affluent areas. Whilst the ‘Progress 8’ school accountability measure is partly designed to address this issue, Ofsted has never, in my view, taken the prior attainment of school cohorts sufficiently into account in their inspection frameworks.
Then there’s the super-high-stakes, overblown nature of the education inspection process in this country. The shocking bluntness of a 4-point ‘Outstanding/Good/Requires Improvement/Inadequate’ judgement scale is the most obvious manifestation of these stakes. Why must it be so? Why can’t the external eye on schools be coming much more from a collaborative, let’s-work-together-to-make-things-better methodology? Done with as opposed to done to. I don’t accept that a process that is essentially about quality assurance and accountability can’t involve working regularly with a school to both hold it to account and to help it improve. Many multi academy trusts operate evaluation models of this kind, and some other countries manage to do it as a national model; why can’t we?
One last main point: a school is a fairly complex organisation, because schooling is a complex business – there are many variables at play when it comes to understanding why Johnnie has done well in his exams but Mary hasn’t, or why Ms Smith’s classes got better exam results this year than Ms Jones’. And yet full Ofsted inspections only come around every four to five years and they last just two days; indeed, the inspectors are usually writing up on the afternoon of Day 2. So it feels like an almost undoable job for inspectors to arrive at an accurate and fair judgement – in, let’s remember, a very high-stakes situation – in the relative blink of an eye. The crucial job of holding schools to account and helping them improve is surely better done as an ongoing conversation rather than a once-every-four-years breakneck-speed event?
The Ofsted
Ofsted inspection can, and should, be much better; more nuanced, more humane, more collaborative and ultimately more effective in helping schools improve. In 2022, there must be a more mature way of holding schools to account for the standard of education they provide than a hugely rushed once-every-1500-days -or-so process carried out by people with no knowledge or experience of an individual school prior to inspecting it? We probably have one of the best education systems in the world; by and large, it’s grown-up and sensible and effective. It’s time that the quality of our national schools evaluation model matched the quality of our schools.
