There will be no more timely an opportunity to reinstate the key principles of an educational approach to school inspection than 2017. Next year will be the first in post for a new chief inspector and a new Ofsted chair.

Both will need to encourage a change in the teaching profession’s mindset towards inspection, so that it comes to be seen a developmental, educational enterprise, not a fault-finding, hypercritical process.

Below are five points they should consider, in part inspired by the ideals of the pre-1992 HMI inspection system that Ofsted replaced.

1. Subjective judgement

The essence of inspection is the exercise of professional judgement - easier to recognise than to define. It’s certainly not a matter of ticking off 101 criteria outlined in a handbook. Inspection judgements are derived from observations that are mediated through past experience. They cannot be characterised as objective. They cannot be proved correct or incorrect; they can only be approved as right or condemned as wrong by the exercise of another professional judgement.

Inspection cannot and should not claim to be more than the professional subjective judgement of a group of experienced, expert observers. As such, the findings of any inspection are contestable and never definitive. This needs to be recognised in any future re-evaluation of inspection.

2. Collective experience

Inspection relies on the collective experience of the inspectors - a social process. Their collective judgement-making is based on knowledge of a variety of institutions in different educational contexts nationwide, shared in lengthy discussion with other similarly experienced inspectors. Inspection leading to a published report for a variety of stakeholders cannot, and should not, be a solitary enterprise; an individual’s views need to be moderated with those of others to arrive at as defensible a verdict as possible.

3. School ‘snapshot’

Inspectors can only report and interpret activities seen at a particular point in time - a “snapshot”. They cannot comment with any plausibility on what has happened in the past or predict what will happen in the future. They cannot comment with any authority or conviction on progress over time, whether by groups of pupils or the school itself, since they do not have first-hand access to the past.

Admittedly, they may have an earlier inspection report to refer to. But they do not have full access to their predecessors’ assumptions, expectations or deliberations for comparison. Nor can they know with any certainty what has transpired in the interval between inspections.

Data from the past may be available but data is fallible, contestable, variously interpretable and very partial as an indicator. Every inspection report is inevitably out of date immediately after the inspection, but that does not mean that it is not useful in the short to medium term as a basis for professional reflection and development.

The time-specific, “instant” nature of inspection judgements needs to be more fully recognised in any rethinking of inspection.

4. Bespoke approach

The evaluation provided by inspection is qualitative. Nothing speaks for itself, everything needs interpreting and that interpretation inevitably involves value judgements and the use of qualitative descriptors such as “good”, “very good”, “excellent”, “satisfactory”, “reasonable”, “fair”, “poor” and so on.

There can be no stipulation as to which qualitative terms are to be used; they must “fit” the perceptions of the activities being evaluated. They cannot be reduced to just four numerical grades as under the current Ofsted regime; reality is much more complex. That oversimplification may be useful for the purposes of educational accounting but fails to take into account the many-varied facets of education that can be captured only (and then only in part) in well-crafted prose.

Inspection teams need the freedom to part with artificial, misleading constructs

Inspection teams need the freedom to dispense with artificial, misleading constructs, such as overall inspection gradings, and to present schools in their idiosyncratic variety with idiosyncratic descriptors to match. Each inspection report has to be bespoke - not a formulaic account with minimal variation from school to school.

5. Suggestions, not diktats

Inspections should result in recommendations, not diktats as to “what the school needs to do to improve”. Inspectors should raise issues a school needs to consider, not necessarily to act on; that’s a crucial distinction. However, there is a professional obligation on the part of schools to respond publicly to those recommendations, even if it is to reject them in part.

Inspection reports should never of themselves determine an institution’s future, but they can be powerful in their advocacy of the need to consider changing policy and practice. Such a change in tone and substance would need to be part of a re-professionalised inspection system.

Colin Richards is a former primary school teacher, university professor and HMI. For a more detailed version of this piece, email profcrichards@gmail.com