For the Headteachers’ Roundtable, the announcement today that there will be an immediate end to single-word overall Ofsted judgements can only be seen as a champagne moment.
It is a recognition of our long-held view that this judgement serves no useful purpose other than to shame school communities and school leaders, and stands in the way of the kinds of factors that make real school improvement possible.
It is a welcome beacon of hope at the beginning of the school year. We also trust that it signals the start of much more measured reform of how our schools are inspected that will culminate in what is published with a new Ofsted framework.
‘Harrowing’ inspection experience
In 2019, when the Headteachers’ Roundtable asked Ofsted to “pause”, it was seen as a radical position and not everyone in the sector, including some of the teacher unions, wished to align themselves with it.
It felt brave for school leaders to speak out in that way. Headteachers who had lost their jobs following an Ofsted Inspection were quietly pitied but not listened to. They were encouraged to accept their failure rather than blame a punitive and toxic inspection regime.
I remember attending a Headteachers’ Roundtable conference in that year at which Stephen Tierney, who was chair of the organisation at the time, invited James Pope, whose work had been featured in the BBC documentary School, to speak about his own harrowing Ofsted experience.
It was the first time I had heard a headteacher do this in public. It was liberating to have the Ofsted experience so openly described. Most of his peers in the same position had signed gagging clauses during their employment severance agreements.
Of course, following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, this silence was broken. The calls for an end to grading lost their taboo and became deafening from many quarters, including ex-inspectors and HMIs - and this was led, in large part, by the campaigning work of Ruth Perry’s sister, Professor Julia Waters.
Still work to do
So today is cause for celebration. It is about the sector, its stakeholders and headteachers having been listened to by a secretary of state for education, and we must thank Bridget Phillipson for that. Her predecessors would not make the change that she has embraced so speedily.
However, this change marks only the beginning and not the end of Ofsted reform. The retention of sub-judgements is not much of an improvement on an overall judgement being displayed.
We have to hope that the work that goes into introducing report cards addresses the toxic notion of categorising and shaming schools and focuses on capturing both schools’ strengths and the things they are working on to improve in a way that is meaningful and useful for all stakeholders, including the schools themselves.
Caroline Derbyshire is chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable
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