I once drove past a school that proudly displayed a banner on its front fence: “Outstanding” it read, in bold lettering, followed by “Forest Schools Provision”. At the time, I smirked, fairly certain that such a banner clearly implied that the rest of the provision was probably not judged the same way, certainly not when it came to Ofsted. But on reflection, if any school can have a banner to promote its strengths, why not share the brilliance of the forest school?

Personally, it would mean little to me were I looking for a school for myself or children, but it certainly says something about what the school values. Leaving aside the use of banners, if a school wants to share with its community a particular strength that it values, then why shouldn’t it? In a way, it’s a shame that the word has become so sullied because of its use by the inspectorate. Like the once useful word ‘satisfactory’, the use of ‘outstanding’ as a generic category has weakened its value.

Part of the reason is that it overplays its hand. Surely no school would claim to be outstanding across the board? Perhaps part of what earns a school the highest of judgements is its ability to recognise its own strengths and weaknesses and to act upon them. But that in itself suggests that any school that is judged to be “outstanding” will have some areas still in development.

That’s part of the reason I was so pleased to see the NAHT Accountability Commission report call for the replacement of the “outstanding” category in Ofsted inspections. The current system of schools having not been inspected for more than a decade is clearly a farce, and it doesn’t help to foster wider improvement in the school system.

Lack of nuance

I’ve visited plenty of schools in my time, in all 4 Ofsted categories, and I can’t think of a single one where there hasn’t been something to learn. By the same token, spending time in an “outstanding” school doesn’t always make me feel I want to replicate what happens there in my own school. The problem of a very simplistic banding system is that it lacks nuance. Wouldn’t it be much better if a school that wanted to develop its forest school provision could easily find other schools who already did that well? Who knows, they might even have a strength that they could offer in return.

Perhaps, long ago in the days of local authority officers and inspectors, such local knowledge was more easily shared. Now, once again, with groups of schools, it has become possible to share strengths and support other schools to develop, but it certainly isn’t as simple as raising “outstanding” schools on a pedestal for all to learn from. We need something more subtle to recognise the areas in which our schools excel, and - as the NAHT report rightly says - something that recognises the contexts in which they have achieved that success.

It’s far easier to excel in music and the performing arts if half of your pupils attend Saturday tuition paid for by their families, for example. Similarly, it’s probably much easier to make great value-added progress if your catchment includes lots of pro-education families who arrive in Year 2 with limited English.

The commission report points out that we have all the raw materials in place to make for an excellent education system. Currently, we do too little to recognise the pockets of brilliance that exist in schools of all Ofsted categories and place too much emphasis on a simplistic one-word judgement. It’s time to scrap “outstanding” and start finding out which schools are brilliant in their fields of expertise - and sharing that brilliance about a bit more.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets as @MichaelT1979