The chief inspector’s refusal to allow her inspectors’ overall effectiveness judgments to be influenced by socioeconomic context can best be criticised by use of an analogy. If in another guise she was to be UN chief inspector of medical care, presumably she would rarely, if ever, be able to award a grade for outstanding effectiveness to medical provision in any of the multitude of refugee camps worldwide, since that would have to be compared with provision in mainstream well-provided and less crowded (though still crowded) western hospitals. Context matters; it affects judgments of quality. That needs to be recognised.
There is a very serious and fundamental point behind the current controversy over the undoubted fact that Ofsted judgements of schools are lower in certain areas - many of them with a high proportion of white working-class children.
In her recent speech, the chief inspector acknowledged this disparity in judgement but defended her organisation by stressing that “the overall effectiveness of a school is not an effort grade”. That is true as far as it goes - which isn’t very far.
If effectiveness grades are to mean anything, they have to be awarded in relation to criteria - and these criteria need to be as clear and as objective as possible. Yet Ofsted’s own don’t meet those two overarching criteria.
This is only partly because Ofsted’s wordsmiths could be more proficient and sensitive in the text they produce but mainly because the nature of what has to be judged is impossible to define with any clarity - whether in the current inspection framework or that envisaged for introduction in 2019.
Ofsted’s ‘great injustice’
All effectiveness judgments are just that: judgements which are neither totally clear nor completely objective. They aren’t incontestable truths; they aren’t authoritative pronouncements. They are, or should be, the best interpretations that inspectors can offer based on very wide experience of schools in similar contexts.
A key word is “interpretation”. Inspectors have to exercise interpretative judgement in the absence of those hard-and-fast criteria. Inevitably, any act of interpretation involves consideration of context and circumstance but that consideration can be conducted sympathetically or unsympathetically, sensitively or insensitively.
Ofsted’s current stance is to hinder its inspectors from making overall judgments of the quality of education (i.e., effectiveness) that are sensitive to the context on the grounds that an indefinable set of objective standards derived in an educational vacuum can be justifiably applied from on high to all schools. They can’t; they don’t exist - except perhaps in the minds of those who have never inspected.
In taking this stance, Ofsted is doing a great injustice to some of those working with disadvantaged communities who are not only working hard - note the “effort grade” - but who are also, in many cases, providing a better quality of education than Ofsted recognises. It needs to distinguish much more clearly between the quality of education provided and overall effectiveness determined very largely by criteria derived in a sort of Platonic vacuum.
Is it too much to ask that, just as all schools should have high but realistic aspirations for their students, Ofsted itself should reasonably aspire for its employees to be able to make judgements of quality of education sensitive to context and reported in bespoke, not formulaic, inspection reports that do far better justice to circumstance?
Colin Richards is a retired HMI
