Ofsted has been commissioned to carry out additional monitoring of independent school inspectorates by the education secretary.

This comes after the inspectorate pushed for such a move, stating that its ability to assess the work of inspectorates for independent schools was currently “seriously hampered”.

In a letter to Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman, education secretary Damian Hinds said: “When we met, you also raised the issue of Ofsted’s monitoring of the other independent school inspectorates. I know that you take a different view to your predecessor, who had asked for the monitoring to be scaled back, and that you now want to collect more evidence to better inform your assurance role.”

He added: “On the basis that you now feel able to allocate more resource to this activity, I am happy to commission additional monitoring. I am confident that the arrangements can be agreed at official level and I understand that officials have already had an initial discussion on this and a more detailed discussion is planned later this month.”

More access to private school inspections

In November, Tes reported that Ms Spielman had urgent Mr Hinds to allow the inspectorate more access to check on private school inspections.

She warned that the watchdog had only been able to check a small number of inspections, and she wanted Ofsted to be able to carry out more unannounced checks of private school inspections and undertake termly checks focused on safeguarding.

She explained that since the last spending review, the work that the Department for Education was asking Ofsted to do did not allow it to provide a reasonable level of assurance about private school inspections. In a letter to Mr Hinds, Ms Spielman said that in the past three years Ofsted had only been able to monitor four private school inspections, two carried out by the Independent Schools Inspectorate and two by the School Inspection Service.

In his letter setting out his new plans, dated 15 November, Mr Hinds also demanded that Steiner schools be subjected to “additional scrutiny” by Ofsted. “In the case of the independent schools, I would like to commission Ofsted to conduct a series of inspections of some of the Steiner independent schools, rather than the School Inspection Service (SIS), and for this to go alongside increased monitoring by Ofsted of SIS inspections,” he said.

The incidence of safeguarding issues in private Steiner schools “appears to be higher” than average, he explained.