Ofsted is under pressure like never before. 

The inspectorate has had more than 27 years of treating every school-improvement problem as a nail to be hammered with its graded inspection system. Schools in the most disadvantaged and challenging areas are, of course, hammered more than most. 

Background: All heads urged to join anti-Ofsted ‘quiet revolution’

Opinion: ‘Stick to your guns, Amanda Spielman’

Retention: One in three teachers leaves within five years

But now people are tired of the ever-changing goalposts and fads of the latest education secretary, schools minister or chief inspector. 

It’s simply time to stop, take a deep breath and look at the part accountability can play in school improvement - and then determine what part we think it should play.

Drowning in accountability

In 2018, I opened the Headteachers’ Roundtable (HTRT) Summit with the words of Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” 

The fact is that teachers, school leaders and schools are drowning in our pernicious accountability system.  

According to Professor Steve Munby, “England has the highest-stakes accountability system in the world…Other systems from around the world look on at the accountability system in England in bewilderment.” 

This bewilderment only increases when they look at our inability to recruit sufficient teachers and the woeful retention of staff.

The accountability regime leaves England with a relatively inexperienced teaching profession.

If we know anything, it is that teachers tend to get better and better in their first few years in the profession. Losing so many teachers after three to five years is debilitating to school improvement efforts.

Stop enabling a flawed system

Dan Heath’s new book Upstream, published last week, includes a chapter entitled “How will you change the system?” His number-one message is to stop enabling a flawed system and to vigorously challenge the unacceptable status quo.

The HTRT’s #PauseOfsted campaign - in which we call for school-employed Ofsted inspectors either to resign from inspecting or simply to make themselves unavailable for future inspections - is an attempt to call a halt to a flawed system.

Pausing Ofsted inspections will give the time and space for people to think clearly and coherently about how responsibility, accountability and school improvement can best work together. It is the whole accountability system we believe needs reviewing.

School leaders account for approximately 70 per cent of inspectors. Some, of course, are very honest with themselves, engaging in the inspection process as a way of better understanding how inspection would impact on their own schools. It was a means of gaining an insight into Ofsted’s thinking and process. 

To be clear, these school leaders aren’t motivated by gaining an unfair advantage over other schools. Rather, their motives are rooted in fear. 

However, the reality is that the schools these heads lead are advantaged in the accountability system, and become more so. The poor get poorer. 

Dealing with the messy reality

While ethical statements and commissions are necessary, ethical actions are what really matter.

Standout leaders deal with the messy reality and are prepared to make bold decisions that will substantially improve the situation. 

Having spent the past decade or more hearing calls for school leaders to be part of the inspection process, it may be difficult for some professional associations to join our clarion call. 

But the alternative is to continue propping up a deeply flawed system. Ofsted, for all the meetings, tea, coffee and biscuits, continues to do exactly as it pleases, ignoring powerful evidence like the emerging findings on the new inspection framework from the NAHT school leader’s union.

It’s hard, after years of campaigning to improve a system, to accept that now is the time to stop and cut your losses: to accept that, despite your best efforts, the system remains fundamentally flawed.

But I would argue that it is now time to accept that we must reset and replace an accountability system that does too much harm and too little good.

A long march ahead

HTRT is only 15 working days into our campaign. We’re in what I call the “letting people know” phase.

We are settling in for a long march, in which we hope the moral compasses of people’s thoughts and actions become realigned.

The decision to remove yourself, a school leader, from the Ofsted inspection process - because you realise that you can no longer hope to do good - can be a Damascene moment for some school leaders. But for others, it will take longer. 

But, ultimately, I believe that heads will come to see that this is the only way to tackle the damage inspection is doing to teacher workload, retention and recruitment, as well as to headteachers’ lives and the use of already stretched resources and finances. 

Indeed, this weekend we will publish a powerful blog by an NAHT executive council member, which will say: “I could no longer be associated with, or represent, Ofsted as an inspector or advocate. As someone who used to publicly praise and support Ofsted, I find I can no longer defend the many flaws.”

Some of the changes HTRT is suggesting are relatively simple: for example, an Ofsted complaints process that includes an independent hearing to redress complaints upheld during the process. Or the use of contextualised or comparative data within performance tables, alongside the introduction of proportionate accountability for any pupil who has ever attended a school (a far more effective way to address off-rolling).

Other suggestions are more ambitious. For example, the current inspecting of safeguarding is inadequate. Safeguarding is an audit issue, not an inspection one. There should be regular audits - reported to governors or directors - to help address off-rolling.

We need to ensure child protection arrangements are secure and well implemented and the needs of vulnerable children are met. This should be a continuous cycle of “plan, do and review”, with external oversight.

Perhaps most radically, we want to see improvement for schools working in the most challenging circumstances to be inextricably linked with improvements in health, social services, policing, housing and economic prosperity.

And, finally, we believe graded inspection needs to be chopped; it certainly hasn’t led to improvement in those schools Ofsted unkindly refer to as “stuck”. It’s time for them to go.

If we could get these reforms adopted, we might see an end to the damage the current accountability system is doing. 

Stephen Tierney is chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable, a blogger and author of Liminal Leadership. He tweets @LeadingLearner