Headteachers should ignore Ofsted and focus on what they think is right for their school, the chair of the Social Mobility Commission has said today.
Social mobility tsar Katharine Birbalsingh told heads at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) Annual Conference this afternoon (12 March) that she did not think Ofsted was “necessarily, as an idea, a force for good”.
However, she added that, under its current chief inspector Amanda Spielman, the inspectorate was better “than it had ever been”.
Nonetheless, she said: “Too many of us, understandably, as leaders, are constantly worried about what Ofsted is asking for. And you must try and just put the blinkers on and ignore it and just do what is right for your children and do what is right for your school.”
Ms Birbalsingh said heads had to “fight” for what they thought was best for their schools.
“Because otherwise, it’s not very inspirational to say to staff, ‘We’re doing what we’re doing because we’re moving from ‘good’ to ‘outstanding’, or ‘We’re doing what we’re doing because this is what Ofsted wants’,” she added.
“You need to believe in what you’re doing, you need to believe that you’re doing it to make your children succeed,” she said.
In a speech that was mainly focused on the work of Michaela Community School in Brent, where she is co-founder and headteacher, she said that her job and that of other heads in the audience was more important than the role of the chair of the social mobility commission.
She told heads that in a “more challenging school” she would “highly recommend” silent corridors, as corridors could be “horrible places where children get bullied, there’s lots of screaming”.
Ms Birbalsingh added that, at her school, they worked “very hard with families to encourage them not to give [students] a smartphone… and if we genuinely want things to be fairer, and we want our disadvantaged children to be socially mobile, the best thing you can do for them is get them not to have a smartphone”.
Ms Birbalsingh said some Year 7 and 8 pupils at Michaela did not have phones at all, while Year 11 pupils handed theirs in to the school to keep in a safe place in advance of their exams.
Asked about how different services that affect children could be brought together for a system-level response to social mobility, she said: “It’s really important to think about what we are doing personally.
“It’s very easy to point elsewhere all the time and say, ‘The cause is over there’… What we must always do is look inward and think, ‘Well, what am I doing? What’s in my grasp to change?’”
Ms Birbalsingh said that, in schools, “there’s too much of an argument around the things that do work” and that the commission was collecting evidence on these.
But she added: “When you look out for all the small stuff, the big stuff just happens.”
