The next chief inspector at Ofsted needs to rebuild trust between the inspectorate and the teaching profession, a heads’ leader has warned.
The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), Geoff Barton, also suggested that the next head of Ofsted should be someone with experience of running schools - something he highlighted as being absent in the current leadership.
He was speaking as ASCL launched a new discussion paper on the future of inspection that claims the implementation of Ofsted’s current Education Inspection Framework has been flawed, and says that the union is concerned the watchdog is losing the trust of the profession.
ASCL has raised concerns about the way Ofsted is approaching both safeguarding and subject-focused inspections.
Its report makes a series of recommendations, including schools’ overall inspection grades being scrapped immediately, and Ofsted reviewing the use of pupil voice in inspection reports to ensure that evidence is checked.
Mr Barton said the ASCL discussion paper was being launched as the process for appointing a new chief inspector was underway.
Next Ofsted chief ‘should have school leadership experience’
Amanda Spielman has led the inspectorate since 2017 and her term as chief inspector was extended for two years in 2021 to give her more time to bed in the Education Inspection Framework, which was introduced in 2019.
The Covid pandemic led to routine inspections being put on hold for around 18 months in 2020, before resuming in September 2021.
In its new report, ASCL raises concerns about the way in which inspections are being carried out under the framework, and recommends a series of changes.
Commenting on what should happen under the next chief inspector from 2024, while speaking to Tes as the union launched its report, Mr Barton said: “There is a need to rebuild trust between Ofsted and the profession. I think people will interpret that in different ways.
“Does that mean [the next chief inspector] needs to be somebody who has run a school? We haven’t had that for a while. We haven’t really got a leadership team in Ofsted who have been involved in running schools.
“And from our point of view, that’s a little bit of an issue.”
Mr Barton also called for the government to try to reduce the impact of inspection on schools.
“I am taken by the point that Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters make in their book on the English education system, that the chief inspector has more influence over the curriculum and over the behaviour of teachers and leaders in schools than the secretary of state does.
“Now that seems to me an indication that we have allowed inspection as a process to become disproportionately more significant than, frankly, it is in most countries.”
On the appointment of a new chief inspector, he added: “My hope is that what we’re not going to get is a new chief inspector full of their own personal, idiosyncratic whacky wheezes because I don’t think the profession needs that.”
He said ASCL’s new report is trying to reform inspection to serve the purposes of a government “which needs to recruit and retain more teachers and more leaders. And inspection, we know, is one thing that drives people out from going to the areas that need them”.
The new report highlights a concern among heads about how Ofsted inspects safeguarding following its review into sexual abuse and harassment in schools.
The report says ASCL strongly welcomed the Ofsted review and believed it was right to seek the views of pupils on all aspects of their experience, particularly those linked to safeguarding and personal development.
But it adds: “However, since summer 2021 school and college leaders have reported that comments made by a small minority of pupils have sometimes been used disproportionately to reach judgements. In many cases, these comments do not appear to have been triangulated by other evidence.”
The report calls for Ofsted to undertake an immediate internal review into how pupil voice is used during inspection, and how claims are backed up in wider evidence.
The report also makes a series of longer-term recommendations, including removing safeguarding from Ofsted inspections.
It says: “We propose that, broadly speaking, Ofsted inspections should not inspect safeguarding, health and safety or financial and risk management.
“Instead, we suggest that schools and colleges should have annual light-touch safeguarding and health and safety audits, removed from the cycle of inspection.
“This would, in our view, both better protect children and young people, and allow Ofsted inspections to focus on the substance of education. Where Ofsted has concerns over safeguarding or pupils’ safety, they should refer these to the relevant body.”
Mr Barton said there was also a concern among heads about the subjectivity of the deep dives carried out into different school subjects during Ofsted inspections.
Ofsted’s framework places an increased emphasis on curriculum, which Ofsted assesses in part through deep dives into individual subjects at a school.
Mr Barton raised concerns that these deep dives could be carried out by inspectors who were not subject experts, and he also questioned how robust the process was.
He said the deep dive outcomes were not predicated by “your experience and your skill as a head of maths” but by “your ability to explain things in an articulate manner”.
He said: “It isn’t necessarily, methodologically, the real deep dive that we might have thought and if then your curriculum is found to be wanting based on that conversation, you can see how you start to get a disproportionate sense of an inspection system, which is now starting to feel subjective.”
Tom Middlehurst, ASCL’s curriculum, assessment and inspection specialist, said: “Unfortunately, we are at a point where I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that most of the sector, most of the teaching profession and leaders, have lost trust in the Ofsted process. So something has to change.
“We would always advocate not changing something if it is working, but [inspection] is not working at the moment for schools.”
Ofsted declined to comment.
