“We believe this should be a watershed moment and Ofsted should look at this the same way, too.”
The message from Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, makes it clear that for many in the profession, the events of the past week must be a catalyst for change in the way schools are inspected.
There has been a huge outpouring of anger, grief and frustration from teachers and leaders after the death of headteacher Ruth Perry. She died following an Ofsted inspection in which she was told her school would be downgraded to “inadequate”.
Her family have said she took her own life after the inspection.
Three major education unions called for a pause in inspections, a head considered a public boycott of inspection and other groups of school leaders suggested wearing black armbands and holding a minute’s silence to make the profession’s feelings clear to the inspectorate.
Today, Ofsted responded with a message from its chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, who said the news of Ms Perry’s death was met with great sadness at Ofsted, and it was profoundly upsetting for colleagues.
She said, however, that inspections should continue because pausing them would not be in children’s best interests.
In response, Mr Whiteman said: “Carrying on as normal is not an acceptable answer.”
And there is a growing sense within the profession that change needs to happen.
The events of the past week, in the words of Caroline Derbyshire, chair of the Headteachers’ Roundtable group, have “brought everyone up short and allowed us to see inspection and its impact through a different lens”.
She added that concern and unhappiness over the use of one-word inspection grades had been building over time.
A number of organisations have already said that it is time to get rid of them - including the party hoping to form the next government.
Labour announced that it plans to consult on replacing inspection grades with a school scorecard and introduce an annual school safeguarding check.
This follows the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) calling for overall inspection grades to be scrapped immediately and the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) recommending they be reviewed.
Perhaps the most striking part of Ms Spielman’s statement today was an acknowledgement that the debate about removing grades is a legitimate one.
The reliability and impact of Ofsted grades
Concerns have been voiced this year about both the reliability and the impact of inspection grade judgements.
In an ASCL report in January, general secretary Geoff Barton described them as a “woefully blunt tool with which to measure performance, failing to account for the different circumstances under which schools operate”.
And he warned that negative judgements “come with huge stigma attached”.
A CST paper released just days later raised questions about whether Ofsted’s current model of inspection allows it to assess schools with the certainty that a one-word inspection judgement implies.
In 2019, Ofsted launched its Education Inspection Framework - with an increased emphasis on the school curriculum and its intent, implementation and impact, and a reduced focus on exam and test scores.
The aim, which received some support from the sector as it was launched, was to ensure that inspectors got to the substance of education rather than rewarding schools who taught to the test.
But the CST report, written by its deputy chief executive Steve Rollett, highlighted that the current framework requires inspectors to make more inferences in reaching their judgements compared with the previous inspection regime, which was more reliant on performance data from tests and exams.
As such, inspection outcomes are harder to predict and “can feel arbitrary” to some schools, the report warned.
Labour’s Ofsted scorecard plan
Labour’s plan is to consult on a school scorecard to replace the one-word judgement.
In her speech to the ASCL conference, shadow education secretary Bridget Philipson said: “Parents and schools deserve better than a system that is high-stakes for staff but low information for parents.”
But how would this work?
In a blog post, former DfE civil servant Jonathan Simons has set out how the last Labour administration approached a plan to introduce a school scorecard when he worked for the education secretary at the time, Ed Balls.
Mr Simons, a partner at Public First and head of education practice, warned that when deciding what data should be included, “you may want simplicity, but you’ll end up with complexity”.
He also said that Labour would need to decide how the scorecard would work alongside existing performance tables and also whether it wanted to keep graded judgements for sub-categories of a school.
The impact of graded inspections on school staff
There has also been growing concern about the impact on staff of fully graded Ofsted inspections - especially when they restarted in September 2021, as schools were still working with the impact of the Covid pandemic.
The headteachers’ support group Headrest warned in a report in October of that year that the return of graded inspections in this context was toxic to headteachers.
And former Department for Education adviser Sam Freedman suggested on BBC Radio 4 today that the strength of feeling towards Ofsted in part reflected a build-up of resentment “more towards the department and ministers” by school staff who felt they had not been supported by the government during Covid.
Labour frontbencher Wes Streeting said today that Ofsted needed to “reflect on the culture” of school inspections.
He also pointed to an “unhealthy degree of pressure that people feel under when they’re going through an inspection”.
But in a sense, the pressure felt by school staff comes not only from the inspection itself but also from the consequences.
The government can intervene if a school is rated as “inadequate” to move a school into an academy trust, and has recently extended its power to do so if a school gets two consecutive judgements of less than “good” - despite Ofsted raising concern about this.
Mr Freedman warned that any reform plan for Ofsted would need to think not only about how inspections are carried out but also how the findings are used by the government to regulate schools.
He said: “There are challenges and issues for sure, but you can’t just abolish it overnight and hope all the problems go away. We need to think seriously about what we want, what we expect schools to do and how we are going to assess that.”
He added that at the moment, the only thing the DfE has to regulate a school is Ofsted inspection outcomes. “It isn’t really about inspection; it’s about how the inspection results are used. That is what causes so much stress for our teachers.”
And he described the current system as a “very crude” way of assessing schools.
‘A simple summary of a school’s strengths and weaknesses’
In her statement today Ms Spielman, whose term as chief inspector comes to an end this year, said that the debate about grades “shouldn’t lose sight of how grades are currently used”.
She said that they “give parents a simple and accessible summary of a school’s strengths and weaknesses and are used to guide government decisions about when to intervene in struggling schools”.
And Labour has said that under its proposals, trigger points for intervention will always feature as part of inspection “because Labour will never stand by as children are failed”.
In its latest statement, the DfE has said: “Ofsted has played a crucial role in upholding education standards and making sure children are safe.”
The department said Ofsted also provided “independent, up-to-date evaluations on the quality of education leadership, which parents greatly rely on to give them confidence in choosing the right school for their child.”
Labour plans to remove the one-word inspection judgements from Ofsted reports if it comes to power were well received at the ASCL conference earlier this year, but this remains a general election result and a consultation away from becoming a new reality.
The reactions to Ms Spielman’s statement today suggest that many in the profession think a more immediate change to the status quo is needed, in light of the anger felt over the past seven days.
