Ofsted will not inspect individual staff members under its new report-card model, a senior official from the school watchdog has confirmed.
“We are definitely not returning to the days of lesson observation and individual grades for members of staff,” Ofsted’s national director for education, Lee Owston, said of plans to introduce a report-card system for schools next September.
Mr Owston was addressing the inspectorate’s leaked draft report-card proposals, which included plans for teaching to be assessed as a separate category, as Tes exclusively revealed last week.
Ofsted guidance states that inspectors currently observe lessons as part of their inspection visits.
Teaching and curriculum are assessed together in the current education inspection framework under a “quality of education” judgement.
Speaking at the Schools & Academies Show in Birmingham this afternoon, Mr Owston also said that a new inspection framework may focus more on “statutory outcomes”.
“What we are not returning to is a judgement that purely relies on statutory outcomes,” he said.
“But I think we do need to look more at statutory outcomes than perhaps we do currently under the education inspection framework,” he added.
Report card ‘will not please everybody’
Mr Owston told audiences “not to believe everything you read”.
However, he did not deny that an individual grade on the quality of teaching may be considered under plans for the new framework.
“You would expect me to be putting every single option on the table so I can have a debate with the right individuals,” he said.
Ofsted’s report-card plans will open to a public consultation in January next year.
The aim is to get to a “sensible middle ground that will not please everybody, but will be a better inspection system”, he continued.
“This is not a done deal. There is still formal engagement, and there can still be a formal consultation in the spring, and even after that, we’ll still be iterating on the future. Please keep that in your mind.”
Defining inclusion is ‘very tricky’
Mr Owston also admitted that defining “inclusion” is a “very tricky task in terms of what that term actually means”.
Ofsted has announced that it is producing an inclusion “criterion” as part of its wider report card from September 2025.
However, leaders have told Tes that the measure could risk schools being blamed for a crisis that is “way beyond their control”.
Mr Owston said that inclusion does not include only pupils with special educational needs and disabilities but also disadvantaged pupils and those that “may be vulnerable”.
Inspection toolkit to ‘support school improvement’
Mr Owston told audiences about the inspection toolkit, which Tes revealed Ofsted is due to launch alongside its inspection framework next year.
The inspection toolkit can be used to “support school improvement”, the senior official told audiences.
He said part of this will mean “being even clearer in the criteria that we want”, Mr Owston said, adding that Ofsted’s future criteria for inspection will be “easier to understand”.
Another Ofsted “ambition”, Mr Owston said, is for schools to be able to use a local inspector and to “talk to somebody that understands the context” in which they work, so that Ofsted does not have to “open that conversation at the point of inspection”.
But he added that this will not “100 per cent” be in place by next September.
Ofsted will also ensure that inspections will be conducted by a “specialist or an inspector with a specialist background to match the setting of the school they’re inspecting”, he said.
For the latest education news and analysis delivered every weekday morning, sign up for the Tes Daily newsletter
