Ofsted inspections are “not particularly useful” to parents choosing schools, new academic research suggests.
The study highlights how a school’s Ofsted inspection outcome can be years out of date, and says that it is not an indicator of the future academic performance of a pupil there.
The findings follow calls by sector leaders for the Ofsted ratings system to be reviewed, as reported exclusively in Tes yesterday.
And they come the day before parents across England are set to find out whether they have been allocated their first choice of secondary school.
Today’s report - produced by Dr Sam Sims, Professor Christian Bokhove and Professor John Jerrim, who now also works for Ofsted as an adviser - analyses all inspections of mainstream secondary schools conducted between 2005 and 2015.
In a blog setting out the research, Dr Sims says: “One reason to doubt whether Ofsted can inform school choice is that many schools haven’t been inspected for several years.
“Consider a parent who was choosing a school in October 2013. They might be reading a report from an inspection that was conducted in 2011, and their child wouldn’t start at the school until September 2014. Of course, parents are really interested in how good the school will be in the five years after that [2014 to 2019].”
Ofsted reports ‘average more than 1,000 days old’
For their research, the academics created a hypothetical scenario of parents with two children - born exactly two years apart - choosing a secondary school for their eldest child in October 2013 to start the following year.
Dr Sims says: “For our hypothetical parent, we found that the most recent inspection report across our 2,538 secondary schools was on average 1,040 days (almost three years) old by the time their child would begin at the school.”
He adds that reports were even older in many schools rated “good” or “outstanding”, which are inspected less frequently.
“These long lags mean that half of the headteachers in place when the most recent inspection was conducted were no longer in post when the child would have started at the school,” Dr Sims says.
Schools rated as “outstanding” were excluded from routine Ofsted inspections for most of the past decade, meaning many had gone without regular inspections for at least 10 years.
But in 2019 the government decided to lift this exemption, and the inspectorate began visiting “outstanding” schools again at the start of the previous academic year.
The research published today also sought to test whether older inspection grades are still informative.
For this, researchers looked at whether the most recent inspection judgement of a school predicted pupil outcomes during the period in which the hypothetical child would have attended it.
They found a clear correlation between pupils attending a school with a higher Ofsted grade at the time of application and going on to attain higher grades.
However, the researchers asked whether this “simply reflects a self-fulfilling prophecy in which rich parents of high-achieving children buy houses near ‘outstanding’ schools”.
They said that when they controlled for pupil prior attainment, admission type and pupil deprivation, “the difference” in attainment scores for schools across the four Ofsted judgements collapsed.
They found that only an “outstanding” judgement was associated with a (0.1 standard deviation) increase in pupil results.
In his blog, Dr Sims acknowledges that it could be wrong to expect inspection judgements to be able to predict future exam results.
“It might be argued that inspections inform parents primarily by gathering evidence of what it is really like ‘on the ground’ in a school, which may not be adequately captured by exam results,” he says.
Academics tested this by looking at a range of metrics that they thought would be easier for inspectors to observe than for parents.
Dr Sims adds: “We found small differences on pupil absence rates, no differences in parental satisfaction, and (again) no detectable difference between the bottom three judgments in terms of parent-reported behaviour standards.”
Parents buying houses near ‘good’ schools
Overall, the researchers found, parents who choose a “good” secondary school for their child “will not leave with appreciably better outcomes than a parent who selects an ’‘inadequate’ school”.
The one exception to this, they noted, is an “outstanding” judgment, which “does predict future academic outcomes - though only if the inspection was conducted within the last five years”.
Regarding schools with other grades, they concluded that for parents “Ofsted judgments are of limited use to them in selecting a school”.
They said: “By and large, inspection reports are not particularly useful for parents choosing secondary schools…we recommend that parents think twice before paying more money for a house because it is near a ‘good’ school.”
An Ofsted spokesperson said: “We know that parents value our inspection reports. We are pleased that this study commends our independent, expert view and notes that our inspections help improve, in the long term, schools that are judged ‘inadequate’.”
The three authors recently produced another piece of research showing that lead male Ofsted inspectors gave higher grades than their female counterparts when inspecting primary schools under a previous Ofsted inspection framework.
