The leading body representing academy trusts has questioned the certainty and reliability of Ofsted inspection grades and warned that its judgements can feel “arbitrary” to schools.
In a new paper on inspection, the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) also questions whether Ofsted currently gathers enough evidence to be able to form a judgement about the quality of education in a school.
And the group - which represents more than 60 per cent of England’s academy sector - questions whether the evidence Ofsted gathers would be better presented without big graded judgements.
Ofsted’s education inspection framework places an increased emphasis on curriculum, which helps inform a “quality of education judgement” about each school given a graded inspection.
The new CST discussion paper questions whether all of the inspectorate’s judgements are “sufficiently valid”.
It comes as the Association of School and College Leaders called for inspection grades to be abolished and warned that the next chief inspector of Ofsted would need to focus on restoring the trust of the profession.
The paper, written by CST’s deputy chief executive, Steve Rollett, highlights a concern among school leaders that the quality of education judgement is overly focused on curriculum.
Ofsted inspectors assess the intent, impact and implementation of the curriculum as part of their quality of education judgement.
Quality of education was introduced as one of the distinct judgements Ofsted makes about a school in 2019.
In the CST paper, Mr Rollett said: “Does the ‘quality of education’ sufficiently capture the intended construct?
“There is a view among some that the current conception of quality of education overplays specific elements of curriculum design. One solution to this would be to provide counterbalance through a greater focus on other aspects of the construct which are currently underrepresented.”
However, it notes that this would mean increasing the length of inspections and the number of inspectors needed.
Mr Rollett adds: “Given the current funding pressures, it is hard to make the case that additional funding for inspection should be a priority.”
The CST paper asks whether what Ofsted is actually assessing would better be referred to as “curriculum sequencing” rather than the quality of education.
The paper also asks if the answer is to move away from “big graded judgements of schools”?
In his conclusion, Mr Rollett says: “The case made in this paper is not that the Ofsted’s judgements are ‘invalid’ per se, but rather it asks whether they are all sufficiently valid - and whether inspectors can be sufficiently certain - for the purposes to which judgements are put, and whether the cost in terms of unintended consequence is too great.”
The paper also explores how the current Ofsted framework differs from its predecessor introduced in 2015.
It says that the current framework requires inspectors to make more inferences in reaching their judgements compared with the previous regime, which was more reliant on performance data from tests and exams.
It warns that the cost of Ofsted’s previous approach was “that inspection provided limited insight beyond what already existed in league tables”.
The paper adds: “In contrast, the 2019 Education Inspection Framework was established to reveal information which could not be seen in league tables, most notably curriculum quality, through a higher inference inspection model.
“But the trade-off in doing so may be that inspection outcomes are harder to predict and stakeholders may feel that outcomes are more arbitrary.”
Ofsted declined to comment.
