It’s November 1999. The air is crisp. The promise (and terror) of the new millennium is all around us and Robbie Williams is in the charts. I am two months into my teacher training and things have been relatively calm. Then, on a Monday morning, a call comes that will change my experience of the workplace significantly for the next few months. Ofsted.
Other than a withdrawal of support and watching my colleagues and superiors run around like headless chickens, my first experience of Ofsted was quite a positive one. The inspector recognised I was still training, saw that some of the groups I had were particularly challenging, and was kind when he gave me feedback. I’d only been observed once before so any tips I could pick up were gratefully received.
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But as my experience grew, including my experience of inspection in different settings, so did my scepticism about this kind of feedback. Some of it simply didn’t fit what I was trying to teach, didn’t work with my class, would make my workload fly through the roof or conflicted with what had been said before.
This was also true of others who observed, including those within my school who were often blown by the winds of fashion of the time, or those in the local authority and Department for Education. My own feedback to teachers often followed pro-formas from universities, designed by senior leaders or plucked from the pages of the latest education bible. It increasingly became clear that judging individual lessons and individual teachers was a nonsense.
The research that began to call into question the validity of observations from the likes of Professor Robert Coe, therefore, came as no surprise.
Judging teaching: a fool’s errand?
This doesn’t mean that I think visiting lessons and talking about what was seen and making recommendations or providing further support is not valuable. It is, very much so. But making a judgement on individual teacher quality has come to be known as a bit of a fool’s errand. There are still those who claim to be able to do this well, some of whom I respect greatly. However, the weight of evidence is against them.
It is, therefore, a concern to see headlines emerging that indicate that Ofsted’s new report card may be bringing back a judgement on the quality of teaching. While this may be intended as a holistic approach, it does suggest a potentially retrograde step for schools and inspection.
When we bring judgement into observations like this, we bring many risks to our ongoing improvement. The observation becomes summative, a point-in-time judgement, and one that works against the slow, incremental improvements that we know all teachers make. It stops people wanting to take risks and makes teaching even more of a performance than it already is.
Inspectors, many of whom continue to teach, know that sometimes a lesson can go wrong - that the IT wouldn’t work or nerves took over or a wasp flew into a classroom - and they may ask to revisit or look at some more lessons. Often there is more than one inspector and, therefore, the events in one lesson do not negate evidence gathered elsewhere.
Inspectors may see really strong learning represented in students’ books and conversations, and the data may also show high achievement. Teachers may be very clear about why that particular lesson didn’t work and provide contextual information and precisely what they will do to rectify it next time. There are many elements to this, including behaviour and attendance, that can be a barrier to students’ success within the individual lesson.
Looking to leaders
A judgement on teaching does also sit within the leadership criteria. It comes back to the point about what leaders want students to know and be able to do at different points and how successfully they ensure this happens. Do leaders know how to support teachers to improve so that learners can learn? How effectively are they doing this and what impact is this having? Are their ambitions for all pupils being achieved and, if they are not, what is it that leaders are doing to put the right things in place? Again, individual lessons or teachers are just one aspect to this.
There are many different things that influence student success. The quality of classroom practice is, of course, important. But separating this out and isolating what may be happening in the classroom from the whole-school context and culture and the actions of leaders is unlikely to yield much useful information. Indeed, it shifts the emphasis away from the way organisations work as a collective and places undue emphasis on a single, hard-to-verify and very much open-to-debate facet of the whole.
At this stage we don’t know what Ofsted’s exact intentions are about judging teaching. However, what I do know is that it is an area fraught with difficulty. It risks distortion of practices and the creation of policies that are written to include tick-box compliance to half-formed ideas. The unintended consequences need to be carefully considered before we head back to the perhaps best forgotten errors of the olden days.
Zoe Enser is the school improvement lead for a trust in the North West of England
