The proportion of parents who trust Ofsted’s judgements of a school’s quality has fallen, a new survey has found.

The YouGov survey, published by Ofsted today, found that 59 per cent of parents agreed that Ofsted provided a reliable measure of a school’s quality in 2017, compared to 66 per cent in 2016.

Reasons given by parents for feeling that Ofsted information was unreliable were that the school was different during inspections, that inspections were too short to give meaningful information and that inspectors were not looking at the right things.

But there has been a smaller drop in the proportion of parents who say Ofsted is a valuable source of information about education in their local area, from 69 per cent in 2016 to 67 per cent last year.

Most parents (61 per cent) think that schools should have no notice inspections, with 52 per cent thinking a half day notice of inspection makes sense.

The survey of 1,128 parents, 1,000 parents of school-aged children and 128 parents of pre-school children, was carried out in December 2017. It found that only a fifth of parents read the whole of the Ofsted report on their child’s school or pre-school, with a further 36 per cent saying they had read most of it.

It also found that the information that parents found most useful when choosing a school or college was the quality of teaching (67 per cent), how happy children are (66 per cent) and how the school deals with bullying (57 per cent).

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