The former Covid recovery tsar who resigned this year over the government’s “half-hearted” education catch-up plans has questioned if now is the “right time” for Ofsted inspections that “frighten” heads to be taking place.

Sir Kevan Collins’ comments come after the government revealed this week that it has handed over £23 million to Ofsted to speed up inspections to assess schools’ Covid recovery progress.

He said: “I am not sure this is the right time to do the kind of inspection we are doing. I do think inspection has a place within our system but there is something wrong in that people are frightened of it, there is something incorrect in that.”

Background: Sir Kevan Collins resigns

Inspection: Call to stop graded inspection over fears around heads’ wellbeing

Controversy: Teachers’ leader says Ofsted is a ‘reign of terror’

Sir Kevan was responding to the question “is this the right moment to be inspecting schools?” by an audience member at the Schools and Academies Show conference panel event in Birmingham.

The government has provided extra funding through the Spending Review to ask the watchdog to provide a quicker assessment of how well education is recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ofsted said that beginning with last term’s inspections, all schools and further education providers will now be inspected at least once by the summer of 2025.

Sir Kevan said: “It is not an oxymoron to wish to consider an idea of an intelligent accountability framework in this country. I don’t think we have one.

“I think people are far too fearful of the accountability structures and what it ends up doing is abdicating responsibility to accountability.”

Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said at the same event: “One of our members contacted us a few weeks back to say they had received a bomb threat at the school that they took seriously. [They] got the leadership team together and said, ‘We have just had a bomb threat’, and the leadership team just said, ‘Thank God, we thought it was going to be Ofsted.’”

He added: “What we say is if you phone to inspect a school and they say not now, you trust that leader and have that deferral process. The second thing is that window of time you might need to be inspected causes huge stress because it stretches into the future. Our third point is we are concerned about the subjectivity that goes on.”

Headteachers’ unions and school leaders’ organisations had called for Ofsted inspections to be scaled back because of Covid disruptions.

Sir Kevan resigned as catch-up tsar earlier this year when the Department for Education announced plans for £1.4 billion for education recovery, after he had asked the government to fund a £15 billion package to help pupils recover learning lost during school closures owing to the pandemic.