Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman has admitted that the initial language used in the new school inspection framework was more suited to secondary schools than primaries. 

But she has disagreed with claims that the new framework sees primary schools “through a secondary school lens”.

The claim, first made by the NAHT school leaders’ union earlier this year, was put to her by Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis at the Commons Education Select Committee meeting hosted online this morning.

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Mr Gullis said the new inspection framework had been criticised by primary headteachers, who said their schools were “being looked at very much through a secondary schools lens in terms of structure”.

Ms Spielman said: “That is something I don’t agree with. The framework was very much developed to think about [both] primary and secondary, and there are larger proportions of primaries in the country and a larger proportion of the pilot inspections we carried out were in primary schools.

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“I think we identified early on where the language we used about subject leads was not always used by primary schools and we clarified that very quickly to make sure people understood. We simply wanted to make sure we were having the conversation with the right person who was making the choices about what children were learning in a particular subject area.”

In February the NAHT warned that the new curriculum-led inspections were ”brutal” and had left some staff needing counselling, and that they needed to be urgently reformed because they were “deeply problematic” in primary schools.

It said the new framework was creating a new workload and demanding a model of curriculum management that schools did not have the capacity or resources to implement.

In a report, it stated: ”The heart of the issue is that primary subject leadership simply does not work in the way that Ofsted appears to feel would best fit its revised inspection methodology. This is not simply an issue for very small schools; it affects most, if not all, primary schools.”