Exempting outstanding schools from inspections may be prompting them to focus more on exams and tests - at the expense of a broader curriculum, a senior Ofsted official said today.

Sean Harford, Ofsted’s national director of education, told delegates at the Pathfinder Teaching School Alliance conference in Leeds that the length of time that some schools were going without inspection was “a real issue”.

“People berate us for not going back [to outstanding schools] for ten or 11 years, but we can’t because the regulations say unless there is a drop in performance or a parental complaint, then we can’t go back.”

When asked if there was a danger that outstanding schools are less willing to broaden the curriculum and risk their status, Mr Harford replied: “It is a bigger issue in primary than secondary,” he said. “Because they can focus on just reading, writing and maths and keep below the radar, unless they get safeguarding concerns.  That is part of the reason why there is an outcry.”

Speaking after the conference, Mr Harford added that without going into outstanding schools, Ofsted could not know if they are narrowing the curriculum. He pointed to Ofsted’s curriculum review last year which found that some primary schools were narrowing the curriculum.

Mr Harford thought that outstanding schools might think that by narrowing the curriculum they could keep themselves under the radar.

“The exemption, we feel, is putting schools in position where they go too long between inspections and that is a concern,” he said. “We think there should be provision to enable us to look at, if not all of them, a greater proportion of them. Parents are concerned that outstanding schools are going too long without an inspection and we share that concern.”

He estimated that the regulations as they stood meant that in the last five years, around three to eight per cent of outstanding schools had been inspected.

Mr Harford added that what Ofsted “clearly couldn’t do” was simply remove the outstanding grade because at the moment the regulations make schools in Ofsted’s “highest grade” exempt from routine inspection. This means that if the outstanding grade was scrapped then “good” would become the de facto top grade and all schools rated good would become exempt from inspection.

Adam Cooper, head of Knavesmire primary in York, whose school has not had an inspection visit since 2007 told Tes that he “works his socks off” to make sure his pupils have a broad and balanced curriculum. The school’s Year 6 pupils recently went on a residential trip to Barcelona - just weeks before the Sats tests in May. But Mr Cooper did agree that it would be a good thing for outstanding schools to be inspected more frequently than they are.

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