Teachers to decide on call for Ofsted to be abolished

Members of Britain’s largest teaching union will vote on motion to abolish schools inspectorate at conference next month

25th March 2021, 5:38pm

Dave Speck

Schools inspectorate Ofsted should be abolished because of the workload it creates for teachers and because of the “lack of reliability” between inspectors, among other reasons.

That’s according to a motion up for debate at the annual conference of the NEU teaching union next month.

Presenting the conference agenda in a briefing for reporters this morning, NEU joint general secretary Mary Bousted said the motion was “dear to my heart” and “likely to get a lot of debate”.

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She said: “The motion is a really good motion. It goes through the issues of the lack of reliability between inspectors - that’s a particular issue with the new inspection framework.

“It states that the framework is not fit for primary schools, which don’t organise on a subject basis in the same way as secondary schools do.”

She also said Ofsted couldn’t match its inspectors with inspections of subjects they were qualified in, and that the new framework was increasing workload for teachers.

The motion, being proposed by the NEU’s West Sussex branch, also calls for the abolition of league tables and for “the development of an alternative framework for accountability based on self-evaluation”.

The main points of the motion include:

Demands created by accountability’ is the most significant cause of teachers’ and school/college leaders’ excessive workload leading to nearly 40 per cent of teachers leaving the classroom within five years of qualification.
Ofsted and league tables place schools in competition with each other, leading to growing inequality between schools.
Ofsted’s own report (June 2019) illustrates the lack of reliability between inspectors, questioning the accuracy of Ofsted findings.
Ofsted inspections do not account for the local context, or multiple demanding roles discharged by schools in high poverty areas and therefore Ofsted fuels teacher recruitment and retention challenges for those settings.

The Department for Education and Ofsted have been contacted for comment.