We exist in the infinite. This is a difficult concept to get one’s head around. In fact, it’s probably a logical impossibility, given that the average human brain consists of only 1.5kg of squishy grey and white matter and the infinite is, well… infinite.

Fortunately, our brains have evolved cunning little diversionary processes to protect us from the knowledge of our own insignificance. Religion, politics, society, culture, and sport - to name but five - are fascinating and involving activities in which we can immerse ourselves and be reassured of our place and importance. It is easy to see how the genes of those who preferred action to deep reflection have been favoured over time. Deep thought does tend to make you more vulnerable to being eaten by a lion. But it also leads to superficiality of decision-making.

Our brains have evolved to become efficient pattern-recognition machines. The trouble with this skill is that we sometimes see patterns that aren’t actually there and ascribe agency to the random. On many levels, the benefits (not being eaten by a lion) outweigh the costs (mistakenly seeing Jesus’s face on a piece of toast)[1]. But the false positive comes from over-extrapolating from a single data point, and this has other more challenging side effects. For example, it leads many headteachers to believe that Ofsted and, indeed, the education system as a whole is out to get them. When, in fact, Ofsted is probably the most reflective and self-critical element of our state education system and the danger lies elsewhere.

Ofsted admits its mistakes

Before I go any further, particularly given the pseudo-scientific introduction above, I should declare my interests. The trust that I have run since its inception eight years ago has 28 primary schools serving 11,000 children (49 per cent are pupil premium and 53 per cent English as an additional language). Over the past 12 months, I have been on the receiving end of 13 Ofsted inspections, three pilot inspections and a multi-academy trust summary evaluation. This doesn’t mean that I am any less susceptible to cognitive bias than anyone else in the sector, but at least I am citing the breadth on which any argument from experience sits.

In the current political climate, we should be careful before criticising Ofsted. Over the past decade, more than any other instrument of educational accountability, it has shown itself to be reflective and self-critical. Ofsted appears to worry deeply about the impact of its inspection framework and its judgements and is more self-aware than the Education and Skills Funding Agency or the Department for Education. Compared to its counterpart government agencies, Ofsted is open, tends to admit its mistakes, is prepared to do the difficult or unpopular in the interests of all children and is less likely to mistake activity for progress.

Our experience of the new framework pilot inspections last year was largely positive. Partly because they afforded risk-free opportunities for genuine conversations with senior inspectors about improving outcomes for children. But we also welcomed the shift of emphasis away from a largely data-driven “outside-in” approach towards a more Socratic “inside-out”. What I mean by this is that the previous framework favoured school leaders with narrative strengths who could “explain” the idiosyncrasies in their data with conviction and panache. The new framework appears better suited to allow the school to reveal itself rather than be vulnerable to retrospective justifications of historical surprises.

Gaming of the system

A weakness of the previous framework was the degree to which it incentivised gaming of the system. But this is also a flaw of the high-stakes accountability era of the scapegoat, in which we currently all live. If we venture out of our ideological trenches, I suspect that we might agree that test results are only ever a proxy measure for children’s learning and not always the most reliable one at that. Prior to the change in frameworks, we always found that when an inspector was not “getting” a school, the best way to deal with this was by spending more time with children and looking at their books, as this would broaden the evidence base significantly.

This is not to say that the new inspection framework is perfect. The shift away from the use of data for the “quality of education” judgement seems to have been counterbalanced by a shift towards the use of data for “behaviour and attitudes”. I am unconvinced by the resilience of the evidence base for this and schools in the most deprived quintile are going to find it harder here. There will also be at least a year of bedding in of the new system, as headteachers and inspectors need to rebuild their tacit knowledge of what is expected of each other and resharpen their encoding and decoding skills.

As I write, I am sitting in a staffroom on day one of my 42nd Ofsted inspection. I asked the headteacher whether the paragraphs above bore any resemblance to her lived experience and she said:

“It’s a blessed relief not to have to go through in the minutest detail why your EAL boys in Year 3 were doing comparatively poorly last year. The new framework is much more grounded in the experience of children”

The challenge for our system is that Ofsted is only our auditor. Local authorities, multi-academy trusts, regional schools commissioners and the DfE itself are responsible for what is done before and afterwards. The inspector today evinced genuine surprise when I told him that we attended all of our schools’ inspections. He said it was rare to see a MAT or local authorities except at final feedback. I have to hope that his experience is just an outlier because behaviour like this sets the tone and culture for our sector, not the inspection itself. Yet it always seems to be Ofsted that bears the brunt of our frustration with the system as a whole. You don’t blame the thermometer for measuring the fever, and the thermometer doesn’t write prescriptions. But if you don’t measure patients’ temperatures, people suffer unnecessarily.

The difficulty with running schools in challenging areas is that everything seems to be stacked against you. We have placed the burden of responsibility for the maintenance of society as a whole upon headteachers. Coupled with the massive defunding and fragmentation of the education system over the past decade, it is not surprising that many are shouting, “Enough!”

Each September school leaders are expected to pick up the burden of optimism for their children and start again at the beginning. It is only natural that approaches evolve that improve the KPIs that are being measured. Whether this is a narrowing of curriculum in primary to prioritise core skills or in KS3 to extend the run-in to KS4. But if these decisions are implemented in a way that impairs the overall developmental experience for children, then we have to accept that we risk treating the symptoms and not the underlying problem. Turning against institutions - be they the BBC or Ofsted - is en vogue at the moment. But to quote Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale Jim, Who Ran Away from His Nurse and Was Eaten by a Lion:

“...always keep a hold of nurse

For fear of finding something worse”

Hugh Greenway is chief executive of the  Elliot Foundation Academies Trust