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This blog is the third instalment where we are looking at data from our tracking of Ofsted inspection reports, to show how the new framework is playing out for schools. Here we focus on primary schools and outline how the new framework and inspection processes appear to more challenging for this sector.

SSAT broadly welcome the ambitions set out in the white paper – Every child achieving and thriving.

This post presents our first analysis of what is happening under the new inspection framework, based on almost 550 ‘next steps’ published in reports for schools that have been inspected since November 2025.

Twice in the past month, the HMCI Sir Martyn Oliver has made an identical claim about the new Ofsted inspection framework judgements: “There is no read-across from the old grades to the new”, a striking claim and one that is doubted by many in the education sector.

Last year, I had the pleasure of joining The Teaching Commission, chaired by former NEU joint general secretary Professor Mary Bousted and supported by the major teaching unions and other partners. The Commission’s remit for 2025 was to examine the root causes of the teacher recruitment and retention crisis and identify practical, actionable recommendations to make teaching an attractive, sustainable profession again.

Marius Frank’s blog reframes disability, adding children “disabled by circumstance” whose poverty, trauma, inequity or other unidentified needs create similar barriers to learning: barriers that can eased so that more children achieve and thrive.

At the end of last week we received the very sad news that Barry Cooke has died.

Nigel Farage is the only politician to describe Britain as broken according to the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. The Labour Government talks about the many problems they inherited from the Tories. People complain that the NHS, transport, immigration, water, trains, etc are not working. We no longer have a rules-based international order and President Trump causes concern to many people daily. Change is needed – not just for a few people, but for everyone.

Lucy Easthope, is UK’s leading authority on recovering from disaster. She has been advisor on nearly every major disaster of the past two decades, including the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury Poisonings, Grenfell. Most recently advising the Prime Minister’s Office on the Covid-19 pandemic.

For the past year, some of the education team at SSAT have been working with school leaders from the network and colleagues from the EEF and the Research Schools Network, as part of EEF’s Working Through Others project.