Blog posts by: Dr Keven Bartle

So, the new Ofsted inspection framework is finally with us, almost exactly two months before it will be used in earnest for the first time.

Since the turn of the calendar year, I have been responsible for SSAT’s offer for supporting schools in supporting student leadership. When I took on this role, I couldn’t have been more delighted because my first brief as a newly appointed assistant headteacher was to build our school’s student leadership offer. Exactly twenty years later, I was being asked to return to where my whole-school leadership journey started.

SSAT have been tracking every ‘need to improve’ comment from every inspection conducted since September 2023. This post looks at what has changed between the 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years, offering some insights into the impact of changes to the inspection framework in response to the Big Listen.

SSAT are the UK’s biggest and most experienced provider of student leadership training and support for education providers, with over 30 years of experience helping settings build the capacity and capabilities of their student leaders.

This blogpost will outline how SSAT’s analysis and synthesis of research findings have helped us to redevelop our offer to schools in enhancing provision for student leadership development.

This morning, I asked an AI tool ‘what are the recent trends in pupil behaviour in English schools?’. The response that came back said this:

In this blog, we would like to share with you some insights about how attendance has increasingly become the business of Ofsted inspectors.

I have been tracking every inspection carried out in England since the start of the 2023/24 academic year. The focus has been on what ‘need to improve’ comments have been made in inspection reports. There are now over 1,600 ‘need to improve’ comments published on reports conducted since the start of the academic year and so I wanted to identify some emergent themes.

Leading schools is exhausting and never more so when rapid changes are needed and the external climate is uncertain. In this post, I want to share a very personal experience of the challenges this very situation presented for me as a headteacher between 2019 and 2023.

This is the third and final of a trilogy of blogposts about SSAT’s Head Cases programme, which uses case studies and case methods to explore typical challenges facing headteachers.