Reflections on the new inspection framework: Old wine in new bottles or a vintage year?
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.
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Student Leadership: A more nuanced approach to participation and empowerment
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.
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Inspection Insights: How have improvement needs changed between 2023/24 and 2024/25?
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.
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Student Leadership for IMPACT: An invitation to find out more about SSAT’s work
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.
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Student Leadership for IMPACT: Taking lessons from research into our practice
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.
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Attention needed: What is happening with behaviour in inspection reports?
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:
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Pupil attendance is now officially everyone’s business
In this blog, we would like to share with you some insights about how attendance has increasingly become the business of Ofsted inspectors.
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Beyond the Big Listen: What is happening with inspections (so far) in 2024/2025?
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.
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Momentum and capacity: A story and a proposition for school improvement support
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.
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An outline of the case method approach for SSAT’s Head Cases programme
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.
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