When schools are fully ready for inspection processes, school leaders are enabled to focus on demonstrating their school’s true purpose. When this happens, inspection outcomes are more likely to validate school self-evaluation and recognise their culture.
The return of school self-evaluation for inspection
Last week I read an article in the TES that rather stopped me in my tracks. The headline ran “Schools grading themselves is ‘almost impossible’, heads warn Ofsted.” This article expressed sector concerns about the newly reintroduced requirement for schools to self-evaluate and grade their schools for each of the new inspection areas, using each of the new gradings.
The reason I say that this article stopped me in my tracks was because, despite reading pretty much every news item on the changes, this requirement had flown beneath the radar. Plenty of reports explored the challenges of the new inclusion and achievement judgements. Plenty more focused on whether the new requirements on staff CPDL would signal a golden age for teacher development. And, naturally, plenty more focused on the wellbeing impact of the new Ofsted inspection regime for school leaders, staff and pupils.
Having read and re-read that article, I was transported back to the 2005 inspection framework and the demands then for a school Self-Evaluation Form (SEF) ahead of inspection. This was an approach that was ended by Michael Gove in 2010, who said at the time:
“The Coalition government trusts teachers to get on with their job. That’s why we are taking steps to reduce the bureaucracy they face and giving them the powers they need to do a good job.”
Now, of course, there are some people who might be laughing up their sleeve with regards to this quote about trust in the profession. There may be others who look at the period between 2010 and 2015 as a golden age of possibility for a self-improving school system, filled with academy freedoms that has somehow slipped from our collective grasp. There may be others who feel that the administrative burden of self-evaluation never truly went away.
Whatever your take on school self-evaluation against standards dictated by Ofsted inspection teams, the one undisputable thing to say is that it is now firmly back on the agenda. The language may be more mollifying for school leaders than in 2005, but it is also clearer than the 2012 and 2019 iterations of the inspection framework, that self-evaluation has a formal status in inspection.
“We do not expect schools to have completed any formal self-evaluation using the toolkit. However, they may wish to use the toolkit to support continuous improvement. In the planning call with leaders, we will ask where they see themselves against the 5-point scale of each evaluation area.”
School leader workload in ensuring readiness for inspection
Taking a step back, though, these reflections got me wondering about the challenges for school leaders and those responsible for governance, in ensuring readiness for the inspection processes. Given the significant changes in the 2025 Ofsted vintage and the short turn-around time from publication of the toolkits and guidance, to the first inspections under the framework.
As well as the inspection toolkit for schools, which runs to 81 pages (and is over 23,000 words in length) there are two guidance documents published by Ofsted, one for inspectors and the others aimed at school leaders. Copied and pasted into a Word file, this additional information runs to the following lengths:
- Guidance for inspectors – 15,753 words covering 38 pages
- Guidance for schools – 6,731 words covering 16 pages
It is interesting to note how more extensive the guidance for inspectors is than that for schools. But, added to the toolkit, this means that there are more than 45,500 words covering 135 pages that school leaders need to be savvy about, to ensure they are ready for all inspection eventualities.
Reminiscing about inspection readiness as a former headteacher
In preparation for my final go-around with an inspection as a headteacher, my team, coordinated by someone taking a role very similar to that of the ‘nominee’ in the new Ofsted framework, put together a single central document covering all elements of readiness for inspection. Having not shown ourselves at our best in our previous inspection, we felt this to be an essential strand of our work.
The shared document had sections for preparations, ranging from the very practical elements of what information we needed to share swiftly with inspectors, to the administration of the visit and the roles of every person on site. We captured our reflections, from the top-line key messages we wanted to relentlessly promote before and during inspection, to self-evaluation headlines linked to a firm evidence base. We used the tool to plan for everything, from key queries we anticipated having to field, to what the different stages of the process would involve for different people in different roles. Everything was covered. Nothing was omitted.
The net result of this work was an inspection process that ran as smoothly as any I have experienced as a school leader. Literally everything we needed for the inspection (aside from an additional request for information that we were quite happy to furnish) was at our fingertips, either in the document, or accessible via a hyperlink. Needless to say, the outcome validated our self-evaluation of where we were at that time. The experience was close to pleasurable and at no point did we experience the sense of vulnerability typical of many inspections.
The key to that document was that it was rooted in the guidance supporting the 2019 framework, but was organised in a way that enabled our reflections to be captured, evidenced, reviewed, evaluated and confirmed by school leaders and governors, over the months (indeed years as our inspection was delayed by the pandemic) leading up to the process.
Which is not to say that we felt constrained by the audit tool we were using. In that time, we pursued what our school community needed as we had always done. But we paid significantly more attention to the accountability we had as leaders for our choices, actions and impact along the way. And we recognised that inspection validation has a community contribution to make: it is always nice to feel recognised, whatever the source of that recognition.
SSAT’s readiness for inspection audit tool
All of which is to explain why I have developed a similar audit tool for other school leaders to use, to ensure their readiness for the new inspection process. Taking a fine-toothed comb to the 45k+ words and 135 pages of inspection guidance and evaluation documents, our Readiness for inspection audit tool configures what we know about the inspection process, in a format specifically created for school leaders to capture key insights efficiently and effectively.
Designed for use over time, to help leaders prioritise their focus, our invaluable Ofsted inspection audit tool enables collaborative approaches to curating and evaluating documentary evidence of readiness. Our aim has been to create a ‘one-stop doc’ covering the practicalities of readiness for the calls and inspection activities, to support school leaders and staff at all levels, for what they need to consider before and during the process. We also wanted to construct a different way of looking at the grading criteria within the toolkits, to support informed, precise and manageable self-evaluation.
Given their importance to the new framework, the themes of inclusion and leadership ripple throughout the audit tool, keeping them front and centre of the preparations needed to ensure readiness for inspection. And, although inspections will always involve some elements of the unknown, this tool covers every element of what we do know from the guidance documents.
Readiness for inspection: culture over compliance
It feels necessary, at the end of this blog, to explain what the readiness for Ofsted inspection audit tool is not about. In doing so, I want to use some of the words I find most resonant in Ofsted’s new framework: that this is about the culture of readiness rather than compliance with ‘what Ofsted wants’. However, as any school leader or governance professional knows, culture and compliance are not mutually exclusive. Instead, it is better to think of compliance as a foundation stone for the architecture of culture-building activity.
Extending the metaphor a little, the construction of any edifice in which people are to exist and form cultures, requires compliance with established standards. Our classrooms flourish only when those in them follow clear rules of conduct. Our curricula have impact only when they are knowledge-rich and delivered by the knowledgeable. Our pupils feel safe only if their physical security is guaranteed. In each of these familiar domains we want achieve the maximum, but in all of them compliance with the minimum is essential.
Why this prologue? I want to be clear that our new self-reflection inspection audit tool is designed to free up school leaders’ valuable time to be able to focus their energies on what really matters. Culture, as the saying goes, eats strategy for breakfast.
This unique new tool empowers schools to strategically cover off the non-negotiables of an Ofsted inspection in a systematic way, so that they can focus instead on showing inspectors what makes their communities uniquely special places, their school culture.
Dr Keven Bartle, Senior Education Lead, SSAT
Keven has been a teacher for almost three decades and was headteacher at a richly diverse secondary school in London for nine years. Through his career, Keven has been committed to the power of education for social justice and transformation, working in schools where staff make a difference to the lives of children, families and communities.
