One thing that Ofsted could do right now
22 March 2023
By SSAT
Everyone in education’s thoughts this week are with the family, friends and colleagues of Ruth Perry, the Reading headteacher who took her own life in January. No one at this stage can know the thoughts that were in Ruth’s head at the time and it would be completely wrong to speculate.
What is clear, however, is the proximity between her death and the Ofsted inspection at her school which has led to demands for change in the inspection process from both teachers and parents. The inspection report had overwhelmingly positive things to say about the school. It is clearly a good school but some of its safeguarding practices led to an overall judgement of “inadequate”.
Wholesale reform of the current Ofsted framework is undoubtedly needed. The absence of any independent appeals procedure, the generic and predictable approach to evaluating the curriculum and its appropriateness to how primary schools work and the current summary reports which don’t do justice to the work that schools have put in to achieve a judgement of good or outstanding are only four areas needing urgent attention. The Labour Party’s outline proposals for a dashboard approach rather than an overall judgement are thought to be worth considering by the current HMCI, although no one would welcome a return to the 44 separate judgements that were part of the framework a decade and a half ago.
But any wholesale review of Ofsted needs to be left to Amanda Spielman’s successor who will take up post next January. There is, however, at least one change that could be implemented almost immediately.
When inspectors evaluate safeguarding, they can only make one of two possible judgements: it’s either effective or it isn’t. If it isn’t judged to be effective, that overrides all other judgements. Leadership and management will be inadequate and that then decides the judgement for overall effectiveness.
What parents want most of all for their children when they’re in school is that they should be safe. Inspectors are told that if they find the odd administrative error – for example with the single central record – that can be easily put right, they can give the school until the end of the day to do so. Unfortunately, the binary nature of the safeguarding judgement allows no such leeway or exercising of professional judgement if inspectors find aspects of policy or practice that need to be (and could be easily) improved but which aren’t posing an immediate danger to pupils. There is a world of difference, for example, between disclosures from pupils not being properly dealt with and weaknesses in record-keeping. The former is inexcusable; the latter can be easily remedied.
Schools judged to be inadequate normally receive a monitoring inspection up to 9 months after a graded inspection. That’s a long time if there are serious concerns about pupils’ safety. Equally, with adequate support, a school where there are minor concerns about safeguarding procedures (which nonetheless led to an inadequate judgement) ought to be able to put things right in less than a month.
So, in such circumstances, one thing that Ofsted could change right now would be to be more nuanced in its safeguarding judgement and not allow it to automatically override everything else. If a school was “good” throughout but inspectors found that there were changes needed in safeguarding policy or practice that could be made in a short period of time (and that there was sufficient leadership capacity to do so), publication of the report could be delayed until an inspector had re-visited the school within a short space of time to look specifically at safeguarding. If there were no further concerns, the report could be published with a judgement of “good”. If effective action had not been taken, the initial judgement of inadequate would stand.
Few people in education would deny the need for an effective accountability system to give parents information about the quality of the school their children go to. The current Ofsted process has its faults and its inconsistencies, although it is arguably much better in both respects now than it has been in the past. Tweaking how safeguarding is evaluated will not solve all current problems with the system; we’ll need to wait for a new HMCI (and possibly a new government) for that. But it would go a small way towards treating school leaders as professionals and perhaps show a little more humanity when judgements are made.
