Blog

The new Ofsted framework promised to focus on inclusion. Achieving, belonging and thriving sit at the heart of the new inspection processes. As the most critical facet of inclusion, attendance should be reflected in the reality of school’s experiences of inspection, not just the rhetoric.

Research shows it is essential for students with Speech Language and Communication Needs (SLCN) to be explicitly taught tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary, yet this is a strategy that all students benefit from: if we want our students to confidently speak like scientists, linguists, mathematicians, artists, musicians, historians, we must provide them with the vocabulary to do so.

Congratulations to the teams at Bishopshalt School in London and St Louis Grammar School in Ballymena, who have become the latest two Leading Edge schools to successfully achieve ‘transforming’ status in all 12 strands of the SSAT Framework for Exceptional Education. St Louis are the first school in Northern Ireland to achieve accreditation in all 12 strands.

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.