
Nick Ferrari 7am - 10am
4 February 2025, 10:09
As a headteacher, I've seen Ofsted at its worst – but rejecting these vital reforms suggests we fear any accountability.
Ofsted on Monday published its promised overhaul of school inspections. Inspectors are replacing single-word judgements about schools with what it calls a ‘balanced scorecard’: essentially a ‘traffic light’ system rendering different judgments for different areas of school activity.
Chief Inspector Sir Martyn Oliver pushed through the change, with the encouragement of the current government, after many years of deep dissatisfaction among teachers about how schools were inspected and judged. The case for reform was given increased poignancy by Headteacher Ruth Perry’s tragic suicide following an inspection that her sister has described as “rude and intimidating”.
The teaching profession has reacted to the new report card with jubilation and a collective sigh of relief.
No, wait: of course it hasn’t. This is the hyper-charged 2020s, when trust in and between public services has all but evaporated, replaced by tribal sloganeering and perpetual outrage.
No, the teaching profession, or a good chunk of it, has decried the new report cards. Teaching unions, including my own, have rushed to conclude that the only thing worse than an inspection regime that collapses all of school experience into an overly simplistic, one-word summative judgement, is the logical alternative: an expansive and nuanced assessment of schools’ strengths and areas for development.
I have been a Headteacher for 10 years. There is a great deal of Ofsted’s historic practice of which I strongly disapprove. My own experience of inspection has, candidly, run the gamut from empathetic and diligent, to insensitive and slapdash.
But I refuse to be an armchair critic in these circumstances.
I don't know Sir Martyn personally, but, at first glance, he appears to have delivered. We were promised that Ofsted would introduce a dashboard for school effectiveness. We have a dashboard. We were promised that the obsessively personalised nature of accountability would be replaced with something more focused on institutions. It has.
Some critics have called for the complete abolition of common grade descriptors. I’ve found Heads and former Heads reminiscing fondly about the bespoke school reports published in the 1980s. I grew up on a council estate in the West Midlands and attended state schools in the 1980s. Go there today and you’ll see the proud legacy of that era of schooling; almost all my schoolmates still there, struggling to match their parents’ already meagre standard of living.
Are the new report cards perfect? Obviously not. Perfect was never in scope. There is, in particular, a long way to go in explaining how the new reports will weigh in the balance with more quantifiable measures such as exam results.
But are the report cards unveiled this week a substantial improvement over the previous inspection regime, one that better reflects the complexity of schools’ provision under varied circumstances? Yes.
Most state schools continue to face significant challenges. Sometimes those challenges can seem insurmountable. Covid and the legacy of lockdown cast a long shadow over children’s socialisation and schools’ battered budgets often will not stretch to the wraparound care required.
Teachers’ pay and conditions fail to attract sufficient graduates for Heads in many parts of the country to promise a qualified teacher with a good, relevant degree in every classroom. And then there are those schools that are literally falling down because of disastrous construction choices made decades ago.
The atmosphere is febrile—perhaps, understandably so. But that cannot be an excuse for setting our faces against progress.
If we do not at least try to implement the Report Card system, parents and other stakeholders will fairly conclude that we don’t object to this or that form of accountability, but to accountability itself.
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Alex Crossman is Executive Headteacher at The London Academy of Excellence.
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