England’s biggest school leaders’ union, The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has called for a halt to graded Ofsted inspections, saying they “pose a real and present danger to the well-being and mental health of school leaders and teachers, and possibly even a risk to life.”
The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has called for a halt to graded Ofsted inspections
It is true that Ofsted inspections are unnecessarily stressful, and there is lots to criticise. The current process has undoubtedly become more punitive than supportive; the endless admin and data-collecting demoralises teachers, who are already in worryingly short supply and are leaving in droves; and the recent reforms have merely tinkered with the semantics rather than created meaningful change.
And yet, just because we don’t want Ofsted, doesn’t mean we do not need it. As broken, over-bloated and bureaucratic as inspections may be, they play an important role: they provide information to prospective parents, incentives for schools to improve standards, and create accountability – which should not automatically be seen as a ‘dirty’ word.
The problem with NAHT’s rhetoric, and playing on public fears that it is only a matter of time before we have another tragic death like Ruth Perry’s, is that it actually undermines support and sympathy for teachers. NAHT’s focus on ‘risk to life’ not only appears to risk going against the Samaritans’ guidance about discussing suicide (namely that suicide ideation is extremely complex and should not be attributed to a single, simple cause or external factor) but also misrepresents what teachers actually want.
Everytime an article broadcasts a teaching union’s calls for Ofsted to be paused, particularly in the name of mental health, the comments sections become inundated with knee-jerk reactions accusing school staff of shirking responsibility. Readers assume that teachers simply want to mark their own homework; that students are expected to cope under pressure, so teachers should face scrutiny too; that if heads are too fragile for inspections, they should not be in leadership positions in the first place.
Yet most teachers don’t want an end to all inspections, they just want inspections that actually work: inspections that develop expertise rather than focus on compliance; that are thorough and comprehensive rather than mere tick-box exercises; that return to the main focus of evaluating teaching and learning, rather than assessing dozens of other peripheral areas. In other words, they want actual inspections, not audits.
When it comes to Ofsted, people like to recite the old adage that “weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter.” Yet in light of Ofsted’s recent reforms, perhaps it’s better to trot out (pardon the pun) a different aphorism: “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.” The new Ofsted system is a mess, and it is this that NAHT should focus on: not that the system exists, but that the system is fundamentally flawed by design.
The problem is that the new Ofsted Report Card has inadvertently exacerbated the ever-expanding expectations on schools, without giving schools (and inspectors) more time to prove success in the ever-increasing numbers of areas they are judged on. Instead of a single-word judgement, schools will now be graded on nine areas: leadership, curriculum, teaching, achievement, behaviour, attendance, personal development and well-being, inclusion and safeguarding. Each area will be ranked in a Nandos-colour-coded traffic-light system as either urgent improvement, attention needed, expected standard, strong standard or exceptional.
What this means in practice is that schools have to prove more and more with less and less time. The new rules also mean that a school must hit every bullet point in a category to meet a particular grade, which means that inspectors (who are also under immense time pressure) must chase each one of these points relentlessly so that they can make a two-dimensional judgement. Safeguarding? Met or Not Met. The new ‘Report Card’ has therefore been reduced to a regulatory version of painting by numbers, rather than something holistic, contextualised, and, again, primarily focused on teaching and learning.
Ofsted’s note on its areas of research interest earlier this year is further evidence of this institutional over-reach. As the former Ofsted chair, Amanda Spielman, points out, most of its questions are about anything but actual classroom teaching – inclusion, attendance, admissions, exclusions, family support – and the disproportionate focus on children who tick disadvantage boxes makes it appear like Ofsted is judging social care rather than education.
Ofsted’s ever-proliferating criteria therefore reinforces this expectation for teachers to not only be subject specialists, but disciplinarians, mental health champions, surrogate social workers, pastoral role models, PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education) experts and parents by proxy. It is this pressure to perform a dozen different roles that impacts teachers’ wellbeing, rather than the fact that schools have to undergo inspections at all. We may blame Ofsted for exacerbating the teacher retention crisis, or having lost sight of its original purpose (which is a worthy one), but that does not make it fundamentally ‘dangerous’ – just hopelessly ineffectual.
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