Kristina Murkett

If relationships between Ofsted and schools are already frayed, then we may officially be about to reach the end of the rope. Headteachers are now threatening to quit as part-time inspectors unless Ofsted delays and revises its changes to how schools and colleges are graded in England. Ofsted relies on around 900 part-time inspectors, who are mostly serving headteachers and senior leaders, to assist its 300 officers in carrying out thousands of inspections each year. The new Ofsted ‘report card’, set to be brought in this September, is a rushed botch job which promises semantic tweaks rather than actual reform. Ofsted was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this achieves the exact opposite.

At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore? For too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time.

The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’  It is of course true that private schools are under more financial pressure than ever, and are making cost-cutting decisions that may add to teachers’ workload: one in five private school teachers say they have had colleagues made redundant since VAT on school fees was introduced, while 26 per cent say that their school has frozen recruitment.

Parents of young children should be happy: since September 2024, those with an income of less than £100,000 a year have been eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week once their child is nine months old. From September this year, that will increase to 30 hours a week.  However, once again, it seems that the government has promised the moon but in realiy only paid for a small asteroid. Nurseries claim that the scheme is financially unsustainable because the funding was set before significant rises in their costs as a result of Rachel Reeves’ budget. Increases to national insurance payments and the minimum wage mean that the sector will now be paying 11 per cent more in wages and staffing costs from April, or about £2,000-2,500 per staff member.

When it comes to behaviour policies, schools have fallen into two extremes. Across the border in Scotland, schools practise ‘restorative justice’: a relationships-based, non-punitive approach that favours constructive conversations over traditional sanctions. On the flip side, academies across England are adopting an authoritarian, zero-tolerance approach, where detentions are given for minor infractions and routines are enforced with military precision. Yesterday, one school in Harlow hit the headlines for giving detentions to top set pupils who score less than 90 per cent in maths tests: another controversial academy policy flown under the banner of ‘high expectations’. Being educated is not about giving up joy but finding joy in new things Clearly, the latter works.

The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after an external review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the curriculum and that ‘high-brow pursuits’, such as ‘visits to museums, theatres and art galleries’, might be replaced with more ‘relatable’ activities such as graffiti workshops.

In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents were prepared to pay the price because they decided it was still worth being late. This experiment demonstrated the limit of economic incentives without other social motivations: something which seems very timely as we return to the debate around whether parents should be fined for taking their children on holiday during term-time. For Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.