LEADERSHIP FOCUS | FEBRUARY 2020
Ofsted inspection – a change for the better? Leadership Focus journalist NIC PATON takes a look at the new Ofsted inspection framework. t the end of the day, we aim to ... put the interests of children and young people first, by making sure inspection values and rewards those who educate effectively and act with integrity. We hope you will agree that this framework can be a real and positive step in that direction.” So said chief inspector of education Amanda Spielman in her foreword to the Education Inspection Framework 2019, last spring’s consultation document on Ofsted’s proposed new inspection framework that, since the beginning of the current school year, has become a reality on the ground for schools up and down England. Five months in, is the new framework and inspection process, therefore, a “real and positive step”, as Amanda has suggested? Has it changed things for the better? Has it led to a less confrontational, less high-stakes, more consensual and
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constructive approach to inspection and accountability? It may only be a snapshot, but the initial verdict of NAHT members is very much that the new framework ‘requires improvement’. In fact, if anything, fears are growing that the new framework has the potential to have an even more corrosive effect on teachers and school leaders’ morale and retention than the unlamented regime it has replaced. Take these comments (see overleaf for the full story) from an NAHT member in Essex: “By the end of the first day, they were talking about us being in ‘requires improvement’. It was terrible. I actually wrote a letter of resignation the following morning and sent it to one of my governors.” Or (again as we shall come to shortly) these from an executive head in the north of England: “It was quite a damaging process; it was definitely worse, undoubtedly worse, than the previous inspections.”
Or, as another NAHT member puts it: “I’ve had head teachers saying to me that it was brazen and gruelling and very demoralising.” “What we’re finding from members is that the stakes are just as high as they always were; the fear is just as significant as it always has been,” agrees Ian Hartwright, NAHT senior policy adviser. NAHT has published advice for members on what to expect under the new inspection framework and how to prepare (see page 28). But there is concern about the anecdotal feedback coming back from members on the ground. The sense is of an inspection framework and regime that remains overly rigid and inflexible, which can put teaching staff (especially at primary level) under unreasonable pressure and expectation, and which has lost none of its high-stakes confrontational approach.
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