28
SOUNDING OFF!
Ofsted is delivering... but what?
by Colin Richards
Judging from my reading of a sample of newstyle reports on primary schools Ofsted is delivering on its promises/threats. The much contested grades are foremost. The reports are much shorter. Their judgments are more sharply expressed. Curriculum is placed left, right and centre. Knowledge (teachers as well as children’s) is of overriding importance as is memory. Teaching quality is scarcely mentioned. Other shibboleths are re-iterated in report after report: phonics (inevitably) sequencing, coherence, structure, ambition, cultural capital etc. Test results do not feature explicitly as in the past but are very much there in the sub-text. In what appears to be a deliberate provocation to those critical of crude simplistic grades the six grade descriptors are more prominent than ever. They dominate the opening pages of the report; they imply that the essence of a school can be summed up in just a few hackneyed words. Ofsted is doubly down on the issue rather than moderating its stance. This does not bode well for the already fraught relationship between schools and the inspection body. It disrespects parents too – assuming that what they want from reports are headlines apparently simple to understand. Compared with their predecessors the new stylereports are certainly (and mercifully?) more concise. Gone are page after page of hackneyed civil service
PrimaryFirst
prose; in their place there are just two three pages of a slightly different but still hackneyed prose. The judgments rendered are certainly sharper than in previous reports - partly due to the use of very short sentences fired staccato-like across the page. Brevity and sharpness come at a price. That price is the absence of nuance, the absence of qualification, the absence of a sense of what is unique or particular to the school being reported on. Sharpness also conveys a sense of authority and certainty - far from the tentativeness that should properly characterise complex educational judgments. Certainly it is true that Ofsted is not pulling its punches, but punches they often seem, especially to those who do not share all of the institution’s basic assumptions about the nature of knowledge and skills, about how children learn and about the nature of teaching in the primary phase. A famous architect once said that “A house is a machine for living in”. In these reports a school appears as “a machine for delivering the curriculum”. The previous neglect of the curriculum by Ofsted has been replaced by its opposite – an undue concentration which makes other aspects of school life appear far less important and subservient to curriculum delivery. Subjects feature to the exclusion of other ways of transacting the curriculum, whether in terms of topics or broad areas such as the arts or the humanities. Not one of the reports mentions or evaluates a school’s projects or topics. Mathematics and aspect of English continue to be the prime focus. Despite
