Colin Richards discusses the new-style Ofsted reports

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

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

so-called “deep dives” into foundation subjects the latter are still marginalised and comment about them is scanty and uninformative. References to “broad” and “balanced” are noticeable by their absence.

The reports focus on curriculum managementhow schools plan, organise and “deliver” the curriculum. Those judgments are important but fail to address the fundamental issue of whether the curriculum itself is worthwhile, challenging enough, age/stage appropriate or motivating enough. Ofsted’s default position is that the national curriculum has all of those qualities. Thus despite its protestations Ofsted is not inspecting the quality of the curriculum itself. With Ofsted’s preoccupation with teachers’ and children’s sequential subject knowledge and with the emphasis on children knowing more and remembering more, report after report proclaims the same mantra encapsulated in this recommendation that “Leaders need to ensure that teachers develop a deeper understanding of the way in which learning can be sequenced, both within the foundation subjects and between subjects, so that pupils know more and can remember more.” How many times will that be repeated report after report in the years ahead, I wonder? It will be a small minority pf primary schools that will escape a judgment along those lines. Which raises the issue of how realistic is Ofsted’s expectation in the short-to medium-term. Ofsted’s previous preoccupation with reporting performance data has been replaced by indirect reporting of that data. References to improvement or deterioration over time reflect inspectors’ use of such data. In some reports reference to changing standards in reading and mathematics are clearly, though not explicitly, based on data analysis. In this new dispensation data may not be “king” but it is still mightily(?) influential in overall judgments of school effectiveness. Ofsted’s new framework represents more than the “evolution“ of policy and practice that the chief inspector has suggested. Rightly or wrongly what many would see as an invaluable childcentred ethos is being challenged. Rightly or wrongly many primary schools are going to be discomforted and demoralised by the kind of inspection delivered in these reports. Rightly or wrongly there will be a large rise in the number of primary schools deemed to require improvement under the new framework and a decrease in those accorded “outstanding” status – with predictable consequences for teacher morale and retention.

Let me put it even more sharply. Rightly or wrongly the reports presage an attempt to “secondaryise” primary education as we have come to know, respect, love or deplore it - a project fraught with difficulty without fundamental changes that inspection alone cannot bring about. It is that important and that contentious.

A former primary school teacher Colin Richards was Staff Inspector for the School Curriculum for HM Inspectorate before its replacement by Ofsted.