Academies dominate list of schools benefiting from quick return inspections after being rated “inadequate” by Ofsted

Parents backing a local authority school which is at the centre of one of the most contentious current forced academy sagas are desperate for Ofsted inspectors to return, confident that such a visit would confirm the progress it has been making and allow it to be left alone.

Many visitors unfamiliar with England’s new structure of education control, which seems to institutionalise instability, might find the above paragraph bizarre, or shocking if they do understand what now happens in our system.

But it is the reality facing Crigglestone Mackie Hill junior and infant school in Wakefield, west Yorkshire. I wrote yesterday about the decision by the Regional Schools Commissioner, Vicky Beer, to press on with academisation plans for this school in the face of seemingly united local unhappiness with it.

Both the school’s chair of governors, Denis Barry, and its local MP, Mary Creagh, have written to Ofsted asking for a return inspection, which they are confident would lift it out of a special measures judgement that has stood since December 2017, especially given what they say are very positive test results from this summer.

But Ofsted have stated that they can only guarantee – or almost guarantee* - that the school will be subject to this reinspection – which if successful the data suggest would vastly increase the school’s chances of carrying on with its own improvement path with its partner high school, rather than being academised – within three years of the special measures verdict.