Ofsted is delivering…but what?

Colin Richards

Colin Richards, the former senior Her Majesty’s Inspector, offers thoughts on Ofsted's new framework, having viewed some of the first inspection reports to be produced under it. 

Judging from my reading of a sample of new-style 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 doubling 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 style-reports 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  previously- 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 will 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.