Headteacher survey raises yet more questions for Ofsted

Inspectorate’s modern set-up should be up for debate, alongside the wider incentives of school reform policies. Details of today’s report should also add to the pressure on Ofsted to do more to get its processes right.

 

My first thought, on reading the findings today of an independent survey of school leaders’ reactions to new-style Ofsted inspections, was what a brilliant exercise this was.

Ofsted had been advised by Dame Christine Gilbert, in her review of Ofsted’s work following the death of the headteacher Ruth Perry, that post-inspection surveys of schools should be carried out and published by an independent organisation, rather than by Ofsted itself.

But the inspectorate has yet to take up that recommendation, despite Dame Christine having since become Ofsted’s chair.

So a group of five influential academics and former senior inspectors took up the challenge. They surveyed schools which had been inspected, receiving responses from 100.

Again, doing that, given that the inspectorate continues to face criticism that it does not open up its processes up nearly enough for independent evaluation, seems both powerful and worthwhile.

Statistical findings

But there was no surprise that the content of what the survey unveiled was far less positive, with eight headteachers, the report said, stating that they would quit the profession as a result of their latest inspection experience.

Again unsurprisingly, more broadly the results are challenging for Ofsted, whose chief inspector, Sir Martyn Oliver, faces questioning on the new framework at a meeting of the Commons Education Select Committee tomorrow.

Some statistics stand out from this exercise. Most damningly perhaps, in terms of what might be seen as the aim of this reform from a government point of view, fewer than one in seven (15 per cent; 10 per cent agreeing and five per cent strongly) of the headteachers responding believed that the new set-up is an improvement on its predecessor.

By contrast, 49 per cent disagreed, 29 per cent strongly. Given all the pressure felt by Ofsted, and the government, to make things better following Ms Perry’s death, the notion that inspection has actually worsened, in the eyes of school leaders, should be highly concerning to anyone with influence over this system.

The statistics also show that, for this sample, the process appears not to have had a positive impact on headteachers’ workloads – 53 per cent disagreed with the statement “I spent just a little time preparing for the inspection”, 42 per cent strongly, in what was the most negative statistical finding overall – while nearly one in four heads disagreed, 11 per cent strongly, with the statement “the inspection process was supportive”.

Free text comments

But I was most struck by the free text comments offered by the headteachers and quoted in this report.

A few categories of response stood out.

First, the report highlighted a finding, as reflected in heads’ comments, that there was, as it put it: “Strong concern that the context of the school was not sufficiently recognised.”

While one head had remarked that Ofsted’s “recognition of the school context was refreshing,” 24 heads disagreed.

One said: “If you are a school in an area of disadvantage, you are on the back foot. I wouldn’t recommend any aspiring leader to take over a school like mine under this Framework. Achievement is not judging achievement, it is attainment…why would you choose to work in an area of deprivation under this approach?”

Another, leading a secondary with a much-higher-than-average proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals (46 per cent), said: “How can a school in the bottom fifth for deprivation be compared to schools in the top fifth across attendance, literacy and achievement?”

There was some sense that schools with high numbers of disadvantaged pupils found it extra-difficult to emerge from the new inspection framework by the more exacting nature of its rules, with every statement in a particular part of the rulebook needing to be hit in order for a particular grade to be awarded, compared to the previous set-up where only most statements needed to fit.

Second, there was deep scepticism over Ofsted’s decision to evaluate pupil behaviour and attendance through a single grade.

A primary head said: “Attendance and behaviour being together is a farce! They are two separate things and should be treated as such.”  

The head of a post-16 academy wrote: “Putting attendance (lots of responsibility on parents) alongside a judgement of behaviour (responsibility on schools) seems unfair – they are two distinctly different aspects of school life.”*

The head of a primary with attendance of more than 96 per cent wrote: “We can influence attendance, but we can’t control it. We received no advice from the inspectors about how we could do better on attendance.”

Third was what seems an enduring problem of inspectors not necessarily inspecting a phase in which they had experience, the report noting that “three heads objected to being inspected by inspectors who have never worked in their phase of education,” under the sub-heading: “secondary inspectors evaluating primary schools”.

One head said: “the provision of children who are two years old…was being judged on exactly the same criteria as 15-year-olds in a secondary school…the inspector did not have a clear understanding of the needs and behaviours of young two-year-olds.”

Fourth was the simple human aspect of the implications of the inspection process for those on the end of it.

One primary head said, of their school’s experience of inspection: “The toll on heads is high. My team are resilient and committed but my deputy, who has been teaching for over 20 years, returned on the second morning [of the inspection] and said ‘I can see why Ruth Perry did what she did.’” This head had complained of the workload involved: “Our self-assessment was 10,000 words long as we wanted to cover everything.”

Another primary head said: “The inspection caused both mental and physical distress to the entire senior team. People were very ill during the Christmas break, a month after the inspection.”

This was the case despite several heads having commented that inspectors were often checking if they were Ok, during the inspection. This would indicate that, while the inspectorate has paid attention to trying to soften the interactions that inspection teams have with school leadership, the structural implications of the way inspections have been set up – arguably exacerbated by the weight being placed on judgments through government intervention in the case of a bad grade, and parental choice - could make this feel like window-dressing.

Possible caveats

In terms of how much should be read into this survey, it is relatively small – one of the writers told me that there had been 1,474 inspection reports published under the new framework at the time the team stopped receiving survey responses. So the 100 heads contributing would represent about one in 15 of those inspected.

It is possible to wonder, too, whether those responding might be more motivated to do so if they were unhappy about the way the inspection had gone.

That said, the team did check whether the responses they received were representative of schools overall in terms of those which had received reports under the new framework. It checked whether particular Ofsted grades; levels of disadvantage; phase of education, type of school (maintained or academy); or whether they responded by email or by the postcard the team provided were over-represented, in terms of responses.

On only one dimension – maintained school leaders being more likely to return questionnaires than was the case in the academies sector – did they find any statistically significant difference. With those who received good Ofsted ratings just as likely to respond as those receiving bad, it may be that the survey did not over-represent the dissatisfied.

One final quibble – I note that this survey report tended in its substantive text to follow what seems in recent months to have been government, and often media, practice of not using the term “academy trusts,” simply calling them, instead, simply “trusts”. I think this is disappointing, as the academies policy has a distinct meaning – and academy trusts are different from other types of trust which still exist in English education – and not using that term arguably makes this less clear.

But that is a minor point, given that this is a report about Ofsted.

The background against which Ofsted operates

My overall feeling on Ofsted is that it is impossible to consider the inspection regime without thinking, also, about the entire neoliberal architecture on which England’s school system has sat in recent decades. The implied lack of trust in professionals which sits behind Ofsted – which I wrote about 20 years ago in my book on results-focused schooling** is also the product of introducing a fragmented, quasi-market system which arguably puts a premium on institutional reputation rather than genuine public service.

The stories coming my way at Education Uncovered, in which concerns are often raised about the way some organisations are run, I think reflect that overall structure. This suggests to me that there is still a need for an outside agency to check on how institutions are operating, but that its actions should focus on deep investigations when what seem genuine concerns are raised, rather than what reports such as this show up for the inevitably superficial and/or mechanistic two-day visits we see with modern inspections, with implications of unjustified stress for practitioners who are doing the right thing.

Even within the current structure, this report suggests that more could be done to make improvements, however. There should be much for Ofsted to ponder about, in these responses, and hopefully much for MPs to use, in their session with Sir Martyn tomorrow.

 

*As a parent, I would quibble with the notion that control of attendance rests wholly or even, in all cases, mainly with parents, if only because, in some cases, health conditions are a highly significant limiting factor. In fact, trying to use statistics to make judgments either on parent or school quality on this front is super-problematic, given the lack of nuance we see in the interpretation of statistics, and the anxiety-ridden defensiveness that this generates.

**See Chapter 17 of my 2007 book Education by Numbers: the Tyranny of Testing, in which I took issue with the notion, as set out by a seemingly influential political theorist, that there was no problem with assuming that teachers were “knaves,” prone to follow self-interest, rather than altruism.