Ofsted under fire for praising high-profile free school’s curriculum as “broad” –without mentioning absence of computing, single sciences and design and technology

The school arguably most closely associated with this government’s education reforms has secured another “outstanding” verdict from Ofsted –but with the inspectorate controversially describing its curriculum as “broad” despite evidence that it might not be.

Michaela Community School, in Brent in North London, appears to be offering no computing/information technology at all as part of its normal daily lessons, despite the subject being on the national curriculum at key stages three and four.

Design and technology also does not appear on the school’s list of subjects on its website, despite being on the national curriculum at key stage three, while music is only listed as being taught until year eight. In addition, drama is not listed as being taught; only a single modern language was on offer for most pupils in terms of GCSE qualifications last year; and vocational qualifications were not listed among those taken in 2022.

The school also appears to have been the only mainstream secondary in its local authority last year which did not have a single student taking single science GCESs, which are usually seen as the most detailed foundation for science A-levels, with all Michaela pupils taking double science GCSE instead. Most of its students appeared to have chosen from only 11 GCSEs last year-the smallest range of qualifications among Brent’s secondary schools.

Despite all this, Ofsted, which visited the school in May to check if its previous “outstanding” rating should still be in place, stated in its report that Michaela’s curriculum was “broad and exceptionally rich”.

Remarkably, given that the inspectorate has been stressing the importance of the curriculum in recent years and emphasises it in reports, there was no mention at all of the various subject absences as described above, with parents who might read the report not told that the school, for example, appears not to be teaching computing or design and technology, at least during normal lesson time.

Michaela had the highest results of any secondary school in England last year in terms of the government’s key “progress 8” GCSE results measure, although the DfE has issued a post-covid health warning on the use of such statistics.

Michaela’s curriculum as described on its website

Having seen some debate on twitter about Ofsted’s description of Michaela’s curriculum as “broad and exceptionally rich,” Education Uncovered decided to scrutinise the publicly-available evidence on this, via the school’s website and the DfE’s list of subject entries for the school at GCSE or equivalent in 2022.

On the school’s website, Michaela’s curriculum is described as “uniquely challenging” and “uniquely coherent”.

However, there is no mention of computing/information and communication technology, despite this being a national curriculum subject at key stages 3 and 4; or design and technology, which features in the national curriculum at key stage 3.

The full list of subjects set out on Michaela’s website is: English; maths; science; humanities (history, geography and religion), French; art; music; PE; and personal, social, health and emotional education.

The school only lists music on its curriculum up to year eight.

Design and technology is listed in the national curriculum as an “entitlement”, such that pupils in local authority maintained schools have to be able to study it if they wish. The fact that Michaela had no GCSE entries in the subject in 2022 underlines its apparent position as not having been offered at the school. Michaela, as an academy, has the freedom not to follow the national curriculum. However, this seems another aspect in which the school’s offer is not “broad,” at least in relation to the expectations on non-academy schools.

Ofsted (see below) has also now pointed me towards its own inspection framework, which says that academies are expected to offer a curriculum which “should be similar in breadth and ambition to the national curriculum”. Again, there is the question on whether this can possibly be the case with respect to breadth, at Michaela.

GCSE subject entry data

Turning to the DfE’s data on subject entries at the school, remarkably this produces a list of only 11 GCSEs taken by students at Michaela in 2022, other than what may have been community languages (Arabic, Persian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish), four of which only had one student entry each, with the other, Arabic, having only eight entries.

Other than this, Michaela only had students taking English language; English literature; maths; double science; religious studies; French; history; citizenship; fine art; photography; and geography.

So that is only 11 subjects. Unlike in other Brent schools, there were no non-GCSE/vocational courses listed as having been entered by Michaela pupils.

Comparison with other schools in Brent

I looked at the GCSE subject data* for all 14 other mainstream secondary schools in the local authority of Brent: academies and local authority maintained schools.

Remarkably, it seems clear from this analysis that, judged by GCSE entries alone, Michaela actually had the narrowest subject offer of any Brent mainstream secondary in 2022.

School name	Total KS4 subjects (1)	Max entries (2)
Wembley High Technology College	27	394
Capital City Academy	26	181
Kingsbury High School	26	305
Alperton Community School	25	251
JFS	24	273
Preston Manor School	24	240
Claremont High School	23	265
Queens Park Community School	22	207
St Gregory's Catholic Science College	22	183
E-ACT Crest Academy	21	203
Newman Catholic College	20	99
Saint Claudine's Catholic School for Girls	20	302
Ark Academy	18	164
Ark Elvin Academy	18	182
Michaela Community School	11	120

Note 1: This lists the number of individual GCSE or equivalent subjects which had entries of at least 10 pupils in 2022, in each school, as published on the DfE’s website.

Note 2: This gives an indication of the size of the school in terms of last year’s GCSE cohort, with “max entries” denoting the highest number of entries in any one subject, for each school.

According to the DfE’s school-by-school data, all but three of the schools had more than 20 GCSE or equivalent subjects in which at least 10 pupils were entered. One, Wembley High Technology College, offered 27 subjects, while Capital City Academy and Kingsbury High School had 26 each. The average number of subjects offered was 22, with two schools, both run by the Ark academy chain, offering 18 each.

Michaela’s number of 11, then, was way below these figures.

A list of some of the extra subjects available at GCSE or equivalent in these schools, but not at Michaela, gives some flavour of the difference. Capital City Academy offered, for example, among others GCSEs in German and Spanish as well as French; health studies; hospitality and catering; media/film/TV studies; sociology; graphics; and computing.

Kingsbury High School included an offering of business studies; computing; design and technology; drama and theatre studies; engineering; French, German and Spanish; PE/sports studies.

By my calculations, all of the other schools in Brent except one – Saint Claudine’s Catholic School for Girls – had pupils entered for computing or information and communication technology, sometimes with a couple of separate qualifications offered in this subject.

And every other secondary school in Brent apart from Michaela had some of their pupils entered for the single sciences of biology, chemistry and physics, alongside other students being entered for double science.

Most of these schools also had at least two modern languages in which at least 10 students had been entered for GCSE – some had three and in one case the number was four - as against the single subject of French, at Michaela.

It should be acknowledged, here, that Michaela is relatively small, which may limit the scope for the larger range of options you see in much larger secondaries. The highest number of entries Michaela had for any one GCSE subject was 120, which would be the size of the entire year group, compared to a remarkable figure of 394 at Wembley High Technology College.

However, Michaela is not the smallest secondary in Brent. Newman Catholic College only had a maximum of 99 entries for any one subject. It still, however, offered 20 GCSE or equivalent subjects to at least 10 students in 2022.

Implications for understanding of the school

The figures above seem interesting in their own right, in terms of trying to understand the curriculum offer at Michaela. They have clearly not featured prominently, if at all, in Ofsted’s inspection process. The available information suggests that this is a relatively small school, offering a relatively restricted diet of GCSE and equivalent courses, albeit with pupils within these courses doing remarkably well against government metrics.

Other than the lack of entries for the national curriculum subjects of computing, design and technology, music and PE, the fact that fact that no pupils at Michaela took single science GCSEs may also provoke debate.

The double science entry, whereby students take all three of biology, chemistry and physics but the combined content only amounts to two thirds of what it is for those taking the three sciences separately (“triple science”), appears to have been the school’s offer in 2022.

Although there have been some calls to make double science compulsory for all students across England, taking the three separate sciences at GCSE offers a higher volume of study in preparation for science A-levels.

Would Michaela’s students, then, be as well-prepared for A-level as those taking triple science, even with excellent teaching? Should pupils not at least be given the option of triple science, within a curriculum offer which is said by Ofsted to be “broad”?

Certainly, Michaela’s hubristic claim that its curriculum is “uniquely challenging” may seem especially vulnerable in relation to the only-double-science-offer which is apparent in its 2022 statistics. It would, at least, have been nice to have this offer set out for public discussion by the inspectorate.

Implications for Ofsted

Perhaps the most staggering aspect to all of this is that Ofsted, supposedly so focused on the curriculum, is not even documenting within inspection reports when entire national curriculum subjects are not being taught to pupils.

This website reported on this remarkable phenomenon back in 2021, having reported how an academy controlled by the former minister and Conservative Party donor, Lord John Nash and his wife Lady Caroline Nash, was not teaching computing or ICT and that this had not been disclosed in an Ofsted report following an inspection in December 2019.

I had asked Ofsted why the non-existence of a national curriculum subject on a state-funded school’s curriculum had not been documented. I was taken aback when it told me that this would not necessarily feature in reports.

The Michaela case seems to show this happening again. Again, it is extraordinary that entire swathes of potential teaching provision can be absent, with inspectors only remarking that the curriculum is “broad”. “Broad” on what measure, would be the question, when comparison to what is on offer at other schools suggest the offer is actually relatively narrow.

The school’s approach may well be defensible. It achieves great results, and no doubt its parents are very happy with the offering. But the nature of its curriculum must be worthy of feeding into the national debate about this school; Ofsted, supposedly so interested in the detail of curricula, would surely agree.

Extra-curricular provision

Ofsted’s report does highlight some extra-curricular provision at Michaela. It says: “Pupils widen their interests through participation in a range of extra-curricular activities. These include musical and sporting clubs, Mandarin, chess and sign language. Activities such as ‘Presentations Club’ and debating help pupils to develop their self-confidence and spoken skills.”

But, as some have argued on social media in discussing this report, this is not the curriculum that pupils must access during their compulsory time in school, and it would be wrong to assume that all pupils could access after-school provision.

“Deep dive” Really?

The report may underline, too, the shallowness of Ofsted’s allegedly “deep dive” approach to the inspection of individual subjects. The report on Michaela states that science was one of four subjects at the school into which inspectors carried out “deep dives”; the others were English, science and history.

Yet, remarkably, this is the only mention of the word “science” in the entire report. There is no discussion on, for example, the fact that the school’s GCSE entry last year was entirely in double science, and the merits of this versus single science.

Some depth.

There was some discussion about this report on twitter when it emerged this week. A fear is that, with a school as high profile and successful as Michaela, others may be tempted to go in for what is seen as a narrowing of the curriculum away from creative or vocational subjects – with music reported this week as already having fallen rapidly in recent years at GCSE level - following this tacit endorsement by Ofsted.

There were also suggestions that other schools had been criticised and marked down by Ofsted on the basis of curricula which had been said by the inspectorate to narrow, but which were actually broader than Michaela’s offering.  

Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector, herself has criticised the teaching of national curriculum subjects at key stage 3. In a letter to the Commons Public Accounts committee in October 2018, she wrote: “Our research has found evidence that an overly data-driven accountability system is narrowing what pupils are able to study and learn…In secondary schools, we found many examples of key stage 3 being narrowed to just two years. That means that pupils drop design and technology, art, music or languages after just two years of secondary study.”

Yet, the evidence above suggests music is being taught in just two years at Michaela, and design and technology not at all, but that this was either not noticed, or noticed but ignored, by inspectors.

Why, then, did the inspectorate not put Michaela’s achievements in context: that this is a successful school which nevertheless seems to be offering a relatively small range of subjects, at least within its normal curriculum during the day?

Julie Price-Grimshaw, a former Her Majesty’s Inspector and music teacher, flagged up issues around Michaela’s report on twitter, without naming the school. She told me that both Ms Spielman and Sean Harford, who at the time was Ofsted’s schools director, had emphasised the need for Ofsted to check schools were offering a wide curriculum as the inspectorate prepared to launch its current inspection framework in 2019.

Ms Price-Grimshaw said: “If you look at everything Amanda Spielman and Sean Harford said about a broad and rich curriculum, it’s very hard to see how this [Michaela] fits the bill.”

The twitter thread in which the former HMI raised the issue also saw multiple questions of Ofsted's position raised, one experienced educationist tweeting, having learned of the report's omission to mention the apparent non-teaching of national curriculum subjects: "How on earth?...Surely this can't be right?" 

This case raises multiple further questions, as the inspectorate struggles for credibility.

Ofsted response

I sought a response from Ofsted. It replied: “I’m afraid we don’t comment on individual inspections or reports. All schools are judged against our published framework, and no other factors are taken into account.

“As you mention, academies are not required to teach the national curriculum. This is outlined in our inspection handbook, which states that schools are expected to offer pupils a broad curriculum which should be similar in breadth and ambition to the national curriculum. Questions about what a school should or should not include in its curriculum are for the DfE, the schools regulator, rather than Ofsted.”

If academies are said by Ofsted to be expected to offer a curriculum similar in breadth to that of the national curriculum, it is hard to see from the above how Michaela matches up to that: it appears to lack some national curriculum subjects, but without others in their place to compensate and provide the requisite breadth.

I also sought a response from Michaela itself, but at the time of publication had yet to hear back.

*I looked at all mainstream secondaries for which data was available (one is another free school which did not have year 11 pupils sitting GCSEs in 2022. The analysis above is based only on subjects with at least 10 entries, within a particular school.