Powell Orders Ofsted Back to the Drawing Board on Inspections
School inspections in England will be overhauled for the second time in a year after complaints that the new system was dangerously stressful and was damaging teachers’ mental health. The education secretary Lucy Powell will tell Ofsted to “go back to the drawing board”, having concluded that changes made by her predecessor were creating problems for head teachers. The ratings themselves are expected to stay.
What Ms Powell wants changed is how inspectors weigh context. She is not expected to scrap the ratings that score schools from “exceptional” to needing “urgent improvement”, but to require inspectors to take greater account of each school’s social and economic background, and in particular to rethink how inclusion is measured. That is a reversal of emphasis rather than structure, aimed at a specific grievance: that a school serving a deprived catchment is marked against the same line as one that is not. This framework was itself Labour’s answer to the death of the head teacher Ruth Perry, and revising it within a year invites the charge that the regulator is being redesigned faster than schools can adapt. The evidence against it is blunt: a National Education Union survey found three in four inspected staff said inspections had harmed their mental health. Paul Whiteman of the head teachers’ union warned that leaders in deprived areas “must not be placed at a systemic disadvantage by an inspection framework that fails to properly reflect those contexts”. Watch what Ofsted is actually instructed to do.