Credit: Phil Meech for IOE.

19 November 2024

By Bernie Munoz-Chereau

This commentary is adapted from Bernie’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, ‘Democratic decision-making in English education: whose voices count?’ You can watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Imagine for one moment that you are subjected to the visit of a team of inspectors. They will come to your workplace at any time after one to three days of giving notice. When they arrive, they will spend a couple of days collecting information (i.e. observations of your performance, interviews with your colleagues and/or ‘service users’, institutional data, etc.). Then, they will use the evidence they have gathered to rate the quality of your performance, which will first be communicated to you in a meeting with you and your team, and then reiterated in a written report a few weeks later. This report will identify the name of your organisation and, once published, will be publicly available for anyone in the world with access to the Internet.

If the inspectors conclude your organisation is doing a good job, new opportunities may open up for you as its leader, such as taking on more responsibility, career progression, and even training those new in your sector and profession. If, on the contrary, the inspectors conclude the performance of the organisation you lead is poor, a spiral of decline might follow. In the worst-case scenario, your institution might be closed or taken over. Colleagues might move to other jobs, while, for those who remain, there might be fewer resources to work with.

Within England’s schools system, these latter risks are very real following a poor outcome from an inspection by Ofsted. (more…)

7 June 2022

By Bernardita Munoz-Chereau, Jo Hutchinson and Melanie Ehren

Finding ways to solve the stubborn underperformance of around 580 schools in England is high on the government’s agenda. The Schools White Paper ‘Opportunity for All: Strong schools with great teachers for your child’ sets out the government’s plans over the coming years, with strategies to address schools with successive ‘requires improvement’ (RI) grades.

Yet since 2017 Ofsted has focused on a group of schools judged as ‘requires improvement’, ‘satisfactory’ or ‘inadequate’ in every inspection over more than a decade. Subsequently, Ofsted conducted qualitative case studies of 10 ‘stuck’ and 10 ‘unstuck’ schools. ‘Fight or flight? How ‘‘Stuck’’ schools are overcoming isolation’ reports that ‘stuck’ schools need more targeted assistance, following more thorough and detailed inspections that are not tied to overall grades .

Our two-year mixed-methods research project studying ‘Stuck’ schools’, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, concluded that (more…)

Melanie Ehren. 
In November 2017, Ofsted’s chief, Amanda Spielman, talked about one of the biggest problems in current education systems: the culture of fear and game-playing around school inspections, where educators for a long time have been guided by external accountability standards and have lost a sense of professionalism. An entire industry has supported schools in getting Ofsted-ready and many teachers and heads would scrutinize any school improvement activity, peer review or school self-evaluation to see how it would help the school get a good Ofsted-grade.
The fear of being classified as a failing school, being named and shamed, losing one’s job or student intake (particularly from high socio-economic backgrounds) has taken away much of the agency from teachers and head teachers to shape their own professional practice. This trend that is sometimes reinforced when large Multi-Academy Trusts introduce strong internal quality control around Ofsted grades and standards (e.g. performance management or peer review).
Ofsted’s ‘myth busting’ campaign, where the agency actively tries to debunk existing (more…)