My worries about the end of Ofsted’s one-word grading

Good morning. Our recent Q&A didn’t get round to answering one question concerning what readers should look out for in education policy. One aspect of that is the new government’s review of the curriculum.

Another is Labour’s pledge to replace Ofsted’s one-word headline verdicts with a more nuanced “report card”. Ministers have taken the first steps towards implementing this in state schools in England by bringing an immediate end to the one-word reports this academic year ahead of the introduction of its new report card.

The final detail on what that system will look like is still up in the air, and it may well be that the concerns I outline in today’s newsletter are addressed by them. Nonetheless, I do have considerable concerns about this policy. More on that below.

A new school of thought

Labour has moved to satisfy one of its manifesto pledges of replacing the single headline judgments, introduced by Tony Blair, and it will implement a new “report card” system from September next year. In the meantime, inspections will provide one-word assessments across quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, and leadership and management.

Parents consistently tell the Ofsted annual survey that they find these reports useful, believe them to be a core part of improving schools, and they are generally among the top three reasons parents give for choosing a school, after location and the school’s ethos. If you have travelled at all in England, you will almost certainly have seen banners outside schools or adverts in local newspapers proclaiming when a school is ranked “outstanding” or “good”.

It has long been a complaint of the profession that the education watchdog’s headline verdicts — which assigns schools a ranking out of “outstanding”, “good”, “requires improvement” or “inadequate” — are simplistic. Katharine Birbalsingh, the Conservative party’s favourite headteacher, declared last year that “any inspectorate makes schools worse, not better”, and has called for Ofsted to be scrapped and to instead force schools to have a continuous open door policy for visitors. The Tony Blair Institute, which has welcomed the move, has called for the introduction of a “Digital Learner ID” to allow continuous assessment and its own radical reform of Ofsted.

The campaign against single headline verdicts came to a head in January last year after the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, following a critical report into her primary school, Caversham Primary School. Following the inquest into Perry’s death, Berkshire’s senior coroner issued a “Prevention of further deaths notice” to Ofsted, the Department for Education and the local authority.

I have a number of concerns here. First, the reason for Ofsted’s rating of Caversham Primary School as “inadequate”, in what was otherwise a largely glowing report, was the school’s failures to ensure that it met its statutory safeguarding responsibilities. While these issues were not estimated to take more than 30 days’ work to remedy, according to inspectors, these are obviously among the most serious failures that can happen at a school. It is hard, therefore, to imagine an adequate inspection framework that is not going to carry at least the threat of heavy sanctions. There are inevitably going to be cliff edges in a school inspection report about whether or not outside intervention is needed to turn around a school that is in difficulty.

The second is that switching to a report card is not going to meet any of the concerns set out in the senior coroner’s letter and that they are in fact, less effective than the measures Ofsted gave in response at the time.

The third concerns the mooted alternatives. I don’t think either the Birbalsingh or TBI plans will serve most parents as well as Ofsted reports and will instead work best for the most engaged parents. It is implausible to imagine that either the continuous open day plan put forward by Birbalsingh or a “Digital Learner ID” are going to allow parents to discover shortcomings in safeguarding or other issues that while not obvious in terms of academic output, are core responsibilities of a school and are absolutely why an inspectorate is an essential part of schools policy.

My worry about the interim report card is that there are two ways that it could end up, neither of which are particularly good. The first is that it could eventually look a lot like His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services reports into the police and fire services respectively. Here are illustrative examples from Surrey:

I don’t think that anyone glancing at these is left struggling to decide where to place the police and fire services in Surrey on a scale from “outstanding” to “requires improvement”. Indeed, when you look at these charts it becomes screamingly obvious why at the last election Surrey returned a majority of MPs for a party other than the Conservatives for the first time since 1885. That the inspectorate is unable to reach a simple, one-word headline on these inadequate services simply makes HMICFRS look like a poor regulator. This inspires confidence in absolutely no one.

The other possible failure is that it ends up looking like Education Scotland’s reports. I can’t do this one justice with a screen grab. But suffice it to say that if I wanted to design a format to put as much between a parent and discovering that their child’s school is ranked as “weak” at both “learning, teaching and assessment” and “leadership of change” as I possibly could while still retaining a patina of transparency, this is pretty much close to what I would pick.

The previous system certainly had shortcomings. But one undeniable strength of the now-abandoned single word system is that it was easy to understand for parents who, whether because of lack of education themselves or lack of time, had to rely on a quick guide to how their children’s schools measured up.

I’m open to the idea that when the DfE unveils what its final report card looks at, it will have devised something that provides parents with clarity, makes the regulator look credible and addresses the concerns that school leaders and teachers have. But that seems like a very tall order and my concern is that this move is a retrograde step.

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Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Bryony Jarman-Pinto’s excellent new record Below Dawn while writing my column, which you can read here.

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