It has been a terrible few weeks for Ofsted. AS the BBC said a week ago ‘the dam has burst on strength of feeling’ after the tragic news of the death of Ruth Perry a popular headteacher of Caversham Primary School on 17th March. She had taken her own life having had a frightful inspection experience in which her school was downgraded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. The full report can be read here. The inspection took place in November 2022 but as a result of data protection rules, and as is standard inspection practice, Ruth Perry was not able to disclose the final grade between when she was told in November 2022 and the publication of the report in March 2023. Of all the many tragic details of this story, this delay seems particularly egregious and unconscionable. There is a coroner’s inquest taking place and this will decide the part the inspection played in Ms Perry’s death but there is no doubt at all about what the family believe.
The backlash against Ofsted resulting from this story from the media, headteachers, teachers’ unions, parents and many others has now generated a very significant head of steam which is not letting up. It is now 2 weeks since Ms Perry’s death and reports in all forms of media, social and mainstream, are still coming thick and fast. The anger is tangible and the outpouring of personal, and horrifying, inspection stories is still rampant. Only yesterday the National Union of Headteachers announced they were considering legal action against Ofsted on the basis of alleged human rights violations as a result of Ofsted’s decision not to pause inspection activity in the immediate aftermath of Ms Perry’s death.
There are several remarkable features of this which are significant and are indicative of the culture the inspection regime presides over. The first is that stories of questionable inspection practices are not new at all. In fact amongst those in the teaching profession, stories of intimidating, manipulative and aggressive behaviour on the part of inspectors are commonly shared, as are stories of overwhelming stress and workload pressures brought on by inspections. These are shared as war stories in hushed tones out of the corners of mouths, in corridors and by photocopiers the length and breadth of the country. They are professional folklore and as they are largely unverified they often go ignored and lead to no change. Brave individuals who felt motivated by inspection-related trauma to publish their stories in the media never until now gained much traction and the media gaze moved on seemingly with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders.
Ofsted’s attempts to dispel some (though not all) of the myths that have grown up around its practices have been half-hearted. While I am quite sure Ofsted is not fully responsible for the travel and direction of the professional folklore that surrounds its practices, I sometimes wonder, in my most cynical moments, whether Ofsted allows some of these myths to circulate because they suit its purposes? The fear these stories can induce in professional colleagues is, one might say, a stimulus to action. Maybe this has gone too far now. Tim Barton’s true story of a headteacher calling an emergency meeting to announce a bomb scare at the school is a fascinating insight into the impact of this fear of Ofsted. Apparently the senior team suspected that the meeting had been called to announce that Ofsted had called and on hearing that it was a ‘just’ a bomb scare there was palpable relief (see Why the increase in inspections is damaging for Ofsted | Tes Magazine). Now, and at long last, the news of Ms Perry’s death is finally shining the light of accountability on to Ofsted and these stories are now being published and getting the attention they warrant.
The other remarkable feature of this is the near-total lack of response from Ofsted itself. With the exception of the Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, and her statement of the 24th March, Ofsted has remained completely silent. Calls for them to pause inspections, at least in a show of respect, have fallen on deaf ears. It is of course unknown what impact the outcry is having on internal, confidential communications. One would hope that individual inspectors who are now having deeply unpleasant experiences of inspecting schools while being looked on as pariahs are holding Ofsted’s leaders and managers to account and lobbying them to change their approach forthwith. We will probably never know.
This is a further problem. Ofsted operates in near total secrecy. Its inspectors have to sign the Official Secrets Act and, rather like informants or secret police, this creates a perception that individual inspectors can be duplicitous and creates a huge psychological barrier in any engagement with them by other members of the profession who are subject to them. I mix with known Ofsted inspectors at various conferences and am wary at all times of what I say to them. I also note with amusement the strategies others deploy when speaking to them because these conversations are rarely candid or honest. Some individuals circulate around inspectors in the hope of getting pearls of wisdom or an inside track into Ofsted’s latest thinking. Others seem to accept that in speaking to an inspector, they are already somehow being inspected and seek to publicise and advertise their achievements and good practice to them. Most, like me, give them a wide berth and/or assume poker face if we encounter them. Why do I do that? I simply do not trust the organisation they belong to. Ofsted has done nothing to reassure me that the things I might say to them informally do not ‘count’.
I have seen during my many experiences with Ofsted, inspectors placing documents provided for them into their files and noting down evidence from conversations and meetings. I am told that this evidence is destroyed but who checks and do I trust them that it is? Do individual institutions have a file opened on them at Ofsted HQ? Do individuals have files opened on them and are some flagged internally as ‘problematic’ and in need of additional Ofsted scrutiny or – dare I say it – re-education? Do individual inspectors go rogue and keep their own files on schools and individuals and see it as their mission to return later and ‘finish the job’? Again no effort to dispel the rumours and no visible accountability. The number of times that I have seen inspections of schools announced when the timing has raised eyebrows is curious. How often have I seen this scenario played out: Multi-Academy Trust CEO is anxious to bring new schools into their fold to increase turnover, intake, capitation budgets. Key headteachers in the trust are Ofsted inspectors or have links to Ofsted. Neighbouring non-academised or non-MAT schools have a difficult inspection and are put into an ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ category and are taken over. Is this pure serendipity? The folklore rumours are reseeded again.
And yet the disastrous few weeks Ofsted have had are only the culmination of a very difficult period in which their credibility has, rightly, been questioned in other ways. I have noted before (see Children punched and hit over the head in care homes rated ‘good’ – BBC News) how their inspection of the Helsey group of children’s care homes failed to uncover very serious safeguarding concerns. I wonder whether the reaction to this from Ofsted created the overcompensated knee-jerk response evident in the references to sexualised behaviour from children at Caversham Primary. Furthermore, there have been a series of rows with Ofsted from subject associations about Ofsted’s publication of their research reviews in each subject area. In Maths, for example, Ofsted have been accused of completely misrepresenting the research of senior and respected academic Professors Mike Askew and Mark Boylan. There have been similar controversies in the English and MFL research reviews. The accusation is that Ofsted has used and abused the research of others in order to conceal and at the same time justify its own ideological (and government-apeing) preference for traditional teaching approaches. As the educational journalist Warwick Mansell has said ‘academics have referred to Ofsted as taking an approach to the use of research which would be frowned upon in an undergraduate essay, if not in school work by pupils’ (Mansell, 2022) . This raises many questions about whether it really is raising standards or whether it is policing ideological mantras. However, yet again, not a great deal of noise in the mainstream or in the public’s attention about this.
If this is not sufficient to paint a picture of an institution with enormous power that behaves with impunity then my final point underscores the arrogance with which it regards its own importance. Throughout these last few weeks, Ofsted’s defenders, mainly government spokespeople, and the statement from Amanda Spielman referenced earlier, have stressed that Ofsted raises standards. To pause inspections would therefore bring standards down. Even the slogan on the Ofsted logo says as much: ‘Ofsted: raising standards and improving lives’. However, this is mistaken and untrue. Ofsted has no direct role at all in raising standards. Its inspections merely judge standards in schools and other educational settings and produce reports in which recommendations are made. Schools decide what to do about inspection report recommendations and school colleagues, headteachers and governors are the ones who drive up standards in schools. Ofsted has no direct role at all in operationalising improved standards in schools. In this way, Ofsted’s slogan is deeply misleading and takes away the achievements of so many other professionals in the education system who work so hard. Schools are good not because of Ofsted but because of the colleagues and leaders who work there.
Caversham Primary School had by all accounts maintained its high standards since its last inspection, when it was found by Ofsted to be outstanding. Yet because of a change in inspection framework this was now judged to be inadequate. It is vitally important to recognise that the school was downgraded not because of any fall in standards at the school, but because of a change in inspection framework. So the shock and trauma that has been wrought in the community of Caversham Primary is not a direct result of any change or drop in the standards at the school but because the inspection framework has changed. The coroner’s inquest will determine what role this had in Ms Perry’s tragic death. Coroners have, however, cited Ofsted stress as a factor in the deaths of 10 other teachers (see Revealed: stress of Ofsted inspections cited as factor in deaths of 10 teachers | Ofsted | The Guardian). I challenge Ofsted and its defenders to say that all the trauma and stress they have wrought is a price worth paying. If the system is to change and there is now finally consensus that it must then this should start with a judicial enquiry into the practices, methods and ethics at Ofsted and a new and completely transparent approach to holding it to account. Only then can confidence be restored.