Events this week made me reflect on a previous crisis affecting Ofsted.
Shortly before 17-month-old Peter Connelly’s death hit the headlines in 2007, I spoke to Sharon Shoesmith, an extraordinarily dedicated improver of schools and servant of Haringey. There had been failures in social services and Haringey was Victoria Climbie’s borough.
Soon, the press were putting an aggressively critical spin on things I’d heard from Sharon about their preparation for a media onslaught. Ed Balls – a passionate and energetic secretary of state – dismissed her. Ofsted’s hugely determined and competent chief inspector Christine Gilbert came under fire too.
When you know the people involved, reality seems a long way from the ‘heroes and villains’ coverage of any crisis. Reacting to press outrage or scapegoating is easy. Identifying root causes is harder. Unintended consequences proliferate.
New directors of children’s services began overwhelmingly to have social services backgrounds. Lack of senior education expertise became one of three main factors in disconnection between local authorities and schools.
The underlying reality did not change. When Peter died, 50 children a year were killed by abusers. Actions were taken, reviews held, the spotlight moved on – but that average of a child killing every week did not. It remains today’s shocking reality.
The wrong focus
So in the flurry of reviews, research and plans published by Ofsted this week, what will matter most in the long term and what are the risks?
Frustratingly, this debate has focused on the detail of Ofsted process, as if that is the main source of stress, rather than the significant consequences of inspection judgments. And that is leading us to look for solutions in the wrong place.
If you asked me to review your school and I ran a poor process, offended staff and handed you an unclear report that said everything was hopeless, you might be furious. But in the end, you probably wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
If Ofsted run an exemplary process in the most charming manner and leave all challenging language out of their report yet decide that the threshold for intervention is met, then it matters very much to you – and for a very long time. Because consequences.
It isn’t wrong to work to improve framework, process, tone, language and reporting. But if we think changing those things is going to reduce stress dramatically, I think we’ll be disappointed.
One widely reported but seemingly unexamined research fact is that 72 per cent of social care providers say Ofsted is trusted, compared to 29 per cent of schools.
But why? Are Ofsted’s social care inspections a lot better? If so, our solution is right there: get the social care inspectors to train the school ones.
No. The difference between the sectors lies not in what Ofsted does or how, and not in its rating scale either, but in its reports’ public profile, how they are used, by whom and with what impact. These differences are the key drivers of anxiety and of trust. Crucially, they are not in Ofsted’s gift.
Bigger than Ofsted
So this week’s most important recommendation is Christine Gilbert’s unremarked last one: in planning for a school report card, government should initiate a debate about the elements of the public accountability system, of which Ofsted is part.
Because, though you wouldn’t know it from any of this week’s commentary, nobody in schools is accountable to Ofsted. We are accountable to governing bodies, local authorities or trust boards. How those bodies and government should use Ofsted is the key issue.
Some of the most uncomfortable questions about Caversham get a bit close to home for many of us and are not being asked or answered.
How could a local authority not be aware of serious safeguarding issues in a maintained school? How can that disconnect be addressed? And why is any head in any school left not knowing what they don’t know?
In our trust, it is our job to know our schools, to have honest conversations about what needs to improve and to take action long before Ofsted gets to us. We need to ensure heads have the support, challenge and development they need.
As I have said many times, no one has been or will be sacked in United Learning because of Ofsted. If Ofsted ever tells us something we don’t know, we should collectively look at ourselves to see why we were surprised – not rush to scapegoat an individual.
But if Ofsted should not be able to tell a competent governance authority something it doesn’t already know, then who and what should it be for? Well, certainly to identify incompetent governance authorities.
Primarily, however, it exists for parents. To tell them the truth clearly and not pretend it’s more complicated than it is. To hold the feet of people like me to the fire so that problems cannot be overlooked, disguised or underplayed. So that children can’t be failed behind closed doors or parents gaslighted that things are fine when they’re not.
Uncomfortable truths
Knowing that the truth will be told transparently in public in the future creates focus and drive now. It is supposed to be uncomfortable.
This week’s research showed that particularly poorer and less well-educated parents do trust and rely on the current Ofsted model. Two-thirds (67 per cent) of parents in the lowest income category agreed that the single-word Ofsted grading system was useful, compared with 42 per cent in the highest income category.
It is disappointing that new, listening Ofsted didn’t address findings which point in a different direction to the changes they are introducing.
Are those changes going to be good, bad or indifferent? Honestly, it’s too early to say. Much will depend on implementation, and we should scrutinise carefully proposals which are responses to a current crisis narrative.
For example: safeguarding failures will go unreported for three months in otherwise good schools. How to reconcile this with failure to keep children safe being the most serious failure?
‘Problems that can be quickly fixed’ implies irrelevant bureaucracy. But the DBS system is the key legacy of the Bichard inquiry following the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman at Soham, aiming to prevent future harm to children from school employees. It cannot be downplayed.
Accountability deep dive
In other areas, the devil is in the detail.
An inclusion judgment could be positive if it focuses on the success of the less advantaged. But it could be negative if Ofsted start challenging reasonable behaviour policies or over-emphasising the rights of the recalcitrant individual over the wellbeing of the whole community.
Inspectors will ‘gather evidence more flexibly, in a way that is right for the school’s context’. But if the end of deep dives means inspectors get to choose how to gather evidence, or do it less systematically, that would further undermine the reliability of ungraded inspections.
‘Taking better account of the context that a provider is working in’ can’t be allowed to mean lower expectations for children from poor areas or where other schools and colleges are doing badly.
‘Removing unnecessarily negative terminology’ can’t mean shying away from saying things as they are for fear of upsetting people.
Getting the implementation of these changes right is important. But more important is to have that conversation about how accountability should work overall in the interests of children and what Ofsted’s role in it should be alongside governance authorities and the government.
Because this must not become another crisis remembered with horror, where blame was thrown around inappropriately and cosmetic changes made, but the opportunity for deeper change was missed.
