Commenting on Ofsted’s new draft inspection framework, Geoff
Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders, said:
“Ofsted’s new inspection regime is a major change which will see
inspections focus more on the quality of the curriculum taught in
schools and less on test and exam results. This is a step in the
right direction and it should restore some badly needed balance
to a system which has become far too dominated by the
government’s soul-destroying fixation on grades and data.
“By the same token, however, Ofsted needs to understand the
pressures under which schools are operating. Its proposal to
judge leaders on how well they manage teacher workload is
laudable in its intention, but inspectors will need to take into
account the fact that workload is often driven by external
factors such as government reforms to exams and the curriculum,
and a school funding crisis which is driving up class sizes and
thus generating more work for teachers in charge of those
classes.
“Similarly, Ofsted is right to scrutinise the use of exclusions,
whether external or internal, but it also has to appreciate that
the severe funding pressures under which schools are operating
make it difficult to provide the early intervention which
prevents challenging behaviour escalating to the point of
exclusion.
“Ofsted also plans to ask questions of schools operating a
shorter Key Stage 3 in the early years of secondary school to
ensure they are still teaching a broad range of subjects. This
must be a conversation rather than a rush to judgement. Schools
may feel they need to teach a shorter Key Stage 3 because new
reformed GCSEs contain so much content that a longer Key Stage 4
is necessary in order to deliver them.
“Unfortunately, the inspectorate’s plan to judge a school’s
curriculum partly on how well it is preparing to achieve the
government’s ‘ambition’ of 90% of pupils taking GCSEs in the
EBacc suite of subjects is misconceived. This target is
unachievable because there are nowhere near enough modern foreign
language teachers in the system to teach that many pupils. It is
nonsensical to judge schools on factors which are clearly outside
their control and we will be pressing Ofsted to amend this
section.
“The inspection framework also deals with the practice of
‘off-rolling’ whereby by parents are persuaded to withdraw their
child from a school, and the ‘gaming’ of exams in which pupils
are entered for qualifications which are not in their best
interests but may improve the school’s results in performance
tables. The vast majority of school leaders will wholeheartedly
support any action to prevent off-rolling and gaming. These are
unacceptable practices, which shouldn’t happen and don’t do so in
most schools.”
