Commenting on Ofsted's confirmed plans for education inspections,
Pepe Di'Iasio, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders, said:
"Inspections should do two things - provide parents with an
accurate reflection of a school's performance while doing so
without placing an excessive burden on staff. Ofsted's plans
achieve neither objective. The tweaks made to its proposals
following the consultation period are just that - minor and
cosmetic changes to a flawed rationale. To make matters worse,
the planned introduction of this system is far too rushed and
gives schools little time to prepare for a huge change in how
they will be inspected.
"As we have warned on many occasions, it will not be possible to
apply reliably a five-point grading scale across multiple
evaluation areas during the course of a single inspection. Even
with the number of evaluation areas slightly streamlined, this
exercise requires inspectors to make a large number of finely
balanced judgements in a very short space of time. Regardless of
the amount of training delivered, it is unlikely that inspection
teams will be able to do this consistently between different
settings, and the result will be a system that is inherently
unreliable.
"The new inspection system will also place a huge amount of
stress on school and college leaders and their staff because they
will face so many judgements across so many areas. Those
achieving the 'expected standard' will effectively be told that
this is not good enough, and they should be striving for 'strong'
and 'exceptional.' It is a recipe for professional burn-out with
the implication that however hard you work you should be doing
better.
"Let's remember that this entire process began with the suicide
of a headteacher under the previous inspection system. Yet here
we are with a reformed system which appears to be even worse. We
are gravely concerned about the welfare of leaders and teachers
as well as the impact on recruitment and retention.
"We will spend some time now looking in detail at the proposals
and consulting with our members over our next steps. We have
previously said that we will consider encouraging members who
serve as Ofsted inspectors to withdraw their services and we will
now put that question to our elected members."
Ends
Editors' notes: The Association of School and College Leaders
(ASCL) is a leading professional body and trade union
representing 25,000 members across the UK. Our members include
trust leaders, headteachers, principals, vice-principals, deputy
and assistant headteachers, and business leaders, of state-funded
and independent schools and colleges. They are responsible for
the education of more than four million young people in more than
90% of secondary schools and colleges, and in an increasing
number of primary schools. We provide high-quality advice and
support to our members, deliver first-class professional
development, and we work to influence national education policy
on behalf of children and young people.
