Commenting on the new inspection arrangements for
Ofsted, Dr Mary Bousted, Joint
General Secretary of the National Education Union, said:
“Ofsted is not proposing to abandon data as a key factor in its
inspection judgements. Inspectors will still arrive at secondary
school armed with data on Attainment 8, Progress 8, the
proportion of pupils entered for EBacc subjects and the
percentage achieving level 4 and level 5 passes at GCSE English
and maths. And inspectors will still arrive at primary schools
armed with data on KS 2 SATS results, the phonics test and, in
time, the times table test and baseline assessment.
“Under the proposed framework, schools and colleges will not be
able to contextualise their data in their conversations with
inspectors, meaning that they will effectively be judged against
national attainment scores which may bear little or no
relationship to their own school’s or college’s student
population.
“We believe that schools and colleges will still not be evaluated
accurately or be provided with worthwhile feedback, and it will
remain the case that Ofsted has neither the financial nor the
human resources to effectively implement its ambitious inspection
proposals. Ofsted does not have the capacity to quality assure
its own judgements and we do not have confidence in the capacity
of inspectors to make judgements on the curriculum, particularly
out of their own subject/phase expertise.
“We also believe that the criteria looking at pupil’s resilience,
character attributes and ‘virtues’ encourage a deficit model of
mental health and wellbeing rather than looking at measures which
assess a whole school approach to social and emotional wellbeing.
“The first step for a radical overhaul of the inspection system
would have been the removal of the 4-grade system of judgements,
to make space for proper professional conversations about
curriculum, and to provide helpful information to support school
improvement. Ofsted have woefully missed that opportunity.”
