Lee Owston's speech at the Schools and Academies Show

Ofsted's National Director for Education, Lee Owston, spoke at the Schools and Academies Show in London.

Good morning.

Thank you for inviting me to speak at the Schools and Academies Show today. It's good to be back and to see so many familiar faces.

I was here in November when we were launching Ofsted's renewed approach to education inspection. We're now 6 months into the first set of inspections and, as of today, we've published around 900 report cards.

With thousands of inspections still to go, we can't draw any firm conclusions just yet – but, I'm sure, like me, there are plenty of you looking to see if there are any emerging or recurring themes that we can learn from. So, I'll use our time together today to dive head-on into a few of the main areas.

I particularly want to use the theme of ‘context' to:

• provide some reassurance around inspection methodology, particularly linked to workload and wellbeing
• offer you some clarity around a few of the evaluation areas: achievement, inclusion, and attendance and behaviour
• and share some examples of exceptional practice

Wellbeing and workload

Many of you will have heard me say that one of my main priorities in developing the renewed education inspection framework was to change the ‘feel' of inspection. To shift the tone, improve the professional relationships and become more transparent in the process of inspection itself. Inspection, after all, is a distinctly human endeavour.

And it will always be.

In that spirit, I've spent lots of time listening in roundtables, at regional events, visiting schools and meeting with sector and union representatives. And of course, we're always listening to what you tell us through our webinars.

It's an important part of my job to continue to listen – to understand where we can consider doing more and to hear what's going well.

We know that the planning call is working really well for you. It gives inspectors a chance to understand your school's structure and its unique context and for you to tell us about your strengths and priorities.

And we're being told that inspectors are checking in on your welfare – not just for leaders, but for staff too. What I'm hearing is a sense that we're all on a more mutually supportive journey, with more transparency and collaboration to help each other get the very best for children and learners.

And to continue on the theme of supporting wellbeing, I want to reassure you of a few things.

First, we have heard of some leaders feeling that they need to match the number of available leaders on inspection days to the number of inspectors arriving at the school. That is not the case!

We are not asking you to pull leaders out of classrooms to be with inspectors. That goes against what we want to see, which is an accurate picture of a typical day within your school gates. This will mean some joint activity, but if that isn't possible please, let your staff carry on in their day-to-day work while inspectors go out and look at the great things you're doing on their own. We have more regular reflection meetings now so we will always alert you to what we have seen or heard, even if you haven't been stood alongside us to see and hear it too.

Second, I want to address self-evaluation. At the point of inspection, this is about an early conversation with the lead His Majesty's Inspector. I see self-evaluation as a verb not a noun – it's the process of knowing your school, not a detailed document that inspectors need to specifically consider.

We want to know your successes, what you are proud to celebrate, where you've made a difference, what you're working on next and what this will look like in terms of our time in your school. This, of course, is aided by a common language – so we are all focused on the same expectations. That's why we ask for this conversation to be centered around the evaluation areas and standards in the toolkit. So, while we want to talk about your self-evaluation, it doesn't need to be written down specifically for inspection.

Third, I want to let you know that we will be settling back into an annual cycle of reviewing our toolkits. We will not be making sporadic, small updates throughout the year: we will have one annual review point and release those changes in time for September every year.

So, this year, we will be publishing the changes in June, but they will not come into effect until September. This upcoming set of changes will include clarifying exactly what evidence we consider for the ‘achievement' evaluation area.

Linked to that, we also promise to be sensible when we consider what inspection can carry in terms of updated Department for Education guidance. When guidance changes, we won't expect you to have a perfect policy, perfectly enforced, from day one. As I said, inspection is a human endeavour, and we will consider how you are doing your best with the time and resources that you have. We won't hold you to account for something that doesn't yet exist.

And last, we are making sure that you can feel confident in the fairness of your grades. We undertake regular evidence base reviews, our senior inspectors provide onsite quality assurance, and every week I chair a national panel to ensure our grades are as consistent as they can be.

And when our monitoring visits start, they will allow us to change grades when improvements have been made. You won't have to wait for your next full inspection – so if the grade no longer reflects the practice you and we see in school, we'll change it straight away on the report card.

Understanding context

So now let me turn to context. Context does matter. It ensures our evaluations reflect the real circumstances in which you are working and the lived experiences of your children.

It is the lens through which you have identified priorities and made decisions and so it is the lens through which we seek to understand why your school is as it is.

But we do need to be clear on what we mean when we talk about taking context into account. Because sometimes, we can all be too broad – it's not as simple as having a ‘challenging' context or not. It's far more nuanced than that.

Context is any information that helps us interpret our evidence fairly. It is always part of inspection, but never a pre‑determiner.

The toolkit gives clear guidance on how we consider different contexts for each evaluation area. Often, this is straightforward and informs ‘what' we do – for example, adapting our activity to the size or type of your school. But, when context becomes more complex, it shapes how we evaluate what we see.

I'll use high EAL as an example. To really understand that context, we need to go beyond any data. We need to listen to what leaders tell us and what we see on site. Because high EAL might explain patterns in the data – or it might not.

For example, are EAL learners new to English, new to the country or are they in line with their peers in terms of their language proficiency?

Our understanding of context should always develop through conversations, what we see in classrooms and corridors and of course the broad range of evidence we gather.

Context should help inspectors ask better questions, not shortcut their thinking. It should help them interpret evidence more precisely, without making assumptions. Above all, context should inform what we do, but never pre-determine a grade.

Achievement

We often hear about context when discussing the ‘achievement' evaluation area – and particularly when we're talking about schools serving the most disadvantaged communities.

There's a concern that we are not taking context into account and a misconception that these schools are being compared bluntly to national averages.

As I've said before and will say again today: This is not true.

We recognise that pupils have different starting points and we are looking for them to progress from there. The expected standard refers to being typically, broadly in line with national averages.

This does not mean that schools who are 1 percentage point below the national average are going to automatically be graded as ‘needs attention'.

Our Inspection Data Summary Report (the IDSR) uses a confidence interval, which broadly places key headline measures into 3 categories: below average, close to average and above average. Around 40% of schools are categorised as ‘close to average' with 30% above and below. That means 70% of IDSRs show statutory outcomes as being close to average or above. Within that we have all different kinds of school context – small, rural, urban, coastal, primary and secondary, and those serving the most disadvantaged communities.

We have specifically trained our inspectors to look at how well disadvantaged children are achieving compared with disadvantaged children nationally, baking context into the expected standards. Everyone has access to that training we've delivered because we want to be transparent. You certainly don't need to watch it, but if you think it would be helpful, please do!

Even when the IDSR identifies ‘below average' performance, that information is not a pre-determiner of the achievement grade. It is just one part of the picture.

Remember, the expected standard starts with the sentence, ‘On the whole, pupils achieve well.' This may or may not be reflected in national outcomes. And that's why inspectors gather evidence on site to get a rounded understanding of how well pupils achieve and how well they progress from their starting points. And I assure you that we have seen schools with below average performance statistics presented in the IDSR being graded expected and strong for achievement.

We'll be releasing our own management information later this month to unpick this picture further. But, it is showing that schools in the most disadvantaged areas are certainly able to receive all of the 5 grades, including for achievement – often with strengths in inclusion and leadership.

Attendance and behaviour

I've also heard some concerns about how we've linked attendance and behaviour – that you might have well-behaved children in school, but that your grade's being dragged down by less positive attendance.

We structured this evaluation area in this way because of conversations with sector organisations and union representatives, where we heard that you wanted to see fewer evaluation areas. This is not the only combined grade: curriculum and teaching are also evaluated together.

Attendance and behaviour are intrinsically linked.

Poor behaviour affects all pupils. The vast majority who follow the rules shouldn't have their learning affected by one or two disruptive pupils.

But poor attendance, like poor behaviour, is also disruptive. Of course, it's disruptive for those who are absent – falling behind in their learning, missing out on knowledge, losing the opportunity to form friendships.

It's also disruptive for the pupils who attend regularly. It creates unpredictability, slows the pace of learning, and takes teacher time from other students.

Linking attendance and behaviour means we can look at the bigger picture of helping all pupils to feel that they belong at your school. When pupils feel like they belong, they want to attend. They have teachers who support them and subjects that inspire and engage them.

Children with sporadic or persistent absence are themselves vulnerable. So we have to ask, and we want to see leaders asking: what is preventing children from wanting to attend this school?

Does everyone working at your school have high expectations for pupils' attendance? What is being done for pupils who face barriers to attending? How are you working with children and families who have sporadic absence, to stop it from becoming persistent?

We know that the factors responsible for this country-wide crisis of attendance, including the long legacy of the pandemic, are bigger than any individual school. We know, too, that these factors disproportionately affect schools in the most challenging local areas and make poor attendance more of a challenge in these places. We will always take into account where you are striving against the odds.

Again, the expected standard allows us to focus on improvement and the specific children or families you've been working hard to positively influence. We've baked your context into the evaluation by looking not at the headline figure, but the individual improvements for the specific children and families you've prioritised.

We do not plan to separate out the attendance and behaviour grade. However, as you will have seen on the report cards published so far, we do present 2 separate paragraphs: one on attendance and one on behaviour. When parents read the report card, it's clear to them what the nuances are and what a school is doing to improve or maintain high standards in these areas.

We are planning to add subheadings beneath the grade to make that even clearer. We won't be backdating that but it will be used going forward.

I also want to assure you that the grades for attendance and behaviour are more positive than you might assume or have heard!

Currently, around 1 in 10 attendance and behaviour grades are being given ‘needs attention'. And as myself and our Chief Inspector have said many, many times since we introduced this renewed approach, ‘needs attention' isn't a fail.

Even though those who have received ‘needs attention' aren't meeting the expected standard, they may very well be at the early stages of implementing a new attendance strategy, or maybe they are coming from an exceptionally low starting point. The report cards go into these specifics, and point out where we are seeing improvement.

Inclusion

Ensuring that every pupil feels welcomed through the school gates and wants to go to school is directly linked to inclusion.

We mean inclusion in its widest possible sense. When we talk about knowing the children at your school, of course we mean knowing who is disadvantaged, who has SEND or who is known to children's social care – but it does also go beyond the statutory groups.

There are different reasons that children may need support and could benefit from inclusive practice. That's why we have a fourth ‘contextualised' group – those facing other barriers to their learning and/or wellbeing.

Who are the children whose fatigue from caring responsibilities perhaps holds them back from participating in lessons? Which children are currently experiencing disruption at home? In this way, barriers to learning and wellbeing may be shorter or longer term.

We want to make sure inspectors are going into resource bases and into the classrooms of lower sets. I encourage everyone to be open to exploring the full extent of what inclusion means and the specifics (or context) of the community you serve.

I heard of one very straightforward example recently that demonstrates how inclusive practices are often borne out in the experiences pupils have every day. One of our inspectors visited an art lesson where some children didn't have the colouring pencils they needed, while the rest of the class did.

It meant that those children, who wanted to join in and who had just as much ambition as everybody else, were literally not being given the tools to realise that ambition.

Now that's a simple example. But it is indicative of something more complex: we want to see, in a bigger sense, teachers spotting where pupils don't have what they need to thrive and to be doing something about it. It means telling us about the children's needs at the point of inspection and showing us how you're meeting those needs.

Inclusion is everyone's business, which is why it runs like a golden thread throughout all of our evaluation areas, while also standing alone as a grade in itself.

Report cards

I'm delighted that all those facets of inclusion are coming through strongly in our report cards and the narrative detail explains the grade given in every evaluation area.

One parent may be particularly interested in how a school's inclusion offer might meet their child's individual needs. Others might look more carefully at the enrichment and pastoral offer through ‘personal development and wellbeing'. We heard these examples, and more, when testing our report cards with parents last year.

Just as the report card is more useful to parents, so too is it more useful to you. You now have a much richer narrative that celebrates your unique journey to be better, recognises the priorities you have set, and signals your next steps for continuous improvement. Now that is a vast improvement on being given one overall grade that limits the scope of how you can tell your school's story. But don't just take my word for it…

I'm pleased that others are seeing it this way, too: Ben Clark, from Copperfield Academy in Kent, said recently that when you read the report for his school, ‘you get a really good indication of what our school is like'. He says it's a ‘very fair reflection of what is happening in our school at the moment' and that it is ‘much more informative'. I'm grateful to Ben for those words and hope that many of you will find this to be the case!

When you share your successes, you can highlight the parts of your report that you think are most important. If there is a grade you're particularly proud of, then say so! If you feel the inspector has described something unique to your school – whether that's the quality of the teaching or the sense of safety and wellbeing that pupils have – we are encouraging you to draw on that.

We have created QR codes that you can download from your inspection report. You can use those QR codes on your marketing material and your banners. When parents scan the QR code, they go straight to your full report card.

Exceptional practice

On that theme of highlighting things to be proud of, I've spoken before about how we will use the ‘exceptional' grade to shine a light on the very best provision in the country.

I want to end today by doing just that and pointing out some exceptional practice. It's not a grade that's coming up very frequently, but we are finding it. By definition it's the kind of work you don't see every single day, but it makes you stop and think: ‘this is so effective, so transformational, so sustained in practice, that it would legitimately support all schools to improve'.

We've seen Dormers Wells High School in London where inclusion work is ‘exceptional'. Leaders working closely with a range of external agencies, and this partnership securing expert and coherent support for pupils' aspirations. The pupil premium strategy is also crafted extremely well and makes a genuine difference to students' success.

We inspected St Bede's Catholic Academy in Stockton-on-Tees where attendance and behaviour is ‘exceptional'. Leaders have overcome significant challenges in an area of very high deprivation by putting attendance as the highest priority. Pupils want to come to school because they take pride in achieving their goals. The school is helping other local schools to transform in the same way.

We've seen Mary Rose Academy in Southsea whose post-16 provision is ‘exceptional'. Leaders have a real sense of ambition for their pupils, and there is a focus on industry which helps pupils to genuinely understand the world of work.

We've inspected Goldsmith Primary Academy in Walsall whose efforts in inclusion, leadership and governance, and personal development and wellbeing were all found to be ‘exceptional'. Governance is genuinely visionary, and pastoral support is second to none.

And we've seen Leigh Academy Halley, just a hop across the river from here into south-east London, which has achieved ‘exceptional' in multiple areas including attendance and behaviour. Sustained efforts there mean attendance continues to rise, pupils attend regularly, and persistent absence has fallen considerably.

Not one of these schools was ‘exceptional' across the board. They all had a mix of grades on their report card. Every single one is working in areas that are more deprived than the national average, with higher-than-average numbers of children who are eligible for free school meals. Some also have above-average numbers of pupils with SEND and with EHC plans.

I've only scratched the surface today so I encourage you to go and read the full report cards online for the detail.

To these schools, and many others I don't have time to mention, congratulations on doing the very best you can for the children in your classrooms. We are pleased to be able to recognise your exceptional practice and we will continue to do so, wherever we find it.

Wrap-up

I encourage everyone here today to keep seeking out exceptional practice, to learn from it and take inspiration for what you can implement in your own schools.

Our vision is for a self-improving system, where all schools help one another to get the very best outcomes for children. We want all of us to work together as a sector, and as a country, to continue raising standards of education even higher, especially for the most vulnerable, so that all children can achieve, belong and thrive.

Thank you for your time today. I look forward to answering some of your questions and I'll be at stand H40 afterwards, if you want to find me there.