My instincts are telling me that I don’t understand Ofsted reports

The dread moment is almost upon us. The Choosing of the Secondary School is nigh. My eldest child is only 10: a dreamy and sensitive character whose clothes are always on back-to-front, and who loves nothing more than playing superheroes with his little brother. It is impossible – appalling – to imagine him sharing an institutional space with giant, horny adolescents.

“At big school,” he inquired the other day, “will the boys have beards?” Teenagers are, to him, as strange and unknowable as grown-ups, or badgers. Yet the moment the gates of Big School clang shut behind him, their culture will become his. The atmosphere of the school, and the particular personalities of its teachers and pupils, will shape the second half of his childhood – and perhaps his adult destiny.

Oh God, the strain! We have to decide by September which schools to apply for. But how can we possibly know where he would be happiest, most successful, least bullied? “Think about what is right for your child – don’t rely on what others tell you,” advises the website for our local education trust. This reminds me of what well-meaning friends said when I had my first baby: “Just follow your instincts.”

What if your instincts lead you … nowhere? What if you are a rank amateur, with no intuitive understanding of how to nourish, console or sleeptrain an infant? Back then, I turned to books. The Baby Whisperer, The No-cry Solution, The Lots of Crying Solution – I worked my way through the canon in search of my instincts.

When it comes to choosing schools, however, there is no canon. It basically boils down to Ofsted reports. And even these, it turns out, are unreliable. A National Audit Report this week warned that more than 1,200 schools rated “Outstanding” haven’t actually been inspected for at least six years – and 300 for more than a decade.

Since 2011, “outstanding” schools have been spared further inspections unless their exam results begin to slip or Ofsted receives a complaint. The idea is that this frees up the regulator – which, like all public bodies, is short of both money and staff – to concentrate its firepower on underperforming schools. But Ofsted itself admits that some top-ranking schools may have slipped to “middling” while its gaze has been averted.

Our nearest “outstanding” school, I now discover, was last inspected in 2010: the year Apple launched its first ipad. Three prime ministers, four education secretaries and – crucially – three head teachers later, who knows how the place has changed? I have seen at my children’s primary school – which was skidding rapidly downhill until a ferocious superhead came in and hoiked it back up – how quickly new leadership can transform a school, for better and worse.

The opaque bureaucratic language of an Ofsted report is hard enough to interpret without this extra layer of uncertainty. Is it still the case that, as the inspector observed in 2010, “leaders’ understanding of the academy’s strengths and areas of relative weakness is incisive and provides a firm foundation for the capacity to maintain excellence and improve still further”? Who knows? But it sounds like it might be bad if it wasn’t.

Once again, I find myself hopelessly out of my depth as a mother. No instincts, no experience and – the final cruelty – not even any decent literature.