‘The best inspectors cause no harm - the worst exacerbate it’
Ofsted has hit national headlines this month following the tragic death of a head teacher who took her own life while awaiting a damning inspection report. Here, Phil Karnavas, who led the Canterbury Academy for 27 years, reveals why he believes the educa
Reports suggest the untimely death of Ruth Perry was caused by, or linked to, Ofsted. I, with most others, simply do not have the knowledge or understanding of this specific tragedy to make any comment, and I would not wish to intrude upon the grief of her family, colleagues and friends.
However, in general terms, I remain of the view that Ofsted is well past its sell-by date and serves no great purpose. An imprecise and clumsy mechanism, it simply cannot do that which it purports to accurately evaluate the quality of education provided by all schools and provide parents with useful insights so that they can make informed future choices.
It cannot accurately evaluate the quality of education for a variety of reasons.
Schools are different. Schools do different things. Schools do them in different ways. Schools are complex and of different sizes, with different ethoses and different intakes. They experience different challenges at different times, while delivering different curricula and extra-curricular or enrichment activities.
Schools provide different personal, social, health, emotional and family support, and provide these in different ways and to different degrees.
They work with an enormous range of stakeholders, agencies and other organisations in a vast network of formal and informal relationships.
It is a ludicrous proposition that one person, or a handful of people, can acquire enough information, assimilate, analyse, assess, accurately and fairly report it in one or two days.
So, in reality, they don’t try. The emphasis, no matter what the spin, is on attainment, not achievement, and the focus is firmly on the narrowly academic.
So, generally speaking, schools with children who attain highly in maths and English will do well with Ofsted. Schools that don’t, probably won’t.
And they won’t no matter how good art, dance, drama, vocational subjects, music, sport are; or how many lives have been turned around; or how many families have been helped; or even how well children have achieved considering their starting point.
Schools are inspected on a top-down, rigid, one-size-fits-all model purporting to provide a framework for national consistency.
Except it doesn’t.
There is inconsistency. Any Ofsted inspection depends, almost entirely, upon the lead inspector.
The lead may be experienced or inexperienced, they may have a particular conscious or unconscious bias, they may be influenced by the school that they once worked in, they may or may not understand an area that the inspected school operates in and, it shouldn’t matter - but it does, they may or may not warm to the head.
There are good lead inspectors, mediocre ones and bad ones. The best will prevent Ofsted from damaging a school. The mediocre will allow the damage. The bad ones will exacerbate it.
The best lead inspectors are educationalists rather than inspectors. The worst are apparatchiks. The best will try to support, be flexible and nuanced. The worse will try to catch schools out, be rigid and dogmatic. The best will have looked at background information and be prepared to listen and take a range of evidence into account to reach a balanced judgement.
The worst will look at last year’s results, prejudge an Ofsted grade and inspect to justify it.
Most believe that an Ofsted judgement is about who you get and when you get them.
Many suspect that on any given day (or two days) most schools in the country could be graded ‘2 good’ or ‘3 requires improvement’, or even ‘4 special measures’. There are many arbitrary elements in the process. It depends.
In practice, Ofsted, even if it could be consistent and accurate, doesn’t really provide parents with much useful information. It tends to be based on the results previous children have attained. It implicitly assumes parents will agree that results are the be all and end all of school.
As soon as a report is published, it is out of date. Some Ofsted reports are so out of date that years - in extreme cases almost a decade - have gone by. Ofsted reports may be useful for levering schools into academy chains but parents should read them with a pinch of salt. Ofsted does cause stress. Ofsted does not help. It is not supposed to.
Once seen, an Ofsted lead or team will never be seen again. You can be as fluffy as you like but it is basically a punitive model. It exists to find fault. I was never convinced of its value educationally or to the tax payer. My view remains, that as far as a school is concerned, the best Ofsted can do is no harm, and that does not strike me as a compelling reason to keep it. The money it costs could be better used helping schools, helping staff, helping families and helping children
However, I retired five years ago. Perhaps, it’s different now.
‘The best lead inspectors are educationalists rather than inspectors. The worst are apparatchiks...’