Education – Ofsted – What an inspection should be.

Posted on by Opher

PublicSchools

Ofsted has been used as an arm to promote government dogma on education. It is far too limited, narrow in scope and prescriptive. It has become draconian and oppressive. Rather than encouraging excellence and outstanding teaching it has stifled it. It has created an unimaginative, stultifying, uncreative, restricted curriculum that is overly bureaucratic, too onerous on teachers and tries to fit everybody into the same mould.

Here’s what I think an Ofsted Inspection should be:

  • It should be objective and feedback what it sees
  • It should recognise that there are many ways to teach and the three part lesson is only one
  • It should recognise relationship as the basis of good teaching.
  • It should recognise that a teacher’s strengths are their personality and not merely their classroom organisation and lesson plan. Eccentricity can be good.
  • It should recognise that exam results are not the most important aspect of education
  • It should recognise that skills, discussion, self-esteem and attitudes are of equal, if not greater importance
  • It should value creativity
  • It should value social attitudes and equality as much as knowledge acquisition
  • It should recognise that a lesson cannot be judged on student progress alone – sometimes there are more important things
  • It should never tyrannise staff or schools
  • It’s pronouncements should not so drastically affect a school’s reputation that it destroys the school
  • It should work with staff to look for ways of improving rather than being coldly, cruelly judgemental
  • It should value the happiness of students
  • It should value the positive moral attitudes of students
  • It should value self-esteem
  • It should value skills

Schools are not factories turning out fodder for industry; they are education centres turning out well-adjusted citizens full of self-esteem and worth, interests, values and an enquiring mind.

Education should be fun, expanding, creative and varied. All subjects are of equal worth and the unquantifiable aspects are more important than the measurable.

Safeguarding has become out of all proportion. It is not about making children safer – it is about covering backs. It is impinging on good healthy education.

PSHE, Restorative Practice, Pastoral Care, Student Voice and SEAL are the most important aspects of education.

If caring is not at the centre of the school’s achievements it is failing.

Divisive strategies to raise (misguidedly) exam results through streaming or banding create arrogance and failure equally. Even if they did raise standards, which they don’t, the social fall-out is not worth it.

Ofsted inspections have to take all this into account and help schools progress rather than merely damning them.

Now that 40% of Ofsted staff have been sacked for incompetence perhaps it is time to have a rethink about its role, purpose and operation? It needs to become less dogmatic, political and cold and more useful, helpful and guiding.

Education is an art, not a science. It is not black and white and prescriptive. It is fluid and variable.

You cannot put teachers in strait-jackets and expect them to perform.

12 thoughts on “Education – Ofsted – What an inspection should be.”

  2. If it can’t be measured, then it can’t be valued… is the mantra of the bureaucrats and their handlers. This is the failure of formal education. I agree with you.

    1. And the unmeasurables are every bit as important as the measurable. By emphasis on measuring they devalue the unmeasurables.

  4. We have gone down the wrong path. I recall a time when the teachers of different schools would meet together to share good practice under the mentorship of the local subject inspector. Ofsted inspections then became mechanical exercises constrained within judgements based on exam results – far too top-down and non-interactive.

    1. Exactly. Those were the good old days when ideas were shared and education was creative, before it was crammed into a strait-jacket and had the life squeezed out of it. Mechanical exams-based judgements with heavy punitive sanctions for stepping outside the line are no inducement for quality education.

      2. Inspectors used to engage you in discussion and were often a source of good ideas and ways to improve. What went wrong? Tory policy went wrong.

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