A Nottingham teacher has said her "whole career" has been blighted by Ofsted. The education regulator has also been described as the "thorn in the side for teachers and education" by a leading union boss.
It comes as the National Education Union passes a motion to establish a new commission investigating the reliability of Ofsted’s judgements. At the NEU’s annual conference on Monday, April 11, members also voted to create a new inspection system for schools based on “collaborative support”.
Louise Regan, from Nottingham, said her “whole teaching career has been blighted by Ofsted” while Paul McGarr, representative for Tower Hamlets in London, said the research reviews published by Ofsted were “ideological position papers”. The union said Ofsted had never published research demonstrating its judgments accurately reflected the education schools were providing, while the inspectorate awarded “outstanding” grades to four times as many affluent secondary schools as deprived ones.
Read more: 50 best rated primary schools in Notts according to Ofsted
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU, said Ofsted had been “the thorn in the side of both teachers and education for decades”. “No school expects to not have an accountability system in place, but Ofsted represents all that is wrong about the tick-box approach to education that successive governments have pursued,” she said.
She added that Ofsted had driven up “unnecessary workload and stress” for teachers and had been a significant factor behind the “alarming numbers leaving the profession every year”.
“Research shows that Ofsted is unfairly biased against schools and colleges in poor areas and is far more likely to slap them with an unjust negative judgment – even if they are improving,” she said.
An NEU member survey found that 56% of members spent over half their working hours on Ofsted preparation before an inspection, while 80% agreed that Ofsted should be abolished or radically reformed. The conference also passed an amendment to the motion to create a working party to explore producing alternative research reviews to the ones published by Ofsted on the teaching of different subjects.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Ofsted provides an essential, independent judgment of schools, colleges, children’s homes and early years settings.
“Inspections are not only helpful for nurseries, schools and colleges in understanding how they are performing, but also to parents when making school choices, with Ofsted inspection judgments being a key factor in their decision making, alongside proximity and the ethos of a school.”
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