School inspections in England and Wales should be abolished and headteachers should refuse to work as inspectors until “toxic” pressures on mental health have been resolved, a teachers’ union says.
Delegates at the National Education Union’s annual conference on Wednesday backed a new campaign by the union to abolish Ofsted, which has been blamed by the family of a headteacher for contributing to her death.
The motion calls on the NEU to develop alternative methods of school assessment in England that are more “supportive and collaborative”, and states that “Ofsted is causing significant risk of harm to our members”.
Mary Bousted, the NEU’s joint general secretary, said her union would be campaigning for Ofsted to be replaced with a system that was “supportive, effective and fair”. She said the union was conducting focus groups with a research team working to develop a better alternative.
“For school leaders, the excessive high stakes and punitive nature of inspection can be intolerable and have a devastating impact on their professional and personal lives,” Bousted said.
The motion also calls for Estyn, the schools inspectorate in Wales, to be abolished.
The conference in Harrogate heard from teachers who worked at schools near that of the Berkshire primary school head Ruth Perry, the NEU member who killed herself in January after being told Ofsted inspectors would downgrade her school to “inadequate”, its lowest rating, from outstanding.
Paul Arnold, who teaches near Perry’s former school in Reading, said he could “not begin to describe the damage and loss felt by our community”.
“Thirty-two years of passion for the profession, destroyed in a single word,” Arnold said.
Perry’s family said they had “no doubt” her death was a “direct result of the pressure put on her by the process and outcome” of the Ofsted inspection.
After the motion was carried, Louise Atkinson, the NEU’s president, read out a message from Perry’s sister, Julia Waters: “Thank you NEU. Ruth’s name must not be lost in vain.”
One consequence of the motion would be that headteachers who are NEU members could decline to work as part-time inspectors, which could limit the number of inspections that Ofsted carries out.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said he had heard of headteachers resigning as Ofsted inspectors as a result of the controversy after Perry’s death.
Whiteman said the feeling among school leaders was that the response to Perry’s death “needs to be a watershed moment”.
“We now know, not just through the tragic death of Ruth Perry but the others that have come to light since, that not only does [inspection] create stress within the system, but that it is a serious stress that is leading to harm. It has to be dealt with immediately,” Whiteman told journalists in Harrogate.
Robin Bevan, an NEU executive member and the head of a school in Essex, said Ofsted’s inspection regime was “an international outlier” and that teachers in other countries looked at England “with pity and with ridicule”.
Bevan said: “For a long time the argument would have been reform, but the organisation has utterly lost any public credibility.”
He accused Ofsted of refusing to investigate the reliability of its inspections, with more than 2,000 schools having been given the wrong grade.
“At the moment Ofsted does really nothing at all around financial efficiency or financial prudence, and yet that needs to be in there somewhere,” Bevan said.
“Because of that, Ofsted is tragically silent on underfunding, because there are things they say are wrong in schools and the reason they are wrong is that schools can’t resource it or recruit staff to deliver it.”
