Choosing your child’s school can feel like immensely high stakes. They will spend years living and breathing that choice, and it will almost inevitably be where their younger siblings go. So it was sighs of relief all round this month when my niece got into her first-choice primary, a lovely school where she attends nursery, and the only one that’s a walk away.
How to pick a school isn’t always obvious. Distance is a factor; parents often visit to get a feel; and there is a range of public information, from Ofsted inspection reports to pupil attainment data. Is it better to go for a school rated “good” by Ofsted that you can walk to, or is an “outstanding” school worth the daily drive or bus? What happens if the head leaves an outstanding school a year or two in, given the difficulties in recruiting a new one because of the risk it might be downgraded next time?
A recent academic paper on Ofsted judgments and secondary school choice concludes “our advice to parents is not to place too much emphasis on them”. Not because they can’t offer a snapshot of what a school is like in the here and now, but because schools change quickly enough that Ofsted judgments don’t predict what a school will be like in a few years. Ofsted reports are on average three years old at the time parents make their choices. Headteachers are key to a school’s culture; yet about half of heads who were in place at the time of an inspection will have left by the time a child starts at the school. The authors find that Ofsted grades are weak predictors of absentee rates, parental satisfaction and exam results years into the future, and, once you take into account differences in pupil intakes, future average outcomes are similar across schools rated “inadequate”, “requires improvement” and “good” (although an outstanding grade has some predictive power).
In some ways this is reassuring: it suggests that school choice isn’t such high stakes. Other research finds that schools that get inadequate judgments subsequently tend to improve. It is another nail in the coffin for a mantra that remains popular on the right, that parental school choice – through parents picking better schools – can itself drive an increase in school standards by putting worse ones out of business. There is neither the robust information nor the number of excess places that would begin to pave the way for that.
But this data also plays into the debate about the role of Ofsted more generally. Ofsted has never been popular with teaching unions; there will always probably be a degree of healthy tension between school staff and the regulator. But that tension has reached fever pitch in recent months.
As a former school governor, I think being a good headteacher is one of the most difficult and important jobs. It has become even tougher in recent years, which makes the stress of an Ofsted inspection harder to swallow. Morale in the profession is at rock bottom as a result of teacher shortages, declining real pay, falling budgets and cuts to the social safety net that mean schools having to cope with hungry children, undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues and children at risk at home. The pandemic has made all of this worse. And justified changes to the inspection framework in recent years – more regular inspections for schools previously graded outstanding; more focus on breadth of curriculum – have created new losers and so more heat.
Last month, the family of a headteacher who killed herself in January after Ofsted downgraded her primary from outstanding to inadequate went public. Too much of the reporting and commentary around this case has laid responsibility for her death at the door of Ofsted, in breach of Samaritans’ reporting guidelines around suicide. But it has, understandably, become a lightning rod for intense anger in the teaching profession.
All this means that Ofsted reform is on the agenda. But it needs to be driven by an understanding of the strengths and limitations of school inspection, which has an important role to play in any education system. There is clearly a value in having independent professionals assess whether children are happy and safe and accessing a sufficiently broad curriculum at school – things you cannot find in test data. While Ofsted judgments may have limited predictive power for the purposes of school choice, parents have a right to information about how their child’s school is currently doing against these criteria.
The problem is that Ofsted judgments have become far too important. We don’t know how reliable they are: the extent to which a judgment by one inspector on one particular day will match a judgment made by another inspector on another day; another study by the academics who looked at the school choice issue found that factors that should be irrelevant – like the gender of an inspector – make a difference to inspection grades. To some degree, these judgments will always have an element of subjectivity baked in that is impossible to eliminate.
But that subjectivity is not reflected in the way Ofsted judgments are used. Over the past decade, more and more schools have been taken out of local council control to be run by independent academy trusts with light-touch oversight from the Department for Education. The only grounds on which the government can intervene when a school is failing academically is if it gets an “inadequate” judgment from Ofsted. Then a whole raft of consequences follow – very often, a head teacher losing their job, and the school being transferred to a new trust.
This is an extremely blunt lever. As is so often the case with assessments, the issue is not with the principle of school inspections – although the way they are done could be improved – but how they are applied in the wider school system. The difficult truth is that a more intelligent approach to school inspection cannot be achieved by simply changing the way Ofsted works; it requires rethinking from scratch the way underperforming schools are managed. Not a particularly sexy question for politicians, perhaps, but a vital one for any government committed to ensuring that all children get the education they deserve.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
