No, they didn’t build an aqueduct and certainly didn’t bring peace to education. They cost the taxpayer around £200 million per year apparently and are staffed by former senior management who needed a new challenge having got as far as they could within schools. The reports they compile are seen as the be all and end all as far as the performance of a school is concerned, both by the public and by local government. But can their judgement be trusted and should we pin all our opinions of a school to Ofsted’s mast?
An Ofsted inspection lasts a few days, depending on the size of the school. The inspectors notify the school, giving them a little time to prepare and then arrive shortly afterwards with clipboards in hand. They will talk to the school’s headteacher and other senior management and then go around and see some parts of lessons, rarely whole lessons, just snapshots. All schools will try to guess when Ofsted are going to arrive and try and get ahead, but ultimately no-one knows until it happens.
From their findings having visited various classrooms and comparing them to in-house observations of lessons, they make a judgement on the standard of teaching. Is this fair? Some topics are covered over a period of lessons, so will seeing bits and bobs really give the inspectors a proper idea of whether the students are making sufficient progress and engaged? The answer is “no”, but what they will be able to see is whether the students are controlled and therefore in an environment where they are able to make sufficient progress.
One ought to bear in mind also the recent background of the inspectors. On the whole they are former senior staff, and anyone in teaching will know that senior staff are quite a long way removed from the classroom in general. Most headteachers I have worked under have had no timetabled lessons, with their deputies only teaching a fraction of a normal timetable. Surely you can therefore assume that the Ofsted inspector has not taught a full teaching timetable for a minimum of 10 years.
The last 10 years in education has seen an enormous change in the behaviour of students. Teachers now have just one sanction, namely a detention, but can only set a significant detention with 24 hours notice. Students are only too willing to tell their teacher what “rights” they have, and more and more, their parents will back them up. This attitude was not so prevalent when the Ofsted inspector was a classroom practitioner (if they ever were) and they will therefore find it difficult to empathise with a teacher’s plight.
Teachers are put under a lot of pressure to pull out all the stops by senior staff. They must produce detailed lesson plans (something that is impossible to do normally) and “take risks” in observed lessons, and by definition a “risky” lesson could go one of two ways: brilliantly or awfully. This means that the Ofsted inspector won’t see what happens day-to-day within that school, they will see a show. Is this conducive to a balanced judgement of a school?
Are the Ofsted inspector’s judgements of your lesson really worth listening to as their teaching experience is now outdated and therefore irrelevant? If the inspector was a practising teacher, then maybe, but there are factors involved that they are never going to see, no matter how much data they look at.
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