No Notice Ofsteds

Sir Michael Wilshaw has made his mark barely fortnight into his tenure as Chief Inspector of Schools by announcing that from Autumn 2012 schools will not receive any notice of an Ofsted inspection. Is this a major thing? No, is the short answer, and it should have always been like that in my view.

Currently schools get 2 days notice, so removing that will make little or no difference. It won't allow schools the opportunity to make certain troublemakers "disappear" through exclusions in those 2 days. Inspectors will get to see schools how all the students, teachers and parents see it, which should be a good thing.

I only have one worry with regards to this, and that is a knee-jerk reaction from headteachers so desperate for a good Ofsted judgement in order to further their careers, I mean, to ensure that the children at their school receive the best education available to them.

Headteachers and their underlings are constantly trying to second guess Ofsted's views/judgements. Ofsted seem fixated on paperwork and data, a fact that Wilshaw states that he want to address, although I doubt that he will. I am therefore awaiting the announcement from the head at our school that all staff must hand in full, written up lesson plans at least a week in advance. Other schools apparently do it, but the turnover of staff at those schools is far higher than at others because there simply aren't enough hours in the day. Also, what use are they? None, in fact most teachers when forced to wrtite them, barely take any notice of them at all - they are just a paperwork exercise. They take at least an hour to fill in, and if you have 5 lessons one day, that 5 extra hours to find. Whatever happened to the work/life balance?

Now you may think that I'm advocating that teachers don't plan lessons, and I can assure you that I'm not. What I am suggesting is that you don't need to break every minute of every lesson down into specific activities. I also think that having every possible detail of every child in a class on a lesson plan is completely unnecessary as teachers, I'm not sure if you'd noticed, are generally quite intelligent, and tend to remember important information like a child who struggles with English or maybe has a torrid home life. That's not to mention the cost of photocopying (about 4p per copy); the bill for the photocopying alone would run into tens of thousands of pounds per year. And on top of that the extra server memory required to save all the plans electronically.

You won't hear me say this too often, but Wilshaw's idea is fine in itself, I just worry about the repercussions.