I’ve spent the best part of two decades working in and around education policy. During that time we’ve had eight prime ministers, thirteen education secretaries and four Ofsted chief inspectors. Goodness knows how many conversations I’ve been involved in over those years about policy changes – some brilliant, some bonkers, most somewhere in between.
What I’ve come to realise is that the most frustrating moments aren’t when a politician comes up with a terrible idea. They’re when something which has the potential to be a really good idea gets bent out of shape, and turns instead into something which is at best a shadow of what it could have been, and at worst actively harmful.
Enter Ofsted. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks for the inspectorate. Education Secretary Lucy Powell has variously described the current inspection system as “high stakes and low trust” and “a tick-box exercise”, and committed (at a fringe event at the Labour party conference) to making significant changes to the current inspection system, less than a year since its latest relaunch.
Last week, an independent evaluation of the new inspection framework, commissioned by Ofsted itself, painted a mixed picture. Ofsted’s press release accentuated the positive. More than six out of ten respondents felt their inspection would help them improve their school. Providers were generally positive about what their report card – the results of the inspection – said. Almost three-quarters thought that inspectors had sought to take account of their provision’s unique context. These findings showed, according to the chief inspector, that Ofsted was “on the right track”.
Others were less convinced. Almost nine in ten schools, according to the report, said that inspection had a negative impact on their staff’s mental wellbeing. Almost half of secondary leaders did not think that their inspection had been tailored to the context of their school. Half of school leaders said they did not think that the workload caused by inspection was manageable.
On Friday afternoon, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) – usually considered the most moderate of the education unions – took the highly unusual step of passing a motion of no confidence in Ofsted’s leadership. ASCL called on the government to pause inspections and review the inspection system as a matter of urgency, saying that it would survey its members on whether to hold an indicative ballot on industrial action if change was not forthcoming.
To declare my interest, I worked at ASCL for a decade, from 2015 to 2025, heading up the union’s policy work. During that time I was involved in countless discussions with school and college leaders, with Ofsted and with the Department for Education about what a robust, fair accountability system should look like.
And here’s the rub. A couple of years ago, we’d got to a good place. There was a consensus starting to develop around a more holistic view of what schools do, and how they should be held to account. ASCL, in its Blueprint for a Fairer Education System, proposed the introduction of an ‘accountability dashboard’ or ‘balanced scorecard’. The Education Policy Institute’s Reforming Accountability report also proposed an approach which gave a wider view of a school’s performance, and our effective school groups benchmarking tool set out a series of metrics and a method of using them to compare schools, multi-academy trusts and other groups of schools.
It felt like this vision was about to be realised. Labour’s 2024 manifesto committed the party to ending single-word Ofsted judgements in favour of a new school report card, which would provide parents with a clearer, more nuanced view of a school’s strengths and weaknesses across multiple areas.
The then Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, lost no time in enacting this commitment when Labour came to power. Many of us spent hours in DfE meeting rooms, working through what a report card-based system might look like.
But as those conversations progressed, the gap between the approach we hoped for and the one we ended up with started to widen. It became clear that some of the key elements of a successful report card-based system weren’t going to materialise. While overall grades were abandoned, the flawed belief that inspectors could accurately assess a school’s performance across a multi-point scale was not. Although inclusion was, theoretically, woven through the framework, schools with more advantaged intakes would still have an innate advantage. Most problematically of all, in my view, while the Secretary of State set the overarching vision, Ofsted was largely left to determine for itself what schools and colleges should be held responsible for, and what standards they should meet.
What a missed opportunity. An approach that had so much promise has instead left the sector frustrated and parents no better informed.
So what should happen now? There is, in my view, a way forward. We can reclaim the sound principles behind the report card idea and create a system that is closer to the shared vision many of us advocated for during those initial conversations with DfE – one that is simpler, more humane, and more useful.
These are the steps the government needs to take:
- It should create, through legislation, a new, slim set of statutory standards, which set out the expectations on state schools – not unlike those which already exist for independent schools.
- An inspection framework should be drawn up which holds schools to account against these standards – and only these standards. Again, there are parallels here with the Independent Schools Inspectorate.
- Schools should be assessed as having met or not met each of these standards. If they don’t, they should be supported to do so as quickly as possible. There should be an understanding that schools serving more disadvantaged communities are likely to find it more challenging to meet the standards, and that they will need greater resources and support to do so.
- If we can’t let go of the view that schools won’t aim for excellence when ‘only’ required to meet an expected standard – a view I think is a slight on the integrity of leaders and teachers – then there is a less damaging way to handle it. If we must have a way to prove how many schools are going above and beyond, let’s do that by showcasing areas of excellent practice on their report card, rather than feeling the need to slap a number, a colour, or an adjective on it.
There’s obviously a huge amount of detail to work through in designing this new approach. But these principles are, in my view, what we should be aiming for. The elected government – not the inspectorate – should set what schools are expected to do, and to what standard. The inspectorate should evaluate whether or not a school is meeting those standards – not against a multi-point scale, but as a simple yes or no. Schools with the greatest challenges should receive the greatest support to meet these expectations, and the consequence of falling short of a standard should not be public castigation, but rapid further support.
We came so close to achieving this vision a couple of years ago. With a bit of bravery, we could do it now. Let’s not miss the moment again.
