There are many times in everyone’s professional life when you consider whether it is time to speak up. Often, the decision is tempered by a desire not to be seen to be over-critical or be viewed as a whinger. Occasionally, we all have to reflect on our moral purpose and consider whether enough is enough.
In 2018, I started to receive a fairly regular stream of calls from distressed senior leaders and governors/trustees who were seeking some professional advice about their inspection experience. They invariably had just said goodbye to an inspection team and felt an injustice was being carried out. Not all of the calls were from those provisionally judged with a much lower grade than they expected but a key element was a sense of bewilderment and a feeling that no one, especially the Lead Inspector, was willing to listen.
As a very experienced former senior HMI who was responsible for the development and roll out of school, local authority and initial teacher training inspections, I had begun to publish some critical comments on the inspection process. I wasn’t difficult to track down. I was concerned about the mental state of many of those to whom I spoke with and urged them to seek professional support from their trade union, their GP or their family and friends. In time, some brilliant colleagues established the Headrest (service for headteachers), where colleagues properly trained to offer support were available.
A number of those who contacted me spoke about the professional and personal shame they were feeling and were genuinely concerned about losing their job and in time, because they knew how difficult it was to professionally come back from a negative Ofsted judgement, even their home.
It is not hard to imagine how I felt when I heard of the tragic death of Ruth Perry at Caversham Primary School in early 2023. I was not alone in believing that this could and should have been avoided. By this time, the post-Covid impact of a narrow inspection Framework with brutally established judgement descriptors were being applied by poorly inducted HMI who were rarely visited during an inspection to check on their approach.
As Dame Christine Gilbert explained clearly in her report into Ofsted’s response to Ruth’s death ‘The Coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths report was highly critical, and reached a verdict of ‘suicide, contributed to by an Ofsted inspection carried out in November 2022.’ She found that ‘parts of the Ofsted inspection were conducted in a manner which lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity.’ The Education Select Committee also produced a critical report which indicated ‘that Ofsted has lost trust and credibility among many in the teaching profession’.
The appointment of Sir Martyn Oliver from January 2024 was seen by many as an opportunity to re-establish Ofsted’s credibility and set the sails differently so that a new direction could be achieved. I became suspicious of their intentions when I tried to complete their Big Listen survey in which I found that some of the most important questions were not being asked or were worded in such a way that they led the respondent to a particular response. I worked with Prof Colin Richards, another former senior HMI, and others in establishing the Alternative Big Listen and then the Alternative Big Consultation when Ofsted released their proposals earlier this year. There is a general consistency to our findings from both surveys. Around 90% of respondents either thought the proposals were ‘generally unfit for purpose’ or ‘unfit for purpose’. Despite the negativity, Ofsted appears to be moving forward in the hope that the profession will not see the whole thing as a re-brand with a few tweaks of what went before. As a former HMI for whom I have deep respect told me recently ‘It takes a particular sort of genius to respond to criticism of unreliable judgments by having more judgements’.
This week, HMCI and Dame Christine Gilbert, the newly appointed Chair of the Ofsted Board appeared in front of the Education Select Committee. I was pleased to see that a specific question was asked as to why the details of Ofsted’s recent consultation had not been made public. It was ironic that the Chief Inspector should respond by suggesting Ofsted had been transparent in providing a summary of the views shared. There is no doubt in my mind that if the responses had been very positive Ofsted would not have hesitated in sharing the details. On a related issue I can imagine a situation where a school shares a summary evaluation of some evidence with an inspector, and the inspector rightly asks to see the actual evidence and data behind the evaluation to check on its veracity. It would not be acceptable for the school to refuse, but this is precisely what the inspectorate is now doing in not sharing the details.
Now, all of this matters. I am a strong believer in the usefulness of inspection, but I have come to believe that reliability between inspectors is a major concern. The inspectorate has made various efforts to ameliorate this, including the requirement for all inspectors to complete over 50 online training modules, some of which were from 2018 and even one which had the same content as another but used the voice of a woman in place of a man. You really couldn’t make this up. All their efforts may be in vain because of the empirical evidence that suggests inter-reliability between inspectors is just too tricky to get right.
I am not alone in my concerns; Terry Pearson (an independent researcher) published a paper in Forum in November 2023. The subtitle was ‘Chasing rainbows’: idiom – Constantly pursuing things that are unrealistic or unlikely to happen.’ Pearson’s paper considers the merits of Ofsted’s own attempts to check on the reliability of various inspectors’ judgements over time and deduces that ‘the reported measures of reliability in these studies have persistently fallen short of those that are generally expected for high-risk assessment situations. The contrived conditions of the studies also mean that the levels of inter-inspector reliability reported may not be sufficiently indicative of those which are likely to occur during inspections.’
He goes on, ‘Inter-rater reliability coefficients certainly convey information about the extent to which inspectors are in agreement or disagreement when allocating ratings for schools, but they provide no indication about whether those ratings are accurate or legitimate. As such, their usefulness in reassuring the public and others of the trustworthiness of inspection ratings is very limited.’ This suggests that no amount of online training is likely to tackle the inherent unreliability of the process.
This research makes a mockery of Ofsted’s attempt to emphasise the judgement making will result in a ‘secure fit’ rather than a ‘best fit’. Anyone with a secure (no pun intended) understanding of how inspectors manage judgement-making in any Framework can foresee the difficulties when it comes to pushing through an uncomfortable judgement with a school that sees things differently. This approach is fraught with dangers for both the inspectors and the schools because it is seeking a conclusive and definite judgement which is too often subject to personal opinion.
Ofsted had an opportunity to create clear water between the previous Framework and their current proposals. Many in the profession including governors, trustees and believe it or not, parents and carers, wanted radical reform. Ofsted’s own wellbeing assessment undertaken by Sinead McBrearty indicated a “systemic deafness” regarding stress, cognitive overload and reliability concerns which put into serious doubt whether the organisation had the ability to respond boldly and safely to the challenges they face. I’m left wondering whether Ruth Perry would have been in safer hands with the changes Ofsted is intending to implement. I believe she wouldn’t.
1. doi: 10.3898/forum.2023.65.3.09
