Ofsted - unfit for purpose yet too big to fail
Ofsted has come to hold significant power in England's state school system, the extent of which far over-reaches its legitimate authority as an inspector of quality standards and regulator. Its activity can disrupt communities, terminate careers and, as we have seen recently, end lives. With that power then comes an equally significant responsibility to maintain its own standards of impartiality and independence, and to be open to scrutiny. But as is now abundantly clear - including from the following example of a successful tribunal case - it has not just failed to do this but takes a defensive disinterest in doing so it can continue to hide the extent of its dysfunction. It has become too big to consider change let alone failure. But this denial has no place in a healthy school system, and must change.
Ofsted is now by some measure the most contentious and influential organisation in the school sector, and not just because of the importance of its primary task of inspecting and regulating schools. For the last 20 years - but particularly since 2012 - its influence has extended far beyond this statutory role, because of both the combative and partisan positions adopted in public by its leaders and the increasing impact of its judgements on the schools it inspects. When the system is designed to encourage parents to choose where to send their children (and the funding that follows them) on the basis of an Ofsted grade, a judgement has a significant and long-lasting financial and strategic effect on a school and its community. Of course, in the current context, an Ofsted judgement can also mean a school is forced to contract its assets to the DfE or, if it's already an academy, to transfer them through acquisition by another trust, so the stakes are incredibly high. Because of this, Ofsted's judgements have a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of staff in the schools it inspects, particularly the school leaders who are, to use the prevailing language of the system, accountable for their school's standards (and therefore its Ofsted grade). And as we have been reminded recently by the heartbreaking case of Ruth Perry, Headteacher at the Caversham Primary School in Reading who took her own life after Ofsted held her accountable for its 'inadequate' judgement, as well as some of the subsequent moving testimony from others it has harmed (see here and here for examples), the devastating nature of these high stakes cannot be underestimated when people give so much of themselves to their vocation.
Given all this, it is vital that Ofsted's judgements can be trusted; that it is both impartial and independent, and open to external scrutiny of such. Sadly, it's not. In fact, it seems to make a point of being closed off to scrutiny and plays deaf to the concerns of the sector. It took a week for Ofsted's chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, to acknowledge the outrage that followed news of Perry's death, yet she still rejected calls from teachers, leaders, unions and Perry's family to pause inspections and carry out a review. Instead, during the intervening week and in the face of all the emotion, Ofsted sent an inspection team flanked by Police into a school that had publicised its intention to refuse entry as a mark of respect for Ruth Perry, and then published its report from the inspection at Caversham with a callously bulleted note that "there has been a change of leadership at the school following the death of the headteacher who was in post at the time of the inspection." This line has since been deleted.
The inspectorate then kept its head down during the Easter break, no doubt hoping that the fuss would blow over and that teachers would chill out and fall back in to line as they always have done in the past.
But this time seems different. Even the announcement a week after the Easter break of a handful of cosmetic changes to Ofsted’s most obviously toxic methods has been branded as insufficient and insulting, not least because of how the involvement of the DfE in the process undermines the inspectorate’s charade of arms-reach independence. It appears that people have had enough; that Perry's suicide was a last straw, perhaps symbolising all those whose lives and livelihoods have been damaged by inspections before, but whose experience had somehow faded into the collective unconscious.
This entrenchment might feel to Ofsted like independence and objectivity but it's actually the opposite. In fact, when one gets a look inside the inspectorate - both through the growing number of recent 'testimonies' from former inspectors and brutalised heads, and through the successful FOI release described below - it becomes clear that this energetically managed opacity is actually designed to obscure just how subjective its judgements actually are, and how dependent it has become on the system it serves. Now that Ofsted is fighting to regain credibility and its correct place in the system, it needs to acknowledge and face up to these flaws, because doing so is the only way it can itself survive.
In 2015, when an inspection of Ely College in Cambridgeshire judged it 'inadequate' and put it into 'special measures', the community was shocked. How could a judgement be so different to the everyday experience of the school's staff, parents and children? How could ten years of prior improvement and steady development suddenly be judged to be so bad, just two years after the school received a letter from the Secretary of State congratulating it for being one of the 100 most improved schools in the country? And how could one part-time inspector's judgement be so different to that of a former professional HMI who reported that the school was "at least good in all areas" just four months prior to the fateful inspection, having been asked by the Regional Schools Commissioner to check that all was well at the school.
I was the lead local governor at the time and have written elsewhere about the brutal impact of the judgement on the school's leadership team. But to summarise, the school’s trust then - the CfBT Schools Trust - panicked, making the highly experienced Principal and her two long-serving Vice Principals sign gagging clauses before sacking, ‘disappearing’ and replacing them with a catastrophically inexperienced and temporary team which went on to significantly disrupt the school’s culture and performance, run up huge debts, and alienate an already shocked community, all whilst failing to make any improvements.
Though the damage to me was nothing compared to those who lost their careers, livelihoods and wellbeing, or the young people whose education was severely affected by the disruption (including one of my kids), I still bear deep scars from the process. The intensity of the emotions that followed - first complete disbelief, then a numbing shame and a hollow, helpless anger - initially blinded me to the bigger picture, but once they settled, they became a driving force for the work I do now. It was seeing how the school system can gag, discard and forget people who had chosen the career to do only good that has led me to support them, enabling school and trust leaders to create a fairer and more humane system.
Luckily, a parent with children at the school at the time was not blinded, however. In fact, he saw things very clearly. Like many parents and members of the community, Paul Boam was as confused by the judgement as the governors and staff were. His kids were happy, engaged and thriving at the school, and all of his contact with it - both directly and through the other parents and teachers he knew - was positive. So because the judgement didn't add up, he lodged a Freedom of Information request with Ofsted to see the data that led to the decision. This was refused so he escalated his request to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and, when this too was refused, he went to Tribunal. Unfortunately for Ofsted, Mr Boam is an independent expert in the standards of the UK Accreditation Service (UKAS) - the body appointed by government to assess and accredit organisations that provide inspection services - and so was very aware of both his rights and what a high-quality inspection service should look like.
His case was that Ofsted's judgement was sufficiently questionable to be open to scrutiny, and that the inspectorate should have no qualms about being open to that scrutiny if it was confident in the robustness of its judgement. And after several hearings, it was upheld by Judge David Farrer QC in May 2016.
Reviewing the detailed case notes here, it's very clear that Ofsted refused to engage fully with the Tribunal or respect the nature of the case, and that the Judge felt its opposition became more arrogant and flaky as its position became more desperate. He seemed particularly unimpressed with its unevidenced claim - backed by a 'bland' and 'worthless' email from an anonymous officer at the DfE - that to release its evidence would incite parents to lobby and disrupt the DfE's work at the school following the inspection. So much for Ofsted's ongoing claims about holding parents' best interests at heart and promoting choice!
Under the direction of the Tribunal, Ofsted released a redacted ‘bundle’ of evidence forms relating to the 2015 inspection to Mr Boam in early 2017. Given my interests as both a former governor and a current parent, and my understanding of the sector, he shared them with me. Our collective review of these - based mainly on Paul's understanding of what an objective, impartial and professional inspection process should look like - indicated the following:
There was lots evidence in the written notes and comments that the inspection team was trying to catch people out, and judgements based on whether a hurdle had been reached or not, instead of the sort of formative and objective evaluation we would expect to see in a sophisticated inspection methodology.
There were some very basic but serious flaws in data handling, not just with respect to best practice and legislated standards for objective and fair inspection but also data protection and safeguarding (for example, Ofsted and the Lead Inspector were communicating using the email address he also used to run his private school improvement consulting business, meaning that sensitive and commercially useful data was being transferred to his own systems).
The fact that the Lead Inspector ran a school improvement business alongside his role as an inspector meant that his judgement could not be impartial. In fact, the inspector had much to gain from a bad outcome in any inspection in any school to which he had not provided paid consultancy.
There was sufficient evidence (hard and soft) to support some of the judgements, but certain judgements were ‘forced’ on the basis of subjective evaluation or unreliable data.
The Lead Inspector took the lack of immediate rebuttals by school leaders to his challenges as evidence backing his hypothesis.
There was a disproportionate focus in the report on data relating to SEN students, which was a legitimate concern but unusual given the nature of the school and the relatively low number of SEN students at the time.
There was no objective evidence to back up a serious comment made about safeguarding which led to the school being judged inadequate in this regard ... the judgement was completely conjectural.
Despite the judgement that behaviour was inadequate, there was very little evidence that would justify an objective evaluation of the schools behaviour policy, or evidence - other than conjecture and the Lead Inspector’s personal opinion - to support it.
The evidence presented to back up judgements about behaviour was based on flawed data (because accurate data of the type the Lead Inspector required wasn’t available), and flawed conjectural logic (because the school had a robust behaviour policy, behaviour must be terrible).
We also noted that:
Pre-inspection, the Lead Inspector informed his team that: “We have had enormous amounts of back room stuff happening as you know”, and implied that this (whatever it was) was influencing the pre-judgements.
There were some unusual communications between the inspectors before the visit, in which the Lead Inspector was clearly setting the team up for a difficult time.
The decision to move from a short 'section 8' inspection to a longer and more detailed 'section 5' inspection had been made before the team arrived and was planned in emails between the Lead Inspector and Ofsted as part of the pre-visit briefing. Despite this, the Lead Inspector began the inspection by lying to the gathered staff that it was 'just' a 'section 8' inspection.
The fact that the school was pre-judged is completely clear from the bundle … provisional grades are given in the pre-inspection evidence forms and these are erased, adjusted and replaced with lower grades as the pre-visit research develops.
We were struck by the nature of the material included in the pre-inspection papers, which relied to a great extent on clippings of negative stories from local newspaper reports and letters to editors from a disgruntled former employee and vexatious parents, with no questions asked about their reliability or veracity. Grades appear to have been given on the basis of these clippings.
An unusual amount of attention was paid to the school's whistleblowing policy, with notes that seemed to link this to a pre-inspection communication or complaint made to Ofsted from a member of the school's community, though this was never discussed with the school before or during the inspection.
There was evidence of a complete misunderstanding of how governance and accountability works in a multi-academy trust. In fact, although the trust's director of education had been present at the inspection, the inspection team had bluntly refused to engage with him.
Although we knew that there would be significant media interest in this at the time, we decided not to publish the forms and our review. In the 20 months or so since the inspection, the CfBT Schools Trust had not just failed to improve the school's situation but made things far worse, and the Regional Schools Commissioner had transferred the school to a new trust which was already having a positive impact. We decided that instead of stirring things back up for the school, we should stir things up at Ofsted, and engage with its new Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman, who had arrived a few months earlier in January 2017. An opportunity arose in June when I challenged her from the floor during her speech at the Festival of Education. I subsequently sent the following in an email and requested a meeting:
"Ofsted’s biggest problem at the moment is that it is not trusted by people working in schools, partially because it doesn’t acknowledge its impact on the stability of the school system as a whole, nor the role it plays in ending the careers of school leaders and teachers. This is made worse by the fact that many judgements are questionable, and yet the inspectorate is entirely opaque and not open to challenge. My point on Friday [at the Festival of Education] was that your views on curriculum and educational priorities are all very well, but do not actually matter, at least until you can correct the above. That seems to me to be the main role of the HMCI. [...]
My suggestion - that Ofsted should itself be subject to conformity assessment by the UK Accreditation Service (UKAS), an independent body that accredits organisations providing inspection services and whose accreditation demonstrates competence, impartiality and performance capability - would help substantially in achieving this aim, not just because you would have an objective stamp of quality assurance, but because attaining that stamp would force the improvement you desperately need.
UKAS provides conformity assessment. Conformity assessments rely on objective evidence of conformity to allow an attestation of competence against predefined normative references. These normative references might be an international standard, a defined code of practice or an agreed set of measurable objectives. But in principle, conformity assessment both checks and is itself performed according to the following core principles: impartiality, competence, openness, responsibility, confidentiality, responsiveness to complaints and a risk-based approach.”
We highlighted that these principles were drawn from international standards such as ISO /IEC 17020:2012, where for example, clause 4.1.2 of this international standard requires: '4.1.2 The inspection body shall be responsible for the impartiality of its inspection activities and shall not allow commercial, financial or other pressures to compromise impartiality'. We pointed out that there are over 100 clauses like this within this international standard for inspection and suggested that she might take an interest in seeing how many others Ofsted would fail to meet too, before concluding:
"As far as we know, Ofsted is not part of such a scheme, and so is apparently authorised by the Department for Education to work unmonitored, in secret and unaccountable for all of its actions. That’s not right. Mr Boam and I - as parents with children in the school system and an interest in high quality, fair and impartial inspections that do not do more harm than good - are happy to meet with you to discuss this further."
Spielman's emailed reply included the following:
"Your proposal on UKAS is an interesting one, hence the follow-up. It does, though, rely on the yet untested assumption that regulating a regulator would lead to higher quality regulation in the first place. There are other ways to quality assure regulation – not least by listening to the views of the regulated, which Ofsted has been doing much more of. And we are planning to do more still."
To which I responded:
"With respect to UKAS, I hope you have a conversation with them, if not with the parent involved in the Tribunal case here. Their work is certainly not untested, and focuses on improving the quality of regulation (as perceived, as well as as experienced) through benchmarking it against international standards. There are many potential benefits for Ofsted in this, but the main one (to my mind) is increasing trust (through transparency and third party scrutiny) in Ofsted's process. Acknowledging that trust in the objectivity and consistency of Ofsted's regulation (at least of schools) is very low, and being seen deliberately to address that is vital. Listening to the regulated is important, but can't address this point.
You’ll note that the Care Quality Commission - which monitors, inspects and regulates health and social care services - is in the news today with respect to its review of adult social care homes. You’ll also note that the CQC works closely with UKAS in a number of key areas to ensure its work has credibility, and to demonstrate that to the public and professions. In fact, just a cursory look at the CQC’s website provides a number of reassurances about impartiality, competence, openness, responsibility, confidentiality, responsiveness to complaints and a risk-based approach."
The correspondence ended there, but I'd been grateful for the engagement and the opportunity to sow the seeds of an idea into Spielman's thinking.
It clearly didn't have an impact on practice though. And judging from her responses to the recent calls for a root-and-branch review of its approach after Perry's suicide, it seems Spielman's not changed her position on openness in the six years she's led the inspectorate either. This is a significant problem because the issues we highlighted haven't changed, and actually seem to have got worse.
If challenged now on impartiality, Spielman might point to the fact that Ofsted no longer uses inspectors subcontracted from providers like Serco, but although this arrangement was seen by critics as resulting in potential conflict, Ofsted presented the changes as being about quality assurance and performance management. This denial of even the possibility that its inspections might not be impartial because of the conflicts of interest indicated at the time that Ofsted was blind to the problem. It clearly remains so. Inspectors might now be contracted directly by Ofsted but they are still allowed to engage in work that conflicts with their supposed impartiality. For example, the inspector who led the sub-contracted team at Ely in 2015 survived Ofsted's so-called 'purge' of sub-standard sub-contracted inspectors in September 2015 and is, according to his website, still inspecting schools alongside his private work as a school improvement consultant. This is a fundamental problem.
But there's a new and potentially more serious sort of conflict now too, arising from the greater competition that exists in the sector between trusts whose financial model depends on adding new schools to their portfolio. As highlighted in Private Eye (no.1594), some of the inspectors hired by Ofsted on a part-time basis also hold senior roles at trusts that may have a commercial and competitive interest in the schools they inspect:
Given the involvement of inspectors (not to mention board members!) with skin in the game like this, it is simply not possible for Ofsted to claim that its judgements are impartial and they therefore cannot and should not be trusted with any degree of certainty. Given the consequences, that is surely a scandal.
But the strategy also calls into question Ofsted's independence, simply by virtue of the fact that the inspectorate is so completely dependent on the schools it inspects to provide it with part-time inspectors as well as those taking up full-time roles. The Tribunal's notes also provide an interesting glimpse into the link between its work in inspecting schools and the DfE's follow up work in schools that require intervention. The judge spent some time exploring this and one feels there's some good material there for an investigative reporter with the stamina and appetite for the task, particularly now that the claims of ‘arms-reach’ distance between the Department and Ofsted are obviously a fantasy.
With respect to independence and this link between Ofsted's work and the DfE's goals, one also has to ask why Ofsted inspects what it does and not other things, and whether it has a particular form of 'quality' in mind. If you ask a school leader what most inhibits their ability to maintain a good standard of education in their schools, they will point to a difficulty in recruiting teachers and leaders, a decade of underfunding (and now the prospect of having to find the money for pay increases from existing budgets), and poor buildings or resources. And yet Ofsted doesn't account for any of these things when it inspects. One could speculate that this is because to do so would be to clarify that school leaders' accountability only extends so far, and that the really critical stuff is down to the government department that funds Ofsted's work. In terms of the particular sort of quality it is looking for, one has to ask serious questions about both the rationale and effect of the inspectorate's 'curriculum unit', which has formed a view - and apparently a very partial, ideologically biased and politically influenced view - on what constitutes standards in terms of teaching. This sort of conflicted strategy calls into question the partiality of the whole enterprise, not just the people it sends out to inspect schools.
And then finally there's the fundamental issue of whether inspection of the sort carried out by Ofsted is actually right for the school system. This is obviously a far larger issue than there's space for here, and - given the HMCI's reply above - it's a question that’s not even in Ofsted's universe let alone it's mind. But there is a whole industry that's built up around the management and improvement of quality in organisations, and one of its central tenets for the last 40 years or so is that you can't inspect quality into a system. If you want to improve quality, you have to change the design. This is true of all types of system, but where humans with all their beautiful flaws, foibles and 'nature' are involved to the extent that they are in the school system, trying to use inspection as a blunt instrument to bring about change will by definition result in perverse outcomes. And sometimes very cruel ones.
Given all this, as an organisational consultant and coach with a focus on the experience of those humans who drive all the wonderful complexity in the school system, I'm really interested in what Ofsted's behaviour and organisation tell us about its own inner workings and the nature of the system it’s in.
The inspectorate seems to do all it can to remain closed off from the best practice available outside the school sector as well as the potential benefits of scrutiny from within. It refuses to engage with both external quality assurance agencies and with teachers or leaders to discuss reform even in the face of the legitimate emotion aroused by Perry's suicide. This 'cold shouldering' is an extraordinarily heartless response, and one which is particularly striking as it must surely disguise significant emotions within Ofsted itself. No-one is immune to the sort of empty sadness or feelings of hopelessness that follow a suicide, and given that the vast majority of staff and inspectors in Ofsted are or were headteachers, there will be significant feelings of guilt there too. Indeed, we're beginning to see some of this as people resign or break ranks. But for an organisation to mask all of this, it needs to draw enormous energy from some other driving force, and I think this is fear. I think Ofsted fears openness and transparency with such intensity that it can't even bring itself to show empathy in the face of suicide. One can perhaps understand why.
In my work, when I have an intense feeling that someone or something is wrong, I am trained to reflect on that and to ask myself 'but how are they right?' It's a central principle in psychotherapy, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and high-stakes negotiations as well as my particular approach to coaching and consultancy. So how, in this case, might Ofsted be right?
Well, given that the whole school system seems now to balance on assumptions about its reliability, the idea of opening Ofsted up to scrutiny, exposing its now obvious flaws and potentially having the whole project come crashing down around you is not going to feel like an attractive or viable option for the Chief Inspector or her Board. But if they really care about the people in schools - young and old - as well as the health of the system itself, they are going to have to get over that fear, face reality and acknowledge the inspectorate's flaws. It seems to me that they are going to have to do that quite soon too, because those it holds accountable seem disinclined to tolerate its pretence of impartiality and reliability any longer, given that one of their colleagues took her life as a result of one its questionable judgements.
In fact, opening up to external scrutiny, asking for help and adopting good inspection practices seems to be the only way Ofsted can regain the credibility and confidence it desperately needs in order to serve its purpose of improving standards in schools. As things stand, it is clearly not just unfit for that purpose. It is actually making things worse.