Tears came to my eyes as I listened to Julia Waters describe the harrowing circumstances surrounding her sister Ruth Perry’s suicide following the coroner’s conclusion that it was caused by an Ofsted inspection. Her words vividly exposed the fact that Ofsted is inadequate, not Ruth’s school – but ‘inadequate’ is too soft a word to describe the workings of Ofsted; ‘criminally negligent and entirely unfit for purpose’ is closer to reality. I was a teacher in full-time employment in schools and University from 1956 to 1988 and fortunately never experienced the crazy introduction of Ofsted in 1993 and associated ill-thought-out interventions by politicians whose single aim was to do anything that might help them win the next general election. Many MP’s are lawyers whose professional goal is victory rather than truth, so education (something few at governmental level ever understand) is unsafe in their hands. Following retirement I worked voluntarily with a teacher in a school in a deprived area, on the development of a comprehensive literacy programme, based on creative writing which was highly successful. After working on this for three or four years the headteacher came to me one day and said the programme must be abandoned as it did not fit in with requirements of the ‘literacy hour’, another lunatic government intervention, long since consigned to the scrapheap. I immediately bade him farewell and never set foot in the school again.>> The purpose of Ofsted inspections is, presumably, to improve the quality of education, but the idea that this can be achieved by an inspector watching a teacher as he or she reaches a class, examining lesson notes and other records, is ludicrous. Can you imagine a hospital inspector standing behind a surgeon while he performs a heart transplant, a building inspector looking over the shoulder of a bricklayer while he builds a wall, or a tax inspector standing behind a tax payer while he completes a tax return? How about an inspector criticizing Dickens for his style of handwriting or the colour of his ink? This is what teachers have to put up with under current Ofsted methodology. One of my daughters, Head of Humanities in a school near Hereford, was down-graded from ‘outstanding’ to ‘good’ because her pupils were not underlining the date in their notebooks. Unbelievable, but perfectly true. Teaching is an art, a creative activity, and like all creative activities demands freedom of action. However, as human life – children and adults young and old – is the subject of teachers’ work, such freedom has to be informed by the rights and opinions of others. It is an activity shared with many others – parents, colleagues, future employers and not least pupils and students themselves. It is, or should be, a collaborative and co-operative effort. The problem is that governments of all types have always been highly suspicious of, if not totally opposed in their to creative activity that could result in their authority being questioned, so when they become responsible for financing a very expensive project such as compulsory schooling it is not surprising they make a mess of it. Defence is another field that involves creative activity when senior officers have to arrive at ways to win wars, and here politicians have learned through bitter experience leave it to the professionals, as when Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery planned and executed the Normandy invasions and not Churchill and Roosevelt. This operation was evaluated not by inspectors from Ofshoot standing behind soldiers as they fired their guns, but by awaiting the result of the battle. The same should apply to education – it should be left to professionals to lead and make crucial decisions, although not without a great deal of consultation with wider society. But the concept of ‘inspection’ in education, as in warfare, is totally misguided. Ofsted is an absurdity – it attempts the impossible. Evaluating education by inspection of schools is like evaluating paint while it is drying. Education is intended to positively affect the existing and subsequent life of each individual citizen and the only way in which its quality can be assessed is by examining all its outcomes, which means at a late stage in life. This may sound impracticable at first sight but this approach, if attempted, could have profound consequences. Consider what could be revealed if some fundamental questions were asked: what has gone well in your life? what has gone badly? have your ambitions been achieved? If you could lead your life again, what would you do differently? Answers to these questions, and many similar ones, would prove very useful in informing today’s teachers about what they should be aiming at and how these aims might be achieved. Inspection, as it’s currently pursued, does none of these vitally important things – in fact, quite the opposite. The tragic death of Ruth Perry might lead to a radical rethinking of what education is all about. I look forward to the day when Ofsted is seen as the educational equivalent of the flat earth society. Norman Rimmell December 2023 __________________________________
This piece is very badly misinformed.
For example, Ofsted do not view lesson notes (and this is explicit in the inspection handbook) nor view other records (in relation to teaching, progress data etc. – they may look at things like attendance data the school already has). They look at whether, and how, pupils are learning.
For another, no school will have been downgraded from outstanding to good for pupils failing to underline titles. Either this is a work of fiction by the author or the school are using that line to try and underplay the real reasons.
There is legitimate debate about Ofsted but it is not furthered by misinformation pieces such as this.
I am very well informed by my daughter who was until recently a teacher. She confirms that her lesson notes were inspected. Sam has misread my article – it was my daughter who was downgraded, not her school.