Is Ofsted still truly independent of the Department for Education?

In his latest blog, education journalist Warwick Mansell looks at how Ofsted’s inspection system, and its politically questionable relationship with the government, is feeding mistrust on the ground.

It appeared to be a Freudian slip. “Yes, we will look at that, or rather Ofsted will look at that in conjunction with us.”

Nick Gibb, the schools minister, was discussing a technical aspect of Ofsted’s set-up, as detailed debate continued about the operation of inspections following the national sadness around the death of the headteacher Ruth Perry.

But he may have given the game away as to the level of influence the Department for Education wields over its supposedly independent inspection agency.

For, while the stress that Ofsted loads onto schools has rightly been much-discussed after Ms Perry’s family said she took her own life in the wake of an “inadequate” judgement for her school, the inspectorate’s interaction with the government’s political agenda for education has been less widely aired.

To discuss the technical aspect first, Mr Gibb was being quizzed, on Times Radio, about the use of inspectors’ assessments of the quality of a school’s “safeguarding” within Ofsted’s current framework.

Currently, if a school fails on safeguarding, which is effectively one of four or five sub-judgements within inspection reports – it fails overall, no matter how the institution is performing in other aspects. Safeguarding, then, is termed a “limiting judgement”: it defines the limit of the overall outcome, as “inadequate”, if this aspect is failed.

Ms Perry’s school, Caversham primary in Reading, was one of only a handful this year to be rated “inadequate” because it failed on safeguarding, despite having been adjudged “good” across all its other work.

There is a debate about whether that is right. Some, including a former inspector who is fronting a campaign against the current set-up, argue that otherwise good schools should not be failed on the basis of what he implied might be relatively minor mistakes in safeguarding paperwork.

Even Michael Gove, the former education secretary, reportedly said the concept of “limiting judgements” should be looked at. Others say keeping children safe is so important, no school should be allowed to fail on safeguarding and then pass an inspection overall.

Wherever one stands on that debate, it is clear that the use of this sub-judgement in this way is placing a great deal of power in the hands of inspection teams, as overseen by Ofsted itself, to effectively determine the future of schools and their leaders on the basis of the detail of how schools operate.

For there are multiple impacts. As the Ruth Perry case has shown so tragically, this set-up stands to damn a school leader’s career in one word as “inadequate”, because any failure on safeguarding virtually automatically* leads to a verdict of “inadequate” for a school’s leadership and management.

It also means that, when a school is not already an academy, that it must be turned into one, in a process that is irreversible. That is, permanent, significant, time-consuming and costly overhauls of school control must come after a school fails this one, admittedly important, sub-judgement within Ofsted inspections.

Not only this, but the verdicts as handed out by Ofsted seem virtually unchallengeable, once the inspectorate has arrived at its judgement.

Aside from all the pressure that this places on school leaders and staff, another question worth asking is whether Ofsted’s system can really bear the consequential weight that this current set-up now places on it.

The academy question

I ask that particularly because, with the government seemingly intent on creating as many academies as possible before the next election, there are widespread concerns that the detail of safeguarding may be being used by Ofsted to fail schools, which then under DfE rules must become academies as a result.

Is that fair? Well, as an investigative journalist any such agenda is hard to prove on the ground. But, again the way Ofsted’s systems are set up places huge weight on this detail within inspection findings.

That set-up, and the high stakes that the DfE has loaded onto inspection system as a result of its academies drive, is certainly contributing to an undermining of trust in the inspectorate.

This is coming against the backdrop of Ofsted, over the past two years, having controversially waded into the detail of how and what teachers should teach. This has come through a series of “research reviews” of national curriculum subjects by Ofsted, some of which have been heavily criticised for a selective or even on occasion fictional relationship with the evidence base, seemingly in support of a traditionalist teaching agenda favoured by Mr Gibb.

Is Mr Gibb, a minister who has been in post for most of the past 13 years and who has perhaps the most detailed interest in what happens in schools of any such figure in recent times, steering the inspectorate? The level of control over Ofsted, technically a non-ministerial government department whose inspectors once had a fiercely-defended sense of independence, is impossible to know for sure.

Yet all of the above is certainly contributing to an undermining of trust in the inspectorate. Its processes, and its relationship with the DfE, should be subject to a thorough independent review.

*Ofsted’s rules imply that a school failing safeguarding should not in every case lead to its failing on leadership and management. They say that “there may be circumstances” where this would not happen. But in all 285 cases of a school failing on safeguarding I could find on Ofsted’s database, it did also fail on leadership and management.

Warwick Mansell is a freelance journalist, who founded and writes for the investigative website, Education Uncovered.

The views expressed in this article belong solely to the author as an independent contributor. They are not endorsed or necessarily shared by Prospect.