This is really just a follow up to this post: What I’d do about OFSTED I thought I’d spend a little more time emphasising why I think OFSTED needs to be abolished, or changed beyond all recognition immediately, rather than gradually reformed over time.
1) Gradual reform has already had plenty of time and failed.
Having written many, many blogposts about OFSTED’s advocacy of progressive teaching methods, I would like to think I can tell if change is really happening. I have heard a few more positive stories in recent months from people who were being inspected, but when I was researching this post by flicking through OFSTED reports from inspections in early October I was amazed that it was as easy as ever it was to find examples of inspectors endorsing progressive education apparently without any awareness that it might be controversial or that they were meant to be reporting on learning, not teaching style. Perhaps there were less references to the evils of teachers talking, but there were more references than ever to the importance of students working independently and directing their own learning.
2) Changing the rules doesn’t change the people.
I despair at what I hear from OFSTED inspectors. In case you missed it, here’s an anecdote from David Didau’s Learning Spy blog:
I spent some time discussing and dispelling various Ofsted myths and for the first couple of workshops all went well. Staff felt inspired to be the expert in the room and clear about what was and wasn’t expected by Ofsted. But in the third workshop someone interrupted to say that the Ofsted inspector down the hall was telling people the exact opposite of my message. Upon investigation I discovered that this inspector was telling people the following:
- Detailed lesson plans were required for all observed lessons
- Progress needed to clearly demonstrated in 20 minutes
- Teacher talk must be minimised
- Students must be learning independently for significant proportions of every lesson.
To say I was flabbergasted is putting it mildly. But, rather than accept that this was all true, I decided to speak to the inspector over lunch. I had every expectation that his views would be much more nuanced than had been reported and that we would be able to find common ground. I was wrong. The inspector really did seem to think that these thing were true and really had been training teachers that they should be doing them. Needless to say, I made my views clear and was able to support the points I made with reference to the Handbook. I’d like to report that all ended amicably and the inspector thanked me for my perspicacity. This was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not the case. This was the point at which our discussion ended:
“Yes, that what it says, but it’s not what we actually look for, and it’s not how we judge schools. If schools want to guarantee a good outcome they need to follow my advice.” Or words to that effect.
To me this isn’t particularly shocking. The progressive ethos has not been driven out of OFSTED even if it has been driven out of the handbook. Several of the people who wrote subject reviews for OFSTED full of the trendiest nonsense imaginable are still in post. The culture goes deep and often ideas from progressive education are simply assumed by people who are completely unaware that there is even an argument. When people tell me my blog has had an influence on their educational thinking, the thing I hear most often is not “your arguments convinced me that yours is the right side in the debate” but “until I read your blog, I hadn’t realised there was a debate”. OFSTED inspectors, even when told to be neutral about style of teaching, may not even know what neutral is. This point stuck in my mind recently while reading Mary Myatt’s blogpost here. In this post Mary, an OFSTED inspector, is explaining how OFSTED won’t put too much faith in individual lesson observations, and how it is what happens over time, not in a twenty minute observation that matters. However, she phrases it like this:
A handful of lesson observations do not a judgement make. They have to relate to how much progress students are making, over time. Not every ten minutes.
There’s no silver bullet for this. Certainly not a checklist of what some schools think what Ofsted wants. It’s good, thoughtful, student centred practice, day in, day out. [my italics]
Now if you are aware of the debates over traditional and progressive teaching methods, you’ll know that traditional methods are often accused of being “teacher centred” while progressive methods are described as “child centred” or “student centred”. For an OFSTED inspector, particularly one who has blogged before about there being no preferred style of teaching, to use that term is staggering. The terminology used by one side of the debate is assumed to be shared by all.
3) OFSTED are not a coherent organisation under anyone’s control.
I’d heard it claimed before that OFSTED don’t actually exist, but most recently Mark McCourt emphasised it to me when I spoke to him over half-term. While I don’t really understand the set up, inspections are actually delegated to private contractors. Different companies operate in different parts of the country. When we talk about OFSTED and OFSTED inspectors we are very often talking about employees of particular private companies. Add to this the use of inspectors who are also operating as consultants and you start to wonder who actually has control here. Whose line do inspectors follow? That of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector? Or the private company which employs them? Or the consultancy (and their customers) who they work for on the side?
And if this wasn’t bad enough, sometimes there are even more questionable interests involved in inspection team. According to the Local Schools Network, the following story recently appeared in Private Eye:
The Eye reported how “sharp-eyed parents” noticed the team that inspected Wanstead High School included Moazam Parvez, a head of a neighbouring school. Ofsted judged the school as “requires improvement” – a drop from a previous judgement of “good”.
Ofsted also judged the London Nautical School as “requires improvement”. The Eye found the inspection team included Sir Daniel Moynihan, CEO of the Harris Federation academy chain which sponsors academies in London and has taken over a number of “failing” schools including Downhills.
In 2011, the Eye had received assurance from Ofsted that if any inspectors were “involved in an organisation in competition with the school under inspection” then Ofsted would regard it as “a conflict of interest to be avoided”.
The Eye asked Ofsted whether the inclusion of Parvez and Moynihan in inspection teams was a breach of that protocol. Ofsted promised an explanation but “answer came there none”.
Who does actually trust an OFSTED inspector to be independent and objective, regardless of what happens to be in the handbook?
4) Would the “reformed” OFSTED actually be of any use?
I think this is the most depressing point of all. Even where inspectors have moved away from their old requirements for groupwork and minimal teacher talk, the new elements of the inspection handbook are being turned into another mechanical checklist anyway.
I am hearing stories of schools forcing teachers to mark in completely impractical ways (the inspiration behind my last blogpost) because the OFSTED handbook talks about “Consistently high quality marking and constructive feedback from teachers ensure that pupils make rapid gains.” A common interpretation in schools, and one that seems to be confirmed by some OFSTED reports, is that marking must now, not only include feedback from the teacher to the student, but have feedback from the student to the teacher. Mary Myatt’s blog seems to confirm this:
What inspections are looking for is that there is high quality feedback which crucially is acted on by the student or pupil. Too often what we see is feedback without any response. So, how can it be moving learning forward? The kid has ignored it, not because they cant be bothered, but because they haven’t been expected to… And that misconceptions are picked up and used as the focus for discussions either in the book or in the classroom.
Now while I have no objection to this particular style of marking (if done well it probably is the most effective sort of marking), I do have issues about the effect on workload and the effect it has on setting teachers’ priorities. Having every book marked this way and giving time in lessons for student responses might actually be even more onerous that having to do groupwork in observations.
Another craze in OFSTED-chasing schools results from this passage in the handbook:
Inspectors must consider whether: teaching engages and includes all pupils, with work that is challenging enough and that meets their individual needs, including for the most able pupils
Now it is entirely possible, given his views on setting, that Michael Wilshaw only meant to discourage schools from putting students with drastically different requirements in mixed ability classes where the work is matched only to the lowest common denominator. However, this has been interpreted by some schools as a need for “differentiation”, providing different resources and opportunities to learn for different students. Combined with previous fads for AfL and showing progress every 20 minutes, teachers being observed are now often expected to produce a multitude of different resources (often with levels on) for observations and to find a way to distribute them that can be justified to the observer (self-assessment and moving kids around the room seem particularly popular). This approach is to be followed even where classes are similar in ability or where it would be entirely possible for students of different abilities to use the same resource.
While this might be down to schools misinterpreting the requirements of OFSTED, there are enough OFSTED reports complaining that classes are all doing the same work to convince schools this is what inspectors want to see. Again, it is almost enough to make one wish for the days when a card sort done in groups would tick the boxes.
As long as OFSTED exists, and as long as it observes lessons and gives detailed gradings, then teachers, managers and inspectors will be looking to create a formal, or informal, checklist of what must be done. Changing the checklist from groupwork and mini-whiteboards to dialogic marking and an ocean of levelled worksheets might reflect changes in priorities but it remains as mechanical and as burdensome as before. The teacher who simply tells kids what they need to know and then makes them practise using what they’ve been told until they won’t get it wrong will still be seen as inferior to those who “play the game” no matter how well their students learn.
In conclusion, a reformed OFSTED would still be a bureaucracy that teachers and school leaders will have to second guess rather than a simple check on failure. Worse, unless more evidence is forthcoming that OFSTED has changed most of that second guessing will be based on the same trendy nonsense that OFSTED have been forcing on us for years now. Wilshaw’s decrees are not going to work. If we want teachers to teach, then OFSTED will have to go.
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Scenes From The Battleground 
Has OFSTED Changed Since Last Month?
November 27, 2013Last night I did my regular trawl through recent OFSTED reports. I had written about some reports from early October here, and some from September here. For both of those two previous blogposts I had easily found OFSTED reports which showed a clear bias towards particular types of teaching despite all the claims that there is no preferred OFSTED lesson style. This time, however, looking at late October and early November inspections, I found very few such reports. Most reports were bland, talking about marking and questioning and sometimes differentiation. A few even praised explanations or subject knowledge. The usual condemnations of teacher talk and the constant promotion of “independence” were the exception not the rule.
When I mentioned this on Twitter, some of those who replied to me mentioned recent OFSTED training, which suggested a surprising and dramatic change in approach (by which I mean: doing what Michael Wilshaw says they should do instead of completely ignoring him). I asked one of them to send me a longer description and they sent me this (thanks):
I don’t know how representative this is of other inspection providers, and even when I’ve been cataloguing the worst ideological excesses of OFSTED there have always been those with a different experience. However, this is clearly the best indicator yet that OFSTED no longer see it is as their mission to root out traditional teaching and replace it with chatting in groups. Please feel free to comment if your own experiences confirm or contradict this.
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