Every week, one of our team will take a look at one of their specialist topics and offer their unique insight. This week, William Stewart examines how Ofsted will set the bar in its new inspection system
“We are not ‘raising the bar’.”
Could Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman live to regret the reassurance she has offered schools spooked by her new focus on the curriculum?
School inspection revamps are an expected part of the Ofsted cycle that have previously almost always been about “raising the bar”. Don’t let schools get too comfy, has been the thinking. Change things up and keep teachers on their toes.
Ms Spielman, by contrast, has opted to soothe schools worried about being downgraded. It is an unusual message to take to the general public that relies on Ofsted to uphold standards and to the ministers that demand them.
But the potential problems go deeper than mere presentational issues. This is because Ofsted is not only pledging not to toughen things up; it also has a “commitment to keeping the overall proportions of schools achieving each grade roughly the same”.
For an inspectorate supposed to be grading each school “without fear or favour on the quality of education as we see it”, that could be a very difficult pledge to fulfil.
It is hard not to draw the obvious parallel with the comparable outcomes approach to grading exams that took centre stage at Ofqual when Ms Spielman was chair at the exams regulator. For exams, the process of preventing grade inflation or deflation was both controversial and complicated. But you could at least do it with all the marked scripts in at the same time.
Ofsted will not have that luxury. Its school inspection reports will have to be released one at a time, when they are ready. And inspectors will be expected to base their grades on what they find at each school.
Nevertheless Luke Tryl, the watchdog’s head of strategy, is confident Ofsted will be able to “set the bar in the right place” to maintain the existing grade profile, using results from pilots of the new framework. But the sample used in the pilots is unrepresentative - and includes no “inadequate” schools. So what happens if, several months into the framework, the grading profile does change? Does Ofsted then tell inspectors to get tougher/be easier on schools to get things back to where they should be? Does it start giving inspectors quotas for particular grades? Or does it start revising the grades it has already given out?
And this is where the explanations start to dry up. Mr Tryl has been clear to Tes that “this is not comparable outcomes or quotas”. But he has offered no other suggestion as to what will happen if Ofsted does not get its grading profile right first time. If there is a plan B, they’re not letting on.
William Stewart is the news editor at Tes
