Ofsted’s inspectors could give little more than 150 minutes’ notice before arriving at your school if plans for its new inspection regime get the go-ahead, Tes has revealed.
An inspection team would phone the school before 10am and then arrive after 12.30pm on the same day.
Ofsted insists that its arrival will only be for pre-inspection planning on site - and the official visit will start the following day - but headteachers and teachers are unlikely to see it that way.
The proposed changes come amid widespread worry that the inspectorate will not be able to carry out its new-look curriculum-focused inspections, due to be implemented in September next year, in the time allowed by the current timetable.
The news angered one teachers’ leader, who said that schools should have at least 24 hours’ notice before inspectors visit. Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said: “Given the scale of change that Ofsted is proposing with its new framework, I think it is only common courtesy for school leaders to be given at least 24 hours before visiting to give them time to prepare and collect their thoughts.”
The revelations about close-to-no-notice inspections came in the same week that Ofsted boss Amanda Spielman published her latest commentary on her plans for the new inspection framework. She discussed the research and piloting the inspectorate had undertaken. Ofsted visited 64 schools to look at how it could inspect the intent, implementation and impact of a school curriculum.
It found that less than a quarter of the primary schools scored highly for the quality of their curriculum.
And nearly half (15) of the primaries finished in the bottom two of Ofsted’s five ratings, compared with a total of three secondary schools.
In response to Ofsted’s research findings, James Bowen, director of NAHT Edge, part of the NAHT heads’ union, writes: “So what are we to conclude from this? Are secondary schools simply far better at curriculum design than primaries? I’m not convinced.
“For me, these findings tell us as much about the nature of the current primary accountability system and the structural differences between primary and secondary schools as they do about expertise in curriculum design.”
