Amanda Spielman has set out her stall.

The chief inspector has explained on national TV and radio, and in front of headteachers in Newcastle, how she intends to move Ofsted away from an emphasis on data and exam results to looking at “the real substance of education”.

Not only that, but her reform of school inspections will also reduce teacher workload, Spielman claimed last month. It is an attractive pitch, particularly for teachers and school leaders sick of decades of perverse incentives pushing them into doing the wrong thing. And, by all accounts, it has gone down very well.

If all goes to plan, Ofsted could be at the centre of a much-needed cultural shift in England’s schools, relieving teachers of their data management duties and allowing them to get on with the job of educating the whole child. But that “if” is a big one. Despite the confident assertions from Ofsted and Spielman’s pride in what “will be the most researched and evidence-based framework in Ofsted’s history”, the outlook is uncertain both for the reform itself and for the standing of the chief inspector.

Most obviously, there is already a wave of publicly expressed opposition amid fears about the changes that the chief inspector wants to make and the way she wants to introduce them. The concerned parties range from the largest heads’ union to Teach First, the Chartered College of Teaching and the leader of one of England’s most prominent academy chains.

Most worryingly for Ofsted, they also include the education secretary, Damian Hinds, who fears that the change could compromise one of his key priorities - reducing teacher workload. History tells us that when a secretary of state falls out with their chief inspector, things do not go well for either side.

This relationship is always a potentially difficult one. It may be the minister who selects the head of Ofsted, but, once in place, the chief inspector is in charge of what is a separate public body to the Department for Education, accountable only to Parliament. And they are in a role that carries with it an obligation to criticise government where necessary, to demonstrate that they are no political poodle.

But maintaining reasonable DfE-Ofsted working relations is important for both parties - not to mention the wider schools system, which is not helped by contradictory messages from the top. However, this relationship cannot be taken for granted (see box, below).

A less than satisfactory relationship between Chris Woodhead and education secretary David Blunkett eventually resulted in the controversial chief inspector leaving early. The no-holds-barred briefing war between Spielman’s predecessor, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and the DfE offers an even more salutary lesson.

By 2015, as Wilshaw’s spell in charge was coming to an end, the watchdog was “in a bad place”, Professor Chris Husbands, then director of the UCL Institute of Education, noted at the time. And the same case could be made about Ofsted’s position today, as more and more key figures come out against the Spielman reforms that Hinds seems reluctant to throw his weight behind.

The pair are still keeping up appearances. Last month, when asked if he felt that Spielman was the right person to introduce the new inspection framework, Hinds told Tes that the chief inspector was “doing a great job”. That vote of confidence may not be quite the doom-laden signal it would represent for a football manager on a losing run. But the fact remains that at the moment Hinds and Spielman are dangerously close to a collision over the future of inspection.

So how did Ofsted get to this point? It wasn’t very long ago that Spielman seemed to be sweeping all before her. She won an early and significant battle with the recently departed DfE national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, over who should be top dog in the world of school accountability. Spielman’s victory meant Ofsted was given sole rights over school inspection, with Carter and his regional schools commissioners effectively put back in their box.

The new chief inspector also made a confident stand against private faith schools “deliberately resisting” British values in her first annual report.

The inspectorate’s controversial Bold Beginnings report on early years was hardly a triumph. Even so, whispers about Spielman’s supposed lack of suitability for the role, as a non-teacher, suddenly seemed very old hat.

So was what came next a result of overconfidence, hubris even? Or are Spielman’s inspection changes actually a far-sighted reform that will lead to a better schools system? If it turns out to be the latter then the chief inspector will have pulled off an impressive feat, because the potential problems with her plan go way beyond the threat of increased workload.

If Ofsted was just saying that it wanted to stop schools gaming the system, it could have been more straightforward. But Spielman has gone much further with a plan to investigate and focus on the actual curriculum that schools teach. It is not just that she is proposing another major trespass on teachers’ “secret garden” - the school curriculum, which Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has called on outside forces to stop “tinkering” with. It is also that, with less than a year to go before implementation, there seems to be an absence of detail about how this will work.

Of course, the content of what schools teach has always, in theory at least, been part of what Ofsted inspects. But, as far as the chief inspector is concerned: “It is clear that, for some time, Ofsted hasn’t placed enough emphasis on the curriculum. For a long time, our inspections have looked hardest at outcomes, placing too much weight on test and exam results.”

For Spielman, the curriculum goes beyond a school’s timetable, the subjects it teaches. She wants her new school inspections to get a “handle on the real substance of education”, “the essence of what performance tables cannot capture”. The aim sounds laudable. But it is also an ambitious one that is so far largely undefined.

Defining quality

The biggest clue to date on what exactly the chief inspector wants her new inspections to examine comes in Spielman’s description of her proposed new “quality of education” judgement. She says it will look at: “What is it that schools want for all their children?”, “how is teaching and assessment fulfilling the intent?”, and, lastly, “the results and wider outcomes that children achieve and the destinations that they go on to”.

On the final point, results and destinations data is already available and collected by the DfE. “Wider outcomes” could mean something new and different, but we don’t know what, let alone how inspectors will be supposed to make a judgement on it. Looking at what schools “want for all their children” must be simply a matter of asking the headteacher. Presumably, if their response is something that Ofsted decides is reasonable, then that will be OK. But it is no more than a stated aim and it will mean nothing on its own.

So the crucial bit must be when Ofsted looks at whether a school’s teaching and assessment is “fulfilling” this “intent”. Which brings us back to a long-standing problem for the inspectorate: the lack of resources it will have to do this properly.

As Spielman has acknowledged, the days are long gone of “large teams of inspectors visiting schools for a full week, with a full range of subject expertise, making it possible to review individual subjects in depth”.

“It is worth remembering that most primary school inspections today are a one-day visit by a single inspector,” she has said. Indeed, the most time that inspectors will usually have in a school is two days. Spielman has said she intends to “rebalance” the time inspectors spend planning and writing up inspections so that they have more hours on site. But with inspectors already carrying out two inspections a week, and extra money unlikely to be available, the gain can only be marginal (see box, page 29).

The reality is that Ofsted inspectors won’t have the time to see what is really going on in schools - to get any real sense of the totality of actual “teaching and learning” based on “the real substance of education”. They will continue to instead look at proxies for teaching and learning; slightly different ones possibly, but still proxies.

And Spielman has already been clear about what those proxies are. Her new inspections will be about “letting [school] leaders tell their own story”, and about “having those professional conversations with leaders and teachers”. That raises the prospect of two very unsatisfactory outcomes. The first is that for schools to succeed and get a “good” or “outstanding” rating, it won’t depend on what they actually do, but on their heads being able to talk a good game, to present a good story about what they do.

Of course, inspectors will be able to triangulate anything that is said against school performance data, as they do now. But the whole point of this inspections overhaul is supposed to be about getting beyond mere numbers and ensuring that schools concentrate on wider goals. After all, Spielman believes Ofsted is currently “placing too much weight on test and exam results when we consider the overall effectiveness of schools”.

So how will Ofsted inspectors know if schools are doing more than teaching to the test if they haven’t got time to “review individual subjects in depth”? How will they know that a school’s curriculum fulfils its intention for pupils if they can’t really see it being taught? Will they just take a head’s word for it? If not then it seems that the only possible solution would be to ask for documentation. And that, of course, is very likely to mean the second unsatisfactory outcome - more work for teachers.

Spielman may insist that “a focus on substance will help to tackle excessive workload”. But she hasn’t really explained how. Logic instead suggests that the view that it will create more work expressed by Hinds; Dame Rachel de Souza, chief executive of the Inspiration Trust; the NAHT heads’ union; and by Tim Oates - Ofsted adviser and leader of the last national curriculum review - could well be justified.

And we haven’t even got to the vexed question of whether Ofsted is in a position to objectively judge a school’s curriculum without being biased in favour of a particular approach. Teach First chief executive Russell Hobby is clear that it is not. “You can’t say that ‘this is a good curriculum’ unless you have a view on what a good curriculum is,” he has said. “And I think that is incompatible with Ofsted’s stance on freedom and autonomy for the profession itself to determine these, given that we may have strong beliefs ourselves on what is a good curriculum.”

Others might agree with Spielman that it is perfectly possible to “acknowledge a range of successful curricular approaches”. But a close look at the research conducted in preparation for the new framework suggests that even if that is true, Ofsted may not be entirely neutral on the issue.

Critics have called for a pause in Ofsted’s plans, to give schools time to adjust. But Spielman has responded by saying that “the changes to inspection simply can’t wait”. “One year of delay in this framework is the equivalent of more than 8 million child years of delay and half a million teacher years of delay,” she said last month.

But is there really any need for all this? The new-style inspections, the extra work, the risk of bias? Ofsted already has to check that schools offer a “broad and balanced curriculum”. The concern about schools gaming the system with inappropriate qualifications, and “off-rolling”, and the narrowing of the curriculum, are real ones. But you don’t need radically different inspections to identify these issues. It’s all there already in the existing data, in a school’s exam entries, the changes in pupil numbers as a cohort passes through a school, and the qualifications it uses.

Spielman’s plan, in contrast, appears likely to miss its mark. She says her new inspections mean that “Ofsted will challenge those schools where too much time is spent on preparation for tests at the expense of teaching”. But how will her inspectors know? Schools won’t volunteer this information. The chief inspector also says her reform will challenge “where pupils’ choices are narrowed” or “where children are pushed into less rigorous qualifications mainly to boost league table positions” - but Ofsted could do that now anyway.

If the inspectorate really wants to make a difference to schools’ inappropriate behaviour then why not quietly begin a crackdown on it within the existing framework? If it really believes there are “powerful vested interests” opposing an examination of what schools really do, if it really thinks there is a need to “expose the emperor’s new clothes, those who have trumpeted stellar headline results that are built on the back of curriculum narrowing and teaching to the test”, then why frighten the horses?

Why alert your targets to your intentions and give time for opposition to build by announcing a lengthy and time-consuming change? Why not just get on with it with the tools already at your disposal?

Spielman is absolutely correct in wanting to tackle the “pressure” that has warped our education system by incentivising schools “to put overall results ahead of individual children’s needs”. But the chief inspector needs to get it right first time because she may not get another chance. If she uses the wrong method and allows workload fears to act as a distraction, then those that Ofsted believes have gained by playing the system at the expense of pupils will continue to get away with it.

William Stewart is the Tes news editor. He tweets @wstewarttes

Heavyweight clashes: Ofsted chiefs vs education secretaries

When David Blunkett took over as education secretary in 1997, he reportedly saw Chris Woodhead, the controversial chief inspector he inherited from the Conservatives, as “too much of a loose cannon”.

Support from Tony Blair for the Ofsted chief, possibly backed up by fears that a Woodhead sacking would see New Labour portrayed as being soft on standards, ensured that he stayed on. But the seeds of disharmony had already been sown.

“Blunkett never said to me, ‘Shut up, or I’ll sack you,’” the late Woodhead told Tes. “There used to be a group of us, the great and the good, who used to meet together every term or twice every term. And increasingly no one wanted to talk to me. I did become a pariah.”

Eventually this became too much and Woodhead resigned in 2000, only two years into a new contract.

By contrast, when Sir Michael Wilshaw began as Ofsted chief inspector in 2012, relations with the then education secretary were very good. Michael Gove had already praised Wilshaw as a “hero” and had gone out of his way to get the former head to take the job.

But it didn’t take long for things to sour. There was a semi-public row with ministers over their decision to oust Wilshaw’s ally Baroness Morgan as chair of Ofsted, and the chief inspector’s admission that he was “spitting blood” over suspicions that the DfE was briefing against him.

Then Gove’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, already worried about Wilshaw’s leadership, latched on to academics’ concerns about the reliability and validity of Ofsted inspections. He wrote an internal DfE memo, leaked in October 2014, noting that senior department figures were “increasingly alarmed” and that it was “worth thinking about the whole Ofsted approach with a blank sheet of paper”. Wilshaw hit back, saying the leak confirmed his suspicions about “plots and smear campaigns”.

And that set the tone for the rest of his increasingly combative spell at Ofsted.

How will Ofsted find more time for inspections?

Chief inspector Amanda Spielman has said she intends to “rebalance inspector time usage so that more time is spent on site… with less time away from schools and colleges in pre- and post- inspection activity”.

But there are unlikely to be any extra resources available to help Ofsted implement these changes. Indeed, Spielman has already made it clear that the inspectorate has reached the limit of what it can do on school inspection “within our current funding envelope”. And that’s without reinspecting around 2,000 “outstanding” schools which Ofsted has not been back to for at least six years, including hundreds that have gone for at least a decade without inspection.

So “rebalancing” existing inspector time is Ofsted’s only real option. But how much extra time in schools will it achieve? Inspectors have reported that the current regime has become a “treadmill” that involves them completing two school inspections per week. This must mean they have somewhere between less than a day and two days to plan and write up each inspection. So even if that time is cut back, the extra hours that inspectors will be able to spend in schools will be marginal at best.

Can the watchdog be a fair judge of curriculum?

Of the 23 schools that Ofsted handpicked to help it decide what good curriculum design looks like, around a third were described as having a knowledge-led curriculum and half were said to be knowledge-engaged; leaving less than a fifth with a skills-led approach to the curriculum. And in a commentary by chief inspector Amanda Spielman, written for publication alongside the research, all the points she makes on specific findings suggest backing for a knowledge-based, as opposed to a skills-based, approach.

For example, stressing the “importance of the subject as a discipline” - something that a skills-led cross-curricular approach might be seen as rejecting - is viewed as an encouraging indicator of “curriculum quality”.

The idea of “subject-specific progression models” is also portrayed in a positive light

Then Spielman says: “It appeared harder for schools to model progression in terms of skills. Leaders who said they had attempted to map pupils’ progress in developing skills were generally clear about what they wanted pupils to achieve...However, they were less sure about how they intended to do this. They also had no secure way of knowing whether pupils had acquired the defined skills.”

And this, she adds, was often in contrast to the “knowledge progression models”, where “the sequencing and order of what pupils were expected to know were much more clearly detailed and articulated”.