Headteachers’ leaders have called on the government and Ofsted to delay the introduction of new inspections and report cards, as well as plans for school profiles, until next year.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has warned that Ofsted’s plans for its new inspection framework will leave school leaders in a worse position than they are now and make grades less reliable.
It suggests delaying the launch of new inspections, along with the Department for Education’s plan to create digital school profiles, until September 2026.
The new profiles are set to include information on schools in one place, such as from Ofsted inspection report cards and performance data.
Ofsted is consulting on its proposal to create up to 11 evaluation areas and a new five-point grading scale for its report card school inspections, which are due to start in November this year.
This follows a government decision to abolish single-word overall effectiveness grades last year.
ASCL’s response to Ofsted’s consultation on its proposals warns that the plans will cause greater anxiety for heads and mean less reliability between judgements.
Pressure to delay new Ofsted inspections
ASCL says the watchdog’s proposed toolkits, showing how inspectors would grade schools, “are wildly open to interpretation”.
And the union strongly refutes comments made by chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver, who said during ASCL’s conference that he was “saddened” that critics of planned inspection reforms have not “managed to understand” them fully.
ASCL says it rejects the ”suggestion that individuals or organisations who don’t support the proposals in this consultation are coming from a position of ignorance or misunderstanding, or are hoping for less accountability”.
The union calls on the government and Ofsted to fundamentally rethink their plans and look to replace the proposed five-point scale with a simpler approach, based around whether or not schools are meeting expected standards.
ASCL says it accepts that legislation means Ofsted has to identify schools causing concern. But it says, instead of a binary system, Ofsted should use a “3+ point scale” for each evaluation area it inspects schools on. It would then rate them as “causing concern”, “attention needed” or “secure”.
It suggests that, instead of awarding a grade of “exemplary”, Ofsted could identify exceptional practice in narrative reports.
Ofsted has faced massive scrutiny since the death of headteacher Ruth Perry and a subsequent coroner’s ruling that inspection had contributed to her taking her own life.
ASCL says it is “extremely disappointed” that Ofsted’s proposals “go nowhere near addressing the serious weaknesses of the current system outlined in the inquest into Ruth Perry’s death, the independent Gilbert Review and the education select committee’s paper on Ofsted’s work with schools”.
The plans do not address “the acute concerns about mental health and wellbeing, will lead to perverse incentives in the system, and will not provide more reliable information for parents”, it adds.
Julie McCulloch, ASCL’s senior director of strategy and policy, said: “It is our belief that school and college leaders - and the system as a whole - will be worse off if [the plans] are implemented in their current form.
“Our biggest concern is that the proposed move to a five-point grading scale fails to address concerns about school and college leaders’ wellbeing and the impact of this on the current leader and teacher recruitment and retention crisis, and will undermine the reliability of inspections.
“We do not think that inspectors can reliably make nuanced graded judgements across eight to 10 evaluation areas on a five-point scale, and believe that this will undermine trust in the inspection process and ultimately lead to more complaints and challenges.”
ASCL also criticises the timescale of Ofsted’s plans and the fact that the watchdog is trialling its new inspection approach while the consultation is ongoing. This has reinforced “the view of many of our members that these proposals are a fait accompli”, it warns.
It adds: ”We cannot see how, if this consultation is meaningful, Ofsted can read and process all responses at the start of May, respond, adapt the proposals as necessary, pilot and trial the final inspection approach, train HMI and other inspectors, and undertake meaningful stakeholder engagement with leaders, teachers, governors, trustees, parents and young people about the changes, all within the timetable proposed.”
Instead of introducing the new inspections after the first half-term of the 2025-26 academic year, ASCL calls for the process to be delayed until September 2026.
Concerns over interventions
In response to a separate DfE consultation on accountability reforms, ASCL says it does not support the proposal that schools graded as requiring significant improvement before September 2026 should be subject to structural intervention.
The union says this would be unfair on schools that happen to be inspected earlier, as others with the same outcome after September 2026 may not face rebrokerage or an academy order.
Instead, the “default approach” should be for Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams to work with schools where the leadership and governance have shown an ability to improve areas that are causing concern - the same as the DfE has set out will happen after September 2026.
ASCL says this is another reason for delaying implementation of accountability reforms to September 2026, as “capacity of RISE teams before 2026 is identified as an issue”.
While ASCL says that in general it supports the deployment of RISE teams as a support broker, the union raises concerns about the small teams’ capacity to provide a universal support offer to all schools.
ASCL further suggests that the DfE should consider publishing a directory of the organisations that RISE teams direct schools to as part of the universal offer, though it says this would need its own consultation.
“This would allow schools to find their own targeted support, without needing to go through the RISE teams themselves, and stop this information being kept internally by a few individuals,” the union’s response says.
“There are some risks to this, but as RISE teams are required to provide a universal offer in any case, it is essentially already happening, but in a way that is less transparent.”
Publishing school performance
ASCL also says the DfE must demonstrate value for money in investing in new digital school profiles, given that a lot of information is already available online.
The union would like to see schools able to personalise their profiles, but with a cap on how many items they can add.
The DfE should “urgently consult separately” about performance measures that would be used on new school profiles such as the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8, ASCL says.
The DfE has also set out how it wants RISE teams to engage with schools where there are concerning drops in pupil attainment. Responding to this, ASCL says that requiring targeted intervention for this is “problematic” because the DfE would have to define what concerning drops were.
“This would create a de facto new floor target for national attainment data, which, in turn, would discriminate against schools serving more disadvantaged cohorts,” the union says.
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