Ofsted has warned the Department for Education that any further budget cuts will compromise the “reliability” of its inspection judgements.
The chair of Ofsted’s board voiced concerns to a DfE official at a board meeting last year, the minutes of which were published today.
“Many parts of the DfE regulatory system, including actions following a ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’ rating, rely on Ofsted inspection judgments,” Dame Christine Ryan told a board meeting in September 2023.
“A high level of assurance on the reliability of inspection judgements is therefore needed, but will be compromised if inspection itself and the activities that support inspection quality are further constrained.”
Earlier this month Ofsted raised similar concerns about the impact of budget pressures when it told MPs that meeting demands for in-depth inspections could cost millions more per year.
In its response to a Commons Education Select Committee report on school inspection, Ofsted told MPs that proposals for change needed to be considered within the context of its funding constraints.
“We have continually been asked to do more with less,” Ofsted wrote in its response to the MPs.
Ofsted funding fears
At its board meeting in September, Dame Christine also told the DfE that Ofsted was losing its capacity for independent discretionary work - such as its review looking into sexual abuse in schools - because its budget is “progressively constricted”.
The chair described these budget constraints as systemic issues that needed to be considered fully by the DfE, including in its own risk assessments. A DfE observer told Ofsted’s board that these concerns would be communicated to ministers.
The inspectorate’s funding is 29 per cent lower in real terms compared with 2009-10, according to its response to the select committee this year.
The pressure on Ofsted’s budgets was also emphasised late last year by former chief inspector Amanda Spielman, who was still serving as Ofsted’s head at the time of the board meeting.
“Relative to school budgets, the current government allocation to school inspection is about a quarter of what it was 20 years ago,” she wrote in the watchdog’s annual report in December.
“This means that school inspections are necessarily shorter and more intense; reports are necessarily briefer; and many strands of our work that help build school sector goodwill and reinforce our value to the sector, government and others are having to be progressively curtailed,” Ms Spielman added.
This month Ofsted announced the launch of its “Big Listen” consultation, which is seeking views from school leaders, teachers and parents on the inspection system.
