A school’s leadership cannot be of a high standard unless inclusion is ingrained into its culture, Ofsted’s chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver has warned today.
He also told a conference that a school is not serving its community if it engages in off-rolling or never takes on disadvantaged or vulnerable children.
Sir Martyn has highlighted the importance of inclusion in the new report card and school inspection framework that Ofsted is currently consulting on.
Under the plans, inclusion would be one of eight main areas that Ofsted inspectors would assess schools on, using a new five-point grading scale.
The watchdog will also be making a binary judgement about whether safeguarding standards are “met” or “not met”.
Shifting the dial on inclusion
The chief inspector told the National SEND and Inclusion Conference today that he hoped the new inspections would “shift the dial” on inclusion in the same way Ofsted’s current framework, introduced in 2019, has done with curriculum.
Sir Martyn added: “When Ofsted put curriculum front and centre in our approach, the dial shifted. We saw schools and other providers really prioritising substance. Making sure they always had a clear idea of what children should know and by when.
“The importance of curriculum remains, we must not lose sight of that. But I now want to do the same for inclusion.”
Sir Martyn, who was chief executive of Outwood Grange Academies Trust before becoming Ofsted’s chief inspector at the start of last year, said today that inclusion was not an add-on or separate from everything else a provider should be doing.
He said: “We want to bring a real focus to it through its own evaluation area. But it will also be threaded through every other inspection area.
“Everything we look at will include a consideration of how it works for disadvantaged and vulnerable children.”
During his speech, he posed a series of questions around inclusion, such as: “Can leadership be of a high standard if inclusion isn’t ingrained in the culture? Can you have high standards for behaviour if you are lowering your expectations for young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or failing to meet their needs?
“Can a provider be serving their community if they engage in off-rolling? Or if they never on-roll disadvantaged or vulnerable children?”
He answered: “No, no, no. No to all of those questions. Because you need to get it right for everyone.”
Ofsted announced today that Mark Vickers, chief executive of Olive Academies, has been appointed to be an external adviser on inclusion as the watchdog develops its new inspection plans.
Yesterday, the Commons Education Select Committee heard concerns that Ofsted’s planned focus on inclusion does not include an assessment of how representative a school’s intake is of pupils with SEND in the local area.
This was raised by the Association of School and College Leadership’s SEND and inclusion specialist Margaret Mulholland during a session on solving the SEND crisis.
Tes revealed last year that inclusion was set to become an increased focus of Ofsted inspections.
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