When I came to England 10 years ago, I had five children to get into schools: one into primary and four into secondary. I vividly remember going through all the school websites and, of course, looking at inspection judgements.
My youngest son is now at the same secondary school our older children went to. While I’d like to say this is because I did the same level of research for him, it’s mostly because my wife and I just couldn’t bear to add another stop to the “Taxi Bokhove” circuit.
But if we had looked at Ofsted judgements, would it even have been a reliable indicator of school quality?
This is something that John Jerrim, Sam Sims and I looked at for a recent article in the Journal of School Choice, in which we analysed all inspections of mainstream secondary schools conducted between 2005 and 2015.
To explain what we found, let me give you a scenario: imagine a parent choosing a school for their child in October 2013. The parent might read a previous inspection report, say from 2011, but their child won’t start secondary school until September 2014.
So, does the report really say anything meaningful about what the school will be like during the time the child attends it?
We found that the most recent inspection report across our 2,538 secondary schools would be almost three years old by the time this hypothetical child started secondary school. In schools rated “good” or “outstanding”, reports were even older, as those schools are inspected less frequently. In addition, half of the headteachers listed on the reports would no longer be in post by the time the child started.
But could the reports still tell us something about pupil outcomes? To find out, we looked at data between 2014 and 2018, the period in which our hypothetical child would have attended the school, alongside the most recent inspection judgements at the time of application.
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We found that pupils who attend a school with a higher Ofsted rating at the time of their application are more likely to go on to attain higher. However, when we take into account pupil prior attainment, admission type, and pupil deprivation, there was actually little difference in outcomes across the four Ofsted judgements.
And when we include school exam results available at the time of choice, there is no detectable difference between schools rated “good”, “requires improvement”, or “inadequate”.
Of course, exam results aren’t the only thing that matters when we think about school quality, so we also looked at how other measures linked to inspection judgements. We saw only small differences on pupil absence rates, no differences in parental satisfaction, and (again) no detectable difference between the lower three judgments in terms of behaviour standards, as reported by parents.
Overall, inspection reports don’t actually seem to be very useful for parents choosing secondary schools. A simpler inference from, for example, Progress 8 scores, might be just as useful. The one exception to this is the “outstanding” judgement, which does appear to be more informative.
However, parents should still think twice before making far-reaching and potentially costly decisions in relation to house purchases, as even “outstanding” judgements will end up being out of date by the time your child attends school.
Increasing the frequency of high-stakes inspections would make judgments more reliable, but that would be a different discussion altogether - one which might have other negative consequences.
Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
