Chief inspector Amanda Spielman would do well to take lessons from Mikhail Gorbachev. Regimes regarded, rightly or wrongly, as repressive are at their most vulnerable when they attempt to reform, and do so publicly. Ofsted has been a flawed organisation under former chief inspectors; now with greater glasnost and perestroika, it is trying again - with some success, but with some danger - to put its house in order. Therein, as Gorbachev would recognise, lies the seed of disintegration unless it is very carefully and sensitively managed.
Ofsted is certainly more transparent of late and more modest in its claims. It has ceased claiming to be the most important factor behind school improvement. It has even acknowledged, admittedly somewhat tardily and under pressure, to have contributed significantly to the narrowing of education and to the excessive “datification” of the education system through its past inspection priorities.
It has commissioned research into the reliability of its inspections, into practices such as work scrutiny, and into how far it is possible to assess students’ progress through inspection. It is seeking, I suspect vainly, to learn from other organisations’ research and practice in classroom observation.
It is even claiming to be subtly combining art and science (“an art conducted scientifically”), and to be exploring how best to enhance the validity and reliability of its inspection procedures. It increasingly speaks the language of social science and thus opens itself to critique from that quarter.
Critics are circling
To my mind, most of these developments are healthy and long overdue, though they pose dangers to the “health” of Ofsted itself in the short-to-medium term.
Its critics are beginning to circle and with renewed confidence, citing these developments as Ofsted’s admission of its own weaknesses. They argue: why should we have Ofsted if it cannot prove that it is a major factor in school improvement? Why retain a system that doesn’t meet the purported social-science criteria of objectivity, reliability and validity? Ofsted is not yet facing an existential crisis - the equivalent of Gorbachev’s annus horribilis of 1989 - but the danger signs are there.
What’s needed by Ofsted itself - and by the teaching profession it seeks to influence - is a fundamental change of mindset. Ofsted needs to make clear, and to robustly defend, the stance that inspection is not an incontestable set of authoritative pronouncements, nor is it applied social science, but rather an art requiring educational connoisseurship involving the making of complex judgements, honed by extensive experience by inspectors in the widest possible range of schools.
It involves observations, inferences and value judgements so it can never be definitively and incontestably reliable or valid since those value judgements are in essence contestable.
Wouldn’t it be valuable for all schools to receive an independent, inevitably subjective judgement of the quality and standards they currently achieve, a kind of bespoke appreciation, provided they are able to respond publicly to whatever is being suggested on the basis of the inspection?
It is this, with the professional judgements of its inspectors at its core, that Ofsted should be pursuing and strenuously advocating, rather than the pursuit of a research-informed organisation seeking spurious claims of social-scientific validity and reliability. Perhaps it will…perhaps it won’t!
If it does not, then Ofsted’s welcome glasnost and perestroika could well result in its eventual dismantling. That would be to the detriment of the education system as we know it.
Professor Colin Richards is a former HMI