Dear Amanda. I’m reporting a serious safeguarding concern

To: Amanda Spielman

Re: SERIOUS SAFEGUARDING CONCERN

Dear Amanda,

As Keeping Children Safe In Education requires, I am writing to report a safeguarding concern that only you are in a position to address. I am publishing it here not as a provocation but to ensure that this reaches you rapidly, so that you might act with haste.

As the person leading Ofsted, with oversight of those who determine how well we respond to these issues ourselves, the action you take will be a model to us and to your inspectorate.

We are doing what is required of us by the DfE, by inspectors and by our moral compass. We focus on the quality of the curriculum and on  personal development. We make reasonable adjustments and maintain high expectations. We go above and beyond every day, and every day this takes us ever further away from our own health and wellbeing.

But we keep going. We hold up communities with no other safety net. We make phone calls, home visits and threaten fines to those with no means of paying. We promise one-to-one care without knowing how we will resource it, and we always find a way.

Despite all this, the children in our care (in your care) are not faring well and this worsens daily.

We understand that ‘the pandemic is over’. We come to work suspecting we’re infected, but knowing a positive test result only makes life harder. So we say we have a cold and we work through it, surreptitiously holding our breaths when frail colleagues or students come near.

What’s more difficult is the big ask: normalising abject poverty. Pretending lockdowns didn’t rock the lives of our children and their families to the ground in a violent avalanche of jagged edges. Keeping calm and carrying on when we know they’re slipping through the net and there’s nothing more we can do.

Your latest annual report provided a glimmer of hope that you understood.  Low attendance, lack of social services capacity, dreadful SEND and mental health services due to underfunding. Yes, we thought. She will do as she said and make Ofsted a force for improvement and for good.

Then inspections began. They asked us how we were addressing societal woes we had no hope of remedying. More evidence for you to fight the Good Fight, we hoped. Ofsted will share best practice and dig others out of the hole. Amanda will shout and scream that our children are in trouble.

That’s not what happened. You asked why  children weren’t in school even though you knew. You asked what we were doing about it and we told you. Good work, you said, but behaviour and attitudes were ‘Inadequate’ because all of our “good work” wasn’t showing sustained improvement on the attendance graph.

You asked if we were keeping our kids safe and we showed you we were. We explained that part of this was excluding those few children who posed serious danger to others despite all of the support we’d put in for them and our countless emails begging for help from LAs and CAMHS. Good work, you said, but leadership and management were ‘Inadequate’ because too many of those children were SEND.

Because of this, our children are in more and more danger each day. More of us are leaving, unwell, not applying or afraid to lead. We’re retiring, retreating and tired. Our workforce is dwindling in number and stamina at the same time as our children’s position worsens.

Many will have quietly become young carers during the pandemic or have hidden safeguarding concerns. Many will have been introduced to gangs, drugs and porn. Many will need academic interventions and specialist support.

How will we know or address any of this when we are so stretched and exhausted? When we simply don’t have the manpower and our Ofsted outcome scares off the few who were interested?

Therefore, as I am required to do, I formally report that our children are in danger. We are out of funds, options, capacity and answers. So if not for what is right, then for your legacy, what will you do to save them?