High stakes? The fault is not in Ofsted but in ourselves

I did not want to write this piece. I’ve watched from the sidelines over the past month as social media filled with the polarised views of people taking private tragedy and making it about themselves, projecting onto it their own sense of injustice or their own agenda. All this has only confirmed my view that the real trouble with Ofsted is us – what we do with its ‘judgments’, our gross over-reactions and over-simplifications.

Ofsted is not a regulator or an employer. It does not end people’s careers. Ofsted is merely an inspector. No more. No less. The responsibility for the broken and dysfunctional contract between school leaders and society lies with us, the employers. 

I am not saying that many school leaders do not live in semi-permanent fear of an unfair or unreasonable Ofsted outcome. Or that headteachers do not fear for their livelihoods and even their sanity. They clearly do.

But the reason they fear a rigged accountability system is because we have not done our job. We have not told them regularly that Ofsted is merely an audit, one input among many others about school effectiveness. We have not reassured them that an unfavourable judgment leads to support and reinforcement rather than exile and shame. 

Unfortunately, because we have fragmented our education system so completely over the past 13 years, all that is left is accountability. Cynically, one might observe that it is much simpler and cheaper for government to blame someone else for failure than to engage in the complex, messy and expensive process of improving public services. A school has been found to be under-performing for its children. The sword of Damocles has fallen on its leader. All is well in the world.

If we want a fairer system, then we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with school leaders whose schools could do better. To do that, we need to genuinely know our schools, and Ofsted is part of how we do. Looking the world in the eye and arguing that a poor Ofsted report is leading to improvements that would be ill-served by a change of leadership, that’s on us.

This is the problem of leading system change. If you want to improve a system (as opposed to merely giving the appearance of it), you only have two inputs: picking the team and setting the direction. And one of the core elements of setting the direction is making a judgement call about how much change the people in your team can cope with.

An organisation cannot get better faster than its people can cope with change. Poor leaders either under-estimate tolerance for change and accept under-performance, or they over-estimate it and break the whole organisation. Keeping the organisation in the sweet spot between complacency and recklessness can only be done with detailed knowledge of its component parts, and an Ofsted report every five years falls well short of that.

Ofsted is far from perfect. However, unlike most instruments of government, it knows this and doesn’t pretend to be. In fact, it is probably the least broken bit of our education system. Respected internationally, it is in the main staffed by people who are knowledgeable and passionate about education and who want to improve our education system. 

Of the 60 inspections I have been on the receiving end of over the past decade or more, only one was genuinely inaccurate – an error rate of 1.66 per cent. Even then, we didn’t dispute the grade but the tone of the report. And then we made it clear to the senior leadership team that we saw the judgment in the broader context the progress they were making and that they should not worry.

Knee-jerk responses to single inspections are driving this pervasive and high-stakes sense of dread and all the bad practice it engenders. They represent a failure of governance in both maintained schools and academies, not Ofsted. Creating the psychological safety that school leaders and teachers deserve and need to drive genuine improvement is our job.