Ofsted “can’t” judge schools on admissions, a senior official at the watchdog has insisted, following “inaccurate” reports that inspectors could mark down institutions that take too many middle-class children.
Matthew Purves, who leads Ofsted Academy, the watchdog’s new inspector training and development arm, also said the inspectorate would take inspiration from its work clamping down on off-rolling as it developed plans to assess schools’ inclusivity.
Established earlier this year by Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted’s new boss, the academy brings together the inspectorate’s work to attract, retain, train and develop inspectors and administrative staff.
It has also been tasked with making Ofsted more transparent in the wake of the ruling than an inspection contributed to the death of Reading headteacher Ruth Perry.
The inspectorate is also drawing up plans for report cards for next September. Inclusion is set to be a key “criterion”, and officials are scrambling to find a definition of inclusive schools ahead of a consultation in January.
The Sunday Telegraph reported last weekend that schools “face being marked down for taking on too many middle-class pupils under plans being considered by the education watchdog”. But Purves said this was wrong.
“The truth is, our scope is limited. That’s not part of Ofsted’s remit, and we don’t look at that. We can only look at the pupils who are there. So there is a limit on what we can do. That story is just inaccurate.”
However, he said inspectors had “for years” been “looking at what schools do for the children who are there”.
“Think back to the progress that we collectively made on off-rolling a number of years ago… Ofsted really drove some thinking and some behaviours there.”
He said part of the development of the new framework was “listening to colleagues who know about these things and feeding that into what we do, alongside the years of experience inspectors have of looking at things like off-rolling, inclusion, etc, and bringing those two things together”.
Purves was a key author of Ofsted’s 2019 education inspection framework, introduced by Oliver’s predecessor, Amanda Spielman, which switched towards a focus on curriculum.
‘Long period of training’ for Ofsted inspectors
“If you’d asked us seven years ago, we’d have said we thought we’d done a good job communicating the changes, but it’s really hard to reach 22,000 school leaders and many, many more colleagues in other remits,” said Purves.
“So we’re learning some things… Last time, we consulted really fully on the materials that we were going to inspect with. We’re going to run a similarly fulsome consultation early in the new year and put the materials out there for everyone to see.”
He said a “long period of training” for inspectors would get them ready between “:now and September”.
Ofsted Academy will publish more school inspector training materials before Christmas, Purves said, before moving on in the new year to the other sectors it inspected.
Training on the new framework had to be delivered first. “But once we’ve done that, then we’ll put that material out there for everyone to access.”
Purves said the aim was to “eliminate a bit of the mystery about Ofsted … there are still colleagues who have a consultant sell them something that isn’t quite right.
“There will always be people who try to make a profit in the middle and try to sell the consultancy, but we’re trying to cut out the middle person.”
Following the coroner’s ruling on Ruth Perry last December, all inspectors were required to undertake mental health first-aid training. But a lessons-learned review by former chief inspector Dame Christine Gilbert called for more “sophisticated” courses.
One of the training videos uploaded by the Ofsted Academy this week, which was delivered to inspectors in the spring, is titled “Setting off on the right foot”.
Purves said this was “all about the inspector-leader relationship, and how that plays into mental health and wellbeing”.
He added that the academy had also introduced “routine reflective practice”.
“A lot of what inspectors talk about in that space, either unprompted or through some of the examples that we’ve chosen with them, is about how to support leaders, how to manage a difficult situation in everyone’s best interest.
“It is front and centre of inspectors’ minds, and we’re putting it into those routines of our practice to make sure there’s a place for it.”
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