Ofsted has enlisted the help of a national children’s charity and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) as it develops a new “criterion” for inclusion in the new inspection report cards.
Sir Martyn Oliver, the chief inspector, announced this week that inspections from next September will have an increased focus on how schools support disadvantaged pupils.
The National Children’s Bureau (NCB) has been awarded a £90,000 seven-month contract to “conceptualise vulnerability and inclusion for Ofsted”.
Schools Week understands it will help Ofsted understand the evidence for how best to support vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils. The EEF is also involved in that work, it is understood.
Ofsted said the research would “help us develop an evidence-led conceptualisation of vulnerability and inclusion that we can apply to our inspection and regulatory work”.
Leaders this week welcomed the focus on inclusion, but warned against creating “perverse incentives” for schools.
The inspectorate has provided little detail so far on what metrics it will use to judge inclusion, but it will “evaluate whether schools are providing high-quality support for disadvantaged and vulnerable children”.
Oliver told Schools Week assessing inclusion could involve looking at how well schools used pupil premium funding, and warned he would “grade down” schools that refused to take children with SEND or off-rolled them.
The watchdog will consult on the new criterion in January.
Data problems
Jonny Uttley, the chief executive of The Education Alliance, said it was a “welcome step forward” but “the concern at the moment … would be that we must make sure that we don’t introduce a load of new perverse incentives and we place data in its real context”.
Gary Aubin, a SEND consultant, said there was a “real danger of perverse incentives, for example schools to stay exactly at national averages for SEND support levels irrespective of their cohort, or for heads to ask SENCOs to become ‘EHCP machines’ rather than achieve balance in their role.”
The government hit a wall with this when, under SEND reforms, it pledged to publish contextual information alongside performance data to “make it easier to recognise schools” that were “doing well for children with SEND”.
But the proposals had “mixed feedback”, with similar concerns it could “risk generating perverse incentives”. It was then dropped.
Basic data on how many EHCP pupils a school has is also problematic. A low number could mean a school offers effective, early support and a statutory plan isn’t needed.
FFT Education Datalab previously created an inclusion measure, which compared EHCPs and disadvantaged pupils to the local area, how much mobility there was in year 9 and 10 compared with similar schools, and absence for vulnerable pupils.
Dave Thomson, chief statistician, said: “Maybe the best that Ofsted can do is create a set of measures, but use it to ask questions rather than arrive at definitive statements about inclusion.”
Reviews to ‘call out’ schools put pupils off
To “complement” the focus on inclusion, the watchdog will also carry out annual safeguarding, attendance and off-rolling reviews to “call out schools that illegally or unethically put children off a school before they even apply”.
Aubin suggested Ofsted look at a school’s responses to EHCP consultations by local authorities, with inspectors asking parents for their views.
Nick Harrison, the chief executive of the Sutton Trust, said schools should be assessed on whether they adequately reflected their local communities, and “be held accountable for their admissions’ codes and how those policies impact on the socio-economic mix of their pupils”.
Time pressures may be ‘challenging’
The inspectorate will also not “penalise schools that use suspensions and exclusions legitimately” and “focus on whether behaviour policies and practice are appropriate”.
But Tom Richmond, a director at the EDSK think tank, said time pressure meant that a deep dive into the effectiveness of every school’s support mechanisms would be “particularly challenging” for inspectors.
Ofsted pledged to recruit more inspectors from the alternative provision and special school sectors and improve training through the new “Ofsted Academy”.
It is also considering if special schools need distinct “rubrics”, a set of criteria inspectors use to assess the provision in mainstream schools.
Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission are also reviewing the current area SEND inspection framework, launched in January 2023.
Monitoring inspections will be halted while the review is taking place.
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