Amanda Spielman was Ofsted’s chief inspector from 2017 to 2023 and previously chaired exams regulator Ofqual. She talks to Schools Week about her time in office …
Q: What are you most proud of?
Changing inspection to a model that really looks at the substance of education and the integrity with which it’s delivered.
I got so many letters and emails from people saying how transformative it had been. It changed how people were thinking and talking and made them really want to think about the core of education.
Q: What hasn’t gone as well with your reforms?
Governments continue to suck money out, there’s a massive real terms reduction [in Ofsted funding] so the [inspection] process gets ever tighter and thinner].
Using generalist inspectors was a government policy change 20 years ago. It was a mistake and it would be better to reverse it. It’s not possible within the constraints government sets to give people subject experts in everything. But now they are all equipped, at some level, to look underneath [into what schools are teaching.
Q: Did Ofsted have a pre-conceived view of what good curriculum looked like?
It’s not credible to have an inspectorate with no conception of what good is. Previously, inspectors brought their own conception of what was good. By making the conception of quality explicit through the subject research reviews and training for inspectors, we brought a higher level of consistency, which was one of the things people were always concerned about.
I’d rather be unpopular than say things I didn’t believe to be true
Q: Can you deliver reliable outcomes under the current system?
The greater the consequences that hang on inspection, the greater the sector expectation of reliability at those judgment points. But that’s not something government, in my time, has been comfortable acknowledging – that shrinking inspection has implications for reliability.
Q: Were inspections too much for smaller schools?
The default expectation for primary schools is that they teach the national curriculum. The difficulty we had was it sometimes felt as though people said “but because we’re small, we shouldn’t have to justify what we teach children beyond English and maths”.
But from the child’s point of view, you wouldn’t expect them to have had a much more limited experience just because the school happened to be small.
Q: Why do you think more people have lost confidence with Ofsted post-Covid?
Morale has dropped … suddenly the job became far, far harder. Inspection came to be seen as an unfair imposition on top of everything else, no matter how good the model was, or how careful and sensitive inspectors were.
Q: Is there anything you regret?
I really regret that, despite my efforts, I wasn’t able to talk to Julia Waters [sister of Ruth Perry, the Reading headteacher who killed herself after an inspection]. I deeply regret Ruth Perry’s death.
I do accept that the inspection contributed – at least in part because it was how she first learned of serious failings in her school, which so regrettably led to her fearing for her job and reputation.
From my first day I was conscious of the fear factor and all the changes I made were intended to reduce this as much as it was possible.
I regret how difficult the world finds it to talk about difficult choices that we cannot run away from
I also regret how difficult the world finds it to talk about difficult choices that we cannot run away from. That if we are to look after the interests of children in schools, there will be times when tough and difficult messages have to be given.
And I felt last year that there was a great reluctance to talk honestly about this tension and how best to address it. It will never be possible to smooth it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.
For example, where an inspection uncovers very serious failings … how is it possible to involve all the relevant people to make sure that there is support, but that changes that children need are made promptly? This really gets to the heart of the wider government regulation and academy policy: heads are told that decisions about their future will be made not by the people they work for, but by someone else. And they may not know for many months who that someone will be. It creates serious jeopardy. I understand why that’s so extraordinarily stressful.
My efforts to get government to recognise the full weight of that pressure, and to think about intelligent ways to manage and mitigate that, and improve the system, got no traction.
Q: Do you think the criticism Ofsted got was unfair?
People find it very hard to separate the message and the messenger. By default, the messenger [Ofsted] is assumed to be responsible for everything. I think Ruth Perry’s sister [talked about] the “disproportionate consequences”. And that chimes with what I’ve heard many times. But that is entirely outside Ofsted control.
Do I think it’s right that Ofsted should fudge or soften judgments and not say when things are not right for children if it thinks there’s any possibility that somebody could be upset by that? Of course, I don’t.
Q: Did you show enough empathy after Ruth Perry’s death?
We endeavoured to express all the regret, all the empathy, all the sadness that we felt. I was in a very difficult position where people wanted me to say that the inspection had been wrong, and yet I couldn’t without undermining a serious and competent inspector. All the reviews did not support that.
I wanted there to be more discussion around the whole conception of what government does when schools are failing, and whether and how to update this framework of intervention with academisation as the key lever.
When people say that I was antagonistic or confrontational, I ask them where? Because I don’t believe I ever was. I was scrupulous to avoid attention-grabbing rhetoric that upsets people so much.
Q: Would you have done anything differently?
I’d want to look again at communications. We did everything we could to be open and communicate honestly and appropriately. But it was clearly a case where there were people who would not have been satisfied with anything less than [me saying] “we got it totally wrong”.
Q: Why did it take a tragedy for change?
Ofsted is incredibly responsive, [but] this is where the unreality has often crept in: people want it somehow to be able to take away a fear of consequences. Only the people responsible for deciding what happens to schools can do that.
Ofsted is set an impossible task of removing a rational concern that sits entirely outside [of its remit]. The only way Ofsted can remove that anxiety would be to say that every school is good, without exception.
It’s a bit of a myth that Ofsted doesn’t listen. Within the constraints, I think we were as responsive as we could be.
Q: Do you think that’s happening now?
Anecdotally, I’m worried that inspectors don’t feel supported to make the tough calls that, from a child’s point of view, should be made. If the personal risk that they take in making those judgments is as high as it seems to be, it’s hard to see how you can attract good people to the job.
There’s a gap between the reality on the ground and the thing Ofsted is seen to represent: as the hated, heavy-consequences. The tinkering of what Ofsted does will not solve that, the government has to think long and hard about its policies.
Q: What did you learn about yourself?
That integrity matters. I’d rather be unpopular than say things I didn’t believe to be true. That’s important in a chief inspector. You can never hope to make everybody happy.
So much of the trouble I had came from the way the context had been changed by the ratcheting up of regulatory levers, particularly the two “requires improvement” [intervention] policy. That hugely increased anxiety about inspection, predictably, which was why I advised against it.
That made Ofsted’s job progressively harder. At school level, the government wanted to sustain a high-pressure, high-stakes accountability system. I did everything I could within those constraints to make inspection as constructive and supportive as it could be with, I believe, considerable success. But ultimately, if government turns up the thumb screws too far, people are going to scream.
