You couldn’t make it up!
So the school where we work in our “day jobs” was “Ofsted’ed” back in Autumn – I’ve written about it here -> part 1, part 2 and part 3.
To cut a long story short at the end of the inspection our leadership team were told that the “overall effectiveness” was outstanding. As a school that was previously (on two occasions – one of which was prior to academy conversion) judged as “requires improvement” there was a lot at stake. After the inspection, apart from allaying some fears when we were told that we were no longer “requires improvement” not a word was said until some time later when we were told that up until lunchtime on the previous Friday we had been judged as outstanding but the judgement had been downgraded to a “good” following the quality assurance process by Ofsted.
Well … you can only imagine how this felt.
Ofsted do make it clear in their school inspection handbook (ref: 150066) which sets out the arrangements for the feedback meeting to schools that the grade is provisional. It states that, ‘During this meeting, the lead inspector will ensure that the headteacher and governors are clear…that the grades are provisional and so may be subject to change as a result of quality assurance procedures or moderation…’
It still irks me that this can happen and me being me I can’t just let it go without rationalising the whole thing – so off went a freedom of information request to Ofsted asking them for details about how many schools had experienced changes to their judgements or sub-judgements for the period September 2014 to December 2015.
Today I received my response (only a week later than they were supposed to provide me with the information after I have had to chase them TWICE!). The information arrived on a spreadsheet – which has a small number of inspections on it – 18 in total!
So let’s look at how this is broken down:
Of the 18 schools that had some part of the judgement changed only 7 involved a change in the Overall Effectiveness (the school where we work is one of these!):
- 3 went from requires improvement to good (so I can’t imagine they feel a reason to complain!)
- 1 went from Good to requires improvement
- 1 went from requires improvement to inadequate
- 1 went from Outstanding to Good (this HAS to be us!)
- 1 went from “likely to meet relevant standards” to “unlikely to meet relevant standard”.
The other 11 schools had sub-judgements changed but not their overall grade. Remember that “Teaching and Learning” is a limiting factor and so unless that changed it won’t affect their overall judgement and it obviously didn’t.
You really couldn’t have made this up but at least we now know that we are one of only 4 schools that a change in judgement following quality assurance meant a downgrade. Does it make any difference? Not really no. Then again getting any form of judgement from Ofsted isn’t the validation I personally look for.
Interestingly I am of the understanding that during the QA process Ofsted informed us that there was insufficient evidence collected or documented to say that the teaching & learning was outstanding (I don’t know the in’s and outs and to be frank it’s done now) so I find it fascinating that on the 6th January Ofsted published a document entitled “Gathering additional evidence to secure and incomplete inspection: Ofsted-related prototcol” (catchy title I’m sure you’ll agree!) and having read it cover to cover I have to ask myself if its publication was as a result of our inspection debacle (remember my words, my blog, my opinion!).
This blog post means that the matter is well and truly put to bed for me. We woz robbed!
