Zachary Marsh: We shouldn’t apologise for holding schools to account

Ofsted needs reform but undermining accountability is not the answer

Ofsted has had a difficult time of late. The release of two reports, one from the NEU and the other the IPPR, have called into question the institution’s credibility within the education sector. Both have lashed out at Ofsted’s single-word judgements. Worse still, they attacked the suitability of high-stakes inspection altogether. To abandon this central tenet of Ofsted’s role would be a grave disservice to our education system and the families and children it serves.

Both reports wrote damningly of the anxiety Ofsted inspection sparks among educators and the lack of focus on improvement in Ofsted’s work. Yet as the current chief inspector Amanda Spielman noted in her annual report, this unfairly misreads Ofsted’s role. Ofsted’s job is to measure performance, not to drive improvements. Ofsted’s critics appear fundamentally hostile to that goal. The NEU has been on a long-term crusade to erode accountability in education. To them, Ofsted is a tool for marketisation, guiding parental school choice and forcing schools to compete on quality.

Yet accountability serves a vital role. Winston Churchill said it best in 1939; “criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.” The government, parents, communities, and schools themselves have the right to understand how our schools perform. Accountability works. International evidence shows that high stakes testing or inspection is a compelling motivator for school reform. Why should we abandon such a powerful tool for raising school standards?

At their core these criticisms of Ofsted lack logical coherence. It would be unacceptable to refuse to identify failing schools purely to preserve the morale of their teachers. It is perverse to suggest that because Ofsted inspections routinely find the same schools inadequate, the problem is the inspectorate and not the long-term failings of the schools themselves. The NEU’s proposed solution, where Ofsted would be removed from school inspection altogether, would effectively see school’s marking their own homework. The only beneficiaries would be failing schools cocooned in their own ignorance. The victims would be thousands of children thrust unprepared into the workplace and hamstrung from the get-go.

Anyone who has worked in education will acknowledge that the quality of senior leadership often makes or breaks a school. It is only right that Ofsted holds headteachers accountable for the policies they pursue within their mini-fiefdoms. In the private sector CEOs rise and fall based on stock price and shareholder scrutiny. Similarly, educational leaders have no right to be insulated from the consequences of their actions. However unpopular it makes them, Ofsted ensures the buck stops there. A system that rewards exceptional headteachers whilst terminating failing leadership should be valued precisely for the positive pressure it exerts.

A particular target of recent Ofsted criticism has been its use of single-word judgements. This critique is not without merit – of course, no such statement can truly encapsulate a dynamic school environment. Yet the alternative may well be worse. The key advantage of single word judgements is that they are simplistic and easily interpreted, satisfying demand from parents for guidance on school choice. 84% of parents surveyed in 2021 found reports to be useful. Lengthy narrative reports, or a lack of public-facing guidance altogether, risks exacerbating educational inequality. Disadvantaged families, time-poor and without the same social and cultural connections as their middle-class counterparts, are likely to be the losers from a policy where judgements are more subtle and parents are forced to dig deeper to investigate school quality for themselves.

None of this means that Ofsted does not need reform. Yet the focus needs to be on enabling Ofsted to do its work more thoroughly and credibly, rather than reforming its purpose. Concerns that Ofsted does not stay long enough to properly understand a school and that the process unfairly reflects the interests of individual inspectors need to be addressed. Ofsted requires the resources to expand its number of inspectors and improve training to build greater consistency. Longer inspections with better qualified inspectors should make schools feel they have received a fairer hearing. This should also reduce their ability to game the inspection system, with less room to hide.

The government should ensure Ofsted’s inspection framework is more consistent. Much of the stress generated by Ofsted within the teaching profession stems from a not-unreasonable exasperation that the goalposts always seem to be moving. Curriculum was in and attainment out under Spielman – her successor looks set to reverse this. Schools have a right to know for several years what report card they will be measured against, as opposed to drafting and redrafting curriculum and policies in response to each new blast of Ofsted guidance. More certainty would hopefully include a greater role for progress 8 ‘value-added’ scores, better meeting parental demand for accurate information on school impact on attainment and levelling the playing field for excellent schools held back in league tables by challenging and deprived cohorts.

Ofsted is not without its flaws. But this recent spate of criticism, particularly from the NEU, employs reasonable critiques to disguise a more insidious agenda that believes education and educators ought to effectively be left unaccountable to the parents, communities, and children they serve. Conservatives must offer full-throated resistance to this agenda. Weakening Ofsted accountability serves only those seeking to avoid it altogether – and risks undoing a proud legacy of Conservative educational improvement.

Zachary Marsh is a graduate of the Teach First programme and is now a Masters student at the LSE studying Social and Public Policy.