SCHOOLS that achieve good examination results but could do better will be issued with warning notices telling them they are “inadequate” and must improve, under reforms to Ofsted inspections announced yesterday.
Head teachers will be given a year to make progress or risk the prospect of being placed in “special measures”.
David Bell, the head of Ofsted, said that inspection periods would also be halved, from six to three years, for all schools. Heads would be given just two to five days’ notice of visits, instead of up to ten weeks, and inspectors would arrive unannounced where schools were causing concern. Mr Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, said that the changes represented the most radical overhaul of inspections since Ofsted was founded in 1992.
A new four-point scale will be introduced to rank schools, with one for “very good” and four for “inadequate”. The chief inspector made clear that schools with apparently good results would be caught in the last category as well as those considered to be failing.
Inspectors would return after 12 months to decide whether to renew or remove the notice. Schools that fail to improve risk being placed in “special measures”.
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Mr Bell said that the changes would enable Ofsted to make “a more direct contribution to school improvement”. Subject to parliamentary approval, the measures will take effect in the autumn.
The new grading regime opens up the prospect of parents being told that schools they thought were doing well are in fact causing concern. An Ofsted spokeswoman said that schools with good results would be issued with improvement notices if children were not making as much progress as they could. The notices will replace the present classifications of “serious weaknesses” and “under-achieving”.
Mr Bell set out the changes as part of a new “lighter-touch” inspection regime that he said would produce shorter, sharper assessments of standards. Reports will be published within three weeks of inspections, instead of up to five months later. Schools will be given greater responsibility for assessing their strengths and weaknesses before Ofsted visits. They will be required to keep an annual self-evaluation record for inspectors to study.
Inspection teams will be smaller and will visit schools for just two days instead of a week. They will not look at lessons in every subject, as they do now, but will instead rely on data about a school’s performance and observations of teachers at work.
As well as inspecting classroom standards, Ofsted will also be expected to judge how well a school is meeting the five outcomes for children set out in the Every Child Matters Green Paper.
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These are: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and achieving; making a productive contribution; and enjoying economic wellbeing. Ofsted was unable to say yesterday how a school might be considered to be improving a child’s economic wellbeing.
Reaction to the inspection reforms among teaching unions was mixed. David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said it supported shorter inspections based on a school’s self-evaluation but that two days’ notice of visits was “quite unacceptable”.
John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said: “The high-stakes nature of inspections has not changed. No matter how much the Government claims to trust schools, these changes do not reflect that trust.”