Today marks the last day in office de facto of Amanda Spielman, who has been the longest serving  Chief Inspector of Schools since Ofsted’s foundation in 1992. She is to be replaced by Sir Martin Oliver, who has a formidable in tray to cope with. Let us consider the problems that face him:

1.  On Spielman’s own admission Ofsted is currently completely discredited. It is difficult to argue with this assessment given that Ofsted has just been declared guilty of lying to an inquest, has been accused of falsifying reports, and has been openly colluding with the Department for Education to further their bizarre agenda of enforced academisation (which seems to have been the real reason why Caversham primary school was graded inadequate and therefore for the suicide of Ruth Perry). As long as Ofsted is seen as first of all totally unreliable and secondly as a tool of the Department for Education it is not going to have any credibility whatsoever.
2. The second major problem facing him is an issue of personnel. It is not only Amanda Spielman who is leaving, but also chris russell the director of education. Out of the seven most senior officials at Ofsted three have left in the past four months. Russell is being replaced by his own deputy ostensibly to ensure continuity. However, with due respect to Lee Owston the mess that Chris Russell has made of things suggests that they would have been better off making a clean break. It will be urgently necessary for the unfortunate individuals taking over to assert not only their independence but their willingness to learn.
3. Until this week – and I mean literally this week – they had no proper safeguarding procedures. The only way to raise a safeguarding concern about an OFSTED inspector was for the headteacher of the school in question to raise a concern with the lead inspector. This could only be done during an actual inspection so if a child has subsequently raised a concern about the aforesaid Inspector it would be ignored. This was even assuming that the report would be registered which usually it was not. If the concern was about the lead inspector the responsibility of dealing with any safeguarding breach remained with the lead inspector. Not unexpectedly, there are very few reports logged by OFSTED of lead inspectors committing safeguarding breaches, even though anecdotally there is one lead inspector in the west midlands who behaves so inappropriately that he has been nicknamed ‘Timmy Savile.’ If a school had a system whereby the only person you could report a safeguarding concern about the head to was the head, Ofsted would (quite rightly) say that it was an inadequate system. The fact that OFSTED do not seem to think that this applies to them is possibly the most worrying thing about their entire insouciance in recent weeks. The opening of a helpline to report lead inspectors is a start, but not a sufficiency. Until it is open to all staff and parents at a school to phone this hotline to report any concerns they may have, bypassing head teachers whose careers depend on not upsetting the lead inspector, it is completely worthless.
4. On top of this, there appeared to be a very serious concerns around training in Ofsted itself. In a recent employment tribunal, an inspector who was found to have fondled the hair over the young boy was ruled to have been unlawfully dismissed by Ofsted because they had never explained to him that Ofsted has a ‘no touching’ policy. Since this is possibly the most basic part of safeguarding training imaginable it must be assumed that no safeguarding training is therefore taking place at all (and that would be borne out by the fact that Spielman herself did not know what safeguarding was or when it should be applied, extraordinary though that statement is). This appears to be of a piece with them offering no training to their inspectors on how to handle distressed staff or children, despite the claims to the contrary made at ruth perry’s inquest which the coroner dismissed in the most cutting terms, and also with their constant failure to manage GDPR breaches appropriately, to the extent that staff have had to be warned in a number of schools not to allow Ofsted inspectors to talk to them about the children in front of other children and if they try to throw them out of the room. There is also every reason to doubt that OFSTED are maintaining appropriate safeguarding checks on their stuff, as they do not appear to be routinely checking them through the update service and instead rely on inspectors to tell them if there have been any concerns raised outside their roles as an Ofsted inspector. Since I have the personal misfortune to know an inspector based in Staffordshire who was fired from a previous job for racially abusing a colleague yet continues to work as an Ofsted inspector it is not difficult to imagine this is simply not happening.
5. The curriculum framework which was introduced in 2016 and is supposed to be one of the great successes of Spielman’s tenure may politely be characterised as the most unmitigated fiasco since Hannibal ordered his elephants to charge at the Battle of Zama. The issue with this framework is that in both its dogmatic insistence on certain types of teaching, and in its equally bizarre insistence that a school is a school is a school and therefore using the same criteria to judge pupil referral units like DixieDean’s and girls’ grammar schools like the one I taught in in Gloucester long ago, it is not only setting schools up to fail for no fault of their own but also making it much much harder for children to learn if they do not fit into the neat boxes that exist in the tidy minds of Ofsted’s management. Any system that makes it harder for children to learn and in particular to learn to read is to my mind a bad system. It is also not popular with teachers – the fact that Spielman thinks it is is yet one more example of her boundless capacity for self delusion – and because of its inability to flex is making very minor matters into very much more serious ones with in many cases unfortunate consequences. (I am not including Caversham in this for the simple reason that it seems very unlikely that anything at all was in fact wrong there, and it was failed on orders from the DfE not from a realistic appraisal based on any form of framework.)
6. Not coincidentally, Ofsted is under enormous pressure from politicians and from teaching unions and has been the target of several reports in the last few weeks with more to come out. We had obviously the coroner’s report on Ruth Perry, plus Jim Knight’s NEU-funded report recommended the total abolition of the inspection system. Even Sam Freedman, who as a senior adviser to Michael Gove is responsible for many of the disasters engulfing OFSTED, has weighed in with a typically pompous report where he essentially blames all the mistakes on everyone but himself. Labour has been talking about abolishing the current one word system or summary and replacing it with a report card.

So what does the unfortunate Sir Martin Oliver have to do? Well, the honest answer is I have no idea. It is very difficult indeed to see how Ofsted can recover from the disasters that have been wrought in the last five or six years. At the very least, however, he needs to assert his independence and tell the DfE that he is no longer running a prefect service for them.

It is therefore to say the least concerning that one of his first appointments- if indeed it is his appointment rather than one that has been forced on him- is of Rory Gribbell, a special adviser at the Department for Education who despite being their senior education specialist for a number of years now and having worked closely with Dominic Cummings, Rishi Sunak and Nick Gibb, has never actually worked as a teacher (his experience being two years on the notorious TeachFirst programme). Such a person, deeply imbued with the ethos of the DfE, whom he describes as ‘brilliant people,’ is the worst imaginable appointment to help Ofsted recover its soul.

Oliver himself, although he has a highly successful background as a head teacher and later as the chief of an Academy chain, has never actually worked as an inspector. It is not hard to imagine that he will find navigating OFSTED extremely difficult as a result.

 Those who say that we need to get rid of inspections altogether in our schools are misguided. Jim Knight’s report suggesting that teachers should go for self evaluation is nonsensical on 2 levels. First of all, any half decent teacher always does self evaluation on every single lesson they teach and every single action they take. If they don’t bother doing that they’re probably not a very good teacher.

So we would allow not very good teachers to get away with it and we would allow good teachers to carry on doing what they’re doing but we would offer them no guidance or support on where they make mistakes (and even the most brilliant people can make mistakes from time to time). Secondly, no organisation epitomises the pitfalls of self evaluation better than Ofsted. It has effectively been unregulated for 15 years and the result is that it has fallen into a pit of arrogance and stupidity that any or reasonably competent oversight body- or indeed, a totally incompetent oversight body like the DfE- would have spotted and warned it away from. Ofsted  itself is frankly of limited importance in this regard because of its small size but the mass education of our children is not.

 All of this has happened on the watch of many education secretaries. However, Gillian Keegan has known for nearly a year about the shortcomings of Ofsted and has batted away every single inquiry with the words that Ofsted is an independent body that she has no control over.

This doesn’t fool any teacher in the land and nor did it fool the coroner, to the extent that Keegan did in the aftermath of the inquest admit that she would have to pay attention to the prevention of death report. She has also concealed reports on  RAAC  and overseen a disaster in school budgets where they were advised they were getting a 25% higher increase than was in fact the case.

If Oliver attempts a cleansing of the Augean stables she is very much in the firing line. If he does not, and there is a further major scandal as seems very probable given the ramshackle state of Ofsted, she’ll be in an even worse mess. The election is likely to be in May. I give her a 50% chance of making it in office.

Y Doethur

Y Doethur (uh DOY theer) is a former teacher, lecturer and would be considered by Spielman to be a school leader. He’s now a freelance educational consultant with clients across the globe from California to New Zealand via China and even including the deepest, darkest recesses of Milton Keynes.