Taking Control 2

How to prepare for Ofsted under the education inspection framework

Paul Garvey

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785834950
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Written by Paul Garvey, Taking Control 2: How to prepare for Ofsted under the education inspection framework equips teachers, subject leaders and school leaders with the tools and know-how to enable them to prepare for their next inspection with confidence.
Distilled from Paul's 11 years' experience as an Ofsted inspector, this practical handbook builds on its predecessor Taking Control to help your school ready itself for inspection under the 2019 education inspection framework (EIF).
It features many first-hand experiences of inspection under the updated EIF and highlights the methodology of inspection - including 'deep dives' and the 90-minute phone call - combined with top tips to ensure you get the best out of the assessments.
Paul also provides a range of effective dialogic tools to help you compile a persuasive self-evaluation form (SEF) in order to convince the inspection team of the true quality of your school's provision and ensure that you're awarded the deserved grade.
The book will alleviate some of the worries surrounding inspection, helping schools to avoid piling unnecessary work onto staff, and encourages leaders to feel much more confident about the process. It also looks at inspection from an inspector's point of view - sharing their methodology pre, during and post inspection - and includes a wealth of experiences from both primary and secondary schools of actual inspections under the 2019 framework.
Furthermore, Paul furnishes his guidance with highlighted references to paragraphs and pages in the section 5 and section 8 handbooks, making it easier for you investigate the detail further, should you need to do so.
Suitable for head teachers, senior leadership team members, subject leaders, classroom teachers, governors and all stakeholders in mainstream schools in England.

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CHAPTER 1

INSPECTION PREPARATION

1.1. Be a Great School

First and foremost: be a great school. Here, I agree with Ofsted completely. If your school is a great school, you have no need to worry about Ofsted and absolutely no need to do anything extra to prepare, even for this framework. Your curriculum will stand and your leaders will be able to speak with confidence in deep dives. If this is you, please pass this book on to a school that may need it. Schools such as yours just need to carry on doing what they are doing and continuing to improve.

I know of a few schools which did not complete a self-evaluation under the previous framework. They had no need. Instead, they had a great school with excellent data to equip them with the confidence that an inspection team couldn’t miss that they do things in an excellent way. Some schools may feel that way under this framework too, and good luck to them. What those schools do is nothing short of remarkable, year after year after year. There is no set pattern or format that makes them remarkable; just a vision of excellence which brings everyone on board and with the leadership to achieve a common purpose – excellent outcomes, in the widest of senses, for their pupils. That vision and common purpose leads to large and small comprehensives (with or without sixth forms) being excellent; nursery, infant, junior and primary schools being excellent; very traditional schools being excellent; Montessori schools being excellent; grammar and Steiner schools being excellent. There are examples of excellence in every type and phase of school.

There is #nobestwayoverall here (my Twitter hashtag in which I fully believe). With great vision and purpose, all schools have the potential to be excellent. In all these schools (and classrooms) there is just excellent 18leadership and a vision that fits the context of the school to a T. If that is you, please put this book down and do something more worthwhile. You don’t need my help: you are already firmly in control!

Please just be ethical in your approach. If not, we can end up with this:

So, school improvement, in 5.

1. Take a Grade 4 school by forced academisation.

2. Impose zero tolerance.

3. Exclude all kids who can’t cope (all the poorer behaved ones you don’t want).

4. Off roll to home ed others in Y11.

5. Dissuade parents of SEND.

Hey presto!1

Behaviour quickly shapes up and results, both short term and long term, are almost certain to be better than they would have been. It’s a seductive method of school improvement, but is it ethical?

Better published results may produce rapid school improvement, but what about the pupils who are no longer there and would have stayed to take GCSEs under a more inclusive regime? What about their families? Or other schools that must pick up the pieces? Or the effect on the targeted pupils’ mental health? Or increases in crime in local communities as the security of a caring school is gone from those young people’s lives? There are serious questions to be answered by schools and trusts which pursue this route of rapid school improvement. Real school improvement for all pupils – holding fast to the faded but moral tenet of every child matters – takes time, and the inspectorate and government should recognise that and grant more time to schools in challenging circumstances and their head teachers.

Most of these schools have maintained excellence for a number of years and continue to be outstanding. But many of them have not been inspected for nearly 15 years and over 1,000 have not been inspected 19for over a decade.2 I believe that this exemption is an anachronism that Ofsted must address. Although many of these grade 1 schools continue to be excellent, others may be developing problems that are not easily (or yet) revealed in their IDSR or known to parents. If there is no inspection of these schools, who would know before a crisis hits? It appears that outstanding schools will now be included in regular inspections from September 2020.

It is my personal belief that, if we must have Ofsted, all schools should be inspected regularly. I also believe that the outstanding grade should be removed from the Ofsted handbook. In my view, schools should be judged to be either providing a good education or not. Parents’ perceptions of what is an outstanding school are often very different to the outstanding criteria set out in the handbook. If a school is judged to be providing a good standard of education, then let’s allow parents to choose their school based on the information the school provides. They will have the security of Ofsted’s stamp of approval, without the worry or perception that, even if a school is ‘good’, it could somehow still be quite a way from being ‘good enough’. But, even so, that school may still turn out to be perfect for their child.

Schools also know that an outstanding badge will exempt them from inspection, as long as their pupils’ outcomes remain pretty good and they have no major safeguarding issues that Ofsted judge to be ‘qualifying concerns’. Such concerns are down to Ofsted to decide. There are no detailed published criteria, yet, for them. A qualifying concern would cause senior HMI to send in an inspection team.

Notwithstanding my own objections to the grade of outstanding or, indeed, the continuation of Ofsted, I am a realist. Ofsted are unlikely to disappear overnight and the badge of outstanding currently confers significant weight in MAT discussions. Hence, despite any objections to the whole process, or parts thereof, that you or I may have, this is a very good reason to be inspection-persuasive if you are a grade 2 or grade 1 cusp school. Taking Control 2 will help schools in your position.

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1.2. Progress Since Your Last Inspection

Immediately following your inspection, ensure that you address what your inspection team asked of you. No matter what grade you received, those ‘What does the school need to do to improve further?’ points may come back to haunt you if you are not seen to have acted on them or if you cannot show that the school has improved. Even if you are a grade 2 school and were inspected five years ago, it would not be sensible to think that you can safely ignore these concerns. You can’t.

I have to mention that you may find some silliness in certain ‘points for improvement’ from around five years ago. They derive from inspectors being asked to be time specific about improvement points with short time limits. We were requested to ask schools to make improvements in approximately 12–18 months. It was supposed to provide an exhortation from Ofsted that improvements should be rapid. Unfortunately, it led to the farcical situation where inspectors were writing 18-month timescales for improvement for good schools that were not going to be inspected for at least three years, and sometimes five! (This has now been changed to approximately four years.) Who would monitor the improvement (or not) at the end of the written timescale? You can safely ignore those frankly daft time limits, but you can’t ignore the improvement points.

I will detail the ways in which improvement can be demonstrated throughout the book, but the points for improvement from your previous inspection need to be explained fully under a subheading in your self-evaluation. If your SEF is convincing and you can show that improvement is clear, it is highly unlikely that your HMI/Ofsted inspector will make them an area for detailed exploration. You may not even be asked about them. There will be other inspection-trail, curriculum-based fish for your inspector(s) to fry. However, if you skip over them, then you may find that you are suddenly having to scramble around for evidence to show that improvement has happened and laying yourself open to an issue that could cost you.

This is where your previous lead inspector can have been at his or her best. If you are a grade 3 or grade 4 school, the points for improvement (perhaps with some discussion) will have been set by your inspection team. They are often plentiful, often too plentiful; their number would 21have been determined by the writing expectations and quality assurance process. Your lead inspector will have known that any criticism of the school in the main body of the report would have to be followed up in a point for improvement, and as grade 3 and grade 4 schools often have a range of poorer areas, there may be a plethora of points for improvement.

However, if you were a grade 2 school, you (or the head teacher at the time) may well have been able to work with the lead inspector to formulate areas for improvement that were most useful to the school. This excellent approach was used by many leads. I did, and I confess that I often exchanged next-day emails with head teachers of schools I had just inspected as good or outstanding to ensure the correct wording on areas for improvement. I often found them very hard to formulate at the end of the second day when I was usually shattered and my brain was turning to mush. If your lead inspector worked with you in this way, improvements in these areas ought to be easy to evidence, as they will have been areas in which you knew you needed to improve.

If you are a grade 4 school, fight against forced academisation with everything you have got, and good luck. It’s not easy but it is possible. By April 2019, 33 academy orders had been overturned in the previous three years.3

If you are not ‘rebrokered’ (Ofsted’s scare quotes, not mine, in the section 8 handbook) via an academy order from the secretary of state for education, you will be subject to monitoring visits and reinspected within 30 months (para. 150, p. 37, S8). During this time, any HMI monitoring visits will assess your progress against the improvements asked for during your inspection. You must target your work towards these. Escaping fr...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Inspection Preparation
• 2: SEF Writing
• 3: An Inspector’s Inspection – Inspection Methodology
• 4: A School’s Inspection
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1: Primary Self-Evaluation Tool
• Appendix 2: Secondary Self-Evaluation Tool
• References
• Copyright
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