10 Goals for Ofsted

I have just read a very interesting article from the Teaching Toolkit about steps that Ofsted could take to improve their monitoring within schools. You can read the article here http://bit.ly/2gctngH

Now of course everybody has their opinions regarding school inspections and there are those far more qualified to comment than I am. However, within the realms of recruitment and retention Ofsted inspections seem to be having an effect and not necessarily where you might expect. 

To an outsider you might expect that schools that perform badly with Ofsted struggle to recruit, whilst the best schools find it easier. In a lot of circumstances that is still true, however there does seem to be a trend emerging. 

I was speaking at a recruitment fair a couple of weeks ago to the Head of Recruitment at a large Academy chain and she told me that she will no longer put in an advert that a school is rated Outstanding by Ofsted. When I asked her why, she said that teachers we being put off because the standards and pressure was deemed by many teachers to be too intense. That is the school is outstanding the only way would be down and if they did not produce outstanding lessons to both internal and external inspectors in exactly the way they wanted, they would lose their jobs. 

I have heard similar things myself when speaking with teachers. I do think that there may be misconceptions from teachers when it comes to both under and over-performing schools. There are schools with terrible Ofsted reports that have been taken over with fantastic new SLTs but struggle to find new staff because of the previous reputation of the school. That is more common but we also work with Outstanding schools who have become outstanding through fantastic leadership, supportive staff and a wonderful ethos. 

They key is to do the research to get to the bottom of what a school is really like and how it reacts to Ofsted. That is what we will strive to do to help you make the right decision for you. Something tells me that this is a debate that will keep on rumbling.