OFSTED Inspections

The Early Experience

Janet Ouston, Peter Earley, Brian Fidler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351385978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The national programme of four-yearly school inspections was introduced in 1993, based on common criteria set out in OFSTED's Handbook for the Inspection of Schools. Revised guidelines were introduced in February 1996, reflecting the lessons learned, and this book, originally published in 1996 articulates ideas that would have informed these revisions, including short essays by the Secretary of State for Education and Employment and the Education spokesmen of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

Registered inspectors, teachers, researchers, parents, school governors, policy analysts and policy makers all offer their experience of the strengths, weaknesses and outcomes of the OFSTED inspection process.

The book is a companion to Improvement through Inspection? – Complementary Approaches to School Development by the same Editors, published and now reissued simultaneously.

Part One: OFSTED Inspections

Chapter One
The Early Experience of OFSTED

by Vin Davis

In this review of the Office for Standards in Education's (OFSTED) first two years it seemed appropriate that OFSTED should itself have an opportunity to put the new inspection system in context. The first years of the new system have seen a rise in OFSTED's critical profile and, hopefully, a growth in public understanding of its functions and activities. This chapter looks in detail at OFSTED's role in the inspection process and examines the ways in which it has sought to improve the system.

The Office for Standards in Education was established as a new government department in September 1992; its general purpose was to improve standards of achievement and quality of education through regular independent inspection, public reporting and informed advice to ministers. OFSTED took over responsibility for monitoring inspection of schools from the LEAs. Until then LEA inspections had tended to be variable in coverage, both over time and geographically, and the absence of national benchmarking resulted in some inconsistency. Responsibility for the four-year inspection cycle lies with the Secretary of State; OFSTED's role is to regulate and manage an efficient school inspection system and to plan for its future. Part of its brief was that all schools in England should be inspected within four years.

Under the new system, OFSTED does not employ its inspectors, but contracts them by tender. Inspectors are required to make judgements on four main areas:

• the quality of education provided;
• the quality of standards achieved;
• the efficient management of the school's financial arrangements;
• the spiritual, moral and cultural development of pupils.

In setting up the system, OFSTED had the following imperatives in mind:

• the importance of national consistency;
• the importance of supporting schools' action and development planning;
• the importance of judging standards and quality at all levels of teaching and learning.

It was for this reason that a common Framework (OFSTED 1994b) was established by statute and supported by a Handbook for Inspection (OFSTED 1994a). The Framework provides a clear and comprehensive set of criteria which is intended to establish the optimum in consistency and objectivity. The focus of inspection is the child in the classroom; the Framework enables inspectors to look at standards of provision, standards of pupil achievement and other contributory factors in any type of school with this in mind.

Some critics of the OFSTED inspection model argue that an identical set of observations and a common Framework cannot guarantee that inspectors will always be able to agree on the quality of a lesson. However, benchmarking, training, monitoring, regular updating of the Framework, and regular changes in inspection teams all help to promote consistency; they also ensure that there are more checks on the validity and reliability of judgements under the new system than at any time in England's 150 year history of statutory school inspection.

OFSTED is concerned to ensure that inspection processes are consistent, reliable and intelligible. But in the drive towards these goals it is important that the less measurable or more creative aspects of education are not unwittingly filtered out. As Her Majesty's Chief Inspector (HMCI) stated in his Annual Report (OFSTED 1995a), 'if inspection is perceived as imposing uniformity, discouraging initiative or stifling imagination, its capacity to bring about improvement will be undermined.'

An OFSTED inspection report offers the school an analysis of what is working and what is not working; it is the school's report, for the school to use in whatever way it sees fit. Post-inspection action may be required, but the form of that action is not prescribed. It is the responsibility of the head teacher and governing body to act on the recommendations of the report, with the help of the LEA if appropriate. It is not part of OFSTED's responsibility to provide post-inspection support.

Some schools find it challenging to improve themselves - they need support from a variety of external sources. It is not uncommon for OFSTED to be told that improvement through inspection will not work unless inspection is accompanied by advice, that inspectors need to engage in discussion with teachers; but the regulations which govern inspection do not require inspectors to give advice or to justify their judgements to schools. It is for the school to decide how it might best act upon inspection findings, drawing on the expertise of others where appropriate.

The inspection system produces a very great deal of information about education in England. Around 1,000 inspections in 1993/94 and 6,000 each year in the future provide a valuable resource enabling national characteristics to be established and schools to be compared like with like. OFSTED has designed a central database system - the Education Information System (EIS) - to collate the output from these inspections. The database has two components:

• the text of all inspection reports, records of inspection evidence, subject summary forms, lesson observation forms, and supplementary evidence forms;
• numerical and other coded data, including subject information, the head teacher's form, and judgement assessments.

Data from other sources, such as the annual DFEE Form 7 school census and the public examination performance tables, is collated with EIS data.

Reports from inspections provide a 'snapshot' view of a large sample of schools, but they cannot provide all the detailed evidence necessary for HMCI to give advice on particular issues. Data from inspections are therefore supplemented by evidence from more specifically focused inspection of schools by Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools (HMI); taken together the two sources of information put OFSTED in a strong position to comment on the quality of education provided in schools and to suggest ways of improving it.

Under the Education (Schools) Act 1992, HMCI also has a duty to review the standards of independent inspections and reports made by registered inspectors (RgIs). In order to fulfil this duty, HMCI arranged for inspections to be monitored by HMI, the professional staff of OFSTED. During the first year of independent inspections of secondary schools, HMI monitoring has taken two forms: visits to schools to observe the conduct of inspections, and checks on inspection reports. Follow-up inspections of some of the schools are also an important part of this process. HMI assessment of RgI inspections helps to throw light on the strengths of inspection practice and to suggest areas for further development for individual Rgls and for the whole system.

It is too soon to know whether the OFSTED inspection system is successful. Monitoring at many levels suggests that, overall, the new system has made a promising start. Any flaws are understandable given the difficulty of establishing, in a short period of time, an inspection system based on independent RgIs all working to a common set of criteria and procedures. The way in which Rgls have conducted their inspections has generally been of a high standard. However, some inspection reports do not provide such clear and informative evaluation and are less well written; good grammar is less important than clear and informative evaluation. OFSTED has given priority to following up Rgls who demonstrate serious weaknesses in their management of an inspection or in the writing of their report. However, statistics on Rgls monitored more than once show that 78 per cent have either maintained high standards of inspection or improved on their earlier performance.

RgIs are drawing on their early experiences to improve inspections and act on HMI comments on their performance. No one should underestimate the challenge presented by introducing a national system of independent inspection on this scale. Neither OFSTED nor the independent inspectors would claim that the system is perfect, but the experience of the early years has shown what can be achieved and already areas for further improvement have been identified (for example, the clarity and precision of evaluation in written reports).

In his report (OFSTED 1995a) on the quality and service of inspection 1993/94, HMCI reviewed the work of OFSTED in regulating and managing the new school inspection system and planning for the future. He concluded that the year 1993/94 may well prove to have been a turningpoint in the implementation of the Government's educational reforms. Education is now recognised as too important and too expensive a public service for schools not to be accountable to the local communities they serve.

In its second year of existence OFSTED has concentrated on issues of quality and service and on trying to meet its inspection targets. A number of initiatives have been introduced to make the inspection system in OFSTED and in schools more effective by:

• providing high quality advice at the national education level to inform policy development and evaluate the effects of policy;
• examining ways in which the inspection process can support particular schools in their work;
• focusing inspection on the individual class or lesson, the critical area for achieving significant change.

The achievement of a four-year cycle of school inspection, a major part of OFSTED's remit, was strongly reaffirmed by the Secretary of State in her North of England speech this year. To this end, OFSTED launched its Additional Inspector (AI) initiative to overcome the shortfall in the inspection cycle of primary and special schools by appointing suitably qualified individuals as AIs in OFSTED's primary and secondary school inspection programme. After training and induction, in which they will work alongside HMIs, AIs will take part in and lead inspection teams. AI posts, offered either as a fixed term contract or as a secondment normally lasting for a year, are considered to be particularly suitable for head teachers and deputy head teachers and will provide valued professional development opportunities.

In the coming year, OFSTED intends to carry out a review of its second round of inspection and revise its inspection strategies accordingly. Any such revision would be designed to:

• make inspection more manageable for inspectors;
• make inspection more acceptable and useful to schools;
• contribute more effectively to schools' strategies for sustained improvement;
• improve evaluation and reporting.

OFSTED is also looking at ways of reducing the bureaucracy of inspection. The overall aim is to ensure that inspection will, in future, provide clear and unequivocal evaluation for parents and for the school without being burdensome and stressful for all involved, especially for teachers and inspectors. A new Framework for Inspection has been developed after wide consultation and, to support the Framework, a new Handbook in three versions, for primary, secondary and special school inspections, will provide phase-specific guidance. Inspection reports will also take greater account of trends in, and the school's own strategies for, improvement.

Another important aspect of OFSTED's work is the production of inspection 'tools' to assist RgIs in undertaking their work. The most important tool for this purpose is the Pre-Inspection Context and School Indicator (PICSI) report. PICSIs have been continually updated and improved since they were first introduced. Currently, the results of the research published as Assessing School Effectiveness (OFSTED 1994c) are being incorporated into the PICSI.

OFSTED is also continuing to develop its research and development programme. The EIS database now contains very extensive information. It is being increasingly used to throw light on key questions of educational effectiveness and efficiency, such as the links between class size and quality of teaching, and between resources and outputs. Most of this work is being undertaken by OFSTED itself, but use of the EIS database by outside researchers is also being established.

OFSTED has also decided to embark on a series of research reviews, five of which were commissioned from external researchers in 1994/95, on maths teaching, achievement by minority ethnic pupils, effective learning styles and strategies, international comparisons, and school effectiveness research. A good deal of educational research is written for other researchers and fails to inform and guide the decisions of practising teachers; the aim of the OFSTED reviews is to put research findings directly into the hands of teachers.

Increased inspection activity has placed greater emphasis on research directly related to inspection issues. Thus there is scope for research into the impact of inspection on school improvement. OFSTED is cooperating with members of the research community in developing and testing a range of theories of school inspection which we intend to feed back into thinking on the best design for inspection and the criteria which are applied during inspection.

Looking forward, OFSTED is likely to continue to commission a number of reviews of research in key areas. Among the research projects likely to be developed are work on education of particular groups of pupils, such as those who are gifted or particularly able, a reading survey in collaboration with three LEAs, and an investigation of standards over time in public examinations, as well as work that draws on the EIS database. In April 1995 OFSTED made inspection reports available on Internet; over 1,500 reports are now available to users throughout the world. Our immediate aim is for the reports to be more readily accessible to the general public.

In conclusion, inspection offers a fresh and independent view and, hopefully, helpful recommendations for development. It identifies both strengths and weaknesses which, when viewed positively, may be used by the school to bring about desired change. Parental involvement is crucial in this process; parents are a key client group. It is important to remember that OFSTED inspection is a Parent Charter initiative. Inspection should be a joint venture, requiring positive attitudes from all involved. In looking to the future, OFSTED wishes to encourage schools to depart from their current practice of somewhat sterile policy writing (brought on, no doubt, by Framework requirements, now amended) to that of policy linked to self-review. There needs to be a shift in emphasis away from policy writing towards self-review. If self-review can be seen as an unthreatening norm, then periodic external review reinforces and adds an extra perspective to school self-evaluation, providing a focus for improvement and a catalyst for change.

Part Two: The Handbook

Chapter Two
Where angels fear ...

by John Fitz and John Lee

Introduction

The Education (Schools) Act 1992 significantly transformed the mode of school inspection. It replaced Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), a small body of professionally independent inspectors, established in 1839, with HMCI...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction
• PART ONE: OFSTED INSPECTIONS
• PART TWO: THE HANDBOOK
• PART THREE: THE INSPECTORS' PERSPECTIVE
• PART FOUR: THE SCHOOLS' PERSPECTIVE
• PART FIVE: PARENTS' AND GOVERNORS' PERSPECTIVES
• PART SIX: THE POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
• Concluding Note
• References
• Index