The New Teacher’s Guide to OFSTED

The 2019 Education Inspection Framework

Samuel Stones, Jonathan Glazzard

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781529712094, 9781529712100
• eBook ISBN: 9781529729801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

What does the new OFSTED framework mean for me as a teacher?  How will it change what happens in schools and classrooms?

This new text guides you as new or trainee teachers through all you need to know about the 2019 OFSTED inspection.  It helps you understand and reflect on the context of the new framework, as a professional.  It dispels many of the myths that you might hear in schools and provides much needed clarity and detail.

The book:

·       Explores the context of the publication of the new framework and what this might mean for schools and teachers

·       Demonstrates how the framework links to what happens in classroom and to school level priorities from SLT

·       Includes examples of outstanding practice to learn from

·       Features a mythbusting section to understand the facts about OFSTED

·       Helps you understand, prepare for and approach OFSTED inspections with confidence.

1 What does Ofsted mean for teachers?

What will you learn?

This chapter introduces the Education Inspection Framework (Ofsted, 2019) and outlines its four key aspects in relation to the judgements that will be made by inspectors. It also highlights the implications of these for school leadership teams and teachers. Additionally, the chapter considers the new inspection framework within the context of its predecessor and in doing so provides a summary of key changes. Some common myths and misconceptions are addressed, and practical guidance is offered in relation to the inspection process and your lesson planning. Throughout the chapter we draw on key research to illuminate examples of best practice and we illustrate these through practical, hands-on case studies to support your reflection on professional practice. The chapter also emphasises the importance of teachers’ subject knowledge and the way in which this is presented to learners. There is discussion in relation to the role and value of assessment, and we situate this discussion within the context of the new inspection framework to support leaders and teachers with their understanding of the inspection and its implications. Finally, the chapter emphasises the importance of teachers and leaders working together to create a calm and safe learning environment and it begins to consider what this might look like in a range of educational contexts.

Key policy

The Education Inspection Framework applies to maintained schools and academies, non-association independent schools, further education and skills providers, and early years settings. It is the framework that inspectors use to determine the quality of a setting. Judgements are applied to four key aspects:

• the quality of education;
• behaviour and attitudes;
• personal development;
• leadership and management.

The judgements made by inspectors in relation to each of these categories determines the overall inspection outcome for the school. Although school leadership teams influence all of the four aspects, teachers are also accountable for the quality of education, the behaviour and attitudes of learners and their personal development, regardless of the stage they are at in their career.

Inspectors quality assure the school provision to determine the quality of education that is provided. Previous inspection frameworks have focused heavily on the outcomes that learners achieve. This has resulted in schools focusing on raising academic attainment, often at the expense of the quality of the education that schools provide. The current inspection framework focuses much more sharply on the curriculum as the underpinning ‘substance of education’ (Spielman, 2019). Schools and teachers therefore need to give attention to what learners are being taught, how well they are being taught and what learners know and can do as a result of the curriculum. Inspectors will focus on the richness of the curriculum and there will be less focus on paperwork that is generated solely for the purposes of inspections.

The new framework provides a refreshing opportunity for schools to reclaim the curriculum. Although there is an expectation that learners will be taught the National Curriculum, there is a greater focus on the ways in which schools shape the curriculum to suit their own contexts. This ensures that the curriculum provides learners with rich, meaningful and relevant learning opportunities which provide them with cultural capital. This concept will be further explored in Chapter 4.

What does inspection mean for me?

Inspectors are not looking for a ‘show pony’. This is a teacher who is able to perform well during observations, but when they are not being observed their performance is inadequate. Neither are they looking for a ‘jazz hands’ type of teacher – one who is all-singing and all-dancing during observations but lifeless the rest of the time. What inspectors are looking for is an effective teacher who can promote learning – that is, they ensure that learners gain knowledge, skills and understanding. Inspection is not about ‘putting on a show’. If you teach effectively consistently, then you have nothing to worry about. Inspectors are not trying to catch you out. They seek assurances, through lesson observations, talking to learners and looking at their work, that you are providing them with a consistently high-quality educational experience.

Lesson planning

Inspectors will not expect to see lesson planning in a particular format. They will be more interested in how you are sequencing learning over time so that learners make gains in knowledge, skills and understanding. They are also interested in how you plan opportunities for learners to revisit concepts and skills over time so that they do not forget what you have taught them.

Inspectors will be able to ascertain from observing a lesson if the lesson is well planned. They do not need to see a lesson plan to make this judgement. This has implications for the way that you structure a lesson. Although inspectors will not expect to see a specific model of teaching, a well-structured lesson will include the following:

• checking on learners’ understanding of what they have previously been taught;
• modelling and explaining new learning;
• opportunities for guided and independent practice;
• carefully sequenced lesson content to enable learners to make progress;
• use of assessment at specific points during the lesson.

Key research

Research identifies two evidence-informed strategies that support learning:

• Spacing out learning: According to Coe et al. (2014), time spent reviewing or practising leads to much greater long-term retention if it is spread out, with gaps in between to allow forgetting.
• Interleaving: According to Coe et al. (2014), learning in a single block can create better immediate performance and higher confidence but interleaving with other tasks or topics leads to better long-term retention and transfer of skills.

Case study

Sarah is an experienced middle leader and Head of Science in a large comprehensive school in North Yorkshire. Her colleague, Jasmin, is a recently appointed middle leader and Head of Maths. Their school has implemented a development programme to support new and aspiring middle leaders. This programme provides opportunities for middle leaders to work together to support and enhance professional development. In line with the school’s teaching and learning priorities, Sarah and Jasmin have committed to a teaching and learning project that is designed to enhance and develop the existing Key Stage 3 curriculum offer within their subject areas.

With the support of the senior leaders, Sarah and Jasmin have dedicated some of their existing teaching and learning time to enable them to undertake this cross-curricular project. They have consulted with the teachers in their departments and have agreed that together they need to develop further their approaches to interleaving within and across their curriculum areas. The middle leaders have created a shared document that is accessible to all teachers within their departments. This document contains information in relation to common topics and concepts that are taught within the Key Stage 3 curriculum of each subject. Subject teachers can contribute to this document on an ongoing basis.

Sarah and Jasmin used this document to update their existing long-term curriculum plans. Together they identified the ways in which the skills and concepts of one subject could be taught, assessed or built upon within the context of the other subject. They also incorporated these common concepts in their assessment materials to support students in accessing and retrieving information. In one example, Jasmin was able to create and share a maths assessment which assessed the required mathematical skills, but through the presentation of a case study which students had been exposed to in an earlier science lesson. In another example, the teachers in Sarah’s department were able to teach a problem-based lesson through developing students’ understanding of ratios that had been taught in an earlier maths lesson. Through this collaboration, Sarah and Jasmin updated their existing curriculum plans in order to identify appropriate points to revisit the skills, concepts and knowledge taught in one another’s subject areas.

To review the impact of their curriculum project, Sarah and Jasmin combined one of their faculty meetings. This provided an opportunity for all teachers of maths and science to jointly discuss and review the curriculum project. Within this meeting, one colleague explained that she was concerned that in some cases subject terminology differed in its meaning across subject areas. To address this challenge, the teachers worked together to identify concepts and vocabulary that differed in their application to the subject area. This information is now used by all teachers so that subject-specific differences can be explicitly taught and sequenced at appropriate points in the curriculum, regardless of a teacher’s subject specialism.

Subject knowledge

Good subject knowledge is essential for effective teaching and learning. This requires that you understand not only the subject content of the lesson, but also understand what comes before and after that content within a sequence of learning. If you understand how your lesson fits into a sequence of lessons, you will be able to revisit prior learning if learners develop misconceptions and move them on to the next stage if they require additional challenge. Good subject knowledge also involves being aware of the likely misconceptions that learners may develop within a lesson. If you are aware of these, then you can specifically address them with your learners in the lesson.

Developing learners’ subject-specific vocabulary is critical because advanced vocabulary provides learners with cultural capital. Identify opportunities within your lesson to explicitly teach subject-specific vocabulary and ensure that unfamiliar vocabulary within texts is explained to learners, as this will support their comprehension of a text.

Key research

According to Coe et al.:

The most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach, and when teachers’ knowledge falls below a certain level it is a significant impediment to students’ learning. As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify students’ common misconceptions.

(Coe et al., 2014, p2)

Presenting subject matter

Inspectors will be interested in how you present subject matter to your learners. Clear, concise explanations are crucial, but it is also important to model new learning and tasks visually. Strategies to aid modelling include the following:

• sharing worked examples with learners on the interactive whiteboard;
• using a visualiser to live model a skill or task;
• presenting the solutions to a task on the board after learners have had an opportunity to practise the new learning independently, thus providing them with instant feedback;
• using a visualiser to live mark a piece of work, thus enabling learners to mark their own work after the marking process has been modelled.

The use of ‘I’, ‘We’, ‘You’ is also a useful strategy because it provides learners with additional support before they are required to complete a task independently. This strategy is summarised below:

I: Teacher models the new learning.

We: Guided practice in which learners work in pairs or groups to complete a task similar to the one that the teacher modelled or where the teacher provides learners with an opportunity to instruct the teacher how to complete a problem.

You: Independent practice – learners work silently.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Introduction
• 1 What does Ofsted mean for teachers?
• 2 Myth busting
• 3 Research into the quality of education
• 4 The framework: quality of education
• 5 The framework: behaviour and attitudes
• 6 The framework: personal development
• 7 The framework: leadership and management
• 8 Key things to remember
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index