The cumulative impact of staying open during Covid lockdowns, compensating for increasing levels of child poverty and a seeming perma-crisis in recruiting and retaining teachers has required extraordinary resilience from schools, especially those serving disadvantaged communities. Then, amid increasing frustration about an accountability system growing ever more disconnected from the realities of teaching and school leadership, came news of the death of Ruth Perry.
The response has been raw, visceral and disturbing. It is an inflexion point which has catapulted the debate about Ofsted school inspections onto the national stage. Stepping back from this harrowing period, we must now explore the role of inspections in school improvement, and where better to turn than the department for education’s own research?
When Ofsted was created in 1992, there can be no denying that something was needed to shake things up. Under-performance was rife, and there was a good argument for grading lessons and schools. Since then, the values of high standards, educational equity, professional accountability and evidence-based practice have become deeply embedded, but this has come at a cost.
