Ofsted’s chief inspector Amanda Spielman has warned against “overloading” schools with social challenges, in her final speech as head of the inspectorate.
“We need to avoid the temptation to overload schools, by seeing them as the first lever to pull in the face of any social challenge,” she told delegates at the Festival of Education, held last week (6 July) in Wellington College.
“‘Teach it in schools’ is a common refrain, but the pressure of treating schools as the solution to everything puts education at risk,” she said. “We need teachers to concentrate on the real substance of what they are teaching.”
Spielman cautioned against trying to “tailor every lesson too closely to a headline”, adding that doing so risks children leaving education with “prescribed solutions to yesterday’s problems but without the tools to tackle tomorrow’s problems”.
