Ofsted has moved from being “critical friend to simply a critic”, the children’s commissioner has said, as she called on incoming chief Sir Martyn Oliver to fix “what went wrong” under his predecessor.
Dame Rachel de Souza also took aim at the Department for Education’s intervention in failing schools, which made the “humbling and humiliating experience” of an ‘inadequate’ judgment “so much worse”.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, de Souza, the founder and former chief executive of the Inspiration Trust academy chain, spoke about the inspection of Great Yarmouth Primary Academy.
The school was plunged into special measures in 2018, prompting immediate public criticism of the inspection process by de Souza.
