After her suicide and the coroner’s judgment, Ruth Perry’s name will mark not just the downfall of Ofsted’s reign of fear, but an end to the pitiless exam and inspection-driven education era in England.
The coroner’s exceptional verdict of “suicide: contributed to by an Ofsted inspection” found the inspection of Caversham primary school in Reading, where Perry was headteacher, “lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity” and was at times “rude and intimidating”.
Here ends the culture of terror-inspections of public services. Everything wrong with Ofsted applies equally to the Care Quality Commission and its tormenting one- or two-word ratings of NHS trusts. The notion that lazy public servants need thumbscrews to drive them on has finally reached the end of the road.
This bullying of schools condemns children to pressure-cooker learning. Targets and terror make it harder than ever to recruit and retain staff into the underpaid teaching profession, which attracted just half the number of trainee secondary school teachers needed in England this year.
Targets and terror still leave a third of pupils failing those vital English and maths GCSEs, branding them as no-hopers. Worse still, this figure rises to more than 50% for children who have received free school meals at some point in the past six years, stamping pupils as “inadequate” just like the schools they are more likely to attend. The most deprived schools have had the deepest cuts, reports the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
We rightly exercise the utmost caution when it comes to ascribing reason or blame to suicide: it may have multiple or inexplicable causes. That is what makes the coroner’s verdict on Perry’s death so devastating. Warned that her school was to be downgraded from outstanding to the lowest one-word, she wrote a note: “I.N.A.D.E.Q.U.A.T.E. keeps flashing behind my eyes.” Ofsted’s judgment was itself grossly inadequate, damning everything about the school because of record-keeping faults.
Long before this tragedy, the shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, called for Ofsted to end these brutal one-word judgments. Labour would use a rounded report card instead, while radically reforming the curriculum.
The Perry case opened the floodgates to teachers daring to reveal the intolerable fear and stress of inspections and often unjust judgments. Appraisals may be a normal feature of employees’ working lives, but they are assessments conducted by managers close at hand assessing year-round work, not snap judgments made in a day by strangers who may be “rude and intimidating”, delivering a career-killing single word.
