A school must pay Ofsted tens of thousands of pounds after losing a High Court battle over its ‘outstanding’ downgrading, with a judge ruling leaders effectively “masked suspensions in all but in name”.
The watchdog was “neither irrational or unreasonable” to downgrade Thomas Telford School, in Shropshire, to ‘good‘ over wrongly-recorded suspensions, the court found.
The school claimed the December 2022 inspection was mired by “errors”. An injunction attempt to block publication of the report was thrown out last year.
But High Court judge Mary Stacey threw out the city technology college’s (CTC) judicial review and ordered it to pay Ofsted’s legal costs of £42,000 in a judgment handed down yesterday.
