Over the years, Ofsted’s role has shifted from ‘aiming to improve lives by raising standards in education and children’s social care’ to a high-stakes, low-trust culture of school judgment. Worse: the framework itself is driven by an ideology of knowledge-rich curriculum, an obsession with cognitive science and reductive government targets for ‘academic Ebacc subjects’. In short, the inspectorate is no longer a collective of professional experts, but an autocracy.
The engine room for the implementation of this policy is Ofsted’s ‘curriculum unit’ – a small group of mostly externally recruited HMI with minimal inspection or senior leadership experience. Their chief tool is the ‘subject deep dive’, said to ‘provide evidence of curriculum quality, which informs ‘our quality of education judgement’. And the result is that in almost every school, learning is organised through subjects, with leaders attempting to ensure their curriculum fits this methodology rather than developing alternative strategies that may be more appropriate for their pupils.
