February 4, 2025 - 7:00am

As part of his Plan for Change, Keir Starmer has announced a “zero-tolerance” approach to “low expectations in schools”, stating that Ofsted reforms will help to drive up standards in hundreds of schools across the country.

Change is overdue: trust between schools and Ofsted has completely broken down, particularly since the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry in 2023 after her primary school was downgraded from “Outstanding” to “Inadequate”. Too many schools operate in a culture of fear because inspections have become more punitive than supportive. The current process also demoralises teachers, who are already in worryingly short supply and are leaving in droves.

However, the proposed reforms suggest that Ofsted is merely tinkering with semantics rather than fundamentally re-evaluating its practices. Instead of a single-word judgement, schools will now be graded on nine areas: leadership, curriculum, teaching, achievement, behaviour, attendance, personal development and wellbeing, inclusion, and safeguarding. Each area will be ranked in a traffic-light system as either causing concern, attention needed, secure, strong or exemplary.

Ofsted was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this does the exact opposite. By broadening the assessment criteria, Ofsted has not only made a more complicated system, but a more demanding one. Once again, schools must demonstrate more and more with less and less time. It feels like all Ofsted has done is put the previous single-word judgements through a thesaurus, when we need to instead reconsider how to make the inspections themselves more effective.

The reforms need to be practical rather than linguistic. A more detailed report card only works if inspectors, and schools, are given the time, space and resources to make adequate judgements. Currently, inspectors are only in schools for one or two days, which is nowhere near long enough to make potentially over 40 different judgements — before 2005, they were there for at least a week. Schools also only get a day’s notice, whereas previously they had two months to prepare. It used to be that six or seven inspectors would visit a school; now it may only be one or two.

On the one hand, we have ever-expanding expectations of schools and criteria by which to measure them. Yet on the other hand, we have ever-squeezed deadlines and timeframes with which to prove success in all of these areas. It is this paradoxical situation which puts undue pressure on schools, and forces them to paranoically collect evidence on the off-chance they get the dreaded “call” and will only have 18 hours to prepare. This unnecessarily stressful situation will only get worse as schools are expected to fulfil more roles in society — for example, Starmer also wants free breakfast clubs and mandatory tooth-brushing lessons in schools.

Unions may want to abolish Ofsted altogether, but the reality is that Ofsted needs more time in schools, not less. It’s all well and good promising that a report card will offer more nuance and insight, but parents and schools need to have faith in the validity of the judgements, which will only happen if the inspection process is reformed as well. The current brevity of inspections means that something which should be holistic and contextualised has become a mere regulatory box-ticking exercise, and it is this bureaucracy which Labour should address.

When it comes to Ofsted, people like to trot out the old adage that “weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter.” In light of the department’s proposed reforms, perhaps it’s better to say: “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.”


Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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