“Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. The quality is already in the product. You cannot inspect quality into a product” W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis.
Cosmetics and tragedy
The government’s decision to abolish one and two-word overall judgements for Ofsted inspections of schools is largely cosmetic and makes little progress in answering the question of how to assure quality in English schools.
Following the tragic death through suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry in January 2023, after Ofsted downgraded her school from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’, there have been many questions asked about the work and usefulness of Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, for those who don’t know).
The law of unintended consequences: the negative impact of Ofsted
The anguish and soul-searching about her death, however, have camouflaged some wider truths. Firstly, Ofsted has been feared and detested by most teachers for many years because of the possible ignominy and professional humiliation it can bring; but also because it tends to corrupt the curriculum as schools focus increasingly on getting the ‘basics’ right: so music, art and drama are sacrificed for more maths and more English.
Secondly, Ofsted was always the wrong answer to the right question. The question, ‘how do we raise standards and assure good quality in schools?’ is an important one. Education employs hundreds of thousands of people and costs billions of pounds of public money every year. We have a right to expect that this money is being effectively spent to give every pupil an excellent education to open opportunities in adult life.
The strange history of inspection
So, it’s not just a question of fiddling around with the Ofsted framework or jettisoning the single phrase judgement of ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. That misses the point. Inspection of schools, although having a rich history in Britain, is unsuitable and ineffective as a process to quality assure education.
It’s a strange starting point to explain that, although school inspections have been around since the Victorian inspections of Board schools, its modern philosophy probably began with the building of the modern Japanese and US car industries in the 1960s. How could you control the quality of the cars rolling off the production line?
The answer seemed to be inspection (and later total quality management or TQM) and with the ruthless intention of rejecting any that were sub-standard. As time moved on, it became necessary to inspect the production of the components just as fastidiously. But the TQM gurus, such as Deming, Juran and Taguchi, were very clear that their principles were not applicable to the service sector, such as education. This has been ignored by successive governments in the UK (Ofsted has its Welsh and Scottish equivalents) and we’ve been saddled with Ofsted since 1992.
Quality assurance that works
Instead, we need processes of quality assurance such as high-quality professional development, professional coaching and peer mentoring. It won’t appeal to the Daily Mail as it lacks the fear element. But teachers, and most parents, know that children perform best when they feel safe, encouraged, free to wonder and know that others are interested in what they’re doing.
Adults are no different. There’s no doubt that fear can be galvanising, but if we want our schools to actually perform at their best and optimise learning for children, we need to get rid of fear, which means getting rid of Ofsted, and institute something far more positive, far healthier and far more effective.
It is Green Party policy to abolish Ofsted and to bring in a centre of educational excellence which will adopt more effective quality assurance measures. It will also mean reinstating, re-equipping and regalvanising local education authorities – and they will need their own regime of quality assurance.
