Festival of Education
The Oppidan Team were delighted to attend the 13th festival of education at Wellington College. The Festival of Education brings educators from the UK and beyond for two days of invaluable CPD, discussions and networking.
One key talked focused on the future of inspections with Amanda Spielman and Walter, Oppidan co-founder, got his pen and notebook out to find out more...
“You would want to know if your local hospital was inadequate or required improvement wouldn’t you?”
The memory of Ruth Perry clinged to the auditorium seats as Amanda Spielman, now in her last year of seven as His Majesty’s Chief Inspectorate at Ofsted, began her keynote speech at the Festival of Education.
As somebody whose business is not inspected by Ofsted, my lens trained on Amanda was neither clouded or informed by the context that others, mostly teachers, viscerally showed around me. A “challenging” tenure, in her own words, the backdrop to her talk centred on the gradual erosion of social trust between educators and inspectorates.
“Inspection shows the vast majority of schools are producing a good education.”
A new set of measures - “proportionate and sensible” will launch in September and she remarks on the early signs of recovery post pandemic.
She said public discourse needs to improve around the sector; schools, she says, should not be the first lever to pull in social discourse. Teachers, she remarked, need to concentrate on the substance of what they n/do so well rather than meddle in context beyond the classroom.
Future challenge within the sector more widely rests on low attendance, “still the main problem for schools.” Post-16 education is being neglected as public attention is drawn to schools; the fact that 17-year-olds get half as much teaching as 15-year-olds can’t be right.
There was an interesting point I hadn’t realised on inspections in MATs; inspections taken at school level means those are susceptible to both central and local oversight.
As the talk drew to the Q&A, the context to Ruth Perry’s death made the first question inevitable: “if you were the government, would you drop the single-word grade judgments for inspections?”
Against a backdrop of continued criticism from schools over the last year, these four words have provided huge concern for the sustainability of relationship between inspectorates and schools. Though quick to claim her legitimacy stretches only so far - “I am accountable to, but not an elected member of, parliament,” she reiterated that abolishing the judgments we make about school, the combination of the judgements that make up the effectiveness grade, would be wrong she says.
Accountability, and what that means for the social contract between teachers' pupils and parents is vital for allowing teachers to do what they do best. The inspections are popular: EIF influences inspection in other countries she says - and was quick to remark that only 12 in 20,000 schools were graded inadequate based on safeguarding issues.
Does she rest the burden too heavily on parents to read the overall report rather than just focus on the overall grade? What sits below that merits greater attention, she says. A suspension of belief I thought when that grade is painted in big letters on the front gate of the school.
Whilst the semantics around relabeling words is up for discussion, summative words do provide clarity, and that is useful, whether in your local school or in your local office.
Aside from a few generalisms - “schools are about education” … “we recognise the importance of leadership in schools,” on balance, I’d put this as an outstanding showing for Amanda Spielman.
By Walter Kerr