 Everyone, we know Ofsted play an important role across the education sector and in recent events with the tragic news of Ruth Perry, a head teacher and the outrage that we've seen across the press. I just thought I'd share some of the things that I've been researching in recognition of the current system and why I believe the gradings should be reformed. So in England, if you're watching this outside of the UK, our teachers going through a very tough period, pay rise, costs of living, strike action and so on and so forth and now Ofsted getting in the way. So but we have got some reasons to be cheerful. It's not all doom and gloom. There are some amazing work going on. But for this video, I'd like to just unpick why I believe Ofsted gradings should be reformed. So if you're not familiar with the landscape, 70% thereabouts, I don't know the exact number. I will find out that school leaders, school and college leaders are additional inspectors. So they make up the vast majority of the Ofsted workforce at least for schools. And what I've unpicked here, so I'm going to go through some reasons, but if I just come off my slides for a second and I've got this blog here. So there's the blog. It's a seven minute read. If I just skim you through it. I think it's important first to identify that it's more than just schools. So Ofsted have in my opinion, a valid purpose to exist, whether it exists in its current form is debatable. But you can see here on the street, if I just zoom in slightly, it's inspecting children, settings, early years, nurseries, social care services. So looked after children, fostering adoption. You've got pupils that are home, elected for home education, online provision, academy school systems. And that's all I'm talking about here. Alternative providers, apprenticeships, local authority provisions, prison education, initial teacher trainers. So the remit is enormous. And we could probably argue is their funding well spent? Are they valid for money? I think they should be given more money. But in the rest of this blog, I've got a little document here I'm going to share with you in a moment. Then some reasons why we should keep degrading, try to offer some balance reasons against. And what we know in terms of research, I've got lots and there's lots, lots more. And then some initial alternatives which need to be thrashed out. And I brought it all together based on all the things I've been researching the last six, seven years and all the things I see around me through from colleagues in the profession. And there's lots of good people in our school system who volunteer and step up to be inspectors who want to transform the profession from within or transform the inspection process from within. And there's lots of kind of negative associations with that also. But there are good people, people I know, trying to do good things for the system. So I just want to go through, I guess, first of all, let me just go through 10 reasons why we should keep the grades. So I'm trying to offer some balance. Now I've been at the sharp end of the wedge, I've lived the special measures, inspection, and I know the damage it can do to the school, to the individuals that choose to work there and the community. And there'll be others on the other side of the fence that will view this process as a good thing to raise standards. So bear with me. So why should gradings go? Let me just move my face in here, make it a little bit bigger. So we get a benchmark for parents. That's the first thing, performance. Well, we need to identify the hallmarks of a performance. That's the key part for this one here. The process helps us identify improvement areas. So we want to be held to account. So it allows us to make progress. Parents can use the grades as informed decisions. You look at Parent View and Offstead Research. They generally sample 1000 to 1500 parents on an annual basis that represents 8.8 million people and 80 million families. So they can't survey everyone. And you can dig into the research, and it's broadly in line all the time. Most parents don't go beyond the first page of at least the old reports, which are very lengthy, which is why Offstead changed them. So Offstead are doing things a little bit better, but we know they've got lots more things to do. And like me and you, there's lots of us with an invested opinion. So we're never going to get something that we're all happy with, including myself. And people will believe that the grading system gives us a transparent objective measure of the quality of education taking place. It perhaps promotes a healthy competition towards excellence. And it helps us improve and target future strategies. So it allows us to find out what training we need, for example, as professions, as a profession, a system level quality assurance process for maintaining standards. So we've got this framework, this benchmark that keeps us all in check. It safeguards our children. That should probably be the first reason. And those are maybe my first date. Now I've got a few more for why this should go. And I'll go into these in a bit greater depth, because this is underpins a lot of my own experiences, what I see across the profession, speaking out on behalf of others who can't and so on and so forth. So I'll go through these reasons. I'll sign push you back to the blog. And I'm just going to sideline to a great piece of research. So let me go through my reasons. So it simplifies a complex the work of a skill in one word, inadequate, requires improvement, good or outstanding. And we see lots of people quite rightly share we're good, we're outstanding. Some people spend thousands on a large banner to go across the side of the building. And there's reasons for that too. But we never say yes, we're inadequate or yes, we're required occasionally we see where requires improvement because we've got out of that rut. But grading fails to see or capture the complex work of an institution, whether you can expect to school in a day and a half, I think remains to be tested. We know that grading lessons in 60 minutes, observing teachers was neither here or there in 2014. Here we are 10 years later, challenging the same kind of issues. And Oxford has and although it's evolving, but a one size fits all inspection framework for schools, it's evolving into kind of early years framework. They recognize all schools are unique, but we all follow this one size fits all methodology. If we move away from grades, we provide more qualitative assessments. So think of our car, MIT, you pass or fail, if you fail, you get a period of time to refine the things that you need to fix. That's in place in some respects, for that requires improvement model with the monitoring processes that happen. Grading schools limits our curriculum. So we think about, you know, we come in and test the e back curriculum. For example, we see what schools are doing or not doing. And yes, there's a whole lot of argument about assessments and exams and what kids can study, but I'm not looking at that now. I'm looking purely at what offset test, you know, if you've got a strong e back, a strong English maths or not, that also is a feature in the inspection process. And I'll probably say for number five there, probably quite rightly, a poor inspection grade leads to head teacher attrition. So football manager syndrome. I'm sure you know somebody who has fallen to the sword. I certainly do too. And I would work with them tomorrow. But the inspection process fails to recognize their strengths. I guess this also fits in with number one at the top here when you get this kind of one word, it forces us to prioritize our reputation. So if we're outstanding, that goes to the banner, that marketization of education where we have to get admissions, that competition taking place. The research is clear on the kind of inequalities in the system, the bias, and that we know disadvantaged schools like Daki four or five or more likely to be judged inadequate and requires improvement all time and time again, and are in this spiral of decline, being regurgitated and rebranded as stuck schools or coasting schools and so on and so forth. There's the whole industry of for the estate agents with the housing markets. If you just dig into your kind of press releases from your local journalists, whenever schools get rated well or poorly, there's a whole industry happening there. So I've dug into the research on housing for of that too. I mentioned stuck or coasting schools and how they get into that spiral, lower grades, I live this one, reducing budgets, lower reducing resources, you can't attract the right teachers, and it takes you longer to improve income, additional recruits from outside multi academy trust to sorry to be cynical maybe save the day, but there are brilliant trusts out there. I also recognize the subject, subjectivity of the inspection process. So it happens in lessons, we do it too when we watch one another, the broader our perspective, the more wildly our evaluations, it's important to narrow our focus. I don't believe that happens in inspection. So it's not bulletproof. There's new research just published not so long ago. It ciphers whether male or female are more likely to give you a harsher inspection. So come back to that in a moment. And we mentioned that grade is not reliable indicator quality of education. In fact, there's a great piece of research that says it's a weak predictor of long term outcomes for our young people. And if I just move my face to the side here, so you can see this last one. There's very little available from us that on parental influences, peer influences, local community resources, and how they play a role in the final grade. We know parents make a difference, but it's very other than parent view survey. Nothing else is identified in terms of what difference it makes to that final grade or student social cultural capital. Now I've got lots more, but if I just pause on this slide for a moment, I'll just go through, I guess, if I just pop to my blog. And I'm just going to stop on this graphic actually. So this graphic here, if I just zoom in so you can see this a little bit more, there we go. So I was part of the NEHT Accountability Commission just before the pandemic. And this fabulous piece of research published by the National Foundation of Education Research looked at inspection systems in a number of jurisdictions around the world. And there's a bit of a code there to break down, so you can maybe look at this while I speak, look on the blog for more details. But we might be familiar with Finland and Singapore, who often are cited as, at least here in England, places to visit, go see good practice, high performance in PISA rankings, OECD, etc. But they have an inspection system, but the results are published to the general public. Isn't that amazing? We can also talk about Estyn, our lovely inspection system here in Wales, who have just abolished grading inspections. And Siams, who inspect our church schools, almost one million pupils who've also moved away from grading inspections this year. The interesting question to ask them would be why. So we know the rationale, but we probably should ask why is it taking so long? And it's great to see. So I'm not complaining. But if I leave this on the slide for a moment, I'll just kind of summarise my 10 reasons before I really give you the juicy stuff. So one, offset inspections are too narrow. They focus too much on test scores, exam results rather than holistic assessments. We know it's moving to curriculum quality of education. That's good. We're not there yet. The inspection process is too punitive. It creates a culture of fear in schools. Some will not recognise this because they've not lived the sharp end of the wedge. It's system, the grading system is unreliable. So I've got 10 reasons here. The third one is grading is unreliable. It's inconsistent. Four, they're often disruptive to the general day-to-day work of the school, teaching and learning, school leader life. Ask a school leader how many hours they put in before an offset inspection. They'll often say, I'll see you on the other side. Five, offsets inspections are expensive. They place a big burden on taxpayers, local authorities, which are already struggling with tight budgets. Six, offset inspections don't take into account wider social economic factors that can affect schools' performance such as poverty, deprivation and inequality. We're still waiting for offset to do some research on how funding has impacted on school standards. Seven, offsets inspections do not take account or provide meaningful feedback of subjects. So there's a bit more discussion in terms of primary leaders not being specialists in all those subject areas. That's taken quite a bit of time for that discussion to come through. So if you're not familiar with this, there's a lot of pressure on our primary colleagues in the system who have to be an expert in all their subject areas. Number eight reason, narrowing the curriculum in some respects are, I can understand why we have an eBAC curriculum, but being a design and technology teacher seeing my own subject decimated over the last 10 years as a result of that policy. And the Department for Education is still not meeting its targets. You can see how the curriculum has some unintended consequences when it becomes a little too narrow. Number nine, offset inspections do not take account of the views and experiences of teachers particularly. So there's no teacher survey, there's a parent survey, there's a student survey, but there's no teacher survey giving valuable insights anonymized about the school's strengths and weaknesses. And in a high stakes scenario, you can see why that information is not garnered. But in a removing the grading system, this would be valuable data in terms of teacher workload and wellbeing. We need to work harder keeping our teachers not pushing them out. And I guess the final one that cultural high stakes accountability I've already mentioned, you know, football manager syndrome, I suppose, where we've got this overemphasis on performance rather than collaboration. So there's much, much more. But I'm just kind of giving you a whistle stop to what I'm trying to tackle people that are teachers and experts and researchers and just general parents interest in the bit more. So in this blog, you've got the kind of wider perspective. And I'll come back to this in the future. But I've just merely put together all my ideas to do with schools. Here's an overview compared to other countries. We've also got a bit of historical reason here. And I'm going to come back to this point to finish. I've for years thought that offstead reasons to grade schools was stooped in legislation. So here is something very special. And I'll come to my alternatives to finish. I've got lots of research here. So please look through that in greater detail. I guess just to pick out one or two of things that have really surprised me would be, you know, how before inspectors moved to iPads, they used to kind of edit handwritten notes to suit a grading outcome. How decades of research has unpicked that offstead outcomes are weak predictors and there's no difference between a requires improvement or an outstanding school in terms of long term outcomes. Offstead use machine learning, which an artificial intelligence algorithm bit of a mouthful, artificial intelligence algorithm to predict what schools to inspect. I suppose when I first discovered this, it sounded a bit dark and sinister. But actually, I guess it's one way to ensure the resources are effectively deployed. We still have schools that are inspected for a decade. We have lots of schools that are over inspected. So how do we get to a better balance? I think we need to increase offstead inspections and funding, actually. I bet you didn't think you'd hear me say that. There's lots more. I won't go through it, but I'm going to come to my alternatives. But here's two really critical things. Number one, I did a couple of investigations into the schools that Amanda Spielman, the current is Majesty's chief inspector, just wait for this to load up what schools that she visits. No, it's not part of our major remit. But what I've since learned through a couple of conversations with colleagues online is actually she visited Cavish and Primary School prior to their inspection last year in 2022. So this was quite revealing. And what I learned from Offstead's freedom of information response was that you can see here, we do not normally schedule visits outside of schools that are likely not to be good or outstanding because it puts undue pressure on the schools. So if you're recognizing that happens in an inadequate or requires improvement school, you can see that it might also happen in other situations. So that is that's quite a revelation. And then the last one, and this is the this is the juicy bit. I used to just think that Offstead's decision to grade schools was stooped in legislation. But my good friend, Terry Pearson, and I have been digging into the details. I'm going to grab a few people together to bring a few more ideas and thrash it out and then look at other areas of the sector, not just schools. But what we've discovered here is that it seems that there's never been any legislation for Offstead inspect using grades back to 1990.92. It was up to the chief inspector to decide how to report back to government. So there it is in bigger print there. And there's a lot more. So there's a link there on my Twitter, but I've also put it in the blog. So I've been sharing this with a few people today who I would assume would know this, and I've learned that they don't. So I'm going to keep sharing this until we're all familiar with actually there's no law here. How Offstead choose to report back to government is their decision. So it's their decision to add the grades. It's their decision to choose the words. And it's their decision to hold schools to account in the way that they do with one reductionist word. And we know the unintended consequences of that. So I don't plan this to be anything polished. I'm just going to finish with some of my alternatives. Now these need to be thrashed out. I need to remove all my bias in this blog post. Plus I need to dig into the research and provide a foreign against argument to make it fair and sensible. And then my plan in the future with a group of people to help me is thrash out other areas of the Offstead industry and why we need an inspection service been around for 150 years, whether it's Offstead or another reincarnation, we don't know. But one thing we know for sure is there's many unintended consequences and an abundance of research to suggest that grading isn't effective as we would think it is, despite what ministers say. So here are my 11 alternatives. I don't have these on a slide. I think it was about 145, 148 million pound Offstead had last year in the annual reports. I think we should be given them more. I think we should inspect schools more often in all the other settings. If we increase funding, Offstead could do more. We can increase the number of inspectors to support schools through that MOT process. One of my colleagues online today said we should be caring for schools, not measuring. And that's just the way that we need to try and think about reframing inspections, bringing qualified counselors and psychologists into the inspection process, facilitate all school leaders to be inspectors for many years. If you're a good or outstanding, you could get a ticket to become an additional specter and the rest of school leaders in the profession were ostracized. So if you chose to work in a school that was labeled, you didn't have that privilege to go and learn from your peers or to learn the Offstead way in order to learn how best to approach it when you were on the receiving end. Five, I think a desktop safe driving check should happen for all institutions on an annual basis. This is why I believe in schools should be inspected every year, why we need more funding to do so. This will address safeguarding, it's going to address all the sexual harassment claims we've had recently, and so on and so forth, and many more. Number six on the screen, abandon gradings. Let's move to a qualitative approach. Thematic inspections perhaps are looking at specific subjects, specific themes. So often do this in the research already. Why can't that be part of actual Offstead processes for inspections not just trying to tackle everything and everything? I get it, accountability standards, I get it, but how can we move to a more rounded approach instead? And I think I need to thrash that one out a little bit more. How can we define standards? So if we think about Estyn and Science Church of England, they've moved to a compliant or not yet compliant judgment. And I've been saying this for many years. I used to say good or not yet good. So if we want to move from that one word reductionist adjective, there's an alternative here, compliant, not yet compliant, broadly the same thing, but I think that has to be the next step. I've mentioned the MOT period, so you get a chance to improve your failings. Number 10 here on the screen, a system to collaborate rather than compete, where expertise must be shared and schools are rewarded for sharing their expertise and funded to do so I should add. 11, how do we distribute this knowledge, this expertise geographically? So we've got the MAT system, we've got our Hub regions, we've got our Offstead regions, sorry, our regional school commissioners. So how can we do more? The research I read in terms of multi-academy trusts and how teachers responded during the pandemic, it was pretty much the local community or your local network that helped you get through difficult times. 12, legal schools, I've not mentioned that at all, but there's a big need there and we've got a lot of looked after children or vulnerable children that need to be protected. And that final one there, thinking about Progress 8 and all the pros and cons with having a metric. And I'm not here for soft standards or anything but, but I am here for a more balanced and nuanced approach. And this one here where we can look at progress measures towards academic results, higher education pathways, destinations as a part of a good measure, part in full-time employees, teacher well-being, apprenticeship pathways, vocational pathways, mental health well-being and non-cognitive attributes. We've got a whole raft of things that we could consider with Offstead, but it's going to need some funding and it's going to need lots of people to put their heads together and come up with an alternative that suits everybody. And I've not really touched the tip of the iceberg, but I thought I would just bring everything together in a blog post here for you to read, dig into the details. I've given you a little whistle stop summary and a couple of slides and a couple of ideas to consider. And I think I'm going to leave it as that because it's a very difficult, sensitive and it's been a difficult moment for lots of people in the profession, nonetheless, Head Teacher Ruth Perry and her family. And I guess for me and many people that I've been speaking to who've lived an inadequate Offstead inspection, that trauma, that anxiety, those memories that it brings back, I guess is why many of us have gone through quite a difficult couple of weeks. Anyway, I am sharing this video in honor of Ruth Perry and other Head Teachers and school leaders who have been at the sharp end of the Offstead process. I'm here not to call for an abolition of Offstead, far from it. I'm calling for a reform. So thanks for watching this. Please, you know, it's not a perfect recording, but at least just putting some ideas together for people to watch and send me feedback, send me your ideas. Please leave a comment on the blog, because my attention with Terry Pearson is to thrash this out over the coming months and years, gather a group of people, talk with our teaching unions, and see how we can get to a better system that supports everybody, parents, pupils, policymakers, and of course, our teaching profession, which in some respects, like I said at the start of the video, is on its knees despite some amazing work going on behind the scenes, we've got costs to live in, reduced school budgets, strike action, all this stuff with Offstead going on. It's very difficult to think the teaching's in a good place. And if we think about, you know, why we suffer from a teacher recruitment crisis, here's one big reason right in front of us. So thank you for watching. I'll see you another time, another place. Bye for now.