Report cards were meant to lower the stakes of inspection. They multiplied them. The problem was never the grade. It was our dependence on applause.
NB: I write as a senior leader in a secondary school and as a regional representative for a school leaders’ union. These views are my own, not those of either organisation.
The applause machine
Report cards were supposed to take the pressure off. They have done the opposite.
After Ruth Perry’s death the single-word judgement went, because one word had proved able to carry more than a person could bear. What replaced it was not fewer judgements but more: six or more areas, each graded in public on a five-point scale, with QR-code badges for schools that want to display the result. The single word has been broken into six, and every fragment still cuts.
Ofsted’s own evaluation now finds that nearly half of school leaders say a recent inspection harmed their staff’s wellbeing a fair amount or a lot. ASCL has passed a motion of no confidence in the inspectorate’s leadership; NAHT has already called for graded inspection to stop.
Call the system what it is: a machine for distributing applause, and its withdrawal, in public and at scale.
The other applause
The obvious answer is to oppose Ofsted. That is necessary, and it is not enough.
Opposition has an audience too. A motion of no confidence is played to members as surely as a mock inspection is played to the inspector. Leaders who once performed compliance for the inspector can perform defiance for the staffroom, and feed on the same thing: the room’s approval. I say this as someone who represents school leaders in a union, and who has felt the pull of the room himself.
Both are leadership facing an audience. The alternative is not the middle ground. It is leadership facing the children.
Leading without applause
I was recently asked whether a piece of development work was really about “when Ofsted asks”. I said no, and meant it. Quality assurance and Ofsted readiness are different things, and the profession conflates them at its cost. We should be able to show, every day, that we are prepared to teach, because ours is a research-informed profession that never stops changing. Without that, teaching is reduced to supervision. Preparation is a moral obligation to the children in front of us, not a performance for a visitor.
That is the work, and it has six disciplines.
Drift. Drift is never a decision. Each toolkit update turns a school a few degrees towards its auditor, and nobody notices the heading until the school is facing the wrong way.
Restraint. Leaders must be ready for inspection: able to narrate the rhythms and patterns of their school, and willing to invite outside eyes to test that account. What readiness must never become is a lockdown drill, with staff rehearsed into performance and evidence trails built for questions that may never be asked.
Identity. A school that knows what it is reads a grade as information. A leader whose worth is fused to the grade reads it as a sentence.
Coherence. Inspection should meet a coherent school, not a prepared one.
Pressure. A leader is a membrane between what arrives at the gate and what reaches the classroom. Its job is to decide what passes through, and in what form.
Attention. Attention is a school’s scarcest resource. Ask of any inspection-shaped task what it takes attention from. The answer is almost always teaching.
Reform will not be enough
Lucy Powell says reform is needed, and she is right. Schools should face fewer curtain calls: fewer graded judgements, more narrative, and a reading of context that does not mark schools like mine down for the children they admit.
A system that judges in public will hurt people however settled they are, and that failure is the system’s, not theirs. But character is what keeps a school itself while reform takes its time.
The day after
Reform can turn down the applause machine. It cannot stop leaders building their identity around it.
The grade was never the problem. The need for applause was. Policy can lower the stakes; only leaders can lower the need.
One question is worth carrying into every inspection, and into every week without one: would your school still be recognisably itself the day after?
Leave a Reply