Ofsted

Making sure your child is getting a great education

Ofsted is a name that will already be familiar to most parents and it’s one you will continue to hear throughout your child’s secondary school education.

Understanding the reasons for the checks and their impact, will give you peace of mind that your child’s school is doing everything it can to ensure pupils receive a high quality education.

All schools are required by law to be inspected, but how often it is visited will depend on how it has previously been judged. For example – after a school is rated as outstanding it will then be exempt from regular inspections. But a school placed in special measures, due to concerns about standards, will be monitored and inspected more frequently.

A full inspection normally takes two days. When they arrive the inspectors will look at the school’s self-evaluation and analyse the pupils’ progress and attainment. They talk to the headteacher, governors, staff and pupils and consider your views as a parent.

Inspectors spend most of their time observing lessons and looking at the quality of teaching in the school, and its impact on learning and progress.

They also look at the personal development, behaviour and welfare of pupils, the promotion of spiritual, moral, social and cultural development; and how well the school is led and managed.

Parents are given the option of providing their views.

After the visit, the lead inspector reports her or his judgement to the headteacher and governors. The inspectors’ findings are published in a report for the school, parents and wider community. This provides information about the effectiveness of the school’s work and contains recommendations about what it should do to improve.

If Ofsted judges a school to be ‘inadequate’, it will be placed in one of the following two categories – special measures or serious weaknesses.

The former means the school is failing to provide pupils with an acceptable standard of education, and is not showing the capacity to make the improvements needed. Inspectors will visit the school regularly to check progress, until it can be removed from the category. It will then be inspected after about two years.

A school judged as requiring improvement at its last inspection is a school that is not yet good but overall provides an acceptable standard of education. The school is inspected again within a period of 30 months. If a school has been judged as requires improvement at two successive inspections, it will be subject to monitoring from inspectors to check its progress and is inspected again within a period of 30 months

If a good or outstanding rating is given, the school will receive a one-day inspection about every four years to confirm that the school remains good or outstanding and that safeguarding is effective.

In a similar way to Ofsted, the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) reports on independent schools’ compliance with the DfE Education (Independent Schools Standards) Regulations.

The ISI inspects schools that belong to the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which has more than 1,200 members.

But ISI and Ofsted use a different framework and criteria for judging school quality and they use different judgement words too.

ISI uses excellent, good, sound and unsatisfactory and Ofsted uses outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate.

Another difference is that ISI inspection teams largely consist of practising senior leaders currently working in ISC schools.

ISI inspectors judge ISC schools against the higher standards of academic achievement and extra-curricular activities in the sector as a whole as well as against national norms.