Wellbeing of school staff is as vital as pupils’ progress | Ofsted

Regarding your editorial (The Guardian view on Ofsted: radical change is needed, 12 June), as a parent of two children who attended Caversham primary school until last year, I can attest to Ruth Perry’s dedication and strong leadership. Our children had an overwhelmingly positive experience at the school.

My view of the Ofsted system is that it is too focused on treating schools like service providers to “customers”, ie children and parents, and not concerned at all with the wellbeing and resource health of the school itself. If Ofsted’s objective is to care about educational quality and child safety, it should be as concerned about staff as it is about pupils – without the staff there is no school.

The state education system should not be treated as a marketplace of competing providers – we need all schools to excel in their communities. Ofsted inspections should consider staff morale and resources, and work with schools to resolve problems. Audits in other professions lead to major and minor nonconformances being identified, which results in actions to be completed in a certain time. Only then is a final judgment on compliance published. Ofsted could adopt a similar approach. Judging a school as inadequate, then, six weeks later, re-evaluating it as good is not helping portray an accurate reflection of the school.

Ofsted inspections are punitive and distressing for many staff. Heads are particularly vulnerable due to the managerial isolation that the role brings. If the head is lucky, they have supportive governors, but could otherwise have no one to professionally support them.

Children receive a school report on their performance in key areas and are expected to appreciate how they are doing from it. Surely, parents are also capable of making a similar judgment.
Mark Shannon
Reading, Berkshire

Your editorial stating that proposed reforms of Ofsted “do not go far enough” itself does not go far enough. Ofsted should go. The government should disband it and redistribute funds on inspector/adviser teams in local authorities. Schools aren’t factories and don’t need tick-box inspections; they need dialogue with experienced fellow professionals. That can come from local authority advisers who understand local problems and from colleagues in neighbouring schools on the basis of self-evaluation.

Schools improve from the inside through staff collegial discussions, parents’ input, community support, local governors and fellow educators, not from the outside by fear of in-and-out visits by Ofsted.
Michael Bassey
Emeritus professor of education, Newark, Nottinghamshire

Your report (Ofsted school inspection reforms ‘nowhere near enough’, 12 June) highlights the retention of the grade “inadequate” despite minor modifications to the inspection procedure and its outcomes.

The reason for the retention of this key term is ideological. Since April 2016, a school judged “inadequate” can be issued with an academy order and moved out of local authority control into the waiting arms of an academy trust, through a process of forced privatisation. Staff wellbeing and pupils’ progress are trumped by the conviction that two legs are good and four legs bad, so there can be no place for diversity, a duty of care or local democratic accountability.

The public have woken up to the effects of privatisation on our rivers and beaches. Perhaps the time has come to consider its impact on those who study and work in our schools.
Paul Clarke
Horsham, West Sussex