Your editorial, “Champion of the deprived” (last week), speaks of Ofsted’s annual reports as “an important vehicle for airing difficult truths”, and lauds them for exposing the education system’s failure with the most disadvantaged pupils.
In 36 years in the system, I have observed – and perhaps therefore been complicit in – the behaviours you highlight. However, your championing of Ofsted does not mention its own central role in creating this environment in the first place. With performance table data being the major determinant of Ofsted outcomes, the inspection system itself fuels the behaviours it condemns. Additionally, many schools remain uninspected for years and are in a position to pursue “performance” at whatever cost – that cost often being passed on to other schools.
What is needed is a broader approach to inspections that recognises (via Ofsted outcomes) the brilliant work of the many inclusive schools that, because of their reluctance to move disadvantaged students on and their willingness to accept those moved on by other schools, might not always hit the thresholds held so dear by the inspection framework. Let’s hope that Amanda Spielman will use her new role to “walk the talk” in this.
Ken Hall
Knaresborough, North Yorkshire
Some real-life context is urgently required for Ofsted’s annual report on the education system’s treatment of vulnerable children and the Observer’s coverage of it (“Vulnerable pupils abandoned by school system, says Ofsted chief”, News, last week). In both of those, and in Lord Adonis’s comment on “the cancer of school expulsions”, the reality is ignored of school provision for all pupils – and especially the vulnerable – enduring prolonged cuts and damaging change. Your editorial fully endorsing this “champion of the deprived” accepts that expulsions are linked to league tables; it assumes that schools are simply cynically gaming the system.
Is it really not apparent that teachers, as well as parents, are now “ill-equipped” to meet these children’s needs? Let the child and adolescent mental health services and the counsellors, teaching assistants, special educational needs budgets, pastoral workers and specialist teachers that have been removed, be restored, then assess who has “lost sight of the purpose of education”.
League tables build in comparisons of schools with huge, incurable, widening disparities, automatically disadvantaging some by the very nature of their location and the effects of austerity. How can Ofsted be regarded as independent when it furthers this government’s agenda of academisation and, ultimately, privatisation? This government is surely the power to whom truth must be spoken, not the system it is decimating.
Jane Price
Minehead, Somerset
Amanda Spielman’s denunciation of the treatment of disadvantaged children is welcome, especially her comments on the practice of “off-rolling”. However, two things seem to be missing.
First, schools are under pressure to conform to the standards laid down by whichever secretary of state most recently left his or her mark on the assessment criteria. If schools are to be passed or failed on some formula for GCSE results, is it any wonder that they game the system to maximise their scores? And would Spielman not accept that Ofsted has some responsibility for establishing and sustaining the climate in which schools operate, and hence for demagnetising their moral compass?
Second, Spielman acknowledges that “dealing with students of different needs isn’t always easy”. No, and it isn’t cheap either, because such children often need one-to-one support and specialist input. Suppose a headteacher decides to keep and nurture every student, resisting the results pressure from Ofsted, not to mention the pressure from parents of other children; decides, in Spielman’s words, “to do what’s right by children”. Fine, but where is the money to come from?
John Filby
Ashover, Derbyshire
