Ofsted: an end to 'reign of fear'?

Calls are growing for an overhaul of how schools are assessed, after a coroner ruled that an Ofsted inspection which "lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity" and was "rude and intimidating" at times "contributed" to the suicide of Ruth Perry.

The 53-year-old head teacher killed herself in January while waiting for an Ofsted report that, as she feared, downgraded her Caversham Primary School in Reading from its highest rating to its lowest over safeguarding concerns.

Following the coroner's conclusion, Perry's name will mark "not just the downfall of Ofsted's reign of fear", said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, "but an end to the pitiless exam- and inspection-driven education era in England".

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'Perry case opened the floodgates'

The issues leading to this state of affairs began "decades ago", wrote former Ofsted inspector John Bald for Conservative Home, and "reflect a schism over the purposes of education that is summed up in the legislation of Labour and Conservative governments".

The Perry case has "opened the floodgates to teachers daring to reveal the intolerable fear and stress of inspections" that can deliver a "career-killing" single-word judgement, said The Guardian's Toynbee.

Even Ofsted's outgoing chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has admitted that reform is needed.

An Ofsted spokesperson said it was "immediately introducing a number of measures" to "address several areas of concern set out by the coroner". This included "developing new training for all inspectors, to include external experts, that will take place in early January".

All schools in England due an Ofsted visit this week can request their inspection is deferred until 2024 – "and all requests will be granted, unless the watchdog has significant concerns", reported The Independent.

What will be "crucial", said the BBC, is how the new chief inspector Martyn Oliver "sets the tone publicly when he takes over in the new year – it's one thing he can control".

'Can't fix Ofsted without fixing the sector'

Ofsted's response was "wholly inadequate" and "completely misses the point", claimed Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) union.

Media commentators and unions are "carrying the hopes of the profession by enticing us to imagine a life without Ofsted", said FE Week. "But the rallying cry for its dismantling is frankly just noise. If it was sent to the scrap yard tomorrow, we'd have a new Frankenstein agency welded together and released back into the wild by a week on Wednesday."

Short of scrapping the education regulator entirely, both main political parties have put forward proposals aimed at reform.

Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has signalled further changes to Ofsted inspections while Labour, which looks on course to win the next election, has set out its own plan to replace the current system – which ranks schools from "outstanding" to "inadequate" – with a more rounded report card.

"But change at Ofsted isn't enough," wrote Jon Severs for teachers' news site TES. Perry's death "became a symbol of the inspectorate's negative impact on the profession, and what was unfortunately lost in that movement was the wider context in which an inspection takes place", he said.

"Ofsted is a product of the sector, it operates within the context of that sector, and therefore you can't fix Ofsted without fixing the sector, too."