OFSTED and Ruth Perry
Blog 15. In the wake of the damning inquest verdict on Ruth Perry's suicide, we consider how the role of OFSTED came about and why it should be abolished
OFSTED’s ‘Divine Right’ Creates Schools Hell
James Whiting SEA General Secretary explains how a quirk of the British Constitution gives OFSTED unaccountable power to change the focus of education, wreck schools and end careers. Instead of discussion and debate on education, similar to a cult, OFSTED pretends only it possesses education truth.
My qualification for writing a critique of OFSTED comes from serving as a teacher and senior leader over 40 years and finally becoming an OFSTED inspector (not HMI) leading short inspections before resigning. OFSTED is a closed inward-looking organisation which demands of its employees total acquiescence to its ‘sacred’ texts. If the monarchy was appointed by God, then OFSTED’s unaccountable power derives from authority rested in the Crown, which in the antiquated British constitution, means it is not subject to democratic checks and balances.
As I write the coroner in the Inquest of Ruth Perry has ruled that OFSTED ‘likely contributed to the death of Ruth Perry’ and said the inspection ‘lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity’ and was at times ‘rude and intimidating’. I worked with a range of inspectors including HMI. Most were conscientious and humane. The nature of the inspection process though, in which the school has to be crowbarred into an imposed set of criteria, always leads to considerable distress and conflict when it becomes clear that a school is to be condemned to ‘requires improvement’ (RI) or worse. Holding the line when school leaders are looking into the abyss means the inspector has to bury sensitivity and empathy. The process also gives the rogue inspector the licence to be disrespectful. Indeed, the catholic view of life after death works well as a metaphor here. The heaven of a positive judgement leads to more children, more funding and attracting better staff. RI is a kind of purgatory where schools have to work extremely hard just to stand still as staff leave, children prove harder to attract. The purgatory is made worse by the threat of an OFSTED monitoring visit and the constant pressure a local authority or academy trust will put on the school. Finally, there is the hell of an inadequate judgement. All that investment, intellectual and emotional, a head like Ruth Perry puts into a school is squandered in an instant. The local press features the shame, children leave, careers are ended and the school is then ‘brokered’ by regional commissioner to an academy trust.
In the Caversham Primary School instance this hell was to be visited on the school because there were errors in its safeguarding paper work, not because it was providing a poor education. The arrogant initial response to Ruth Perry’s suicide shows OFSTED’s belief in its own importance and lack of humanity. As it stands any flaw in safeguarding can lead to the hell of an inadequate judgement regardless of the quality of education in the school. In a breath-taking display of hubris, OFSTED stated they will now revisit a school given inadequate for safeguarding reasons six months after the report is published and should the bureaucratic changes be made to their liking, reverse the inadequate judgement. The humane alternative would have been to hold off publishing the report and the inadequate judgement for six months to give a school a chance to make the required changes. This iteration may well have saved Ruth Perry’s life.
Matthew Arnold, whose phrase ‘the best which has been thought and said’ appears in the Gove engendered preface to the national curriculum, was one of the first HMIs appointed in 1851. This was an appointment made not by parliament, but as a result of one of the typical vagaries of the British constitution, by the Privy Council on the advice of the prime minister.
Back in 1970 HMI were usually classically educated and liberal members of the establishment. They were given a radically different brief to the OFSTED employed-HMI of today.
Inspectors are appointed to serve as the professional advisers of a government department. The manner of appointment therefore follows the normal pattern for this category of public servant, except in one respect - that each is appointed by Order in Council. The title of Her Majesty's Inspector and the formal appointment by the Crown still serve as a recognition of the limited but important degree to which the inspectorate is independent of the executive.
The inspectorate acts in the confidence that a long tradition of independence has given it the right to speak its mind on educational issues. It recognises the right of its employer not to listen to its words, not to publish its writings, but would insist on the established privilege that what it does say or write should reflect the independent free judgment of an individual or of a professional group. (HMI Today and Tomorrow (1970) London: Department of Education and Science
OFSTED was established in 1992 just before the election of that year. This was because the Tory government of the day wanted to replace the independent HMI. Their comments were not necessarily supportive of the government’s record on education and they did not have the capacity to deliver mass inspection of schools. However, the act putting OFSTED at the centre of education provision maintained the same method of appointing Her(his) Majesty’s Chief Inspector through the Privy Council. They would now be in charge of the new OFSTED whose authority derives from the Crown not parliament. In practice, the Council appoints the nominee of the secretary of state in consultation with the prime minister.
Constitutionally, an appointment on behalf of the Crown cannot be undone by Parliament who only have advisory powers over them unlike the American Congress. The current chief inspector Amanda Spielman was appointed by Nicky Morgan via the Privy Council route, in spite of the Education Select Committee voting against her appointment because, unlike Matthew Arnold, she had never taught a lesson in her life. The only way the HMCI position would become untenable is if the Secretary of State no longer had confidence in them. Though OFSTED regularly reports to the Education Select Committee, such reports are for information only. The committee has no powers to direct OFSTED or throw out the conclusions of a report. However, the HMCI once appointed has iron clad protection from removal because the appointment is political in the first place, meaning failure would indicate the poor judgement of the Secretary of State. On the rare occasion when OFSTED releases a critical report (e.g. the recent one on implementation of T levels), the DFE is willing to live with because it demonstrates OFSTED’s quasi-independence.
The political nature of HMCI appointments was neatly encapsulated by David Blunkett’s attempted reappointment of Chris Woodhead, the then scourge of teachers, to show he was going to be tough on the profession. Woodhead though resigned himself because he ‘felt unable to defend aspects of government policy’.
How the HMCI is appointed and the lack of accountability for decisions may seem irrelevant to the suicide of Ruth Perry, but in working for OFSTED I experienced an autocratic culture of infallibility and entitlement bordering on arrogance. Employees directly employed by OFSTED as inspectors are now given the title HMI. However, the contrast between them and the independent liberal thinkers of the past could not be greater. HMI are now forbidden by contract from using the title in any other context than official OFSTED business and must tow the OFSTED line at all times. They become members of a cult whose infallible text is the Common Inspection Frame work and its associated documents.
In training sessions new frameworks are handed down on high like tablets of stone. Imagine being told, as we were, when the new framework was being developed that educational progress will now be defined as ‘knowing more and remembering more’ and that this paradigm shift and everything that flows from it has to be accepted without debate. The culture of the ‘divine right’ allows this particular divinity to change its mind and then in true Orwellian 1984 style, ditch and even laugh at (I witnessed this,) what was previously professed to be the truth.
Gone or reduced in importance from the judgement criteria are:--
· Progress from starting points (progress has disappeared as a concept altogether)
· Understanding
· The disadvantaged
· Skills
· Teachers (the new framework barely mentions generic aspects of pedagogy such as questioning, feedback etc)
In the new framework knowledge and the curriculum have become the main focus with a new word ‘sequenced’ now used in schools and inspection talk all the time. ‘Sequencing’ the curriculum ‘effectively’ is the new mantra.
The authors of ‘Beyond Ofsted’ (2023) an inquiry commissioned by the NEU sadly took a deliberate decision not to consider the role of OFSTED in promoting a specific ideology of education which can be changed it seems as a result of political whim. Instead it focuses on the stress caused by the inspection process, the lack of consistency and the lack of evidence that inspection results in school improvement. I would concur with those findings. I would argue also that the divine right OFSTED appears to have to impose different priorities on schools in line with the thinking of a new HMCI, creates what Mary Bousted said is “a tsunami of work as leaders and teachers move heaven and earth to provide the new evidence that they ….imagine OFSTED will demand to see’(quoted in the report) The most recent change though goes beyond evaluating different aspects of schooling to imposing fundamental change in the nature of education itself.
The Privy Council mechanism was used to give the HMI of the past independence from the government of the day. The old HMI were commentators, advisers and compilers of reports into aspects of education. They did not have powers to dictate educational practice in schools, label them as inadequate and wreck careers. The powers granted to OFSTED in 1992 should at least have gone hand in hand with a strong accountability system not some ‘divine right’ to exercise more or less unbridled power over schools.
OFSTED has to go. It is unaccountable for its actions. What is more, it seriously believes it is some kind of guardian of the truth (though this keeps changing) when in reality education has always been controversial and subject to a range of legitimate views. There is no one truth, but OFSTED does not baulk discussion of its pronouncements. It has unbridled power which it can exercise inhumanely, even brutally so important is adherence to the truth. ‘Beyond Ofsted’ does not quite reach this conclusion even though it is NEU policy. How schools should be accountable to their communities and the state who funds them needs working through, but without OFSTED.
A second article will consider alternatives.
Dedicated to Ruth Perry