Ofsted's Four Challenges

Miriam Rosen's HCMI report for Ofsted published in November 2011 identified four challenges facing education in the UK. 


Tackling failure. 

• The number of schools judged inadequate went down from 553 in August 2010 to 451 in August 2011; a reduction of over 18%.
• Schools judged inadequate are turning themselves around faster than they used to. On average it now takes 18 months to get out of Special Measures; it used to take 20 months. More than a fifth of those coming out of Special Measures went into Good rather than Satisfactory!

This seems to be good news; Ofsted certainly seems to be raising standards at the bottom end.


Raising ambitions.

• "Nearly 800 schools, have been judged satisfactory for at least their last two inspections and have no better than satisfactory capacity to improve. Of the 40 previously satisfactory colleges inspected this year, 22 continue to be no better than satisfactory and two declined."

What they seem to be saying here is that satisfactory providers are becoming complacent. Satisfactory is no longer good enough. There seems to be a particular problem with the FE sector which Rosen highlight's elsewhere in her report.


Improve the quality of teaching.

• "At the heart of every learning institution is good teaching, with a clear focus by the organisation’s leadership on continually improving teaching, which leads in turn to consistently high standards of practice by teachers. However, the quality of teaching in our schools is still too variable .... Satisfactory teaching does not deliver good enough progress for pupils in the most challenging circumstances. Just 3% of secondary schools and 4% of primary schools were judged outstanding for the quality of teaching across the school. .... None of the colleges, adult and community learning providers or prisons we inspected received an overall outstanding judgement for the quality of teaching."

Again, satisfactory is no longer good enough. Certainly a judgement that so few providers are outstanding for this key measure is scary.


Ensure the best services for those who need them most.

• "The fifth of schools serving the most deprived pupils were four times more likely to be found inadequate than the fifth of schools serving the least deprived pupils. Seventy-one per cent of schools serving the least deprived pupils were judged to be good or outstanding this year compared with 48% of schools serving the most deprived." But 85 schools in deprived areas were outstanding: almost all were urban schools and over a third were in London.

I don't think many teachers would be surprised by this finding. It has always been far harder to provide an adequate education to pupils from deprived backgrounds than to those from affluent backgrounds. Many would say that the Ofsted judgement criteria make some allowance for this extra difficulty but not nearly sufficient allowance.