Quality of Education - The Direction of Travel

Having participated in a pilot of the draft Ofsted Framework (Quality of Education section) in November 2018 and also having had a section 5 inspection in April of this year, I was invited to speak at The Westminster Briefing ‘Understanding the Direction of Travel: for Schools: Preparing for the New Ofsted Framework’. The conference took place yesterday and I was really pleased with the positive feedback on my contribution which delegates said, “gave great insight into experience of new style inspections” and provided “practical advice to take back to school.”

So I thought I’d share this more widely in the hope that colleagues who are due an inspection soon may benefit from my experiences.

As ever, there will be critics out here who are vehemently against ‘preparing’ for Ofsted but if you act upon any of my suggestions there should be a  two-fold benefit – yes, your actions may tick an Ofsted box, but you will also have improved aspects of the Quality of Education in your school.

If you are due Ofsted from September onwards, I strongly recommend that you read the Draft Framework and Draft Handbook so that you can understand the proposed changes. Then consider - are there changes you need to make to your SEF? Would it be helpful to reorganise your SEF to respond to the new sections? Would it provide clarity to have the Quality of Education section split into strengths / areas for improvement under the headings Intent, Implementation, Impact?

My experiences from the Pilot and my Section 5 inspection are that inspectors are looking for planned clarity of skills’ progression in subjects (intent), proof of clear progression of skills across year groups and through the school in pupils’ books/ pupil voice interviews (implementation), and evidence of long term remembering and the interconnection of knowledge (the new definition of progress and therefore, impact). 

We have worked hard in our school to ensure foundation subject books contain high quality, rich English – the same as you would find in English books – but it is important that the subject specific skills are the main focus of the learning and that this is clearly evident. We have dedicated time and training to developing teachers’ and pupils’ metacognition skills over the past two to three years, and the foundation books reflect quality articulation of reasoning – with younger pupils describing and explaining and older children justifying and convincing.

I was asked to explain why my curriculum is relevant to pupils in my school – what had I planned and shaped to ensure it had an impact on the children whose needs are not the same as pupils in schools with different demographics and circumstances? Consider this for your school. What do you do? As Head of a small school with a (relatively) high proportion of disadvantaged pupils who live in a small predominantly white middle class village, I ensure our curriculum, for example, provides opportunities for pupils to be outward facing eg our recent link with a village in Tanzania or our maths challenge event that involves pupils from many other local schools.

As a Head that moved a school out of Special Measures, the initial part of that journey was very data focused (and make no mistakes, published data and the IDSR will still be used by Ofsted to decide key lines of enquiry and to gauge the impact of everything that we do in schools). I used to have data drops six times a year and it felt like I was proving in-year progress to governors and HMI by showing increasing numbers. Once out of special measures, I reduced this to three per year which is more than enough! The draft framework is quite clear on reducing teacher (and leader) workload and anything more than two to three data collections per year will be seen as disadvantageous. So how will you prove progress? You, as a leader, will need to get into classrooms, carrying monitoring activities and actually seeing for yourself, via book scrutinies, learning walks and pupil voice, that pupils are being taught the progression of skills that was panned and that they are committing their learning to their long term memories and integrating new knowledge into larger ideas. If your school is already au fait with metacognition and the articulation of reasoning and thinking, then you are ahead of the game. I spent time looking at books with my subject leaders – asking them to train me on how to spot the skills’ progression and what to look for in each subject.

Finally, from speaking to a colleague who was inspected recently, I spent time with my staff discussing the safeguarding risks that are specific to our pupils in my school. This was a really useful exercise as we debated our top three, which included mental health issues connected to poverty and also to pressures from the Kent Test, and the awareness of complacency that could result in a school that has low levels of serious safeguarding incidents. Lo and behold, I was asked this very question in April, “What are the top three safeguarding risks for pupils in your school?”

Things to ponder:

Curriculum Intent

?      Do you have a clear overview of the progression of skills (practical, knowledge and understanding) for the pupils’ journey through your school for each subject?

?      Is your curriculum bespoke to your school and does it reflect the needs of YOUR pupils – how can you prove it?

Curriculum Implementation

?      Does the work in pupils’ books evidence skills’ progression across a year and across the school?

Curriculum Impact

?      Does pupil work evidence achievement in that subject, remembering in the long term and integration of new knowledge?

?      Consider how often your teachers collect data, why they are doing it and who is it for. Is data collection purposeful and gathered from first-hand evidence eg by looking at books, speaking to children, observing teaching and learning?

Safeguarding

?      What are the top three safeguarding risks for your pupils?