On Being Inspected

As a school Dorothy Goodman has had the honour of being inspected twice over recent months – once by Ofsted (we were part of the new pilot inspections programme), and the second time by an external consultant for our continued Investors in People status (which, fortunately, we passed!). What I am sharing therefore is my perception of the two, having experienced them very close together (Ofsted in June; IIP in September).

At first sight what is interesting is that the processes appear to be coming from different starting points. For Ofsted what is now important is that the Head’s view of the school is judged to be accurate. So, although the new inspections will be shorter (our own lasted less than 2 days), the examination of what the Head has written on the SEF (the Self-Evaluation Form that is replacing the S4), and of the Senior Leadership Team, is extremely rigorous. What is being tested is the central nervous system of the organisation. Is what the Head says accurate? If it is, and if the school has the capacity to improve, then why probe into the nooks and crannies? An example of this can be seen in the way that observations of teachers were carried out, since, despite the fact that we only have 8 teaching staff, not all of them were observed. What inspectors did was to ask me my views of the teachers, and what they then did was not so much judge the teachers as test out my view of them. And if I was essentially correct, why carry on observing? This seems to be the spirit of the new process.

And of course, in checking the Head’s view of the school, judgements made by others over time will be extremely helpful, i.e. comments from the JESE, reports from external consultants or from the Head’s Performance Management Review, views expressed by governors etc.. If all of these judgements are in line with the final grades submitted by the Head Teacher then the evidence base is clear.

Click Here to see ofsted report in pdf format

Investors in People, on the other hand, comes at things from a seemingly different viewpoint. The process involved discussions with 20 employees, including a governor, which represents about 30% of the people who work here. In essence what they were doing was asking other people about me, whereas Ofsted were asking me about other people! The questions for IIP were detailed and extremely rigorous, focussing essentially on staff development issues, and providing some highly useful feedback in terms of areas for further improvement. For the new Standard organisations are benchmarked against others in each category, which helps to pinpoint accurately where one should be looking to do better. I found this extremely useful and have been able to integrate a number of the suggestions for further action into our overall School Improvement Plan.

So, where is the commonality in the two processes? Essentially it is in the concept of self-review / self-evaluation, and is summarised neatly in the Investors in People Standard for Level 4 (the highest level):

“The organisation will also be able to demonstrate that it uses information from both self-review and external sources to improve its practice”.

The essential questions for each inspection are:

• Does this organisation have an accurate view of itself?
• Has this organisation identified what it needs to do to improve?
• Does this organisation have the capacity to improve?

Tony Smith
Dorothy Goodman School