Education Inspection: the future

Ofsted recently held a launch event for a common inspection framework which has been remodelled for further education and skills, schools and early years. The slides presented at the event are all available here.

From September, Ofsted will inspect good schools and further education and skills providers once every three years under a new short inspection model. Starting from a premise that the school or provider is still good, inspectors look to ensure that those standards are being maintained as well as checking that leaders have identified key areas of concern and that they have the capacity to address them. 

Basildon: A Model for Educational Excellence

In just two years, several failing schools in Basildon have turned the tables, receiving 'good' or 'outstanding' Ofsted ratings in 2013. Other schools have improved and by next year, headteachers across the town are confident all their schools will be rated “good” or “outstanding”.

There have been several contributing factors to these achievements: successful schools have agreed to step in and  help out struggling neighbours immediately if needed; all schools, academies and local authority-maintained schools, have signed up for the town’s excellence panel; the town’s teaching school, Lee Chapel, sees its role as training new recruits for every primary school in the town - not just its own; successful heads act as mentors to newly-appointed ones.

Now Basildon's pioneering model could be adopted by schools across the rest of the country. Plans are already underway to extend the scheme to other counties and possibly, extending the blueprint to secondary schools too.

Update: School Inspection

The March edition of the School Inspection Update has been published, discussing inspection of school and academy sixth forms; there are various links within the document for further reading and statistics on topics such as online safety, teaching assistants, workload, performance tables and more. Handbooks for school inspectors can be found here.