When you’ve got the Secretary of State for Education in England acknowledging concerns about Ofsted’s consistency in inspections and someone as well-connected as his former special adviser, Sam Freedman, saying similar things, then you know that the frustrations of teachers and headteachers at the so-called chalkface have filtered upwards.

The trouble is: knowing this doesn’t make it any easier for a school when it gets a rogue inspector, a rogue team, or a group of disparate individuals who have taken their tone from the Chief Inspector for Schools and are on an apparent mission to show that a school has lost its focus, or is complacent, or is peopled by whingers, or whatever this week’s finger-wagging narrative might be.

I receive lots of emails from people in schools who resent the way that Ofsted appears to drive what we have to do each day.

That includes the fatuous notion of demonstrating progress every twenty minutes. I have written about this elsewhere; and inveterate blogger @oldandrewuk has similarly highlighted the pernicious way in which Ofsted appears to promote a ‘preferred’ teaching methodology.

The saddest part of all of this is the sense of fear Ofsted invokes across the profession. You only have to talk to members of school leadership teams on a Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday to see the way their phones are out and their faces ashen between noon and 2pm in case the ‘call’ comes in. Thereafter, as the Wednesday bell tolls, a kind of hilarity breaks out.

As I wrote once on Twitter, for schools on Ofsted-standby, Wednesday night is the new Friday night.

Many outside the teaching profession won’t get this: they won’t understand the collateral damage Ofsted leaves behind, the way people who often fled the classroom many years ago deign to tell those of us still in the classroom how we should be teaching.

Outsiders won’t understand how superficial the judgements often are - for example, a teacher in Suffolk was told a lesson couldn’t be better than a ‘3’ [requires improvement] because one student - yes, one student - had some graffiti on her book and this somehow indicated a poor attitude to learning by all her students.

Good people I respect and admire are being cowed by all of this.

One undoubtedly good school last term got the Ofsted call to visit on a day when they knew that as part of a pre-planned PSHE programme they would have guest speakers talking to students.

They decided - naively, it now transpires - to carry on as normal. They thought Ofsted would appreciate their community engagement.

The result: inspectors graded those lessons as 3s or 4s because the outside speakers didn’t - wait for it -  demonstrate student progress.

Thus a more timid and less effective school which had cancelled the guest speakers at the last minute might have done better.

This is precisely how inspection drives practice. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was good practice.

Instead it’s too often mechanistic and robotic - because real learning doesn’t neatly fall into 20-minute chunks.

As the Secretary of State implied, a school’s inspection outcome seems still to depend on which group of Ofsted-trained individuals (I avoid the word ‘team’) you happen to get.

Thus our most urbane and widely-read Education Secretary presides over the most mechanistic inspection regime we’ve seen: in many cases, so data-driven is the inspection process that the team might as well have stayed at home, avoided paying money to Premier Inn, and instead phoned in their final report based on their Excel spreadsheets.

And here, at the risk of depressing those who return to school tomorrow, is a sad true-life account of the system from a member of a leadership team in a school that the local community admire and support, and where the inspection team appeared determined to expose them as complacent and lacklustre. It’s as if they came in with that mission.

This member of the school’s leadership team, who I’d have thought in the future would make an outstanding head, summed up his own thoughts like this:

I take my hat off to anyone with the courage to be a headteacher.  I have to consider my ability to keep a roof over my children's heads and I am not skilled, dedicated, or brave enough even to consider it.  

We should be afraid of inspections.  They are not predictable and they are not necessarily fair and people lose their jobs because of them.  

A sample of 0.04% of lessons annually is thought to be sufficient to support judgements which can condemn a school or a leader.  I think the Statistical Society might have an issue with that.  

We do a difficult and incredibly important job.  Inspections should help us to be better.  I've had four section 5 inspections in four different schools under four different inspection schedules.  I've yet to experience one which helps teachers teach any better or students to learn any faster or deeper. Perhaps somewhere it does happen.  

I work in a high-morale, high-resilience school.  We are determined to make a mockery of the inspection by mid-August.  Perhaps this is the value of inspection after all: people rail against the injustice and work a bit harder.  I would honestly say that we feel more united and determined than ever.  Ofsted have provided the common enemy that Alex Ferguson always invented to unite his team.  It actually works.  All you have to do is go through an inspection that tells you repeatedly how rubbish you are.  

Post-inspection, I am older and wiser, slightly colder and harder, but resisting the temptation to be dispirited or demoralised.

After all, it’s four years or so until they next visit. During which we can focus on real teaching and real learning.

If you are on Ofsted-watch in the next few weeks, my very best wishes. Keep focussing on the things that matter for your students, your school, your community.

And if you are badly and inaccurately inspected, make a bigger fuss about it. We must as a profession take on this climate of fear.

The Dementors may be circling at the gates, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves more regularly and more forcefully who is really in control, who and what really matters in our schools, and what ‘real’ education is all about.

Geoff Barton

Sunday 2 June 2013

21:30