Ofsted downgrades schools

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Ofsted is said to have raised the bar so much in its inspection criteria that the proportion of schools now classed as inadequate has leapt to 10 per cent compared with 4 per cent in 2008/2009.

And around 50 per cent of all the schools inspected in the autumn were considered to be either satisfactory or inadequate. Just 9 per cent of schools are deemed to have been outstanding this time around whereas 19 per cent were in the previous inspection.

Ofsted said: "We have made it clear that every time an inspection framework is revised, expectations are raised too."

However, John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told the BBC: "I don't think [Ofsted] is serving parents very well in the comparative views it is providing."

And John Fairhurst, head of Shenfield High School in Essex, was disappointed that his school was downgraded from good with outstanding features to satisfactory because the school's 2008 GCSE results were weak.

"It's become a rather skimpy inspection with an altered agenda – heavily data driven," he said. "The framework proved, in our case, superficial and underestimated the good work of the school."