Ofsted have done their best to downplay the fact that 75 per cent of outstanding schools have lost their designation after re-inspection. But it remains a rather startling number and can’t fail to call into question the validity of their original grades and the inspection process itself.
Spielman maintains that the level of re-designation is an ‘inevitable’ phenomenon following on from some outstanding schools not being inspected for up to 10 years.
Unfortunately, this explanation—it’s more of an observation than an analysis— throws up some further uncomfortable questions. Why is it inevitable? Why is exemption from inspection afforded to outstanding schools leading to such complacency that these schools subside into mediocrity, or worse, on such a wholesale basis? If it were the case in just one or two outstanding schools, such assumptions of complacency might be more plausible.
Some comments, possibly emanating from Ofsted itself, have suggested that these 330 de-designated outstanding schools were self-selected, in that they gave enough cause for concern to warrant re-inspection despite exemption.
Fair enough. No evidence has been forthcoming to support this proposition. But in any case, why did this large number slide so dramatically?
Headteachers matter
The split between primary and secondary de-designations might hold some clues. Primary schools far exceed secondary schools in this ‘loss’ of status and one can speculate that size of the school might be a significant factor. The loss of an ‘outstanding’ headteacher might have a much more profound and immediate impact in a small school with a limited number of other staff than in a secondary school ,which is much more of a large, semi autonomous system where the headteacher is more a helmsperson than day-to-day decisive force. Six–ten years, the number during which many of the outstanding schools had not been inspected, corresponds to the length of tenure many heads serve in post. And it coincides with an era in which it has not been easy to fill primary headship posts …because of the extreme pressures of the job created by, yes, Ofsted.