Below (click on the link), one headteacher writes about a school community's experience of Ofsted and lays bear the current reality of the Ofsted regime in England. Please do look at the complete story written by Geoff Barton.
I myself have experience of complaining to Ofsted, about Ofsted, in different roles and capacities - and I have concluded from personal experience that Ofsted hides behind its 'policies and procedures' and the 'Freedom of Information Act' and the fact that they 'do not have to take individual cases into account'. I have found therefore, through experience, that the organisation is entirely lacking in transparency and accountability - in fact it is impossible to hold Ofsted to account - which suggests that the organisation is, in fact, lawless or above the law - and that this is a highly frustrating, unjust and immoral set of circumstances.
We should not tolerate this state of affairs any longer - and there should be a serious investigation into Ofsted's practices. Following the General Election in England, I shall be calling upon my local MP to get the ball rolling with an investigation on my behalf and on behalf of others.
Further, we are duped into thinking that we can call upon organisations such as the 'Children's Commissioner' and the 'Ofsted Adjudicator' for support - seeking justice and transparency - but I'm afraid they state that they are without any power to do anything about 'individual cases' so - in effect, one could argue that they may as well not exist in the first place. Are these organisations which are not 'fit for purpose'?
I have encountered huge hypocrisy and injustice regarding Ofsted's policies and procedures and lack of transparency and accountability.
Anyway, here is Geoff's story and it should be taken seriously.
https://www.tes.co.uk/news/school-news/ ... eir-health
Debbie: By the way, my latest complaint about Ofsted was about the illegal, unjust and sustained exclusion of a seven year old child from a primary school which was judged to be 'outstanding' in all categories. It proved utterly impossible to get any information from Ofsted to account for its inspectors' judgements. The implications go far beyond the needs of the individual child as so many very wrong decisions were made with regard to her education and care - and that child is now in another school having lost months of education and having suffered very damaging, inappropriate and unjust treatment.'This is a story about heads who end up losing their self-esteem, their health or their livelihoods. It is a story about Ofsted’
Geoff Barton
27th April 2015
This article is not about me. Instead, it is both about – and for – those school leaders who have given their professional lives to troubled schools, often in challenging circumstances, and then too often paid a devastating personal price.
It is about a group of people too easily unnoticed or forgotten: headteachers who ended up losing their self-esteem, their health or their livelihoods.
It is a story that goes largely untold because these school leaders – vilified or humiliated or simply no longer able to cope with the unrelenting pressure – retreat via ill-health or a surreptitious legal agreement negotiated by their union that binds them to silence.
It is a story about Ofsted.
It is the following state of affairs that are at the heart of the worries:
But I have recently been through a punitive Ofsted inspection and then stepped into the woeful labyrinth of Ofsted’s complaints procedure.
I have experienced at first hand the bruising effect of the inspection process and witnessed the coldly impersonal way the organisation closes in on itself to evade criticism or scrutiny.
It’s an experience that in another context – with different parents and governors, and less personal support – might have singled me out as the cause of the problem rather than part of the solution.
This is for the disillusioned, the discarded and, in particular, for the disappeared.
It was as if evidence of some kind had to be scrabbled around for in order to justify a judgement that fit the data.
The complaint
We decided to make a complaint, even though everyone advised us that this would be a waste of time and effort. But we had to complain. The judgement on the school was an injustice and we owed it to the students, the parents and the governors to state our case.
So we resorted to Ofsted’s complaints procedure.
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so Orwellian, predicated as it is on doing all it can to deter anyone from complaining. Such a mechanism then allows the organisation to claim that the rate of satisfaction with Ofsted is high.
Even getting the name of a specific person to address my complaint to proved impossible. In the end I had to resort to a bland “To whom it may concern”. The system appears to be built on a barbed-wire principle of deterrence.
The first simplistic sign of this approach is to inform potential complainants that we must not question the inspectors’ judgements about category 4: “Ofsted won’t investigate complaints about the judgement of a report that says a school has a serious weakness or needs special measures. Judgements of this type are reviewed before being approved.”
This, of course, is laughable. If our complaint is that inspectors have failed to look at the externally verified internal data we provided during the inspection, how exactly is a fact-checker in a far-flung office supposed to investigate that? They don’t have the data. Whose evidence are they going to be looking at?
It’s a pre-emptive strike, of course, designed to confer a veneer of analytical rigour, but which essentially boils the process down to the inspector’s word against the complainant’s.
I rejected the logic of this. I insisted to the subsequent HMI assigned to investigate our complaint that the original inspector’s notes should be released. This, I said, would quickly sort out the complaint one way or another. It would allow us to see what evidence those all-important final judgements were based on and whether due account had been given to the information we provided during the inspection.
I was told that this request to see the evidence could definitely not be agreed to – and that I would have to resort to a Freedom of Information request.
This response says a lot about an organisation so superficially precious about the quality of schools’ data and yet so determined not to reveal the processes that take place in its own back rooms.
It seems extraordinary to me that the Ofsted refuses to release its inspectors’ evidence forms in order that we might see how a judgement was reached. Such a request would bring transparency and it would focus inspectors’ minds, knowing that the evidence they collected could be scrutinised, in the way that schools’ data is scrutinised constantly and publicly.
This, after all, would have scotched my complaint if the inspection reports showed a catalogue of substandard teaching, marking and student progress.
In response to the inspection report, we produced a forensically argued complaint. We spent, in total, more than 20 hours on it, knowing that this would likely be a futile use of our time.
The document was much more systematic and dispassionate than this article. It focused on three core complaints, each supported with detailed evidence:
The unanswered questions
I was telephoned by an investigating HMI, who took an avuncular “May I call you Geoff?” approach, and a similar phone conversation took place with our head of school. Both of us stood by our complaint.
But we knew even before we began to restate our concerns that it was all a simple issue of one word against another.
The final letter from the investigating HMI lists our evidence against the response of the lead inspector. In each case, it says: “This aspect of your complaint is not upheld.” It also contains that classic trope of so many bureaucrats, thanking me for raising my concerns and reassuring me that that “they have been noted”.
I wrote back pointing out that this phase, in my experience, is a frequent tactic for obfuscation – “Your comments have been noted” too often means nothing. I asked for some clarification of what precisely had been noted, by whom, and for what purpose. I have heard nothing back, of course.
Much of the above will feel like the whingeing of someone whose ego has been rightly dented or whose complacency required a public kicking. Perhaps.
But I’m conscious also that there are wider implications here and that while I’m around to write publicly about a bruising but not catastrophic Ofsted process, too many colleagues disappear as a result of theirs.
Debbie: In my latest complaint to Ofsted, about Ofsted, it was a child who disappeared in the system - like so many others I have discovered.