Ofsted chair welcomes call for greater scrutiny of ‘outstanding’ schools
Professor Julius Weinberg, the new chair of Ofsted has told school governors that it would be “helpful if they pushed for Ofsted to carry out more inspections at ‘outstanding’ schools.”
Professor Weinberg’s comments followed his speech to the annual conference of the National Governance Association in Birmingham on Saturday. This was the first speech he has made as chair of Ofsted since his appointment in April.
At the moment, any school that is judged as ‘outstanding’ for overall effectiveness at their most recent inspection will be exempt from further inspections. However, their performance will continue to be monitored and an inspection will take place if the chief inspector or education secretary raises concerns.
But in Ofsted’s strategy document for 2017-22, the schools regulator said that it intended to inspect a greater proportion of ‘outstanding’ schools and colleges.
Following his speech on Saturday, Victoria Clifford, chair of governors at St Bede’s School in Surrey, told Prof Weinberg: “Having become ‘outstanding’, I understand we have no further inspections on the horizon, which if you are rather shallow and target-orientated makes you think, ‘Oh, I can take my foot off the pedal.’
“I know you are strapped for cash but I think it would be good to have some inspection of ‘outstanding’ schools so we keep our foot on the pedal.”
Professor Weinberg told the governors: “From our point of view, if you push that point of view I would be very happy.”
He described Ms Clifford’s comments as “very helpful”, but told her that “there is a very difficult resource question here”.
He said: “Ofsted wants to do more inspections of the full range and breadth of school provision because that just informs us.
“My experience of regulating medical schools shows that this approach helped to spread best practice.”
Professor Weinberg added: “Of course, I think it is good for the institutions to feel that they might have an eye cast over them, and I think it would be very good for us and our teams to see the full range of types of schools and school performance and, therefore, actually inspect some ‘outstanding’ schools. But if you are going to prevent bad things happening, you have to apply your resources where they are most needed.”