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Accountability
Don’t need this pressure on: Towards intelligent, sustainable accountability.
I wonder how much longer we will go down the accountability road we’re on before politicians, DFE, Ofsted and some of the beneficiaries of the current system realise just how bad things are; before they realise that they themselves are making things worse; before they change tack. You only have to read the powerful recent … Continue reading
Ofsted Inspection is Deeply Flawed – says a serving inspector.
As someone who has raised multiple concerns about the validity of inspection processes over several years, I often receive messages from people on the receiving end. This year alone, at least 10 different people have shared their bad experiences; their feelings of injustice, insecurity, demoralisation, disillusionment – after an Ofsted inspection that has taken them … Continue reading
Ofsted Grades here to stay. Now what?
A while ago I wrote a blog exploring the reasons why Ofsted Grading is such a terrible idea: Five reasons to ditch Ofsted grades. Here are the reasons: They are a ludicrous over-simplication Inspection is fundamentally too subjective and unreliable The public interest illusion: schools needing the most help are damaged even more. The hideous hubris … Continue reading
Five Reasons to Ditch Ofsted Grades
Some recent conversations have made me want to return to this theme. I really hope we can build some momentum around this issue. Here goes: I reckon that in 50 years time, we will look back at the current Ofsted-grading era as one of the big educational blackspots of history. Serious educationalists and policy makers … Continue reading
Six principled practices for intelligent schools:
On my travels I’ve encountered schools that are doing brilliant things without resorting to short-cuts, without saying that they’ve sacrificed their principles to satisfy external pressures and without making life miserable for their staff with ugly brute-force whip-cracking performance cultures. Some schools are lovely to work in because leaders increasingly recognise the power of building … Continue reading
Priority One: Improving the Quality of Teaching.
The dominant issue in delivering a great education to all young people in a school or college is to ensure that they are being taught well, by someone with the confidence, knowledge and skills required, relevant to the school/college context, in every lesson. Recruiting, retaining and developing great teachers should be a total frontline priority. It already is … Continue reading
Standards?! What’s going on with GCSE grades?
Are standards going up? Here’s my annual twitter joke for GCSE results day: DfE media guidance. Response to GCSE outcomes: If results have gone up: This is evidence of policy raising standards. If results have gone down: This is evidence of policy raising standards. It’s a clever trick – but it’s not actually wrong. A … Continue reading
Ofsted Reliability Trials. Some suggestions.
(UPDATE at the Bottom…) It’s very welcome news that Amanda Spielman is going to support an Ofsted ‘research push’ as reported here in Schools Week. The publication of results of an initial trial is a step in the right direction. In my ‘Gimme some truth‘ blog at the end of 2014, I complained about the … Continue reading
More issues with Progress 8.
In this post I’m going to set out a few of the issues I see with the use of Progress 8 data, especially as one of the indicators of school effectiveness in inspections and in general school-to-school comparison and evaluation. For further reading on Progress 8, you want also wish to read the following: My … Continue reading
Dissecting Progress 8. The good, the bad and the ugly.
Now that Progress 8 has been born and looks like it’s here to stay, there’s no use wallowing for too long in outrage at the data-garbage bonkersness of it all. We might all agree that averaging out every child’s achievements across the school via a super-convoluted and arbitrary algorithm to generate a single number with … Continue reading
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