LABOUR’S plans to scrap one-word Ofsted assessments could leave out time-poor parents, according to a former director of the standards body.
While Sir Kier Starmer is set to expand on Labour’s plans to plug the shortage of teachers in a policy speech later this month, some have criticised his proposals to give more nuance to Ofsted ratings.
Luke Tryl, an ex-director at Ofsted and former education advisor to the government, said that making the ratings more complicated would make them disproportionately more difficult to use by lower income parents.
He explained: “The unintended consequence of Labour’s policy is that we create something which in paper looks like some great balanced scorecard but is basically only read by a small few and leaves behind the vast majority of parents.
“We know lots of parents are very time-poor; there is a risk that what you end up doing is biasing towards more engaged parents who can afford to spend time doing the research, which we know tends to be the higher-income parents.”
It comes as calls for the standards body to make a number of reforms, including to its assessments which have been branded “simplistic” and “reductive,” continue to grow following the death of Ruth Perry.
Ofsted recently announced a number of changes to its operations, reporting that it is making changes to how it communicates with schools ahead of inspections and implementing follow-up visits if they fail in certain metrics.
Proposals will see more notice given to schools about when their inspections are taking place, though the actual date of the inspection taking place will still be at short notice.
Schools who fail on safeguarding alone will receive a follow-up visit three months after the initial inspection, due to safeguarding being a limiting metric of the inspections.
This means that a failure in that category leads to an “inadequate” rating in most cases.
Only around 12 schools across the country are thought to have been judged poorly in safeguarding alone in the past 18 months.
Ofsted is also overhauling its complaints process, with the internal reviews process being dropped altogether, and schools will be able to lodge a formal complaint immediately.
Plans are seeking to “depersonalise” discussion of weaker areas of performance, referring to schools as a whole rather than individuals.
Despite the proposals, many feel the standards body hasn’t gone far enough, with Ms Perry’s sister, Julia Waters, who said that the one-word ratings given to schools put schools and teachers under “intolerable pressure.”
Matt Rodda, MP for Reading East added in June that Ofsted needed to “rethink” its single-word assessments, “which seemed to be very harsh and inaccurate in this case.”
The Labour party is also thought to be going to lay out proposals to move away from an “over-reliance” on exams and to modernise the curriculum.
Mr Starmer will lay out the party’s proposals later this month.
