Bring It On: Ofsted Tell Schools Planning To Legally Challenge Them

Ofsted has told schools that plan to legally challenge their judgements to” bring it on” as the British Education inspectors ridiculed school heads that engage in what they described as a ”colossal waste of tax payers money in trying to overturn judgements from Ofsted.

Senior Ofsted deputy director for schools, Matthew Purves, told an event in London today that his organisation has “very consciously tried to make sure everything’s judged well and judged once” under its new inspection framework. The open challenge  comes following a number of legal challenges launched by disgruntled schools in the past few years, all of which Ofsted has won.

Most notable among the victories of the education inspector was a legal triumph in 2018 against Durand academy . Ofsted won a court judgement against the defunct Academy following an appeal to overturn an earlier victory by the school by the High Court.   Durand Academy was eventually rebrokered to new sponsor the Dunraven Educational Trust and rebranding as Van Gogh Primary school.

Under Ofsted guidelines, the behaviour of pupils will form a category of its own, a distinction that does not sit well with all schools. When asked whether Ofsted expected challenges in the High Court if two schools, one with “happy, healthy children” but poor exam results and another with good results but poor behaviour were judged differently, Purves said: “I think it’s going to be foolhardy, but my first response would be bring it on.

“We’ve got to judge what we find, and if schools want to challenge that, first of all that’s a colossal waste often of taxpayers’ money that could be spent on children’s education. Sometimes schools will feel that’s justified,” he said.

Purves said one of the things he likes least about the current framework is that often schools are judged with a “flat profile” – where individual headline judgments are very similar.

“We’ve very consciously tried to make sure everything’s judged well and judged once in the new handbook,” he said.

“To take your example, [if] the school is getting great results, but there’s a major culture of bullying or children are very unhappy, etc etc. Well, take the personal development and behaviour and attitudes judgments. In this hypothetical example, they can’t be good. They may be RI, they may be inadequate, we’d have to look at the criteria and work that out.

“[Although] that doesn’t mean the quality of education judgment has to be benchmarked to those, I’d have a lot of questions about the way the education is being delivered because quality of education isn’t just about results, it’s the way you get there.

“But it’s possible that teaching in the classrooms is incredibly well thought-through, brilliantly delivered and that’s why they’re getting great results in spite of that, so I would be very willing for a judgment which judged quality of education to be good if it was and other things to be RI and inadequate if they weren’t.”