By Victoria Mckeown-
A deficient complaint procedure at Ofsted has been exposed, after its system was tried by this organization following an investigation into a school were a teacher alleged institutional racism.
Close scrutiny of Ofsted’s report about St Harris Academy Tottenham in 2019 was conducted after one of its teachers, Joshua Adesui, accused the school of institutional racism, and gathered 6,000 signatures calling for the principle of the school to resign or be sacked.
Adusei, 27, had alleged that the school’s discipline policies disproportionately affect students from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds.
Suspended teacher: Joshua Adesui Image: change.org
The Eye Of Media.Com at the time contacted Mr.Adesui, and asked if he could provide any factual evidence to back up his allegation, but he did not respond to our requests. In the process, a history of Ofsted’s report was examined to obtain a full picture about the school. After their it emerged that Ofsted had criticized the school’s zero tolerance policy was too strict.
After an issue arose in the first week of May, following an inquiry into some of Ofsted’s assessment of schools, Ofsted’s press officer, Emma Bowden Right was unable to respond to a question about how an Ofsted report arrived at the conclusion that the school’s zero tolerance was too strict. Ms Wright was frustrated at the probe to a question for which she had no answer, then dropped the call.
Proposals to expose the deficient press officer immediately were shelved after our quality control team considered it not the best response, but rather to follow a complaint process and assess the integrity of the process. Because Mr. Wright is employed by Ofsted, it was concluded any blame about her ineptitude had to be attributed to her training , rather than her own inadequacy.
However, her arrogant decision to drop the phone without fear of consequence meant the matter called for more examination, and a complaint process was preferable to assess how it is dealth with, in case the matter was diffused.
There was a hope that the complaint process could resolve the issue. There was also an internal debate about how necessary it was to expose Ms Wright without allowing enough time for Ofsted to conduct an investigation of its own and resolve the issue. However, Ofsted’s complaint procedure is generally designed for schools, child care providers, or social care. Its complaint procedure also does not address complaints sent after 5 days(which you never mentioned) which appears unreasonable/
Despite receiving a comprehensive complaint in writing about the conduct of their press officer, the situation was not addressed as the education watchdog insisted on a formal complaint.
The Ofsted press office were contacted for comment about the defective process which appears to limit complaints that come in.
Ofsted has for years provides valuable assessments of schools and usually provides detailed reports about their findings of various schools. They then rank the schools as outstanding, good, or needs improvement- to indicate where there school is at, and make recommendations for improvement.
The regulator has however sometimes been challenged about the quality of its reports.
An example occurred recently, after a new provider, MRG Services UK Limited, criticized the Ofsted’s competence in its latest report on their school, stating that it visited while many of the staff were still working from home or furloughed, which “inevitably led to very limited contact time”.
The inspector covering themes one and two of the inspection – ensuring the attainment of requirements of the provider requirements and beneficial outcomes did so from home, was said to have had no factual observations to make. This is just one example of the possibility of usually efficient organizations to have glaring flaws in its system which if not confronted, will continue at the expense of schools and other bodies inspected by Ofsted.
When organizations as established as Ofsted cannot efficiently answer reasonable press enquiries, it exposes failings in its system, which could be more persistent that immediately apparent.
An investigation into Ofsted’s handling of both our enquiry and its assessment of the school is ongoing.