“Single-headline grades are low information for parents and high stakes for schools,” said British Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson in a statement the day the first stage of inspection changes was announced. The overhaul plan calls for school “report cards” to be introduced in September 2025 to give families a more “comprehensive assessment” of school quality “and ensure that inspections are more effective in driving improvement,” according to the official statement.
“Parents deserve a much clearer, much broader picture of how schools are performing—that’s what our report cards will provide,” said Phillipson, who also serves as a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, which won back control of the government from Conservatives in July 2024.
In March 2024, Ofsted—which reports to Parliament—launched the “Big Listen,” a campaign to gather feedback from educators, caregivers, parents, and others to inform plans to revamp the inspection system. The project was described as the “largest consultation in Ofsted’s history,” with surveys completed by more than 20,000 people.
Many education groups—including the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of School and College Leaders, and NASUWT, the U.K. teachers union—voiced overall approval for the plans to overhaul inspections.
The National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), an independent research institution, was generally upbeat but raised some issues of concern.
“We welcome Ofsted’s openness and willingness to listen and take action,” said NFER chief executive Carole Willis in an email. “One of the most positive changes is the commitment to greater transparency from Ofsted,” as well as its plans to be more collaborative with schools and provide more “context” for review findings.
Willis cautioned, however: “Research has raised questions over the reliability and consistency of Ofsted judgements. . . . There remains a question over whether inspections are long or deep enough to allow robust conclusions to be drawn about the quality of provision in the complex areas Ofsted inspects.”
Two former Ofsted inspectors, concerned about the direction of the Big Listen, launched the “Alternative Big Listen,” an independently funded survey that drew more than a thousand responses, mostly from educators, and considerable media coverage.
“The Big Listen asked questions in a very closed manner, and it didn’t ask [certain] questions,” said former senior inspector Frank Norris in an interview. Ofsted, the alternative report concludes, has “lost very significant levels of trust and confidence from the school sector,” and faces an “existential crisis.”
The purpose of the English school inspections is threefold, the government explains in a published guide for parents: provide information to parents, promote improvement, and “hold schools to account for the public money they receive.” The guide says: “School inspections are required by law. We provide an independent assessment of the quality and standards of education in schools, and check whether pupils are achieving as much as they can.”
The English inspection system has drawn some attention over the years in the United States, including through a 2012 report produced by U.S. education analyst Craig Jerald that provided an especially in-depth look at how the English model works and how it might be adopted here to inform states’ school accountability efforts.
“[T]he English example suggests that inspections offer a way to make much more nuanced judgments about school performance, provide richer information to parents and the public, [and] offer better formative feedback to schools,” Jerald wrote. They “leverage expert judgment rather than relying solely on spreadsheet formulas.”
School inspection systems are common across Europe and also have emerged in places such as Hong Kong, New Zealand, and South Korea, as education analyst Robert Rothman noted in a 2018 report for the National Center on Education and the Economy. The Standing International Conference of Inspectorates, an association of national and regional education inspectorates founded in 1995, now counts 43 members, including England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Ukraine.
In England, most state-funded schools receive an inspection every four years, but those rated as “needs improvement” or “inadequate” get a follow-up visit sooner. An inspection typically lasts two days, and schools usually get just one or two days’ notice beforehand. Inspectors currently make judgments in four areas:
- quality of education
- behavior and attitudes
- personal development
- leadership and management
During the visit, inspectors talk to the headteacher and other school leaders, school governors (overseers), staff, and students. But inspectors devote most of their time, the parent guide explains, “observing a wide range of lessons and looking at the quality of education in the schools, and the impact of the curriculum.”
If the inspectors issue any “key judgements” of “inadequate” or “failing,” a school is placed in one of two “categories of concern”: “special measures” or “serious weaknesses.” A school designated as needing “special measures” is deemed to be “failing to provide pupils with an acceptable standard of education” and “not showing the capacity to make needed improvements,” according to Ofsted. Such schools are supposed to receive intensive support, but they also can face consequences if they do not show improvement over time, including the removal of staff and even a full takeover or school closure.
In an interview shortly before the plans to overhaul Ofsted inspections were announced, an Ofsted official described the agency’s work and the inquiries it receives from other countries.
“We get about 50 requests [for information] per year, but hardly any come from the U.S.,” said Verena Braehler, the deputy director of research and evaluation at Ofsted. “It is getting more and more global.”
Braehler noted that “inspectors . . . consider the performance data, they speak to the leaders of the curriculum and how they are planning, and they visit a lot more than one lesson. They might look at yearbooks, at the curriculum, ask students to come out separately” for conversations, for example.
She emphasized, though, that responsibility for making improvements does not rest with Ofsted.
“We can point to the strengths and weaknesses, but we are not the improvement agency,” Braehler said. “We diagnose. We don’t treat.”
—E. W. R.
