MNHQ here - AMA with Ofsted Chief Inspector Sir Martyn Oliver, 8th June, 7-9pm

[RhiannonEMumsnet]

Hi there,

We’re delighted to announce an AMA with Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector at the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, on Monday evening (8th June) between 7 and 9pm.

Sir Martyn has worked in education since 1995 starting as a teacher and joined Outward Grange Academies Trust (OGAT) in 2009 where he became Principal of Outwood Grange Academy and then a National Leader of Education (NLE). In 2016, Sir Martyn was appointed Chief Executive and Accounting Officer for OGAT, a role he held until he started at Ofsted in January 2024.

Please post your questions below and join him on the thread on Monday evening to hear the answers.

As always, please remember our guidelines - one question per user, follow-ups only if there’s time and most questions have been answered, and please keep it civil.

Thanks,
MNHQ

Retired teacher here, parent and grandparent. When I first taught Ofsted inspectors would visit and give judgements, but in their feedback would make suggestions for improvement or extension. Now they just judge, which is easy to do but very unhelpful. Should this not be changed.

Oooh, what an opportunity. Great AMA, thanks.

I have experience, as a parent of 3 schools. I primary and 2 secondary.

All three schools have been broadly fine for my children with the odd bump in the road along the way. But my observations are:

Schools have no money. Like, 30 gluesticks for a teachers Christmas gift is the best thing they've ever seen wrapped up, no money.

Schools have increasing demands. So many more pupils need more than academic lessons. They need quiet spaces. They need differentiated learning. They need breakfast. They need safeguarding.

So, on a diminishing budget schools, head teachers, teachers and TAs are expected to do more. How does the ofsted criteria accommodate for these challenges?

Or, are the ofsted criteria fit for purpose given the current challenges facing schools?

Following the White Paper on SEN reform, will OFSTED be reviewing its training and guidance for Inspectors, so that they can more accurately assess the support the school is providing to children with SEN? Achievement targets, like how many children with SEN achieve GCSE's are only a tiny part of the picture.

Why have you sucked the joy out of teaching?

Does Ofsted consider schools who offer mixed sex toilets/changing rooms to be in contravention of the law, and also safeguarding and if so, what will they do about this?

Angry parents often threaten to report a school to Ofsted. How do you deal with such complaints which seem evident to be parents out for revenge, perhaps against the Head Teacher?

My question:

Why can’t all OFSTED inspections be changed so that inspectors just turn up at any school at 8.30am on any day of the week without prior warning?

This would:

a) Give inspectors a proper view of schools rather than the artificially sanitised version hastily cobbled together once an inspection has been announced

b) Reduce pressure on teachers in the period before an inspection. At the moment, the day before an inspection is absolute hell - schools open until 10pm, teachers working through the night, SLT behaving even worse than usual…

Thanks

How do you sleep at night? More seriously, where do you see inspection playing a positive role in school improvement? Inadequate judgements, or their colour combo equivalent now, drive schools substantially further down before there is any possibility of them picking themselves back up. ( Although, like Trigger’s broom, “themselves” is misleading because barely any of the same people will be there to make the change.). Conversely, some really poor schools do enough of the ‘right’ things visibly enough over two days and can carry on complacently letting children down. How does inspection help?

Is Ofsted now past its sell by date? It has had many incarnations, but does not appear to have a consistent framework and experience to properly evaluate the range of schools and experiences in the state sector.

When will we get an independent and impartial compliants system, like the police have with the IOPC?

As a childminder of 17 years, i have heard dozens upon dozens of childminders and settings make complaints about their inspections and inspectors and only once, quite recently, has the complaint been upheld.

No surprise when OFSTED manage their own complaints that the outicome always finds in favour of the inspector. You can't possibly believe that they are never making mistakes, treating staff and childminders unfairly and making personal and not professional judgements?

Sir Martyn,

You have taken over an organisation that was recently found to have contributed to the death of headteacher Ruth Perry. Ofsted has been recognised to place unbearable burdens of stress on the teaching profession and is implicated in the large numbers of teachers leaving the profession.

There have been what feel like token adjustments to inspections to account for this, while many feel like the new framework which covers more areas of for inspection increases workload rather than reducing it.

We also have new findings that the Ofsted inspection outcome for achievement appears to correlate highly with the prior attainment profile of each school (see picture). Are schools still being graded on their cohort, and why would teachers want to work in schools who will be penalised by Ofsted because of it? In addition, schools are still waiting for information on the new enrichment benchmarks which they will be judged against in the autumn. These enrichment benchmarks are causing wide concern among teachers who, with the dire state of school funding, rightly believe that they will be pressured into working even more unpaid hours to provide extra-curricular activities 'for Ofsted'. I know this is already happening.

Many teachers feel that the only way for teacher workload, recruitment and retention to be taken seriously by those running education would be for it to form part of Ofsted inspections, and for schools to be downgraded if they are working teachers into the ground. Instead of this, Ofsted appears to be going in the opposite direction and increasing workload, particularly in schools with challenging cohorts.

My question is: do you feel any responsibility for tackling teacher stress, recruitment and retention, particularly given your organisation's recent history, and if so, what is going wrong?

Please ask @noblegiraffe’s question first as she absolutely gets to the heart of what parents, teachers and school leaders depend on most: teaching being a profession that attracts and retains high quality professionals empowered to do their jobs.

As the expectation is that more pupils with complex needs will be educated in mainstream settings, the percentage of children in mainstream settings who will not achieve standard GCSE outcomes will increase. How will Ofsted's inspection framework evolve to ensure schools are not penalised for serving these pupils well?

Currently, there is the perception that schools must continue teaching towards GCSEs, even when this is not the most appropriate pathway, because inspection judgements remain closely linked to attainment measures. There are alternatives that schools are exploring, but there will be a timing gap while schools establish these effectively (scrabble for funding, build facilities, train staff etc).

What specific changes will Ofsted make to prevent accountability pressures from driving educational decisions that may not be in the best interests of these pupils?

There is so much that could be asked! My 4 priority questions would be:

1. How does Ofsted reconcile the vast volume of the primary curriculum with cognitive load theory and a child's actual capacity for long-term retention?

2. Why is the burden of low attendance placed so heavily on schools under the guise of 'belonging,' when external socio-economic barriers are often outside our control?

3. How can inspections ensure a fair balance so that universal strategies aimed at the most vulnerable do not inadvertently lead to the wider student cohort being overlooked?

4. How does Ofsted account for cases where the intense pressure to maintain high attendance metrics forces schools to keep persistently disruptive pupils in the classroom, resulting in compromised safety and disrupted learning for the rest of the children?"

Do you feel ashamed that ofsted inspections are the cause of some much stress and teachers leaving the profession?

Have you looked at other countries which have at least as good education systems but do not have any form of national inspectorate but instead have local partners who work collaboratively with schools? Why do you think you should exist at all as an organisation when you do more harm than good?

I ask as a governor of a small rural primary school…why were the recent changes to your Ofsted inspections ultimately no more than tinkering rather than taking a wholesale change to remove the damaging judgement based system for schools, instead moving to an holistic an supportive system. As a comment, I am deeply disappointed in OFSTED and the harm it does to schools and the mental health of our teachers and leadership. No amount of words will change the fact that how you work is harmful.

Are you concerned that the SEND white paper will mean that more children with complex needs are placed in mainstream schools and that schools will not have the benefit of any EHCP top of funding, but that the new delegated amounts pale in comparison to the money they have lost.
In other words you are saying to teachers and parents - we know mainstream schools weren’t able to do a good job meeting the needs of these children but now you can have higher needs with less funding.

Since this is doomed to failure, costing us good teachers, huge challenges in every classroom and of course SENd children not getting an education - how are you speaking out to stop these ‘reforms’?

Well said, I hope this is asked. I believe this feeling to be reflective of many of those who work in education, as well as of many parents. It was a wasted opportunity for positive change.

Are you concerned about the rapidly declining number of Childmiders?

As a childminder, I would like to ask why they have seen fit to change the grading system to now make it seem SO much more complicated, and replaced the previous system with one which seems much more pressurised as now there are 7 areas to achieve in!

Why are schools who are magnet schools for pupils with SEN unfairly penalised under the new inspection framework?

We have 15% of the school with an EHCP when compared with 2% of the school down the road, and 3.5% nationally for a mainstream primary school. This impacts not only on our attainment but also on our attendance as a lot of these pupils have complex medical needs and lots of appointments.

As it stands, if both schools presented identically in all other areas of inspection, the school down the road would be graded better than us as their results and attendance would be better despite being so very uninclusive that most of the local parents send their children to us instead of them.

How will safeguarding be inspected in September when schools don't have the new KCSIE guidance and it's nearly the summer?

What is your justification for the shameless bias against schools who cater for a high proportion of disadvantaged children in the achievement section of your framework? How can condemning schools who transform these children’s lives support them in the future when their achievements are devalued in this way? And can you explain why lifelines such as Alternative Provision and Supported Moves are effectively being removed from schools in the new guidance, forcing schools to permanently exclude children who desperately need an opportunity to re-invent themselves? This government’s education policy is more damaging to the future life chances of the most vulnerable children in society than anything that Gove did.

Thanks. I am so angry at the missed opportunity to truly bring value to schools.

I have four questions, all written from first hand, professional experience.

Question 1 – Achievement and Predictable Bias
During consultation on the new framework, many school leaders warned that achievement judgements would continue to correlate strongly with factors outside a school's control, including prior attainment, disadvantage, home background, parental engagement, SEND levels, pupil mobility, service children, the effectiveness of support services available to families, and the statistical volatility of small cohorts.
Those concerns appear to have been realised.
Why did Ofsted proceed with a framework that was predicted to produce this outcome, and how can you demonstrate that schools are being judged on the quality of education they provide rather than the characteristics and circumstances of the children and families they serve?

Question 2 – Inclusion as a Disincentive
Are you concerned that the system now creates a disincentive to inclusion?
Some leaders believe that being recognised as highly inclusive simply attracts more pupils with complex needs without the funding, provision or capacity to support them. At what point does celebrating inclusion become a mechanism for overloading the very schools that are doing the right thing?

Question 3 – Unequal Inspection Conditions
How can inspections be considered equitable when some MATs can deploy senior leaders, specialist staff and additional teachers across schools during inspection, while maintained schools have no equivalent support available from local authorities?
Is Ofsted inspecting the school's normal capacity, or the resources that can be assembled for inspection week?

Question 4 – Public Understanding of the New Judgements
Under the new framework, many schools are publicly celebrating having "met the standard", often accompanied by positive media coverage and parental communications.
Do you believe the public genuinely understands the distinction between "meeting the standard" and excellence, or is there a risk that parents are being misled into viewing all schools that meet the standard as performing at a similarly high level?
If the purpose of inspection is to help parents make informed choices, how will Ofsted ensure that the new judgements provide meaningful differentiation rather than simply becoming a pass mark that schools understandably market as a badge of success?

Thank you.