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An Early Years Perspective: OFSTED: reform required This message adds to the blog that Mike Aylen wrote in April, when he commented on current concerns about Ofsted.  They are not new.  Early years provision has been persistently misunderstood and poorly served by Ofsted inspections. Early Years is a complex phase, involving provision in the private and voluntary sector as well as a decreasing number of maintained nursery schools.  It also includes the reception class in every primary school.  Research commissioned by the Froebel Trust, led by Dr. Susana Castro-Kemp of the Institute of Education at UCL, reported in May 2022 that “interactions with Ofsted inspectors are characterised by a power imbalance” (1). She quotes findings from a Nursery World survey which show grave failures in the Ofsted inspection process (2). Although there is general ag...

NIL SATis - Nothing is enough Why are we testing children so much? It is time once again for SATs and by now these children have already been subjected to Baseline assessment, Phonic Screening, Key Stage 1 SATs, Multiplication Tables Check, and some might be doing the 11 plus. Who are all these tests for? There have often been reports from secondary schools suggesting that SATs testing in primary schools is inaccurate and unhelpful in creating a profile for an individual child which they are then required to use to project a child's outcomes at 16. Do they enhance children's opportunities to learn and what do they tell us about children? A test is simply a snapshot at a particular moment in a child's life. This will only tell you about one small aspect of a child's development and growth and can't show how far knowledge and skill are embedded in the individual whic...

OFSTED OR BUST? You do not have to look very far on Google or indeed (if you have time) speak to your colleagues to conclude that Ofsted needs to change radically. The National Education Union’s recent webpage headline is ‘Replace Ofsted’.  Old news? The elephant in the room? Those lucky readers who work in schools know that this organisation is going badly wrong confirmed by the recent headlines in the press and social media. How many suicides, reported heart attacks and mental breakdowns do our colleagues have to endure before we all quit? The link between the reducing teaching workforce numbers, at all levels, is interesting. Ofsted seems to think that teachers ‘are fleeing to better paid jobs’. That may be true but with the stress of teaching AND Ofsted (the elephant) it certainly does require much better renumeration and free psychotherapist ses...

DfE drops its academisation goal for 2030   The news (reported on 24 February 2023 in https://schoolsweek.co.uk) that the DfE is ditching its key goal for all schools to be academised by 2030 reminds us of the fickle nature of the political world, accentuated in recent years, by the high turnover of education ministers. The current Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, is the fifth in just four months, an extraordinary catalogue of changing personnel at the top! This about-turn in policy is welcome, nevertheless, because it should, at least in theory, enable the remaining 61% of primary schools, which are not academies, to make their own judgements about whether to go down the academisation route. In practice, the context of under-funding from central government to the local authorities, has made it increasingly difficult to provide local services at the level they...

We are being told by the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, that more pupils by the age of 18 must have a greater understanding and application in maths so give future citizens more ‘confidence’ in the subject. What about the humanities, arts and all the creative areas of the curriculum? I fear that greater attention to the mathematics curriculum could be top-ended loaded. That is, what happens at 18 influences what is taught in primary schools. Still, the general election is not far away and it will take more than two years to implement. Two years is a long time in politics....