Amanda Spielman, former Ofsted chief inspector, is set to become a Conservative peer. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is elevating Spielman – who served as head of Ofsted between 2017 and 2023 – to the House of Lords for her outstanding record in improving school standards.
Spielman’s peerage is richly deserved. She helped ensure that Tory education reforms, which saw the share of children in Good or Outstanding schools rise from 66 per cent to 86 per cent between 2010 and 2018, were maintained.
Throughout her tenure, Spielman’s enduring focus was on the curriculum. Too often, as she outlined early in her time at Ofsted, teachers were leaving pupils ‘with a hollowed out and flimsy understanding’. Spielman wanted schools to return to first principles: to focus on what they wanted to achieve and what the basic requirements of this were.
To put this into place, Spielman spearheaded a new education inspection framework that shifted the focus from abstract metrics to a closer assessment of the concrete substance of education, curriculum breadth, and teacher involvement.
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