The teaching unions never let a good crisis go to waste. Following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, the headteacher of Caversham Primary School in Reading, who took her own life after Ofsted told her it was going to downgrade her school from ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’, the NEU has called for the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills to be replaced by a body that’s ‘supportive, effective and fair’.
As the co-founder of four free schools, I feel ambivalent about Ofsted. On the one hand, Ofsted has been kind to my schools, ranking three of them ‘Outstanding’ and one of them ‘Good’. But on the other, there isn’t much correlation between how pupils perform and a school’s Ofsted rating.
In 2020, the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin, along with several colleagues, looked at what percentage of the variance in individual GCSE results could be explained by the Ofsted rating of the school they attended, i.e.
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