Ofsted vs English education

The head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, believes that supporters of Michael Gove are running a ‘dirty tricks campaign’ against him. In the Sunday Times, Sir Michael claimed that his critics were annoyed because Ofsted had criticised two free schools: the Al-Madinah in Derby and the Discovery New School in West Sussex.

Civitas, the think tank of which I am director, is one of two think tanks whose criticisms he seems to have taken very personally. In reality (naively, it now seems) we were carrying out our study in the belief that Sir Michael had a philosophically similar view  and that he was struggling to change Ofsted’s direction because so many of its inspectors were committed to the now-discredited child-led methods of the 1960s and hostile to more-modern teacher-led approaches.

During Sir Michael’s outburst he claimed that Ofsted was the chief protector of education standards and that recent criticism was undermining its authority. He went on to say that  ‘extreme educational philosophies’ had no place in modern schools.