Ofsted’s zealous overreach

Obviously it is not the fault of Ofsted that a headteacher, Ruth Perry, killed herself after her school, formerly rated ‘outstanding’, was downgraded to ‘inadequate’ by its inspectors. Suicide is, by definition, the decision of the person committing it. It is also true that second-rate schools and teaching unions detest inspections precisely because they keep them up to the mark. Nevertheless, Ofsted does need to think carefully about the impact of that word ‘inadequate’ when linked, as it was in the case of Ms Perry’s school, with another word, ‘safeguarding’. I saw what happened when the same charge was laid against Ampleforth College. ‘Safeguarding’ is a word that contains many things. In the Ampleforth case, for example, one of its alleged safeguarding failures was that the taps in one block were too hot. In Ms Perry’s school, the failure seems to have been about poor record-keeping. The trouble is that in the public and journalistic mind, a failure in safeguarding is seen as tantamount to saying that a school harbours child abusers.