Scrapping Ofsted would suit teachers – but be terrible for children

There is one thing that seems to have gone missing from the campaign by the National Education Union (NEU) to abolish Ofsted: children. They hardly get a mention. What we do learn, from the press release announcing the NEU’s latest motion to get rid of the government’s schools’ inspection regime, is that the teaching profession ‘can be trusted to do their jobs effectively without a punitive, high-stakes system to keep them in line’. Further, Ofsted’s regime causes ‘teachers and other school staff sleepless nights, anxiety, and an urge to leave the profession’.

In other words, NEU members don’t like being inspected. They would rather the government just paid them to get on with teaching without checking from time to time that they are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing. That rather than, say, putting their feet up on the desk while they allow the kids to run riot, or dumping the official curriculum and indoctrinating pupils with their own political beliefs.