Ofsted school inspections aren’t consistent, research shows – freelance and male inspectors are more lenient

Ofsted, England’s schools inspectorate, has been under significant scrutiny for the stress and mental distress it causes teachers.

The government has ended the controversial system of awarding schools a one-word, overall judgement. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson stated that the system was “low information for parents and high stakes for schools”.

Another change to Ofsted now means that schools will be notified of an upcoming inspection on a Monday, so they do not have an anxious wait to hear whether the inspectorate is coming to them that week.

But a public consultation – the Big Listen – shows that teachers, parents and others involved with education have further concerns with how Ofsted works.

A significant theme among these concerns was consistency. Respondents to the consultation felt that inspectors had variable approaches, that judgments were subjective, and that the results received varied depending on which inspector came to the school. This lack of consistency is borne out by my research.

I have dedicated my research work to assessing the reliability and consistency of Ofsted inspections. In recent years, I have been working with colleagues John Jerrim and Sam Sims on a project funded by charitable trust the Nuffield Foundation, called Inspecting the Inspectorate.

Finding inconsistencies

In one research paper for the project, we drew upon data from more than 30,000 school inspections conducted in England between 2011 and 2019 to find out if there were inconsistencies between how different inspectors approach their job.

We found that permanent Ofsted employees were harsher in their judgements than those who inspect schools on a freelance basis. Furthermore, we found male inspectors awarded slightly more lenient judgements to primary schools than their female counterparts.

Many Ofsted inspectors are also school leaders, such as headteachers. It’s likely that schools who have a member of staff who also works for Ofsted benefit from the professional network that Ofsted provides. In a second paper, we found that schools that have a member of staff working for Ofsted received better inspection outcomes than schools without an inspector on their payroll.

One thing we suggest is that other schools may benefit from having access to the training material and professional development opportunities that Ofsted provides.

In another research paper, conducted separately to the Nuffield project, we looked at the usefulness of Ofsted inspections for parents in choosing a school for their children. The research shows that parents selecting secondary schools using Ofsted judgments are often making use of dated information.

For example, at the time parents make school choice decisions the last inspection might have been years ago and headteachers might have changed. The government has only fairly recently added schools graded outstanding to the inspection schedule: an outstanding school might not have been inspected for more than ten years.

We also found that there is almost no difference in future academic, behavioural, school leadership and parental satisfaction outcomes between schools rated as good, requiring improvement and inadequate in the inspection data parents might use at the point of school selection.

The only exception was for an outstanding judgment. If the inspection had taken place in the previous five years, the judgment predicted better academic outcomes.

Need for broad change

Finally, our Nuffield Foundation report includes a pre-print study (which means it has not yet been reviewed by other scientists) looking at whether Ofsted reports have changed over time.

Drawing upon data from more than 60,000 inspection reports for primary and secondary schools in England between 1997 and 2022, we looked at the extent of changes in reports due to policy changes.

We found that the themes in the inspection reports did not change much if the policy change was limited. But the more sweeping changes of the 2019 education inspection framework led to Ofsted putting more emphasis on leadership, subject specialism and the curriculum. This suggests that for inspection practices to really be reformed, structural policy changes are needed.

Ofsted’s response to the Big Listen and its acceptance of recommendations suggest that large changes are afoot, especially with the decision to scrap one-word judgments and replace them with report cards.

However, it is important that such reforms are not made just by Ofsted behind closed doors, as James Bowen, assistant general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, has pointed out. Furthermore, as several recommendations show, independent scrutiny and transparency are needed during and after such reforms. Only then can we see whether the inspection process is consistent.

Our research has large relevance for the future of Ofsted. Several elements of recent consultations point towards the need to make the inspection process more consistent, especially in a high stakes context in English schools. Making Ofsted training materials available to all schools could lead to numerous advantages.

One challenge in our research was to obtain the best data available. Ofsted could be more transparent in its processes and provide more data for independent analyses. We hope that our research and recommendations will ultimately lead to improvements in the inspection process.