As children throughout Britain went back to school this week, the big news was that Ofsted, the state agency that inspects schools in England, had been ordered by the new Labour government to ditch its controversial system of one- or two-word school gradings.
Previously, all schools in England had been rated as “inadequate”, “requires improvement”, “good” or, the most coveted and highest ranking, “outstanding”. The top grade had the power to raise house prices in a school’s catchment area.
Teachers unions had long complained that the inspection process and its trite one- or two-word outcome, while concise for parents, placed intolerable strain on teachers and school administrators. Then the case of Ruth Perry changed everything.
For 13 years Perry had been headteacher at Caversham Primary in Reading, about 65km West of central London. The school had been rated as outstanding for more than a decade and was the most sought-after primary in the district. Perry was a popular headteacher and widely admired at Caversham, where she had been a pupil herself.
Ofsted’s inspectors arrived at short notice in the middle of November 2022. Within a few hours, Perry’s life began to fall apart. The inspectors uncovered a few gaps in the school’s paperwork surrounding child safeguarding procedures. Its headteacher became distraught. On the second day of the inspection, Ofsted officials discovered mistakes in some of the background checks done on foreign staff that were employed to help pupils whose first language was not English.
None of the discrepancies were significant and all could have been rectified easily, but any gaps in safeguarding procedures would automatically lead to an immediate “inadequate” rating while changes were made. Perry quickly understood what would be the likely outcome. Her levels of distress alarmed fellow staff.
Perry, who had two teenage daughters, feared she would be blamed for any fall in house prices in the local area after the school’s rating was cut. She wondered how she would break the news to parents. She feared her own daughters would be bullied at their schools. Most schools in England are run by local authorities, but schools graded as “inadequate” could be taken over by independent academies. Perry feared Caversham would be run by an academy and she would lose her job.
Her mental health declined swiftly over the following weeks as she waited on the Ofsted report, which she wasn’t supposed to discuss with parents until the process was finished. She bore the weight of the downgrade that she knew was coming.
It later emerged that Perry had woken in the early hours of Christmas morning and wrote a note about she was feeling: “I.N.A.D.E.Q.U.A.T.E. keeps flashing behind my eyes.”
On January 8th, 54 days after the inspection, Perry took her own life. Ten weeks later Ofsted published its report, rating Caversham as “inadequate” but praising the school’s atmosphere among staff and pupils.
Perry’s family campaigned to have the one- or two-word gradings abolished. They blamed the stress of the inspection process for the decline in her mental health that led her to her death. At her inquest, the coroner found that the inspection had “lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity”.
As schools prepared to return this week, Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s new education secretary, ordered that Ofsted’s one- or two-word ratings be scrapped with immediate effect. Instead, a more detailed report card-style system to inform parents will be put in its place for next September.
The new changes will apply only in England, as education is among the powers given to devolved administrations in the UK. In Wales, for example, its schools inspection body, Estyn, scrapped its one- or two-word school gradings system in early 2022. Labour has run Wales for more than 25 years.
The UK government has denied the new system will be confusing for parents, many of whom appreciated the simplicity of the old regime, if not its brutality. The local school attended by one of my own children, for example, had recently signalled to parents of current and, presumably, future pupils that an upgrade to the coveted “outstanding” status was on the way.
Run by an academy, which frees it from certain local authority rules and lets it set its own curriculum, the school’s leaders had for years been working towards the top grade. Earlier this year, the school received a type of interim inspection following which it was advised that it would probably be upgraded to “outstanding” if a full Ofsted inspection happened in the next one-to-two years. The full report outlining this was published online and the headteacher proudly sent it to parents.
All has changed now and rankings such as “outstanding” and “inadequate” have been abolished forever – too soon for some aspirant schools, but too late for teachers such as Perry.