By mandating, as part of the minimum standards criteria (discussed in parts 5 and 6) that schools participate in a quality assured improvement programs.
You'd neeed someone exceptionally bright (highly experienced in education with at least an MEd and a recent MBA as well) organising the regulation of the frameworks for such programs at the inspectorate.
They'd need a small team of people who worked to quality assure improvement programs (individual schools might be quality assured or bodies which groups of schools worked with may be).
The at last schools would have the freedom to select who they worked with to mentor them on quality improvement. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have PRUs being mentored by bodies with specialist expertise in running PRUs for example?
Ofsted has to exist (unfortunately), so instead of giving jobs to those who are just topping up their pension, why not pay the money to cover currently teachers and school leaders to train and inspect schools? It would give a far more accurate report on a school as those writing the report have current experience in teaching/schools. My main bugbear with Ofsted is that inspections are carried out by people who have no recent experience of teaching or management.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments Lutters.
ReplyDeleteIf properly reformed Ofsted would not be a source of employment for box tickers. The focus of inspections would be on assessing the competency of and mentoring headteachers so all inspectors would need to be credible to our best headteachers and would also have been trained in forensic inspection - the skills of checking out if things are are they seem to be which are quite different from box ticking.