Dear aspiring Ofsted Chief Inspector

The selection process is underway for the next HMCI to replace Amanda Spielman at Ofsted from next January.

Here is an open letter to the applicants.

Dear aspiring Ofsted Chief Inspector,

No one can accuse you of lacking courage by applying to be the new HMCI amid the current climate of antipathy towards Ofsted. We wonder what it is that you’ve been telling the interview panels to make them think that you are the right person for the job. Hopefully it’s not all about “maintaining the status quo”.

So what do you have on your to-do list? In the unlikely event that you’re short of ideas, here are just a few suggestions.

There are few people in education who don’t think that schools should be accountable, so we’ll take that as read. It’s more the form that the accountability takes that’s at issue.

The four Ofsted judgements have become part of the nation’s lexicon way beyond their use with schools. But they’re not sacrosanct. They were perhaps a useful tool back in the 1990s when Ofsted came into being and parents had little or no indication of the quality or otherwise of their children’s schools. But they have outlived that usefulness. Rumour has it that the current HMCI wanted to get rid of the “outstanding” tag altogether. If that was the case, what’s the justification for trying to describe the whole of what a school does by using one of the other three? (We do need to be careful what we wish for, though. Reading a report from 2006 recently, we counted no less than 44 separate judgements that inspectors had to make about a school. If you move towards a dashboard model for inspection, you’ll need to tread a careful path between those two extremes.)

Ofsted rightly sees review as a vital part of a school’s planning cycle. That also needs to apply to Ofsted itself. Instead of confidently asserting with each new framework that everything is now perfect, now is surely the time to acknowledge the defects within the current one: it’s essentially a model for secondary schools and doesn’t comfortably fit with how primary schools work; it’s curriculum-theory heavy with predictable, generic questions that largely determine the quality of education judgement; inspectors who are non-subject specialists can ask those generic questions but they can’t be sure of reliably judging the quality of a department’s work; and, of course, safeguarding effectively being a limiting judgement, and a binary one at that, can wipe out the good work inspectors might have seen elsewhere in a school.

If schools are rightly held accountable, that also needs to go for the organisation you’re applying to. Short of a school or a MAT spending taxpayers’ money on a judicial review, Ofsted essentially marks its own homework at the moment. There needs to be an independent review process that can be seen to be fair.

The current HMCI frequently quotes the satisfaction levels that Ofsted achieves from school leaders and other stakeholders but, again, there is no independent source to verify it. Would you commit to introducing one?

The previous HMCI definitely improved the consistency of Ofsted inspections when he brought the inspectorate in-house, away from the commercial interests of Serco and others. Training now for non-HMI inspectors is definitely far superior to what it was then. But something else has been going on with the profile of your central team of full-time HMI. Where once becoming HMI was the pinnacle of a school leader’s career and HMI as a whole were highly respected by serving headteachers, it is now largely a stepping stone to other, presumably better-paid posts, in multi-academy trusts and elsewhere. They are also no longer for the most part former headteachers and many don’t have the breadth and depth of experience of their predecessors. Sometimes that shows in the way they judge and talk to colleagues in schools.

Only a few years ago, the plan was that Ofsted would stop being a “here today, gone tomorrow” presence in schools and would instead try to forge longer-term relationships with them. Unfortunately, that never happened, but that’s not to say that you wouldn’t have the opportunity to move in that direction. Believe it or not, many senior and middle leaders already speak positively about the professional dialogue they had during inspection, but could you make sure that they’re not just the lucky ones? We appreciate that in an increasingly fragmented educational landscape it’s hard to build a system of ongoing support, but please do at least say that you’d try.

We know you’re not going to be short of people telling you how you might do your new job if you get it and we’re sorry for joining their ranks. If appointed, you would have a priceless opportunity to change the way that Ofsted is perceived and to reflect the values statement on your website: “We put children and learners first, and we are independent, evidence-led, accountable and transparent.”

Good luck during the selection process; if you’re chosen, we will all wish you well.