Blog posts by: Dr Keven Bartle

I have been tracking every inspection carried out in England since the start of the 2023/24 academic year. The focus has been on what ‘need to improve’ comments have been made in inspection reports. There are now over 1,600 ‘need to improve’ comments published on reports conducted since the start of the academic year and so I wanted to identify some emergent themes.

Leading schools is exhausting and never more so when rapid changes are needed and the external climate is uncertain. In this post, I want to share a very personal experience of the challenges this very situation presented for me as a headteacher between 2019 and 2023.

This is the third and final of a trilogy of blogposts about SSAT’s Head Cases programme, which uses case studies and case methods to explore typical challenges facing headteachers.

Contemplating headship? Concerned that the NPQH, for all its benefits, hasn’t quite given you the experiences that you know you will face in taking up the role? Considering how you might bridge the experiential gap between being a deputy and being the person with their name on the signage? If so, you are crucial to the future of the education system. This post is for you.

At the end of the 2023-24 academic year, we published the findings of our survey of 236 headteachers in our ‘Labouring to Love Headship’ report. The picture presented was gloomy around preparation, induction, training and support for those taking up headship.

Overall grades from inspections are on their way out in 2024-25 and, by 2025-26 we will see more changes as the much-heralded ‘report card’ system takes effect (possibly seeing the end of the four-tier grading system, but who knows with any certainty). As we step forward into this new and slightly uncertain future around inspection outcomes, I thought it would be of interest to school leaders to have another delve into the weeds of SSAT’s inspection tracker.

In the past week, I have been looking at the regional variations in the 2023-24 inspection data with some interest and so I wanted to share them with you. Hopefully you will find them fascinating too.

My previous blog queried whether the data about ‘need to improve’ comments from inspection reports since January might be pointing towards an ‘Oliver effect’.

As mentioned in a previous blog on attendance, we have been tracking every ‘need to improve’ comment written by inspection teams during their visits to schools and colleges in 2023/24. At the time of writing, there were almost 4,000 such comments.

On Thursday 18 July 2024, SSAT will be publishing the findings from a survey of 236 serving and former headteachers who, between them have almost 2,000 years of headship experience. The survey questions drew from 26 reports into headteacher retention published since 2017.