Beyond the Big Listen: What is happening with inspections (so far) in 2024/2025?

As regular readers of my SSAT blogposts will know, 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. I have been waiting to write the first post for the current academic year until enough reports had been published to make the data robust enough for meaningful analysis. Writing this on Friday 29 November, 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.

And to remind you of my usual caveat: the data presented here in percentages is by the total of ‘need to improve’ comments, not the total of all schools inspected. I have also not commented on settings other than primary and secondary as data samples for other settings are still small.

Insights about the quality of education focus since September 2024

All the ‘need to improve’ comments we track are linked with one of the four main areas of the inspection framework. Of these, the quality of education element of the framework dominates, with 75.2% of needs comments related to this area. Since September 75.8% of comments have been about the quality of education, suggesting a renewed focus on this aspect of provision. However, schools with more challenging gradings tend to have a longer delay to publication and include more needs related to behaviour and leadership, so this might change.

There are, within this increase in focus on the quality of education, some fairly interesting increases in needs identified at the start of this academic year. Here are a few more notable trends:

• Formative assessment continues to be the most common need to improve and it is continuing to increase in frequency into 2024-25. Overall it represents 14.1% of needs but the rate for quarter 4 (Q4) of 2024 is 14.6% (and a staggering 19.5% for secondaries).
• Adaptations for all students and for SEND students are also gaining greater attention. SEND support has been strong since 2023, with 5% of all comments, but that has increased to 6.2% in Q4 so far. Adaptations more generally has been less prominent (3% since September 2023) but the figure for Q4 of 2024 is 5.4%. Between them these comments of adapting provision represent 11.6% of all needs, the second highest need.
• The teaching of writing is the need that has increased most rapidly since September, moving from 1%-2% of comments through 2023-24 to 6.5% of comments in Q4 of 2024 so far. Writing features in 8.5% of all primary school needs in Q4 of this year.
• Another trend for inspections so far this year is oracy, which is up from 0.3% of all comments since 2023 to 0.9% of needs in Q4.

Insights about other aspects of the inspection framework since September 2024

Needs related to behaviour and attitudes have been stable at 10.4% overall and in Q4 of 2024. Within this area, attendance issues continue to be more frequently represented in inspection reports. General comments on pupil absence were 5.5% of all needs in Q4 (5.1% overall), with the attendance of vulnerable groups being mentioned 0.7% of the time in Q4 (0.3% overall). The focus on behaviour appears to have cooled a little so far this year, although comments about attitudes to learning and engagement are up slightly in this current quarter, as are issues around the recording and reporting of behaviour incidents.

Personal development in 2024-25 so far continues to be the Cinderella of the inspection framework and is, if anything, appearing to be less important, representing only 4.3% of needs in Q4 against 4.9% of all needs since September 2023. There has been a notable increase for secondary schools in comments relating to the extra-curricular offer for students and the provision of careers and guidance. Primary schools have seen a small increase in comments related to the overall quality of personal development.

In Q4 of 2024 there has been, so far, a small increase in focus on leadership and management, from 9.5% overall to 9.7% in the quarter. Needs related to poor monitoring and evaluation by leaders are the most frequent comment in this area and are increasing, from 1.8% of needs overall to 2.2% in Q4 thus far. There has been a sharp increase in comments about generally low expectations of students this academic year: overall this stands at 0.3% but it has featured in 0.8% of comments since the start of the school year. Concerns about professional learning for staff continue to be strong in Q4 (as they were for Q3 and Q2 of 2024), featuring in 1.1% of needs comments compared to 0.8% since September 2023.

Insights about graded inspections since September 2024

The biggest change to inspection reports since the Big Listen exercise is the removal of the ‘overall effectiveness’ judgment. In some senses, this feels like less of a big change than the rhetoric would suggest for a couple of key reasons:

• Independent schools and FE providers are still given an overall effectiveness grade.
• Reports from graded inspections give a profile of judgments that make a significant claim on overall effectiveness in the eyes of the reader.

For the sake of continuity of analysis over time and against sectors that still have the ‘single word judgment’, I have continued to make a note of inspection outcomes as if an overall effectiveness grade were being awarded, with the ‘quality of education’ judgment the default. Since the start of the year, I have also captured the profile for each school across the four main areas of the inspection framework. For example, a school with all ‘good’ judgments, for example, is recorded as GGGG. A school with an ‘outstanding’ for behaviour and attitudes in an otherwise ‘good’ profile is recorded as GOGG.

What are we seeing in the profiles of schools since September looks interesting:

• 95% of schools that previously would have been judged ‘outstanding’ have a consistent profile of OOOO (i.e. ‘outstanding’ for all four judgments). In the other 5% of cases, only one ‘good’ judgment is present in the profile.
• 74% of comments for schools that would previously have been given a ‘good’ overall effectiveness judgment are linked to a consistent GGGG profile. 27% have one or more ‘outstandings’ in their profile. Only 1% have a single ‘requires improvement’ grading.
• Things get more interesting with schools previously judged as ‘requires improvement’ for overall effectiveness. Only 22% of these have a consistent RRRR profile. 25% of comments were for schools with an RGGR profile and 21% were for schools with an RGGG profile.
• There have been only a small number of schools with profiles that would have led to an overall effectiveness grade of ‘inadequate’. Comments for schools like this were consistent across the framework (i.e. IIII) in only 15% of cases, with 46% having an IRRI profile instead.

What this analysis shows is that a consistency of profile becomes more important when higher judgements are given, which is not perhaps all that surprising. The lower the judgments across the profile of the four main inspection areas, the more likely there is to be variance.

One reason for continuing to track inspections with a ‘presumed’ overall effectiveness outcome in our analysis (or a real one for independent schools and FE colleges) is to gain a sense of how the approach of inspection teams may or may not be changing since the Big Listen. Using this ‘presumed’ data we can see that in Q4 of 2024 inspections appear to be better at recognising strengths, although I would again stress that more challenging reports take longer to publish.

• 9% of comments in Q4 of 2024 were for schools we presume to be ‘outstanding’, compared to 8.5% since September 2023.
• 72% were for schools we presume to be ‘good’ (68% since September 2023).
• 16% were for presumed ‘requires improvement’ (19% since September 2023).
• 3% were for presumed ‘inadequate’ (4% since September 2023).

Similarly, in tracking presumed overall outcomes, we can continue to look at changes since the previous inspection. Here the picture is more mixed for Q4 of 2024, but broadly positive. Fewer schools appear to be declining in outcomes, with more schools maintaining performance.

• 11% of comments were for presumed ‘improved’ schools (13% since September 2023).
• 68% were for presumed ‘static’ schools (64% since September 2023).
• 21% were for presumed ‘declined’ schools (23% since September 2023).

Insights about ungraded inspections since September 2024

It is fascinating that so-called ‘ungraded’ inspections now seem more closely linked to grades than the graded inspections. After all, the title of these reports say that the school was formerly ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ and then, in the first line, say whether they have maintained, improved or declined since then. It is one of the oddities of a phased move from one inspection schedule to another one next year.

So far, our inspection tracker has captured 9% of need to improve comments for schools that were previously ‘outstanding’ for overall effectiveness. Of these, every single school has been found to have ‘maintained’ the quality of their provision (and therefore presumed ‘outstanding’). There is an interesting facet to this data, though, in that four previously ‘outstanding’ schools have had two need to improve comments identified but are still seen as having maintained their effectiveness. This is highly unusual compared to reports in 2023-24, where a decline in standards would have been more likely to have been reported.

91% of comments from ungraded inspections were for schools previously judged ‘good’ for overall effectiveness. Of these 75% are about schools that ‘maintained’ (presumed ‘good’?), 6% were about schools that ‘improved’ (presumed ‘outstanding’?), and 10% were about schools that ‘declined’ (presumed ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’?). In the overall picture presented above, all these schools are counted as having retained their grade as it requires a separate graded visit to officially change the schools’ gradings. This again suggests that inspection processes so far in the 2024-25 academic year appear to be better at recognising the strengths of schools, giving them time and space to resolve issues seen on inspection. This, of course, was one of the considerations arising from the Big Listen response.

Conclusions

It is probably still too early to make any truly hard and fast judgments about how the inspection system has changed for schools since the start of the academic year and in light of the Big Listen outcomes. Positive reports tend to be published more swiftly than those that pose significant challenges and this may impact on the ‘presumed’ outcomes and changes outlined above. These reports also tend to focus more on issues with behaviour and attitudes and leadership and management, which could change the data around trends in needs a little.

What we can say with reasonable confidence, though, is that formative assessment remains a key need for schools to address, that adaptations for all students (and especially those with SEND) is becoming more important, alongside the development of writing skills, and that attendance continues to be of profound interest to inspection teams up and down the country.

If you are in the inspection window and interested in seeing how the insights presented here evolve as the reports from this first term of a new-ish inspection regime are published, join us for our spring term ‘Readiness for Inspection’ webinar.

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If you are a MAT leader, LA school improvement partner or representative of another organisation who might benefit from further insights from our inspection tracker (which drills down to regional and county levels), feel free to book a call to discuss how we can help.