A summary of recent Ofsted changes - latest news

The new HMCI's announcement
“We need clear and demanding criteria for a school to be judged ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. A good school should have at least good teaching, and an outstanding school should have outstanding teaching. Good and outstanding leadership of teaching and learning drives improvement and knows that the culture of the school and the progress of pupils depend on it.”
This raising of expectations for outstanding schools will lead to Ofsted reviewing the status of some outstanding schools."

To summarise - From September 2012, it is proposed that:
• schools cannot be judged ‘outstanding’ unless their teaching is ‘outstanding’
• schools will only be deemed to be providing an acceptable standard of education where they are judged to be ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’
• a single judgement of ‘requires improvement’ will replace the current ‘satisfactory’ judgement and ‘notice to improve’ category
• schools judged as ‘requires improvement’ will be subject to a full re-inspection earlier than is currently the case
• a school can only be judged as ‘requires improvement’ on two consecutive inspections before it is deemed to require ‘special measures’
• inspections will be undertaken without notice being provided to the school
• inspectors should undertake an analysis of an anonymised summary, provided by the school, of the outcomes of the most recent performance management of all teachers within the school, as part of the evidence for a judgement on Leadership and Management