Changes to ungraded inspections

In his speech, Sir Martyn talked about the importance of professional dialogue between the inspection team and school leadership during inspections. The emphasis of ungraded inspections will be on providing school leaders with opportunities to demonstrate where they have improved and to discuss where they still have work to do. Because of this, we have announced that from the autumn term onwards, we will no longer carry out deep dives during ungraded inspections.

So, what will ungraded inspections look like now? And how do we know this approach will work?

Trying out the new approaches

Since the announcement, we’ve been working on what ungraded inspections will look like in practice. To make sure that we get this right, we asked some of you to be involved. I’d like to thank those of you who offered up your time to give us your honest feedback and who invited us into your schools to help us check whether we were on the right lines. This has made us even more confident that these changes are for the better.

So, what did we do? First of all, we spoke to some school leaders about what we were planning to change. Then we went to a range of schools to try out parts of the inspection or do a ‘walk through’ of a whole inspection. At each point, we’ve taken feedback both from school leaders and our inspectors about what is working well, and have changed things along the way. As we have said since the beginning of this year, we’re serious about listening, serious about acting and serious about improving. And from these valuable discussions, we’ve now got our new way of working ready to go in the autumn term.

How will a new ungraded inspection begin?

As you would expect, the day before the on-site inspection begins, we’ll have an extended phone conversation with you. This phone call is about working out what we need to do during the on-site inspection to get the evidence we need.

In this call, the headteacher will be able to talk to the lead inspector about some of the things that really matter in their school. They will discuss the school’s context, the things that the school does well and the things that have improved since the last inspection. And there will be the chance to discuss anything that leaders still need to tackle to make the school the best it can be. Of course, this call doesn’t need to be just with the headteacher. In fact, we’d actively encourage headteachers to have someone else with them, or indeed a few of the senior team, who can all contribute to this important conversation.

The lead inspector will have done some preparation before this call, and will have some questions to ask leaders. These might come from the data they’ve seen in the IDSR or from looking at the school’s website and previous inspection report.

Through this conversation, the lead inspector will agree with the headteacher several areas of focus for the inspection. These will take account of things that the inspector wants to look at and things that are particularly important to the school – for example something the school has been working on, or something related to its particular context.

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