Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
The long-standing single headline grade for schools has been gone for over a year. Now we know the detail of what will replace it: a new report card, with six evaluation areas graded according to five-point scale.
This has been a difficult piece of reform for the sector to navigate. There are multiple views about how to reform inspection, and Ofsted is undeniably operating within competing tensions – all of which means we were unlikely to see a framework that everyone would be fully content with. But as we set out in our response to the consultation, we believe Ofsted has made a number of welcome changes, and that the framework is stronger for it.
By the by, implementation of the framework on the ground is as important than the ink on the page, and so it will be hard to really understand the full impact of the new framework until it comes rolling into schools.
With a couple of months to run until this happens, Ofsted will no doubt be busily training inspectors and publishing materials to supports schools.
But something else worth considering is what will we do?
The temptation may be to map the old onto the new, to try to translate the new descriptors into familiar categories, to read across from ‘old money’ to new. Doing so is understandable: people often crave familiarity as a hook to hang their understanding on.
But we need to be careful. If we simply graft the new approach to grading on top of our understanding of the old one, we might miss the chance to really shift how we talk about inspection and, crucially, how we experience it.
At the centre of the new grading approach is the “expected standard” – the midpoint of the scale. Crucially, Ofsted has been clear that this is not a proxy for the old “requires improvement” judgement. A school judged at the expected standard is meeting the standards it should. It is delivering what children, families and the public have a right to expect.
That clarification matters. For years, the “requires improvement” label carried connotations that in some cases went far beyond its meaning. In other cases, schools that were at the bottom end of “good” were assumed to be of the same quality as those at the top end, when in fact they were closer to those of the grade below. Staff could feel demoralised, parents unsettled, and much of the system pushed into a binary judgement of “good” versus “not good enough.”
There’s just a chance that the new approach could open up a better conversation about school quality.
This is not a shift Ofsted can make alone. Inspectors and policymakers can signal intent, but the narrative around inspection is also shaped by the profession, the media, and the conversations in trust boards, leaders’ offices and staffrooms. How we choose to describe and respond to the new grades will, in part, set the tone.
We’ve seen echoes of this before. Think about how naming the GCSE grade 4 a ‘standard pass’ had the backwash effect of implying the grades below it were not passes. To be clear, they are grades. But the system – and public understanding - has struggled to overcome the long shadow cast by that decision.
Language matters.
School trusts have a distinctive role here. Trusts can be protective structures – a way of enabling schools to work together, providing resilience and support that an individual school might struggle to sustain alone. That protective role extends beyond finance or curriculum: it includes working to relieve pressures on staff where possible and supporting leaders so that schools can be high quality and sustainable.
Trusts offer the chance to share conceptions of quality between teachers, heads of department, and leadership teams all year-round, not just once every four years when an inspection team comes knocking. Working constructively with school leadership, trust leaders and governance can build a deep knowledge of each school's strengths and weaknesses - and all schools will have both. When inspections do come, this should reduce the surprises, and take down the pressure levels for everyone.
More importantly, it also gives schools and trusts the power to act early in improving things. Ofsted may only visit once during a pupil's time in a school. That's too infrequent for it to be any real guarantee of quality. Instead we - as the people with the most passion for and the most experience of education - need to own what high quality, inclusive education means, and ensure its delivery.
The introduction of this framework is a moment where trusts can lead in reframing the conversation. There is an opportunity for the sector to use the report card to broaden the story of school quality; in theory, multiple graded areas provide more texture than a single headline could. This creates space to celebrate areas of strength, even when others still need work. It invites a richer dialogue between schools, trusts, parents and inspectors about what quality looks like.
The danger, of course, is that the system defaults to old habits: the same high-stakes culture with new labels attached. Preventing that will require conscious effort. Ofsted must continue to emphasise the meaning of the new framework. But it will also require leaders to show discipline in how we communicate about inspection, both internally and externally.
Leadership is, in many ways, about setting the weather. We cannot control every policy decision, but we can control the conditions within our organisations: the tone of conversations, the narratives we reinforce, the culture we model.
This is one of those moments. Our collective agency in this moment matters. The framework is new, but the responsibility for how it lands does not belong only to Ofsted.
