Preparing for Ofsted

Been Ofsteded this week - all very gently and successfully.
  
Up front, my general impression is that they've largely decided what you're going to get before they even arrive, based on your exam results, value added and Panda/FFT data. The visit is largely to confirm that their suspicions are correct. They're not going to give a school with poor VA or declining results 'good', or vice versa.

  
Secondly, it's vitally important to realise that they no longer come to inspect the whole school. The SMT is supposed to be doing that already. You won't understand properly what's going on I don't think unless you realise that they're not there to assess YOU - they're there to confirm that the school's assessment of itself (in the SEF) is correct. So really it's only the SMT that's on trial, and when they come to observe or talk to you they're primarily seeing if the SMT have 'got you right'.


Pre-preparing for Ofsted
One of the big problems with Ofsted now is that they give you almost no notice, so anything that isn't in place can't be put right before they arrive. The answer to this, of course, is to make sure that your patch is shipshape anyway, not only in terms of documentation, but also in terms of methodology/practice/standards. That, I suppose, is what self-evaluation is all about anwyay. The biggy, as far as I can see, is to keep your AfL marking up-to-date. This is the one that you will be most embarrased with if you've let it lapse. But there's a whole load of other things (such as group work) which you'll get caught out on if you suddenly try to turn it on just for the inspection.

We were sort of expecting to be ofsteded, so we had been 'working up' to it for some time in a less-than-frantic way. As part of this - if you're interested - I posted some relevant materials/CPD sites on an ofsted webpage on the school website. Of course, many of these materials are Greenfield-specific, but they'll give you the idea of the kind of thing you need to get sorted. As SMT myself, part of my aim was that staff should be familiar with what the school was trying to do - it's particularly important that the inspectors should find a staff, to use the awful management-speak, that is 'singing from the same hymnsheet'.
You're going to be ofsteded about every three-or-four years, so you should know more-or-less, as in the old hide-and-seek game, whether you're 'cold' or 'hot' for an Ofsted. There is precious little excuse for a teacher who is surprised by a regular Ofsted, and it is worth beginning to crank up your record-keeping and ordered-ness from about 18-months in. That way Ofsted is a leisurely stroll, rather than a mad panic.


When you get the message
The message gives you precious little time. We were told on the Friday, and couldn't get in touch with the lead inspector until Monday, for an inspection that started on Wednesday.
As soon as we were told, I put out a document to staff on how to use their last two days to best advantage. As you may realise from its filename, there was a bit of discussion about this. A couple of earlier versions were knocked back by the rest of the SMT because they were too long and frightening, so this is the final slimmed-down version! (Of course, I didn't give out the last four 'Countdown' and 'O-Day' pages all at once - I stuck them up next to the cover list on Monday through Thursday). I have to say that it worked very well and staff felt supported and prepared when the inspection arrived. In the event, also, the advice to HoDs proved vital, as you will read...

  
But the general brunt of the advice was: first day, tidy your patch and prepare the lessons; second day, remind yourself of what you're going to say if they interview you and get a good night's sleep.

There is one very important point that you have to take account of if you're being ofsteded. When you get the letter, your Head gets to make a phone call to the lead inspector. You will remember that I said that they arrive with their minds fairly much made up. Well, in the phone call, the Head gets to ask what the key issues/areas at question are going to be. It is vital that you find out this out from him because - whereas you won't have enough time to rush off and do everything - you WILL have enough time to rush off and gather all the information you can think of about the issues they are checking up on. Thus, when the inspectors arrived, I as Deputy Head had been able to assemble a box file of data relevant to their questions - recent inspection and IIP reports, our analyses of the latest examination and FFT data, portfolios of LDD and NEETS cases, pupil and parental perception surveys etc. HoDs were also alerted, so that they could think about how THEY contributed to the issues.

Vitally, also, as far as the pupils are concerned, FIRSTLY make sure that they ALL know in every subject what grade they are at and what they have to do to improve, and SECONDLY get some toughie to go round and make it clear to every pupil that the inspectors aren't there to assess the teachers, they are there to assess THE PUPILS, and that the judgement of the inspection will be a judgement on THEM, not the staff. It is vital that the pupils get the message that they are ON SHOW during the two days, and that a negative result will harm them, not the staff (it helps to prevent joke fire alarms etc).


During the Inspection
It may help if you realise what is going on during the inspection.
Our inspectors spent the first morning whizzing round classes taking 'snapshots' of staff's teaching. You need to realise that they are not assessing you - they are merely judging if SMT's assessment of your T&L is correct. In some lessons they only dropped in for a few minutes. The trick here is to have your lesson objectives written on the board and to conduct a mini 'interim-plenary' almost as soon as they walk into the classroom!

After that - since they found the school's perception of itself valid - they spent the rest of the first day interviewing key people about the areas they had identified.
What we did here - and I think it is one of the cleverest things I have ever done - was to ask and establish that we could put more than one person into those interviews. Not only did it put two brains into answering the questions (and your colleague could answer the questions you got stuck on) it REALLY took the terror out of the interviews. Also, because you were thinking as your colleague was talking, it meant they the inspectors were just talked to death for the entire inspection by teachers desperate to tell them what we were doing and and how well it was working - it must have sounded very enthusiastic at least, and impressive!

Maybe other inspection teams do things diffently, but ours wonderfully told us at the end of the first day where their reservations lay. That gave us all a night - of course not to invent things - but at least to gather together what we had on those issues. One of them was a request for evidence that departments were regularly and rigorously monitoring their own progress, and I was able to phone round the HoDs and tell them to bring in the QA stuff they had assembled. The result was that - after, admittedly, 3 hours sleep that night - I walked in next morning with a pile of information many feet deep!!! And it worked - we convinced them on every issue that we WERE successful!

They spent the second morning interviewing staff about those issues - precious few observations, of course, because they had established that our standard of assessment of lessons was spot on - then the afternoon writing up and feedback to SMT (again, we asked for an extended team in there) at the end of the day. I rushed in and wrote the headline on the staffroom whiteboard (wonderful how many staff were waiting around for the result!) and typed up the verbal feedback and distributed to all staff the next day.


After the Inspection
Watch out for anticlimax and exhaustion.

It is human nature to listen eagerly to see if you get a mention, and very easy to feel upset if you don't - especially when a department you know is not as good as yours gets singled out apparently randomly for mention. You are certainly bound to be crestfallen if they find something to criticise. Be ready for it, and take it all professionally.

Watch out for the danger of exhaustion - that the inspectors leave and all your standards and punctuality go to the wall.

Be ready for the pupil backlash also - THEY have been 'holding themselves in', and it is easy for their pent up emotion to splurt out the next day in wildness and conflict.


Hope this helps if you're about to be 'done'.

 

Posted on: Nov 11 2006, 01:12 PM