Ofsted offers first look at new report cards for schools

Ofsted has provided a first look at its new report cards for school inspections.

The schools inspectorate for England is consulting on the new system after it scrapped single-word judgements last year.

Ofsted boss Sir Martyn Oliver said the new system – to be introduced in the autumn – would help parents to better distinguish between schools across areas like attendance, inclusion, behaviour and leadership.

But the plans have drawn strong criticism from several teaching unions, who said the proposals risked “replicating the worst aspects of the current system”.

The changes follow a major public debate around Ofsted after a coroner ruled that an inspection contributed to the death of primary school head teacher Ruth Perry in 2023.

Mrs Perry’s sister, Prof Julia Waters, said she was concerned the new system would be “a rehash of the discredited and dangerous system it is meant to replace”.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is expected to set out her plans for struggling and failing schools in a speech on Monday.

Under Ofsted’s proposals, the old one or two-word judgements, ranging across four grades from “Outstanding” to “Inadequate”, will be replaced from the 2025 autumn term by a report card describing what inspectors have found on key aspects of each school, including:

• Quality of education
• Behaviour and attendance
• Personal development
• Leadership and management

There will be five possible grades for each area, which are also one or two words in length: “causing concern”, “attention needed”, “secure”, “strong” and “exemplary”.

The grading scales will focus on how schools support disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils, and there will be more emphasis on the local circumstances which schools operate in.

A separate part of the report card will say whether the school’s duties around safeguarding have been met.

The new format will be used for inspections across all settings, from early years to further education colleges, but will be tailored to the type of provider, Ofsted said.

Sir Martyn said the proposals were designed to “raise standards and improve the lives of children, particularly the most disadvantaged”.

He said the “suite of grades” would give parents “much more detail” and help identify a school’s strengths and areas for improvement.

But school leaders’ unions said the new system would add “enormous pressure” to schools, and could “worsen an already severe recruitment and retention crisis” in teaching.

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the plans would generate a “new league table based on the sum of Ofsted judgements across at least 40 points of comparison”.

It would be “bewildering for teachers and leaders, never mind the parents whose choices these reports are supposedly intended to guide”, he added.

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said the plans would “do little to reduce the enormous pressure school leaders are under”.

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the five-point grading scale “maintains the current blunt, reductive approach that cannot capture the complexity of school life nor provide more meaningful information to parents”.

As well as criticism over its single-word judgements, Sir Martyn has also previously said Ofsted’s inspection process should be “far more empathetic”.

Those comments came in the wake of the inquest into Ruth Perry’s death, in which the coroner said the inspection at her school had “lacked fairness, respect and sensitivity” and was at times “rude and intimidating”.

Ofsted removed its practice of issuing overall grades for a school at the start of the current academic year, bringing in a temporary system of grading individual aspects of a school’s performance, ahead of the introduction of report cards in September.

Wirral head teacher Stuart Mycroft had his school, Castleway Primary, inspected under the current system in the autumn term.

He told the BBC he was not convinced that Ofsted had truly changed.

He said the inspection had left him crying in his office, despite it ultimately resulting in a “Good” judgement.

He said the inspection process had been confrontational and unpleasant.

“The impact emotionally was huge,” he said. “I was absolutely exhausted.”

Ofsted’s consultation on its new report cards will run until 22 April. It said it would be trialling the new system over the coming months.