Sarah Mackenzie: Ofsted isn't asking the right questions

The Big Listen is here, and whatever you make of it, I’d urge you to respond. There was a time, in the pre-Ofsted Big Conversation days, when it felt like there was no opportunity for dialogue, no openness to listening, to change. So, we should grab this opportunity.

Sir Martyn Oliver has expressed a desire to listen, to change, to the possibility of a new guard. However, whoever advised him on the content of The Big Listen appears to be firmly from the old guard. After some frustrated scrolling, with no option to select that I was a leader, proprietor or registered provider, as I would have been able to if I was in social care, independent schools or FE, I selected that I am ‘employed in a registered childcare setting’ and moved onto the questions.

How shall I describe them? Bland, vanilla. I was met with questions such as if I thought it was important that Ofsted makes it clear whether children are safe. What insight can be drawn from a question like that? Is anyone going to say that they don’t think it’s important that Ofsted highlights children’s safety?

You may be wondering what were the questions like on the complaints process, inspector conduct, consistency of judgements, one-word judgements, frequency of inspections, the impact on mental health? Well, they were notable only for their absence.

When Ofsted commented on the Education Select Committee’s report on its work recently, it said it suspected a significant amount of fear about Ofsted inspections was driven by individuals seeking to profit from inspection preparation. Couldn’t this consultation be an opportunity to test out that suspicion, to ask providers? Isn’t this consultation an opportunity to hear from providers on the conduct they have experienced, what’s worked well, what hasn’t. When conduct has been poor, what true forum have we had to raise concerns? What course of action have we had to take? There hasn’t been any notable dialogue on that topic, other than the Secretary of State saying she would respond with a punch if faced with improper Ofsted inspector conduct – unofficial DfE advice, of course.

Ofsted’s purpose is to raise standards. But when you’re raising standards, you have to constantly self-reflect. If you don’t ask difficult questions, you don’t get the answers you need. Ofsted needs to reflect now and raise the standards of the questions it is asking, for the sake of providers, itself and, most importantly, the families it serves.