We all know, that as well as giving an overall grade, Ofsted give schools an individual judgement against 4 criteria: attainment, behaviour & safety, leadership & management, and quality of teaching. Theoretically it would possible to possible for a school to different grades for all four areas in one inspection. To my knowledge this has never happened.
The correlation between some judgements is a lot stronger than others. There is fairly weak correlation between the behaviour grade or the leadership grade with a school’s overall grade. It’s reasonably common for schools to be awarded one grade higher than their overall grade in either of these categories. But the correlation between quality of teaching and attainment is 97%. Likewise, the correlation between these two grades and the overall grade tends to be a given.
In today’s TES, former special adviser to Gove and Director of Research at Teach First, Sam Freedmanhas explained why he thinks Ofsted should no longer judge schools against the quality of teaching they offer. This sounds anathema. Surely the most important thing schools do is to teach. If Ofsted aren’t going to be inspecting that, what on earth will they doing?
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The Echo Chamber 