Last week the 'Big O' rolled into my school - an event we had been bracing ourselves for since May. That's right. We'd been on high alert for an eye watering seven months (something akin to slow torture). Now I'm going to contradict the title of this post by mentioning them.
Ofsted.
That wasn't so bad and in fact, the whole experience can be summed up in this way too. For my overseas readers, Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) carries out school inspections. If you're a good school, you are inspected every three years. They come in with the expectation that you are still performing at the level of the last inspection. However, if they see anything that suggests otherwise, it turns into a 'full' inspection. In other words, they come back the next day with more inspectors (gulp). We were notified half way through the day before and what ensued in between was a flurry of activity, preparations, tweaks and pure panic!
Their job is to improve standards in education and this can only be a good thing. However, you can't help the anxiety that comes with something like this. The grading you are given has wide implications; it will impact staff morale, parents' perceptions (present and future) and the wider community.
Thankfully, the Ofsted inspectors saw all that they needed to see in one day and were very impressed by the young people in our care. The inspector that observed my lesson gave me some pertinent feedback, though we must remember that they only see a snapshot in time. We teachers know the contexts of our learners, their backgrounds, barriers and challenges. We know what real progress means for them and it isn't always reflected in black and white data, statistics, figures or a twenty minute observation.
So the school breathed a collect sigh of relief. Until the next time...
