Ofsted Inspection – Headless Chicken Time

Context

A document for Pre- Ofsted preparation has been sent out to all lecturing staff. (See Appendix)Not only does it include sixty do’s and don’ts it also includes a huge chunk of Bloom’s Taxonomy with an equally long introduction to it, a lecture length piece on Variety in the Thinking Process and Learning Outcomes, and a section on Psychomotor domain. The people who sent this around no doubt thought they were impressing the lecturing staff with their expertise, except that the lecturing staff know how basically ignorant these people are whilst also being totally inept at managing people and raising standards.

 My First response to the unfortunate person asked to disseminate the material

I have just received the document “Preparing for Inspection”. Do Ofsted require all this?  You could have the perfect lesson plan but it will be disregarded by the Inspector who is there to do a different job of work. This all seems inspired by people who go in fear of Ofsted and want all the paper work in order. I bet there are a lot of headless chickens at the moment. I have been through three inspections and every time the inspectors have commented on the over preparation by the school which like all paperwork can be devised to hide a multitude of sins – but you can’t get away with poor teaching and little learning going on. The Inspector actually watches the lesson and talks to the students. I think documents like the one just sent to us make people nervous and don’t contribute to improving performance. Mind you the inspections I experienced were ten years and more ago and it may be that Inspectors are now up themselves in the way they weren’t before- witness the decline in educational achievement they have presided over in the last decade

My e-mail to the  ‘onlie ‘begetter of the document follows.

I think documents like this one (twelve pages 4000 words) make people nervous and do not contribute to improving performance because it is just information overload. It is a compendium and not generic to the college. It looks to me like there has been a good trawl of relevant internet sites to create this document with no compassion for the PBI who have to carry it out and with no internal evidence that in this college it is possible to work at this level for five hours a day five days a week.  Unless it passed me by I know of no time when this approach to class room teaching was actually road tested by the people responsible for disseminating it. I have seen on the Ofsted website what other colleges do with their student data using ICT to create generic strategies for learning and teaching. We need a gradualist approach and the first thing needed is an efficient data capturing system that is useful before one even meets a group of students not a list of a hundred do’s and don’ts that may or may not be valid.