Heads to
meet with Gove and Wilshaw over Ofsted

Members of the Headteachers’ Roundtable group are meeting both Mr Gove and Sir Michael on Monday to outline their concerns about the current regime.

The group was set up by a team of leading headteachers who want to ensure school leaders have a voice in shaping education policy.

It includes John Tomsett the head teacher of Huntington School in York, Ros McMullen, the principal of the David Young Community Academy, in Leeds, and Dave Whitaker the executive principal of Springwell Community School, a special needs school in Barnsley.

The heads met for a conference in York yesterday to discuss Ofsted.

Mr Tomsett said: “We want to see a much deeper and broader inspection regime

“The concerns are that looking at 25 minutes of a lesson does not give someone a basis to say whether a school is outstanding, good, requiring improvement or inadequate.

“Ofsted during an inspection will look at 35 lessons and they will not see these in full. When you consider a school can deliver 2,500 lessons in just a fortnight you can see the problem.”

Mr Tomsett told the Yorkshire Post that as public servants the head’s group wanted schools to be held accountable.

But he warned that the current system was not doing this.

He also voiced concern about the lack of consistency during inspection and said “Ofsted does not have enough high-quality inspectors to be able to do the job.”

Ms McMullen said that the Headteachers’ Roundtable wanted to be able to provide evidence to the Government of what school leaders know works.

She said: “We are not a party political body. One of our five principles is that the pace of educational change should not be affected by party politics - the education of children is far too important for that.

“At the end of the day everyone’s goal is the same, we want to give students the best chance to succeed.

“The Headteachers’ Roundtable wants to say to politicians: ‘What do you want to achieve? And here is how you can achieve it’.”

The Headteachers Roundtable started as a group on the social networking site Twitter but now meets regularly to discuss and campaign on education issues.

The role of Ofsted has dominated the headlines in the past week following the decision not to keep its chair Baroness Morgan in place as the head of the inspection watchdog.