Ofsted: The Government would be better off regulating the behaviour of families than teachers - David Behrens

Each one is failing to a greater or lesser degree. Ofwat and Ofgem have been complicit as water and energy firms hike their prices obscenely while directors reward themselves for failure. Ofcom has run scared from taking on either a monopolistic BBC or the out-of-control spreaders of misinformation online.

But this has been Ofsted’s week to bare its teeth, or lack thereof.

The suicide two years ago of a headteacher given a damning one-word verdict on her school’s performance prompted demands for a fairer, more nuanced system of assessment. The one Ofsted unveiled on Monday was condemned by almost everyone in the sector as even worse than its predecessor.

Consisting of a grid of coloured squares from green for ‘strong’ to red for ‘causing concern’, it was the literal manifestation of box ticking – conceived by lazy minds to deliver superficial change with as little effort as possible. It did nothing to shift the culture away from criticism and towards community partnership.

Ofsted’s main failing – and that of successive education ministers – has been to come at the problem from the wrong end. The reality is that bad reports are more often a reflection on neighbourhoods than on individual schools. The cohort of students determines the level of education they will absorb and the type of staff prepared to teach them.

This is not a revelation; it is a fault line that runs right through Britain. Unauthorised absence is at record levels while the shrinking proportion of parents who actually value schools have to lie and cheat to get their kids into a good one.

Nearly half a million fines were issued last year to families who took their children out of lessons without permission and the figure was higher in Yorkshire than anywhere else. Yet at the same time, one in four parents bent the rules or played the system for a place in a school with a good Ofsted report, according to the property website Zoopla. That figure is rising year on year.

I can entirely believe it because I did the same thing 20-odd years ago, upping sticks to a ‘better’ area five miles up the road at the cost of a considerably bigger mortgage so that Behrens junior could have the advantage of going to a school with a better grade. If that makes me a cheat, I’ll give myself up to the authorities and get my wrists slapped or my box ticked.

The school we chose earned its Ofsted mark on the backs of families who kept it supplied with children brought up to believe that education didn’t end with the school bell at three o’clock. That meant the best teachers gravitated there and why wouldn’t they? Doing any job is more rewarding when it’s actually valued.

But environments in which learning extends beyond the classroom are becoming the exception. Another set of figures last week revealed that fewer than half of parents even taught their children how to open a book before their reception year. Many kids are apparently arriving without ever having turned over a page because they’re only used to swiping across their screens.

It means staff are required to be nannies more than teachers and that puts Ofsted’s green boxes out of their reach. You can’t blame the schools for it, yet we persist in doing so.

The result is that even the best brought-up children whose families live where they can, drift through their school years trying to rise above the sea of mediocrity in which they are forced to swim. Peer pressure drags too many of them down to the prevailing level.

The most disruptive peers are removed to schools for children with ‘behavioural, emotional, or social difficulties’ or excluded from education altogether, at which point they become the problem of the criminal justice system. We have seen all too painfully the consequences of that.

If you could solve any of this by regulating the behaviour of families in the way governments seek to regulate teachers, you might start to level the playing field. But it’s a minefield for any administration. There are no votes in marking parents.

That’s why Ofsted has taken the easy route of coloured boxes that can be understood by adults who don’t know how books work, at the expense of stigmatising teachers. The intelligent approach would be to bring the two sides together, not drive them further apart.