'Ofsted is wrong to drop one-word ratings for schools - they're actually really helpful for parents'

Seeing that a local school you were considering ‘requires improvement’ could be the deciding factor as to whether you send your child there.

You won’t know what about the school necessarily needs to be improved from those words alone. But they do give you an overall idea of what government inspectors have found there, one that anyone is able to understand. It will also likely drive you to seek out more information, about the place which may be responsible for your child’s education and social development six hours a day and five days a week, in what will be some of the most influential years of their lives.

Last week, the government announced that Ofsted - the government body responsible for inspecting schools - would be dropping its controversial one-word rating system with immediate effect. Schools were previously given one of four grades; ‘outstanding,’ ‘good,’ ‘requires improvement,’ or ‘inadequate,’ after being graded by inspectors across a range of different metrics.

For the time being, schools will still be inspected and graded across these same metrics, which include the quality of education provided, student behaviour and attitudes, school leadership and management, and student safeguarding. But from the start of the next school year in late 2025 these will be replaced entirely with a new “report card” system, the BBC reports, the contents of which are yet to be decided.

These overall grades have been controversial in the teaching community, and for understandable reasons. Last year, a coroner ruled that an unfavourable Ofsted inspection that saw her school downgraded to ‘inadequate’ was a contributing factor in the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, no doubt a distressing and traumatic experience. Education unions have slammed these grades as reductive, boiling down the performance of a whole school to a single word, and some even want Ofsted to be abolished altogether.

I’m sure anyone, no matter which field they might work in, can empathise with the stress inspections caused to educators, that of more bureaucracy being heaped onto your workload. But at the same time, all grades are by their very nature reductive. And it’s absolutely vital that our state schools - which nurture, protect and care for children from all walks of life - are held to the absolute highest standards.

Many of the young pupils turning up to British schools each day will be vulnerable in some way, whether it’s needing more support to thrive in education, coming from troubled homes, or even coming from a background where they run the risk of facing discrimination. For some of these children, schools having excellent leadership, high expectations of student behaviour and strong safeguarding policies in place can change lives.

That makes it just as important that families are able to easily find out whether their child’s current or prospective school meets their expectations and their needs. But parents and carers also come from all walks of life. Some may speak different languages, or have differing levels of education, comfort and familiarity with the more technical terminology often used in formal report writing.

Losing the overall grading system means losing a valuable asset - the ability to get a straightforward, no-frills-attached idea of how a school is performing at a single glance. More information, including a detailed breakdown of how schools have performed across the different inspection categories and the inspector’s actual comments, is already easily available for those who want it. But these reports are often laden with jargon, and time-consuming to sift through.

At the end of the day, scrapping overall grades will not actually change a lot for schools. They’ll still need to be rigorously inspected, and those found not to meet the government’s expectations in one way or another will still need to make changes - and will sometimes face intervention in more extreme cases.

We don’t know yet exactly what criteria the new report cards will feature, or how this information will be presented. But unless special care is taken to make sure the new system is just as straightforward, all removing overall grades really seems to be doing is adding another barrier - one that makes this essential information just that little bit less accessible.

What do you think about schools having overall Ofsted grades - are they a helpful tool, or unnecessarily reductive? Have your say and make your voice heard by leaving a comment below.