primary education

Everything you wanted to know about a rogue inspector…but were too afraid to ask.

theprimaryhead4 Comments

There came a time when darkness reigned. Few who came into its contact remained unscathed, and some even perished. Resistance seemed futile and the battle, as was presumed by so many, had been won. Thus, so it became so, that ‘twas the darkness that reigned supreme. Those that lived in its fear gave this darkness a name: The Rogue.

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Chapter 12: The Rogue Dynasty and its eventual downfall

Pity the poor Head of an improving school, who, after receiving their 12:14pm phone call on a Wednesday afternoon gathers the staff to inform them that over the next two days they are being inspected by Ofsted, but don’t worry, they say, the lead inspector sounded quite nice on the phone.

Pity the poor Head, who, after welcoming the inspection team into the building, engages with small talk about the early morning traffic, all the time wondering if now would be a good time to bring up ‘British Values’ just to get that bit over with, as they all wait for the lead inspector to arrive.

Pity the poor Head who is quickly realising that the person now facing them, tippexing out all the green on the freshly printed RAISEonline data pack, considers rational thought and reason to be things they have neither the time nor inclination to indulge in.

Pity the poor Head as they prop up the conference bar and bore anyone who is still listening about the injustice of it all, and that if they’d only been visited by the inspector who’d judged the school down the road, they wouldn’t now be in this mess.


Tribal Tales (vol 2) – “In which we invite the reader to feast upon a feeble head.”
Trad tale: anon

We’ve all heard the stories. We’ve all read the reports. We’ve all shaken our heads with faint disbelief. But we’ve all secretly thought the same thing: it wouldn’t happen to a school like mine.  As time passes between inspections we convince ourselves that these are just spook stories, designed to pass the hours of a sleepless night. Every now and then we overhear a conversation about an inspector gone rogue in another school in a different authority. Shouldn’t happen, we say (…no smoke without fire though, we think) but, no, that sort of inspection couldn’t happen to a school like mine.

Could it?

Tread carefully dear reader, for this is not for the faint of SEF or weak of RAISEonline. This is a most cautionary tale for those of you naïve enough to think you’ve got what it takes to spot a Rogue and send it back under its bridge to lick its wounds as your school stands tall and undefeated. For it’s your school, my friends, that the Rogue likes to feast on more than any other.

Are you ready?

Then I’ll begin…Everything you wanted to know about a Rogue Inspector but were too afraid to ask.


Shark infested waters!

Be of no doubt that the rogue inspector has a very clear mind of what they intend to find in your school before the inspection even begins – they are cold blooded, single minded creatures of habit. They understand their prey, however, and do their best to lull Heads into a false sense of security in order to get closer: the initial phone-call will be pleasant and, in the morning, the offers of coffee will be gratefully received with warm smiles all round. Only during the first initial conversation with the Head do they begin to act naturally. Like a shark smelling fresh chum in the water, the rogue inspector will frenzy around a little blue titbit they’ve found in your RaiseOnline. They’ll be itching to close in for the kill but they won’t swallow you whole of course, oh no, that would be too easy; after all, they have two whole days to play. Instead they will take the tiniest bite to see how you taste, then they’ll throw out a lifeline – something along the lines of ‘well I’m sure that’s not the whole story and we have plenty of time to find out more’ in an attempt to make it seem like you have a fighting chance. And as they turn away and start to sniff out some poor unsuspecting teacher who will bravely try and swim in the same water as this calculated killer, you can’t help thinking that you’re about to be turned into shark-bait.


‘It’s not all about the data…’

There are two general rules of thumb when dealing with a rogue inspector and their use of data within an inspection. Firstly, despite them saying otherwise, it really will all be about the data. Secondly, the more a rogue inspector uses data, the less competent they seem to be at interpreting it. A rogue inspector wants a clean narrative. They will therefore select data that provides this. Conflicting data will be ignored, side-lined and given no credence during a discussion. The broader your own data analysis, the narrower their data field becomes. They will justify this by claiming that you are too stupid to see the obvious and that you are using a range of data to mask your failings. No matter what, they will stick to their preconceived and biased narrative. An experienced rogue inspector also knows better than to actually understand the data they are looking at or to use data consistently. Their claims that, it is not all about the data is untrue; what they mean is it is not about all data. The rogue will follow the ‘Blue’; that is all they need, that is all they will use and your resistance is futile.


You’re damned if you do…

Even the most rogueiest of rogue inspectors understands that there has to be a degree of discussion during an inspection and there are various games and tricks that the rogue plays in order to get through these more tedious elements of an inspection. A particular game that the rogue enjoys playing is the ‘critical fool’, first established when SEFs were no longer statutory. The aim of the game is to get the Head to discuss an area of weakness that they have identified and are tackling. The rogue inspector listens to the weakness and writes it down in great detail on an EF. No attention must be paid to what the school is doing to address this weakness as this isn’t as much fun and doesn’t add any value to the final score. Then, during the rest of the inspection the rogue inspector will refer to said weakness as much as possible. As this continues the rogue inspector will begin to believe that they themselves have spotted the weakness. In subsequent discussions, therefore, the rogue inspector will comment on the weakness and suggest that the leadership team must be ineffective for not seeing it or tackling it; when the Head inevitably says that they do know about the weakness, the rogue inspector will feign a stunned expression and say something along the lines of ‘So you admit it?’ When the other senior leaders pipe up to say that they know about it too and that they’d be happy to show the inspector what they’re doing about it, the rogue will shake their head in despair and tut ‘Even your leaders know about this weakness.’ When you all scream ‘WE KNOW AND HERE IS WHAT WE’RE DOING ABOUT IT!’ the rogue will cease to engage and simply write on their EF ‘Leaders admit to weakness and apparently do nothing about it.’ As you stand there in disbelief the other inspectors will add 5 points to the rogue inspector’s score and the game begins again.


Progress over any old time will do

Progress over time. Like what exactly constitutes requires improvement, ‘progress over time’ is a broad church and one that provides the rogue inspector with enormous scope for fun and games. It can become pretty confusing trying to keep up with the rogue inspector’s particular choice of time frames as they will vary. Just try to remember: whatever period of time will best fit the judgement the rogue inspector most wants to make, that will be the one that they use. If achievement has improved over two years, try looking at it over three, or four, or ten: as long as it allows you to find a declining pattern, you’re onto a winner. Progress in books looks pretty good since September but what about since yesterday. Yesterday? You heard the man, look at yesterday’s work compared to today’s, no progress! How dreadful. It gets even more hilarious during lessons. You can be watching the most amazing lesson but if there is any lag you can bet your bottom dollar that this will be the precise period of time selected for progress to be judged. But wait, the new handbook says – let me stop you there…this is a rogue inspector we’re talking about.


Positively moronic

Now that the rogue inspector has gotten down to brass tacks and lets you know, in no uncertain terms, that if this school was a horse it should have been turned into glue a long time ago (but not officially of course, otherwise you’d be able to get support from outside to help fight your case and the rogue doesn’t want that, they want you all to themselves), you begin to think about how to get the reigns of the inspection back in your hands. Fight back, you tell yourself; be positive! You dutifully bring out all your evidence to show your improvements, your successes, your reasons why the school is doing well. The rogue inspector puts on their rubber gloves and tentatively handles a few bits and pieces whilst trying not to inhale. Finally they push it all to one side and brand you an over-optimistic idiot. Rather than being used as evidence to show capacity to improve, the rogue inspector deems it evidence that the school’s employment of you is akin to asking a feeble brained village idiot to become secretary of state for education, or, asking Michael Gove to become secretary of state for education. Your attempts at highlighting successes to a person who does not wish to see success has only worsened the overall outcome for you and your school. Whoops.

Bingo Time: eyes down (actually, eyes closed will do)

The Ofsted inspection handbook makes clear that the criteria for each judgement should not be used as a tick-list. The rogue inspector does not know this of course, because they tend to only have photocopied the four ‘inadequate’ pages of the handbook, for that is all they need. They will spend the inspection demoting as many good judgements as they can that were made by the additional inspectors.  This illogical way of carrying on was handed to the rogue inspector on a plate when it was decided that there would be no ‘requires improvement’ criteria contained within the handbook. The majority of inspectors are able to use discretion, additional evidence, proportionality and professionalism to conclude that if something seen is not ‘good’ then there may be other evidence to draw conclusions from, so, you know, they are able to make well informed and sensible judgements that reflect the reality of the school.  The rogue inspector has no time for such subtleties, plus their train is booked for 4pm and adhering to the handbook would take ages. Far simpler to keep your eyes down and try to apply as many inadequate statements as possible with the hope that if they spread it about as liberally as they can, they can least get an RI out of it when comparing their scorecards with their fellow inspectors.

Code breakers

It is not, when you actually think about it, a huge surprise to find that the rogue inspector does not adhere to a basic moral or professional code when conducting an inspection. This could include not following handbook procedures properly, being rude and obnoxious to as many people as possible, failing to engage professionally with senior leaders or, in the worst cases, the rogue inspector will happily welch on agreements made at the start of the inspection. It is not uncommon for a rogue inspector to be found observing members of staff that, for a variety of reasons, you negotiated at the start to not be observed. The rogue will happily comply, at the start, but these members of staff are seen as golden opportunities for a rogue inspector and are not to be missed; particularly if the consequences of such violations will last long after the rogue inspector has written their draft report.


Fact or Fiction?

When the draft report is written it is worth remembering that the rogue inspector is actually nothing more than a frustrated writer on a par with a two-bit peddler of a penny-dreadful. Don’t be fooled into assuming that you have been sent the wrong school’s report, check the inspection number at the top and you will see that, sadly, this is a report of your school. Take the time to get past the clunky phrasing and the badly formed sentences and you will find that it is the lack of technical accuracy that is worst of the literary crimes on display here. Statistical analysis isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but your newest parent governor could take one look at the misinterpretations of national data and declare the report a joke. Sadly, this report is for your eyes only – better cancel that mini-break, you’ve got a factual accuracy check to get on with all by yourself.


That’s not all folks

The saddest element of a rogue inspector’s existence is that their influence does not end when they leave your school; unfortunately, their legacy will live on. There are many victims of rogue inspectors: Heads, teachers, governors, children, schools, communities and even Ofsted itself. Ofsted is a sound idea with a clear and solid purpose: raise standards, improve lives. The rogue inspector serves no purpose except to satisfy whatever warped ideology they are individually peddling. They hinder the progress of the very schools they inspect and the organisation they represent. How sad that they exist. Let us hope that their time will soon come to an end and posts like this are considered to be a historical document or a grotesque work of fiction rather than a depressing and dangerous truth.

No laughing matter

theprimaryhead6 Comments


 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you get if you cross a perfectly healthy, young, competent and determined teacher with five years of dedicated service?

I don’t know, what do you get if you cross a perfectly healthy, young, competent and determined teacher with five years of dedicated service?

I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with an occupational health referral.

As we stagger across the half way line of the academic year like a decrepit donkey devotedly trekking along a beach with a grubby child on its back, I take time to pause and reflect on the state of teaching today. I say ‘take time to pause’- what I actually mean is ‘collapse into a heap on the floor’.

When I started teaching, the level of rigour in the profession, according to my more experienced colleagues, had increased significantly. Gone, I was told, were the days where you would decide what to teach whilst driving to work. Now, systematic schemes of work, progression through key stages, detailed planning, assessments and a clear expectation that children should learn stuff, were the order of the day. We even had national strategies that explained how children should be taught key concepts. Some professionals felt it had gone too far but pretty much everyone (and by everyone I mean the three people in the tiny school I worked at) agreed that the quality of education and the professionalism of teachers had improved.

I, for one inexperienced NQT, felt so lucky that, conceptually, I was so well resourced. The maths unit plans, in particular, I thought, were amazing. I mean, sure, there was no way anyone could actually get though the content of one lesson in a week let alone an hour but they sure helped my teaching.

I worked hard and I was happy. Even when my Head told me to take down a display and do it again because it was, I think the word she used was ‘pants’, I didn’t mind. I worked hard, I was happy and I had time to do what my job required. I don’t think I worked harder than any of my colleagues and best of all, we were clear about our roles and responsibilities. I taught there for four years and at no point did I consider not being a teacher.

Then I became a maths leader at a different school. This school was significantly bigger and in more challenging circumstances. The work ethic of the teachers, particularly the younger ones, was incredible. We all worked tirelessly to support our children. It was really, really tough and I can remember having many conversations with our Deputy where I lamented that no matter what I did the children didn’t seem to be making progress. Don’t worry, she would say, you’re managing to keep them in the class aren’t you, the learning will follow. I never gave up and the children did, little by very little, learn. The sense of camaraderie is the thing I miss the most about that school. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with such an energised team. We worked hard; admittedly it now felt as though we had less time to do our job, but this was mostly due to the challenging and complex nature of our pupils’ lives. I am confident when I say, however, that as a staff, we were really, really happy.

Now, as Maths Leader I naturally had more to do than just teach – but I don’t think the ‘just’ teachers worked less hard than me. At no point did I, or anyone else that worked there, ever have conversations about leaving education.

Then I became a teaching Deputy in another school. At this point, I think it’s fair to say, my workload massively increased. There were days when I felt that nobody worked harder than me and no one had as wide a remit as me. (At this point, all you deputies take a bow…you know it’s true.)

At this point in my career, however, the job started to get bigger for everyone. Yes I was working hard on a variety of things, but teachers were working harder too…and they were ‘just’ teaching. How could they possibly be spending as much time on one job as I was on many? They weren’t slow workers and SLT did as much as we could to streamline tasks and procedures and create consistent systems and yet…the car park remained full until the caretaker kicked us all out.

We were all still very happy (well most of us) but we definitely had less time due to the ever increasing demands of the job. I would also say that at key points throughout the year, there started to exist conversations between the young and the old more experienced about how long one could stay in teaching.

And now I am a Head. I work very hard. But I am no longer at the top of that tree. I can’t think of many people who work less hard than my good self. Teachers work incredibly hard. They have to. If they drop the pace for a single 24 hours, it seems the task of getting back on top of things is gargantuan. Expectations have never been higher, workload has never been denser and remits have never been wider.

We have entered into an age of education where success can never be fully attained…there is always something that needs doing better, to a higher standard, across more areas. Progress isn’t just a circle with no clear start and end point, it is a number 8 on its side: an infinite trap with ever decreasing margins of success.

It is unsustainable.

The powers that be are not helping either. By constantly updating, replacing and inventing new strategies, frameworks, curriculums and expectations, in conjunction with removing standardised checking systems, they have built a profession not on shifting sands but on quick sand. Teachers do not know where they are anymore; all they know is that they are sinking and the more they work the more they go under.

Good senior leaders will try to help by attempting to make sense of this new world. But, in reality, this is like trying to smash a square peg through a round hole when the peg is made out of clouds and the hole is actually a brick wall. Bad senior leaders will be getting everyone else working harder on meaningless administrative tasks in the hope that nobody notices and praying that when the graphs are printed out, they will at least look pretty.

When I look around my school – full of great, dedicated professionals who are dutifully jumping through all the hoops, whilst still helping children learn and be nice to each other – I now often think…could I have done all this when I first started? In conversations with other Heads we ask ourselves how long could a teacher realistically work at a school before burning out? None of us have the answer but we know it’s probably below retirement age.

And this is the sad punchline to a joke that is becoming less and less funny. As the retirement age increases and the multitude of pressures on teachers continue to grow exponentially, it is impossible for teachers to be as good as the sum of their roles and responsibilities. We are, as a profession, working with our noses so close to the grindstone that the most sensible career advice I can give is forget teaching, go work in occupational health.

So enjoy your holiday (I know you’ve earned it), get ready for next term and let’s just hope that by the time we get back to school there haven’t been any new changes.

That Was The Year That Was

theprimaryhead7 Comments

There are two types of change: the obvious and the subtle. Obvious changes being things like a haircut, after which I can look at the pitiful mess of wiry curls sticking out of my scalp and appreciate that at least they’re shorter than before. Subtle changes are like going grey. I don’t actually notice the colour of my beautiful locks changing; no, that is for long lost acquaintances to notice when you bump into them on the street and they choose to point it out to you. And so, too, were the changes in the world of education throughout 2014 both obvious and subtle. Some happened overnight, some were a long time coming, and some, like my recent ‘just for men’ dye job, took people rather by surprise and will take a long time to get used to. 

TeachFirst – EducateLast

One of the changes that certainly took me by surprise, but then maybe I hadn’t been paying attention, was the dawn of the teachfirst teacher. It wasn’t until I tuned into BBC’s ‘Tough Young Teachers’ that I saw first hand the deal some of our most challenging and neediest pupils were getting from their unqualified teachers. The impact however, appears to be anything but subtle. The philosophy seemed simple: clever people can teach. This is fine if you also happen to believe that all fat people can cook and players of Minecraft are qualified town and city planners. 

I watched in a constant state of horror and amusement as these plucky graduates taught class after class of secondary school pupils. At best, it reminded me of my own trial and error experience that was my NQT year, but there were a number of times where it made me rather concerned about the state of teacher training for members of our own profession. It seemed like a cheap quick-fix way of getting educated people into the classrooms, rather than training and developing talented, professional teachers. It is, to my mind, an experiment that risks failure a little bit too frequently. 

I have no doubt that there are, and will continue to be, some great teachers that come out of this initiative and I know there are plenty of teachers who went through traditional teacher training methods who, shall we say, require improvement. I am not ‘that’ interested in the teachfirst debate (if you are then search for long enough on Twitter and you can become bored rigid by countless arguments for and against) but I am interested in what it will lead to. Unregulated teaching is my biggest fear from 2014 – maverick, inconsistent and at times just bat-shit crazy approaches to teaching appear to be all the rage. Forget the ‘traditionalist’ vs ‘progressive’ argument, we’re talking about cults of education here, and, in my opinion, this all started when it became OK to be an unqualified teacher. Governmental freedoms to help new types of schools appoint whoever they wanted (soldiers, clever graduates, wizards) have changed the profession at a time when professionalism is needed more than ever. 

The King is Dead

And then Gove left. Possibly the most wished for change of the year actually happened. Our man in Whitehall got himself a promotion and, like all good promotions, he’s hardly been seen since. What did this change mean? Well, not a lot. So many of his personal changes had already happened that it was difficult to see the light at the end of his tunnel vision. With the appointment of Nicky Morgan (more on that later), we now faced more change, but were told that it was going to be a softer and more cuddlier change. If Gove’s regime had been focussed on telling teachers what to do and how hard to work, Morgan promises us that her ears are open. But, like I said, more on that later. 

Gove has been called one of education’s biggest reformers. I think that means that there is now a longer list of stuff that we have to do so that someone else can look at it all and use it to say that standards are higher. He certainly was very personally driven – no harm in that – except that he was more rigid in his beliefs than those folks who laughed at Columbus for saying that the world was round. In fact, so insistent was Gove on flattening the education landscape, in order for him to traverse and rule over it more easily, that in the end he alienated himself from everybody and ended up on his own flat little island. A word of advice, Michael: don’t take up Minecraft. He has left behind him a battered warzone and, through deregulating the market, has left it harder for us to rebuild it.

The Undiscovered Country

A change that we all saw coming, but to which we prepared for by quite rightly hiding in a cupboard hoping it would pass us by, was the end of NC levels and the 2014 National Curriculum. One thing is for sure, some people are getting rich – our children might be getting stupider, but companies flogging schemes of work and attainment trackers are wising up to the fact that no one knows what the hell is going on. Up and down the land, harassed history subject leaders were panic conferencing and booking every Year 3 class to a trip to Stonehenge, while Heads were meeting up and avoiding conversations about assessments, hoping that someone from the DfE would come out and shout ‘April Fool!’

This is typical of bad change. No, that’s wrong; I don’t have a problem with getting rid of levels if that’s what the government wants, or changing the curriculum – what I have a problem with is the management of the change. The ‘over to you’ approach is not just lazy, but sets the whole country off on a wild goose chase. If we assume that judgements are made by comparing like for like and, where appropriate, taking into account contextual differences (we do don’t we?) then this massive example of buck passing must surely mean that we can no longer be compared accurately, therefore we can no longer be judged via statistics. This should mean that ofsted inspections should go back to those six week long endurance tests so that inspectors really get to know the school and how it operates…but I didn’t read that in the last updated inspection framework. In short, these particular set of changes – coupled with the fact that external judgements will not change – sets too many schools up to fail. 

Stressed Out

When I reflect back on 2014 what springs to mind is the feeling of pressure those in our profession are currently under. The workload has become unsustainable. Don’t get me wrong: you work in my school, you should be prepared to work hard, and, if you can’t stay on top of planning, teaching, marking, assessing and behaviour so that your pupils achieve (however we’re judging that today) then you should choose a different job. If you’re a middle/senior leader, be expected to do that, and more, with a smile on your face, and whilst supporting others. But it saddens me that we appear to be teaching in an age where nothing is good enough. I know how hard teachers work and many of the previous reforms and new initiatives often fail to take into account the contextual challenges of teaching. Therefore we are perceived as talentless fools who can’t even get a child to sound out a nonsense word. Teachers feel unloved because their masters have only been cracking the whip and inventing more stuff for them to do. 

All hail Nicky Morgan then, who is listening to us and wants to tackle the challenge of teacher workload. Call me a cynic but I don’t buy it. It’s election time and, as the scorpion stings the frog, the politician lies to the voters. She says she will carry us on her back and help us move forward. She can say that now because none of us bloody know what success is anymore! You wait until the standardised scores in Reception and Y6 start rolling in and they don’t start adding up: I’ll wager she won’t have carried us too far before we notice the sting in her tail.

Teach, Die, Repeat

Each year, after making substantive changes in my own school, I kid myself that this next year will be the year of no more change – this will be our consolidation year. It never is though because education never stands still. The profession, our communities, our politicians are ever changing, and we adapt and adapt and adapt because that is what we do. 2015 will bring with it more changes (obviously) but, for once, I think we are in dire need of them. I have no idea what the future holds for education but, as always, and despite the rather dystopian tone, I’m kind of looking forward to it…gives me something to blog about don’t it?