What does the new Ofsted framework mean for School Governors?

The new September 2019 Ofsted inspection framework places much more emphasis on curriculum and much less emphasis on precise pupil outcomes. Those major changes have been well covered by lots of other blog posts. This post looks at what has changed in the governance section, and what this means for school governors.

Ofsted has tightened up the descriptions of what is expected of governors. The leadership section used to have the phrase “...and how effectively governors hold them to account for this” appended to many of the bullet points in the leadership section.

That’s all gone now, implying that governors are no longer specifically expected to check that school leaders are doing a good job of, say, motivating their teaching staff.

The implication being, as I see it, that leaders should be given more of a free rein and be subject to less detailed oversight from governors:

Instead, the framework just refers to the School Governance Handbook and cites the three core functions of governors: strategy, holding leaders to account, and financial oversight:

“Holding to account” might still include challenging leaders on how well they manage staff motivation, say, but these mini-examples are no longer listed individually as things that govs need to keep tabs on.

That’s a good thing: in my experience as a governor, it is very easy to slip into micro-management under the pretext of “holding to account”. If governors see a problem with, say, staff motivation (for example if staff turnover or absence seems high) then they should reasonably investigate this.

But they don’t need to be constantly “holding to account” their headteacher on this. They should just trust their headteacher to be on top of this unless they have reason to believe otherwise. Ofsted seems to recognise this with this new wording.

There’s another very significant change which has slightly more radical implications for governors. Paragraph 194 says that Ofsted will no longer consider a school’s internal pupil progress data:

This is huge. It demonstrates Ofsted’s commitment to assessing the overall quality of education. They are not allowing inspectors to fall back on the comfortable, easy approach of just looking at year-on-year data to see if children are doing well. They really will have to make a judgement based on what they actually see is being taught in the school. This all goes back to intent and implementation. If the inspector can make a confident judgement about this, they shouldn’t need to see long reports of test results.

That’s a big ask: an inspector might have to downgrade a school because they think that the quality of education is no longer outstanding, or no longer good, without even seeing any internal progress data.

Should governors follow Ofsted’s lead here and stop looking at internal pupil progress data? This would be a big change: a lot of governors’ meetings are spent poring over data about how much progress this or that cohort is making in this or that subject. We governors feel this is important, to keep an eye on those years that aren’t doing public exams, so we don’t have a big surprise when the SATs or GCSE results come in. How would we know pupils were being challenged and pushed if we don’t have several data drops each year to review?

But do we really need to do this? Remember that the evidence strongly suggests that pupils learn at different speeds over the life of their education. A child who progresses slowly one year, might progress faster in another year. Look at this graph from Education Datalab:

Of those that achieve a 2b at KS1 (using the old levels system), there is a big range of results at KS2, and an even bigger range at KS4.

Just look at two data points: Of those attaining a C at GCSE, about 10% were at L5 and about 10% at L3 back at KS2. Those groups of children would have seemed worlds apart in their Year 6 classroom, yet they all ended up with a C.

The implication of this graph is that reviewing pupil progress every year, or even several times a year, doesn’t really tell you very much. So, 30% of Year 4 have made less than expected progress this year. What does that tell you? What can you do about it? The chances are that this apparent underperformance is just down to normal variation … progress doesn’t usually follow a straight line.

What if governors followed Ofsted’s lead and put much more focus on the strength of the curriculum? Ofsted’s background research paper lists the 25 questions they formulated to help them judge the quality of a school’s curriculum (on page 8). Should governors gather evidence to answer these questions once a year, rather than poring over pupil progress data?

This takes a leap of faith: to trust your school to deliver good outcomes when the time comes, because you are confident they are delivering a quality curriculum year in and year out.

About the author: Bruce Greig has been a school governor for 8 years and writes occasionally about education policy. When not devoted to governor duties, he is an entrepreneur (built and sold two businesses.) He set up School Staff Surveys in 2017 as a side-project to make it cheap and easy for schools to run regular staff wellbeing surveys.