Ofsted was not what anyone was expecting. I think many people thought the days of….
Ignoring teachers as they say hello in the corridor and ignoring teachers in front of pupils if they politely asked, “would you like to see my tracking. Sow etc” had gone. They haven’t.
The team brutally interrogated whole departments for 45 minutes about the curriculum and then right at the end…a very misleading question thrown in about safeguarding. 5 teachers all said the same thing afterwards; “She confused us all and then before we could answer properly, she went “shall I put you out of your misery”
I can tell you: they want to know what all the middle leaders are doing, how and why. They want to know what the teachers are doing, how and why. Then that the middle leaders know everything about the teachers. Then they check all of the above with pupils to see if it joins up. They also test how the curriculum progresses from each KS even that secondary staff know exactly what has gone on at KS2 in their subject area. All I can say is that a lot of people have said it was very very intense and nothing like what they thought. DO NOT TRUST THEM! I feel there was a lot of sneaky, underhanded tactics going on that they used on staff.
Also, although I didn’t fall for this but I’m sure a lot of staff did: In the morning of the 1st day they came to the staff briefing, they were all smiles and laughter. The lead inspector insisted if there was any problems they wanted to know about it etc. Kind of setting the scene that it would be a positive experience…..the mood seemed good. Well it all changed by break.
Thank you so much to my source.