A school judged outstanding but for the data with inspectors refusing to take context or evidence on the ground into account. Our headteacher diarist takes us through their two-day battle with Ofsted.

My key language teacher interviews were interrupted by the dreaded news that Ofsted would arrive the next day and by the essential 40-minute telephone call; Ofsted waits for no-one.

As a trainee inspector, I knew the school was prepared. Yet until 10pm that night the frenzied preparation was a sign of the fear and panic that the inspection process causes. 

The nub of the inspection, all inspections, is data. The inspectors’ immovable hypothesis was that our students arrive broadly average and leave broadly average, therefore we could be judged a broadly average school.

My two-day fight was with an inspection team who would not take into account the context of the school and would not judge the evidence from what they saw. My argument was that the 51 year 11 students placed on the child protection register, by external agencies, was 40 per cent of our year group.

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