Ofsted outstanding? The exemption debate heats up

It was in 2011 that Michael Gove, then the education secretary, introduced rules that granted schools in England rated as “outstanding” an exception from further Ofsted inspections.

The rationale was that Her Majesty’s inspectors would be better off spending their time at schools deemed to be “failing”. Since then, however, the policy has attracted a steady stream of critics, perhaps most notably in the form of the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts which, in September last year, described the exemption as “unacceptable” (CPA, 2018).

“Some pupils go through the whole of primary and/or secondary school without any independent assessment of their school’s effectiveness,” the committee found, pointing out that, as of August 2017, some 1,620 schools had not been inspected for six years or more, including 296 schools that had not been inspected for at least a decade.