After Ofsted inspection this year, Josephine Smith’s school was judged ‘outstanding’ in all categories. Across five articles and five categories, she sets out the steps her team took to achieve this. In part two, she tackles Behaviour and Attitudes
Behaviour and Attitudes: This Ofsted judgement considers how schools create a safe, calm, orderly and positive environment as detailed in the Education Inspection Framework - Adobe Stock

In this series of short articles, I am detailing the steps that we have taken to move our school from “overall good” to “outstanding” in all five categories (including Sixth Form Provision) after our inspection in November.

The inspection framework will be changing in September but while we have had a glimpse of the Ofsted Report Card proposals, the reality is that many schools will still be inspected this year under the current framework.

And of course much of what we know already about how schools are judged will be relevant under the new framework, even if the terminology and the categories may change.

In this second of five articles, I address the Behaviour and Attitudes judgement.

Acing your Ofsted: Five categories, five articles

Behaviour and Attitudes

The Behaviour and Attitudes judgement considers how leaders and other staff create a safe, calm, orderly and positive environment and the impact this has on the behaviour and attitudes of students as detailed in the updated Education Inspection Framework (see Ofsted, 2023).

Internal quality assurance and external whole-school reviews had given us confidence that behaviour was at least good and national metrics for attendance were similarly positive. You will no doubt have a sense of this in your school.

Despite this we spent much time poring over the Ofsted School Inspection Handbook considering whether behaviour and attendance were consistently high enough to be outstanding. Our self-assessment form declared it was and inspectors agreed. Here’s how we did it.

 

Behaviour

If you consider behaviour to be good in your school your corridors are likely to be calm, students will know how to queue for lunch or wait for lessons. It is the same in ours: students hold doors open, talk respectfully to staff: behaviour around school is self-regulated.

One factor we believe contributes to this is that sixth-formers are heavily involved in the day-to-day lives of our younger students and there are established systems in school where students in the years above “buddy” younger students to support and model good behaviours.

The environment to show is one in which “pupils feel safe, and in which poor behaviour is dealt with quickly, consistently and effectively whenever it occurs”, to quote the School Inspection Handbook (Ofsted, 2024).

Our students were (rather touchingly) well behaved when our inspection team visited. It was the clear systems that we have in place, confidently presented logs showing recording and analysis of interventions, and triangulated agreement from leaders, staff and students that we believe sealed the deal.

Last year we introduced the Girls On Board programme (see further information) which helps female students solve friendship issues for themselves. This was praised in our inspection feedback, and I would encourage any good school aspiring to outstanding to look for equivalent ways to involve students in developing best behaviour practice. Moving from compliance to engagement seems to me to be the feature of an outstanding school in this category.

 

Behaviour for learning

Having witnessed exemplary behaviour in assembly, at the start and end of school and around the school site during transitions, we hoped that students’ behaviour in lessons would bear witness to outstanding behaviour for learning.

One lesson that impressed inspectors was a year 9 history lesson: students were given a range of challenging source materials and in groups were required to read, discuss and synthesise the information, then contribute to a group presentation.

The task allowed students to demonstrate outstanding attitudes to learning. Groups were composed to support those with additional needs and the teacher was free to prompt only when necessary. Students were able to demonstrate sustained concentration and group working that revealed commitment and support.

Our work with students on metacognition has also helped, we believe. One pedagogical focus for us has been on checking for student understanding. As well as a CPD focus for staff we have used assemblies and our Personal Development curriculum time (see part three of this series next week) to help students appreciate why, for example, they use mini-whiteboards in lessons or the importance of recall activities. These and other aligned features of classroom practice are ones they spoke to inspectors about, impressing with their attitudes to learning.

 

Attendance

The Department for Education’s live attendance data and the details laid out in the guidance Working together to improve school attendance (DfE, 2024) mean that schools are much more easily able to track and analyse student attendance.

Our attendance is above national for all student groups, but we had identified a trend of lower attendance (compared to other students in our school) for our SEND students.

We made it our mission to show inspectors our systems for intervention, demonstrating a clear understanding of absence causes (especially persistent and severe) and a strategy supported by multi-agency work with the local authority.

 

Student staff and parent voice

I would recommend developing the regular use of your own surveys to mirror Ofsted’s Parentview surveys. We had collected data over four years from parents as well as conducting student and staff wellbeing surveys. The surveys used in inspections contain questions about safeguarding, behaviour, bullying, and how well supported and respected respondents feel they are.

Expect that a relatively small percentage of your parents will complete the Ofsted inspection survey and expect those parents to be at either end of the spectrum in terms of school satisfaction.

Your data can be used to provide a more balanced view, if it is needed, and your willingness to collect and share it indicates your openness to triangulating your own quality assurance. As a guide we had fewer than 25% of household responses by parents to the survey but 94% said they felt that the “school ensures that its pupils are well behaved”.

 

In summary: What should you focus on?

  • Behaviour for learning – not just behaviour. Address any low-level disruption.
  • Enable staff to take risks with student-led learning.
  • Promote student and staff engagement over “compliance”.
  • Use attendance data effectively: Utilise the DfE’s View Your Education Data portal. Develop and implement strategies that address specific challenges, such as group-level disparities.
  • Showcase outcomes from attendance strategies. Demonstrate how your attendance strategy delivers measurable outcomes. Highlight success stories or improvements resulting from interventions, particularly for vulnerable groups such as SEND students.

 

  • Josephine Smith is headteacher of Kesteven and Sleaford High School, a secondary school in Lincolnshire which is part of the Robert Carre Trust. Find her previous contributions to SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/josephine-smith 

 

Further information & resources

Related articles

Acing your Ofsted: Leadership and Management

Acing your Ofsted: Sixth Form Provision

Acing your Ofsted: Personal Development