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. Next up is Leadership and Management
Leadership and Management: This Ofsted judgement considers a vast range of issues from vision to staff wellbeing to safeguarding 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 also be relevant under the new framework, even if the terminology and the categories may change.

In this fourth of five articles, I address the Leadership and Management judgement.

 

Acing your Ofsted: Five categories, five articles

    1. Quality of Education: Published February 26
    2. Behaviour and Attitudes: Published March 4
    3. Personal Development: Published March 11
    4. Leadership and Management: Published March 18
    5. Sixth Form Provision: Published March 24

Leadership and Management

At every subject leaders’ meeting, we start with the same reminder: “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” It’s a quote from American business leader Jack Welch and a mantra that we hold close.

Sometimes it seems most time-efficient to do something yourself but in reality, an outstanding school works as a result of distributed leadership. The Holy Grail is getting to the point where you trust that staff, governors and students will represent school initiatives and the impact they have in the same way, with fidelity.

Ofsted calls this process of checking for commonality “triangulation” and right from the 90-minute phone call the inspection team is looking to see that what the headteacher says is happening is corroborated, first by middle leaders and then by students.

 

External reviews

In the two years prior to our inspection, we undertook a school review as well as a review of safeguarding and a review of SEND provision. We used external providers, and I really encourage you to do the same.

Our reviews were not “mocksteds” (although it is admittedly hard to reassure staff of this fact). Instead, we were clear that we wanted to use visitors to coach middle leaders to best articulate the impact of their decisions.

Choose your review partners carefully. We engaged colleagues from another trust who we didn’t know personally but who had experience of visiting other schools and had successful schools within their trust.

The best reviewers will leave middle leaders and new to post senior leaders feeling more confident, not less. They should also help senior leaders feel that they have areas to work on but also leave them with a clear set of priorities too. We were glad not to be simply checking our own homework and appreciated the fresh pair of eyes.

We were only ready for this stage though when we felt middle leaders had had time to enact their planning. If you bring in a review team earlier, I recommend that you certainly take more of a coaching approach, leaving time in the schedule for leaders to ask questions and have conversations not just take part in interviews with reviewers.

 

Internal quality assurance

We combined the findings of these reviews with our own quality assurance findings and tweaked our School Development Plan to commit to priorities and schedule milestones.

I would recommend you avoid making separate “action plan” documents as the result of any reviews. Instead adapt one clear School Development Plan making it a live and adaptable document that can be used with multiple audiences. We used ours with middle leaders, as a senior leadership team reference guide and progress monitoring document, and with our Local Governing Board.

We used the language of short, medium and longer term priorities:

  • Short-term: Next couple of weeks.
  • Medium-term: Over a term
  • Long-term: Over a school year.

Our subject reviews and the reports generated as a result of them took the same format. This enabled senior and middle leaders to use the same language with the inspection team – development, prioritising and monitoring all looked joined up.

 

Governors

The leadership and management judgement is about how leaders and governors/trustees collectively ensure that the education that the school provides has a positive impact on all its students. As such, it is important that the inspection reveals that not only middle and senior leaders but also governors/trustees “understand their respective roles and perform these in a way that enhances the effectiveness of the school”.

In a trust it may be that the board of trustees has chosen to delegate some of its powers to members of an “academy committee” or “local governing board” at school level. We had our scheme of delegation available for the inspectors to read before the inspection began and as headteacher I was ready to refer to it during the phone call.

We also spent some time making it as easy as possible for our Local Governing Board and chair of the trust to be primed and ready to speak to the inspection team. Two key documents helped with this:

  • A one page at-a-glance guide to the school. This documented our school’s strengths, what we were working on and why in bullet points. It was regularly updated and referred to at each Local Governing Board meeting.
  • A chair’s cribsheet – a more detailed three-page document that held all the key information we thought the governors who met the inspectors might need to know.

The cribsheet helped governors to be able to answer questions on key areas:

  • How they support and challenge school leaders (we have a termly schedule of school visits from local governors linked to key areas of the school’s work).
  • How governors monitor and report on their findings.
  • How well they fulfil their statutory duties, including those under the Equality Act 2010 and in relation to safeguarding.

 

In summary: What should you focus on?

  • Developing and empowering your middle leaders – ensuring they can articulate how they are acting in students’ best interests.
  • Preparing your governors to demonstrate their support and challenge.
  • Ensuring that what you say is happening is also what students, staff and governors say is happening.
  • Being able to demonstrate that all leaders are meeting their statutory duties as laid out in the inspection handbook particularly around safeguarding, equality and avoidance of gaming or off-rolling.

 

  • 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  

 

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