Ofsted rating plans 'unfair to improving schools' (From Oxford Mail)

Ofsted rating plans 'unfair to improving schools'

11:00am Friday 20th January 2012 in Education By Fran Bardsley

Pictured is Windale Primary School headteacher Maureen Thompson and Danny Wango, eight

IMPROVING schools in the most disadvantaged parts of Oxfordshire could be unfairly labelled as failing, teachers have warned.

Education watchdog Ofsted has announced it is to remove the inspection grading of ‘satisfactory’ and replace it with ‘requires improvement’ in an attempt to drive up standards at ‘coasting’ schools.

But headteachers said because of pupil intake, they would struggle to raise the schools beyond a satisfactory rating due to attainment criteria.

Maureen Thompson, headteacher at Windale Primary School in Blackbird Leys, said: “I don’t think many of us would disagree that coasting schools need a kick up the bum, but that is not all satisfactory schools.

“A school like ours, which is improving year on year but can only get satisfactory because of the dampening effect of attainment, is not coasting.

“It is going to be very difficult to separate those two different kinds of schools within the one judgement.”

At the school’s most recent monitoring inspection, 80 per cent of teaching was good or outstanding.

In all, 96 of Oxfordshire’s 287 state schools are rated satisfactory, with 143 good, 41 outstanding and seven inadequate. Under the new proposals, schools would only be allowed to stay at ‘requires improvement’ for three years before facing special measures, and would be reinspected every 12 to 18 months.

Larkmead School in Abingdon is one of 12 satisfactory rated secondaries in the county. It is also one of about 3,000 schools nationally which has received two satisfactory judgements in a row.

Headteacher Chris Harris said: “Our school intake is significantly below national average and it is very hard at the moment for schools like that to be given more than satisfactory in terms of progress.”

He said at Larkmead, the proportion of pupils achieving five A* to C grades at GCSE including English and maths had risen from 23 per cent in 2005 to 57 per cent in 2010.

He feared proposed changes could make it easier for schools with a higher attaining intake to achieve the top inspection grades, while it became more of a challenge for schools serving a less able catchment area.

But Oxfordshire County Council schools improvement cabinet member Melinda Tilley welcomed the move.

She said: “Nothing curls the back of my neck more than people saying ‘we’ve got a bad cohort’.

“That’s blaming children for whatever is going wrong in the school and I don’t accept that – all the research shows it makes no difference.

“What it boils down to is these coasting schools are failing children.”

She said she did not believe all satisfactory schools fell into that category – but said for 96 schools to be rated at that level was “totally unacceptable”.