On a Tuesday morning, you might see a laminated certificate with the words “Outstanding” in bold next to the entrance of a primary school. The certificate is slightly sun-faded. Parents read it slowly. Some people take pictures. It may seem insignificant, but it conveys a lot about the importance of a single Ofsted rating in England and the pressure that surrounds it in staff rooms and headteachers’ offices, where people are secretly fearing the next inspection.
The school inspection system in England recently underwent its biggest redesign in a long time. Ofsted no longer assigns a single overall effectiveness grade as of November 2025. Rather, schools are rated separately in at least six areas: curriculum and instruction, achievement, inclusion, leadership and governance, personal growth and well-being, and behavior and attendance. A five-point rating system is used for each area, ranging from “exceptional” to “strong standard,” “expected standard,” “needs attention,” and “urgent improvement.” Theoretically, this provides a more complete picture of a school’s life than a single, direct word could.
What happened to Ruth Perry was a major factor in the change. The head teacher committed suicide in January 2023 after her school’s rating was lowered during an inspection. Her passing sparked a national discussion about the true effects of these rulings on those who receive them. Professor Julia Waters, her sister, vigorously advocated for systemic change. It’s safe to say that the question of whether the new framework actually addresses what caused that tragedy remains largely unanswered.
It’s already evident that the new system has conflicts of its own. Particular attention has been paid to the “achievement” category. According to data released by Ofsted, just 16% of schools with fewer disadvantaged students performed below the “expected standard” on achievement, compared to 43% of schools with an above-average percentage of students receiving free school meals. It’s difficult to look at those numbers without feeling uneasy. Schools serving underprivileged communities are facing “an uphill battle” to meet the expected standard, according to the National Association of Head Teachers. When the data speaks for itself, it is hard to disagree with that framing.
According to Lee Owston, national director for education at Ofsted, the grades are “fair” because context is taken into account and underprivileged students are compared to their peers nationwide rather than to the general population. In order to clarify this, he has also acknowledged that the inspection toolkit will be updated starting in September. The need to explain how the system operates after it has been in operation is a little telling. “It increasingly feels like Ofsted is tying itself in knots when it comes to the use of performance data,” stated Paul Whiteman of the NAHT. That’s a courteous way of expressing that something isn’t quite right.
An additional degree of uncertainty is added by research published in peer-reviewed journals. Only 4% of the variations in educational achievement at age 16 were explained by Ofsted’s overall school quality ratings, according to one study that followed almost 4,400 students. That number fell to 1% when family socioeconomic status and past performance were taken into consideration. For something that parents view as the gold standard for school quality, that is a remarkably low figure. It implies that Ofsted’s measurements might reveal more about the kids entering a school than about what transpires there.
This does not imply that inspections are useless. Someone needs to look in from the outside of schools where students were going missing during the school day and no records were kept, as one recent inspection discovered. The framework is in place for good reasons. However, there is a growing discrepancy between what research indicates the ratings actually tell us and what they are meant to convey. As this discussion develops, it’s difficult not to question whether any grading scheme, no matter how well thought out, can adequately represent something as complex and human as a school. More boxes to check are probably not the answer. However, no one appears to be certain of the true solution just yet.
