Like all teachers, and anyone else involved in education, I am often bemused by the pronouncements of OFSTED, the Government's inspection agency for schools, playgroups, LEAs, and just about everything else you can think of to do with education. One such is today's announcement that 457,925 of the 1.65 million children who have been diagnosed with special educational needs (SEN) have been diagnosed wrongly.The implication is that schools "mistakenly" identify pupils as having special educational needs in order to get extra funding. This is not true, but it has brought excited banner headlines to the Daily Mail and other such papers. A swingeing refutation of the OFSTED claim is made by Zoe Williams in today's "Guardian", and can be read here.
Speaking generally, there is a more pressing point that occurs to me: OFSTED has been in existence since 1992. During that time, it has inspected thousands of schools, observed tens of thousands of lessons, produced staggering amounts of paperwork, spent vast amounts of taxpayers' money and driven some teachers to suicide. If schools really are wrongly labelling children as having special educational needs, why has it taken the ever-vigilant OFSTED so long to discover it?
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The timing might suggest a Government quango that feels the need to stave off either cuts or abolition under the ConDems cost-cutting chainsaw.
ReplyDeleteOr it could be they're useless.
Or both.
One of OFSTED's clangers was to pass Haringey Social Service Department as "good", weeks before the tragic death of Baby "P". Shannon Matthews, who was kidnapped, drugged and hidden by her own mother and an accomplice in the hope of a reward, was taken off the Child Protection register by Kirklees Council in order to meet an OFSTED target.
ReplyDeletePoliticians set up these systems that fail, usually in a knee jerk response to some tragedy or disaster. You refer to Paby P: the emphasis in child protection keeps on swinging from protecting children to parents' rights. At present, it's child protection, but the next time an innocent parent has their child taken from them, it will swing the other way, as it always does.
ReplyDeleteOfsted with its targets and workforce of amateur busybodies can only muddy the waters even more. And while politicians carry out their pet experiments in education and child protection, and Ofsted want to protect their existence to continue to do badly what they have always doen badly, the interests of children will never be the priority.
As the Government keeps warning us to expect massive cuts in public spending, those of us in education will be watching to see how fair those cuts are going to be. If the cuts fall everywhere, but not on OFSTED, then I anticipate that widespread (and entirely justified) resentment among teachers will follow.
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ReplyDeleteA belated posting here, but one that nails the OFSTED claims as rubbish. These are the words of a friend of mine who worked as a head, deputy head and adviser for a certain North London borough for 30+ years:
ReplyDelete"On SEN and OFSTED: far from it being a funding device to enhance school budgets, in our LEA we could never get any kid statemented in Secondary school. If it hadn't been done in Primary there was no chance. So we covered out of our budget.There weren't enough Ed Psychs and I always thought it was an LEA move to save money from the centre."