Banish inspectors from schools, urges teacher

Headteachers should prevent inspectors entering their schools until the government changes the inspection regime, a conference will be told tomorrow. Mike Curtis, headteacher of Carterton primary school in Oxfordshire, will argue that school leaders should be standing up to Ofsted – the school inspectorate – by refusing them entry. Curtis will tell the annual conference of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) in Liverpool that Ofsted is damaging pupils' education by judging schools on narrow and unreliable measures. He will call on the union to ballot its 30,000 members on whether heads should collectively stop letting inspectors into their schools until the inspection process changes. It comes as the NAHT and the National Union of Teachers have vowed to boycott national tests for 10- and 11-year-olds next month. Curtis said: "If the government refuses to have a new inspection system, let's have a ballot and say no to Ofsted. We won't let them into schools." Excellent teachers are turning down the chance to run a school because they cannot bear the thought of being at its helm when inspectors brand it as failing, Curtis said. Some inspectors have not been heads and do not understand "what it is like to be in the firing line," he said. "It is time we stood up and said this is not acceptable. We have had enough." Over the last decade, Curtis said inspectors had downgraded his school's leadership from "outstanding" to "satisfactory". "You would assume that there has been a decline in standards, but we are actually performing at a better rate; they just keep changing the goal posts." Ofsted should be independent of the government and should give impartial advice to schools on how they should improve, Curtis said. At the moment, it is a non-ministerial government department. Curtis calls for "robust action which is designed to change the Ofsted framework, its process of inspection and the accountability of individual Ofsted inspectors". "We can no longer tolerate the damage it is doing to schools, school leaders and children. It is our opinion that the current mechanistic, data-driven approach gives rise to limited and inappropriate judgment. The associated demoralisation of schools and their communities must stop." . Another motion, proposed by Tony Roberts, a retired headteacher in Lancashire, states that the education system has become "increasingly philistine, sterile and data-obsessed ... to create an illusion of political progress". Mick Brookes, general secretary of the NAHT, said the way Ofsted judged schools at the moment was "clearly wrong", but that very recently it had started to improve. "We need to negotiate hard until we get an accountability system which is less draconian. We expect schools to be inspected, but the inspections must be fair and the culture must not be a fault-finding one." Last month, Ofsted revealed that more schools had been labelled inadequate under its new inspection regime. One in 10 of the 2,140 schools inspected last autumn were judged inadequate, compared to 4% in the autumn of 2008. An Ofsted spokeswoman said the inspectorate had conducted a survey which found schools were "overwhelmingly positive" towards recent changes to inspections. She said: "Nine out of ten who have responded to feedback surveys say they are satisfied with the way inspection was carried out. Most believe inspection judgements were fair and accurate. Independent surveys also confirm that the vast majority of both teachers and parents support school inspection and consider it helps to promote improvement."