"Inspections should do two things - provide parents with an accurate reflection of a school's performance while doing so without placing an excessive burden on staff. Ofsted's plans achieve neither objective. The tweaks made to its proposals following the consultation period are just that - minor and cosmetic changes to a flawed rationale. To make matters worse, the planned introduction of this system is far too rushed and gives schools little time to prepare for a huge change in how they will be inspected.
"As we have warned on many occasions, it will not be possible to apply reliably a five-point grading scale across multiple evaluation areas during the course of a single inspection. Even with the number of evaluation areas slightly streamlined, this exercise requires inspectors to make a large number of finely balanced judgements in a very short space of time. Regardless of the amount of training delivered, it is unlikely that inspection teams will be able to do this consistently between different settings, and the result will be a system that is inherently unreliable.
"The new inspection system will also place a huge amount of stress on school and college leaders and their staff because they will face so many judgements across so many areas. Those achieving the 'expected standard' will effectively be told that this is not good enough, and they should be striving for 'strong' and 'exceptional.' It is a recipe for professional burn-out with the implication that however hard you work you should be doing better.
"Let's remember that this entire process began with the suicide of a headteacher under the previous inspection system. Yet here we are with a reformed system which appears to be even worse. We are gravely concerned about the welfare of leaders and teachers as well as the impact on recruitment and retention.
"We will spend some time now looking in detail at the proposals and consulting with our members over our next steps. We have previously said that we will consider encouraging members who serve as Ofsted inspectors to withdraw their services and we will now put that question to our elected members."