The Big Listen was a comprehensive effort by Ofsted to gather input from a wide range of stakeholders, including school staff, education organisations, parents, and those involved with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). The consultation received an overwhelming 16,033 responses, reflecting the education community's strong desire to contribute to Ofsted's reform.
This extensive feedback process was partly triggered by the tragic death of headteacher Ruth Perry in January 2023, which led to increased scrutiny of Ofsted's inspection practices and their impact on educators' wellbeing. The Big Listen aimed to address these concerns and explore ways to make Ofsted a more supportive and collaborative partner in improving educational standards.
As a result of this consultation, Ofsted has announced a range of reforms designed to transform its approach to school inspections, enhance transparency, and rebuild trust within the education community. These changes span from immediate adjustments to long-term strategic shifts, all aimed at creating a more responsive and effective inspectorate.
Key changes resulting from the Big Listen include:
Key points include:
Monday Notifications: From now on, Ofsted will notify leaders of all routine inspections on a Monday, with inspectors visiting schools on Tuesday and Wednesday. Reports will be drafted on Thursdays, followed by a rigorous review of findings on Fridays.
Curriculum Focus Maintained: Despite these changes, Ofsted will retain its emphasis on the curriculum and early reading, with consultations on report cards beginning immediately.
Inclusion Criterion: Ofsted will introduce a new inclusion criterion, assessing whether schools provide high-quality support for disadvantaged and vulnerable students. The details of how inclusivity will be measured will be subject to consultation.
Safeguarding Grace Period: Ofsted will pilot a new approach to safeguarding. Schools that meet all other criteria but fall short on safeguarding will have up to three months to rectify issues without reopening judgments on other areas.
Ofsted Academy: This new initiative, launching this autumn, will centralise all Ofsted training and development activities.
National Hubs and Reference Groups: Ofsted will establish six national hubs, each specialising in a specific area of its work, and seven external reference groups to provide independent advice and feedback.
Increased Transparency: Ofsted aims to increase transparency by sharing the evidence behind its reports and potentially recording and transcribing final feedback meetings.
Permanent Complaint Reforms: Ofsted will make permanent its pilot complaints panels, which include external representatives to review complaints processes.
MAT and LA Inspections: While working with ministers on future legislation to inspect multi-academy trusts (MATs), Ofsted has not set a timeline for this reform but considers it a medium- to long-term project.
Cultural Change: Feedback from the Big Listen highlighted concerns about Ofsted's culture, with a significant portion of parents and schools expressing distrust in the inspectorate. Addressing this will be a priority moving forward.
Reformed Inspection Frameworks: Ofsted will consult later this academic year on creating a revised education inspection framework for schools, early years, and further education. This framework will incorporate lessons from the Big Listen and support the introduction of report cards in September 2025. The new framework aims to make inspections more collaborative and supportive, with a focus on clear criteria and school context.
New Report Card Features: The report cards will feature "area insights," visualising local data to provide more information to parents and help inspectors understand local contexts.
In a speech made by Sir Martyn Oliver in May, the significance of professional dialogue between the inspection team and school leadership during inspections was greatly emphasised. Ungraded inspections will shift towards providing school leaders with opportunities to showcase their improvements and discuss areas needing further development. As a result of this, deep dives will no longer be conducted during ungraded inspections, beginning at the start of the autumn term.
Since this announcement, efforts have been made to define the practical aspects of ungraded inspections.
Initially, discussions were held with school leaders in regards to these planned changes, and parts of the inspection process were tested in various schools. The feedback from these has been integral to shaping to the new ungraded inspection process.
The ungraded inspection process will commence with an extended phone call conversation the day prior to the on-site visit. This call aims to determine the necessary actions during the inspection to gather essential evidence.
During this call, headteachers will discuss key aspects of their school with the lead inspector, including the school’s context, strengths, and improvements since the last inspection. There will also be opportunities to address ongoing challenges, in which headteachers are encouraged to involve other senior team members.
The lead inspector will be prepared with questions based on data from the school’s website, as well as previous inspection reports. This discussion will help identify several focus areas for the inspection, combining inspector interests and school priorities.
The identified focus areas will guide inspectors' activities during their visit. At least a couple of these areas will relate to the quality of education, assessed across groups of subjects rather than through deep dives into single subjects. Inspectors may also explore specific aspects, such as improvements in assessment, by visiting lessons and discussing their impact with school leaders.
Additionally, one or two focus areas might cover aspects like personal development, behaviour, or attendance, tailored to each school based on the initial phone conversation.
Ofsted have outlined clearly that these changes aim to foster meaningful professional dialogue about the school’s strengths and areas for improvement. A key objective is to reduce the burden on subject leaders themselves, shifting the dialogue so that headteachers and the senior team are more central to the inspection process.
The new inspection handbooks will be published in September, and Ofsted will publish informative videos and webinars to aid schools and provide further details.
Catch-up strategies may include regular, informal assessments; identifying pupils who need additional, one-one support; prioritising practical work that wasn’t possible via remote learning; and recapping the previous year’s curriculum to cover what had been missed. Although everyone within the educational industry have been working hard to enable children to be back on track with their education, Ofsted inspections have proven that concerns in attendance still remain. School have provided reasons such as.
Schools have also reported that the majority of COVID absences have been among disadvantaged pupils, those with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).
Due to numerous lockdowns, children newly entering schools are arriving with lower starting points compared to previous years. These children are struggling to adapt to school life and are experiencing behavioural issues towards learning, causing them to have difficulties in settling in.
Ofsted have found that early year’s pupils are struggling most with social and emotional communication between each other due to a lot of children being born within the pandemic. Child carers are focusing on developing their language and communication skills between other children to help build the bridge of social and emotional skills.
Ofsted have found that there is still disruption of education for further educational students. Interruptions of learning have been caused by COVID absences, falls in numbers of learners on courses, gaps in students’ practical skills and their English & Maths. Mental Illness is also a high concern for students and many are struggling to return to face-to-face learning.
Inspectors have found that in order to help learners catch-up. Providers are repeating elements of courses; offering individual support to develop specific skills; prioritise practical teaching. A number of providers have developed new programmes to support those who have lost their jobs or wanting to change careers due to COVID, enabling them to have the skills and knowledge for re-employment.
For more information, please visit the Ofsted website found here.
There should be no higher priority for any educational establishment than child safety. Whether this is making sure the corridors are clean and tidy, adequate supervision during activities or taking every possible measure to ensure the employees of the school and any sub-contractors are fully vetted before working with young or vulnerable people.
Keeping the premises tidy and providing adequate supervision for curricular and extra-curricular activities is easy enough to manage and facilitate but what about the employees themselves? There have many published cases in recent years where basic employee vetting protocol has been overlooked and resulted in barred people working with children. How can this be allowed to happen? Some of these cases can be directly attributed to the convoluted systems currently in place and a lack of adequate training for those involved in the recruitment of staff.
Here at onlineSCR we have developed a successful, relatively simple, online resource that allows anyone involved in recruiting staff for schools to check and fully vet all potential employees to ensure they are permitted to work with or in close proximity to children. Previously the administration for such a function involved spreadsheets and dealing with one or more external bodies including Ofsted and the Department of Education and basically taking up a lot of time that could be spent concentrating on the core functions of school rather going through the arduous process of vetting potential employees.
As previously mentioned, centralising your current Single Central Record using our system is relatively straightforward. The first step is log into onlineSCR and register your school or other educational establishment. When this has been completed you simply access your Single Central Record through our 24/7 online portal which is fully compliant with all Ofsted and ISI requirements as set out by the Department of Education ‘Keeping Children Safe in Education’ guidance. There are options to add additional admin staff and schools if required.
As previously touched upon, the main benefits of our onlineSCR portal is to save time, increase efficiency and ensure compliance with existing and any new guidelines or legislation. Keeping children safe is obviously the main priority but all of the aforementioned benefits combined with the fact that the school can avoid any negative publicity that can arise in the event of an ‘incident’ as a result of mis-administration are obviously attractive attributes for any school.
If our system is something that you think your school could adopt, please contact us for a no obligation discussion. Our team will be happy to answer any questions you may have about the feasibility of onlineSCR for your particular establishment and can also make recommendations if required. You can also get more specific information on the services we offer by checking the relevant pages of our site or calling us on 0151 606 5101.
