No Ofsted this week, but unions call for longer delay

There will be no routine Ofsted inspections this week in schools, colleges and early years settings, with inspections only going ahead where there are safeguarding concerns. The move comes in response to the emergence of the Omnicron variant of coronavirus. In an email to education settings the Department for Education (DfE) asked settings to ‘revisit their existing outbreak plans to ensure they are well prepared for any future changes’ that may be required. The email continued ‘In order to do that contingency planning, the secretary of state for education and Her Majesty's Chief Inspector have agreed that early years settings, schools and colleges will not be inspected… unless there are safeguarding concerns.’ There will also be no routine inspections in secondary schools in the first week of the new term in January, with the expectation that schools will be carrying out on site testing of pupils for coronavirus during that week.

However, while welcoming these moves, there have been calls from teaching unions for the government to go further. In a joint open letter to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi the NEU and NASUWT unions call for a pause in routine inspections until after the February half-term break. According to the unions, more than 200,000 pupils were absent for covid-related reasons on 25 November and since then infection rates among school age children have risen further. In their letter the unions thank Mr Zahawi for cancelling inspections this week, but argue that extending this pause to February would ‘allow schools and colleges the time they need to deal with the anticipated fallout of the Omicron variant over the winter period and prepare their pupils for the spring and summer terms.’ The letter also says that education professionals are ‘overstretched’ and that inspection ‘places an additional and unnecessary burden on teaching and support staff’. Recent quests for deferrals due to staff shortages ‘have not been considered sympathetically in all cases’ the unions suggest.

Dr Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: ‘The pressures on schools and their staff currently remain exceptional and extreme. It is clear that the resumption of routine inspection has, in many cases, resulted in significant additional workload for teachers and school leaders and has distracted them from focusing on addressing the impacts of the pandemic on their learning and wider wellbeing. Pausing inspection will not only address some of these pressures but would also allow for a plan to be developed to resume inspection in a way that takes account of these extraordinary circumstances and has the support and confidence of the profession’.

Meanwhile, the ASCL school leaders union has renewed calls for schools to be able to more easily defer inspections on request. Julie McCulloch, director of policy at the ASCL, said: ‘We have repeatedly asked for Ofsted to show more empathy in its approach to inspections given the extreme pressures currently being experienced by schools and colleges in light of the continuing disruption being caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.’ She welcomed the cancellation of inspections this week, but added ‘It is our strong view that Ofsted should go further and agree in general to grant the deferral of routine inspections to a later date upon request while schools and colleges continue to experience the disruption being caused by the virus.’