Children’s charity joins the harrowing cry to change Ofsted inspections

The Early Years Alliance charity has urged Ofsted to change their grading system after a head teacher in Reading took her own life due to the inspection pressures.

The charity, which represents nurseries, preschools and childminders, took a snapshot survey of early years’ staff, which revealed many of them found Ofsted inspections extremely stressful, impacting on their mental health.

Despite pre-schools, childminders and nurseries being inspected against a different set of standards from schools, they do receive an overall grade. These can range from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’ which can lead to a school’s closure if the council makes the decision to withdraw funding.

The Early Years Alliance survey, which was distributed to just under 14,000 early years settings in March and April 2023, found over 1,500 of staff (out of 1,708) said inspections were a source of stress ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’ and over 1,200 (out of 1,601) would remove the single word grading.

Additionally, the research uncovered that 330 (out of 1,572) had worked somewhere which has previously filed a formal complaint about Ofsted inspections.

Against this backdrop, the news follows after teaching unions have fought to pause inspections after Head Teacher, Ruth Perry, took her own life. In January this year Ms Perry was pronounced dead weeks after an inspection had taken place – results were published after her death and they downgraded the primary school – based in Reading – from an ‘outstanding’ grade to an ‘inadequate’.

Ms Perry’s family blamed her tragic loss on the pressure of the inspection and head teachers and teachers have been coming forward ever since to expose their own experiences with Ofsted.

Alongside this, Professor Eva Lloyd, from the University of East London, has advised Ofsted to re-evaluate how they conduct inspections.

Professor Lloyd said: ‘Ofsted treats each setting as if it’s a free-standing one, whereas it may belong to a chain that runs 300 nurseries, where a lot of the decisions about what goes on are determined well away from the setting.’

Ofsted have recently called for higher regulatory powers to allow it to examine how organisations running several nurseries are operating, to make sure the impact on children is positive.

Image: Gabe Pierce