The practice of issuing an overall grade Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate has been scrapped.
The move to more nuanced Ofsted grades is a welcome relief for teachers as Ofsted will continue to inspect schools against the same standards, but will now only issue gradings related to individual aspects of a school's performance. We look forward to seeing how the new grading will present itself and hope that more detailed assessments will give families a much clearer and fairer impression of a school.
But Ofsted inspections will remain stressful for schools who don’t have a system such as Earwig in place.
It's one thing knowing that your school is excelling, that your staff are happy and your pupils are thriving but it’s quite another thing to convey all that to an unannounced Ofsted inspector as you trot them around the school in the rain.
We are assured by all of our hundreds of schools across the country that having Earwig all set up, operating and ‘Ofsted Ready’ is the best way to remove inspection stress. Ofsted have even told us directly that they find the Earwig system “Very clear and very clever” and their opinion is even better illustrated by the fact that no Earwig school has ever been downgraded and most were graded ‘Outstanding’.
Schools say that Ofsted love the detail within Earwig, that they can choose which area to delve deeper into and that they can sit, with cup of coffee in a warm office, while doing so.
It is also much easier for the inspector to calmly walk around the school and observe the class atmosphere, the demeanour of the staff and the engagement of the children without also rifling through evidence books or reports at the same time.
The inspector can request that the timelines are filtered to show certain areas of progress or even reports are produced. All possible because the information within Earwig is always ‘live’. They can filter by engagement, by subject, by therapy or by need. All led by you of course.
Earwig’s flexible system of enabling staff to assess against multiple frameworks
impresses Ofsted, as well as the unique EHCP customisable framework.
It’s important not to forget one of Ofsted’s more recent addition to assessment addition which is the management of staff stress and workload. Because once teachers are up and running with Earwig, it becomes a pleasure to use as so much of tedious admin is automated, there is a real enthusiasm when showing the Earwig data to the inspector.
All of these factors and many more tell us why Ofsted love Earwig.
If you’d like to hear from our schools, rather than us, about how Ofsted inspections have gone for them click here.