The purpose of school inspection is what it does
Systems designed to raise standards too often teach schools to look good rather than get better
Just as teachers don’t always do what their leaders hope they’ll do, neither do schools always behave in ways system leads expect. Although this sounds obvious, we often live our lives pretending otherwise. We write plans, set priorities, clarify expectations and assume our noble intentions will translate smoothly into our desired outcome. Then results fall, behaviour worsens, staff morale dips, and we look around for someone to blame.
The usual explanation is comforting: someone must have failed. Leaders weren’t strong enough, teachers weren’t consistent enough, students weren’t motivated enough, and parents weren’t supportive enough. But what if the more troubling possibility is also more useful? What if schools are systems that can produce poor outcomes even when most of the people inside them are well-intentioned, hardworking and competent?
We know from ordinary life that intentions and outcomes fail to match. Someone tidies your desk and you can’t find a vital document. A friend organises a party in your honour and creates an evening you dread. A policy designed to help people ends up making their lives harder.
History is littered with larger, grimmer examples: the Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, the Partition of India, the War on Drugs and No Child Left Behind. Each was, at least in part, an attempt to solve a serious problem. Each created consequences its architects either didn’t foresee or couldn’t control. Good intentions pave the road to hell. But why are we so surprised that good intentions are so obviously insufficient?
In schools, the gap between intention and outcome is often hidden because the intentions are so virtuous. Who could object to attempts to improve attendance, raise standards, keep children safe, develop reading, reduce workload or close gaps? But virtuous aims can still create vicious incentives. An attendance policy can improve the numbers while making school feel more hostile to the families most in need of trust. A data system can promise clarity while generating hours of low-value labour. A behaviour policy can create calm corridors while pushing the most vulnerable children closer to exclusion. None of these things happen because people want them to happen but because systems convert aims into incentives, routines and consequences.
A common response is to assign blame. If we could just remove the incompetent or malicious, all would be well. This is the logic behind school inspection: if a school is underperforming, its leaders must be the problem. Expose them, replace them, and improvement will follow. But this isn’t just wrong, it’s foolish. Replace the leader and the same pressures remain: recruitment problems, unstable budgets, weak local services, inherited curriculum gaps, hostile accountability, fragmented data, exam incentives and the daily weather of human need. Sometimes new leadership helps enormously, but only when it changes the conditions in which people work.
There may be a few schools led by tyrants or incompetents, but most schools, regardless of outcomes, are led by people doing their best. Leading a struggling school — especially one in a deprived area — is punishingly hard. Success and failure are always influenced by luck. Punishing the unlucky for failing to control every variable deters others from taking on such roles.
Good intentions aren’t enough but they do matter. If we assumed that well-intentioned leaders could be supported, mentored, and developed into effective ones, we might create a system with higher morale, less burnout, and better outcomes, especially for the most disadvantaged students.
To do this, we must move away from a culture of blame and towards one of responsibility. Schools are complex networks, not only of people, some of whom may unintentionally act against their own best interests, but also of policies, specifications, software, and other interrelated elements. This complexity means parts will always misalign. Schools aren’t tidy jigsaw puzzles; they’re often cobbled together with string. Sometimes literally.
Leaders have to juggle all of this while also responding to external pressures: government mandates, media scrutiny, societal crises, emerging technologies. It’s inevitable that schools will sometimes struggle. But while unintended outcomes aren’t always a leader’s fault, they’re still their responsibility.
All of which is a long preamble to Stafford Beer’s famous maxim: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” POSIWID, for short. Beer argued that systems should be evaluated on their observable results. A system’s true purpose is revealed by its consistent outputs, regardless of what its designers claim.
No one intends for a school to produce poor outcomes. But if it consistently does, then intention is functionally irrelevant. Focusing on what the system does, rather than what it should do, helps us address discrepancies between aims and outcomes.
Applying the principles of POSIWID to Ofsted, England’s school inspectorate, reveals something about these discrepancies in the inspection process.
What are Ofsted’s stated aims?
“To improve lives by raising standards in education and children’s social care”
To conduct inspections that help services improve
To apply proportionate regulation focused on risks
To inform policy and practice through inspection insights
To adapt to ensure relevant and effective oversight
To be transparent and engage stakeholders
To what extent are these aims fulfilled in practice?
What does Ofsted do?
Publishes a rubric for judging school performance
Conducts two-day inspections assessing leadership, behaviour, curriculum, and safeguarding
Publishes inspection reports with brief recommendations on how to improve on future inspections
Releases subject reviews and clarifies inspection practices1
Shapes school priorities - schools align teaching and assessment with what they believe Ofsted wants
Encourages performative compliance - schools prepare evidence to impress inspectors
Promotes high-stakes accountability - risk aversion, exam focus, and data obsession follow
Increases workload and stress - inspection anticipation spikes pressure, sometimes with tragic outcomes
Constrains curriculum innovation - schools avoid novel approaches that might not align with Ofsted frameworks
Reinforces system hierarchies - inspections influence parental choice and school reputation
Shapes public perception - inspection grades serve as shorthand, often lacking nuance
Fuels a consultancy industry advising schools on how to pass inspections. Though diminished, it still exists.2
Each of these can reasonably be argued to be consequences of Ofsted’s activities even though many of them are unintended. The mechanism is depressingly familiar. Once inspection carries high stakes, schools begin to optimise for what can be seen, evidenced and defended. Curriculum intent statements, book looks, data drops, lesson routines and behaviour scripts become safer than the more elusive business of finding out what students actually know and can do. The proxy becomes the target. The target becomes the work. Eventually, schools are not merely preparing for inspection; they are being reorganised by the anticipation of it.
What does Ofsted not do?
Improve student outcomes directly — this is the work of those who work in schools
Close performance gaps — despite intentions, these remain stubborn or widen
Make schools happier, safer places — while safeguarding is important, cliff-edge judgments likely don’t help
These repeated outcomes reveal Ofsted’s true functional purpose. Whether intended or not, inspection arguably distorts the system more than it improves it.
Ofsted presents itself as the gold standard for school evaluation. But through the lens of construct validity, problems emerge. Construct validity asks whether a test genuinely measures what it claims to. Although inspectors believe they measure “quality of education,” a vague, complex construct, instead, they assesses proxies: lesson snapshots, curriculum maps, brief conversations with leaders, teachers and students etc. But can we meaningfully assess the quality of education a school provides in two days?
When inspections are supposed to reveal something as complex and long-term as the effectiveness of a school, we should ask: do Ofsted ratings correlate with other meaningful indicators? The answer is, at best, inconsistently. While high Ofsted grades sometimes align with good academic outcomes, the relationship is far from perfect. Blunt, high-stakes judgments are antithetical to consistent and valid measures of actual learning. Ofsted too often relies on unreliable proxies like short-term outcomes or performance during inspections, which tell us little about what pupils have genuinely learned or retained. This exposes the emperor’s new clothes: what passes for accountability is often little more than data theatre. If we’re serious about improving education, we need to stop mistaking performance for learning and start measuring what really matters.
Instead, too many inspections end up evaluating whether schools are good at being inspected. That is not the same thing as being good at educating. We mistake performance for learning. Worse still, inspection outcomes skew against disadvantaged schools. These schools are less likely to receive ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ ratings, even after adjusting for prior attainment. If judgments track pupil intake more closely than teaching quality, we’re evaluating demographics, not education. This is a failure of discriminant validity: inspections measure the wrong things. A school might be good at being inspected but poor at educating. That’s a dangerous confusion.
To compound this, Ofsted’s impact is hardly neutral. High-stakes inspection distorts practice. Jane Perryman paints a bleak but familiar picture: under the watchful eye of inspectors, schools stop being places of learning and become stages for performance. The inspection regime, she argues, doesn’t just evaluate schools, it reshapes them. Teachers begin to teach not for understanding, but for optics. Leaders write policies for show, not for substance. In essence, schools are being judged on how well they simulate the illusion of effectiveness. It’s not about what works, it’s about what looks like it works. Perryman’s work reveals the corrosive impact of high-stakes accountability: it warps priorities, distorts identities, and rewards surface over depth.
None of this is to say that accountability is unimportant. Inspection exists because schools are public institutions entrusted with children’s lives and futures. Parents deserve information, governments need assurance and children should not have to wait years for adults to notice that a school is failing them. The case for accountability isn’t trivial, and those who oppose Ofsted too glibly can sound as if they’re really opposing scrutiny. The problem isn’t that schools should be answerable for what they do but that the current model confuses public judgement with useful feedback, and too often rewards the appearance of quality over the slow, difficult work of improvement.
But if we are to hold schools accountable, we need to be clear about what we’re holding them accountable for, and how we’re measuring it. If our tools can’t validly and reliably do that, then they’re not just ineffective, they’re dangerous. A poorly calibrated system of accountability risks incentivising the wrong behaviours, punishing the wrong schools, and rewarding performativity over substance.
In truth, Ofsted does achieve some of its aims: public visibility, pressure to improve, and a semblance of consistency. But if we’re serious about the quality of education rather than the appearance of it, then we need an accountability system with far stronger construct validity. Otherwise, we risk mistaking noise for signal and performance for learning. For all its good intentions, inspection has become a system that too often rewards the management of appearances.
What might a better system might look like?
