For 7 of the most miserable years of my professional life, I had to carry out OFSTED inspections. Not because I wanted to but because Hampshire wanted me to. I was always deeply troubled by having to make judgements about learning based on ridiculously short time in classrooms. But that was how it worked. Despite the fact that there were at least 5 iterations of the framework during these years, nobody seemed to twig that it was a gigantic hoax. I suppose it was the historian in me that was most troubled by the flimsy evidence my colleagues were using to come to hard-and-fast judgments. In Oliver Cromwell’s words, I used to protest that they ought to consider ‘in the bowels of Christ they might be wrong’. There was always another construction that could be placed on the so-called evidence they were using. As historians know well information is not evidence of anything.
So it is heart-warming to see OFSTED coming clean and owning up to this gigantic and professionally destructive charade. The next version of the framework ( there are so mnay I lose count) merely proves that they have got it wrong so many times in the past . 4 grades, 5 grades 7 grades and brown envelopes and often followed by redundancy, back to 4 grades etc.
Now at last from 2019 they have seen the light and have finally admitted that learning “invisible and happens over a long period of time. It is not something that can be directly observed.” HALLELUJAH.
