According to today’s Guradian report an eight-year-old boy was meeting the Ofsted inspector for the first time. “What do you remember learning in history?” she asked, tapping on her iPad. It was months since his year did the subject but he thought of something: “The Vikings.” And what did he learn about the Vikings? “They invented dragons,” he replied.
Under the inspectorate’s new framework, introduced last September, anecdotal evidence of what children say appears to be taking centre stage. The child’s reply about Viking imagery was mentioned three times in feedback to the school as proof of “misconceptions and gaps in the children’s knowledge”, and it went on to inform the final report and decision to grade the school as “requires improvement”.
