Ofsted won’t grade schools ‘outstanding’ anymore – here’s what parents should know ...Middle East

From “outstanding”, down to “good”, “requires improvement” or, worst case, “inadequate”. They are words that will instantly chime with anyone who has searched for a decent state school for their child.

They have the power to make or break head teachers’ careers, send local house prices spiralling, or spell the end for struggling “inadequate” schools.

But now Ofsted is about to ditch the grading system it has used to assess schools for the last three decades.

Ofsted Chief Inspector Sir Martyn Oliver announced that the old grades will be going from November, when a whole new inspection framework is introduced using “report cards”.

Teachers’ unions have criticised the reforms as “rushed” and “cosmetic”, arguing the new cards will fail to give parents an accurate reflection of schools’ performance while placing even greater stress on school leaders.

But the changes are coming anyway, giving parents just weeks to get to grips with them. This is what they need to know.

No more ‘good’ schools

The controversial use of a single, overarching, grade – like outstanding or inadequate – to sum up an entire school’s work was dropped by the education watchdog at the start of the last academic year.

The Government scrapped the use of these “single-word judgements” following a campaign by teachers and others to reform this high-stakes, “punitive” element of the accountability system.

It followed the death of Ruth Perry, headteacher, who took her own life in 2023 while waiting for an “inadequate” Ofsted verdict on her school – Caversham Primary School, Reading – to be published.

But the words themselves had lived on – used for grades awarded to specific parts of a school’s work – until now.

Ofsted admits that the old grading system was “well-established, extensively copied and well-understood”.

But the regulator also said that because 90 per cent of schools were graded either good or outstanding the grade descriptors had become “unhelpful” to parents trying to distinguish between schools, and “unfair” to the schools themselves.

From November, a new, five-point grading scale will be introduced for inspectors to rate particular elements of a school’s work. The new grades are:

The new system will exist alongside the old until all schools have had new style inspections – a process that will take years. But Sir Martyn stressed that “no comparison” can be made between the five new grades and any grades used in the old framework.

Changes to the specific areas looked at in school inspections are also being made.

The old system judged four sub-categories: quality of education, behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management.

Under the new framework, inspectors will look at six: inclusion, curriculum and teaching, achievement, attendance and behaviour, personal development and well-being, and leadership and governance.

The “inclusion” category is new and intended to raise standards for disadvantaged and vulnerable students by encouraging school leaders to offer high-quality support.

Each of these areas will be given a separate grade from the new, five-point grading scale.

Ofsted will also inspect safeguarding and describe it as either “met” or “not met” as part of its evaluation of schools and other education institutions like nurseries and colleges.

New report cards

Ofsted is introducing new “report cards” designed to give parents an at-a-glance, summary of a school.

The cards will use a colour-coded table for easier understanding, with the colours ranging from red for “urgent improvement” to blue for “exceptional”.

Ofsted states that the report card has been designed to give parents “more nuance”, while also identifying “more precisely the areas for improvement”.

Headteachers are suggesting that it will be impossible for the inspectors to accurately judge each evaluation area during the two days they spend at each school, meaning the new system will be “inherently unreliable”.

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), warned that the new system will not provide an accurate reflection of a school’s performance, while still adding pressure to staff.

“As we have warned on many occasions, it will not be possible to apply reliably a five-point grading scale across multiple evaluation areas during the course of a single inspection,” he said.

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“Even with the number of evaluation areas slightly streamlined, this exercise requires inspectors to make a large number of finely-balanced judgements in a very short space of time.

“Regardless of the amount of training delivered, it is unlikely that inspection teams will be able to do this consistently between different settings, and the result will be a system that is inherently unreliable.”

Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) echoed these concerns, saying: “Grading might appear clear for parents, but to try and judge schools definitively across so many areas during what is simply a two-day snapshot, seriously risks them being given unfair and misleading judgements.”

Ofsted has insisted that parents are on board with its new framework. An independent YouGov poll on the views of parents, commissioned by Ofsted, found that two thirds (67 per cent) said they prefer the new report card, with 15 per cent saying they preferred the old style reports.

Ofsted added in its report on the responses to the consultation that focus groups YouGov held with parents heard “similarly strong support”.

But opposition has also come from Ruth Perry’s sister Professor Julia Waters, who said Ofsted’s new plans, were just a “cosmetic rebranding, tweaking and expansion of the same unreliable and punishing system as the one before”.

She is calling on Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to “halt the rollout of these confusing and potentially dangerous proposals”.

Will there be enough inspectors?

Concerns have also been raised over whether Ofsted will have enough funding and capacity to carry out inspections under the new system.

Under the new framework, an extra inspector will be added to each school inspection, and the frequency of inspections for early years providers will increase from every six years to every four.

ASCL is consulting with members who serve as part-time Ofsted inspectors, alongside being school leaders, over whether they should “withdraw their services” due to the five-point grading scale and rushed timescale for implementation.

It comes after ASCL and NAHT wrote to Phillipson in June threatening to carry out this action during the autumn term if changes were not made.

Asked whether the inspectorate had the capacity to carry out the reforms, Sir Martyn said he was “absolutely confident” that “an additional inspector” could be put on school inspection teams and that Ofsted had “enough staff and a big enough workforce to do it”.

He added that Ofsted received one of its highest ever spending review settlements, with the budget rising from just under £140 million in 2025-26, to nearly £159.4 million in 2026-27.

Asked how much of this was additional money to carry out the reforms, Sir Martyn said: “We’ve received one of the largest spending review settlements ever, and we’re directing all of that on the systems and processes that will support high-quality inspection, which is fair and rigorous.”

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