Ofsted
So I have been asked to talk today about the use of research evidence in education and Im going to talk mainly about how Ofsted uses research, but I am also going to be talking about its wider use in the education sector.
Overall, I think there is a tremendous amount for the sector to be proud of: England is really ahead of many countries in harnessing research effectively in education. And Ofsted has clearly been part of that movement in recent years.
I must declare at the outset that I am not myself an education researcher. But I have now spent more than 20 years in education, and in all of that time I have been working in different contexts to make good use of available evidence, and to encourage others to do the same, and have made sure that at Ofsted we now have the capacity to do that well.
And of course, we have several big stakes in good use of research evidence.
First, we want to ground our inspection approach as securely as we can in evidence about education itself.
In this way inspections can encourage schools (and of course nurseries, colleges and the other entities we inspect) to align their models and practices with what is already known about quality. That is a big part of being a force for improvement.
Secondly, we aim to build and iterate inspection models that achieve the intended purposes with sufficient validity and reliability and minimal unintended consequences. Of course, we dont have total freedom here: we have to work within our statutory framework and within the policy constraints that are set by government, including funding. So thats 2 stakes.
The third stake is the aggregation of the evidence that we collect in doing our work, and the related research work that we carry out, makes us a generator of research evidence for others benefit, as well as a user.
And of course, we are just one part of a wider landscape. Much excellent work has been carried out in universities like this one [the University of Oxford] over many years; the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has become part of the national network of What Works centres; and many other institutes and bodies do significant work.
And that brings me to a fourth strand, which links back to the first. Many bodies act as intermediaries, translating complex maps of academic evidence into reports and summaries that can be more immediately useful to practitioners. And this is not of itself a core Ofsted activity, but we know that it is one of the ways that our products are used.
Curriculum reviews
For instance, over the last 2 years, we have drawn up and published a series of curriculum reviews. These offer a researched conception of what we consider to be a high-quality education, by subject and by phase. They help translate our researched framework into subjects and phases. And they provide a platform for inspector training in judging curriculum quality.
(And of course, if we are to be consistent as an inspectorate, we must have a shared conception of what constitutes quality. If you ask people to judge quality in the absence of a clear corporate statement, they will inevitably bring their own views to bear: and of course, individual views will always vary to some extent.)
But we also know that schools draw extensively on these reviews to develop their curriculums. They have been downloaded many hundreds of thousand times. I believe this shows a tremendous appetite for engagement with educational research, as well as an understandable desire to gain some insight into Ofsteds approach.
But of course, there is no comprehensive and definitive version of educational truth. There is much that is well established, and much that is not. New evidence and insights can cast doubt on or discredit previously accepted wisdom. Ill come back to the difficulties this creates a bit later.
But childrens lives cannot be put on hold. So neither schools nor we can down tools, to wait for a pot of fairy gold at the end of an evidential rainbow. We must work with what is available, and what is most relevant to our work, while recognising that we will always have to iterate in the light of new developments.
How Ofsted works
I think this is a good moment to explain just a little more about Ofsted.
In many ways we [Ofsted] operate as you would expect. The principles of good inspection and regulation are straightforward: proportionality, accountability, consistency, transparency and targeting. These are the Hampton principles, and they are deeply embedded in our frameworks and handbooks.
But how does an inspectorate work?
I think we operate to a fairly standard model.
Our frameworks and handbooks are the policy instruments. They are powerful levers on the education sector, and they exert influence long before an inspector comes through the door.
The inspection process itself is designed around professional dialogue. It is intended to help schools improve and our post-inspection surveys do find that, in most cases, it does.
At the end of most inspections, we make judgements, for overall effectiveness and for several component judgements. They give parents, responsible bodies and government a clear statement about the overall performance of the institution.
We also publish inspection reports, describing what is being done well and what needs to improve.
We inspect at the level of the individual school and other institutions, but to report only at this level would be a tremendous waste of evidence and insight. So we have a strand that is responsible for drawing out the insights from the aggregation of our evidence, and for additional research where needed to supplement this, and also to run our evaluation programme.
In fact, there are 3 distinct flows here.
One is the dissemination programme, that includes the curriculum reviews I just talked about, thematic reviews and other research, such as reports recently commissioned by the DfE on tutoring and on T Levels. These are intended mainly for policymakers and for the education sector.
One flow is back into our frameworks and handbooks.
And the final flow is back into our inspection processes, including inspector training and quality assurance.
And of course, we are informed by the work of institutions in all this we do not exist in a bubble.
What inspection is, and is not
And I want to take a couple of minutes to remind us of a broader question: what are the purposes of inspection?
I believe there are 3 main purposes for inspection today that are relevant for the area of research. These sit in the context of a long-standing government policy that puts responsibility for diagnosis with Ofsted, but locates responsibility for treatment and support with schools themselves and with the regions group at the Department for Education (DfE). (This policy is often misunderstood by people who would like us to function primarily as a support mechanism.)
So, what are those purposes?
First, inspections provide information and assurance to parents. Ofsted was created in the early 90s in the context of the parents charter.
Secondly, they inform central and local government and other controllers of schools. Given the independence of our judgements, they provide a legitimate basis for action by others when its needed. And they also signal excellence that others can learn from.
And then, thirdly, they can and should be of value to the people at the receiving end: to teachers and heads. This is true even when inspection is limited to diagnosis. I would be deviating too far from my subject today if I went into the reasons why, but this is a matter of tremendous importance to me.
Case study: the education inspection framework (EIF)
So I am going to take as a case study the development of our main education inspection framework, the EIF. It had to meet those purposes: they are largely defined by government. But we do have flexibility in how we go about meeting these purposes.
And we aim to ground all our work in research evidence and to operate as transparently as possible.
So we took time and care to develop the framework iteratively over 2 years.
To prepare, we reviewed a wide range of research, from many universities, from the Education Endowment Foundation, from the Department for Education, and from other sources. We summarised what we drew on in a review that was published to provide transparency, both as to the evidence we used and our interpretation of that evidence. This g