Introduction

The fluidity of the current management structures concerned with school standards, still under (re-re-) construction is obvious. But local authorities remain part of the story, whatever the current flavour of national rhetoric, and whatever is happening to multi-academy trusts (MATs). How councils work and what they do are also central to the realisation of what I have described earlier as the wider roles and contributions of schools to their communities. But they are partly hampered in this by the currently fragmented and fluid governance arrangements for standards. And as I shall show in Chapter 5, these wider roles cannot actually be separated from considerations of student outcomes, so I begin with them. At the same time, as I demonstrate in this chapter, they are very much still built into what might be termed ‘providing an Education service’. The question for the future is just how.

Arrangements for reviewing and raising school standards

The central thrust of Education policy for 30 years, whatever the mechanism chosen, has been about improving student outcomes: whether the outcomes achieved by all students at various stages of the educational process are sufficient, both in themselves (for example, distributed evenly across all social groups) and in relation to broader policy aims such as promoting social mobility. So it is important to understand the current mechanisms outside schools and academies that supervise their improvement, and how they work together (or not) as the parts of the broader schools ecosystem.

Ofsted and the inspection outcomes it delivers are one of these mechanisms. It should be noted that the vast majority of English schools (around three quarters) have already achieved the national expectation of either a good or outstanding inspection report outcome: 77 per cent by 2020 compared with 75 per cent in 2019 (Ofsted, 2020). This has been the stable inspection test since 2012, with what is required to achieve this grade revised from time to time with new frameworks (current one is Ofsted, 2019, amended 2021). This has been one of the so-called ‘ratchets’ of central government on standards (Riddell, 2016: 129), although arguably less important now.

For schools that have achieved the target of good or outstanding, the current intention is that they will have a further inspection visit about every four years or so (Ofsted, 2019).