National service for headteachers

When Her Majesty's Chief Inspector (HMCI), Sir Michael Wilshaw, spoke at the recent annual conference for the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), he called on headteachers to become more involved in school inspections, in particular as part of the National Leader of Education (NLE) programme.

The National College of School Leadership has agreed to run a pilot scheme from September with around 40 current NLEs. If successful, participating with OFSTED  in some school inspections will become part of the condition for becoming a NLE.

In this speech, Sir Michael also explained the rationale for the main changes he is proposing to the school inspection process from September 2012 on which OFSTED is currently consulting.

These main changes are:

• no notice inspections;

• the outstanding judgement being reliant on gaining outstanding for all four main inspection components, including teaching and learning;

• changing the 'satisfactory' judgement to 'requires improvement' and requiring that all schools judged to require improvement receive two monitoring visits in the two years following the inspection with the expectation that they will have improved to at least good within this time scale. If this is not achieved, the school will be placed in a category - with all that that entails.

You can access Sir Michael's speech to ASCL here >> http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/leading-system-speech