Ofsted’s Annual Report 2021-22

A summary of the key points of this important report, from Amanda Spielman, Alex Jones, Lee Owston, Yvette Stanley and Chris Jones. Listen to what Ofsted inspections found from all the remits we inspect; early years, schools, further education and skills and social care.

Transcript:

Chris Jones
This is a special edition, we're going to be focusing on our Annual Report for 21/22 which was published on the 13th of December. We've got a stellar lineup to talk you through what is in our annual report. We've got Amanda Spielman, His Majesty's Chief Inspector, we've got Alex Jones, who's our Director of Insights and Research, Yvette Stanley, who's our National Director for Regulation and Social Care and Lee Owston, our acting National Director for Education. Welcome, everybody. I'm going to start by turning to Amanda, Amanda, give us your initial reflections on the year that has just gone.

Amanda Spielman
A genuinely extraordinary year. On the one hand, we've been very lucky, we managed to keep children in school through the year. And yet it was such a tough year for everybody from early years, schools, further education, social care - across the board. It's been a tremendous challenge, I think, on the one hand dealing with all the catch up work, not just the academic demands, but also the socialisation and behaviour challenges, also having to do so much more than usual, because so many other services weren't available and of course, because staff themselves are short handed, partly because of recruitment and retention difficulties, but also because of higher than usual levels of staff sickness. So this is a triple whammy there of having to deal with backlogs and the normal work and with other services, that it's still not fully back up to speed with a slightly reduced workforce. It's been so hard and I think I want to start by acknowledging that and saying that what's been achieved I think, is in many contexts, nothing short of astonishing.

Chris Jones
Thanks, Amanda. We'll definitely come back to some of those themes that you've picked up on as we go through this podcast. So I'm gonna turn to Alex next. Alex, you lead the production of this year's Annual Report. You've been fully immersed in its contents for the last few months. But can you give us give us some of the headlines of what Ofsted inspectors and researchers have found over the last year or so?

Alex Jones
Three sort of themes that I would draw out, that really helped to illustrate some of the challenges that the sectors have faced during this year as as Amanda mentioned, the first I think is around the ongoing impact of the pandemic and you know, in early years, we've seen children starting their early years education with speech and language having been affected by the pandemic and the fact that that many of those children have actually lived the majority of their lives in the pandemic. And in older children as well, we've seen the ongoing impacts of the pandemic manifest themselves through some ongoing mental health concerns. And also, attendance rates are still lower than they were pre pandemic. And in FES (further education and skills), we've also seen learners struggling to access work placements. 

That's just to sort of illustrate a few of the few of the challenges that are that the pandemic continues to throw up. And of course, some of that's been some of those challenges are further exacerbated by, especially towards the end of the year, pressures on the workforce across the sectors that we inspect and regulate. So in early years, childminders, numbers are falling, nurseries are closing, and lots of those settings are increasingly reliant on apprentices. In social care. We've seen vacancies for registered managers increase. They're now running at about 14%. And local authorities are increasingly reliant on agency social workers, which can really impact on the provision that children receive and it's especially important in something like that which is so sort of heavily reliant on the relationship that social workers can can have with children. 

And I mean, just to sort of illustrate what this means in education, what do these workforce pressures mean? Well, it can mean fewer staff in schools and colleges and that can mean larger classes, have more mixed abilities and fewer opportunities. For enrichment programmes and, and catch up opportunities deferred, and then the sort of third thing I would I would highlight is the impact that can have on some of the children with with the highest needs and those that are sometimes out of the line of sight of Ofsted and other agencies. 

In the report, we highlight that the numbers of children in care are continuing to rise. Local authorities often struggle to find placements for those children and they can end up accommodated in homes that are hundreds of miles away in some cases, and we've really highlight concerns around the pressure that this place is on the system but in social care, and also in education where the system can struggle to make appropriate provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities in some cases. 

Chris Jones
Thanks, Alex. So you've highlighted some of the challenges that everyone working in education and social care, well, I think recognise and would have worked so hard to tackle over the last year that we've reported on, but looking at own inspection outcomes, that they're largely moving in very positive direction. So I'm going to turn to Yvette and then to Lee to tell us a bit about our inspection outcomes. Firstly in social care, and then in an education,  and Yvette, just tell us about how some of the providers we work with are really successfully rising to the challenges that that Alex spelt out.

Yvette Stanley
Okay, I'm going to start with the inspections of local authority, Children's Services and this framework we put in place in January 2018. And up from a very low base, we've had some solid improvements. So we've gone from 2% of local authorities being outstanding to 16%. That's from three to 24 local authorities and at the other end 11% were inadequate, and we've halved, we've halved that. So a really good story, as I said from from a place where we wanted to see significant improvements, and local authorities have done that, despite the challenges of COVID and where we see that working well. It really is solid leadership, a really child-centred ambitious agenda for change and getting the basics in place so that social workers can do a really good job. Children's homes have continued to be at a very similar level of good and outstanding across all the judgments that we have seen since COVID. The newly registered children's homes, not having quite the same profile only marginally. But absolutely, that really seems to relate to an absence of managers, as Alex said earlier, and real challenges in getting enough aid enough staff to run the homes on a regular basis.

Chris Jones
Thanks for that. That's really interesting. I'll return to some of these things. I think, Lee, over to you. Tell us a bit about what's been happening across our education remits.

Lee Owston
Yes, certainly, just giving you give you a flavour of some of the different remits in in education. I think, given all those challenges that Alex was outlining, at the beginning there, I think, actually terms or inspection judgments, we see across all the sectors either maintaining the proportion of good and outstanding providers that we have in previous years or or improving upon it, which I think is is a great achievement. Just to give you some specifics are at a percentage of state funded schools and are good and outstanding, which is a 2% increase on the previous year. I think particularly, we need to kind of praise those those weaker schools that have certainly improved over the last year. When you look at the proportion 70% of schools judged previously as requiring improvement, that kind of having have improved to good or better and indeed inadequate schools have improved to to good, if not to requires improvements. 

I think, despite those challenges, leaders certainly in the school space are really taking the opportunity to think carefully about their curriculum. I think what the pandemic has enabled all leaders to do is kind of look at their what they want children to learn with fresh eyes and really prioritise what it is that they need at this point in time, always with that long term view about how they want to get back to the curriculum that they were establishing pre pandemic. We've seen 82% of further education and skills providers maintaining their good and outstanding grade and particularly in the in the college space. We've seen a significant increase they're actually in in good and outstanding with with 11% increase on previous years, I would say where we've seen some differences on previous outcomes. 

We obviously have a have a rationale there in terms of early years where there has been a slight dip in good and outstanding provision overall. That's simply because we prioritise those providers that have gone the longest without inspection. So inevitably, a bit like we have with the removal of the outstanding exemption, you know, we've taken the opportunity to go back to those that have been out of the line of sight into an inspection for the longest time, and inevitably more of those have have dropped one two or more grades, but certainly overall because we inspect all education remains under the education inspection framework than actually that focus on curriculum. What is it that children need to learn has given the sector and inspectors the flexibility to really look at what's happening now for the children in front of them? And the story is, there's a lot of great work that's going on out there despite the challenges that everybody's facing.

Chris Jones
Amanda, Yvette and Lee have described the efforts to which people are going to maintain and even improve standards in the across the sectors that we work with despite some of the challenges that we've outlined, particularly in terms of workforce. And I think we talked before about the pressure that especially leaders have been under since the start of the pandemic, and we know that many are continuing to feel that pressure and to interfere with the challenge that we've outlined. It's to their credit isn't it that they are still improving outcomes for children. But do you worry that this situation could could get worse, given where we aren't getting where we've got to go?

Amanda Spielman
Well, it's very easy to see that there could be problems with sustaining the current level of effort, the pressures of the last three years first, the sort of full blown COVID and restrictions and then the last year of recovery. Now these cost of living pressures. A lot of nurseries, schools, colleges are really, really uncertain how they will make ends next meet next year. So what choices they're going to have to make and that makes it really hard to plan solidly carefully, and make really good choices that will in fact, help children sort of complete this job of recovery and do as well as they can. 

So I think it's a tremendously difficult time to be leading in our in our sectors. We know from the first year of COVID, quite how difficult it is for leaders when there are some great uncertainties ahead of them. When every day it feels like you're doing something that you never learned about when you're preparing for the job that none of your peers has ever done before either. So you're all having to do things for the first time. And I think working in the context of a sudden, very, very heavy cost of living crisis really is putting us in a different way. That kind of pressure on leaders again.

Chris Jones
Thanks, Amanda. I'll come back to you. You know, we talked about the challenges facing some of our most vulnerable children expand a little bit on that what what are we seeing post pandemic, in terms of the impact on those children that either Ofsted and other authorities can't see? Or where we're not having the same levels of services we've seen in the past,

Yvette Stanley
Children with special educational needs and disabilities saw their services and support quite disrupted during COVID Particularly those therapeutics of speech and language therapists and for some period, both in ILACS and LA SEND inspections, we've been talking about the challenges in access accessing children's adult adolescent mental health services. And I think those things are continuing and still quite concerning. And if you can imagine the pressure that puts on schools in trying to navigate the absence of those services for for those children with high and completely high leads of complexity. It's the same issue for families. And so we see in our SEND inspections, families who had their respite disrupted or a feeling that they're getting into quite an adversarial position in trying to access the services they need. 

So we're still seeing a bit of that we are seeing schools and local authorities stepping in to provide some of those services. But absolutely, and as Amanda says, schools and local authorities have their own budget pressures and so there's issues around the funding of those services, but also, schools and local authorities don't have necessarily the clinical governance to provide or commission some of those services. So it really does need some joined up thinking, but you could imagine the loss of that respite could put families under considerable pressure and we know that there just aren't enough places, whether it's for children with special educational needs, or looked after children who need residential care. There just aren't enough of the right places close to where children live, to make those placements. And we're particularly seeing that acutely on the on in the secure estate where children in welfare support and we've seen a very sharp increase in children before the High Court needing a secure place and a compensatory decrease in the number of inpatient beds. Now, absolutely. We don't want children hospitalised but we do need safe provision for them in the community.

Chris Jones
And that has a huge knock on effect on parents and families doesn't it has this what we've been talking about around the the numbers of child Minders and nursery places reducing tell us a bit more about that.

Yvette Stanley
We have to put this in a little bit of context. So I think there's been a population decline. Alex will correct me if I'm wrong. There's a little bit of a population decline. But if we're also parents are making different choices about their childcare and wanting much more flexible support when they're perhaps working from home two days a week that in turns puts tremendous pressure on providers who may or may not have the right mix of children in terms of getting enough income in to support their safe and efficient running of their nursery. So we are seeing some impact. And despite childminder numbers going down, which they haven't for a while, the overall places haven't gone down in the same way. But we will probably see some balancing out over the coming months and years as people you know, resettle into workforce patterns and make the demands that they need on their childcare.

Alex Jones
I was going to say yes, that's absolutely right that the population of lots of four year olds in the country is also declining. So that does that is an important context to when we're thinking about child minder and nursery numbers and places. Of course, it's also true that in some of the areas of the country where child minder in nursery places are declining, the population isn't declining in line with the National level - every scenario pockets of different experience depending on where you are across England.

Chris Jones
Lee, I'll come back to you because there's been discussion recently about the numbers of previously outstanding schools that have lost their outstanding grade now that they've been reintroduced into routine inspection in the last year. Just give us your take on on that. Why is that happening?

Lee Owston
Obviously removing the exemption which was a one way valve so that allowed the proportion of schools and colleges that would change that to increase because once you are kind of over that threshold, and you had that inspection judgement, and obviously you weren't you weren't going to drop from that position. I think we have seen some decline inevitably because obviously that exemption has lasted for a long, long time. And we have schools that were returning to you know, some hadn't had inspection for as long as 15 years. And I think there'll be a number of reasons for decline. In those instances, there will have been numerous head teachers, senior leaders, members of staff, over those 15 years, there will have been different frameworks. You know, there's a whole host of reasons reasons that we are very open about in terms of the reports for those schools about we know that any potential decline having happened at any point between the most current inspection and whenever the previous one might have been. 

But I also want to stress to people because I think, you know, we hear most about outstanding schools that have declined, but actually the removal of the exemption has has allowed movement. You know, it hasn't just led to a valve going in reverse. And not everybody declining, actually there are there are schools that are equally improving and becoming outstanding for the first time or indeed throughout ungraded inspections, retaining their outstanding grades, and I think where we see schools maintaining that standard is because they truly have something that you know, others others can come along and learn from you know, they are they are exemplary in that there is aspects of their practice that they should be should share with others because they are they are that strong. 

And I think that often comes down to the way in which their approach their curriculum, the way in which then allow all children have access to know the breadth and depth and ambition of of the subject of the national curriculum and beyond. And I think it is right to have that  because there is something about aspiring to be the absolute best, but what I would want to reassure people about is that actually it does not mean perfection. There's no such thing, there's no such thing as standing still in education and actually what characterises the the outstanding leaders and schools out there is actually they understand that and they are constantly trying to improve and evolve upon while they already do, even though there is a very high standard already. So, you know, yes, there has been decline. We would expect that from a system that hasn't allowed us to inspect outstanding schools for a while. But equally let's remember there's also a lot of schools that are improving to that grade as well and rightly so.

Chris Jones
Okay, let's spend our last couple of minutes is looking forward to next year and as I said at the start the annual report is based on what our inspectors have found during the year, but also some of the research and evaluation insight that we've done over the course of of that year. So Alex, I'll come back to you looking forward what's on Ofsted research agenda for this year.

Alex Jones
Thanks, Chris. I'll highlight a couple of things just building on these points there. We are going to be undertaking and publishing some research on what our inspectors found when they inspected the previously exempt outstanding schools. So really looking underneath the headline figures that what are the experiences of those schools over that period of time and when we've gone back into inspects them now. We're also undertaking an evaluation of our Education Inspection Framework. And we'll be publishing on that in the new year, on what that will entail and the different strands to that. So how will the experiences have been for schools and providers being inspected under the education inspection framework? We have a piece of research looking at early years which is linked to our strategic priority for Ofsted on the best start in life. And we will also be publishing a series of subject reports for providers.

Chris Jones
Excellent. Thanks, Alex. And finally, Amanda, you'll be sitting in the same chair this time next year talking about Ofsted's annual report for 2023. What do you hope to be saying at that point?

Amanda Spielman
Well, I hope first of all, first and foremost to be saying it really does look as though the great bulk of dealing with COVID recovery is behind us. Of course, still some children needing extra help but for the most part the job is done. Secondly, I hope we're seeing a stable and supportive context for everybody working in the sector because that's the context in which the very best work can be done in both education and social care. Thirdly, I'm really looking forward I know we've got strands of work next year that are going to help us get to a whole different level of insight. Over the last few years, we've really been able to get to greater depth in social care and I'm very much looking forward to being able to do the same in education, really drawing on the enormous reservoirs of expertise that we've got within Ofsted, but also linking in to how we make ourselves a force for improvement, how we really feedback as much as we can that is genuinely helpful in all the sectors in which we operate.