Commenting on he news that the government is to scrap single word Ofsted grades, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the school leaders’ union, NAHT said:

“NAHT welcomes the decision by the government to scrap the use of overarching single-word judgments from September. This is an important first step towards building a fairer, more humane approach to school inspection. We have repeatedly called for such a measure to be taken and are pleased that the government has taken swift action whilst it works towards more fundamental reform.
 
“Our recent report ‘re-thinking inspection’ was clear this sort of interim measure would be necessary. The current inspection model not only produces simplistic, reductive and unreliable judgements that are of little or no use to schools, or parents it does real harm to the health and wellbeing of leaders and their teams and undermines both recruitment and retention.  The decision that, moving forward, schools will no longer be described in such a crude manner is therefore very positive news. 
 
“We are equally pleased that the government intends to place a stronger emphasis on supporting schools to improve where they need help, rather than defaulting to heavy-handed intervention or knee-jerk changes of governance structures. 
 
“We would have liked the government to have gone further by also removing sub-judgements from inspections.  It will be vitally important that the grades do not end up being used as proxy measures or given any sort of elevated status.  Doing so would undermine the positive benefits of removing the headline grade, and risk maintaining the many risks and harms associated with high stakes inspection.
 
“We look forward to engaging with the government over the coming months as it seeks to design a fundamentally new approach to school inspection for the future.”