The Ofsted changes are bad news for SEND accountability

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Last week, the government and Ofsted announced that they planned to change how English schools, colleges and local authorities will be inspected.

What changes are coming, and how will these affect children and young people with SEND and their families?

School inspections

You can find a guide to what’s going on with Ofsted here. Most of the changes won’t be happening until next year, and a lot of them will be subject to consultation: we’ll let you know when those consultations start.

But one change starts with immediate effect: newly-produced Ofsted school inspection reports will no longer have an overall single-word judgement, like ‘inadequate’ or ‘outstanding.’ That doesn’t mean there won’t be any single-word judgements in Ofsted’s school reports. For the moment, at least, you’ll still find words like ‘inadequate,’ ‘good,’ and ‘outstanding’ used to describe sub-categories like the quality of education, or leadership and behaviour.

But bigger changes are coming. As trailed in their election manifesto, the government has directed Ofsted to change how it communicates its school inspection findings. From September 2025, there will be a new system of school report cards.

This is a policy that’s still being worked up. It’s not fully clear how the report cards will be different from the current setup. The government says the report cards “will provide parents with a full and comprehensive assessment of how schools are performing and ensure that inspections are more effective in driving improvement.”

But as part of this change, Ofsted says it’ll, “increase our focus and scrutiny on how providers are meeting the needs of children and young people with vulnerabilities such as socio-economic disadvantage and special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND).”

To make this work, Ofsted plans to introduce a new inspection criterion for inclusion into its school inspections. There’s no more official detail than that at the moment.

Inclusion? What’s it to you?

Inclusion is a concept that lots of people agree is good, and that others pay lip service to. But not many people agree on what inclusion actually is, or what effective inclusion looks like in practice. And most worthwhile types of inclusion are very difficult to measure well.

By itself, data can mislead as well as inform. For example, take a mainstream school that has comparatively few pupils with EHCPs. Does that mean it’s not inclusive? Maybe, or maybe not. It might be deterring local kids with SEND from enrolling. Or it might be very good at meeting pupils’ needs without an EHCP. Or it might be a new school in an LA that’s just intensified a policy of refusing EHC Needs Assessments. The number itself doesn’t tell us much.

Ofsted have bought in help to work on this inclusion measure – they’re paying out £90,000 to the omnipresent National Children’s Bureau to produce a “report”.

But there are many, many ways in which this could go wrong. If the inclusion criteria are crude, and if school inspections remain high-stakes, then schools will game the criteria – to the likely detriment of children and young people with SEND.

How should Ofsted proceed?

If Ofsted is going to succeed here, then it will need to take evidence from parent carers much more seriously than it’s done so far. Many of us have experienced school open days where a school leader patronisingly tells us that their curriculum is challenging, resources are tight, and that our kids would be better off at the fluffier school down the road. None of this subtle, but effective deterrence will appear in the data.

And what does success look like to inspectors? One measure we’d suggest – when parent carers of children with SEND no longer see a mainstream school with the best inspection outcome as a bright red danger signal for their kids, then that’ll be a sign things are working better.

A new model of school inspection will need a new inspection framework. Ofsted has said that in future, it’ll be making this framework “tailored to the types of providers we inspect.” This implies that inspectors might take a different approach when inspecting a special school, compared to a mainstream school.

That sounds sensible – but it’ll only make a difference if inspectors have the right skills and experience to assess specialist settings. And all too often, they haven’t.

A research firm working with Ofsted surveyed parent carers recently, including a subset of parent carers who have children in specialist SEND provision. 97% of this group said that inspectors should have specialist expertise in SEND when inspecting these settings. Many parent carers expressed serious concern about inspector quality: over a third of surveyed parents who distrusted Ofsted did so because inspectors didn’t have the right expertise.

For all last week’s fanfare, it’s not obvious how Ofsted intends to address this – a problem that almost scuppered my own kids’ life chances on several occasions. Ofsted will be overhauling inspector training, but there’s little evidence showing how things will change for SEND.

Promoted

Area SEND inspection overhaul

Ofsted is also overhauling other areas of inspection that affect children and young people with SEND. For example, it’s planning to make changes to inspection of children’s social care, although when and how this will affect disabled children is largely unclear.

But there’s also another type of inspection that Ofsted will be overhauling – ‘area SEND’ inspections.

Area SEND inspections are carried out by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC). They inspect SEND services at a ‘local area partnership’ level – that’s the LA, and the NHS services that work within the boundaries of the LA. We’ve covered these inspections extensively in SNJ – for background, see here and here.

Although Ofsted and CQC have been inspecting area SEND services for over eight years now, the inspection framework was overhauled only recently and is still fairly new. At the time of writing, less than 30% of local area partnerships have been inspected under the new framework. Check this interactive map for details- there’s a static version below.

Local areas that have already been inspected in this phase of SEND inspections

Dire outcomes and bizarre decisions

Since 2016, SEND inspection outcomes for LAs and NHS bodies have been dire – arguably, the worst across any sector that Ofsted inspects.

Under the previous framework (2016-2022), Ofsted and CQC inspectors identified significant weaknesses in most of the SEND services that they inspected.
The evaluation scheme is different under the current framework – but inspectors have reported that children and young people “typically have positive experiences and outcomes” (the best result) in just one in four of the local area partnerships that they’ve looked at since early 2023.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that local authorities have been lobbying hard for Ofsted and CQC to completely pause these area SEND inspections until national system reforms are complete. Ofsted isn’t willing to do that – but it is going to be pausing one bit of them. Alongside that, it’ll also be reviewing the area SEND inspection framework “to enable local areas to enhance the support they offer to children with SEND.”

That’s puzzling. The inspections already have an improvement function hard-wired into them, and the Department for Education says that the inspections are a key part of their SEND & Alternative Provision Improvement Plan.

Ofsted hasn’t explained why it thinks the current area SEND inspection framework isn’t doing that job well enough.

But the most immediate consequence is that Ofsted and CQC have paused a crucial part of the current area SEND inspection process: monitoring visits.

Under the current framework, when inspectors judge that a local area partnership’s SEND services have widespread and/or systemic failings, then it’ll award the lowest possible inspection grade, and require the local area partnership to produce a priority action plan. That’s supposed to be followed by a monitoring visit 18 months later, where inspectors check that service improvement is on track. And this is the bit that’s been paused.

The area SEND inspection framework is so new that there haven’t been any monitoring visits yet. The first monitoring visit was due this autumn, but won’t be happening now. There are at least 12 local area partnerships with inspection outcomes bad enough to warrant a monitoring visit, and it’s almost certain that more will be joining them.

Ofsted and CQC say they will continue to do full area SEND inspections under the current framework – but they also say “we will hold off monitoring inspections until after we have completed our review [of the inspection framework].”

Ofsted hasn’t given a timeframe for this review. If you’re feeling optimistic, then it might be a matter of months. If you’re feeling pessimistic, then the current area SEND inspection framework took over four years to move from DfE commissioning to implementation by the inspectorates.

Ofsted and CQC owe families of children with SEND an explanation because there’s an accountability gap opening up here, in an area that already sees precious little of it. And it’s a gap that appears to be accommodating local SEND system leaders who, by their actions, already think they’re above accountability.

With Ofsted’s school inspections, monitoring visits are a key part of the process. School inspections are undergoing significant change too. But the chances of Ofsted pausing monitoring visits for school inspections while they sort things out are precisely zero. SEND, for the umpteenth time, is treated differently.

When she’s described the changes that are coming to Ofsted, the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that “accountability is non-negotiable.” She’s said that in media interviews. She’s said that in Parliament. The Labour Party election manifesto says the same thing.

It looks like not everyone in the system has got the message- and we will be asking them why.

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Matt Keer

Matt (he/him) has two deaf children. He has over 20 years of experience grappling with the SEND system as a parent, and he’s seen the best and the worst that the SEND system offers.
Matt specialises in SEND stats, data analysis, and in-depth investigations of policies. He has given evidence to several Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, and his articles for SNJ on SEND funding, local government policy, and the SENDIST Tribunal have been quoted in Select Committee inquiry reports and national media.

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