Pointlessly Jumping Through Hoops

As much as form-filling, report writing and general paperwork stuff will always be a part of the job, school leadership should never be viewed as overwhelmingly a bureaucratic exercise. If, for whatever reason – be it that the place where you work gives you endless administrative tasks to complete or that you just really love making action plans with lots of fancy-looking graphs on them or whatever, your job involves mainly sitting at your desk and pressing buttons on your computer for much of the day, then you probably need to refresh your view of what makes an effective school leader.

Sometimes, however, you get periods where there’s simply no getting around the need to spend hours upon hours making documents just to satisfy whatever demands are being made upon you from above, be that from within your own organisation or externally ahead of inspection or accreditation processes. When this happens, you pretty much have no choice but to embark upon a joyless journey of stooping over a laptop in which jumping through hoops and adapting your own life (remember that?) is given priority, because to not do what is required would clearly lead to very unfavourable outcomes.

Take school inspections, for example. I’ve done countless Ofsteds during my time in the UK and I’ve seen schools take vastly differing approaches to preparing for them as well as experiencing hugely contrasting inspections and outcomes. In some places, being fully prepared and having everything done properly well in advance is the norm – arguments about doing stuff solely for Ofsted to one side for one moment – whereas in others hardly anything is ready until you get THE CALL, which then leads to a shaky-handed twelve-hour shift in which action plans are fabricated until the early hours of the morning in the hope that no one will actually look at the date upon which the document was first created, because this has been in place for months, right?

To be fair to our friends from Ofsted, they were becoming almost strangely human before I left the UK a few years ago in order to try my hand at school leadership in sunnier climes. Gone were the days (which I can still remember all too clearly) of being told that they didn’t like the way in which your assessment information was presented so could you run along and reproduce it in a format that inspectors would rather look at, if you don’t mind. In place of this madness was a – dare I say it – newly sensible approach in which the common attitude was one of just do what you would normally do and don’t do anything especially for us. Typicality, suddenly, became the mot du jour of inspection processes because the whole point, we all realised, was that inspectors should be inspecting a school as it normally is and not how it is only during an Ofsted inspection. This, let’s all be honest, actually makes a great deal of sense.

There still exists, of course, the possibility of a rogue inspector turning up and using somewhat subjective views to cast seemingly unfair judgements upon something that a school is doing quite well but which they just don’t like for some unfathomable reason, but for the most part the whole inspection process in schools in England became a fairly well-run and considered piece of work which school leaders were actually able to understand, if nothing else. Don’t get me wrong, I still have some issues with Ofsted, and indeed with the English education system at large currently, but this is mainly to do with both the inspectorate and their overlords at the DfE pushing political ideologies onto schools rather than acting as neutral bodies, but at least they’re no longer turning school leaders into desk-ridden pen pushers who exist purely to write the kind of plans that Ofsted want to see.

Alas, if only all inspection processes across the world had also learned that asking school leaders to pointlessly jump through hoops for hours upon hours just to prove that they adhere to local regulations and preferences is a bit of a nonsense. In my experience of working abroad for a few years now, there’s still quite a lot of change everything you do into the way that we like it going on. Let’s be clear, if an inspection regime asks school leaders to modify plans or documents into a different format ahead of an inspection then the only purpose this serves is to create unnecessary additional workload. Not only does performing such a task do literally nothing to improve what happens in a school, it also takes the school leader out of action for a while whilst they become chained to their desk so that deadlines are met. In addition, if inspectors insist that internal processes are changed solely for the duration of the inspection, such as insisting that every teacher creates a lesson plan using a template which the inspection regime has provided and which must include elements which wouldn’t normally be present, then you’re no longer seeing the school as it would normally be, you’re seeing it during a very unusual and stressful period instead. So much for typicality, and all that.

But, as many school leaders sadly know all too well, sometimes you’ve just got to act like it’s 1999 all over again and play the game. Having experienced the bad old days of Ofsted inspectors behaving like playground bullies and making ridiculous demands of school leaders during inspections back in the day, going through similar moments during what is otherwise a much more enlightened educational age almost fills me with a sense of terrifying nostalgia, as if I’m cosplaying the stressed out leaders of yesteryear who disappeared very quickly post-Ofsted during my own formative years in the profession and ended up working as washed-out consultants for local LEAs instead. I’m not against accountability and I get the high-stakes nature of school leadership – setting kids up for the best chances in life is a big deal and we absolutely should ensure that school leaders are doing everything they can to make this happen – but I simply believe that school inspections should be done properly and, perhaps most importantly, that they should be led by experienced professionals who kind of know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

The very best school evaluation processes are those which are focussed upon schools improving rather than proving stuff. The former can be genuinely insightful and valuable experiences from which all parties learn whereas the latter are little more than compliance checks led by power-hungry civil servants. In my professional experience, although Ofsted seem to be moving slowly in the right direction, organisations like Challenge Partners and CIS have got this nailed because they work with and alongside school leaders in order to make both commendations and recommendations. There is paperwork to produce for both organisations, but they would never ask you to rip something up that you favour in order to recreate it in a different format just because that’s how they like it to look. In both cases, they take context into account and understand that no two schools are the same, no matter how closely aligned they may appear to be. With this kind of collegiality and transparency in place, school leaders are then more able and indeed more likely to be able to confront any hard truths which would inevitably come out of visits to their schools, which in turn would lead to swifter and more sustainable improvements being made.

Schools are always on journeys of continuous improvements, and inspection and accreditation processes should be designed to support them to achieve their aims. If, however, unreasonable demands are made of school leaders ahead of inspections in terms of creating unnecessary workload which distracts them from the business of actually running their schools well, then processes are quite frankly ill-thought out and badly designed. Schools and all of their external partners, which should include inspectors, need to see themselves as working towards the same goal, namely school improvement, so anything which weakens rather than strengthens practice is clearly a bad idea.