Ofsted has axed single-phrase judgements for schools in a move that has been welcomed by critics of the education watchdog’s controversial assessment system.

Here, former head teacher Phil Karnavas, who led the Canterbury Academy during 27 years at the school, gives his own damning verdict on the regulator - which he believes should be scrapped altogether…

A recent GOV.UK press release thundered, ‘Single headline Ofsted grades scrapped in landmark school reform’.

Boom! At a stroke, no school is ‘requiring improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. But equally, no school is ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’.

Take those advertising banners down!

But wait, these single-word judgements are, however, retained for ‘Quality of education’, ‘Behaviour & attitudes’, ‘Personal development’, ‘Leadership & management’. This seems inconsistent.

‘Safeguarding’, a problematic area for inspection, is judged as either ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’ which previously had potentially catastrophic consequences for an overall judgment, a school and its staff.

Report cards and further changes are promised, but there are more questions raised than answers, or details given. And, I fear we’ll get the wrong answer because we‘ll ask the wrong question.

That question is not ‘what should Ofsted be?’ but ‘should Ofsted be?’

My answer is that Ofsted is not fit for purpose; it should not be reformed but should be replaced.

Given this appears unlikely then I remain sceptical and fear that Ofsted will, having reached a turning point, fail to turn.

There are historic, structural, operational and personnel issues which combine and conspire to shipwreck Ofsted on the shores of unrealistic expectation, practical impossibility and misguided direction.

Ofsted’s failings highlighted by Ruth Perry’s tragic death were neither new nor specific to it. Ofsted is probably irreparably tainted by a culture which is defensive and complacent, in which inspectors are never wrong with some generating a climate of fear engaging in bullying. For too long too many schools and their staff have been damaged by it.

Ofsted remains a top-down imposed model and, no matter how you spin it, is essentially punitive and exists to find fault. It does not help schools because that is not its function. It does not improve schools any more than an art critic improves a painting.

Some of this isn’t Ofsted’s fault. It has a bewildering 92,000 different educational providers to inspect including early years to 6th form & FE, maintained and academies; mainstream and special with other types of providers many people won’t have heard of. Ofsted employs 1,800 staff with approximately 2,000 inspectors contracted in. That’s a massive ask and it’s under-resourced.

Not only are there bewildering differences between types of provider but there are also bewildering differences between schools of a similar type. Schools are different sizes, have different intakes and serve different areas with different challenges. Schools have different ethoses, do different things, deliver different curricula and extracurricular activities, provide different levels of personal, social, health, emotional and family support and work with a different range of stakeholders, agencies and other organisations in a vast network of formal and informal relationships.

A one-size Ofsted model doesn’t fit all and for some schools Ofsted is less of a framework and more of a straight jacket.

Schools are complex. No Ofsted team, under the present model, can do them justice. The larger the school, the more complex and the more likely it is that an Ofsted could do a large injustice

It is simply a ludicrous proposition that one person, or handful of people, can in only a few hours get to grips with everything a school does and acquire all important information, assimilate, absorb, analyse, assess and fully understand it to produce a comprehensive, fair and nuanced report.

Given the impossibility of seeing everything, Ofsted tends to look at only that which they are required to. English schooling remains essentially an industrial model and one which serves as an extended academic race to the finish line of university application. It is an academic race which, for some, is unwinnable. In this model the acquisition of academic qualifications masquerades as education. Reinforced by Michael Gove’s ‘reforms’ the system, and Ofsted, disproportionately value academic qualifications. Invariably schools whose children have academic gifts will do better than schools whose children have other gifts. Ofsted also implicitly assumes that all parents will value those academic subjects and academic children as highly as it does, even though the majority of parents don’t have academically gifted children.

The inevitable corollary of regarding academic subjects as more important is other subjects become less important; and, consequentially children who do well at academic subjects are regarded as more successful than children who don’t irrespective of whether these children may excel artistically, musically, dramatically, vocationally, technologically, interpersonally, environmentally, sportingly, creatively, practically, organisationally or in leadership.

This is not just immoral; it is also, given the future needs of our post-industrial society and economy, fundamentally stupid.

Ofsted’s focus on attainment, with a nod to achievement, is also informed by a tsunami of statistical information including national or local averages. Sometimes this data can be abused. An Ofsted lead will look at it in advance of an inspection, but rather than use it to inform an inspection, will lazily use it to form a conclusion and then inspect to justify the decision already reached. The use of averages is pernicious and unhelpful because there must always be schools, and individuals, below that average.

There is no such thing as an average school and certainly no such thing as an average child. There are individuals. Every child walks with genius, will achieve something and these achievements should be recognised. The education system seems to recognise and value that which can be easily measured and fails to recognise many valuable things because they are difficult to quantify.

Moreover, Ofsted pretty much ignores a school’s important work in supporting children and families in circumstances as varied as they are complex – mental health, homelessness, drugs, anti-social behaviour, poverty, abuse and so on. Make no mistake, schools are for some given cuts to welfare provision, an important support service and this too should be properly recognised.

Every Ofsted report is out of date. Often a report is published months after the inspection. Some school’s most recent Ofsted reports were published years ago – in extreme cases almost a decade. And every report relies upon the previous year’s examination result. Teachers, courses and students have changed. Of what value is it to tell parents what things were like for children in the past when what they really want to know is what things are like for their child in the present or future?

Any Ofsted inspection depends, almost entirely, upon the lead inspector. Ofsted does have personnel problems. That’s no surprise. In any group of people there will be the good, the mediocre and the bad. All of us have good and bad days. We all make mistakes. A good lead will use their experience, be flexible and attempt to provide a holistic evaluation; a bad one, probably through lack of confidence or arrogance, will be rigid, dogmatic and inflexible. There can be devastating consequences for a school with a lead who gets it wrong. I have pondered whether inspectors should be graded and those grades published to schools and parents - quis custodiet ipsos custodies.

“So what parents are gifted is an imperfect snapshot of a brief moment in time showing only a fraction of a school’s work…”

There can be a shocking mismatch between a school and the lead inspector sent to look at it. Individuals will see things differently depending upon their experience, expertise, bias, mood, personality. Try as Ofsted might, it will never eliminate this. One consequence can be an alarming inconsistency of judgement between similar schools, often close to each other and with similar data, where one ‘passes’ and the other ‘fails’ Ofsted. In some areas such decisions are received with incredulity by parents, teachers and what remains of the local authority.

In the aftermath of Ruth Perry’s death a DfE spokesperson announced: "Ofsted has a crucial role to play in upholding education standards and making sure children are safe in school.

"They provide independent, up-to-date evaluations on the quality of education, safeguarding, and leadership which parents greatly rely on to give them confidence in choosing the right school for their child."

Wrong. And wrong in virtually every respect.

Ofsted doesn’t uphold standards, it reports upon what it thinks some of them are; it doesn’t make sure children are safe, it tries to make sense, largely through a paper chase, of a school’s safeguarding systems; Ofsted isn’t really independent of thought since it reports upon what government thinks schools should focus on; all Ofsted reports are out of date; assessments about leadership are skewed by academic attainment; and, parents generally know the school they want their children to go to irrespective of Ofsted.

Ofsted will typically be in a school for only a few hours every 3 years, or so, and in this time they look for only some things, speak only to some people, observe only some lessons, meet to reflect on their experiences and write a draft. They simply cannot see enough, let alone properly evaluate it, to provide a fully comprehensive evaluation of any school.

So what parents are gifted is an imperfect snapshot of a brief moment in time showing only a fraction of a school’s work based upon fragmentary information filtered to exclude an enormous amount of any school’s provision.

An Ofsted report will say what it says. Some may be accurate, some inaccurate but all must necessarily be incomplete. The team who say it will offer no real help or guidance as to how to move forward, as that’s not their role, and they will never be seen again.

A favourable report makes no real difference. An unfavourable report can be devastating.

I still struggle to see what value Ofsted actually provides.

Obviously I am not a fan. But to be fair, it’s not all Ofsted’s fault. It simply hasn’t got the capacity to do what is expected of it. Some of what is expected of it is misguided. And some of its inspectors do what’s expected of them badly.

If Ofsted is to survive then I hope the promised changes improve things. I believe those in charge want this and, obviously, nobody wants Ofsted to cause distress or be unhelpful to schools. But, I suspect Ofsted may be beyond reform and I doubt whether it can change quickly, or substantially, enough.

I hope I’m wrong.

When I started teaching, in the previous century, the requirement was to provide brief handwritten comments in, ironically enough, Report Cards. I would have written, ‘Ofsted, I fear, will never do well but it could do better.’