Sean Harford became National Director, Education in September 2015. Sean was appointed Her Majesty’s Inspector in 2003. Since joining Ofsted he has worked in school improvement, school inspection policy and organisational restructuring. His previous post in Ofsted was Regional Director (South).
Before joining Ofsted, Sean was a teacher and a successful senior leader in a secondary school in the East of England, as well as associate adviser for a local authority.
Follow Sean on Twitter @HarfordSean
Back in June last year, when Ofsted announced the changes to inspection under the common inspection framework, we also explained how we intended to strengthen the way we deal with complaints about inspection. In September, we introduced independent scrutiny to …
Many of you will have read or heard about the Government’s White Paper: Educational Excellence Everywhere, published last week, announcing the transformation of England’s schools. I thought it would be helpful to clarify what it could mean for inspection.
This post is now out of date. Please read our new post on inspection timescales which we published in June 2023.
A belated happy new year – I hope you all managed to have some rest at the end of last year, and like me, are fully refreshed for this new term.
Sean Harford, National Director, Education, on the detail of short (section 8) inspections.
To do a good job, it’s critical that Ofsted listens to the people who use and work in the services we inspect.
As summer comes to an end it is back to work for many of us, be that for schools, colleges or nurseries. I hope that everyone is refreshed for the coming year, even if you haven’t been able to get …
Back in the early hours of a Wednesday morning in May, through the ever helpful medium of Twitter, I posed the following question: ‘Mainly but not exclusively for HTs or aspiring HTs: what could Ofsted do to incentivise you to
Sean Harford, Ofsted’s National Director for Schools corrects some misunderstandings about Ofsted’s requirements.
Welcome to Ofsted’s new blog focusing on developments in education inspection. We’re launching it at a time where we’re making radical changes to the way we inspect.