We want everyone to feel confident in Ofsted inspections and the inspectors who carry them out. In April 2025, our Chief Inspector, Sir Martyn Oliver, committed to introducing inspector accreditation as a way of recognising and verifying inspectors’ expertise. The …
Today we’ve published our annual updates to the education inspection materials under the renewed education inspection framework (EIF). They cover early years settings, state-funded schools, non-association independent schools, further education (FE) and skills providers and initial teacher education (ITE) providers. …
Children in care are among the most vulnerable in our society. Too often they face significant challenges that can make success harder to achieve. Yet we also know how transformative the right support can be. When schools and colleges get it right, children in …
The Department for Education (DfE) has made its guidance on mobile phones in schools statutory . The DfE’s guidance states that ‘all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default’. We know from our inspections that many of you had already banned …
This week we released information sets to schools, further education providers and inspectors that help frame our inspection activity. These are called the Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR) for schools and Further Education and Skills Inspection Tool (FESIT) for further …
Since September, we’ve carried out pilot inspections in 115 schools and taken time to carefully review the findings. Overall, feedback on the renewed framework has continued to be really encouraging. Many providers described the toolkit and methodology as a positive …
In this blog, we take you through the changes we’ve made to our guidance on registering and inspecting school-based provision to reflect how we are seeing early years or childcare provision being delivered. Our updated guidance offers clearer definitions and …
Earlier this month, we launched a public consultation on our new approach to inspecting education providers. This includes new toolkits for how we will inspect, and the introduction of report cards. We want to hear from parents, carers, learners and …
In this blog, we’ll talk you through the changes we will be making to ungraded inspections in the autumn term. You may already be aware of these changes from the announcements that Sir Martyn Oliver made in his speech to …
Small schools are a valuable part of our education system. Pupils who attend them have unique experiences. Leaders who lead them have lots of opportunities, but also face many challenges. In this blog, we set out how we take these …