Ofsted annual report

Last week, Ofsted published its annual report for the year 2019/20.

It should be noted that this report covers the year when the new EIF was introduced and when inspection activity has been affected by the pandemic.

Some key messages that may be of interest to members are:

Learning Loss

Disruption to learners’ education as a result of the pandemic has been significant, especially in schools. In the pre-16 education sector, time spent in lockdown accounted for some 3% of an individual’s education. The disruption to education during that, and subsequent lockdown, period meant that learners made little progress.

In relation to the FES / Post 16 sector:

  • The proportion of ILPs judged good or outstanding declined for the fourth consecutive year. Whereas, the proportion of Adult and Community Learning providers judged good or outstanding continued to increase and FE remained broadly stable.
  • The proportion of new providers, receiving new provider visits, receiving an Insufficient Progress award increased. Primary reasons for this included: poor use of assessments to support planning of learning, lack of logical curriculum sequencing, insufficient OTJ learning and apprentices not assisted to develop enough new knowledge, skills and behaviours as part of their apprenticeship, instead merely accrediting existing skills that they already have.
  • Governance remains a key issue and concern for Ofsted – “governance was not in place or was not sufficiently challenging in holding senior leaders to account to identify the aspects of the provision that needed to be improved. We also saw leaders, managers and the governance function not moving swiftly enough to implement the recommendations made at a new provider monitoring visit.”
  • Apprenticeship provision is considered to be the weakest, where one in 10 providers are judged inadequate. Almost a quarter (24%) of providers that received new provider monitoring visits in 2019/20 had at least one insufficient progress judgement. Key factors in this were weak leadership and a lack of co-development of the curriculum with employers.