The proposed new Ofsted “report card” system for inspections from September 2025 has been met with a very mixed response. While the move away from a one or two word headline judgment has been generally welcomed, the introduction of five judgment grades across nine aspects of delivery (even more for FE providers) has been criticised as overcomplicated and doing little to address concerns over the stressful nature of inspection visits. From a technical and vocational education perspective these concerns are shared, but they sit alongside other fundamental questions.
Is the Ofsted inspection system really the best method of evaluating the effectiveness of technical education providers? A system which takes the template of a school inspection and applies it to FE Colleges and other training providers is always going to run the danger of seeing colleges as little more than big secondary schools. It’s time to design a quality assurance and improvement system that is tailored to the needs of the vocational education sector and helps England develop the world-class skills system it needs.
Ofsted’s approach to inspecting FE and Skills providers – including universities delivering Apprenticeships – is flawed in three basic ways.
High-stakes inspections
In contrast to the rest of the world, Ofsted has adopted a “high-stakes” system. For training providers the consequences of a poor inspection result are severe, in the worst cases damaging student recruitment and consequently financial health. For apprenticeship providers a poor inspection leads to their immediate removal from the approved list, so Ofsted effectively acts as the regulator of who can operate within the technical training market. Other countries have internationally respected vocational education inspection systems where reports are not widely publicised and where improvement is the main focus, not public criticism.
Broad-brush inspection judgments
Future inspection reports will still contain a series of broad-brush judgments. This might be appropriate for schools, where pupils follow a broadly similar curriculum, take the same qualifications and share common classroom facilities. But technical education students do not. A student studying Construction in a General FE college is following a radically different curriculum to their peers in the Performing Arts department, and the learning environments in which they study are radically distinct. A provider can have very contrasting weak and strong vocational departments, and the determination of headline judgments is based on an averaging out of performance across several areas. This is particularly problematic for a General FE college, and for the growing number of super-sized colleges which operate across multiple sites and wide geographies it’s a ridiculous system. A college with a brilliant Construction department and a weak Performing Arts department, will receive a single judgment for quality of education. This is not only unfair to the Construction team but also means that a young person or parent thinking of going to their local college gets little or no information about whether the specific subject they are interested in is delivered poorly or very well.
Lack of Quality Improvement focus
Ofsted confine themselves to evaluative judgments, based on the evidence they gather. Although each inspection report will make a series of recommendations on what should be done to make improvements, Ofsted will not offer individual providers any detailed guidance on specific improvement strategies for specialised areas. As funding cutbacks have reduced support services across the English FE sector, institutions are increasingly expected to get help and advice from peer organisations, or from a very limited pool of specialist agencies. This lack of focus on improvement contrasts with practice in most other developed countries, where improvement support comes hand in hand with inspection, and those institutions found to be in most difficulties have priority access to additional resources, ranging from extra funding to expert consultancy. The rationale for most education improvement systems across the world is that quality assurance and quality improvement are two sides of the same coin and should always be organically linked to each other.
For FE Colleges, independent training and apprenticeship providers we need something better than Ofsted; an inspection service that is tailored to the needs of professional and technical education rather than a modified school inspection service. This would have the following features:
A primary focus on specialist technical subjects
Applying to providers of vocational qualifications, apprenticeships and higher technical qualifications.
A light touch approach to universities and HEIs, which already have robust internal quality systems, with inspection only triggered when they fall below minimum standards.
Judgments on subject delivery, plus critical cross-cutting themes such as safeguarding, health and safety, and management effectiveness.
Thematic inspections of selected subjects across samples of providers - for example, Engineering or Catering – to complement single-institution inspections.
Involvement of technical experts from providers or industry as advisers to the inspectorate.
Identification of best practice to enable peer mentoring between providers as a means to achieve improvement.
Negotiation with weak providers of detailed improvement plans with specific targets and post-inspection progress monitoring.
An alternative quality assurance and improvement system for technical education providers should be rigorous and evidence based. But crucially, with better technical education a key contributor to the nation’s economic growth and productivity, it should be designed not just to weigh the pig, but to fatten it.
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