After the surprising, or maybe not so surprising announcement that the Government has decided to ignore the cross-party education select committee’s findings/ report, also to ignore the concerns raised by the Coroner who presided over Ruth Perry’s Inquest in her Prevention of Future Deaths report, and ignore everything that every professional and individual that works in education has said in the last year or so and to keep the single/one-word judgements, because in their words there are ‘significant’ benefits from having an Ofsted overall effectiveness grade. They haven’t quantified what those ‘significant’ benefits are, or justified why they have chosen to ignore the cross-party education select committee report or totally disregarded the Coroner’s concerns in her Prevention of Future Death report.
Why are they so hung up on the one-word judgements? What significant benefits do they provide?
I find this totally disheartening, and in my opinion, it just isn’t right and it’s a kick in the teeth for Ruth Perry’s family.
The government are not listening.
Ofsted are not listening.
Does that mean we just roll over and be quiet or keep pushing?
I am not very good at being quiet, so I am not going to be quiet.
People often ask me why I drafted the, ‘Grant an Inquiry of the Ofsted inspection at Caversham Primary School’ petition on Change.org, the truth is that it is a faff to get an official petition on the Government website off the ground. You have to:
Draft it,
Get 5 supporters to sign it,
-then it needs to be reviewed and checked by the Petition team. If they don’t like your wording, or they feel that it is covered by another petition, then can reject it.
The petition I drafted on the official site, when I read the story of Ruth Perry’s sad death was rejected several times, and that is why I then drafted the petition on Change.org. Later on, I made several attempts to get another petition on the official Gov website, but it kept getting rejected and even after trying to reword it, we couldn’t agree on wording as they didn’t want me to mention Ruth’s death. In my opinion, Ruth’s sad death needed to be mentioned in the information of the petition, and they wouldn’t approve it with the death mentioned so I gave up trying to get a parallel petition running and the Petitions Committee refused to debate the unofficial petition.
But, here we go again, another awful decision, to reject the recommendations of the cross-party select committee and the recommendations of the Coroner’s Report to Prevent Future Death following the conclusion of Ruth Perry’s inquest and to allow the one-word overall judgements to remain in place, why???
So I have drafted a petition on the Official Government website.
It has taken 10 days to get reviewed, for us to agree on suitable rewording as they didn’t like the original draft, but it is now live:
‘Reverse the decision to allow Ofsted one-word judgements to remain’- Petitions (parliament.uk).
I would really appreciate it if you could sign and share.
I still strongly believe that we need to speak up, we are stronger together and if we say nothing then things will remain the same. We have a voice and so I think we should use it.