Ofsted grades are for parents, and pausing them fixes nothing

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), England's largest union for school leaders, told the BBC on 21 September that graded Ofsted inspections should stop. Its general secretary, Paul Whiteman, called the report-card framework "a real and present danger to the well-being and mental health of school leaders and teachers, possibly even a risk to life", and asked for a pause and a "fundamental review". The union's survey of more than 5,000 members in June found 72% believed inspection had got worse over the past year. Ofsted's reply was short: it "exists to raise standards for children and to provide clear reporting to parents", and it will continue to grade schools.

The parents' side of this argument has gone largely unmade, so we will make it. Inspection is the only independent, comparable account of every state school in England. It measurably improves the schools that fail it. And the claim that being judged endangers the people judged is not an argument against judgement: every senior public role is assessed by outsiders, and the answer to the stress of that is leaders who can carry it and support for those who struggle, not an exemption from assessment. Removing the grades would not remove the inspectors. It would remove the information.

What parents asked for

Report cards were not imposed on parents. They were requested. Ofsted's Big Listen consultation in 2024 drew 16,033 responses, and the National Centre for Social Research surveyed more than 4,000 parents and carers for it. 83% of school parents said they placed value on inspection reports when making decisions about their child's education. Asked what should replace the single-word judgement, 76% chose separate judgements for each area of school life, against 38% who wanted the single word kept. That is, almost exactly, the report card: a grade for curriculum and teaching, achievement, attendance and behaviour, inclusion, personal development and wellbeing, and leadership, each on a five-point scale from Urgent improvement to Exceptional. Our explainer walks through each area.

When Ofsted put the design to a YouGov sample of 1,090 parents in March 2025, two thirds preferred it to the old reports and 78% said the information would be useful to them. The NAHT's alternative, a short narrative of strengths and areas for improvement with no grades at all, is not what parents chose when they were asked.

Inspection changes schools, not just opinions of them

The evidence that inspection improves schools is stronger than the debate suggests. Iftikhar Hussain, writing in the Journal of Human Resources in 2015, studied English primary schools rated as failing under short-notice inspection and found their test scores rose afterwards, with no sign the gains came from gaming: no weaker pupils quietly kept out of the tests, and improvements that persisted into the medium term. Rebecca Allen and Simon Burgess at the University of Bristol compared schools that only just failed an inspection with schools that only just passed. The near-failures improved over the following two to three years by around a tenth of a pupil-level standard deviation in test scores, an effect the authors call moderate to large. A fail grade, in other words, is not a label. It is one of the few school-improvement interventions England has actually measured.

Inspection also finds what no results table can. Of the 2,451 report cards we analysed on 11 September, 12 schools were judged Not met on safeguarding and 79 were placed in a formal category of concern. Exam data would show nothing at either. A parent relying on results alone, which is where a grade-free system pushes them, would not know.

Accountability is ordinary everywhere else

Every organisation that takes public money or public trust is graded by somebody who does not work there. Company accounts are audited and filed at Companies House. Care homes and GP surgeries are inspected by the Care Quality Commission and rated on a published four-point scale. The chip shop has its hygiene rating on the door. None of these arrangements is popular with the people being rated, and none has ever been replaced with a paragraph.

Schools already have all of this, came the reply from inside the profession on the day:

All true, and all internal. Performance-related pay is decided by the head, the audit checks the money, and the observing is done by colleagues. None of it is visible to a parent. Ofsted is the one part of the system that reports outward, and it is precisely that part the union wants ungraded.

Schools are not chip shops and children are not customers, which is the argument for more scrutiny rather than less. Ofsted carried out 6,471 state-funded school inspections in 2024/25, on institutions a family cannot switch away from at will: the admissions system allocates the place, and the alternatives are bounded by catchment and distance. Where there is no exit, independent inspection is the substitute for the discipline a choice would provide.

A parent choosing a secondary school this autumn, ahead of the 31 October application deadline, can visit for an evening and read a prospectus written by the school.

Being judged is the job

Ruth Perry, head of Caversham Primary School in Reading, died in January 2023 after an inspection downgraded her school from Outstanding to Inadequate. In December 2023 the coroner concluded that the inspection had contributed to her death and issued a Prevention of Future Deaths report with seven concerns for Ofsted, every one of them about process: an almost complete absence of training in recognising distress in school leaders, no policy for pausing an inspection, no clear route to raise concerns during a visit, and the delay before reports are published. Ofsted accepted all seven: inspections were halted in January 2024 for inspector mental health training, heads can now ask for an inspection to be paused, notifications moved to Mondays, safeguarding failures get a three-month grace period before the grade is confirmed, and complaints panels have external members.

What the union asks for now is different in kind: not a change to how inspectors conduct themselves, which has happened, but the removal of the judgement itself. That is not a welfare measure. It is an exemption from assessment, and no comparable role has one. Surgeons are audited on their outcomes. Auditors sign accounts under personal liability. Company directors carry statutory duties for which they can be disqualified. Each of those jobs is stressful precisely because it matters, and a serious profession answers that stress by selecting and supporting people who can carry it, not by lowering the stakes until nobody feels them. A headteacher runs an institution full of other people's children, with a public budget and a staff. The stakes are the job.

The head of a Bolton primary told the BBC her recent inspection was the most stressful experience of her career. Nobody doubts the stress. But it comes from being judged, and the union's own narrative-only alternative still judges: Estyn, the Welsh inspectorate the NAHT holds up as the model, still sends inspectors into schools. What disappears is only the part a parent can read. Shielding leaders from the verdict does not shield them from the inspection; it shields them from its consequences, and a society that wants its schools led well should want the opposite.

The NAHT took its case against the report card to the High Court in 2025 and lost. Mr Justice Saini ruled that "it is for Ofsted to decide how to conduct its inspections in the way which, in its expert judgment, is most effective", and the union's appeal failed in November.

What Wales actually gets

Wales removed summative grades from Estyn reports in September 2022, and Northern Ireland's Education and Training Inspectorate also reports without them. Our database holds every open Welsh school's current Estyn status, so we can say precisely what a Welsh parent gets instead of a grade.

The two statutory categories survived the reform, so the ladder for schools in difficulty never went away. What went was everything above it: 1,426 schools are simply not in follow-up, a status that puts the best school in Wales and the most ordinary one in the same box. For 167 Welsh schools the newest report on file predates September 2019; in England, 7,508 state schools have been inspected since September 2024 alone.

The narrative reports are worth reading, and Estyn writes a separate summary for parents and carers. But a narrative cannot be compared across the three schools a family is choosing between. On our own site a Welsh school's inspection line reads "Not graded by Estyn", and its score rests on results and attendance instead. That is the practical meaning of a grade-free system: a category for the 57 schools in difficulty and nothing that distinguishes the other 1,426.

The stronger case against grades, and why it still fails

The honest objection to grading is not welfare but fairness. Our own analysis of 2,243 mainstream report cards with pupil data shows the pattern. Rank England's secondary schools by their share of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and cut them into fifths:

Researchers at University College London (Sims, Jerrim and Bokhove, 2023), analysing 2,538 secondary inspections, found that once you allow for pupils' prior attainment and deprivation, schools rank in much the same order whatever grade Ofsted gave them, and that the average report was nearly three years old by the time a child started at the school.

Both findings are arguments for better inspection, not none. The UCL team's own data show the grades predict pupil progress far better when the inspection is under two years old; the answer is to inspect more often, not to stop. And Ofsted's toolkit changes, in force since 7 September 2026, now judge a school's results against similar schools rather than the national average, which is exactly the contextual correction the fairness critique demands.

What to do with this

Read the report card by area, not by colour count. A school that is Strong standard on attendance and behaviour but Needs attention on achievement is a different proposition from the reverse, and which matters more depends on your child. Check the inspection date, and weight an old one lightly. Put the grades beside the things Ofsted does not measure: results, attendance, intake and what you saw on the open evening; our guide to reading beyond the grade covers how. Every report-card school is browsable on the site, and our composite score folds the grades in alongside results and attendance so that schools can be compared on the same basis.

Inspection is judgement, and judgement of the people who run important things is uncomfortable by design. The grades were asked for by parents, they change the schools that receive the worst of them, and the alternative on offer is a country where 57 schools carry a label and the rest carry a paragraph. A profession that wants to be trusted with children has to be willing to be assessed in public, and to be led by people who can stand it. Keep the grades. Keep the standard.