Research and analysis

The internal Big Listen: responding to our people

Published 3 September 2024

Applies to England

Foreword from Sir Martyn Oliver

I launched the Big Listen earlier this year to hear from you, from providers, from children and learners, and from their parents and carers about how we could improve our work.

I did this because we needed to listen, and we needed to change. Over the last year and a half, since the tragic death of Ruth Perry, there has been unprecedented scrutiny of our work. But long before that, there has been increasing concern in the sectors that we inspect and regulate that we have not kept pace with the challenges that they face daily.

While our work to promote the highest standards of education and care remains crucial, to be truly effective we must understand and consider these challenges.

Challenges arose from the pandemic and its aftermath, including economic pressures on communities, growing issues with behaviour and attendance in schools, and recruitment and retention challenges across education and social care.

Just as we want our work to encourage providers to build on what works and improve where they can, we need to apply those same principles to our own work. There always has been, and always will be, room for improvement.

That emphatically does not mean that I believe Ofsted is fundamentally flawed. This organisation has done tremendous work, much of it transformative for children and young people. Having experienced nearly 100 inspections myself through various stages of my career, I remain confident that the vast majority of our inspection and regulation work was, and is, being carried out with professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect.

But what the scrutiny and criticism of the last 18 months has shown is that this is not everyone’s experience of Ofsted. The negative experiences of inspection described by some colleagues in the sectors have struck a chord with many. And taken together with the pressures I have outlined above, they have led to questions being asked about our future.

For us to continue our vital work effectively, we need the support and collaboration of the sectors we work with. We need their trust. We also need to make sure we can retain the trust of the parents and children we work for, and of the government, at a time of change.

To secure that trust, we did something bold but necessary. We invited feedback from everyone – warts and all – so we could use it as an opportunity to change and move forward.

Before the Big Listen, we faced criticism that we were closed to feedback and too defensive and dismissive of concerns. The responses to the internal Big Listen have shown me that you also felt the same. That’s not the organisation we want to be.

So, the Big Listen has been really important. It’s given us the insight and the impetus to make real and lasting change based on the views of those we work for, those we work with, and those we work alongside.

I would like to thank you for being part of the Big Listen and for engaging in it so well, so openly and so constructively. It’s not easy to open ourselves up to criticism, and some feedback was tough to read. I really appreciate your commitment to this important process.

I also understand the events of the last 18 months have made your already challenging jobs even harder, and I don’t underestimate the impact this has had on everyone at Ofsted, both in and out of work.

I hope the publication of our Big Listen response will be a fresh start for us all and the first step in resetting our working relationships, for the benefit of children and young people.

It is a great privilege to lead Ofsted and I would like to thank you again for all your hard work and commitment.

Sir Martyn Oliver His Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI)

About the Big Listen

The internal part of the Big Listen ran from Friday 8 March to Friday 31 May 2024. The aim was to make sure staff right across the organisation, in every remit, directorate and region, including Ofsted Inspectors (OIs), could have their say on the future direction of our organisation.

Externally, we also asked for feedback from both the professionals we work with, like teachers and social workers, and the people we work for: parents, carers, and children and learners themselves. We also commissioned independent research companies to carry out polls and focus groups with professionals, parents and children.

This has given us a rounded picture to inform our next steps.

Alongside this report, we also published evidence from other activities that formed part of the Big Listen:

• Report detailing results of the public consultation
• Independent report, written by IFF Research, into the views of the professionals we work with
• Independent report, written by NatCen, into the views of the parents and carers we work for
• Report detailing results of our children’s survey
• Independent learning review led by Dame Christine Gilbert
• Ofsted’s response to Dame Christine Gilbert’s independent learning review

Find all supporting documents for the Ofsted Big Listen response.

Who took part

Internal

• All-staff virtual engagement sessions – 4 sessions attended by 475 staff
• OI virtual engagement sessions – 2 sessions attended by 207 OIs
• Big Listen engagement sessions – 70 team-level sessions
• Big Listen feedback portal – 310 responses: 76 team; 234 individual

External

• Over 20,000 responses to public consultation including over 4,300 from children.
• Independent research surveyed over 4,000 parents, 4,000 members of the public and over 7,000 professionals from the areas we inspect and regulate.
• Focus groups were held with parents and carers, and also with professionals. Further focus groups were held with children in care and care leavers.
• Hundreds more people were spoken to at events aimed at professionals and the public.

Our response and actions

Through the internal part of the Big Listen, you identified areas where we could do things differently and do them better.

It is also clear when we look at your feedback and what we heard from parents, carers, children, learners, and providers, that there are many important areas where views are shared and aligned.

In our response to the Big Listen, we have set out 3 key areas of focus, which respond to the feedback we’ve heard – including from you.

We will reset our relationship with those we regulate and inspect, working collaboratively with them to put children and learners first.

These actions are fundamental to our future success. They will help us to retain the trust of parents, children and government, and to rebuild confidence with the professionals we inspect and regulate.

We will reform our inspection framework for education.

You told us you want inspections to be more supportive and for Ofsted to work better with providers, focusing on improvement rather than grading.

We will change our education inspection framework for schools, early years and further education and skills to be more constructive and collaborative. We will be clearer about the areas we will focus on during inspection. This will support leaders to self-evaluate performance and improve the professional dialogue with inspectors.

We want high standards and positive outcomes for all children and learners. And we do not want disadvantage or vulnerability to be a barrier for them. We want to put vulnerable children at the heart of future reforms because if you get it right for the most vulnerable, you get it right for everyone.

But we will not change for change’s sake – we will hold on to what we know is working and making a positive difference for children and young people.

So, we will continue to insist on brilliant curriculums in schools and high-quality interactions and language development in the early years. Most of all, we will continue to prioritise children’s safety and welfare above all else, whether in schools, children’s homes, childminders or any other provider we inspect or regulate.

We will introduce report cards.

You said our inspection reports need to give specific, helpful feedback. You told us that, currently, they can be too generic, do not enable us to capture the uniqueness of each provider and the context in which they work, and that single-word judgements can be unhelpful.

So, aligned to the intentions of the new government, we will introduce new report cards across all settings we inspect, offering a more detailed and nuanced view of how providers perform. This will remove the single-word (overall effectiveness) judgement, as the government has promised to do – and was called for by a clear majority of respondents to the Big Listen.

We will continue to prioritise the safety and welfare of children.

You have told us that the safety and welfare of children and learners should remain our top priority.

We will work with the new government to introduce annual reviews for safeguarding, attendance and off-rolling in schools to help with regular, constructive conversations between inspectors and schools.

We will also enhance social care regulation and area SEND inspection, tackle illegal schools and children’s homes, and call for unregistered alternative provision to be regulated.

We will pay close attention to local context.

You told is that our approach to inspection and regulation needs more context and balance, so we can recognise where providers are achieving well, particularly in difficult circumstances.

Our new area insights portal will help us understand better the context of the education and care providers we inspect and regulate. It will allow internal and external users to understand the quality and landscape of child services in an area and context for individual providers, bringing together a range of data currently found in many of our pre-inspection tools. This will be fairer to providers and more useful to parents and service users.

We will foster a culture of integrity in which we always treat people with professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect.

You have responded fantastically well to the introduction of our new values. We now need to embed them fully, so that they become the foundation of our work with those we inspect and regulate, and with each other.

We will launch the Ofsted Academy.

You have told us that there are inconsistencies and varying levels of support in our induction and training processes. You want a more centralised approach to the way we train and develop our people.

So, we are introducing the Ofsted Academy.

Building on the professional expertise across remits, the Academy will draw together, in a single place, all of Ofsted’s attraction, induction, training, learning, career development and staff retention work. It will also make sure we share excellent practice, not just with each other but with the sectors we inspect and regulate.

The Ofsted Academy will reinforce and strengthen Ofsted’s values and culture throughout your time with us as a colleague.

We will support you to be treated with professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect.

We have heard from you that when carrying out inspection and regulation, or working to support and enable inspection, you do not always receive the same professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect from others that we expect of you.

Effective inspection and regulatory activity relies on the integrity and cooperation of providers, as much as it does on the professionalism and sensitivity of inspectors.

We have updated our code of conduct to set out mutual expectations for inspection and regulation visits. It makes clear how we want our staff to conduct themselves, but also notes that we expect the same professional conduct from providers so that we can have a constructive and collaborative working relationship.

We have been clear that we will not tolerate any form of unacceptable behaviour, including verbal or physical abuse of our staff or inspectors. This behaviour will lead to appropriate action.

Our new ‘inspection welfare, support and guidance’ hub will also make sure that staff who experience poor behaviour from providers receive timely and considered support from managers.

We are updating the ‘anti-bullying, harassment and discrimination: protecting employees from third-party abuse’ procedure. This makes clear that these incidents will be reported, and data monitored over time to make sure we take the right action and to inform future frameworks, guidance and policies.

We will be a learning organisation that operates transparently, listens to challenge and takes action to change.

Openness and transparency – or a perceived lack of it – was a theme of the Big Listen responses, both from staff and stakeholders. We want to put that right.

We are changing how we handle complaints.

We want to make our complaints process more efficient for education and care providers. You have told us that the process for handling complaints and allegations about inspectors’ conduct could be clearer and more supportive for colleagues as well.

We have developed our complaints model so complaint investigators will ask for feedback on the issues put to us, through a discussion with the inspector’s line manager.

This means that line managers can now work with inspectors to support them through the process and help identify training or development that might also be beneficial.

We will establish 6 national hubs to drive consistency across all our work.

You have said that inconsistent approaches and practices across regions are causing confusion and disparity. You want us to assure both ourselves, and you, that we are implementing our frameworks, policies and processes consistently across our regions.

So, we are changing the way we work internally to centralise processes and practices where needed, by creating national hubs. They will help us achieve greater national consistency, gather and share insights, and improve how we work.

Our ‘hub’ model will create 6 virtual hubs (in addition to the existing supported accommodation and early years quality assurance hubs), which will look after important elements of our work and make sure we have a consistent approach across all our regions.

The 6 hubs will focus on:

• quality assurance and professional standards
• complaints about Ofsted
• area insights and provider intelligence
• regulatory and delivery prioritisation
• enhanced consistency and moderation
• inspection welfare, support and guidance.

With stronger national oversight, colleagues in the hubs will be trained and supported to become specialists in their tasks, with clearer guidelines and standardised procedures to help us make consistent decisions and keep improving.

They will work closely with regional colleagues and national specialists to maintain consistency in decision-making and in applying processes across Ofsted.

Ofsted and you

As well as hearing your suggestions for improvements we could make to our inspection and regulation practices and ways of working, we have also heard feedback from you about what it is like to work at Ofsted.

We will embed our values and behaviours.

From your responses, we have heard that some of you have experienced behaviour from colleagues that falls below expectations.

We want to create a safe and respectful environment in which feedback is welcomed, colleagues feel safe to raise concerns, and problems are addressed respectfully and consistently.

We have recently introduced our new Ofsted values and behaviours, which help us understand what is expected of each of us and feel comfortable addressing any behaviours that fall short.

Work will continue to fully embed these positive behaviours throughout the organisation.

We will introduce our ‘Life at Ofsted – people pledge’.

We will shortly be introducing our ‘Life at Ofsted – people pledge’. This will set out our ambitions for creating a culture we all want to be a part of. It is a promise we will all make to each other to work together to improve the experience of working at Ofsted, for everyone.

We have listened to your feedback from the Big Listen and recent staff engagement sessions. We will now set out clearly our offer to, and benefits for, our colleagues and what plans we have for the future to make Ofsted an even better place to work.

For many of you, our people pledge will already match your current experience of life at Ofsted. For others, we may still have more work to do. But we will work together to make the ambitions a reality for all of us.

We will share more details on the people pledge soon.

We will improve our quality assurance process.

Timely and constructive quality assurance (QA) should sit at the heart of our work and be welcomed as a crucial element of professional development.

You told us there is variation in how our QA processes are applied across different regions, which affects the consistency of our national work. You have also told us that you want a QA process that is supportive and helps you to develop and improve the quality of your inspections, reports and decision-making.

We will establish our new QA and professional standards hub to improve the consistency of our approach to QA. The ‘QA hub’ will work alongside the new enhanced consistency and moderation hub.

Both the QA hub and the enhanced consistency and moderation hub will be made up of teams of expert colleagues, drawn from across our regions. They will use their expertise to ensure the quality and consistency of our nationally agreed QA processes, standards and expectations.

One of the benefits of the hub approach is to release Senior HMI time in regions from activities currently done in region, such as duplicative QA, to provide additional support for inspectors.

We are reviewing some of our digital systems.

You have told us that some of our digital systems need to be reviewed as they are either not doing what we now need them to do or, in some cases, are not working well enough to support you in your work.

We have heard your concerns and frustrations.

We will shortly be publishing the findings of our review of the electronic evidence-gathering (EEG) system. We are in the process of developing a more stable and reliable version of EEG. We will roll it out to all inspectors during the autumn term, including training for all users.

Improvements to usability will follow. We will continue to get feedback and insight from users to inform our strategy for making further improvements to evidence-recording.

We have also been developing our longer-term strategy to move services away from Cygnum, exploring new products and services that will better meet the current and future needs of our users.

This includes new products for inspections and a new regulatory case management service. While we prepare for this new service, our regulatory team has been improving the current one. This is also clarifying our needs for the new service.

We will support your well-being.

We heard feedback from colleagues about how current ways of working affect them.

Making sure you have a manageable workload, supporting you to achieve a good work-life balance, and prioritising well-being are themes from your feedback that we will focus on across our workforce as part of our people pledge.

We want to make sure inspectors’ and APT colleagues’ workloads are varied and motivating, but also well balanced and manageable, so you can perform to the best of your ability.

You have told us that you are concerned about the challenges of balancing workloads with quality. With workloads increasing, challenging delivery schedules and the strain of extended hours and travel, your well-being is being affected.

We are launching new guidance that promotes and supports working flexibly for all inspectors and APT staff who do not have access to flexitime. This is part of our broader effort to improve workloads and well-being.

We are also improving the system for inspectors to log their working hours and activity. We aim to create a single, accurate record that is easier and quicker for both inspectors and line managers to use.

In the North West region, we are running pilot programmes to understand inspectors’ preferred working patterns. The insights from these pilots will help us create more inclusive schedules that better support inspectors’ home lives. We will share best practice from these pilots across all regions with the aim of creating more flexibility for our inspectors’ personal lives.

We will inform and involve you.

We know the importance of clear and regular communication, so you feel informed and prepared for changes.

We have heard in your Big Listen responses that you want more feedback mechanisms, greater transparency in decision-making and better internal engagement.

We have also heard your frustration about occasions when you’ve learned about decisions and changes that affect you from the media, without prior internal communication.

We are committed to involving you and communicating with you effectively as we all work together to deliver the changes we’ve announced today, through our change programme Ofsted 2025.

• We will keep you updated regularly through your leaders and line managers and using our usual channels like all-staff webinars, video messages and the ‘Ofsted Update’ weekly email. We’ll clearly explain any changes and the reasons behind them.
• We will involve you because we value your feedback and want you to help shape changes and we will have various ways for you to share your views.
• You told us how much you enjoyed the ‘Engage’ sessions so we’ll be running more of them, allowing you to discuss topics at an early stage and give feedback directly to senior leaders and other colleagues.
• We will do more to empower managers to explain new developments and support their teams, so colleagues can ask questions, bring ideas and suggestions, and know that they will be fed into the right places in the organisation.
• And finally, but importantly, we will tell you about developments first. We are committed to making sure you hear from Ofsted about matters that affect you first whenever possible, and if this is not possible, we will explain why.

We want to make sure that at every level, in every team, in every region and in every remit of our organisation, you feel involved in and part of the improvements we are making.