One teacher's suicide should not lead to a loss of standards in education

Yahoo

31-01-2025

Julia Waters, the sister of Ruth Perry, the headmistress who took her own life allegedly in response to a negative Ofsted review of her school, has accused its head Sir Martyn Oliver of showing inadequate commitment to reform after a 'defensive and complacent' performance in front of a parliamentary select committee.
His main offence? Pointing out that 'there was no suggestion' that the inspectors who assessed and downgraded Perry's school (Caversham Primary in Berkshire) 'did a bad job or did anything wrong'.
To Waters, this demonstrates merely that Ofsted is not 'making all the changes that are needed to prevent future deaths'. To her, the fact of her sister's suicide is proof that Ofsted needs to change. The Government agrees; it has acted on demands by trade unions to scrap single-word reviews for schools.
At first glance, this might seem reasonable. Modern society tends always, in response to any tragic event, to demand steps to ensure that it never happens again. But when you actually interrogate the underlying logic, it is absurd.
Ofsted's purpose is to accurately assess a school and then communicate that assessment clearly to parents, policymakers, and the public. So long as it does this, and its inspectors conduct themselves in a professional manner, it has done a laudable job, end of story.
Samaritans strongly advise against blaming particular causes for a suicide. But the weaponisation of Perry's case by campaigners has totally ignored that principle, and any interrogation of it must do likewise.
Perry's response was deeply tragic. But it was not a rational one. It was certainly not predictable by Ofsted, nor is it the inspectorate's job to try and predict it. To blame Ofsted for a suicide is to grade it on an explicitly irrational curve.
Maybe this seems a callous line of argument, so let's boil it down to the fundamental question: should we downplay or even cover up for a poorly-performing school, in case one or more school leaders cannot cope with the shame of having their homework marked in public?
If your answer is yes, just abolish Ofsted – and along with it league tables, our participation in PISA, and any other visible yardstick by which schools can be measured against an independent standard.
This is the clear preference of the unions, and the policy pursued for decades in Labour-dominated Wales; it would undoubtedly be most effective if the priority is allowing school leaders of even the lowest calibres to sleep easily at night.
But it would have dire consequences for school performance, as the collapse of standards in Wales demonstrates. It would disempower parents and subject hundreds of thousands of children to an inferior education, with all the attendant implications for their future prospects.
How many children being placed on a worse life path is it worth to mitigate against one possible suicide? If that calculation makes you squeamish, tough; that's the trade-off at the heart of this policy question.
The reflex to make sure any bad thing, however unique, never happens again creates a lot of bad policy. A sensible system is drawn up with an holistic understanding of trade-offs, takes reasonable precautions, and has a tolerance for black swans.
Yet if your policy is to respond to every tragic event with reform, the system's actual tolerance is zero, and it ends up lurching piecemeal towards measures which are wildly cost-inefficient at best and actively counter-productive to the system's core purpose at worse.
Sir Martyn is right. Beyond the personal tragedy of the Perry case, the critical questions about Ofsted are whether it did its job properly. If the inspectors conducted themselves professionally, and their assessment of Caversham Primary was accurate, then Ofsted did nothing wrong.
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