Ofsted · Government · Ofsted's own commentary on inspection and the education sector.
We want everyone to feel confident in Ofsted inspections and the inspectors who carry them out. In April 2025, our Chief Inspector, Sir Martyn Oliver, committed to introducing inspector accreditation as a way of recognising and verifying inspectors’ expertise. The …
Today we’ve published our annual updates to the education inspection materials under the renewed education inspection framework (EIF). They cover early years settings, state-funded schools, non-association independent schools, further education (FE) and skills providers and initial teacher education (ITE) providers. …
Children in care are among the most vulnerable in our society. Too often they face significant challenges that can make success harder to achieve. Yet we also know how transformative the right support can be. When schools and colleges get it right, children in …
Leaders, local authorities, parents and carers frequently ask about how we deal with complaints about a school. When we receive a complaint, we never rush to inspect. In this blog, I’ll explain the processes that we follow when deciding whether to inspect a school. If a parent has a concern about their child’s school, they should first go through …
Since we published the renewed inspection framework on 9 September 2025, we’ve put on lots of online and face-to-face engagement with initial teacher education (ITE) providers to answer your questions. We’re publishing the most frequently asked questions below, so you …
The Department for Education (DfE) has made its guidance on mobile phones in schools statutory . The DfE’s guidance states that ‘all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default’. We know from our inspections that many of you had already banned …
Since we published the renewed inspection framework on 9 September 2025, we’ve put on lots of online and face-to-face engagement with further education and skills (FE) providers to answer your questions. We’re publishing the most frequently asked questions below, so …
Since we published the renewed inspection framework on 9 September 2025, we’ve put on lots of online and face-to-face engagement with schools to answer your questions. We’re publishing the most frequently asked questions below, so you can see all the …
Ofsted has a unique perspective on the various places that children and learners experience. We gain this through our inspections of schools and further education and skills providers, and through our additional powers as the regulator of children’s social care …
This week we released information sets to schools, further education providers and inspectors that help frame our inspection activity. These are called the Inspection Data Summary Report (IDSR) for schools and Further Education and Skills Inspection Tool (FESIT) for further …
