Edssential article from @shaun_allison :
I thought I would write this post in the spirit of #nurture1314 – starting with a confession! I used to be a bit of an OFSTED chaser – there’s a lot of it about. By that, I mean I used to spend a great deal of time distributing checklists, documents and ticklists to colleagues, about ‘what they had to do in order to be good or outstanding‘. Many of them were quite long and frankly, less than useful. Why? Well, teaching is a creative profession and these lists run the risk of shackling teachers to a format or style of teaching that does not suit them. More importantly, it has perpetuated some myths about styles of teaching that ‘work best’ and so must be adopted….often without any real evidence that they do actually ‘work best’.
To their credit, it appears that OFSTED want schools to move away from this ‘ticklist’ culture too. In the subsidiary guidance to the most recent framework, they have said the following: