OFSTED inspection judgments for schools in England

Good afternoon

Thank you for your e-mail.

In order for your request to be dealt with effectively I have forwarded it
to the Information Access Team for a response.

A member of this department will reply to this request as soon as
possible.

However should you require any further assistance please do not hesitate
to contact us.

Regards

Julie Foreman

Quality and Complaints Team

Ofsted - National Business Unit

TEL: 08456 404040

-------Original Message

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Dear Mr Plunkett

Please find attached our acknowledgement for your request for
information.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any queries.

Yours sincerely

Sally Hall
Information Access Administrator
Ofsted
Tel: 0117 94 56230

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Dear Mr Plunkett

Your request has been passed to me for response. I wondered if I could
please clarify what it is you're asking for.

We do have information about inspection outcomes prior to 2005/06.
However, your request asks for the outcome of the last inspection, and
every school which is open and eligible for an inspection at the moment
has been inspected since 2005/06. A literal answer to your request
would not provide you with any additional information. Please could you
clarify exactly what information you are requiring, and for which years.

If it's easier to discuss, feel free to give me a ring on 0207 421 6885
next week.

Best wishes
Helen

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Dear James

Apologies for not responding sooner.
It would be helpful if you could clarify how far back you would like us
to go. The overall effectiveness judgement was only introduced in 2000,
so I would suggest not going back further than that. In addition, the
data becomes more complicated because the inspection was a much longer
exercise pre-2005 and much more information was gathered on the
inspection. Would it meet your needs to provide inspection outcomes
going back to 2000?

I should add that a school's latest inspection outcome is the best guide
to the current position of the school, and previous inspection outcomes
are not really relevant. It depends on how the information is going to
be used as to whether what I provide you with will be useful.

Best wishes
Helen

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Dear James

Thanks for the additional information you have sent through. We've done
investigating and think we can provide information back to the academic
year 1996/97, so an additional 9 years worth of data on top of what you
have already.

We hope to have this with you later this week. There are just a few
things to note. Firstly, because this goes back quite a long time into
the past and the data were held on a different system at that time, I
can't guarantee absolute accuracy at the school level of every single
judgement. There's no reason to think anything will be wrong, and we
know that at the aggregate level the results match published figures,
but I want you to know that there may be data quality issues that we are
unable to rectify at this time remove.

Secondly, the judgements made typically change each year, on top of
large framework changes which typically happen each 3-4 years.
Similar-sounding judgements do not necessarily compare over time. For
example, between 2005 and 2009 a judgement about achievement was made.
From September 2009 onwards this judgement is now about achievement and
enjoyment. The difference between the judgements is sufficient for them
not to map, so comparisons shouldn't be made over time. This will place
quite a constraint on your analysis.

I should warn you that the datasets are quite enormous so I hope you
have a suitably powerful package for the analysis - as well as time to
understand the differences between years and the implications of this in
terms of interpreting your findings.

We'll hope to be in touch again later this week.
Best wishes
Helen

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Dear James

Please find attached a response to your query.

Best wishes
Helen

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Dear Mr Plunkett

I hope you are well.
I'm very sorry to say that we have discovered that some of the data sets
we supplied to you in March were incomplete. The date ranges in one of
the tables used for extraction were incorrect, and as a consequence a
small number of inspections were missing from the data we provided to
you.

Attached to this email are corrected datasets for:
a) Spring and summer term inspections in 2000
b) 2000/01 inspections
c) 2001/02 inspections
d) 2002/03 inspections

We have checked other years and they are correct.

Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused by this mistake.
Best wishes
Helen

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