Writing to a grandparent of a Gladstone Park Primary school pupil, Deana Holdaway, HMI , Principal Officer for Quality Assurance at Ofsted reiterated the areas where Ofsted found weaknesses in the school but went on:
However the report also gives due credit to the school's strengths. The judgement that leadership and management are not inadequate is an important one: it shows that staff have the capacity to continue the school's improvement. (My emphasis)Clearly this raises a vital question: If Ofsted thinks the present leadership and management has the capacity to 'continue to improve' (ie the process of improvement is under way) then why should the DfE think that the school needs to be forcibly converted into an academy with all the upheaval that involves.
One can only conclude that there is a conflict between Ofsted's professional assessment and the DfE's political agenda.
