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As the blog posts in this Special Issue illustrate, school inspection in England is at a critical juncture, with multiple interests, tipping points and pressures combining to create the conditions for new organisational pathways. We have been reflecting on the challenges and possibilities of researching inspection reform at a time of intense scrutiny and contestation. Against the backdrop of widespread recognition that Ofsted must change, not least from the , it is essential to think more deeply about how researchers might examine the extent, enactment and experience of such change. In our contribution, we consider the following three implications.

Implication 1: Conceptualising change and continuity

Understanding and capturing change in school inspection necessitates certain types of conceptual tools; namely, analytics that can capture the dis- and re-articulation of structures, institutions and discourses. One possible approach is mobilising tools which cut across particular cycles of reform, such as Clarke’s (2014) analytic of inspection regimes as ‘assemblages’ composed of heterogeneous elements: places, people, policies, practices and power. Such categories, in remaining constant across time and space, enable researchers to document and trace processes of continuity and change.

Another potential (and complementary) approach is to work at the intersection of path-dependency and path-shaping. The former emphasises the power of institutional legacies and how they work to constrain subsequent reform. The latter implies that social forces can intervene in institutional pathways so that new trajectories become possible. Most research on inspection tends to invoke, albeit implicitly, one of these perspectives at the expense of the other, giving rise to overclaims or underclaims regarding the extent of possibilities for change. We suggest holding both logics in dialogue – that is, considering path-shaping actions within a path-dependent context – offers a productive way to interrogate institutional change.

Implication 2: Working across sites, scales and temporalities

To examine the extent to which Ofsted has changed and is in the process of changing, research needs to attend to multiple sites, scales and temporalities. On the one hand, research needs to document changes at the macro-level, with an emphasis on comparing the extent to which elements of inspection – places, people, policies, practices and power – change from one reform cycle to the next. How, for instance, are the 2019 and 2025 education inspection frameworks different from one another?

‘Research needs to generate an understanding of changes to inspection “on the ground”.’

On the other hand, research needs to generate an understanding of changes to inspection ‘on the ground’. This involves capturing current perceptions and experiences of inspection and comparing them with previous articulations. For example, the extensive written submissions to the Education Select Committee in 2024, representing key stakeholders (teachers, school leaders, governors, inspectors), provides a significant body of secondary data as a baseline to compare with present experiences of Ofsted garnered as empirical primary data.

Of course, working at, across and between these levels is a cumulative, collaborative and collective endeavour. We, as researchers, need to understand at which sites, scales and temporalities we can contribute. Research that traces macro–micro connections, and situates them historically, is well placed to capture the extent to which the inspectorate is forging a new path of policy development.

Implication 3: Aligning research to institutional reform

A key element that interests us about this critical juncture is that the inspectorate appears to be increasing its engagement with the research community. Recently, Ofsted has explored the ‘i�Գٱ�����𳦳پ��Dz�’ and between research and policy, which suggests that there is some scope for critically informed research to engage constructively and positively with the inspectorate. Having observed this development, we note that a key impediment to greater engagement is temporal: while policy moves fast, research is slow.

Our main concern here then is for research to align, as much as possible, to the speed, timing and substance of Ofsted’s latest reforms, connecting them to the formative and immediate experiences of those in practice. This is extremely challenging to achieve, due to the protracted nature of conventional approaches to research funding. However, research that is poised and positioned to examine reform as it is enacted and experienced offers unique understanding of processes of change. For example, swift insights on the effectiveness of reform can be obtained by surveying school leaders as a key proxy or indicator. Research which can achieve such rapid alignment can best contribute to debates about the future direction of inspection.

References

Clarke, J. (2014). Inspections: Governing at a distance. In S. Grek & J. Lindgren (Eds.), Governing by inspection: Studies in European education (pp. 11–26). Routledge.