麻豆淫院

Ofsted is a child of democratic political decision-making. It was brought into being by the , as a specific manifesto commitment of John Major’s Conservative government, and focused on increasing the accountability of schools to the populations that they served. Every government since then, whatever its political flavour, has seen fit to stay with broadly the same model of inspection. Yet at the same time, Ofsted also illustrates how although the introduction by the state of standards, processes and accountability into the practices of caring services can bring benefits, it can also serve to undermine the relationship between those practices and their underlying values.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died in 2025, argued that the problem with the professions in general, as well as with society more widely, is that their practices have become disconnected from their underlying values. He argued (for example in one of his seminal works After Virtue published in 1981) that this is partly because the state and large institutions tended to corrupt them. Teachers might, left to their own devices, have strong underlying values that underpin and align with their practice, such as care for the children they work with, or a commitment to the inherent worth of each individual. When, however, the state intervenes and introduces structures and processes to regulate their behaviour, even when there are good reasons for these and they have democratic assent, there is a risk that the link between values and practices becomes distorted. In education, teachers’ practices become more about teaching to the test, or achieving particular aims, including delivering on the specifications of the Ofsted framework of the day. MacIntyre’s argument is that this happens even if in their minds this may not serve the best interests of all their pupils. Practices can become disconnected from values, or at least the inherent values of teaching held by many.

As MacIntyre (1981) recognises, this disconnection and the tension it creates are to some extent inevitable in complex modern societies – we need organisations and the state to provide the physical and social frameworks in which schools, teaching and the caring services exist. These tensions cannot be avoided. The question is how we manage this. The new illustrates a new version of the tensions between values and practices that arise when government steps in. The framework has an increased focus on inclusion, now one of the six new core evaluation areas to be inspected. Ofsted, which has a strong internal research and evaluation team (which I joined on secondment in 2022/23), has also included inclusion as one of its focus areas in its recently updated .

‘In the real world “inclusion” translates into complex and sometimes difficult choices about practices, linked to values.’

This sounds on the surface very well intentioned, but one could ask what practices and connected values are implied by the term inclusion? As in all systems, teachers and schools have limited time and resources, and in the real world ‘inclusion’ translates into complex and sometimes difficult choices about practices, linked to values. So teachers choose to do X instead of Y, respond to this child in the moment, come back to another child later and so on, hundreds of times a day. Put this another way, any external imposition of what ‘inclusion’ is through a system of externally driven evaluation and accountability runs the risk, even with good intentions, of distorting or corrupting the delicate connection that teachers as professionals make between values and practices in their interactions in the classroom.

This tension between external evaluation and teachers’ professional practice also affects aspects of the relationship between the academy, research and government. In relation to inclusion, for example, research can be framed in ways which obscure the centrality of values and practice in teachers’ work, using outcomes measures that distort, not enrich, what happens in classrooms. This is a risk, but not a certainty. In the research that I led while at Ofsted, which included a study of , we saw how dedicated teachers working with children with often complex needs connected practice to values in meaningful ways. We hope this also demonstrated how thoughtful research can provide the community of teachers with nuanced accounts of practice that they can use reflectively to develop their own local approaches. This involves government in framing research not as a vehicle which serves only to evaluate the outcomes of specific policy aims, even when these have been assented to in democratic systems, but more as a nuanced approach to both exploring and developing the complex systems of practices and linked values that are the caring services.

References

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.