Improving the way Ofsted inspects education
February 7, 2025
Ofsted want to know what you think about their proposed plans for inspecting schools and other settings where children and adults learn. This includes:
- early years
- state-funded schools
- non-association independent schools
- further education and skills (FE and skills)
- initial teacher education (ITE)
In summary, they propose:
- Report cards – these would give parents and carers more detailed information than the current reports, including a new 5-point grading scale to evaluate more areas of a provider’s work and short summaries of what inspectors found.
- Education inspection toolkits – this tool shows providers and inspectors the evaluation areas that we’ll focus inspections on and how we’ll assess and grade providers (scroll down to see our toolkits).
- Inspection methodology – changes to how we carry out inspection.
- Full inspections and monitoring inspections, state-funded schools – we plan to end ungraded inspections of state-funded schools and change our monitoring programmes so that we can check that timely action is taken to raise standards.
- Identifying state-funded schools causing concern – a new approach to how we’ll place a school into a category of concern.
Read the full report and respond to the consultation.
Have you signed up to the monthly SEND Newsletter yet? 📩 The SEND Newsletter is a monthly e-newsletter from the Southend SEND Partnership, bringing together organisations and services that support children and young people with SEND and their families in Southend. It’s designed to keep you up to date with local information, opportunities and support available to families. We contribute to the newsletter each month too, so it’s a great way to see what we’re sharing alongside updates from other local services. Subscribe here:
Event details SEND Information Day Southend SEND Independent Forum (SSIF) and the SEND Local Offer Team are pleased to announce the second Southend SEND Information Day on Tuesday 16 June 2026. This is a free event for the Southend SEND community. It is open to parent carers or family members of children or young people with SEND, and professionals. Venue: Southend Civic Centre, Victoria Avenue, Southend-on-Sea, SS2 6ER Time: 9.30am to 2.30pm Hold the date - further information to follow soon! For a taste of what to expect at the event in June, read about the 2025 SEND Information Day and watch videos here . Pre-register for the event! You can just drop-in on the day, but why not make things easier and pre-register?! Get advance information about the event direct to your inbox, so you can plan your visit and make the most of your time.
As Southend’s Parent Carer Forum, Southend SEND Independent Forum (SSIF), we encourage you to share your experiences — your voice really matters in shaping support for our children and young people. We’re hosting informal drop-in sessions at Southend Civic Centre during the consultation period specifically to gather your feedback and thoughts on the proposed changes, so we can reflect the real views of parent carers in our response. Please come along to share your views or ask any questions — we’d love to see you there. The SEND Partnership is also hosting an information Event and will present an overview of the key proposed changes, highlight the areas the government is consulting on, and empower parent carers with the information needed to share their views with confidence. The SEND Partnership will require pre-booking tickets and you can do that here, tickets .
One of our favourite Events is our regular monthly coffee morning, where Parent Carers can get together to share their experiences. Every month we have the Local Offer team with us and invite 1 or 2 additional special guests from for example Health, Social Care, Education and more, to offer guidance and advice. *Please note that the coffee mornings for 2026 will temporarily be held at the Civic Centre and will again return to SAVS in September 2026* Come along and chat to other ParentCarers, get advice from one of our SEND support service guests and enjoy a hot drink with something sweet. Booking is not required.
