Recommendation 6

In the shorter term, the Department should work with Ofsted to enable the inspectorate to reduce the frequency of inspections to approximately five to six years for ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’ schools and three to four years for schools judged ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. This should be supported by better use of risk assessment to identify schools in most need of inspection. Ofsted should use the additional resource released by this change to enable inspections to be carried out in more depth.