By Matt Bromley
In November 2025 a word was added to the Ofsted inspection toolkit that school leaders would do well to hunt down and capture. That word is “typically” and it appears in the ‘expected standard’ for achievement. There’s another word tucked away nearby – “broadly” – which is similarly worthy of annotation. Underline them both in your printed copy.
Why? Because both these words are capable of some heavy lifting during an inspection visit…
I’m not suggesting these two words transform inspection – they don’t. And the inspection framework – and the way it’s being put into practice by inspectors – remains far from perfect. For example, many school leaders working in communities with high levels of deprivation rightly feel that inspection doesn’t recognise the scale of the challenge they face. Likewise, schools serving large numbers of pupils with SEND argue, with justification, that national accountability measures struggle to capture the complexity of their work. Context might now be acknowledged in theory but it still tends to get overlooked in practice.
But while the inspection process remains imperfect and while school leaders cannot control the framework nor how inspectors translate it, they can control how they engage with it…
And this is where the words “typically” and “broadly” matter because, if inspectors say they want to understand achievement in context, then school leaders need to make sure that context is impossible to ignore. Not as an excuse. Not as a justification for poor outcomes. But as essential evidence.
The best schools I’ve worked with don’t wait for inspectors to discover their story; they tell it – confidently, persuasively, and relentlessly. Then they support it with evidence.
Ofsted says that pupils’ achievement will “typically” be reflected in their attainment and progress in national tests and examinations. Note: typically. Not exclusively. In other words, test and exam results are not hardwired to inspection outcomes – inspectors do not simply compare schools against national averages then draw concrete conclusions.
Instead, inspectors are expected to consider how a school’s disadvantaged pupils perform relative to disadvantaged pupils nationally, rather than simply comparing them with all pupils nationally. Furthermore, Ofsted says that schools helping disadvantaged pupils to close gaps over time should receive recognition for doing so.
On one level, that feels entirely reasonable. After all, schools have been arguing for years that context matters. Schools serving communities facing entrenched poverty have said that raw outcomes tell only part of the story. Schools supporting significant numbers of pupils with complex SEND have made similar arguments.
Which is why waiting for inspectors to arrive and magically understand your context is not a strategy. Your context is only useful if it forms part of a compelling narrative about achievement. The burden, whether it’s fair or not, remains with school leaders to make that case.
Too often, schools define achievement using the measures they happen to have available: SATs outcomes, GCSE grades, progress scores, attainment measures. These things matter but they don’t answer the most important question: What has changed for our pupils as a consequence of attending our school? Or: How are we helping pupils to prepare for future success – in education, employment, and adult life? That’s the story inspectors need to hear.
More importantly, it’s the story governors, parents, and pupils themselves deserve to hear. And it’s usually a much richer story than a spreadsheet can tell.
A pupil who arrives in Year 7 with a reading age three years below chronological age and leaves secondary school able to access academic texts independently has achieved something significant. A persistently absent pupil who develops the confidence and resilience to attend school every day has achieved something significant. A young person who becomes the first member of their family to apply for university has achieved something significant. A pupil with complex additional needs who develops independence, self-advocacy, and confidence has achieved something significant.
Evidencing achievement
The challenge is not recognising these achievements; the challenge is evidencing them.
The obvious question, then, is: how? Because the moment we start talking about capturing wider achievement, many schools make the same mistake. They create another spreadsheet. Another tracker. Another set of data drops. Another workload problem.
I’d suggest the opposite approach. Rather than collecting more information, schools should focus on connecting the information they already have. One way to do this is through a Pupil Achievement Profile…
The principle is simple. Every term, leaders bring together existing information under four headings:
1 Academic development
- Progress from starting points
- Reading-age improvements
- Subject milestones
- Attendance improvements
- Reduction in behaviour incidents
2 Civic participation
- Clubs and societies
- Educational visits
- Performing arts
- Sports teams
- Competitions and challenges
3 Leadership opportunities
- School council
- Student ambassadors
- Peer mentoring
- Reading leaders
- Sports leadership
- Community projects
4 Personal growth
- Confidence
- Resilience
- Sense of belonging
- Aspirations
- Self-efficacy
The first three categories require no additional workload because the information already exists somewhere in school systems. The fourth category can be captured through a short annual pupil reflection survey of no more than four or five questions.
That’s it. No teacher data entry. No termly tracking meetings. No colour-coded spreadsheets. Just a deliberate effort to bring together evidence that already exists. The trick is compile a weight of evidence – not rely on a single source. And that evidence can be anecdotal and narrative, not solely statistical: staff, pupil, and parent voice count.
The power comes when this information is aggregated for cohorts to identify, not only improvements over time, but patterns and trends. For example, leaders might discover that:
- 82% of disadvantaged pupils are participating in at least one enrichment activity, which is a 5 percentage point increase on the previous year.
- SEND pupils are represented in leadership roles in line with their proportion of the school population.
- Reading ages in Year 7 have improved by an average of 18 months in one academic year.
- Pupils reporting that they feel confident speaking in front of others has increased from 54% to 73% over two years.
This gives you something more powerful than a set of numerical outcomes: it gives you evidence of real impact. And that evidence helps answer the question inspectors should be asking: what difference is this school making to the lives of its pupils?
Tell your own story
One of the biggest mistakes leaders make during inspection is assuming inspectors will join the dots themselves. Perhaps they will. Perhaps they won’t. Either way, why leave it to chance? If your pupils enter well below national expectations, say so. If mobility is unusually high, explain the impact. If a substantial proportion of pupils have SEND, show how this influences outcomes. If attendance has improved dramatically, make that visible. If reading ages have accelerated, bring the evidence. If enrichment participation has transformed, tell the story. This is not to be used as an excuse for low expectations; it’s important contextual data to inform starting points and priorities.
In short, inspection should not be a passive exercise in answering questions; it should be an active exercise in presenting evidence. The schools that tend to navigate inspection most successfully are not necessarily those with the strongest outcomes, they are often the schools that understand their own story best. They know precisely where pupils started. They know what barriers existed. They know what changed. And they know how to demonstrate it. They are firm with inspections and say when they disagree – and are quick to provide counter-evidence.
Work smarter not harder
The danger, as I say above, is that, as soon as we start talking about capturing wider achievements, school leaders reach for another spreadsheet. Please don’t. Teachers do not need another tracking system. Leaders do not need another colour-coded dashboard. Rather, what they need is a smarter way of bringing together information they already collect.
Most schools already hold huge amounts of valuable evidence. The problem is that it sits in separate places. Attendance over here. Behaviour over there. Enrichment somewhere else. Student leadership in another folder entirely. So, simply bring it together around the four strands I mention above. Here’s a further note about these four strands:
1 Academic development. The emphasis should always be on distance travelled – so use comparable data where possible. What’s changed over time?
2 Civic participation. These opportunities matter because they build confidence, belonging, and aspiration. Yet they are often invisible in discussions about achievement. You can’t always demonstrate outcomes – what does aspiration look like? – but you can evidence engagement.
3 Leadership opportunities. Leadership opportunities tell us something important about pupils’ confidence and agency – triangulate participation in leadership roles with pupil and parent voice narratives about improving self-esteem and self-efficacy, as well as teacher observations about increasingly frequent and confident contributions in lessons.
4 Personal growth. This is the hardest area to measure and therefore the one schools often avoid. But we shouldn’t. The key is to keep it simple. We don’t need lengthy questionnaires or panel discussions. We don’t need complicated psychometric tools. All we need is a handful of annual pupil reflections: How confident do you feel speaking in front of others? How resilient do you feel when learning becomes difficult? How confident are you that you can succeed? How much do you feel you belong? Then the trick is to track trends over time. What’s changing as pupils travel through our school system?
Here’s an example report on Pupil Achievement Profiles…
Pupil Achievement Profile (Termly Leadership Summary)
Year group: ___________________
Date: ___________________
1. Academic development
| Indicator | Current Position | Change Since Last Review |
|---|---|---|
| Attainment | ||
| Progress from starting points | ||
| Reading-age gains | ||
| Attendance | ||
| Behaviour incidents |
What does this tell us?
2. Civic participation
| Activity | Number Participating | % of Year | % of PP | % of SEND |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clubs and societies | ||||
| Educational visits | ||||
| Sports teams | ||||
| Performing arts | ||||
| Competitions/challenges | ||||
| Volunteering |
Which groups are underrepresented?
3. Leadership responsibilities
| Opportunity | Number Participating | % Year | % PP | % SEND |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| School council | ||||
| Peer mentoring | ||||
| Student ambassadors | ||||
| Reading leaders | ||||
| Sports leaders | ||||
| Other leadership roles |
How representative are these opportunities?
4. Personal growth
Pupil survey questions:
Rate from 1–5:
- I feel confident speaking in front of others.
- I can cope when learning becomes difficult.
- I feel that I belong at this school.
- I believe I can succeed in the future.
- There is an adult in school who knows me well.
Key findings…
5. The Story We Would Tell an Inspector
Complete the following sentence:
“Since joining our school, pupils in this cohort have…”
Supporting evidence…
For more free advice on inspection, visit our…
And don’t forget Matt’s book, How to Ace Ofsted by Making Every Day Inspection Ready… packed with perennial good practice advice about how to make school improvement your routine not your rescue plan…
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