NCAS conference: Ofsted to recruit frontline staff to conduct children's services inspections

Speaking at the National Children and Adult Services (NCAS) conference in Bournemouth, Eleanor Schooling said Ofsted has previously attempted to bolster its inspection teams by recruiting from local authorities, but with little success.

She said the inspectorate will seek to be more flexible in order to attract frontline experts in specific areas.

“Having more serving practitioners is something I feel very strongly about,” Schooling said.

“We need to be making it easier for everybody. I have to say that we haven’t done that so far and that’s one of the reasons that there are not nearly enough practitioners among our colleagues at Ofsted."

Schooling said she wants to develop a new programme that will support people who want to come to assist with just one or two inspections, because a previous recruitment programme was unsuccessful.

“We wrote to people and told them they have got to devote 18 weeks to this before they even began to be a properly authorised inspector, and of course, nobody came forward,” she said.

“So we have got to do it differently and we are going to do it differently."

Schooling said Ofsted is especially keen to recruit serving practitioners who have particular expertise.

“If someone is really good on adoption we want them to come forward and we’ll ask them to look at the adoption part of the inspection – we won’t say to them go and do early help because then they’re going to have to go and learn the whole area when actually they have got great strengths in something else.

“I want to have a much more flexible way of bringing many more people in because they will really add to the quality of our work and I think there is quite a lot for people to take back into their day-to-day work.”