Ofsted and my book

Andrew Old frequently tells me that the way to get lots of people visiting your blog is to mention Ofsted in the title, so here goes.  If you are an Ofsted-watcher, you might be interested in my book, particularly in the appendix. Although my book won’t be published until March 5^th, you can still access the online appendix for free here. The appendix consists of lessons from Ofsted reports. I went through Ofsted subject reports dating from June 2010 to May 2012 and extracted all the descriptions of lessons from them.  In total there are 228 descriptions of lessons, curriculum units and schemes of work. This was a fairly tedious piece of work, and if it’s of use to anyone else, I’d be very pleased.

The main thesis of my book is that child-centred education is the orthodoxy in English schools. The Ofsted lesson descriptions are one of main sources of evidence for this claim, and are also one of the main ways in which such an orthodoxy is maintained, and indeed enforced. You can read what I have written about some of the lessons Ofsted praise here, and here are some links to summaries of each chapter of my book.

• Introduction
• Facts prevent understanding
• Teacher-led instruction is passive
• The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
• You can always just look it up
• We should teach transferable skills
• Projects and activities are the best way to learn
• Teaching knowledge is indoctrination