Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education in England, has announced that it's going to start doing subject inspections again. I have a mixed reaction to this:

On the plus side, I think it's a good idea for two reasons. Firstly, it means that subjects have to be taken seriously and invested in. Secondly, schools can use Ofsted's subject surveys as a benchmark against which to measure their own situation. This is something I encouraged when I was an ICT adviser, and also in this newsletter, in which I published summaries.

So what are my misgivings?

Firstly, in the past I was told (by a senior person in Ofsted) that subject inspections for Computing had been shelved because hardly any inspectors knew enough about the subject to be able to inspect it. Have inspectors been trained in the subject since then? If so, it's news to me.

Secondly, that was pretty obvious anyway, because a lot of inspectors judged how good the subject was being taught by how nicely formatted the kids' work was. When I was an Ofsted inspector myself, colleagues would say to me things like "Computers are being used really well in English". When I asked why, they'd tell me the kids had inserted fancy headings and pictures into their documents.

When I was working as head of e-learning in a local authority, an Ofsted inspector addressed a meeting of the whole education staff and told us that one thing inspectors would look for when observing lessons across the curriculum is whether the teacher mentioned that technology could have been used for this exercise, so they didn't actually have to do so.

I thought this was ridiculous, so I asked a senior Ofsted person of my acquaintance if that was really the case. His response was to put his head in his hands and wail "I've given them so much training..."

In fairness, that was a couple of decades ago. I'm sure that by now things are very different, and that if you are subject to an inspection of your Computing provision it will be undertaken by someone who knows what they're looking at and knows what sort of questions to ask.

But make sure the kids' work looks nice, just in case!

This article was first published in the Digital Education newsletter.