Amanda Spielman, former Chief Inspector of Schools, describes how she approached the challenge at Ofsted
“What does impartiality mean and how should it look in practice?”
These questions constantly preoccupied me during my seven years as Chief Inspector of Schools, not just in the context of judging the quality of education (Ofsted’s principal role) but in dealing with issues around equality.
What was particularly contentious was when rights asserted in relation to religious belief sat at odds with rights relating to sex and sexuality. This was painfully difficult territory, with many people convinced that Ofsted was biased against the protected characteristic they were asserting or was over-reaching in its judgements.
The first time I took a position on Ofsted’s own impartiality came early in my tenure, when I was asked to continue Ofsted’s membership of Step Up to Serve, a thoroughly worthy campaign sponsored by (the then) Prince Charles to promote volunteering and other socially responsible activity. Despite the campaign’s obvious merits, this made me slightly uncomfortable, because I instinctively felt that it could undermine Ofsted’s perceived impartiality, for example when inspecting a school that was also active in the campaign. I therefore ended our participation and the agreeable connections and invitations it might have brought.
Re-asserting the principle of impartiality to my staff in this way proved immensely valuable. It enabled me to turn down all future invitations to ally Ofsted with any cause or campaign, and to be seen to do this as a matter of principle, not of favouring one campaign over another. To give a small example, I declined to approve the purchase of Ofsted T-shirts for a Pride march: staff were of course entirely free to take part as individuals in their own clothes, but we could not give the corporate endorsement that Ofsted-branded T-shirts would have implied.
Nevertheless, the most pressing questions of impartiality lay in Ofsted judgements.
Ofsted is a non-ministerial government department, staffed by civil servants. Its primary purpose is to report on the state of education and care in schools, and also in nurseries and childminders, further education colleges, apprenticeships, children’s homes, local authority children’s services and a number of other smaller services. It is also the regulator of early years providers and of children’s homes. When I left, I was given a poster telling me that there had been 250,000 Ofsted visits on my watch, and many of these will of course have led to a number of judgements, not just one. And because those judgements carried consequences for the organisations being judged, it was essential that inspectors made them impartially and were seen to do so.
One obvious step we took, in the face of claims that Ofsted was guilty of making policy about equalities, was to review our own frameworks and processes, as well as our equality objectives, to identify any areas of over-reach. This review showed, for instance, that we were inspecting independent schools as though they were subject to the public sector equality duty and so potentially expecting too much of them.
Two thinkers helped shape my thinking, notably Professor Tom Simpson of the Blavatnik School of Government, who has articulated so clearly the principle that civil servants sit “downstream of Parliament”: in other words, departments and other public bodies should not exceed or “gold-plate” what is intended by lawmakers.
At much the same time, I read the earlier part of Paul Tucker’s book, Unelected Power. He discusses the concept of democratic legitimacy, arguing that regulators who are not subject to democratic accountability have a particular responsibility to exercise their powers sparingly and only in the way that Parliament intended them to be used, even if those powers as drafted could be used more widely.
It was clear to me that the education inspection framework I inherited was intensifying the pressure created by performance tables, rather than balancing that pressure by scrutinising what sat underneath, by ensuring that education had real substance and that decisions were being made with integrity in the interests of children. For the previous 15 years, governments had assumed that test and exam outcome measures could carry almost the entire weight of what defines education quality and that Ofsted therefore did not need a conception of quality.
This was untenable. No-one would be happy to think that the quality of medical care was judged by the Care Quality Commission only by reference to outcomes, with no assessment of the clinical practice underneath. In education, compliance with the law and relevant government guidance does not of itself define or guarantee education quality. There was no statutory definition of quality of education, nor was there any intention to create one. So I needed to establish a definition of education quality against which to inspect. But it also had to satisfy the test of democratic legitimacy.
We therefore set out to build an inspection framework that was grounded in the strongest research evidence available, assembled objectively and transparently. The research review was circulated in draft to organisations such as the Educational Endowment Foundation and their feedback reflected in the final published version. From the outset it was made clear that the evidence base would get stronger over time and that inspection models should iterate in the light of new findings.
For the first time, the inspection framework was explicitly linked to government curriculum policy, with an expectation that a school’s curriculum should satisfy National Curriculum expectations or be of at least equivalent quality. Inspectors were trained in the underlying conception of quality and in the importance of applying this conception in their judgements. The original general research review was supplemented with a series of curriculum research reviews, one in each National Curriculum subject, drawn up in the same way and similarly used to train inspectors in an explicit and defensible conception of quality in that subject. In this way we translated the principle of impartiality into inspection practice.
This framework has been remarkably useful, given the pressure that is placed on inspection by the consequences that are hung on it by government and others. The objective survey findings consistently showed high levels of satisfaction among school leaders with the inspections of their own schools, despite relentless media negativity. Many school leaders have told me in recent months how concerned they are that the principles embedded in that framework should be maintained and of the negative consequences there may be for children and for teachers if they are not.
Inspectorates have the same kinds of problems as football referees, traffic wardens and criminal judges, among others, in convincing those at the wrong end of a decision that there is no bias against them. Ofsted has for years been put under unrealistic pressure by many who argue that it is failing in its job unless every inspected entity endorses every judgement, even when the outcome is unwelcome.
Despite an improved inspection model, impartiality issues continued to crop up in our work. I came to understand, as I had not understood previously, that we can all be blind to partiality, if it happens to align with our own moral values. The senior team at one independent school, for example, found by inspectors to be using a highly politicised curriculum in humanities subjects, strongly defended it on the basis that the moral rightness of the curriculum justified ignoring the legal requirement for schools to be politically impartial. Teachers who are passionate about particular issues, such as environmental causes, often struggle to acknowledge the dividing line between legitimate education and political activism.
Such inability to see our own partiality means all public sector leaders should remind their staff that they serve the whole country, including those whose priorities and values may be different from their own. We did a valuable exercise with More in Common, where our senior staff completed a questionnaire about their values and beliefs individually and confidentially, with the results aggregated and presented to us in the form of a comparison with the national picture. This helped us see where our collective blind spots were likely to be and also where we were likely to over-focus. It helped to inform inspector training on how to judge political impartiality when issues surfaced in schools.
Many of the deepest and most persistent challenges to impartiality are linked to the set of protected characteristics embedded in the Equality Act 2010.
The potential clashes of rights between different protected characteristics must have been obvious to those who framed the act and I have often wondered what they expected to happen in these cases. It is hard to believe they really thought that all faith schools would willingly start to teach sex education lessons that included same-sex relationships and gender reassignment. I have never learned whether they thought such tensions could and would be resolved. But I did what I could to maintain impartiality through the work described above and latterly by reviewing all of our HR policies to identify and remove all instances of over-reach, where well-intentioned elements had been inserted that nonetheless went beyond the Equality Act.
Since 2010, the difficulties in applying the Equality Act proportionately and fairly have only increased, heightening the impartiality challenge for all civil servants. The definition of many of the protected characteristics has been broadened to include a wider group of people. The scope of disability, faith or belief, sexuality and gender have all widened: environmental beliefs and ethical veganism were probably not in anyone’s mind back in 2010, while sex was heading the same way until the recent Supreme Court judgement. Lobbyists and campaigners for individual characteristics have become more active.
There is of course a highly contested debate about different conceptions of equality, with arguments for and against each. But the kinds of “positive action” described in the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2022 in relation to recruitment and promotion (where appointing or promoting one person is often to the immediate detriment of another person) in my view go beyond the public sector duty to promote “equality of opportunity’’. Is this not going “upstream” of Parliament to use Tom Simpson’s language? For that reason I rejected the gender policy of self-ID at Ofsted, on the basis that it had twice been debated and rejected by Parliament.
A rigorous review of all centrally-promulgated civil service policies to identify instances where the requirements and expectations of the law are exceeded would be a good first step to greater impartiality, followed by a mandate to all departments and public bodies to review and revise their own policies in the same way.
My experiences at Ofsted have taught me that effort must be consistently exerted to maintain impartiality. Awareness of our own blind-spots; repeatedly considering all those we serve throughout the country, and their expectations of our work; regularly reflecting on our existing policies and practices; and maintaining the discipline to apply judgement uniformly across all matters, even when inconvenient; these are all required to uphold this integral value.
Amanda Spielman, former Chief Inspector of Schools, is a Conservative member of the House of Lords. This article began with a talk she gave in June 2025 at a seminar on impartiality organised by the Law Faculty at LSE and Civic Future.
