In September 2019, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) launched the new Education Inspection Framework (EIF) to evaluate education quality and delivery in maintained schools and academies in England under section 5 of the Education Act 2005 (Ofsted, 2019). Soon after its implementation, schools in England have been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic together with schools’ adaptation to the new EIF has imposed huge pressure on inspectors, school leaders and teachers in England. This study aims to reveal school leaders’ perceptions of the new EIF and the micropolitical techniques they used during the inspections. In this article, the following research questions will be answered:

1. What are the major changes between the 2015 Common Inspection Framework (CIF) and the EIF 2019?
2. How do school leaders in England interpret the 2019 EIF policy and prepare for the inspection during Covid-19?
3. How do school leaders use micropolitical techniques during the inspections?

To answer the above questions, this article employs the theoretical framework of micropolitical techniques to uncover school leaders’ interpretation, compliance, resistance, and evasion of the new EIF (Colman, 2021; Foucault, 1988; Hoyle, 1982). According to Hoyle (1982) micropolitics is an underworld that we all recognise and participate in but rarely speak about.  Micropolitics enable individuals and groups to utilise resources and exercise agency for the purpose of sustaining or furthering their own interests (Hoyle, 1982).

In this study, I focus on the micropolitical techniques used by school leaders when they co-construct the space with Ofsted inspectors to make sense of and enact the new EIF. The 2019 EIF requires both Ofsted and schools to collect more qualitative data with individual school’s characteristics. The collected evidence is expected to demonstrate the rationale behind and the process of school core work in four domains: quality of education, behaviour & attitudes, personal development, and leadership and management (Ofsted, 2019). This change shifts the inspection focus away from quantitative student performance data. However, the four-point scale that inspectors use to grade schools remains the same: outstanding, good, requires improvement, and inadequate. How school leaders make sense of the EIF and translate their understandings into micropolitical techniques so that their schools can cope with the new inspection criteria and Covid-19 constitutes the core of this study.

To unpack these power tensions and struggles, this study examines four micropolitical techniques related to policy enactment, which are policy interpretation, compliance, resistance, and evasion. Policy interpretation is a discursive process in which policy enactors (i.e. Ofsted inspectors) and recipients (i.e. school leaders and teachers) continue to develop and maintain socially constructed ideas and images embedded in policy texts and at the same time continue to modify them in their own context (Yanow, 1995). Policy compliance refers to schools having the duty to comply with the inspection requirements and procedures outlined in the EIF. Policy resistance entails thick and thin forms of resistance (hooks & West, 2016). Thick resistance challenges the underpinning socio-cultural-political structures, whilst thin resistance manifests in daily micropolitical interactions (Maguire et al., 2018). For instance, school leaders and teachers use sarcasm, humour, or other emotional responses to ridicule or oppose ideologies and ideas written in the policy. Lastly, policy evasion is a form of resistance within accommodation (Perryman et al., 2011). When resisting a policy seems too challenging, purposefully choosing certain aspects of policies to implement becomes an alternative technique to exercise micropolitical power.  

In this study, I will explore school leaders’ experiences of adopting and exercising the above four micropolitical techniques in the 2020-2022 inspections. 

This study employed two research methods. First, a content analysis method was applied to examine the EIF 2019 guideline and compared it with the old CIF published in 2015. The content analysis looked into the restructuring of the inspection domains and the subsequent challenges in interpreting and implementing the new EIF. By zooming into the original policy texts, I illustrated which evidence was counted and not counted in the EIF 2019. These texts created a space in which both Ofsted inspectors and school leaders exercised their micropolitical techniques to influence the inspection result. The second research method is individual interviews with eight school leaders who have experienced school inspections during 2020-2022. The interviewees were recruited from a Postgraduate Diploma (PGDip) Programme taught in one UK university. Invitations were sent to all the 54 participants of this cohort and eight of them accepted the invitation and met the criteria of leading their schools through inspections under the new EIF. Participation was voluntary, and the interviewees had the right to withdraw during the interview process or skip any questions. The reason for choosing this particular cohort of PGDip students to participate in this study was twofold. First, they were all experienced school leaders and went through Covid-19 as well as school inspections. Second, in the PGDip Programme, they have learned to critically scrutinise various education policies and reflect on their own leadership practices. Thus, this research topic was familiar to them and offered them an opportunity to share their experiences with a wider academic community. During the interview, each participant was asked to recall particular interactions with inspectors and teachers that reflected their policy interpretation, compliance, resistance, and evasion. Brief definitions of these four micropolitical techniques were given to prompt the responses. Each individual interview lasted for 40-50 minutes and was audio-recorded with written permission from the interviewee. All the interviewees and their schools were anonymised during the data analysis and reporting.

The content analysis of the EIF 2019 and CIF 2015 policy texts has identified four major changes. First, the EIF 2019 has a sharper focus on the breadth and balance of the curriculum in the new “quality of education” domain by merging the previous “teaching, learning & assessment” and “outcomes” domains. The second major change in the EIF 2019 is dividing the previous “personal development, behaviour and welfare” domain into two separate “behaviour & attitudes” and “personal development” domains. This separation allows inspectors to provide more accurate and nuanced judgement on the school’s impact on students. The third change manifests in inspectors spending longer time in Good schools and having a longer phone call with the headteacher for evidence collection (Spencer, 2019). The fourth change lies in inspecting previously exempt schools that had received outstanding status (Ofsted, 2021). Some outstanding schools have lost their title under the new EIF. According to Ofsted (2021) by the end of November 2021, “87% of all schools in England were rated either good or outstanding”, which was comparable to “the 86% reported in August 2019, prior to the EIF being introduced and before the pandemic began”. This means on the national level, EIF 2019 has not yielded worse inspection results compared to CIF 2015. The interview data are currently under analysis. The preliminary findings show that the school leaders all experienced confusion and anxiety when interpreting the EIF policy and its numerous updates. Part of the anxiety came from guessing what the lead inspector expected from the school. Keywords such as “intent, implement, and impact” were frequently used to show schools’ compliance with the policy even though some evidence appeared rhetorical. Several school leaders resisted the EIF criteria and decided to offer what was the best for their students rather than what Ofsted looked for.

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