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This week, the Education Select Committee said that Ofsted and the government needed to rebuild trust

in the way in which English schools are inspected and recommended big changes.

This intervention follows months of news coverage of the death of Ruth Perry,

the head teacher who killed herself following an Ofsted inspection at her primary school.

The coroner ruled that the Ofsted report had contributed to her death.

We're not going to explore that case,

but we are going to ask a broader question about school inspections.

How well actually is Ofsted doing?

And how, for the benefit of teachers, parents and pupils, could it improve?

Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.

Let's start by finding out why Ofsted was set up in the first place and what it was meant to do.

Here with me is Sam Friedman, senior fellow at the Institute for Government.

Sam Friedman, before we get going, let's be clear,

Ofsted inspects a whole lot of institutions, including, I think, nurseries and social

care settings, but you and I are just going to focus on schools. So if you could just

tell us which schools, Ofsted has responsibility for? Sure, Offsted is responsible for all the schools in England. Their primary

business, most of their money and effort is spent on state schools. And is there an

Oxfordsted equivalent in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? They each have their own

inspectorate. They all work quite differently from Ofsted, but they do do school inspection in each nation of the UK.

Take us back to before Ofsted actually existed in the 1970s and 80s. When I was at school, there was no such thing. How was schools assessed back then?

So there wasn't really any direct assessment of schools by central government. There was a

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