Ofsted: Academisation made the curriculum 'suffer'

The curriculum in England's schools “started to suffer” because of academisation, a top Ofsted official has said.Sean Harford, Ofsted’s national director of education, said today that the inspectorate “missed a trick” because it was slow to respond to schools having “the freedoms to do different stuff” after they became academies.He said this was part of a ��double whammy” to the curriculum, with cuts to Ofsted’s budget also forcing it to rely more on performance data.During a speech on the curriculum this morning, he also said that pedagogy involving group work was "probably harder" for schools to do than direct instruction.Mr Harford was speaking at the CurriculumEd conference in Lichfield. “Back in the day, as a school prior to academisation, you had to teach the national curriculum,” he said.“This was not something that was a ‘you could do it or not’, and I think at that point the inspectorate kind of thought ‘[the curriculum is] all sorted out now, we don’t really need to think about that too much.But we missed a trick, because as academisation came in over that period and as the freedoms to do different stuff came about we were slow to respond to that.