ABSTRACT
Our evaluation of Ofsted was undertaken with the aid of a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust made to the Office for Standards in Inspection (Ofstin) for an independent review of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) system of school inspection. On the face of it, this might have placed our project straight into the category of adversarial evaluation. But we concluded it within the ethic and methods of quite traditional academic research, and it is for others to consider how far our findings were affected by our own policy preferences. We were in any case required by our terms of reference to make recommendations, supported by the findings of the study.
