Ruth Perry was the headteacher of one of Reading’s most popular primary schools for 13 years, the same school that she had attended as a child. Staff and colleagues described her as a rock: talented, capable and compassionate. Her GP testified that she had had no mental health issues over the previous 30 years.
But it took just two hours of an Ofsted inspection on the morning of 15 November last year to dissolve Ruth Perry’s capability and resolve, and turn her into a shaking, tearful wreck, barely able to speak. People who had worked alongside her for a decade said they had never seen her so upset.
By the inspection’s second day, staff recalled that in meetings Perry “looked at the ground and just made a low, moaning sound”.
Despite Perry’s obvious distress, the inspectors continued and came to the conclusion that she most feared: because of gaps in the school’s safeguarding records, Caversham primary school would be downgraded from outstanding to inadequate.
The inspectors departed but for Perry the mental torture was just arriving. By the next weekend, her husband reported, Perry confessed to “dark thoughts”, and they sought help, first at a psychiatric hospital and then her GP.
As an experienced headteacher, Perry knew that an inadequate grade was more than just a blot on her CV. For a school such as Caversham, maintained by the local authority, it meant being converted into an academy and its leadership replaced. For Perry as an individual it meant losing her job and perhaps even her career.
Ofsted’s rules on confidentiality, however, reinforced the torment. Perry was strictly forbidden to discuss Ofsted’s judgment or inspection report before its publication, other than with a few of the school’s senior staff and governors. Perry found herself unable to share the most significant factor in her mental deterioration with psychiatric counsellors, for fear of further punishment by Ofsted.
Jonathan Perry reported that as “a very honest person”, Ruth found it unbearable to show prospective parents around the school while hiding the knowledge that Ofsted was shortly to declare it inadequate. She even worried that local house prices would fall as a result, making the wider community angry at her.
Perry’s GP said that as weeks passed without the Ofsted results being published, Perry’s worst fears continued to build with no prospect of release. Jonathan Perry noted: “The Christmas holidays were awful for the whole family … Ruth became more isolated and distressed, constantly going over the same worries in her mind but unable to do anything about them.”
Instead, worried about losing her job, Perry and her family decided to pull out of purchasing the house they had wanted to buy – her husband’s childhood home that Ruth had once looked forward to renovating.
The new year came and went; Perry returned to work at the start of term. Ofsted’s inspection report had still not been published by the time she killed herself at home on 8 January this year.
Perry’s death shocked the Caversham community, but Perry’s family and supporters took their grief and outrage to a national stage with a stunning declaration in March this year: that Ruth had died as a “direct result” of Ofsted’s inspection.
Julia Waters, Ruth’s sister, set aside her grieving to go public with accusations that Ofsted’s inspection format was dangerous. Waters warned: “What happened to Ruth could happen again.”
That set off a flood of responses from school leaders and teachers – and former Ofsted chief inspectors – who testified to the harrowing levels of stress that the inspection regime in England heaped upon headteachers – and at the lack of support they received during and after the inspections, leading many to quit teaching.
As Perry’s death sparked calls for reform, Ofsted’s leadership seemed slow to respond. The changes it offered were derided by Perry’s family and leading teaching unions in England as insubstantial and of not going far enough to satisfy their concerns.
But what the five days of Perry’s inquest made clear was the remorseless nature of Ofsted’s inspections and their consequences.
Heidi Connor, Berkshire’s senior coroner, repeatedly asked Ofsted’s witnesses when and how an inspection could be paused or suspended if a headteacher, like Perry, was in acute distress. Ofsted’s indirect answers left Connor to wonder aloud whether a paused inspection was a “mystical creature”.
Similarly, Ofsted struggled to answer questions about what training its inspectors had been given to protect the wellbeing of school leaders. Chris Russell, Ofsted’s national director for education, when pressed by Connor, finally admitted that “there is no guidance” for dealing with headteachers in distress.
The three inspectors who visited Perry’s school all agreed it was normal for their visits to cause “tears, upset, frustration” among staff, as though it was an acceptable part of an inspection.
When Perry was unable to speak during one meeting, an inspector described it as “the distress of somebody who had just been told that what they had been doing was not OK”.
But the same inspector, on her way out of the school for the last time, turned to one of Perry’s colleagues and said: “Make sure you look after Ruth.”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
