Sonia Sodha refers to Ofsted as “the regulator” (“We rely too much on Ofsted. It is a blunt tool that fails children, parents and schools”, Comment). But Ofsted is not the regulator of schools, merely the inspector. A natural question then, is who is the regulator?
The shocking answer is that in England, with the exception of allegations of serious misconduct, schools are almost completely deregulated. They are mostly managed by “non-profit” corporations called academies, which are given freedom to manage their schools with virtually no independent oversight. Complaints by parents or pupils against academy-managed schools are left to the academy itself to oversee, and in the case of a dispute there is no recourse to an independent regulator or ombudsman; a letter from a parent to Ofsted will be met with the stock answer “we are not the regulator for schools”.
