More than one in five inspection deferral requests made by schools to Ofsted were rejected by the watchdog, according to the latest data.
Statistics show that 21 per cent of the 786 requests for school inspections to be deferred were rejected, while 79 per cent were approved.
Ofsted also approved all 37 requests from schools for a pause in an inspection that had already started.
The published covers inspections between April 2024 until the end of March 2025.
The figures include not only Ofsted inspections of state schools, but also non-association private schools, initial teacher education providers, and the SEND area inspections it carries out with the Care Quality Commission.
Ofsted said that in 2024-25 it carried out 8,030 inspections across these areas in total.
Pausing Ofsted inspections
At the start of 2024, Ofsted published a new policy for pausing inspections.
It was part of the inspectorate’s response to a coroner’s report following the death of headteacher Ruth Perry. The coroner had ruled that Ms Perry had died by suicide and that an Ofsted inspection had contributed to this.
In a, the coroner raised concerns about “an almost complete absence of Ofsted training or published policy” for pausing an inspection because of distress to a school leader.
Pausing refers to an inspection that has already started. Ofsted’s policy says that a paused school inspection can become an incomplete inspection if the pause goes beyond five working days.
Ofsted has not published a breakdown of how many of the paused inspections were later resumed. Its policy says that .
The policy lists circumstances in which inspections can be deferred or paused. Ofsted says inspections can be deferred, for example, if the wellbeing of a senior leader, such as the headteacher, would be severely impacted, and there is no other delegated senior leader who can step in.
Other reasons include if a school has experienced a recent major incident or is due to merge, close or move.
The policy says that pausing an inspection already underway could happen where leaders in the school required support. It adds that this may be a result of concerns about the wellbeing of leaders.
It says that pausing an inspection could also happen as a result of a major incident that has a significant effect on the day-to-day running of a school.
Incomplete inspections
The watchdog has also published data showing that there were 61 school inspections classed as incomplete in 2024-25.
And Ofsted changed the overall judgement grade for 18 schools as part of its quality assurance process from April 2024.
Overall inspection grades were scrapped with immediate effect by the incoming Labour government in September 2024.
Ofsted has since launched a new report card system, which gives schools one of five grades in at least six different evaluation areas but does not provide an overall effectiveness grade.
An Ofsted spokesperson said: “The ‘pausing an inspection’ policy was part of the series of improvements we made to the way we work with schools.
“The deferral and pausing policies are there to support school leaders when, in exceptional circumstances, the inspection cannot go ahead, or needs to be paused. We encourage schools to use those policies as they need to, in line with our guidance.”
You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Vlog magazine on and on
