Ofsted’s New Report Cards: Why Know My School Was Ahead of the Curve

Sept. 12, 2025

From November 2025, Ofsted will introduce one of the biggest changes to inspection in years. Schools will no longer be judged with a single word. Instead, they’ll receive a report card, with clear grades across inclusion, curriculum, developing teaching, achievement, behaviour and attitudes, attendance, personal development and well-being and leaderships and governance.

Key Changes with the Ofsted Report Cards

New grading scale – Exceptional, Strong standard, Expected standard, Needs attention, Urgent improvement.
Safeguarding judged separately – either “met” or “not met.”
Categories of concern – urgent improvement or unmet safeguarding will trigger termly monitoring visits.
No more deep dives – inspections will focus on your school’s context and improvement priorities.
New ‘explore an area’ tool – public data will compare your school to others locally.

This shift puts greater focus on evidence, consistency, and improvement planning. Schools don’t need to create new paperwork, but they do need to ensure their self-evaluation is robust and aligned to Ofsted’s toolkit.

How Know my School Supports Schools with Changes with the Ofsted Report Cards

Well, it turns out we were ahead of our time. For the last five years, Know my School has already supported schools with this exact approach. Giving schools clear success criteria to evidence their strengths and identify areas for school improvement, after all, school leaders are the ones who know their schools.

This is great news for a couple of reasons:

We’ve always had a report card; now we’ll simply align ours to match Ofsted’s.
We’ve always had differentiated success criteria – supported by incremental questioning process – that go further than Ofsted’s toolkit. We are currently working on adjusting our framework to reflect the new categories.
There’s no rush or panic. Schools using Know my School can be confident that they already cover every aspect of good practice. The new inspection framework is simply a rearrangement of what you’re already doing.

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With Know my School, your self-evaluation is clear, consistent, and improvement-focused. Whether Ofsted is around the corner or still months away, you can focus on what matters most: school improvement for your pupils, staff, and community.

Discover how Know my School supports school improvement