The single word Ofsted judgment

The public loves it, education hates it, the one word that describes the state of the school our children go to, is how we measure education matters in a busy world.

The system of one-word Ofsted judgements for schools in England has “significant benefits” and should stay, according to the government.

It said the grades, such as “outstanding” or “inadequate”, gave parents an important summary of local schools.

But the sister of head teacher Ruth Perry, who took her own life after her school was downgraded, said she was deeply upset by the government’s response.

In January, a report from the cross-party education select committee called for an end to the single-word judgements.

The closer you get to teaching, the less you want to be judged by a single word.

The single word pension judgement

Imagine a trustee chair’s VFM statement consisting of a single word.

“outstanding”

“indifferent”

“failing”

I think that would be “engaging”. I think we might have a generation of savers who logged on through their phones on pension judgement day to see how their pension had done.

Failing schemes wouldn’t love it, outstanding schemes would love it and indifferent schemes would bite their lip and vow to try harder.

So where would pension’s equivalent of the OFSTED inspector sit? Well we seem to be able to measure a lot more schools than there are workplace pension schemes and if your scheme didn’t get a rating, that would be a thing in itself.

For the most part, an independent OFPEN, probably managed by TPR and FCA could be delivering the red orange and green verdicts by whatever name seems suitable at the time. Personally I’d mirror what OFSTED are doing , that seems to be working pretty well at the moment.

Thanks to Mark Johnson for reminding me that when the corporate schemes were winding up in Australia (2000-2005), wind-up created an avalanche of assets migrating to master trusts.  We now seem to be entering a similar period in the UK.

Mark has written to me

During that time, Warren Chant’s rating tool which rated each master trust and its default into a simple score out of five, and using 1-5 apples as the indicator.  This could be done based on public data and used by the consultants as a tool to help with converting transfers (and fees).  It has survived 20+ years and most likely been a key part of  interest in the business.

I know this is brutal, I know there will be heartache and I know that an adverse judgement could tip someone over the edge as OFSTED’s downgrade did Ruth Perry. I am not heartless but I am mindful of the great good and quite sure that the greater good is getting people interested enough in the pension scheme they are in , to do the things we want them to do – especially by way of contributions when we are young and retirement decisions when we aren’t.

Another correspondent writes

OFSTED sends in inspection teams.  Grills heads and boards and senior staff. Pops in and out of classes. Hangs around to get a feel for the organisation.  With very little notice.

Not a matter of looking at loads of pages of guff on investment performance and KPIs.

That would be a shocker. Perhaps even ask for feedback from members

I imagine consolidation would rocket. As it should.

Of course I will be in a minority in saying that pensions should be judged by a single word. We would much rather the War and Peace statements we have today. But do you know what, Chair statement’s don’t get read and OFSTED verdicts do!