Understanding school inspections in Scotland

Schools in Scotland are inspected by His Majesty's Inspectors of Education, who work as part of Education Scotland. This is a separate system from Ofsted in England and Estyn in Wales, with its own framework and its own scale, so a Scottish evaluation cannot be compared with a judgement from either of the others. This guide explains what inspectors look at, what the six-point scale means, and how to read the inspection information shown on a Scottish school's page here.

How good is our school?

Inspections in Scotland are built around a framework called How good is our school?, now in its fourth edition. Rather than one overall verdict, inspectors evaluate a school against a set of quality indicators. Four of them are used in every school inspection:

• Leadership of change: how well leaders improve the school
• Learning, teaching and assessment: the quality of what happens in classrooms
• Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion: how the school looks after and includes every child
• Raising attainment and achievement: the progress and success of pupils

The same framework is used by schools and councils for their own self-evaluation, so inspection is a check against the standard schools already hold themselves to, not a separate yardstick.

Full and short inspections

Not every inspection covers the same ground. A full inspection evaluates all four of the core quality indicators above. A shorter inspection looks at two of them, where that lighter approach is a fair way to check on a school. The number of evaluations in a report therefore tells you which model inspectors used; it does not mean anything was overlooked.

How often schools are inspected

Scotland does not inspect every school on a fixed timetable. HM Inspectors instead choose a sample of around 120 schools each year, giving weight to how long it has been since a school was last inspected, and what they find feeds the national picture of how Scottish education is doing. A sample has a plain consequence for parents: many schools have no recent inspection, and some have none on record, which is not a mark against them. It is why a Scottish school's page here may carry no inspection at all, and why the date matters when there is one.

Gathering views before an inspection

Before an inspection, the headteacher points parents, pupils, staff and partners to a questionnaire, so inspectors hear from the school community first-hand. Alongside the inspection report, Education Scotland publishes a summary of its findings and an analysis of what those questionnaires said, so the views gathered form part of the public record.

The six-point scale

Each quality indicator that inspectors evaluate is graded on a six-point scale, best first:

• Excellent: outstanding, sector-leading practice
• Very good: major strengths
• Good: important strengths with some areas for improvement
• Satisfactory: strengths just outweigh weaknesses
• Weak: important weaknesses
• Unsatisfactory: major weaknesses

These evaluations sit against the Scottish framework only. They are not a version of Ofsted's grades or Estyn's, and reading them as if they were would be a mistake.

Follow-up and return visits

After an inspection, HM Inspectors may return to a school to see how it is progressing and publish a follow-through report on what has changed. As with the inspection itself, this is a record of the school's improvement journey rather than a fresh score.

How OfferDay shows inspection information

Education Scotland publishes each inspection as a report on its website, and the six-point evaluations appear inside that report rather than in any structured list we can hold. So a Scottish school's page on OfferDay shows the headline facts, clearly attributed to Education Scotland: the date of the most recent inspection and the report type, with a link straight to the school's own report. We do not synthesise or estimate a grade from the report text, and where a school has no published inspection we say so plainly. To find a school, start from our list of schools in Scotland, grouped by council area and town.

We never translate a Scottish evaluation into an Ofsted or Estyn grade, and we never rank Scottish schools against schools in another nation. How we treat every source is set out in our data guide.

What to look at as a parent

• The date first. A recent inspection describes the school as it is now.
• The pattern across indicators. Look at the areas that matter most for your child rather than a single number.
• The report in full. The written findings explain the reasons behind each evaluation; the headline facts here are only a signpost to them.
• Your own visit. An inspection is one view at one point in time. Visiting the school tells you things no report can.