Let’s start with the football…

Manchester City score. Semenyo in with a clever goal… (I’m a life-long Bristol City supporter not a Man City support – I loved this player when he was with us) The away fans roar. The players celebrate. Anyone who loves sports understands these incredible moments where you see history being written. A new player creating a legacy that could be very special…

And then VAR steps in.

Suddenly we’re pausing the universe, zooming in on Haaland’s left back hair follicle to check if it was offside. Five-and-a-half minutes later, the goal is ruled out because someone might have blocked someone else’s aura.

Now… imagine running a school like that?
Imagine Ofsted rocking up with a camera crew, shouting:

“STOP! Rewind that learning walk! I need to check if the teacher’s left elbow was 1.2 millimetres out of alignment with the learning objective.”

We can laugh.
But then I think:
‘…oh wait, that’s kind of what it’s like.‘

VAR has this charming habit of zooming in so close you half‑expect it to start counting tattoos, turning football into a sort of GCSE Maths geometry puzzle. Ofsted, historically, has been much the same, squinting at a whole school through the educational equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass and then announcing headline grades as if they’ve just uncovered a great universal truth. But here’s the thing: schools are not still-life. Lessons are not freeze-frames you can pause and critique like David Attenborough narrating over a a poor lizard running for it’s life as as a slither of snakes close in. Schools should never be inspected as if it was detective work. They’re definitely not meant to be judged by whether their metaphorical heel is one millimeter offside. Yet for years, that’s how it did feel; one slightly wobbly moment sending a school from “Good” to “Requires Improvement” faster than VAR wiping out a perfectly good goal. Football fans hate this kind of microscopic meddling. Teachers and headteachers? They’ve been living that negative energy for decades.

The new Ofsted Toolkit landed in November 2025 and we saw the first reports this week. I’ve read quite a few and my fist impressions are many schools with RA judgements read supportive which are at odds with the dots at the top. They claim they bring clarity, structure and transparency but if you squint (or, frankly, even if you don’t), it starts to look suspiciously like VAR. It won’t be long before we start to see what the big issues are when dozens of reports have the same reasons for Requiring Attention in a certain area and then – In come the Companies/ Consultants to make a quick buck or two selling snake-oil to desperate leaders who are terrified they can’t evidence all the detail. VAR uses ultra‑high‑definition cameras; Ofsted responds with a toolkit that like VAR will ultimately come down to human judgement. VAR draws lines so thin they could be eyebrow hairs; Ofsted draws distinctions between judgement areas so general and objective you’d need a quantum microscope to tell them apart. VAR slows the game to a total standstill while everyone waits nervously; the Toolkit slows school life and makes it a check list where the observers have absolute autonomy. And of course, both systems claim they’re here to make everything “fairer,” and yet somehow manage to achieve the exact opposite; prompting football managers and headteachers to explode in foul mouthed post match rants.

One head teacher spoke to a group of us last week and said two things happened to them last term – An Ofsted inspection and a vasectomy – one was a far worse experience than the other! We all knew which one it was. Our obsession with reporting on the quality of performance in our schools is akin to the old phrase – we spend so much time weighing the pig; we forget to feed it. Ofsted is a famine in our schools – I still struggle to acknowledge what ‘real’ good it actually does that could not be done in a self improving, open and transparent syystem?

VAR is brilliant at being technically correct while being emotionally catastrophic. It obeys the letter of the law with the enthusiasm of a tax inspector, yet somehow manages to suck the joy out of a perfectly good goal because someone is half a millimetre offside. It is not popular with football fans because nobody in the stadium saw anything wrong except the one lonely camera perched above the pitch like an overzealous lunch-time monitor. Schools know this feeling intimately. For years, we’ve endured Ofsted judgements that are unquestionable once released to the public but completely miss our story: the heroic progress within a community written off as Inadequate, one slightly chaotic morning overshadowing hundreds of brilliant ones, a single incident eclipsing years of care, amazing staff freezing like rabbits in headlight, misunderstanding the culture, never seeing the true graft. If VAR kills goals, then overly rigid inspection frameworks kill morale and with it a better analysis of the purpose of a school within a community. What will parents look at in the report? I think those little coloured dots at the top of the page are a huge first impression. In a time of doom scrolling and short attention spans they matter more than I think we yet know.

The trouble with hyper‑technical systems; whether it’s VAR with its robot‑level zoom or Ofsted with its Toolkit is that they forget the one thing that makes both football and education magical: it’s humanity. VAR slows the match down and dissects it with the emotional sensitivity of a toaster, applying a lens so forensic it might as well be analysing moon rocks. But football isn’t played in freeze‑frames; it’s fluid, relational, full of heart and chaos and last‑minute limbs. Anyone who has ever seen their team (in any sport) win in a critical moment knows this… And school life? Even more so. Children are not pixels to be examined. Teachers are not objects to be measured by millimeters. Leadership cannot be captured in a still frame, no matter how many forms you attach. If we applied VAR‑style scrutiny to classrooms, we’d be pausing lessons mid‑sentence, zooming in on whether a child’s pencil angle demonstrated “intent,” or declaring a math’s lesson void because Jonny stared out of the window .6 of a second longer than regulation. In doing so, we’d miss everything that actually matters; momentum, culture, relationships, joy, growth, lived experience. Education is a profoundly human endeavor, and if we choke it with over‑analysis, toolkits and scrutiny that is trying to be universal rather than understanding the many contexts that make every school unique then we don’t just lose accuracy; we lose soul.