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Ofsted has rejected almost one in five of the requests from schools to defer inspections for Covid-related reasons since the start of 2022.

The Department for Education said at the beginning of the year that Ofsted would encourage any schools, colleges or early years settings that are significantly impacted by Covid-related staff absence to ask for their inspection to be deferred.

New figures published by the inspectorate today show that Ofsted has approved 82 per cent of deferral requests from schools this year up to 18 February.

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It received 157 requests for Covid deferrals to school inspections in January and another 46 in the first three weeks of February.

Ofsted statistics also show that 23 per cent of all planned school inspections in the period were deferred.

Controversy over deferrals of Ofsted school inspections

The inspectorate’s work was scaled back during this time as the DfE had announced at the start of the year that Ofsted would not be asking inspectors who were serving school headteachers or leaders to carry out inspection work as a temporary measure. This move was to allow heads to focus on the disruption their schools were facing as a result of the Omicron variant causing a new wave of cases.

Ofsted invited school leaders to return to inspection duties at the end of January.

The issue of schools being able to defer inspections because of Covid disruption has been a source of controversy this academic year.

In the autumn term the Association of School and College Leaders called on the inspectorate to allow schools to be able to defer inspections on request.  

However, Ofsted has said deferrals should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Tes revealed that by the middle of November around one-third of Covid inspection deferral requests from schools had been rejected.