How to read the new Ofsted report cards

For inspections from 10 November 2025, Ofsted no longer gives schools a single overall word. No more Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement or Inadequate. In their place is a report card that grades several areas of the school separately, each on a new five-point scale, plus a plain met-or-not-met judgement on safeguarding.

It is a bigger change than it sounds, and for the next few years it makes comparing two schools genuinely awkward.

The five grades

From highest to lowest, each area is graded:

• Exceptional — well beyond what is expected.
• Strong standard — better than expected.
• Expected standard — a competent, acceptable education. This is the target, not a disappointment.
• Needs attention — falling short in that area.
• Urgent improvement — requiring immediate action.

The point worth internalising is that expected standard is the normal, satisfactory outcome. Under the old scale, Good was the second of four and most schools got it. Here, most schools should land on the middle grade in most areas, and a card full of “expected standard” describes a school doing its job.

The areas

A school’s card covers a set of evaluation areas rather than one overall verdict, typically including achievement, curriculum and teaching, attendance and behaviour, personal development and wellbeing, inclusion, and leadership and governance. Schools with early years or sixth form provision are graded on those separately too.

Inclusion is new as an area in its own right, covering how well a school supports pupils with SEND, disadvantaged pupils and children known to social care. Its promotion to a headline judgement is a deliberate signal about what Ofsted now expects schools to be able to evidence.

Safeguarding sits outside the scale entirely: met or not met, with nothing in between.

Why a card can look uneven

Grades are awarded on a “secure fit” basis: to reach a grade, a school must meet every standard for it, not most of them. That makes cards spikier than the old single word. A school can be strong across the board and still show “needs attention” in one area because of one specific shortfall.

Attendance and behaviour is the common example. Several schools with genuinely good behaviour have missed the expected standard there purely on attendance figures. So read the explanation attached to each grade, not just the colour. Each area carries a short summary of the evidence behind it, and that text is usually more informative than the grade itself.

Most schools still show an old grade

This is the practical problem for anyone comparing schools right now.

Report cards only appear when a school is reinspected. Ofsted inspects roughly 430 schools a month, so it will take several years for every school to have one. Until then, a school’s most recent single-word grade still stands and is still what you will see.

So you will routinely be comparing a school with a 2026 report card against a school whose last inspection was in 2018 and produced the word “Good”. Those are not equivalent statements and there is no honest way to convert one into the other. The inspection cycle for state-funded schools shortens from six years to four from April 2026, which will close the gap faster than it would otherwise have closed.

On this site, both are shown as they were published rather than translated into a common scale, with the date of the inspection alongside. An old Good and a new card are different kinds of evidence and are best read as such.

A grade is a snapshot with a date on it

However the grade is expressed, it describes a school on the days inspectors were in the building. A 2019 judgement predates the current head, most likely much of the staff, and an intervening pandemic.

Ungraded inspections have also gone: from November 2025 every inspection is a full one, so the older pattern of a short visit confirming a school “remains good” no longer applies to new inspections, though those visits are still in many schools’ histories.

The most useful thing a report card gives a parent is not the grades but the reasoning attached to them. It is worth reading the actual document for any school you are seriously considering — every school page here links to it.

How the score works explains how inspection outcomes feed the score on this site, including how the two frameworks are handled without pretending they are the same scale.