Ofsted Inspection Companion

The Ofsted Inspection Companion is designed to support you with information you might need, both directly before an inspection and as part of your regular school reviews, by bringing the data together in one place, along with AI analysis to help you spot trends that you might want to address, or call out to inspectors.  We’ve built this jointly with Arbor and The Key to provide you both insight and advice. 

Before you get started

Permissions

• You need the School: General Admin: Export Data permission to generate the Ofsted Inspection Companion
• Each area within the Ofsted Inspection Companion, once generated, is governed by existing permissions, so each user viewing the report can only see the areas they already have access to elsewhere in Arbor.

If you don't have the relevant permissions, ask your admin team to give you permission using these instructions.

AI usage

• This report has 2 AI summary sections - one for attendance, one for behaviour.
• The AI usage for this report will come out of your monthly AI credit allowance. 
• If you have run out of AI credits at the point at which you generate this report, it will run without the AI analysis. 

Creating the Ofsted Inspection Companion

1. Go to Reporting > Report Library  
2. Select the School tab (or search for “Ofsted” in the search bar on the far right of the page)

3. You should see a report entitled Ofsted Inspection Companion that looks like this: 

   

4. Click on Ofsted Inspection Companion 

5. You’ll see a pop-up that should look like this:

   

6. Fill in the following information:

   • Inspection dates - Fill in your actual inspection dates. We’ll use these to help identify staff members who are off sick and prefill your timetable links for you to more easily access.

     • Top Tip: If you’re outside an inspection window, we’d recommend entering today and tomorrow for these dates

       
        

   • Date Range For Summary Data - Select an overall date range you want to cover with the report by setting Start and End dates. If you want to see the breakdown over time, select a timeframe (Academic Years, Terms, Months, Weeks, Days) in the Split date range into dropdown, or set this to “Do not split” to view the total data over the date range you’ve selected.

     • We’ll provide a breakdown of attendance and behaviour data for you over time.  
     • We can include up to 6 date ranges in the report (e.g. 2 years of data broken down by term, or 6 months of data broken down by month).  

     

   • Date range for individual student records - select a date range for which you want to see individual records.
     • We’ll include a breakdown of information, such as all the bullying incidents over this timeframe or all the physical interventions during this date range
     • If you are in a larger school and want to download or print this report, you may want this date range to be shorter than the overall data date range; this minimises the number of pages this generates. 

       • For reference: a larger secondary school running the Ofsted Inspection Companion would add around 80 additional pages to the report if this date range is set to 4 years, compared to a shorter date range of 1 academic year.

         

   • Students with barriers to learning/wellbeing - You’ll see a selection of prebuilt Arbor demographics and custom groups that you’ve made. Select the groups you would like to see.  

     • Ofsted has a new focus on how schools are supporting students with barriers to learning, which can be things like deprivation, but could also be recent changes to personal circumstances.  You can include these in this report through custom groups. If you haven’t already set custom groups up to record these students, you can use this guide to get started. 
     • Selecting these groups generates a student list, useful for discussing Focus Pupils with Ofsted and evidencing their progress against key metrics.

     

   • Bullying / Harassment behaviours - this may be an area Ofsted dives into - select the relevant behaviour types from your school to include in the report 

     

   • Sexual harrassment/sexual violence behaviours - this may be an area Ofsted dives into - select the relevant behaviour types from your school to include in the report

     

   • Student identifying columns - if you have students with similar names, these can help identify individuals more quickly.  You can select as many or as few of these as you want to include. Your options are: Name, Year Group, ID (this is their Arbor Student ID, not their student number) and Registration Form

     

    

   • Practical details - these are some prompts of things you might want to have written down in preparation for Ofsted. Add any practical information for inspectors, including Wi-Fi access, school day timings, and staff or lesson details. You can put the information in at this point if you have it.  If you don’t want this section, you can add your own information, or edit or remove it after the report has been generated.  

     

7. Click Create Report and wait for it to generate on the next page!

On the report

You can see lots of sections, broken down by year group and students who face barriers to learning.  You’ll also see an AI summary at the bottom of each of the attendance and behaviour sections.  

You can edit these text summaries on reports that you have generated if you want to.  Reports generated by other members of staff are view-only (only the creator can edit them). 

You can also add your own commentary by adding a new page and adding text.  

Please note that you cannot add additional data at the moment. 

You can also download this report if you want to share it with others.  Please exercise all usual caution when doing so, as this report contains Personally Identifiable Information.  

Previously run reports

To find previously run reports, please go to Reporting > Smart Reports > Manage Reports.

You’ll be able to see previous generations of this report and other similar reports, including who created them. Just click on the report and select Open Report on the slide-over to view the report.

You can also generate the Ofsted Inspection Companion directly from this page, by clicking the green Create Smart Report button and clicking on Create Report from Template.