Tonight's @ofqual blog is a kick in the teeth for school leaders and teachers. Please come out tomorrow & explain directly to schools the rationale for this new, onerous, bureaucratic waste of time that profession has already driven a horse and cart through tonight.

For the last 2 years, schools have done the exam boards' work for them but have still paid them for the pleasure. Ofqual failed thousands of students last summer, failed to produce a Plan B for this summer and has now passed the buck completely to schools.

In our trust we have spent 3 years trying to transform teachers' working lives, keeping them in our schools so they can continue to be the single biggest factor in the success of our children. What has broken staff over the years is the volume of onerous tasks the are pointless

Every teacher knows it, every leader knows it, the DfE knows it, unions know it, academics know it and Ofqual really should know it. But tonight they have declared that school staff are required to do hundreds of hours of work, submit that work but @ofqual won't even look at it

Exhibit A (thank you @MrMountstevens). We have to submit long policies but @ofqual will only bother to read a summary and will then make a few phone calls.

Exhibit B: @Ofqual rightly wishes to scrutinise new centres, unusual patterns, historic anomalies. But all centres are required to compile & submit huge volumes of evidence that Ofqual has no intention of looking at. This is the very definition of onerous, pointless work.

So my (genuine) questions to @Ofqual:
1. Why should staff submit 20+ page policies that you wont read?
2. How do you justify the hours spent compiling and sending evidence that you know you won't look at?
3. Have you undertaken a time cost/benefit analysis?

4. What might school leaders ask staff to abandon to make time to undertake a series of onerous and demonstrably pointless tasks?
5. Was there a workload issue at your end that meant this recommendation took 4.5 months to develop, thus leaving schools only one month to deliver?

I try hard to treat my fellow professional as professionals. That means thinking hard about why we ask people to do things, the positive impact the work will have & then explaining that clearly. It is an absolute minimum level of professional decency people should expect.

The minimum level of professional decency we have a right to expect from @ofqual is a proper explanation of why schools are being asked to do this.