Before an inspection, every school leader hopes for the same things. That the inspectors see the school in a good light. That the good practice they know so well is on show on the day. And that the hard work behind teaching and learning earns a favourable outcome. But what do inspectors look for?
I read and analysed every routine report ISI published between April 2025 and May 2026, all 395 of them. The answer is more interesting than a simple verdict. Teaching is the thing ISI most often asks schools to improve. It is almost never the thing that makes them fail.
The second most common thing ISI asks you to change
Strip the reports back to their recommended next steps and count them, and curriculum and teaching is the second most common improvement direction in the whole corpus. Only policies and statutory documentation comes up more often. Add the closely related findings on assessment, feedback and challenge, and around half of all schools inspected this year picked up at least one recommended next step about teaching and learning.
So if your school leaves an inspection with a teaching recommendation, you are in the company of most. That alone is worth bearing in mind before you read your report as a verdict on your staff.
The pattern that runs through almost all of them
A pattern kept coming up. Of all the teaching and learning next steps, 53% use the word “consistent”, “consistently” or “inconsistent”.
ISI is rarely telling schools their teaching is weak. It is telling them it is uneven. Good in places, strong with some teachers and some classes, and not yet the same everywhere. Cranleigh’s report is typical: “ensure that all teachers provide guidance and feedback with greater consistency”.
”Leaders usually know where their best practice lives. Fewer can show that it reaches every department and every key stage.
Read across two hundred schools, that points to variance rather than a missing floor. The inspectors take your good teaching as read. The question is how evenly it is spread.
And that is a different question. Most schools find it has a different answer. Leaders usually know where their best practice lives. Fewer can show that it reaches every department and every key stage.
Seldom a point of failure
Now the second half. When ISI judges that a school does not meet all the Standards, the cause is almost always procedural. A safer recruitment gap. A missing fire risk assessment. A policy that has fallen out of date.
The numbers are stark. Across the whole corpus there are 177 specific action points in the schools that failed a Standard. Only seven of them concern curriculum and teaching. Challenge for the most able and the quality of feedback account for none at all.
So teaching quality sits almost entirely in the developmental part of the report, the recommended next steps, where ISI nudges rather than sanctions. That makes it the most visible public signal of how good your teaching is, and at the same time one of the least likely factors to put your overall outcome at risk.
The three findings that come up again and again
The first is challenge for the most able. Twenty-seven schools were asked to stretch their strongest pupils further, and the wording barely changes from one report to the next: “ensure that teaching consistently challenges pupils, particularly those with higher prior attainment, to think for themselves”. The recurring formula is that pupils should “apply their learning in more complex ways”, “when they are ready”.
This contradicts the story many schools tell about themselves. We tend to describe our teaching as inclusive, and we usually mean that we support the pupils who find learning hard. The inspectors keep finding the opposite edge. The middle is well served, with the top under-extended.
The second is feedback that tells pupils what to do next. Twenty-nine schools, again with strikingly similar phrasing: feedback and marking should “consistently” give pupils “clear guidance about how to improve their work”. The finding hinges on whether a pupil can tell you what their next step is, which inspectors learn by talking to pupils rather than through work scrutiny. The sheer volume of marking is almost never a determining factor.
The third is assessment used to shape teaching. Around seventy-five schools were asked to use assessment information more precisely, to find the gaps and adapt what happens next. “Ensure that teaching uses assessment information more precisely to identify and support pupils”. It often arrives attached to a specific group, pupils with SEND or those learning English as an additional language, where precise assessment carries the most weight.
What attracts the highest praise tells its own story
ISI gives out one accolade sparingly. Of the eighty times the phrase “significant strength” appears this year, twenty-four attach to teaching or curriculum.
I have written before about how what attracts the accolade is revealing. The praise rarely goes to lesson delivery in the abstract. It rewards the whole curricular offer, the curriculum and the co-, super- or extra-curricular around it, designed with intent and explained as a coherent whole. Bedales School’s “outdoor work” curriculum. St Edward’s School’s “super-curriculum”. The way Cheltenham Ladies’ College and The Godolphin and Latymer School weave the academic and the co-curricular together.
Just occasionally the delivery itself is named, as at South Hampstead High School: “the quality of teaching is a significant strength”. Those cases are the exception. The accolade tends to follow intention and coherence, the schools that can say clearly what their curricular offer is for.
What this means to the leadership team
The inspectors are testing whether your best practice is your normal practice. The most useful preparation, then, is consistency assurance. Gather the evidence that strong feedback, real challenge and precise assessment reach across every department, and that leaders can show they keep an eye on whether they do.
Two specifics repay a self-check before any inspection. Whether your strongest pupils are genuinely extended rather than simply kept busy. And whether your pupils, asked at random, can say what they are trying to get better at.
Do that, and you walk those corridors differently. What ISI is really testing is evenness. That is something you can measure and put right yourself, long before an inspector arrives to do it for you.
This article draws on Inside ISI Inspections, Azimuth’s analysis of 395 routine ISI inspection reports published from April 2025 to May 2026. The full report sets these teaching findings alongside what inspectors said about governance, safeguarding, careers, and the early signs of artificial intelligence in schools, among other findings.
Featured image by Lara Jameson
