The new head of Ofsted has said that behaviour at some schools is so bad that there are “no-go” areas for staff, and teachers lock themselves in classrooms for safety at lunchtime.
Sir Martyn Oliver, in his first national newspaper interview since taking over as the watchdog’s chief inspector on January 1, outlined the scale of the challenge facing education in England and set out his mission for reform.
He said behaviour in particular was “certainly a challenge now”. As the leader of an academy trust he said he had taken on broken schools where “students were stopping staff saying, this is a no-go corridor, it belongs to the children”. He added there were also cases of “staff locking themselves in their classroom during break
