The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate

Abstract

England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers’ and students’ spoken language. In this article we deploy a raciolinguistic genealogy to examine the listening practices of the inspectorate, drawing on historical inspection reports generated from archival work, inspectorate language policy, and a large corpus of contemporary reports. We show how raciolinguistic ideologies are deeply embedded into the sociopolitical culture of the inspectorate, and how these ideologies translate into systems of sonic surveillance in which the nonstandardised language practices of students and teachers are heard as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school. (Raciolinguistics, schools, language policing, standardised English, Ofsted, England, social class, ideology)

Language variation and algorithmic bias: understanding algorithmic bias in British English automatic speech recognition

“…Recent work shows that accent discrimination still plays a role high-prestige hiring contexts such as corporate law, although not all regional accents are equally stigmatised [29,85]. Accent bias has also been documented in teacher training and schools in the UK, affecting both first and second language speakers of English [11,37].…”

Raciolinguistic policy assemblages and white supremacy in teacher education

“…This is not simply about individual modes of perception however, but about how institutions, policies, assessments, and other technologies of linguistic surveillance can be complicit in the reproduction of raciolinguistic ideologies. For instance, Khan's (2018) work has shown how language tests for racialised immigrants operate as a mechanism of raciolinguistic surveillance which bolster Islamophobic narratives, whilst Cushing and Snell (2022) show how the schools inspectorate in England have long reproduced raciolinguistic ideologies in their inspections of schools by perceiving racialised and low-income speakers as displaying linguistic deficiencies which are symptomatic of low-quality educational provision.…”

“…Johnson's typology can be mapped onto contemporary state-level teacher education policy in contemporary England. This includes denying writers of colour a space on the curriculum (Iffath, 2020); the Islamophobic state surveillance of 'British Values' in curricula (Crawford, 2017); Ofsted's 2 hostile policing of the language of racialised speakers (Cushing & Snell, 2022) and the state-sanctioned normalisation of racist, overly punitive, and exclusionary behaviour policies (Bei et al, 2021).…”

“…The sub-title of this section is an intertextual reference to Cushing and Snell (2022), where we analysed thousands of school inspection reports to show how the schools inspectorate has operated as an embodiment of the white perceiving subject since their foundation in 1839, and that this is a normalised part of their institutional culture. The schools inspectorate have a majority white and economically privileged workforce (Ofsted, 2020) and play a powerful, agentive role in the teacher education policy assemblage, given that they inspect teacher education providers and enact judgements on what constitutes high-quality language education.…”

“…Whereas schools previously had access to resources under the 1999 Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant, this funding was no longer ring‐fenced as a result of post‐2010 policy changes (although see Tikly et al, 2005 for a discussion of how this funding simply posed a linguistic solution to a structural problem). Ofsted, too, have been granted additional powers by the state to surveil the language practices of pre‐service teachers and the degrees to which teacher education providers are complicit in reproducing curricula underpinned by raciolinguistic ideologies (Cushing & Snell, 2022). In the contemporary teacher education landscape in England then, opportunities for pre‐service teachers to engage with critical issues of language, race and power have been gradually replaced with the requirement to engage with mechanistic and depoliticised models of grammar, vocabulary and reading instruction.…”