A “caring” primary school headteacher took her own life after learning that Ofsted planned to downgrade her school from Outstanding to Inadequate, her family has said.
Ruth Perry, 53, was principal at Caversham Primary School in Reading for 13 years.
She was left a “shadow of her former self” after an inspection in November which she described as the “worst day of her life”, her family told the BBC.
The inspection on November 15 and 16 last year was the school’s first during Ms Perry’s time as leader, after rules around monitoring of Outstanding schools were changed.
On the first day, Ms Perry was told her school would be dropped from the highest grade to the lowest, her family said.
The report, which is now published, found the school to be Good in every category except leadership and management, where it accused the school of poor record keeping and failings in employment checks which could have put children at risk.
This meant the rating for the whole school was dropped to Inadequate.
Ofsted told staff they had seen a boy doing a dance popular on social media and viewed this as evidence of the sexualisation of pupils, the BBC reported.
It is also alleged that inspectors told staff they had seen child-on-child abuse, but Ms Perry believed this was merely a playground scuffle.
The school dropped from Outstanding to Inadequate
The school dropped from Outstanding to Inadequate
Ms Perry’s sister Julia called the process a “complete injustice”, and said the headteacher had a “weight hanging over her” while waiting for the report to be published.
During this time, Ms Perry took her own life on January 8.
Her sister told BBC South: “All during that process, every time I spoke to her she would talk about the countdown. I remember clearly one day her saying ‘52 days and counting’.
“’Every day she had this weight on her shoulders hanging over her and she wasn’t officially allowed to talk to her family.
“I remember the very first time I saw her rather than just speaking on the phone a couple of days after the end of the Ofsted inspection, she was an absolute shadow of her former self.”
She added: “This one word judgement is just destroying 32 years of her vocation. Education was her vocation. Thirty-two years summed up in one word, ‘inadequate’.
“It just preyed on her mind until she couldn’t take it anymore.
“She was a huge loss. She was my little sister… she was only 53, she had so much more still to give, so much more that she could do.”
Ofsted told BBC South: “We were deeply saddened by Ruth Perry’s tragic death. Our thoughts remain with Mrs Perry’s family, friends and everyone in the Caversham Primary School community.”
> Ofsted told staff they had seen a boy doing a dance popular on social media and viewed this as evidence of the sexualisation of pupils, the BBC reported.
From another article I read, the boy was flossing. While I too am horrified at the sight of that dance, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it sexualisation.
As grim as it is, what is the point of this article. It is certainly not Ofsteds fault that she decided to commit suicide if that is what they are some how seeking to imply. I mean do the telegraph do articles on everybody that commits suicide and name a potential trigger?
From full report
>Safeguarding
The arrangements for safeguarding are not effective.
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures.
They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As
a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions
are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are
complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential
risks to pupils.
Some staff have not had the necessary training to be able to record concerns
accurately using the school’s online system. However, staff know how to identify concerns about pupils and to report these to the appropriate leader. The pastoral
support provided for pupils is a strength and they appreciate this level of care.
There is rarely one single reason why a person commits suicide.
And the Telegraph is one of the Tory rags that has politicised teaching and denigrated the profession and humiliated teachers.
Imagine seeing a child doing the floss dance and thinking “that’s too damn sexy”
Someone check whoever did the inspection
Obviously she had some underlying mental health problems you wouldn’t take your life otherwise
The amount of responsibility that a school head has to carry is huge, surely this is an out-dated model now and schools should be run by teams.
How sad, because it sounds like the ofsted report was basically saying improvement needed?
FSA, CQC, and other inspection agencies will always fail you these days for a paperwork issue. Anyone who works in food, care, children, they’ll all tell you – if something is recorded it officially didn’t happen.
There must have been other pressures on her though, because this kind of thing just means you need to improve.
It’s unfortunate but its not offsteads fault is it.
What are they meant to do now, give every school a pass even if it’s not up to snuff?
First of all flossing dance isn’t even a sexual dance, was made up by a kid. If you think its a sexually dance something wrong with you. Really wrong with you.
​
If the kids was grinding and twerking in the hall way than you might have a point.
No one should be driven to this.
And as someone who interacts with ofsted regularly, whilst I know they *want* to make things better for children, I really, really do not think that they do.
I fully expect to get downvoted for this because I can’t figure out a way to put this sensitively.
Mental illness is horrible and if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of it I would. That being said, is there a tiny part of me questioning the suitability of a headteacher of a primary school who’s mental health is so fragile that an Ofsted downgrade caused her to commit suicide? Yes, yes there is.
I’m no ofsted fan, but the rating was deserved for the employment checks failings alone.
Her death is regrettable, but sadly these sorts of job related suicides aren’t uncommon and I’m not sure what raking over this will do for the grieving family nor school.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most people having an aneurysm in this thread have never read an OFSTED report or have any idea what an inspection entails.
This is one head teacher, yes it’s a tragedy but my god people love to over egg context pudding.
There’s a lot going on here… but surprised this hasn’t been mentioned:
> Ruth Perry, 53, was principal at Caversham Primary School in Reading for 13 years. . . . The inspection on November 15 and 16 last year was the school’s first during Ms Perry’s time as leader
So no inspection for *at least 13 years*?!
OFSTED is utterly brutal for teachers.
My wife nearly had a breakdown because of OFSTED, but thankfully was able to see this coming and instead just got up in the middle of the inspection week, walked to the headteacher’s office and quit on the spot. Never been more proud of her.
I don’t know what the answer is, but OFSTED is often needlessly damning on people who are often working with little support in the most difficult of circumstances, and I’m not at all surprised that it leads to cases like this.
The actual Ofsted summary of problems that you can read has nothing to do with ‘flossing’ as is being claimed up and down this thread and the report mentions nothing about sexualisation or violence as the sister of the headteacher is reported to have claimed:
◼ Leaders do not fulfil their safeguarding responsibilities effectively. They have not
exercised sufficient oversight and rigorous monitoring of safeguarding processes.
Leaders need to improve their own safeguarding expertise and ensure that roles
and responsibilities are clearly defined and understood by all staff at the school.
◼ Leaders, including governors, have not maintained effective oversight of
safeguarding. They do not have strong systems in place to ensure that recordkeeping and subsequent follow-up work are effective. Leaders and governors
must ensure that robust systems are implemented so that they are assured
actions taken are prompt and proper.
◼ Leaders have not ensured that there is always appropriate supervision during
breaktimes. This means that pupils are potentially at risk of harm. Leaders need
to urgently address these significant weaknesses in safeguarding arrangements.
◼ Leaders and governors’ oversight of attendance is not as strong as it needs to be.
They do not have an appropriate policy or systems in place to identify patterns
and trends quickly enough or connect these with vulnerable groups of pupils.
Leaders must address this swiftly.
◼ Staff expectations of pupils with SEND are not always as high as they could be.
As a result, some pupils with SEND are not achieving as well as they could.
School leaders need to ensure that the curriculum is consistently implemented
and that expectations of pupils with SEND are consistently high.
Say it louder for those in the back; Teaching is currently an unsustainable and toxic profession, that will damage your mental health.
I lasted 3 years, before I had to leave. I genuinely feel that I’m carrying trauma from my time as a teacher, as I was treated so disgustingly poorly by management and colleagues.
I had no free time, and it was considered abnormal if I didn’t answer an email at midnight. The stresses of the job are ridiculous.
If I didn’t receive a job offer elsewhere and was able to leave as quickly as I did, I don’t think I’d be here today.
>’she had this weight on her shoulders hanging over her and she wasn’t officially allowed to talk to her family.’
Why is this the case? What’s going on here when teachers are being forced to act like they have official secrets?
Ofsted may have been compromised by the government’s aim to turn schools into academies. Step 1, say school is underperforming. Step 2, close school seemingly without any back up plan for the kids. Step 3, swoop in at the last minute with more magic money that didn’t exist yesterday to build a shiny new academy. Step 4, add this to the list of ‘bad’ schools the government ‘saved’ us from while ignoring how much worse the situation is with the new academy, which conveniently doesn’t have to live up to the same standards the school did.
That’s so incredibly sad.
I’ve got three children, adults now. All went to good rated and above schools and to be quite frank, they weren’t. Ofsted need an investigation/assessment of their own.
debating the fairness of the “inadequate” rating misses the point
she suffered a major mental health crisis, maybe she could have been helped through it if she had asked for help or if the people close to her had tried to get her help.
pride is not your friend, ask for help, and don’t make the mistake of defining yourself by your job. It can be taken away at any time and the workplace will move on without you. That’s life.
For those that haven’t ever worked in education, they won’t understand what a crippling effect Ofsted have. Literally everything schools do is to appease the inspectors. Over the last twenty or so years they have systematically squeezed the life out of teachers, support staff and schools. They come with an agenda, they must find something wrong. Or at least something that needs to be better. Over the next two or three years schools will spend all their resources putting those “recommendations” in place because if they don’t people will lose their jobs and the school will be deemed “inadequate”.
Then they come back a couple of years later, don’t mention all that work that’s been put in place but find something else wrong.
It’s a never ending merry-go-round of professionals working longer and longer hours to be told that what they’re doing is less and less acceptable. Goal posts move so far they’re not even on the pitch anymore. No matter what you do the rules will be different next time they come. It’s a cruel game you can never win and it grinds people down to the point of questioning why they bother trying.
All the good teachers, the inspirational teachers have left. They were considered old fashioned, they weren’t ticking the required boxes. All that’s left is admin monkeys and spreadsheet filler inners.
Ofsted should be investigated and disbanded. They’ve done untold harm to education.
Look, it’s obviously awful that this has happened, but ofsted didn’t give inadequate for one pupil doing a fucking dance. Obviously.
If you look into it the score was reasonable for serious reasons like safeguarding.
I absolutely guarantee there were factors relating to her work.. Like the serious unserfunding, horrific pay for her and her teachers, the removal of actually useful teaching tools, tightening rules, way to much respect given to the inane opinions of parents with no education themselves.
But a kid flossing is detracting from the real issues.
This is a person with mental health issues that took her own life because of factors we don’t know about, and also a shitty job that we do know about because all teaching jobs in this country are shitty.
Hence the marches and strikes.
If you have kids and a well paid job, go and donate some money to your kids teacher.
It’s rough out there.
If i where her i wouldn’t took my life to the things that hunt me in every problem there is a solution
27 comments
A “caring” primary school headteacher took her own life after learning that Ofsted planned to downgrade her school from Outstanding to Inadequate, her family has said.
Ruth Perry, 53, was principal at Caversham Primary School in Reading for 13 years.
She was left a “shadow of her former self” after an inspection in November which she described as the “worst day of her life”, her family told the BBC.
The inspection on November 15 and 16 last year was the school’s first during Ms Perry’s time as leader, after rules around monitoring of Outstanding schools were changed.
On the first day, Ms Perry was told her school would be dropped from the highest grade to the lowest, her family said.
The report, which is now published, found the school to be Good in every category except leadership and management, where it accused the school of poor record keeping and failings in employment checks which could have put children at risk.
This meant the rating for the whole school was dropped to Inadequate.
Ofsted told staff they had seen a boy doing a dance popular on social media and viewed this as evidence of the sexualisation of pupils, the BBC reported.
It is also alleged that inspectors told staff they had seen child-on-child abuse, but Ms Perry believed this was merely a playground scuffle.
The school dropped from Outstanding to Inadequate
The school dropped from Outstanding to Inadequate
Ms Perry’s sister Julia called the process a “complete injustice”, and said the headteacher had a “weight hanging over her” while waiting for the report to be published.
During this time, Ms Perry took her own life on January 8.
Her sister told BBC South: “All during that process, every time I spoke to her she would talk about the countdown. I remember clearly one day her saying ‘52 days and counting’.
“’Every day she had this weight on her shoulders hanging over her and she wasn’t officially allowed to talk to her family.
“I remember the very first time I saw her rather than just speaking on the phone a couple of days after the end of the Ofsted inspection, she was an absolute shadow of her former self.”
She added: “This one word judgement is just destroying 32 years of her vocation. Education was her vocation. Thirty-two years summed up in one word, ‘inadequate’.
“It just preyed on her mind until she couldn’t take it anymore.
“She was a huge loss. She was my little sister… she was only 53, she had so much more still to give, so much more that she could do.”
Ofsted told BBC South: “We were deeply saddened by Ruth Perry’s tragic death. Our thoughts remain with Mrs Perry’s family, friends and everyone in the Caversham Primary School community.”
> Ofsted told staff they had seen a boy doing a dance popular on social media and viewed this as evidence of the sexualisation of pupils, the BBC reported.
From another article I read, the boy was flossing. While I too am horrified at the sight of that dance, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it sexualisation.
As grim as it is, what is the point of this article. It is certainly not Ofsteds fault that she decided to commit suicide if that is what they are some how seeking to imply. I mean do the telegraph do articles on everybody that commits suicide and name a potential trigger?
From full report
>Safeguarding
The arrangements for safeguarding are not effective.
Leaders have a weak understanding of safeguarding requirements and procedures.
They have not exercised sufficient leadership or oversight of this important work. As
a result, records of safeguarding concerns and the tracking of subsequent actions
are poor. Leaders have not ensured that all required employment checks are
complete for some staff employed at the school. These weaknesses pose potential
risks to pupils.
Some staff have not had the necessary training to be able to record concerns
accurately using the school’s online system. However, staff know how to identify concerns about pupils and to report these to the appropriate leader. The pastoral
support provided for pupils is a strength and they appreciate this level of care.
There is rarely one single reason why a person commits suicide.
And the Telegraph is one of the Tory rags that has politicised teaching and denigrated the profession and humiliated teachers.
Imagine seeing a child doing the floss dance and thinking “that’s too damn sexy”
Someone check whoever did the inspection
Obviously she had some underlying mental health problems you wouldn’t take your life otherwise
The amount of responsibility that a school head has to carry is huge, surely this is an out-dated model now and schools should be run by teams.
How sad, because it sounds like the ofsted report was basically saying improvement needed?
FSA, CQC, and other inspection agencies will always fail you these days for a paperwork issue. Anyone who works in food, care, children, they’ll all tell you – if something is recorded it officially didn’t happen.
There must have been other pressures on her though, because this kind of thing just means you need to improve.
It’s unfortunate but its not offsteads fault is it.
What are they meant to do now, give every school a pass even if it’s not up to snuff?
First of all flossing dance isn’t even a sexual dance, was made up by a kid. If you think its a sexually dance something wrong with you. Really wrong with you.
​
If the kids was grinding and twerking in the hall way than you might have a point.
No one should be driven to this.
And as someone who interacts with ofsted regularly, whilst I know they *want* to make things better for children, I really, really do not think that they do.
I fully expect to get downvoted for this because I can’t figure out a way to put this sensitively.
Mental illness is horrible and if I could wave a magic wand and get rid of it I would. That being said, is there a tiny part of me questioning the suitability of a headteacher of a primary school who’s mental health is so fragile that an Ofsted downgrade caused her to commit suicide? Yes, yes there is.
I’m no ofsted fan, but the rating was deserved for the employment checks failings alone.
Her death is regrettable, but sadly these sorts of job related suicides aren’t uncommon and I’m not sure what raking over this will do for the grieving family nor school.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most people having an aneurysm in this thread have never read an OFSTED report or have any idea what an inspection entails.
This is one head teacher, yes it’s a tragedy but my god people love to over egg context pudding.
There’s a lot going on here… but surprised this hasn’t been mentioned:
> Ruth Perry, 53, was principal at Caversham Primary School in Reading for 13 years. . . . The inspection on November 15 and 16 last year was the school’s first during Ms Perry’s time as leader
So no inspection for *at least 13 years*?!
OFSTED is utterly brutal for teachers.
My wife nearly had a breakdown because of OFSTED, but thankfully was able to see this coming and instead just got up in the middle of the inspection week, walked to the headteacher’s office and quit on the spot. Never been more proud of her.
I don’t know what the answer is, but OFSTED is often needlessly damning on people who are often working with little support in the most difficult of circumstances, and I’m not at all surprised that it leads to cases like this.
The actual Ofsted summary of problems that you can read has nothing to do with ‘flossing’ as is being claimed up and down this thread and the report mentions nothing about sexualisation or violence as the sister of the headteacher is reported to have claimed:
◼ Leaders do not fulfil their safeguarding responsibilities effectively. They have not
exercised sufficient oversight and rigorous monitoring of safeguarding processes.
Leaders need to improve their own safeguarding expertise and ensure that roles
and responsibilities are clearly defined and understood by all staff at the school.
◼ Leaders, including governors, have not maintained effective oversight of
safeguarding. They do not have strong systems in place to ensure that recordkeeping and subsequent follow-up work are effective. Leaders and governors
must ensure that robust systems are implemented so that they are assured
actions taken are prompt and proper.
◼ Leaders have not ensured that there is always appropriate supervision during
breaktimes. This means that pupils are potentially at risk of harm. Leaders need
to urgently address these significant weaknesses in safeguarding arrangements.
◼ Leaders and governors’ oversight of attendance is not as strong as it needs to be.
They do not have an appropriate policy or systems in place to identify patterns
and trends quickly enough or connect these with vulnerable groups of pupils.
Leaders must address this swiftly.
◼ Staff expectations of pupils with SEND are not always as high as they could be.
As a result, some pupils with SEND are not achieving as well as they could.
School leaders need to ensure that the curriculum is consistently implemented
and that expectations of pupils with SEND are consistently high.
[https://www.cavershamprimary.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10242325-Caversham-Primary-Sc-109778-final-PDF.pdf](https://www.cavershamprimary.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/10242325-Caversham-Primary-Sc-109778-final-PDF.pdf)
Say it louder for those in the back; Teaching is currently an unsustainable and toxic profession, that will damage your mental health.
I lasted 3 years, before I had to leave. I genuinely feel that I’m carrying trauma from my time as a teacher, as I was treated so disgustingly poorly by management and colleagues.
I had no free time, and it was considered abnormal if I didn’t answer an email at midnight. The stresses of the job are ridiculous.
If I didn’t receive a job offer elsewhere and was able to leave as quickly as I did, I don’t think I’d be here today.
>’she had this weight on her shoulders hanging over her and she wasn’t officially allowed to talk to her family.’
Why is this the case? What’s going on here when teachers are being forced to act like they have official secrets?
Ofsted may have been compromised by the government’s aim to turn schools into academies. Step 1, say school is underperforming. Step 2, close school seemingly without any back up plan for the kids. Step 3, swoop in at the last minute with more magic money that didn’t exist yesterday to build a shiny new academy. Step 4, add this to the list of ‘bad’ schools the government ‘saved’ us from while ignoring how much worse the situation is with the new academy, which conveniently doesn’t have to live up to the same standards the school did.
That’s so incredibly sad.
I’ve got three children, adults now. All went to good rated and above schools and to be quite frank, they weren’t. Ofsted need an investigation/assessment of their own.
debating the fairness of the “inadequate” rating misses the point
she suffered a major mental health crisis, maybe she could have been helped through it if she had asked for help or if the people close to her had tried to get her help.
pride is not your friend, ask for help, and don’t make the mistake of defining yourself by your job. It can be taken away at any time and the workplace will move on without you. That’s life.
For those that haven’t ever worked in education, they won’t understand what a crippling effect Ofsted have. Literally everything schools do is to appease the inspectors. Over the last twenty or so years they have systematically squeezed the life out of teachers, support staff and schools. They come with an agenda, they must find something wrong. Or at least something that needs to be better. Over the next two or three years schools will spend all their resources putting those “recommendations” in place because if they don’t people will lose their jobs and the school will be deemed “inadequate”.
Then they come back a couple of years later, don’t mention all that work that’s been put in place but find something else wrong.
It’s a never ending merry-go-round of professionals working longer and longer hours to be told that what they’re doing is less and less acceptable. Goal posts move so far they’re not even on the pitch anymore. No matter what you do the rules will be different next time they come. It’s a cruel game you can never win and it grinds people down to the point of questioning why they bother trying.
All the good teachers, the inspirational teachers have left. They were considered old fashioned, they weren’t ticking the required boxes. All that’s left is admin monkeys and spreadsheet filler inners.
Ofsted should be investigated and disbanded. They’ve done untold harm to education.
Look, it’s obviously awful that this has happened, but ofsted didn’t give inadequate for one pupil doing a fucking dance. Obviously.
If you look into it the score was reasonable for serious reasons like safeguarding.
I absolutely guarantee there were factors relating to her work.. Like the serious unserfunding, horrific pay for her and her teachers, the removal of actually useful teaching tools, tightening rules, way to much respect given to the inane opinions of parents with no education themselves.
But a kid flossing is detracting from the real issues.
This is a person with mental health issues that took her own life because of factors we don’t know about, and also a shitty job that we do know about because all teaching jobs in this country are shitty.
Hence the marches and strikes.
If you have kids and a well paid job, go and donate some money to your kids teacher.
It’s rough out there.
If i where her i wouldn’t took my life to the things that hunt me in every problem there is a solution