03 December 2004
Education watchdog Ofsted faces a legal challenge after inspectors admitted copying chunks of a report on a Birmingham school from an existing study on a Bradford comprehensive.
Ofsted agreed to amend its report on high-performing Lordswood Girls' School after teaching staff discovered that two critical pages were identical to a study on Parkside School in Yorkshire.
Embarrassingly for Ofsted, Lordswood head teacher Jane Hattatt exposed the ruse in the same way she exposes homework cheats. 'I thought: "What would a stupid child have done if they had wanted to pretend to have completed the work they had not done?" So I typed key phrases into the Internet.'
PFdec2004
