EDUCATION unions reiterated their calls for a root and branch reform of the way schools are inspected yesterday after Ofsted downgraded hundreds of institutions. 

The National Education Union (NEU) warned that the supposedly independent inspectorate’s findings are “frequently unreliable and invalid” after it announced that a whopping 80 per cent of “outstanding” schools revisited last year were bumped down.

Most of the 308 primaries and secondaries reclassified were changed to “good,” but 17 per cent were told they “needed improvement” and 4 per cent were “inadequate.”