Poster #4 - The Impact of Sentiment on School Inspection Reports in England

• In Event: 75.043 - MTCC Poster Session 17
  In Poster Session: 75.043-1 - Advanced Studies of National Databases Poster Session

Abstract

The national inspectorate for England (Ofsted) periodically inspects schools as to provide a diagnosis of what they should do to improve. Given that Ofsted employs thousands of inspectors, this raises the question of whether inspectors look for the same thing when judging a school, or indeed offer consistent advice. We analyse the complete corpus of nationally published Ofsted inspection reports since 2000 to empirically explore whether inspection report sentiments have changed over time with the coming and going of different Head Inspectors. We utilise text mining and sentiment analysis to explore these questions. The scholarly significance of the study is that we gain insight into the inspection process, which can contribute to reducing the ambiguity in the inspection process.

Authors

• Christian Bokhove, University of Southampton

• Samuel Sims