A radical overhaul of the school inspection system, making it harder for teachers to disguise their failings, was announced yesterday by David Bell, the head of Ofsted.
Instead of being given two months' notice of an inspection - time usually spent on extensive cosmetic preparation and writing meaningless documents, Mr Bell said - schools will now be told on a Friday to expect the inspectors on the Monday.
"Schools have learnt how to show themselves off in the best light," he said. "Shorter, sharper inspections will give us a 'warts-and-all' picture of schools as we find them, not how they would wish to be found.
"The purpose of inspection is to help improve children's education, not for schools to satisfy inspectors."
The interval between inspections will be halved from six years to three, enabling Ofsted to monitor schools more closely and giving parents more up-to-date information about the quality of their children's education.
"Inspection will be more rigorous and the inspectors' reports will be briefer and easier to read," Mr Bell said. "This is Ofsted consolidating its role as the parents' champion."
To make the process less intrusive and burdensome for schools and teachers, the size of the inspection teams will be slashed - saving £10 million a year on Ofsted's budget of £70 million - and the inspectors will stay for one or two days instead of a week.
Instead of inspecting everything from the state of the lavatories to the religious content of assemblies, they will "focus on what really matters" - the effectiveness of the school's management and the quality of the teaching.
The usual 80-page report will be cut to a maximum of six pages, grading every school for overall effectiveness on a scale from A to E.
"We want to check whether a school's central nervous system is working well, not map its genomes," said Mr Bell, who hopes to introduce the new system by September 2005. "We're exchanging a searchlight for a laser."
All schools in England have been inspected at least twice under the system introduced by the Tories in 1992. But the Government believes so much information is now available to parents that inspections are more elaborate than is necessary.
David Miliband, the schools minister, said it was time for a "sharper focus, lighter touch and a clearer link to school improvement". The Government wanted "a new relationship with schools, one less marked by micro-management and bureaucracy".
The National Union of Teachers said short notice and sharper inspections could mean "rough justice".
The National Association of Head Teachers said it was concerned about the demand for "higher and higher standards" and the poor quality of many inspection teams.
