As schools return and settle into the new academic year, host Shreena Kotecha talks to Lee Owston, Ofsted’s deputy director of schools and education, about some of the recent changes made to the way Ofsted inspects schools. Shreena also finds out what schools inspectors get up to during the summer break.  For more information read the Ofsted blog or sign up to an Ofsted webinar. Shreena: Hello, and welcome to a bite size episode of Ofsted talks to mark the start of the new academic year, which I'm very much looking forward to because my youngest starts reception. I'm Shreena Kotecha and I'm head of strategy here at Ofsted. I'm here with Lee Owston, who is Deputy Director of schools and education, and we're going to talk about what we've been up to at Ofsted during the summer, including some of the changes that have been made to the way we inspect and report. So Lee, one of the questions we often get asked is what happens at Ofsted when the schools are closed?   Lee Owston Yeah, hi, Shreena. Good question. It's certainly true that we don't inspect schools during the six week break. But we don't just inspect schools. So you know, our inspection and regulatory work does continue in early years and further education and skills and some of our adults learning provision. But all of our schools HMI have been former leaders in schools. So, myself included, we're certainly used to longer summer breaks. So, many people enjoy some annual leave during the summer. But we don't get all of the time. You know, we don't get all of the six weeks. There are a number of activities that we undertake when we're working, but schools are closed. So, for example, we might look at completed evidence bases, or we might look at reports to try and gather together some information on a particular theme. So, we've recently done something on careers education to try and understand, you know, how much do inspectors get underneath that in their evidence bases do they then report on it. And of course, if we pull all that information together, it really helps me and my teams understand whether we need to, do we need to deliver some training do we need to adjust our handbooks? Do we need to have a focus in terms of quality assurance?  So, there's plenty to keep us busy, even though schools are closed and inspection isn't continuing. But we really do, you know, maximise that time so that we can hit the ground running just as you said, you know the start of a new term, Ofsted's just the same, we try and get as much done as possible so that we can be prepared for what the year ahead brings.   Shreena Kotecha: Brilliant. And you mentioned that one of the things you get up to over the summer is adjusting inspection handbooks. Could you tell us a bit more about the changes that have been made the schools inspection handbook.   Lee: Yeah, and this is, this is an approach we kind of try and do or take annually. So we try and make as few changes to the inspection handbook as we can. And if we are going to make some changes, we try and do it at this point in the year. So we do it just before the summer, and publish just before everybody goes away on their summer break. So that again, come September, we can implement that new handbook. So we've made a number of updates, actually, for this year, ready for September. And there's probably far too many to list here. But just to give you a kind of flavour of some of the main ones. And actually, before I start, it's important to reassure people that when we do make changes, including this year, they're not fundamentally changing anything about, you know, what we look at, what we evaluate, or how we go about our work. What we're keen to do is try and clarify some of the areas that we know people are less sure about and where we've heard through our engagements that they're just unclear. So we try and review every year and ensure that you know, the messages are as clear as possible. So one of those areas for this year,