Old grade, new card: how to tell which one is live

The simplest rule: the most recent inspection is the live one. If the most recent inspection predates 10 November 2025, the school still carries an old-framework single-word grade, and that grade is current, not historic.

That old grade is not void and should not be struck through or hedged. It remains the school's live judgement until Ofsted publishes a new inspection, however long that takes. Treating a pre-2025 Good as expired is the mirror image of the more common error and is just as wrong.

Where a new report card exists, both records still matter. The card tells you the current picture across six areas; the old grade tells you what the school was judged to be before, and therefore what changed. A school that moved from Outstanding to needs attention on leadership and governance is telling you something a single snapshot cannot.

Two complications catch people out. The first is the ungraded inspection. Ofsted carries these out between full inspections, and they do not produce a new grade — they produce a statement that the school remains, for example, Good. On a profile this appears as an outcome rather than a judgement, and the school's live grade is still the one from the earlier graded inspection. If you treat an ungraded inspection as a fresh grade, you will date the judgement years too recently.

The second is the monitoring inspection, which usually follows a poor outcome and reports on progress rather than re-judging the school. Again: no new grade, and the previous judgement stands.

So the question "what is this school's Ofsted rating" has three parts, and a useful answer gives all three: what the judgement is, which framework produced it, and when. That is why TrustlyEd shows old grades and report cards side by side with the inspection date and type against each, including ungraded and monitoring visits, rather than collapsing everything into one word and a date.

A practical check before any conversation: look at the inspection type first, then the date, then the judgement. In that order, the edge cases stop being edge cases.