Eric Craven

Eric Craven taught in special schools before becoming the headteacher of a special school for pupils with severe learning difficulties in 1986. He also worked as a part-time lecturer for the Open University for 14 years, tutoring the second level special educational needs course, ‘Learning for All’. In 1990 he was appointed to his second headship, that of a large special school, before moving into local authority advisory and school improvement work in Halton in 1999. From there he moved to Wirral where he was the inspector for special educational needs. In 2002 he returned to headship at a day and residential special school for pupils with learning difficulties and emotional, social and behavioural problems. He became one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools in 2003 and worked initially in the School Improvement Division of Ofsted, monitoring schools in a category of concern. As HMI he led school inspections across all phases, visiting over 200 schools in 60 local authorities, undertaking various types of inspection. In more than 140 of the schools he was the lead inspector. Additionally, he led the surveys and authored the reports on ‘Attendance in Secondary Schools (2007)’ and ‘Day 6 of Exclusion (2009)’. He was also a team member on various other national surveys. He was promoted to the position of managing inspector in 2009 and had responsibility for line managing eleven HMI whilst also being Ofsted’s national operational lead for special schools and pupil referral units. In April 2011 he took early retirement from Ofsted. He continued to lead inspections of schools, primarily special schools and pupil referral units, and often acted as a team inspector on mainstream school inspections until the end of 2014. Now he works solely as an educational consultant and currently supports a number of primary and secondary schools, special schools and pupil referral units with their school improvement work.