Party also considering free care services for the over-65s as it prepares to fight possible snap poll

Labour is pledging to abolish Ofsted and end “high stakes” school inspections as part of radical plans drawn up before a possible snap election.

Angela Rayner: ‘I’m not OK with a school system that allows you to fail or be chucked out’ Read more

Announcements on education, health and care are expected to be at the heart of Labour’s pitch to voters at its annual conference in Brighton this week. With Labour’s leadership still under pressure over its ambiguous position on Brexit, senior figures hope that announcing eye-catching policies can refocus a coming election on its plans for public services.

The Observer also understands that the party is seriously considering a plan that would make care services for the over-65s free at the point of use, excluding accommodation costs.

This would deal with the long-running crisis in social care, but may well require tax increases.

Pledging to scrap Ofsted will cause huge debate. While some teaching unions have campaigned for the move, the inspectorate has denied a claim by Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, that it is biased against schools with more socially deprived intakes.

In an interview with the Observer today, Rayner said that England’s schools inspectors were fuelling a crisis in teacher recruitment and failing to give parents an accurate account of school standards.

“We would abolish Ofsted and we would replace it with a different system,” she said. “I believe Ofsted measures poverty. It measures deprivation. It doesn’t measure excellence. And I think Ofsted has to measure excellence. It’s driving these competitive league tables.

“I want parents to have confidence that regardless of where your child is educated or what your child’s abilities are, they will get the best possible education. And at the moment the current Ofsted system does not measure that.”

She also pledged to roll out a national version of the London Challenge, an £80m New Labour improvement programme credited with helping to improve the capital’s secondary schools. It would be led by the National Education Service Labour has already pledged to create.

“Instead of seeing schools as competing with each other, they should be collaborating with each other, and teachers should be enabled and empowered to teach in the classroom,” she said. “At the moment, they’re not given the tools with which to do that. You can see that in a number of things – in the curriculum, in the way that teachers are leaving the profession at record levels. I believe that the whole system at the moment is a hothouse to pitch school against school.”

Rayner said Ofsted’s rating system, which sees schools described as outstanding, good, requiring improvement or inadequate, did not give parents “a clear understanding of what a school is and how good a school is”.

Under the Labour plan, Ofsted would be abolished and replaced with a “two-phase” inspection system. All education providers would be subjected to regular “health checks” led by local authorities. Where concerns arose, more in-depth inspections would be conducted by specialists.

Rayner said: “Certainly some of the things that I’ve been made aware of, when I’ve gone round schools, is some of the gaming that goes on [during inspections]. There is no better judge of whether that school is right for your child [than] by actually physically going into the school and seeing whether the school environment is right for them. At the moment they’ve been weaned off some of that.”

She said that handing inspections to another authority was not a rebadging exercise. “We’re removing the high-stakes single-point testing that Ofsted are doing currently,” she said. However, the party will face criticism that removing the rating system will mean parents will struggle to understand whether a school is good or bad.

It means Labour is planning huge changes to the education system should it come to power. Jeremy Corbyn has already pledged that a Labour government would abolish Sats for seven- and 11-year-olds, as well as plans for baseline assessments for reception classes.

It is also understood that John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, could announce that care for over-65s should be free. The move, similar to measures already in place in Scotland, would spare millions of people from high care costs. However, it would require billions in funding, potentially through higher tax.

Labour refused to confirm that the policy would be announced, but said: “Labour in government is committed to creating a national care service to ensure people are able to access the services so desperately needed.”