RLE
No, I am afraid they don't count. Deepcut was not a good part of our history, but there have been some dramatic and, some may say, well over the top action plans as a result of Deepcut. Just because one training unit had an issue, all of the others, which had no issues, have been made to implement OTT regulations. I am afraid that bringing OFSTED in will just result in another level of unnecessary bureaucracy. This comes from the OFSTED website:
Our specialist inspectors are experts in the type of service they inspect. When they carry out an inspection, be it of a children’s home, a nursery, a school, a college, or a local authority, they focus on the quality of the service for individual children, young people or older learners. During an inspection, inspectors collect first-hand evidence based on the practice they observe and what they learn from the people using the service. They use this evidence and other information available to make their professional judgements which we publish in inspection reports.
Alarm bells should be going off with the first line of this statement. You see "we" have pretty good assessment systems of our own and lots of our own experts. We have STANEVALs, CFS, FOST, CGS etc. We have been doing a pretty good job of training people to be pilots, engineers, adminers, soldiers, sailors etc etc for some considerable time. We always get the latest fad dumped on us "best practice" and we forget that there is such a thing as "military best practice".
We have been pretty good at doing what we do for nearly 100 years (in the RAF's case) and longer in the case of the RN and British Army. We shouldn't be afraid of external comment, but we shouldn't be too quick to throw out good practice because some external consultant with no understanding of our ethos, tradition and techniques makes an observation in a report. We got IiP forced upon us and we dumped it again after a few years. I leave you with this comment from an IiP assessor, in the hope that one day excessive bureaucracy is the first thing that goes a "savings measure": "Actually we recommended that the whole RAF be accredited as a single entity, rather than unit by unit, but that wasn't allowed."