OFSTED

Term started on Wednesday 6th September. The dreaded brown envelope arrived on Friday 8th. By the following Friday, the inspection team had already been and gone.

The first three inspections I faced, we were given at least three months notice. We chased our tails with endless bits of paperwork that nobody read, wrote policies that nobody knew about or knowingly practised, marked all the books we could lay our hands on, and planned our lessons to perfection. Last time, in March 2003, I worked over 70 hours a week for the last month, including half term week.

This time, we had three working days. At least with it being September, there wasn't much marking to catch up with!

The college came out reasonably well, and we are currently waiting for the final report. However, the overall classification was satisfactory, on the new four point scale of Outstanding / Good / Satisfactory and Inadequate. Pretty disheartening to start with, but when the reality dawned on us as a college as to how this judgement was arrived at, I was appalled.

Apparently, the determining factor in shaping the overall grade is the standards section, where your examinations results are compared, grade for grade, against all other schools in the country. So, however you might do in the other sections of the report, the overall judgement has to stay in the standards category.

My concern is this: I work in a local authority where there are grammar schools that cream off about 30% of the best students. When a student gets removed from another school and is classified as "hard to place" five of the eight schools in the area, including the three grammar schools, are always full and will not take any of these difficult youngsters. This means that they all end up in one of the three remaining schools in the authority, or two in the case when they are being transferred between the three schools. Consequently, as a big college, we place over 50% of the cases in the authority.

Our inspection grade for Social Inclusion? Only good.
Quality of teaching and learning? The inspectors saw lessons that were all satisfactory or good, and one or two outstanding, but the quality of teaching and learning is only satisfcatory.

Push too many up to the "good" category, and the inspection report, which is written in preliminary form even before the inspectors set foot on the campus, becomes good, rather than satisfactory. But we can't have that, because your standards, the dominant category, are only satisfactory!

I heard about another selective school recently, which had an OFSTED inspection. Without giving too much away about the school, their Special Needs (they don't have any students on their roll that we would even classify as special needs) was outstanding.

What about Social Inclusion? When they exclude the vast majority of students in their town on the basis of not being clever enough to darken the doorstep? Outstanding, incredibly!

Outstanding, apparently, in just about every category... When asked to justify one particularly hollow claim in their self appraisal, the head is rumoured to have said, "I justify everything in here on the basis of our outstanding results." What infuriates me is that the toothless inspectors rolled over, caved in and let them get away with it.

Whatever this may be, it is not just, it is far from it! I'm a Christian, and I believe that there is an all-powerful God, and that He hates injustice. In the last 22 years, I have always worked in towns where the middle class ladder climbers mostly send their children somewhere else. As our society continues to fall apart, where young people from broken homes are no longer the damaged minority but have become the norm, how can we bring about reformation so that we see an embracing of those who are marginalised (in this case through their aged 11 measured "ability level" - I use the words reluctantly) rather than seeking to enhance the differences?

Brave New World

Bit of a self-indulgent rant about Government interference in the teaching profession this time: non-teachers may want to skip this one altogether - sorry!

Started thinking the other day - yes, I know - dangerous pastime. By next summer I will have spent half my life working as a teacher. I love my job, but sometimes I get the impression I'm like a hamster running on a wheel getting nowhere, just going round in circles.

When I started teaching in 1984, there was no such thing as coursework in any subect, mine being Mathematics, but it was brought in to encourage students to think in independent and divergent ways.

The trouble is, how do you objectively use this to contribute towards someone's overall performance? The exam boards were doing a pretty good job with this, but then the Government sent in their so-called "experts" (who have a specialised knowledge of a small area; as you become more expert, the greater your knowledge of a more contained area, making the ultimate expert into someone who knows everything about nothing) who with their size elevens imposed a generic mark scheme for all tasks. The result was an inevitable slide into everyone jumping through the same hoop in a uniform manner.

This defeated the object of independent thought - perhaps this was a hidden agenda by the thought police, who have now decided to pull the plug on coursework altogether in Mathematics. They claim the system is open to abuse: too right it is! Every educational system has its flaws, but exploitation is one that is normally reserved for the rich and powerful: how else could high ranking members of society pass an entrance examination to our top universities when even a low grade A level pass appears almost beyond them?

Nowadays, most homes have internet access, and just typing in the name of a coursework task we use, can reveal a tailor-made solution (for a price) to whatever you want. Once the masses learn to join in with abusing the system, suddenly our politicians are falling over themselves to take drastic measures to correct it.

I firmly believe in having a level playing field. I used to work with a teacher who was a chief examiner for a subject. Our students always did well in his subject, as they were well prepared for their papers, which had been written by my colleague, albeit a year or so earlier. What annoyed me was that the performance of these students in my subject was being measured against this, and inevitably we came worse off every year. I also believe totally in maintaining integrity, even when the odds are unjustly stacked against you, and I will be writing about this in my next post about the OFSTED inspection we have just had.

Middle Age!

Hey! I'm married to a 40 year old! Sssssshhhhh! Don't tell anyone! Abi looks early 30s or even younger, and she is quite content to leave everyone in blissful ignorance about her true age. We had a lovely couple of days in Paris, in a three star hotel - about the same as an English Tourist Board two crowns, but it was just useful as a base. We did all the touristy type things, like a boat on the Seine, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, with this picture taken at the top. This was the first time in fourteen years since we started a family, that we have been alone together for more than one night. Thanks to Jon and Sarah for offering to be mum and dad to the Sparklers for a couple of days!

Silly Summer

In July, the Yarrells hosted a party for Julia's birthday, and we all had to go in fancy dress, as someone with a name beginning with J. As most of us were Christians, there was the obligatory Jesus. I went as... Julia Yarrell. I think all the negatives have been destroyed, thankfully. Pictured is my lovely wife doing a great impression of Jack Sparrow.

Happy Easter!

Next came Easter, and we spent three fantastic days with good old friends from our days in Northamptonshire, who are now living it up just down the road from us in Cornwall with their four children and their (then) pregnant dog. Esme, their youngest, was born when they were sharing our house prior to us all heading to the south-west.

Extra Family Member

Oops! I've had a blog for almost a year, and have only posted one comment since the original one....

What's been happening then? First of all, we had a lovely German girl called Eve come stay with us for a month in the Spring: she spent her birthday and her first wedding anniversay with us! here is a picture of her.