OFSTED... Grrrrrrr!

OFSTED.

That single word of doom. OFSTED.

It's not even a real word, it's an acronym, and yet it strikes fear into the very heart of every head teacher across the UK.  It doesn't scare me, it intrigues me.  I am a good teacher.  That's not me being big-headed, I am a good teacher.  I work my butt off every day in order to be a good teacher.  I know that the day I find teaching easy is the day I have to leave and do something else.  A good teacher is always trying and always failing, because we are, by definition, people who can always do better.  No two days are the same and no two children are the same, you are constantly improving, constantly making changes and constantly questioning why it was only good.  I want to be brilliant.  Every teacher does, but once we get there we also know there is nowhere else to go, so we keep trying to be brilliant and hopefully we'll get there by the time we retire.

I love my job.  For anyone who has read the backlog of blogs you'll know how much I love my job and I've never been scared of being inspected, but this new form of OFSTED is making me doubt my basic ability to teach.  The whole organisation was overturned in October last year and all new policies put in place, we were told more would be added in January and they were, but on top of that, the policies they had just put in place were changed. So, in short, we have had two major overhauls in four months.  This has sent senior management into meltdown.  We are trying to stay on top of it, but when the inspectors themselves don't know what they are doing, how on earth can we?

My policy has always been the same - the students come first.  Every student is individual, every student has their own target and their own strengths and weaknesses and it is my job to teach them how to deal with those difficulties and to teach them how to learn.  I also teach them how to be nice human beings!  I have been willing to stand up for my policy ever since I started teaching six years ago, and finally OFSTED have agreed the focus should be entirely on the students instead of the teacher putting on a show (under the last government, that's what we were expected to do).  They have a very simple policy:

Every student must make progress in every lesson and this progress must be clearly demonstrated throughout the lesson.

Ok, I can probably do that, although it usually takes longer than 50minutes for a student to understand the structure of a monologue and all it entails, but I'll give it a go.  Of course they forgot to mention the following points:

We will only observe you for 20minutes, we will fail you if we cannot speak to the students when we want, we will decide if the level of progress is acceptable or not and the clincher... if you question every student to make sure they have made progress, you are wasting valuable time that could be better spent teaching!

Are you kidding me??

I've never been scared or OFSTED and I'm still not. I'm hacked off and fed up.  Would it be too much to ask for the organisation to be teachers, ex-teachers, head teachers, consultants?  You know, people who are involved in education right now.  Is that too much to ask?  That the people who have the power to sack us or close us down for failure to provide a good education actually know what they are doing and actually know the situations we are faced with every day.  OFSTED should be a continual study of the school, the teachers and the students.  Anyone can fake it for two days (in fact some schools bring in advanced skills teachers to take the place of their 'less successful' teachers during an inspection), how about you subtly watch us for a term.  Watch us mess up, watch us battle with that student who just doesn't care, watch us succeed, watch us have a brilliant lesson that went completely off-plan, but where they learnt more than you could have planned, watch us laugh with the students who do care, watch us pick up the pieces of a broken family, watch us fail (yes, the horror, it sometimes goes wrong) and watch us try our damnedest to make up for it. Then judge us.  Judge us honestly and judge us fairly.  We're not superheroes and we cannot achieve the impossible, but by the end of the inspection you'll see we sure as hell try to!