It could have been simpler. I mean, usually, you admit an error, apologise, make amends and then apologise again for good measure. Even if, whisper it, you don’t actually feel like apologising, you sometimes do it. In these cases, you can issue, what I like to call, a casual apology. This is similar to idiots who are often forced to apologise for a choice bit of casual racism or sexism; you know, where the person apologising doesn’t really see what everyone else is upset about but they realise that they might have to acknowledge the presence of upsetness in others. A racist, who has declared that they have an unexplainable problem with people who have ‘negroid features’ may wish to apologise, not for what they said, but for the offence their comments have, apparently, caused. The everyday sexist who is surprised that his ‘cuddly‘ nature is misinterpreted as opportunistic, inappropriate and unacceptable groping by the poor and undeserving pretty girls in his office, may, grudgingly, admit that he can see how his actions may have been misconstrued as deplorable and offer an apology, but, you know, they were different times.

Now, I’m not calling Nick Gibb or Nicky Morgan sexist or racist. I’m not. I’m just saying that they might want to learn a thing or two from recent sexists and racists. Or to be more accurate, take the advice that publicists and agents have given recent sexists and racists. So, to be clear, I am not calling Nick Gibb or Nicky Morgan sexists or racists. I’m just saying, maybe they should apologise like recently exposed sexists and/or racists.

Because, let’s be honest, they have made a mistake and they should really apologise. To be fair, we don’t know if they intentionally went out and made the mistake or if the mistake was made by the sheer magnitude of their incompetence. Either way, they’ve gone and done it and the world has been awaiting their apologetic volte-face ever since.

Not Nick Gibb and Nicky Morgan though. That isn’t their style. I mean there isn’t a paper towel absorbent enough to clean up the mess they’ve made over end of year assessments, but by jingo they’re committed to saving face. It’s like seeing a puppy sitting next to a hefty turd, steaming away and slowly melting into the carpet, looking up at its owner with an expression of pure innocence whilst wagging its tail. It’s almost like they’re proud to be racists or sexists, or puppies that have defecated all over my new rug, or, in their case, appalling bastions of education.

It hasn’t been a good year but most of us were cracking on with delivering a new curriculum hoping that, at the end of the year, any test would provide us with a fair reflection of our children’s levels of attainment. We were assured by the DfE that expectations would be similar to previous years’, give or take the odd exclamation mark. And then the news broke that the expectations were significantly higher than we had been led to believe. All over the land, educators were faced with a dilemma: to enable our children to make months’ worth of progress within a couple of weeks we must either begin hot-housing or begin building a time machine big enough for 60 kids.

I was half-way through fixing an electric cable between the local church roof and the school’s mini-bus’s flux-capacitor when I got an email from the NAHT saying that an ultimatum had been sent to the government to either recalibrate the expected standard or delay the date of data submission. Then I heard that all the major unions were going to meet up and discuss the possibility of suspending SATS. Online rationale and emotions rose; I put away my blue-prints for time-travel and I was suddenly filled with hope, as well as a sudden understanding of why I should never be the leader of a union.

The next morning, as I feverishly told my Year 6 teachers all about the union action, I felt certain that the ‘powers that be’ would come to their senses. They would issue a full and frank apology, sort it out and we’d all move on, the best of friends.

Not quite.

A concession has been made. And for that, I thank Nick and Nicky from the bottom of my heart. We now have a few more days to submit teacher assessments. If my teachers started ticking the boxes yesterday, we’ll just about make it.

But they have gone about it in the mealiest mouthed way imaginable.

First we get Gibb’s letter where he graciously tells us that he is ‘prepared’ to ‘relax’ the deadlines for ‘one year only’. What do you mean relax? I think you mean change. I think you mean that you will admit a lapse in judgement and move the deadlines to a more appropriate time that supports and respects the amount of time and effort we’ve put into your new curriculum and recent upping of the ante. Relax indeed. I bet there was a great deal of whooping and high-fiving when that word was hit upon during your multiple advisor led letter writing process. Yeah, don’t say ‘change’, it sounds too weak. Say ‘relax’ instead; that makes it sound like we’re in charge but, you know, we’re wearing slippers. Oh, and ‘for one year only’. Well thank you Gibb for being of the generous opinion that we’ll manage to grasp all of your subtle curriculum changes within the next twelve months. I think you’ll find we might have been alright with your original deadlines had you not moved the goalposts to sometime next academic year.

I was about to get onto the fact that you decided not to issue an apology, not even a pretend one like a good racist or sexist, but then along came Nicky Morgan’s hostage video.

Up against a black background, Nicky Morgan’s face emerged and she began talking to someone. I’m not sure who. It certainly wasn’t me but she seemed pretty sure that she knew them personally. She kept telling this person that they agreed with her. She kept telling them that they, like her, wanted to raise standards and that other people (I assume she meant people like me) were being disingenuous by thinking that they should follow the advice she had given us through the exemplification materials. She kept telling whoever she was talking to that this was scaremongering, as if she had only released the exemplification materials to weed people like me out. She assured us that schools should be able to prepare children for the tests by focussing on making sure each child reached their potential regardless of where the standard is set. At this point in the video her eyes go even wider as if to suggest that her internal monologue is screaming ‘But that doesn’t make any sense!’ You’re right Nicky’s internal monologue, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense that you can prepare a child to succeed in a test when no one knows what a good score in the test is. Sadly, although I know to you and your imaginary friend it sounds very worthy, getting a child to achieve their potential doesn’t provide any comfort because your recently released materials have invented a new level of potential that will be extraordinarily challenging for a lot of children to reach. Although, I am painfully aware, by your smugly written piece to camera, that any resistance to these higher standards will be judged as low expectations.

Again, like Mr Gibb, you offer not one jot of an apology. You make it sound like you are making concessions to mollify the troublemakers. You sound as if this was all rather tiresome and couldn’t we just crack on with getting eleven year olds to write like post graduates. How frustrating! (Sorry that use of an exclamation wouldn’t get me a point at KS1.) How frustrating that is! (Much better.)

It’s such a shame because saying sorry can really help mend relationships. Even some ex-sexists and/or ex-racists, whose new best friends are black and/or women, have said sorry and are now living happy and indiscriminate lives. It’s just a shame that neither Nick Gibb nor Nicky Morgan are interested in learning from their own mistakes. They seem more concerned with playing down their errors of judgement and ploughing their mistake deep into the ground. At what point, I wonder, will they cease and desist and stop hiding under a pretence of improving standards in favour of coming out and valuing the profession above anything else?

 

There is a line in the film ‘The Fugitive’ where, in response to Harrison Ford’s earnest protestations that he didn’t murder his wife, Tommy Lee Jones says: I don’t care. Never have three words of dialogue summed up a character so perfectly. Within those three words contain the very DNA of Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Gerard, a bloodhound of a US Marshall, who cares more about the scent than the sentiment. When he delivers that line, with a facial expression that would make a plank of wood seem lively, you immediately understand that we are in the company of a true professional. A man who is able to do his job to exacting standards because he focusses on the right thing with absolute clarity. 

 

As you walk into the staffroom of Ofsted HQ there is, I imagine, a large banner stretching right across the far wall, just above the washing up rota and the comedy postcards saying ‘Keep calm and carry on inspecting’, ‘You don’t have to be a failed teacher to work here but it helps’ and ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach PE; those who can’t teach PE become Ofsted inspectors’. The banner, written in comic sans, was put up just after their Christmas party, by Sean Harford himself, and contains the 2016 mantra for Her Majesty’s Inspectorate: Myth-busting makes us feel good. 

 

This mantra has already brought us a document on what inspectors don’t want to see during an inspection. I imagine that every self-respecting Head has already had every word of this tattooed all over their body, in a variety of gothic fonts, so that, during a rogue inspection, they can tear open their shirt and scream ‘Read the small print you rogue son-of-a-bitch, you can’t expect to see any sort of marking in our spelling books.’ The mantra banner or ‘bantra’ (as I believe Sean likes to call it) has also resulted in a series of videos where Ofsted inspectors give us the lowdown on how to survive an Ofsted inspection like a pro (in short, Heads should concentrate on doing whatever it is that is important for their children and sod everything else). These will be followed by a series of myth-busting blogs, tweets and memes, culminating in a fancy dress vine video of all the Ofsted gang dancing along to an edited version of ‘Who you gonna call?’

 

It’s difficult not to admire, or even fall hopelessly in love with, this top-down rhetoric. Even if it feels a bit like Stockholm syndrome. I, for one, am happy to be seduced by my former abuser – I only hope that I can remember the safe word the next time we meet and I’m subjected to a data-enema. The thought of staring down an inspector whilst saying ‘But my children don’t need learning objectives that are also linked to British Values’ and getting away with it makes me giddy with excitement. 

 

Gone is the old Ofsted tagline of ‘raising standards, improving lives’. That was, after all, directed towards children and, in doing so, it muddied rather than purified the water inside the education chalice from which we all sup. With every inspection that passed, a raft of analysts were looking at features of all the reports and compiling lists of things schools must and must not do if they wanted to be judged positively. Planning. Marking. Teaching styles. Learning objectives. Targets. Text books. Consolidation. Challenge. Differentiation. The delicate tools of our trade were being blunted by short-sighted leaders and their obsession with doing what they thought someone else would like to see, as opposed to what worked in their school. In trying to raise standards through superficial measures it was the lives of teachers that suffered. Over-worked, under-valued and not listened to. Well, no more. We are entering a brave new world of Ofsted that promises to make sense of a once mad world and restore order and (work-life) balance. Ofsted: Busting myths, improving lives. 

 

Now, we can all be like Tommy Lee Jones. The next time we are told that in order to teach like champions we should be using a shared vocabulary that makes us all sound like the illicit love child of Siri and Cortana rather than a human being we can simply say: ‘I don’t care.’ The next time some piece of education policy around new times tables tests for three year olds gets announced through your twitter timeline, you can roll your eyes, swipe to refresh and say: ‘I don’t care’. The next time you’re sat on a table with an ‘outstanding’ Head who is telling you how their new approach to marking includes teachers skyping every child at weekends in order to counteract the weekend progress slump that was impacting on their Monday morning maths mastery assessment tests, you can take a bite out of their croissant, drain their coffee cup, look them dead in the eye and say: ‘I don’t care’. 

 

How liberating. All we have to care about is doing what’s right for our children and our teachers. I love it when a plan comes together.

 

The one tiny fly in Ofsted’s myth-busting ointment is, and well, it’s such a small matter I almost feel silly mentioning it, but the one teeny-tiny flaw in the plan is that we no longer know what is expected of us. Thanks to the edu-brains of the DfE and Whitehall there isn’t anyone who actually knows if, whatever it is we have deemed appropriate to teach and assess our pupils this year, is on the money. Add to this absence of clarity surrounding progress measures the smorgasbord of options in terms of curriculum material and assessment tracking systems and you’re left feeling like a four-year-old trying to choose which option of free school meal to have on their first day at school. I mean, you know it’s not a good sign when Sean Harford is having to write to all Ofsted inspectors telling them to be ‘flexible and understanding when they consider the outcomes next year’ for schools. This might as well have an additional subtitle saying ‘look, it’s not schools’ fault we’re in this mess so go easy on them’ but I’m sure politicians don’t read subtitles – it’s probably against their British values. 

 

I, for one, have never been prouder of the education that the children in my school are receiving but I have no clue as to whether this is going to be reflected at the end of the year. I’m also reasonably secure that I’m not working my teachers into an early grave. But I’m yet to work out if that is enough. Now, logic tells me that if we teach what the children don’t know, everything will work out, but, until this has all played out in real time, that still feels like a bit of a gamble. I may be trying to act like Tommy Lee Jones and stick to the Ofsted bantra, but I have a bad feeling that I’ll be the Head teacher equivalent of a fugitive on the run, trying to protest my innocence as an inspector, struggling to track down my progress data, stonewalls me with three words: I don’t care.