I WAS mortified, dismayed, devastated, shattered, speechless, confused, distressed - nay, distraught. The momentous Oxford English Dictionary may contain more than half a million entries, but occasionally you encounter some extraordinary event or emotion along the pathway of history which the English language, despite its richness, is ill-equipped to describe.
It was the end of an era, the moment when one of life’s cast-iron certainties suddenly and unexpectedly crumbled to dust before my eyes.
I was talking to a friend who also works in education. I could see he was upset, a touch red-eyed. “Have you seen this?” He passed me a document. It was News from Ten, the useful briefing summary of what is happening in education which is sent round to local authorities. The article in question was one by David Singleton, head of LEA inspection at the Office for Standards in Education, describing the future of local authority inspections.
I read it through. The tone was positive: in future, inspections would be less detailed, “light touch”, and there would sometimes be “thematic inspections” of particular areas like inclusion strategy. It all sounded excellent, until I reached one crucial sentence, about LEAs helping schools to improve, so brace yourself and prepare to be shocked. The momentous sentence read: “In this area, ‘satisfactory’ is not satisfactory.”
I was stunned. Can this really be true, David? Will that time-honoured term “satisfactory”, carved in runic script since ancient times on stone tablets in Old High Ofsted, the arcane and ancient language of the inspector trolls, no longer actually mean satisfactory? Is nothing sacred?
Throughout aeons of educational history, hundreds of thousands of teachers have been told that their life’s work was satisfactory. People raced into staff rooms after OFSTED inspections, sobbing unashamedly with joy and relief, blubbering to their envious colleagues that they were satisfactory.
To be labelled satisfactory (dictionary definition: “adj - satisfying requirements”) was the top accolade after 30 or 40 years of unremitting selfless graft. World Cup winners, Olympic gold medallists, Nobel laureates looked on in envy as teachers rejoiced at their satisfactoriness. Now, from January 2002, with a single stroke of the pen, satisfactory will not be satisfactory any more. My friend and I sank into deep depression and grieved together for a while.
I know the English language has often been stretched to breaking point by OFSTED, David, but I beg you to reconsider. If satisfactory is not the right word in these circumstances, can I suggest OFSTED uses another word instead - like “unsatisfactory”, for example? We mustn’t devalue the gold standard.
As the very linchpin of OFSTED appraisals somersaults crazily, could this indicate that the rest of the terminology will go wobbly? Maybe in future, when an inspection report states “The school has made excellent progress, well above the national average”, it will really mean,“The school is the worst we have ever seen, the head is a complete cretin and the pupils are all on drugs”.
Where will this frightening linguistic erosion stop? It is deeply worrying. Is “generally sound” also under threat, David? Might the term in future mean “this teacher appears to be completely brain dead, even in comparison with the moribund teaching of the rest of the staff’? If so, I think you should tell us immediately, to lessen the pain.
OFSTED is so powerful nowadays, perhaps this drastic cleansing of the language will spread to other aspects of everyday life, as Dave and his pals turn taken-for-granted semantics upside down.
Such a radical and anarchic reversal of language conventions and word meanings is bound to invade youth culture. Hip teenagers will love it, greeting each other in new OFSTED-style “flipspeak”, with a cheery “I like your cardigan”, or “My mum and dad are absolutely brilliant”.
As flipspeak strengthens its grip, speakers will stand up at political conferences and say, “I think our policies are completely loony”.
Adverts will proclaim that drinking is bad for you, or that you don’t really need a new car because the only addition to the latest models is a square bit of tin on the bumpers.
People will find this upside-down version of familiar rhetoric extremely refreshing after decades of cant. We traditionalists will protest, of course, but in the end everyone will want to use it, just as they do text messaging. A flipspeak thesaurus set to music, Singalong with Singleton, and Dave’s Dictionary of New Ofstedese will outsell Harry Potter.
I could even get the hang of flipspeak myself one day, so I sincerely hope no one ever tries to reform OFSTED, because that would be a disaster.
