ALTHOUGH last week marked the retirement of Douglas Osler from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, it should also, if we are serious about quality, mean the beginning of the end of the inspectorate as a whole.
The last decade has been marked by an increasing shallowness of philosophy, banality of language and pomposity of approach. Its website boasts that it has been awarded a Charter Mark of Excellence, and that its departing leader is now a Knight of St Gregory. No doubt he also has a gold star in the top right corner of his P45.
The task that teachers have to do is too complex and subtle for such vainglorious creatures to comprehend. Teachers are simultaneously founts of knowledge, inspirers of effort, monitors of behaviour, managers, pastors and administrators of minutiae.
Yet, every seven years or so, the vainglorious ones descend, with their eagle eyes and clipboards. Their sophisticated intellects extend to a four-point scale: very good, good, fair and unsatisfactory. Nobody is capable of Excellence, except, as noted, themselves.
They have drawn up a set of abstract ideals, very much after the fashion of Urizen, the sterile jealous god in William Blake’s cosmogony. They castigate mere mortals in short, gruff sentences. “The upper class made frequent errors in spelling.” “The lower classes were insecure in recalling multiplication facts.” “Girl 20 cannot define a horse.”
What happens in a classroom is much more than this. Quality resides in the instant of illumination, the moment of creation, in the subtle interplay of obedience and generosity of spirit between teacher and learner. There are thousands of such moments in a school’s day. Yet quality of moment can be readily devalued by the mindset that seeks to target it, test it, record it and convert it into value-added indices.
The only inspectors of the future will be practising teachers.They will be seconded for two years, and during that time visit 40 schools each throughout Scotland. They will work with their fellow professionals and write convivial, energetic descriptions of what is happening, using the full resources of Scots, Gaelic and English, not the current banal-retentive phrase-list.
The inspectors of the future will foster not some platonic best practice, but variety of practice, variety being the precondition of evolution. Their descriptions will be commented on by the teachers of the school. The whole dialogue will go on the website. Then these inspectors will go, not for a gong to the Palace of Westminster but, themselves enriched, back to their own.
