In my day, “satisfactory” meant something was good enough. Why does Roy Blatchford think that changing the definition of words will improve the quality of schools?

In my experience as an HMI, some schools with very good test results were not particularly good schools. They should have been doing better with the pupils they had. Some - but, of course, not all - schools with poor test scores were doing unusually well by their pupils. The simple grading system, whether of three grades or more, does not reveal the true state of affairs. Life is more complicated.

Professor Norman Thomas, Former HMI.