Despite not a single colleague noticing the recent earthquake in Wales, several people in my Year 7 class claimed to have felt it. Maybe a low Richter-rating earthquake is like a high-pitched whistle - only the very young can detect it.

Their personal experiences of the quake became typically competitive. Despite us being over 150 miles away from that mild South Wales tremor, we had the usual stories of walls shuddering and plates flying off shelves and - of course - the customary shaggy dog tale of how the super-sensory family mutt mysteriously began barking just a few seconds beforehand.

I let most of it pass but I couldn’t let the dog one go completely. I gently speculated with them that it was perhaps a statistical inevitability that some dogs in England are going to start barking at any given moment on any given day, regardless of whether there are unusual plate-tectonic movements happening in Wales.

I am equally certain, for instance, that a fair number of the nation’s dogs also began yapping just moments before the ground similarly began quivering underneath the schools minister when he was asked the answer to 8 times 9 on live TV. Again, this was surely just inevitable coincidence.

But the class were having none of it. Others in the room began talking about their own dog’s super-powers. In fact, as far as Daisy was concerned, mere earthquake-predicting was a relatively low-level skill compared with her own dog’s talents. Daisy’s apparently howled when her aunt - 10,000 miles away in Australia - was assaulted by a kangaroo. Meanwhile, Ed’s dog apparently refuses to enter haunted buildings. “But how do you know a building’s haunted, Ed?” “Because he doesn’t go into it.” There is no arguing with that kind of logic.

Teaching a dog old tricks

This unquestioning belief in the wonderful, supernatural sensitivity of dogs does have its educational benefits. As we know, many schools (including ours) now have them on the staff because young children are often happier to practise their reading in the presence of a dog than in the presence of one of us. Admittedly, our school dog has been caught napping at such times, but this does not seem to worry the young readers. They happily continue.

In fact, given the obvious greater hold that a dog has over children, maybe I should step back and let one take more of a lead in my classroom. When I think about my teaching day, there are few things that a dog couldn’t be trained to do better than me - switching on the classroom computer, gesticulating at key words and images on the screen, barking out instructions, controlling the class by cosily encouraging some and growling at others, swooping and making off with any peeking phones, picking up the bits and pieces off the floor at the end of a lesson. That’a boy. Not much left for me to do at all.

The future may not be robot-teachers after all; it may be just a case of unleashing the hounds. Admittedly, a dog-dominated staffroom might see some slightly different action from the kind of social intercourse we normally see there, with far more sniffing around each other’s behinds than is customary. However, the increase in rutting there (which has been falling for decades) would certainly help avert any staff shortages.

If there is one person ideally equipped to oversee the introduction of pilot “dog schools”, it is - say it aristocratically - new education minister Damian “Hinds”. But it’s a completely bizarre suggestion, he would rightly respond. The whole idea is, let’s say it, “barking”. The point is that I have presented ALMOST as fair-minded and evidence-based an argument for “dog schools” as his government has ever managed to muster for pushing on with “free schools”, “academy schools” or “expanded grammars”. As with my young aforementioned class, I just wish honest evidence could prevail over blinkered wishful-thinking. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire

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