forgotten: the general fatuousness of the inspections carried out by the Office for Standards in Education.

If the school where I teach is anything to go by inspections are simply an exercise in window-dressing. The week before the inspection, not only did new posters go up, but whole new notice boards to put them on.

If you visit our school now,

two years later, the same posters that were put up then are still there, going brown and peeling at the edges.

rehearsed lessons and the head was affable and visible for that one week. Policies were enacted then that never existed before or have ever been heard of since.

We are now preparing for the next inspection, to make sure that the standard of window-dressing is even higher. Meanwhile pupils, staff and the buildings are treated with the customary neglect.

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