Becoming an OfSTED Inspector

One day, when you are tired of failing as a teacher, when your social ineptness has alienated you from your colleagues, when your body has reached the final stage of arid decomposition and you take on the appearance of an animated cadaver, and when the last remnants of your humanity have dripped from your soul to leave a void, an abyss of strangulated callousness, then, one morning, at that moment of revelation over a bowl of cornflakes and razorblades and a glass of sour milk, you decide that it is time to apply to OfSTED to become a schools inspector.

Perhaps all along you saw this moment coming. The seeds of this inhuman mentality had long since been broadcast across the ploughed furrows of your psyche. That inexorable desire to be a traffic warden, football referee, tax officer, night club bouncer or GP receptionist. That same mentality, laced with the sort of malevolence that you’d find in history’s despots, warmongers and directors of genocide that breeds an odious species of fucker such as yourself. Somehow, you knew all along you’d end up here, seeping into a staff room like sewage to introduce yourself to a battle-weary, bleary-eyed and terror-stricken array of teachers, with that same old joke on your lips, “Thank you for making us feel welcome, when we know we’re not!”

Inspections from the Office for Standards in Education are like an irritating four-yearly dose of genital thrush. The only benefit is that it reminds you to never let your guard down. But you, you who will gradually evolve into this purveyor of pernicious and punitive interrogation, you knew all along that this was your pathway. Those episodes of “On the Buses” in your formative years; each time you heard Blakey crow his oily order to “get that bus out, Butler,” you felt his pain. They laughed at him, but he was in the right. You too wanted to get Butler, to be able to say, “That’s made my day, that has,” by exacting revenge on this maverick, this charmer, this popular and witty human full of life, the exact opposite to you. What was imperative was that the bus went out on time.

So, there you are, seeping back out of the staff room, smelling the fear flowing out of your victims in your wake, ready to spend your day flying in and out of their lessons like a vulture on the look out for someone’s entrails to feast upon. And the thrill of this power is all the more satisfying when you see how detailed their lesson plans are, how well marked their books are and how well delivered their teaching is, knowing that you won’t even bother observing many of these people, or reading much of what they’ve typed up nor spend more than a few minutes reading what has taken them countless hours to mark. As far as you’re concerned, it’s like judging the Elephant Man wearing drag in a beauty contest. Despite the effort, you’ll still tell him he’s an ugly bugger.

OfSTED raise the bar every so often, such as recently, so that what was once good becomes just satisfactory. You might agree with this as an inspector, as you stare adoringly at the portrait of Stalin on your OfSTED office wall (next to portraits of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Gadaffi and some dead mice you recently stuck up there with a staple gun one dull Friday afternoon) because Stalin dragged the Soviet Union silently and fearfully through an industrial revolution thanks to a combination of unrealistic targets as a carrot and the threat of the gulags as a stick. And you love the Orwellian Doublespeak of the OfSTED epithet that it is not satisfactory to be satisfactory, you can only be satisfactory if you’re good and if you are judged satisfactory in everything then that is unsatisfactory overall and you fail.

The gradings are simple. Some patronising cunt must have once decreed that parents need things simple, because they read The Sun, watch ITV and won’t want to consider much more evidence beyond a single word like “satisfactory” when choosing the right school for their child in what is probably the most important decision of their lives.

Below the three acceptable grades of “outstanding”, “good” and “satisfactory” there is “shit”, “notice to become not shit” and “right in the shit now.” However, even “satisfactory” has the scent of shit to it.

Blakey and Stalin never made allowances for context and nor will you. Once you’ve swept in and out of a school like a Dementor sucking the life out of every soul, you can have a nice relaxing day back in the office typing it all up, punctuating your time by unravelling paper clips, sipping petrol from your hip flask and sharpening your talons on the ragged block of granite you have inside your ribcage in place of a heart.