This Is Not A Drill – The Bluffer’s Guide To Preparing For An Ofsted Inspection
Panic stations! Sound the alarm! Man the barricades and avoid educational Armageddon with Jon Brunskill's sardonic bluffer’s guide to Ofsted preparations…
You finally understand exactly what it would feel like to be a character in one of those asteroid apocalypse movies. But Bruce Willis can’t help you now.
The point of no return has already been crossed. Disaster is hurtling towards you at unstoppable speed. The headteacher, wild eyed and sweating, manically gesturing a phone-hand-signal, blurts out, “We’ve had the call, everything is OK. EVERYTHING IS OK!”
Everything is quite clearly not OK. Everything is very far from OK. But fear not; you have 18 hours until impact, and armed with this trusty guide, you can bluff your way through this Ofsted inspection…
Step 1
Pile additional pressure on teachers while insisting there’s nothing to worry about Briefly consider delivering an amended version of the “We will not go quietly into the night!” speech from Independence Day, before instead calling a huge, panicked staff meeting like one of the town hall scenes from The Simpsons.
Calmly explain that all you need to do is show Ofsted what you do every single day. Then change every facet of the school until it is unrecognisable from its usual self.
Step 2
Pile additional pressure on children while insisting there’s nothing to worry about When asked questions by adults, primary-aged children have an annoying tendency of being completely honest – this is perhaps your biggest threat over the next few days.
Embrace your inner Malcolm Tucker and ensure they are all briefed within an inch of their lives. Drill them with the literacy targets you half-heartedly introduced two months ago, and ‘remind’ them of how they know how to explain their learning objective and success criteria.
Sternly announce that our ‘special visitors’ will be watching their behaviour very closely, so it’s very important that they, you know, behave. For once.
Step 3
Play your best team While little Patrick’s refusal to do anything except shout “You smelly head!” at the top of his voice has become endearing to staff, inspectors may not be so understanding.
Luckily, Patrick has been looking a little peaky recently. Come to think of it, a lot of the children with more ‘lively’ approaches to learning suddenly look a tad under the weather.
Seek them out, hold a compassionate hand to their brow, and ask them how they’re feeling. As they put on a brave – and puzzled – face, saying that they’re absolutely fine, reassure them there’s no need to silently carry the burden of illness, and suggest to their parents they stay off for the next 48 hours.
Step 4
Buy Red Bull Coffee is not going to cut it. Red Bull comes in crates.
Step 5
The books. My god, the books… Triage, my friend. You cannot mark all of those books in the time available, so make three piles. First are your ‘show’ books, belonging to the trusty high attainers with neat handwriting. Strategically place these in areas most likely to be perused by unwelcome visitors.
For the second pile, highlight randomly the books of middle attainers in an array of colours. Have them ‘edit’ their work in a variety of coloured pencils while shouting repeatedly, “What are you doing!? Responding to feedback. That’s right. Just like always.” In the third pile are the ‘hopeless cases’, which will need to be lost in a series of unfortunate incidents including, but not limited to:
• Accidentally being thrown out with last year’s books
• Being ruined by spilt tea
• Insisting the child took it home
• Saying “I’m sure I’ve got it here somewhere,” before hiding in the toilet and hoping the inspectors go away.
Step 6
Deprive yourself of everything that makes you an effective teacher Since you’ll be in school until midnight, takeaway pizza is the only viable option, supplemented with biscuits, sweets and stockpiled generic junk food. If you absolutely must, you can sleep for a total of two hours, but assert loudly the next morning that you didn’t sleep at all.
And it goes without saying that any sort of recreational activity that brings you joy and wellbeing is strictly banned.
Caveat
Of course, you could disregard all of this advice and just do what you normally do, like some sort of maverick cop from an 80s TV show who doesn’t play by the rules. In which case, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
Jon Brunskill is the Head of Year Two at Reach Academy Feltham; you can follow him on Twitter, if you like – @jon_brunskill
