30.03.2023

Against educational tsarism

In the wake of Ruth Perry’s tragic suicide, Paul Demarty demands an end to Ofsted tyranny and instead an education system based on need

Nikolai Gogol’s great comedy of errors, The government inspector, concerns the elite of a provincial Russian town in the 1830s, who learn that an official is due to arrive from St Petersburg to investigate the local state of affairs. A panic sets in, during which a dissolute civil servant is mistaken for the inspector. The townspeople hope he will save them from the exploitation of the mayor and his cronies, but instead he exploits his position to gain all the local bribe money. When the ruse is exposed, the mayor finally addresses the audience: “What are you laughing at? You’re laughing at yourselves!”

Whenever the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) makes it into the news, it is difficult not to think of Gogol’s send-up of decadent tsarism. Alas, it is more tragedy than farce that has propelled this hated bureaucracy onto the front pages this time around. In November last year, Ofsted arrived at Caversham primary school in Reading, which was then rated ‘outstanding’ (the highest available option). The government inspector decided to downgrade that to ‘inadequate’ (the lowest, and essentially a kiss of death to any school leadership team). In January, headteacher Ruth Perry took her own life; and on March 17, her sister, Julia Waters, squarely laid the blame at the door of Ofsted in a BBC interview.

This caused a huge outpouring of feeling. The head of another Berkshire primary promised to deny access to inspectors who were due to arrive the following week; she backed down, but the Ofsted ghouls were nonetheless met by a few protestors. Perry’s image is being pasted to school gates around the place. There is a sense that the dam has burst - that an inspection regime that everyone knows is inhuman can no longer be portrayed otherwise.

Potemkin

One might quibble with all this, of course. Suicide is not responsibly explained monocausally. The ‘inadequate’ rating for Caversham apparently related to safeguarding failures, which is probably the one area where most people would hope for all the Ts to be crossed and Is dotted. But that would be to miss the point.

Waters’ description of Perry’s state of mind in the last months of her life - counting down the days to Ofsted’s arrival, thinking of nothing else, working relentlessly - will be chillingly familiar to anyone who has been a teacher in the last three decades, or has teachers among their close friends and family. The press and social media are currently full of tales of heart attacks, of minor strokes, of teachers leaving interviews with inspectors in tears. Research by the University of Leeds found 10 cases where teachers’ deaths seemed connected to inspections, including two further suicides: Carol Woodward of Plymouth, and Helen Mann in Worcestershire.

As for safeguarding, the inspection regime’s relentless focus on paperwork and ultimately nonsensical bureaucratic exertion is of doubtful utility to children’s safety. Yes, schooling should take place in buildings that are structurally sound, warmed by boilers that do not leak carbon monoxide, and led by teachers who are not convicted of child sex offences, and any government should make sure of it. Setting up inspectors as angels of death in this way, however, merely encourages box-ticking, system-gaming and (in the worst cases) cover-up. If one is forced to meet a target to avoid extreme punishment, it is the letter, not the spirit, of the target that will be uppermost in mind.

This is also more generally true of school staff’s response to inspections in general. The work of a school is gussied up to look like the latest ‘best practice’ model of pedagogy to have captured the minds of gullible politicians and civil servants. Lesson plans are produced to a level of detail that, if followed consistently, would leave no time for actual teaching at all. Particular lessons that are to be inspected must be stage-managed by conspiracy between the leadership, teacher and students (talk about herding cats). My father, who taught in state schools for 30 years, told me a story of a lesson inspection - against all the odds, the rather feral boys in the class managed to stay on their best behaviour all the way through; but, shortly after, a fight inevitably broke out. Most of the class enjoyed the spectacle, as always, but one girl became panicked - she thought the inspector might still be in the room.

To return to the Russian example, a school becomes a Potemkin village. It shows the inspector what they want to see, because they do not want to see reality. Reality, after all, is a system - like so many others - ground down by years of government by people, Conservative and New Labour alike, who hold teachers in contempt and whose idea of educational success is a well-fed job market and nothing else. Morale is plummeting. Creeping privatisation over the years has eaten away at what limited democratic control existed over the system - with the effect that parents trust it ever less. Indeed, Ofsted - far from being some neutral arbiter of school quality - has its priorities set by the government, and as such has been used as an instrument of privatisation, by artificially creating crises where none need occur. Then there are ‘exogenous shocks’, like the Covid lockdowns, whose effect on school-age children and teenagers was little short of catastrophic, according to current indications.

Sorting hats

Indeed, the history and nature of Ofsted is bound up with that of a particularly bourgeois vision of mass education as a whole. For the ruling class, there are two proper outputs of a school system: pliant managers and specialists; and workers with sufficient skills to do the available jobs. Thus it was quite acceptable for working class children to be offered no education at all for a long time; and, after that point, to be filtered into their own segregated schools, where there was not even the opportunity to complete the kind of education that could get them to university. The last version of such schools in the mainstream of British education was the ‘secondary modern’, replaced by comprehensive schools under local authority control, initially under the government of Harold Wilson.

The great opponent of the comprehensive system was, of course, Margaret Thatcher - first as education secretary under Edward Heath and then as prime minister herself. She was unable to reverse the trend, but Tory governments successfully prevented the extinction of selective grammar schools.

The reason the trend could not be reversed, of course, was that state schools remained in local authority control. So, instead, they went for school inspections. Ofsted was founded in 1992 by the John Major government to expropriate local authorities of this role. It was a major shift in the neoliberalisation of education, which amounts to a combination of intense centralism and privatisation.

Quite apart from the avoidable misery and humiliating antics it forces on teachers, Ofsted must be abolished, above all for this reason. It is the lynchpin of the educational regime: along with it go the various other means by which schools can be set in nonsensical pseudo-competition with each other, most especially the invincible obsession of British governments with endless exams. The division between mental and manual labour demands mechanisms to condemn people to failure; thus it demands exams for people to fail, and it condemns whole schools to failure under a fig leaf of bureaucratic rationality.

The fiasco of the A-level results in 2020 - when exam conditions were unachievable due to lockdowns - is illustrative here. Teachers submitted grades based on class performance instead; but the grades were considered too high, so central government just revised them in utterly arbitrary ways; the subsequent outcry led to a reversal, but this just caused another problem, in that universities simply did not have enough places for all the bright-eyed youngsters. That is the problem with teachers, after all: alone among all the interested parties, they do not want any students to fail (except, perhaps, the most troublesome little shits among them … ).

Getting out of this nightmare world, then, means thinking outside the box of what to do with Ofsted. As an opportunistic sound bite, Sir Keir’s Labour has proposed getting rid of the top-line ‘outstanding’-to-‘inadequate’ rating system, to replace it with a scorecard-type alternative. (Given that what was declared inadequate in Caversham was ‘leadership’, it is not clear how this would have been any kinder to Perry.)

Abolition of the whole thing is surely the minimum requirement, with reconstruction of a local and democratically accountable inspectorate to ensure buildings are fit for purpose, curricula do not (for example) include the teaching of Genesis 1 and 2 as literal fact, and other such things. It should fall to local government to level up schools, rather than pronouncing judgment on winners and losers, and watching the sharp-elbowed parents fight each other for places in the ‘good’ schools.

Yet the impulse that produces this sorting mechanism comes from the core dynamics of capitalist society that we mentioned - a tiny number of capitalists exploiting a huge number of workers with the assistance of a small-to-medium class of bureaucratic specialists - and therefore the need to fill these roles in the ‘correct’ proportions. To be done with the tsar’s officers, we must be done with tsars - including the ‘constitutional’ tyrants of the capitalist world.

A humane society would not divide people as early as childhood and adolescence between future proles and bureaucrats; and therefore it would not have a school system designed around that need. The way would be open to education in the true sense. Instead of producing raw materials for the world’s human resources departments (and, increasingly, a permanently unemployed human surplus), schools would aim at the full development of the human personality in each of their charges. A more polytechnic system of education would save young people from premature specialisation, and nudge us towards a society whose occupational specialisations, such as they are, unite intellectual and manual capacities instead of amputating one from the other. To describe such a society is just to describe a social formation making progress towards production for need, not for the profit of small groups of exploiters - a socialist society. Without such a goal, a humane education system is wholly senseless.

In such a society, we would loosen our jealous grip on the endless numbers and metrics that ostensibly tell us how well kids are educated, but in reality tell us only how well one part of an inhuman machine fits into another.