Has the Chief Inspector of Schools really gone rogue?

What’s up with Sir Michael Wilshaw? The chief schools inspector was once seen as a pillar of common sense and an enthusiastic partner of Michael Gove in pragmatic schools reform. Now, he stands accused of trying to enforce a particularly toxic form of political correctness as his inspectors mark down a succession of rural English schools for being insufficiently multicultural — or as some newspapers inevitably framed it, for being ‘too white’. Some critics go further and say that Ofsted suppresses as much good teaching as it fosters and is now poised to present young people with a warped version of our national values. Sir Michael, in other words, stands accused of going rogue.

He has certainly had a most erratic year. Back in January he revealed himself to be startlingly touchy, throwing a public hissy fit upon learning that two think tanks were preparing reports critical of Ofsted. Claiming to be so angry he was ‘spitting blood’, HM’s Chief Inspector of Schools denounced what turned out to be an entirely imagined conspiracy against himself and his organisation, supposedly involving the two think tanks in cahoots with government special advisers.

Although Michael Gove acted quickly to hose down his overheated chief inspector, relations never quite recovered. Another spat followed in the summer, when Sir Michael misremembered the former education secretary’s views on no-notice inspections in a Newsnight interview and was forced into a humiliating climbdown. After Gove had been reshuffled, a government memo surfaced in the Guardian showing that the previous autumn senior officials and ministers had become worried about the slow progress of internal reforms at Ofsted. Sir Michael’s rhetoric shot back up the paranoia scale with more talk of a government ‘smear campaign’. Many of his former supporters in Whitehall now don’t know what to make of him. It’s like a clock that has just struck 13 — people are both nonplussed by what he’s saying now, and doubtful about what he has said before.