How to run a school

Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the Abbey School in Kent. This school, in Faversham, has been given the lowest possible ranking of ‘inadequate’. The report bemoans the fact that pupils are expected to do as they are told, be polite and behave themselves, and describes the atmosphere within the school as ‘oppressive’. By a winning coincidence, Ofsted’s report was published in the very week that the Abbey School reported by far its best ever A-level results. What, Ofsted sees as ‘oppression’, then, is more commonly known as ‘running a school properly’.

In 2017, before the fascists moved in to the Abbey School, not a single pupil got an A* or even an A at A-level. This year two-thirds received grades from A* down to C, and the number of A* and A grades doubled from the last (pre-Covid) exams. Of course a school’s job is not simply to coach its charges towards being possibly employable in the distant future by ensuring they get decent grades – although I would suggest it is by far the most important task and very much more important than the ‘pastoral care’ which now seems to occupy the attentions of about two-thirds of the teaching staff in most state schools. Pastoral care seems to be a euphemism for indulging the kids in their various whims and increasingly means that schools are doing the sort of stuff which should be done by parents.

At the Abbey School, however, they take a different approach. Pupils are enjoined to speak ‘in full sentences, project their voices, sit up straight and listen’. They are also expected to ‘remember basic manners’ and to ‘greet each other’.