Scrap Ofsted and get 5,000 new teachers for our schools

Rod Liddle says that Ofsted’s attempt to rank schools according to their SATS scores is, like so many of its other ideas, not just unhelpful but counterproductive

Fancy a job as head of Ofsted? The post apparently pays not far short of half a million quid per year, and I can’t imagine that there’s much work involved. The problem, I suppose, is that one never knows precisely what they’re looking for when these unelected sinecures at quangocratic bureaucracies are up for grabs, so it’s bloody difficult to prepare for the interview. What qualifies Catherine Ashton, for example, to be the foreign minister for the continent of Europe? She’s worked for CND and the National Council for One Parent Families (why do they have a national council?) and has also been involved in teaching social workers to be more politically correct, which I admit must require a certain breadth of imagination.

But how you hop from there to being a trade commissioner and then to being the person responsible for the EU’s relations with the real world mystifies me. I have always assumed that the procedure for getting one of these jobs involves the ability to spout meaningless drivel, an unquestioning readiness to do as you’re told by idiots, and having your soul sucked out of your skull via a plastic straw inserted in the left nostril. Fair enough, I can do all of that for half a million quid. Who needs a soul?

I am assuming that the Ofsted job will soon be up for grabs because Britain’s biggest regulator, and arguably its most useless (in what you have to say is a very strong field), is not looking too pukka at the moment. It has been kicked from pillar to post in a report from the Association of Directors of Children’s Services as being ‘flawed, wasteful and failing’.