Today was not a Good day, for several reasons, but mainly because I had to discipline a teacher, and put them on a monitored teaching scheme to make sure their lessons were up to scratch. I hate doing this; sometimes I just want to go into the classroom, bore the kids with some dry Shakespeare history play and then go home.

But I am the head of English, and I do actually care that our teaching is Good. Yes that’s Good with a capital G. Ofsted Good, as it were. The ‘sted are due any minute now, and the school is going for Good status. I think we should get it, and actually seeing everyone in the school working towards Good status has (dare I say it) ‘raised standards’.

But for the English and Maths departments the pressure is oh so much higher; the big drive now is 5 A-Cs including English and Maths; because these are considered Good GCSEs, so we have to make sure ALL our pupils have the best teaching possible. And, there’s that word again. Good. It’s really quite an arbitrary way to measure something, if you think about it; I mean Kit Kats are Good, beating Arsenal is Good; a lie in is Good. But, can teaching standards and subjects merely be called ‘Good’? And how on earth can you really measure it? I know Ofsted have a criteria, but does it really mean something is actually Good, or is it just their way of judging everyone?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 4:02 am and is filed under Lessons, Ofsted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.