England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools and, since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted). Our recently published research examines how the inspectorate has policed language in schools, enforcing a particular idea of “correct” spoken English on teachers and children.
We investigated judgements made about the speech of teachers and young people in inspection reports for primary and secondary schools, looking at both historical reports, dating from 1839 to 1993, and contemporary ones, from 2000 to the present.
From a random sample of 3,000 reports out of a total of 102,000, we found that language policing is a normalised part of the inspectorate’s work, especially for social groups who are marginalised in terms of race and class.
