Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. An unexpected kindness, a burst of late summer sunshine, a cheerful snippet of news; things that are never going to change the world, but lift the mood a bit. For teachers braced for the return to school this week, the news that Ofsted’s dreaded one-word grades – potentially career-ending labels, from “outstanding” to “inadequate”, which ended up being all anyone really remembered of an often more nuanced inspection report – will be scrapped with immediate effect may well fall into this category. It’s hardly a revolutionary change, since schools that would have been judged to be failing under the old regime will still face immediate intervention. But it gives teachers just a bit more room to breathe.
It’s a small, human way of recognising the pressures they’ve been under and the depth of feeling triggered last year by the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, after her primary school was abruptly downgraded to inadequate over errors in its safeguarding paperwork. (An inquest later ruled that the sometimes “rude and intimidating” inspection had played a part in Perry’s deteriorating mental health.) Better still, the announcement by the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, comes ahead of a more substantial longer-term review of what teachers are actually being asked to teach, which is expected to examine complaints that the Michael Gove-era curriculum had become impossibly overstuffed (do primary schoolchildren really need to know what a fronted adverbial is?) and badly in need of a little joy injected back into it.
