Let's Not and Say We Did

A funny old week, with people saying that children are over-tested and undertaught, and that parents should have the right to get Ofsted in to inspect schools as often as possible - presumably in the belief that's what's obviously not sauce for the children is sauce for the teachers.

I cannot think of a worse idea than giving parents the right to get schools inspected. It's simply mob rule by any other name. Hermione will have her pigtails pulled in Clapham and Mrs Sacheverell Smythe will be onto Ofsted like a leech on a new leg in the pond. People whose kids attend the glorious "Academy" where Year 8 grilled me about whether I spit or swallow, there has been no full maths faculty for over a year and the HoD won't take responsibility for setting the work and children leave the class and wander about at will (on one occasion lobbing a brick through a classroom window, to a satisfying shattering of glass and smattering of hysteria), will not have any idea how bad things have got, and should they do so, Ofsted will come and fail the school and nothing will be done. Ofsted is not a solution to everything. Or, judging by what follows its yaffling visits, anything. (The school whose English department failed its inspection has still got the same Head in post, and no sign of anything happening, although I wait with baited breath.)

The solution - and this is also perhaps a solution to how to make people happier, another news story last week - is perhaps to DO SOMETHING. I know it's radical and ridiculous, and I also know that the government pees its pants at the thought that people might do something, but that's their prerogative.

Schools should be allowed to put consequences in place for children who throw bricks through windows, and the government should suck it up and provide for those consequences. While the ethos in schools continues to be that children can behave exactly as they wish and their teachers must take the consequences, it is very hard to see how kids have much chance of learning not to be vile at school. When vileness is modelled and inadequately punished, they simply learn to be a bunch of self-righteous arses, and giving their parents the power to back them up will assist them in growing up into even worse arses.

Then we can all watch them complaining about being on the dole while they refuse to work on documentaries, and gasp in shock and outrage when they kill each other with stones in parks and knives outside McDonalds. What a fun-filled world the government has in mind for us. Still, one sees so few of them on Oxford Street these days.