You couldn't make it up

This seems to be the ultimate absurdity of an approach to school improvement that has become more and more discredited with each spineless piece of pandering to mindless government policies and prejudices:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12775784

O.K., parents are important, but all sorts of people become parents - Fred West, for example - and too many of them these days believe, or pretend to believe, that their child can do no wrong. Watching 'Jamie's Dream School' I was interested to see how apparently sensible the parent of the appalling Harlem was. Experience tells me that she would almost certainly not have been as reasonable had she not been on TV. The vast majority of kids who behave badly are as they are because of parenting deficiencies: put simply, their kids have been allowed to get away with things throughout their lives. Now Harlem may indeed be 'lovely' at times (Jamie's description), though I don't think we've seen any evidence of this, but she is also extremely egotistical. Her outburst at headteacher John D'Abbro was of a kind teachers are all too familiar with and in the following episode she was shown to be bent on total disruption, threatening extreme violence demanding the head drop everything because she thought her bag had been taken.

The fact that Jamie was left to deal with the issue of her outburst and the uncontested view that D'Abbro had been 'out of order' were as worrying as the assertion that Harlem needs anger management. She doesn't, though ego management is definitely required, but it may be too late.

D'Abbro had called the special assembly in order to make it clear to all the young people that certain behaviour was unacceptable and that there were limits to what would be tolerated. He needed, in other words, to remind them of his authority (or, if you prefer, the authority of the school, of which he is the representative). He was perfectly correct to tell them that he was in charge and Harlem was totally wrong to challenge him. Good order in schools is ultimately dependent on the vast majority of students accepting the school's authority. (That's not to say that there are no second chances, you're dealing with growing kids who have a great capacity to change, but all kids need to understand that challenging the school's authority incurs unpleasant consequences and the chances aren't unlimited.)

To get back to Ofsted's latest weeze, all schools, and particularly those in areas of great deprivation have groups of parents who they have ultimately to confront, to whom they have to explain that the behaviour the parents regard as normal will not be tolerated. As these parents are sometimes immature, bitter, twisted, and utterly incapable of taking part in a rational discussion, they will end up believing that the school is bad. And now here comes Ofsted inviting parents to badmouth the school to them and, if they gang up with their like-minded friends and put in enough complaints, they will get a 'result': the school will be investigated. And the chief inspector who has sanctioned this approach used to be a headteacher!!!!!

Jamie's Dream School

I could no doubt find a lot to say about it. Might be an entertaining programme and probably is, but I could not get past his trailer where he described his fellow performers as 'great teachers'. No they're not Jamie. As you would know if you read this blog, the ability to be a great teacher does not depend on you being very knowledgeable or very competent in your field (and there must be a doubt about whether some of his band are anything other than self-publicists). You need a complex set of skills and attitudes, along with a high degree of emotional intelligence, to be a good teacher, never mind a great one. But strangely, you may not need a comprehensive knowledge of the subject you are teaching; I've seen great teachers working outside their own subject area and still demonstrating their first class teaching ability. So don't be surprised if those 'teachers' who achieve any success at all are not the ones who are most pre-eminent in their field.

P.S. Re Starkey - I'd have taken bets that he would be a disaster. I don't suppose he's ever had any kind of training to teach, not that that would have made much difference to him even if he'd had the best teachers in the world