As a movement the Scouts have a very good motto. It’s short, to the point, meaningful and easy to remember – Be Prepared.
I try my best to be prepared in everyday life as well as Scouting and most of the time I am. I do slip up from time to time, but that’s life. If you are doing something or you know something is going to happen you are prepared.
Which is why I had to smile at work today when we were told the school inspectors are coming in on Thursday and Friday. We knew they would be coming this year before Easter and yet staff are beginning to panic!
The panic button has been pressed!
I should point out that schools in the UK are inspected by OFSTED every three years and are inspected at the same time of the year and the school gets two days notice of an inspection. Yet there is a sense of worry and not being prepared. Tuesday and Wednesday will see people running around trying to make everywhere and everything look perfect. Perhaps if the staff at work were prepared then the inspection wouldn’t be so stressful!
This reminds me of a description of the baseball drug testing here in the US. They were scheduled, so it was trivial to stop taking steroids in advance of your test. Someone observed that it was not so much a drug test as an intelligence test.
Isn’t it funny! The Swedish inspections are much less dramatic: We get e couple of months notice, and the most arduous bit is getting all the policy documents ready, as they have to be in order. Then they show up. About three people spend about a week inspecting ALL the schools in the council, public as well as state schools, mostly by interviewing a few students and a couple of teachers, having lunch in the canteen (school lunches are free and obligatory in primary and lower secondary, but most upper secondary schools also offer free lunches – great means of competition…) You hardly see anything of the inspectors. What you notice is the obvious flutter of school administrators’ nerves the weeks before, and a bit of tension in the staff room and sourly comments about what the inspectors won’t see. I wish they would be abit more like OFSTED. One of our competitors blatantly lied the inspectors blue: 75% of their staff were trained teachers (in reality closer to 50%, a ridiculously low number!!) they offered career advice and all sorts of services – on paper! A teacher from that school then joined ours, so we got all the staffroom gossip. AND THEY GOT AWAY WITH IT! Grumble, grumble…..