How to run a school

Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the Abbey School in Kent. This school, in Faversham, has been given the lowest possible ranking of ‘inadequate’. The report bemoans the fact that pupils are expected to do as they are told, be polite and behave themselves, and describes the atmosphere within the school as ‘oppressive’. By a winning coincidence, Ofsted’s report was published in the very week that the Abbey School reported by far its best ever A-level results. What, Ofsted sees as ‘oppression’, then, is more commonly known as ‘running a school properly’.

In 2017, before the fascists moved in to the Abbey School, not a single pupil got an A* or even an A at A-level. This year two-thirds received grades from A* down to C, and the number of A* and A grades doubled from the last (pre-Covid) exams.