There is a very specific kind of relief that occurs in my office at approximately five past eight in the morning. By then the children are arriving, somebody has usually forgotten something, at least one adult already needs me for a question that could potentially alter the course of civilisation, and I look at the clock and think: excellent, they haven’t called.
“They” are the school inspectors.
This is a relatively new addition to my working life, because inspections used to have the basic decency to announce themselves. You knew they were coming, which admittedly meant you could spend several weeks thinking about them, discussing them, preparing for them and occasionally waking up at three in the morning remembering a document you hadn’t looked at since February, but at least there was a date in the calendar. I like dates in calendars. Dates in calendars give me the comforting illusion that I am in control of my own life.
Now we have unannounced inspections.
The principle is simple. At around eight in the morning, the phone can ring and someone can tell you they will be at your school half an hour later. Unless you happen to have taken the entire school on a trip, sent the staff to a field somewhere for a training day or can produce another genuinely convincing reason why inspecting the school that day would be impossible, your morning has just acquired a completely different itinerary.
Several schools within our organisation have already had one, which means this is no longer a theoretical possibility I can file somewhere under ‘Things that happen to other people’.
I hate it.
Whenever I say this, someone inevitably points out that an announced inspection is stressful too because then you have weeks to worry about it, and this is absolutely true. The difference is that I apparently prefer six weeks of controlled anxiety to thirty minutes of being informed that my entire working day has just been cancelled in favour of an educational surprise party nobody asked for.
It isn’t even that I think there is something terrible for them to discover. I know my school. I know what we are working on, where things are going well and where we still have work to do, because no school is a finished product and anyone claiming otherwise should probably be inspected immediately.
Still, I have prepared.
I have actually created a document containing the information I might want at hand if the inspectors arrive on a day when the colleagues who know certain details better than I do are not there. They can tell you exactly what is happening in individual classes, while I naturally know the bigger picture but cannot instantly produce every result from every group as though I am an educational version of Rain Man.
After making this document, I briefly wondered whether I would even be allowed to look at it during an inspection.
Then another part of my brain had to intervene and say, Sophie, you are a school director, not a contestant on a quiz show.
You are allowed notes.
The more ridiculous part is what this system has done to Fridays, because Friday is my day off. In theory, this means I don’t work. In practice, my brain has apparently decided that I should remain within emergency travelling distance of the school in case somebody calls at eight o’clock to announce that several inspectors are standing outside looking for the director.
I have genuinely caught myself thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t plan too much on a Friday.
This is, of course, completely absurd. They might not visit my school for years, and I cannot spend every Friday until 2031 sitting at home in a state of professional readiness just in case the Dutch education inspectorate would like a word.
I know where this comes from, though, and unfortunately it has very little to do with education.
I have never particularly enjoyed being assessed.
Somewhere inside the reasonably capable adult woman who runs a large primary school is apparently still a much younger version of me who becomes convinced that everybody else has read an additional manual she somehow wasn’t given. Put me in a room with other school directors and I can be perfectly comfortable until someone knows something I don’t, at which point my brain immediately concludes that they know everything and I have somehow been appointed by administrative error.
This is particularly inconvenient when your actual job involves being the person who is supposed to know things.
Rationally, I understand that an inspection isn’t designed to catch me forgetting an acronym or test whether I can recite every piece of school data from memory. They come to see the school as it actually is, speak to people, visit lessons, look at how things are organised and determine whether the education is good enough. That is a perfectly legitimate thing for an inspectorate to do, even if I would personally prefer them to do it with six weeks’ notice, a calendar invitation and perhaps a reassuring emoji.
So I am trying not to turn a possible inspection into a permanent lifestyle.
The document exists. I know my school. My colleagues know what they are doing. If the phone rings one morning, I will probably feel my stomach drop somewhere around my knees, say something impressively professional like, “Of course, we’ll see you shortly,” hang up and then stare at the wall for approximately seven seconds before getting on with it.
And if they ever call on a Friday, I will deal with that too.
But it is Saturday now, which means there is absolutely no chance of anyone calling at eight to tell me they will be inspecting my school at half past.
I must say, weekends have really gone up in my estimation.
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