I would like to know other people’s opinions on the Ofsted letters to children. After an inspection the inspectors write a simple summary of their findings, which are supposed to explain to the pupils what they have found – supposedly to “boost transparency”.

From what I have read (sorry, Torygraph again!), the comments are not particularly simple – one contains a 23 word sentence, including words such as ‘providing, effective, aspects, education’ etc. I wouldn’t say that this is considering the reading age of your average primary school pupil, but, heh, what would I know?

And fancy telling pupils (who will presumably tell parents) that their teachers are not “making sure you are learning as fast as you can”. Can’t really do the morale of staff or students much good! Certainly in one of the schools that I worked in (it was in Special Measures at the time), I can just hear some of the children there loving the fact that they could blame their teachers for the fact that they were not achieving, rather than the fact that they came to school 30% of the time and when they were there, they beat up their piers, swore at teachers and refused to put pen to paper.

Further comments included “you are not well prepared for your next stage of education, nor your future adult lives.” And – get this – they were still at primary school!