Secret TA: Oh no, it's Ofsted.

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Bite Marks: 0 🥳

Stress Level: Ofsted arrived, so....

Holiday Countdown: 3-ish weeks 😍

So we’ve been running around school like some kind of low budget Charlie’s Angels group, with a vacancy (because there’s only two of us), trying to get more info on the secret relationship. However we seem to have succeeded only in driving the mystery pair deep underground because we got NOTHING...  well, neither of them uses the staff room at lunch now but we can’t find out where they DO go!

“... so just because it’s Ofsted doesn’t mean we should be putting on a performance.”

I was assessing the body language of the male suspect to determine if I could spot any signs. Earlier in the week we had decided that I should watch the guy (because as a man, I should be able to read men better) and my class teacher would watch the woman.  It was only owing to the sharp elbow jab in my ribs that I realised what I was listening to.

“Ofsted?” I hissed.

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

Now this is my first Ofsted EVER but the very mention of an impending visit from them creates a curious atmosphere in a school whereby everyone just becomes intensely vulnerable – it's almost some form of quiet mass hysteria.

“How comes everyone is so sad?”  I asked my Teacher, “Is it going to be awful?”

She thought for a couple of seconds.

“The thing is, from minute to minute we never know what’s going to happen next in class.  Now throw into the mix that at any minute an Ofsted inspector can walk in and then make a judgement on what we are doing.  It’s a no-win type scenario”

Prior to working in a school, I worked in an industry where assessment was part of daily life. I worked in an airport, so someone standing over my shoulder to check how I was doing my checks was totally ‘normal’ to me.  This reaction to a quality check seems extreme to me.

We were back in class and, because I work one to one with a child that has an Education, Health and Care Plan, the teacher and I were just making sure my data was all in check. We were both kind of relieved to discover that it was all good.

“We’ll be fine, we just have to be us.  We do great every day!” I was convincing myself as well as her, “and all we can do is what we do, whether we worry about it now or not”.

She looked at me and said, “Okay, so all we have to do is hope that your little treasure doesn’t catapult over the Sensory Room wall and kick the sink taps off like he does every day...  what are the chances?”

[Nervous laughter]

Things have been easy going with the child I work one to one with, sometimes I do wonder if I have just accepted that getting soaked every day (from the kicking of the taps mentioned above), being covered in saliva and peeling a six year old off the top of a five foot high room divider is my life now.

“Oh sir” Mum was collecting her little one from school, “We won’t be here tomorrow because have an appointment at the hospital”.

I turned around to carry on cleaning up the classroom and found my teacher standing with her arms folded, staring at me and then she said: “You jammy git!”

Next: Secret Squirrels!