No teachers, the head in prison and an Ofsted inspection: it went rather well

25/04/2008 by April First.

Diary of a school Administrator

Read the diary from the start Diary of a School Administrator, April 8

A day that should go down in the annals (if we have annals that is). The head is under arrest, the photocopier has been held as evidence, most of the teachers are on strike, the police are poking around in the false ceiling in the staff room and we have an Ofsted inspection.

Actually I think the inspection went rather well. We – the humble but worthy administrators – answered all the questions, put a few back to them, and generally sorted matters out. Actually I don’t think the inspectors even noticed that the teachers weren’t there.

One rather interesting point arose when Janice responded to a request for policy documents (which of course had been the cause of all our problems over the past week) by stating that they were all on the computer network. Apparently last year the deputy head signed the school up for a service called Ariadne, and as a result got all the policy documents onto our server.

It seems he has been able to tell exactly who has been looking at which documents, he can see which departments are up to date with what, and which teachers are simply not bothering to stay in touch with the administration of their own departments.

So all the photocopying was pointless. I asked Dr Strange at break why he had not announced the introduction of the system (beyond telling Janice), and he mumbled something which (on the grounds that it was more than eight words long) I took to be quite untrue, and that in essence he had simply forgotten about it. Unless of course he and Janice have a thing going, but that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Ariadne is however a wonderful system. If Admin can take control of it, as we have done with Ofsted Day itself, that could really sort the school out.

A teacher who was self-evidently not on strike, but whom I swear I have never seen before rushed into the office this morning and said, “The frog in the school pond is drowning and can’t get out,” before rushing out.

We debated this matter for some time before deciding to take no action on the basis that

a) frogs don’t hop around ponds in April (we weren’t sure on this point but we thought it was fairly safe)

b) frogs can always get out of ponds (ditto)

c) we don’t have a school pond.

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