After teaching for long enough, you become almost completely desensitised to the occasional hideous smell wafting downwind through a school corridor. It’s one of the great perks of hanging on in there.

New teachers are often halted in their tracks whenever one of those familiar school fragrances first hits them, their fresh faces instinctively turning away in revulsion. 

Suddenly they are taken back to some of the oldest and grimmest memories from their own schooldays: “the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril”, as Shakespeare put it (almost certainly after revisiting his old school as a special guest on World Book Day).

My senses, in contrast, are now so numbed that I no longer notice the pungent odours caused by, say, a blocked drain, a Year 10 boy overdoing his Lynx spray or a forgotten mug of coffee that’s been coagulating since Christmas on a team-room shelf.

The golden age of smell

While there are some clear benefits to reaching this impervious state, I do miss that glorious middle phase in my teaching and smelling career. That was the true golden age for me and my nose.

At my peak, I was the envy of the staffroom. I had the perfect blend of youth and experience: in the job long enough to be able to ride all the various odours, yet still nasally sharp and sensitive enough to identify exactly what each smell was and where it was coming from.

Colleagues would marvel at my ability to detect instantly, for example, whether a particular new emergent air was the result of a sabotaged toilet, or whether it was caused by a more substantial blockage further down the system. 

“That one’s going to need the rods out,” I would confidently assure those eagerly gathered around me. How they sighed and swooned.

I could similarly inform admirers whether the whiff of rotting corpse hidden in the depths of a stock cupboard was mouse, rat or the unfortunate outcome of some terrible oversight on a pet-themed “Show and Tell” day a few weeks previously. (“Mum was just wondering when we are getting the hamster back?”)

From glossy corporate to rotting corpse

If I dropped in on someone else’s classroom at the end of a lesson, I could always tell the teacher which year group they had just taught - sometimes even which class it had been. Oh yes, I was quite something back in the day. A mere Ofsted “outstanding” wouldn’t begin to do it justice. 

Smells, however, will probably be something that Ofsted inspectors continue conveniently to duck, despite their avowed new focus on “the whole school environment”. And while they may now - rather grandly - claim to be “deep divers”, they really do not begin to know the meaning of the term. 

True deep diving in a school is joining the noble site team on the front line, as they open up a foul-smelling drain and “rod” their way down to the obstruction, or as they delve into the darkest depths of a musty old storage room in search of a former rodent life somewhere within. 

Some will obviously turn their nose up at all this, preferring to focus on a school’s vision, mission statement and other higher things. 

But the truth about a school is that the gap between glossy corporate on the one hand and rotting corpse on the other is quite narrow. There’s just too many people and nowhere near enough money for things to be otherwise. 

In this sometimes deluded age, smells play a valuable role in reminding us of that reality. 

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’ School in Thame, Oxfordshire