In all fairness, you have to hand it to the government and Ofsted double act. It’s a cunning plan they have devised there. Just when the fury of teachers starts to focus on the one, the other dutifully pops up to divert some of the rage their way instead.

First, this week, we were led to believe that the government was the more outrageously out of touch, with its cost-saving and mainly useless Covid catch-up spending plan - a uselessness to be spread over the course of three years, let’s not forget.  

But then up springs Ostrich - sorry, Ofsted - emerging once more from the desert sands to advise secondary schools not to send their Year 11s and 13s away after taking their teacher-assessed grade tests. Instead, insists chief inspector Amanda Spielman, schools should be helping all those children to continue to catch up on their lost learning.  

GCSEs 2021: Ofsted wants to shut the stable door after Year 11 has bolted

Erm, I think most secondary schools will show you a disappointing scene at the stable door there, Amanda. Those teenage horses have well and truly bolted and are - quite understandably - now Covid catching-up on a year and a half of lost socialising and partying, certainly if the evidence of my neighbourhood is anything to go by. 

What are those lazy, irresponsible schools thinking of, eh, Amanda? Never mind that said exam students have had quite enough of streamed lessons and intense live learning and revision since January, that they have just taken a load of mini-exams, that they have lived through the most uniquely Covid-confined of times. 

Let’s not set them free! Let’s get them back into those classrooms for another seven or eight weeks.  

They may have already had their official last day before half-term, with all the shirt-signing merriment and slight melancholy for how it might have been normally. But it’s still not too late to get them all back. 

No matter that most of those returning students will regard more catching-up now as pointless, given that they see learning to be all exam- and grade-related. (Where they get this idea of education being just about ratings, rankings and league tables, I do not know.) 

No matter, either, that most parents will equally deem such a return to be a waste of time, and that the only children who will bother to turn up will be the ones least in need of any such catch-up.

Running more lessons for the sake of it

Never mind, either, that secondary teachers are currently desperate for some more non-contact time in school, so that we can manage the additional role of being an exam marker, moderator, grader and validator. 

Forget also the fact that most schools are, in any case, setting tasks that will prepare home-based Year 11s for their post-16 options, whether returning to the same school or elsewhere - and that schools with a sixth form will be having the Year 11s in for some induction lessons.  

Forget all such trivialities. We need them all back in, now. After all, as we state school teachers hear so often, most independent schools are still providing lessons for their own post-exam students, all the way up until the end of their term in early July. 

This extra resolve of the fee-paying school has, of course, got absolutely nothing to do with many parents constantly breathing down their necks for reductions in fees, ever since the first day of the first lockdown. 

No, the Ofsted leader’s idea of getting them back in is about something much grander and more visionary than that. It’s about running more lessons for the sake of it, however resented they might be by all parties concerned. 

You do, indeed, need to be in another place to be able to show that kind of vision. 

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