In all my years of headship, I never once had an inspector ask about our successful summer fayre, the sports day, or the school production. For that matter, nor did they ever ask where we sent the excess food from our Harvest Festival.
Those who inspect our schools only pay lip service to the plethora of activities schools undertake beyond the academic core. And yet each of these is a huge, important undertaking, adding stardust to every aspect of school life.
Would the powers that be just rather we held an annual raffle and got on with it?
Harvest festivals may be a relic from a pagan past, they may even be held at the wrong time, but surely they help us teach our children about where food comes from and of course where we can distribute the produce. Sports days can teach us all about winning and losing and being competitive but also respecting fair-play. School plays can be simply transformative.
And yet, they are being squeezed.
Schools and teachers are under enormous pressure to produce the goods dictated by our leaders. It is a tragedy that the stress levels endured by school staff can make these wonderful events sometimes feel like a chore to be endured.
We should never lose sight of the fact that it is often these activities that make each individual school what they are. But herein lies the issue: almost no one in the wider education sector is truly interested in what makes school different.
Instead, schools are increasingly following a prescription written by the government. How sad that in doing so we have lost the individuality in our schools that was so common just a few years ago.
In the process, we have lost the creative arts, food technology, dance and other activities that allowed children to use different skills and develop flourish and flare.
It is not without irony that right at the top of the education food chain, we find the people who make the decisions paying to send their own children to schools that celebrate the individuality so lacking now in the state sector.
State schools must be more than exam factories. Inspection and accountability needs to be recalibrated to celebrate the enormous efforts heads and teachers go to make their school special and individual.
Our schools must be allowed to celebrate their differences and so must our pupils, each unique: each with their own aspirations, their own needs and their own magic.
Colin Harris led a school in a deprived area of Portsmouth for more than two decades. His last two Ofsted reports were ‘outstanding’ across all categories
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