6 months down

It's hard to believe that it's the 1st of March and exactly 6 months to the day that we started our stints as teaching staff in Hastings. There's actually a lot of firsts at the moment: first day of spring (still feels like Australian winter) and more importantly our first day back at school after two highly stressful days of OFSTED inspections. At this point you're probably thinking "What's OFSTED?" or as our kids would say "OFSTED? You effin abusin' me, you sayin my mam's a slapper? You pickin on me cause I'm ginger? I'm goin to friggin punch your ed in you derty pedo. Innit rite?". Ah, you've got to love them.... At least I can come away at the end of the year saying I've learnt a new language.

Anyway, OFSTED stands for Office for Standards in Education and is a huge, huge deal. In November we had a bit of a test run when we were inspected by HMI (Her Majesty's Inspectors) and that was pretty full on but the past two days have sheared years off my life. OFSTED have a lot of power and can make or break your school, meaning they can put your school into what's called "special measures". Schools placed into special measures receive intensive support from local authorities, additional funding and resourcing, and frequent reappraisal from OFSTED until the school is no longer deemed to be failing. Furthermore, the senior managers and teaching staff can be dismissed and the school governors are replaced by an appointed executive commitee. In basic terms it means that the school's trusty old fallback of hiring newly qualified staff from overseas is all over. OFSTED decide who gets hired and fired and ONLY experienced teachers get employed in the future. Meanwhile the "special measures" title gets splashed all over the media and the reputation of the school goes further down the toilet. Let the fun begin.

Well firstly I should mention that the school got a "satisfactory" rating which was met with cheering and wolf whistles by the staff. After work yesterday many of the teachers went out drinking and then today thirty teachers went drinking in first period in the pub opposite the school. I wonder what OFSTED would have say about that? Everyone was extremely surprised by our rating as we were all expecting the worst because some totally crazy stuff happened over the past two days. An inpector witnessed students bullying a member of staff and leaving her in tears, another inspector was told "get the f*** out of the way you f****** c***". Yesterday a young man walked into the school property off the street, found a boy in Year 11 and them promptly punched him in the face, splitting his nose and spraying blood everywhere. It gets better...The student staggers out of the toilets blood gushing Kill Bill style where another student asks him to turn around. When he does turn around the other student projectile vomits all over the floor in the English corridor at the sight of the gore. Yummy.

One of the reasons we didn't go into special measures because there wasn't a culture of fear amongst the teachers. We all look fairly happy and we seem like we're not about to have a nervous breakdown (probably best we didn't mention that one teacher quit last week due to stress and another is off with severe depression and is actually having a nervous breakdown- join the club buddy). The week before the said teacher (Mr W.) quit there was a staff meeting for the form tutors and the conversation went like this (real names not used to protect the guilty):

Ms D: Your form group is in charge of assembly this week, what are you doing?
Mr W: I'm doing a performance piece.
Ms D: Oh yeah, what are you doing?
Mr W: I'm going to hang myself.
Ms D: *silence*

So yeah, apparently we don't look scared enough. Personally I think we're all a bit over it and a little part of all of us is secretly hoping that a student punches us out so we get a nice, fat compo. package from the school. I know, I know, it's a terrible thing to say but it's true, give any teacher a couple of beers and they'll gladly tell you the same thing.

I think I've been pretty restrained not telling you all the crazy stuff we've witnessed over the past six months and now we've passed the point of no return. I really think now's the time to start revealing a few little snippets of daily school life for your entertainment, just stay tuned...