I see Wes Streeting has piped up about Ofsted. Unlike the honourable Member for braying overconfidence, I have experienced Ofsted, and I’m going to tell you why it’s a waste of time and money. https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/1329427249137930240

I’ll set aside the impact it has on the mental health of education workers, because Wes won’t care about that, and move straight to why it’s pointless.

Ofsted is pointless because if they turn up and the school is good, the visit was a waste of time, and if they turn up and the school is shit, it’s too late.

It’s entirely predictable that Streeting would think Ofsted is good, because he sees himself as a part of the managerial class created in the 80s to discipline the professional class on behalf of capital. Sometimes, as in the case of Ofsted, this is done via the state.

Ofsted isn’t even fit for the purpose of maintaining standards of delivery of the highly constricted and constricting curricula in contemporary schools.

A less punitive, judgmental way of maintaining standards would support schools to improve in perpetuity, whether they’re good, bad or indifferent.

But that might mean that you can’t grade them or put them into league tables, thereby introducing competition; an example of actually-existing neoliberalism.

You know that word that Blairites say socialists just use for anything we don’t like? Well this is a concrete example of what it is.

Obviously Ofsted is a part of the ideological state apparatus, but it’s also part of the process of disciplining an increasingly proletarianised profession and driving the value out of labour.

It diverts the attention of teachers- who already probably work 60 hours a week- away from teaching and towards time-consuming window-dressing, therefore having a deleterious effect on children.

But Streeting likes it because acting tough on ‘standards’ fits with the idea that a child’s education is a commodity, rather than a series of collaborations between teachers, parents and children.

Don’t like your kid’s school? Just change it the way you would your broadband provider, or the way you'd change from Sky to Virgin TV.

This also fits with a fundamental unwillingness to meaningfully alter an economy which leads to most parents having to work.

No stay-at-home parent means a child might get to school having been *necessarily* under-parented, and therefore unready for a education system made increasingly inflexible by pressure and scrutiny educators are put under by govt, learning authorities or multi-academy trusts.

Streeting also defended testing. Why? Because testing creates data. Teaching and learning aren’t always particularly compatible with data, but SATs are a handy way of correcting that and making the profession more amenable to managerialism.

Bad for children’s mental health, you say? Ah well who cares about their mental health, the important thing is that we send them into the labour market with a load of qualifications so that capital can be discerning about the workforce we’re providing it with.

Tldr, Oftsed is bad, SATs are bad and Wes Streeting is a dick.