SCHOOL INSPECTORS

I recently had a school visit that clashed with an Ofsted school inspection; not something that often occurs. The day before my visit, at the close of school, the phone had rung and two Ofsted inspectors had announced they would be arriving the next morning and staying for two days. It was the school’s Book Week. Not many lessons had been planned because of the author visit. The week had been freed up for follow-up activities and everyone was looking forward to dressing up as favourite characters in books, and enjoying a week of stories and reading. But the Inspectors weren’t coming to see an author in action; they wanted phonics and maths lessons. So after the phone call, the teachers had all stayed in their classrooms late into the evening preparing 'serious' lessons. The next day they were stressed, Book Week was fast becoming irrelevant and I spent the day dodging the two inspectors as they went from classroom to classroom looking for phonics lessons.

    How different it all was from another inspection four decades earlier when I was a young teacher in an infant school. I too was trying to give an impressive phonics lesson in ITA (the Initial Teaching Alphabet) but the inspector seemed more interested in a home-made picture book of mine written in the Initial Teaching Alphabet,  and the little boy from the caravan park who was sitting in a big arm chair in the reading corner looking at the pictures.

The inspector took the book away with him and sent it off to a publisher. It was as a result of this school inspection that I changed careers and became an author/illustrator after The Emperor's Singing Bird was published by Andre Deutsch in the normal alphabet two years later. 

My contact with that schools’ inspector didn’t end there. He later asked me to illustrate a book of his own. The name of the inspector who came into my classroom was Alan Jamieson and here are some of the illustrations I did for his book The Carnferry Gang.

WORLD BOOK DAY & BOOK WEEK

Nice to think of all the books being read to children on World Book Day.  Thankfully, the weather was good last week as hundreds of authors and illustrators headed off to schools all over the country. Now that schools and authors are well briefed about these visits there are hopefully fewer bad experiences than in the early days. I had a good book week this year, going to three very different schools: a small rural state school, a large urban state school and a small private school in a Victorian house in London. That was all I could manage in the week. I had to turn three others down. It's a shame schools don't spread their Book Weeks more evenly over the year.

You rarely meet other authors during Book Week though I remember once passing Val Biro in a school corridor during a particularly relentless day of non-stop workshops at a large London school with a young male head teacher who was hitting some big targets.

"This one's going to do me in," Val gasped. " Haven't even been offered a coffee." His car Gumdrop was parked in the playground. He'd driven it in rush hour traffic round the M25 to get to the school by nine.

All a long way from a quiet day in the studio.