Not good, but outstanding
Sir: If, as Matthew Parris asserts, ‘There are no “good” teachers’ (Another voice, 7 June), then there can be no good practitioners of anything. To state that those teachers who are good for some children invariably ‘wreck another’s prospects’ is a reasoning which could be applied to all professions.
How does a good Prime Minister promote the best to Cabinet without discarding the deficient and defective? And what of those journalists who decide each week who is worthy of their attention, invariably to the detriment of others who may be just as worthy? The promotion and affirmation of one is necessarily at the expense of another. Some might call it natural selection. Or is Matthew Parris advocating equality of outcome over equality of opportunity?
I must declare an interest: I am a teacher. But I am not ‘good’; I am ‘outstanding’, or so Ofsted tells me. But this ‘outstanding’ is not as the dictionary defines — that is being concerned with superlatives. No, teachers who are ‘outstanding’ are ‘at least good in many respects’, so that they may be decidedly less than good in others.
The desire to make all teachers feel good about themselves has resulted in grade inflation, such that Ofsted’s ‘outstanding’ no longer means outstanding. Indeed, one might as well introduce an outstanding* to distinguish the truly outstanding from Ofsted’s assessment.
Good teachers, as Matthew Parris demonstrates, are those who inspire and somehow live on in the lives of their students. For one to be lauded by a former pupil half a century on, and immortalised in the pages of The Spectator, is indicative of a truly outstanding teacher and manifestly belies the assertion that there are no good teachers.
Adrian Hilton
Ripon College, Oxford
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