If you don’t have the stomach to be that radical, then, at the very least, reform Ofsted out of recognition. Because if you abolished it, you would have to replace it with proper competition between schools and actually give families real choice over their children’s education and I can’t imagine any government ever doing that. (You do know that people don’t have real choice? The only families who have choice are the ones who can afford to move house. If you can’t, you have to go to your local school.)

So if you can’t abolish it, rein it in. And I mean properly rein it in. Michael Gove thought he could reduce its power by allowing governors and head teachers to devise their own ways of reviewing school performance, but Ofsted has in effect squashed that. A real reform would be to demote Ofsted to the educational equivalent of the Health and Safety Inspectorate, giving schools a basic check on order and hygiene. No rats? Finances in order? Great. Let’s get on with teaching.

While you may feel schools are being held to account, some 20 per cent of our children leave school innumerate and illiterate. In what way is Ofsted holding our schools to account? Nearly 30 per cent of secondary schools were found to be either in need of improvement or inadequate last year. Has anything happened to them? People often cite “safeguarding” as a reason for Ofsted’s existence. But when does one ever hear of Ofsted exposing a school for not safeguarding pupils? Rarely. Why? Because all inspectors can do is execute the bureaucratic task of ensuring that a school’s Single Central Register has been properly filled in. The SCR lists staff and their DBS checks — which they apply for to prove they have the all-clear to work with children. But what does Ofsted’s visit of once every three or so years mean? It does not mean children are properly safeguarded. It means both the Ofsted inspectors and the school’s senior team are adept at filling out paperwork. Do you remember the Trojan Horse schools? Ofsted had given one of them a glowing report. In fact, we only ever knew that there was a problem in those schools thanks to a whistleblower.

2. No more Performance-Related Pay (PRP). You should want to hire first-class, highly-committed people who regard teaching as a vocation, not people who want to be set a target and rewarded financially for achieving it. PRP undermines everything we believe in by encouraging the wrong motivation in teachers and it creates an extra bureaucratic workload by having to justify achieved targets. PRP disincentivises a head of department from supporting a newly-qualified teacher by taking the more difficult pupils because it might mean her not hitting her target. With PRP, teachers cannot work as a team.

Teachers have limited time. Either they spend their time doing an excellent job, or they spend it writing things down. Those who manage to do both do not survive for long and leave the profession within a few years, burnt out from the crazy workload. At Michaela, teacher well-being is central to what we do. We keep marking to a minimum and feed back from the front of the class. We use IT to ensure that teacher workload is reduced. We do not have PRP so my teachers work like a dream team. As an example, we’ve had trouble finding science teachers who fit with our philosophy. The whole school, including heads of maths and humanities, are helping to find science teachers for the school precisely because we don’t have ludicrous targets and their pay does not depend on them doing other things. The ethos at Michaela is such that we all work together for the betterment of the school.