After they had departed, my colleague remarked that it felt like winning the FA Cup and going home thoroughly depressed by the experience. We had got the result we deserved, but felt that far from recognising the genuine values being added by the enthusiasm and experience of our hard-working staff, we were instead being assessed only on a set of outcomes, the numbers of examination passes that "proved" we were outstanding at teaching children to pass examinations. What joys Orwell would have had with the concept of "value-added".

Of course, I know that we are an outstanding grammar school, providing pupils from a huge range of social backgrounds with a secure foundation in the love of learning. I also know that some of these pupils would have struggled and almost certainly "failed" in a "bad" school. Yet in 20 years' time will they be saying, "I am so pleased that my school provided such a great non-academic curriculum - oh, and did you know that it achieved +0.48 as a value-added score"? Or will they be more likely to regret never discovering that love of literature, that facility with numbers, that passion for science which would have made them a truly educated person?