ABSTRACT
I knew that review meetings could be tough, but this was something else. We had for the fi rst time in over 10 years achieved poor results on one of our courses. Sitting before me were two senior managers, a governor and an external consultant. I tried to explain why in my view the previous year’s results were anomalous. It didn’t go down well; I was informed that this sounded like complacency. I was reminded that I was being paid generously to manage the department and that an unqualifi ed teacher (employed as a learning mentor) seemed to be having more impact than me. As I tried politely as I could to answer each of their questions, I was interrupted. I left the meeting in no doubt that I was not up to scratch. The next day I received the report from the consultant’s monitoring visit. His verbal feedback had been mixed: hard but fair. The written version had only the negatives.
