ABSTRACT
The emotions experienced by teachers during an inspection could not be anticipated and prepared for. For, though the inspections are scheduled through government policy, there is much about them that is unscheduled. There are no regulations or guidance by custom or tradition on how one should feel in such circumstances. There are no recognized procedures, formalized ceremonies, rulegoverned processes on which to model one’s emotional behaviour. In a real sense, teachers have to feel their own way. Even so, these feelings, we argue, are not an irrational response, a sudden and unreasonable reaction that is best controlled and suppressed, being ‘simple, non-cognitive phenomena, among the bodily perturbations’ (Harré, 1986, p. 2)—a view of emotions dominant since the seventeenth century. Rather, the emotional reactions of teachers to the Ofsted inspection are part of a process in which ‘emotions are characterised by attitudes such as beliefs, judgements and desires, the contents of which are not natural,
but are determined by the systems of cultural belief, value and moral value of particular communities’ (Armon-Jones, 1986, p. 33). In this case, as we argued in Chapter 2, one system of values, the government’s, which many Ofsted inspections seem to support, impacts heavily against a largely oppositional system, the teachers’. In consequence, Ofsted inspections are profoundly disturbing for many teachers. How disturbing, and with what social origins and consequences, is the subject of this chapter.
