IN DEDICATING his book Pushing Back to Ofsted to “the country’s brilliant teachers” who labour under “unnecessary and demoralising regimes of compliance and fear,” Richard House informs us who really suffers through the hellish imposition of Ofsted.

[[{"fid":"22850","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Teachers, certainly, but ultimately the children who should be learning and growing in brainpower in our schools.

His account is an insightful and detailed riposte to an Ofsted inspection that closed a Gloucestershire school. In this instance, it was a privately run Steiner school, but it could have been a state school in any of our villages, towns or inner cities which failed to observe Ofsted diktats and what House calls their “inflexible, tick-box mentality” and anti-educational onslaught on teachers and pupils.