Think back for a moment – if you can bear it – to the types of children with whom you shared your classroom. As sure as eggs is eggs, I’ll bet you’ll recall the earnest spods, the fidgety, the uninterested, the larkabouts, the corpulent, the shirkers, the smelly, the clowns and the downright thick. In fact, a cross-section of people that mirrors humanity itself.

You won’t be surprised to hear that the modern-day classroom still contains all these glorious archetypes – thankfully – but the terminology, at least that used by educational establishments, has shifted somewhat.

My college announced recently that, given our position in the Ofsted inspection cycle, we can expect our next visit sometime within the following six months and that, consequently, this country is at war – sorry, I mean, we need to become “Ofsted ready”. Any readers who are not lucky enough to be part of the state education sector can never really comprehend the tremors that ripple through an establishment at the mention of the ‘O’ word. Muscular senior leaders are keen to prove their joylessly efficient organisational skills; weaker teachers tremble that this is the moment they will be unmasked, while the majority of staff hunker down and hope that the storm will pass them by.

Read more: Leave Them Kids Alone! The Alphabetti Spaghetti of Inclusion