The suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry is a terrible reminder that there is even worse than burnout at work. Perry took her own life on learning that Ofsted, the schools regulator, was about to downgrade her Reading primary school from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’, potentially ending an exemplary 30-year career. 

In a grotesque irony, the one thing the happy and popular school was marked down on was safeguarding. No one would downplay the importance of keeping children safe, but doing so by endangering those who look after them is a contradiction that seems to have passed by the regulator, whose response to the ensuing outcry has been to plough on with its inspections exactly as before.

The episode is triply scandalous – a graphic example of everything that’s wrong with our system of regulation. 

The first is that, as with burnout, the brutality of the method fails the first test of the ‘no asshole rule’ famously defined by Stanford professor Bob Sutton: it’s plain wrong, and inexcusable even if it worked. ‘If performance is your only dependent variable, the human race is not in great shape,’ Sutton reflected recently on wholesale sackings by Big Tech. A place should be found for dignity, he added, ‘and sometimes it even helps’.

The second scandal is that it’s counterproductive, both for regulation’s own aims – improving lives by raising education and care standards for children – and the country’s wider economic objectives.

Like health workers, teachers, particularly heads, have had no let-up from the enormous pressures of the last three years, facing first Covid and now the need to make up for the life-affecting disruptions that have held back learning and development. Accepting the need to put children first, an expression of support somewhere in Ofted’s dry-as-dust statement of principle, values and strategies would have been a better reset than springing a new round of unannounced, even more stringent inspections on an exhausted workforce.

The Ofsted affair comes at a critical time for the profession. The UK is suffering a national shortage of teachers. Vacancies are running at twice pre-Covid levels; nearly half of current teachers, ground down by workloads that have already brought them out on strike, say they plan to quit in the next five years. To many, the inspection crisis is ‘the last straw’. A few years ago, at a routine check-up, my GP greeted me with the news that she had just resigned, a decade early, the day after a bruising inspection that had reduced her as head of the practice to tears and her husband to such rage that he had to be deterred from tracking the chief inspector to his office to punch him in the face. My doctor’s reaction was less extreme than Perry’s, but the result is the same: one professional the less to do an essential job for the community at a time of acute labour shortage – a stupid self-inflicted wound.

As for the economy as a whole, the chancellor’s recent autumn statement made much of the need to coax back to work as many as possible of the 700,000 workers over 55 who have vanished from the national workforce since the pandemic. Casting light on the missing elders, and underlining the previous point, LBS’s Lynda Gratton recently noted her research finding that reluctant returners split more or less evenly between the sick, carers for others and those who would rather retire early even on a lower income than go back to work that they detest. Piling fresh pressure on already stressful occupations is not an obvious way of persuading them to change their minds.

The third scandal is that after all that, regulation in its current form doesn’t work. If it did, we wouldn’t live on an island surrounded by sewage, where a substantial proportion of trains simply don’t turn up at the platform each day and in which almost the first action of every incoming government is to set up a ‘better regulation’ taskforce, with results that are always as disappointing as the last one. 

Politicians are right that regulation needs reform, but they have no idea how unfit for purpose it actually is. Current regulation doesn’t prevent scandals – witness the emerging horrors in the police and fire and rescue services, the dysfunctional energy market and the water and rail disasters mentioned above. Its interventions don’t have a good record of improving performance for the user, quite often the reverse. And nor does it satisfy the politicians supposedly in charge who are perplexed by the regularity with which supposedly ‘outstanding’ establishments are later revealed to be scandalously bad, and by the discovery that the figures the assessments are based on are hopelessly unreliable. 

This is because regulators make the cardinal error of mandating the how – methods and measures – rather than the what, desired outcomes relating to purpose. At a stroke, innovation is killed stone dead as managers learn that it’s not pleasing parents or patients that win them an ‘outstanding’ label but complying with the edicts of inspectors and regulators. Too often, they find themselves locked into practices and processes, often involving costly digital-first ‘solutions’, that reflect today’s faulty management assumptions instead of challenging them. The result is schools that are Gradgrind on steroids.

This needs to be reversed. A good head teacher’s job is to figure out how to create a happy, inclusive and caring school where teachers can carry out the job they joined the profession to do, not a joyless exam factory that boasts of checking all the safeguarding tick-boxes. Trial by ordeal has no place in government policy or on a list of acceptable management practices.