Alastair McKay Chaos reigns in the Marlwood classroom as Mr Pope tries to hold it all together
one wants to park their career in a failing school — and so it goes, until you get to the part where everyone is trying not to talk about downward spirals and sinking ships. Mr Pope does pretty well at this but he cracks after another phone call from Ofsted. “The sword of Damocles is nigh,” he says, which is another way of saying that every crisis is an opportunity, or something.
Of course, just as teaching is a form of acting, so is performing in a fly-on-thewall documentary. Mr Pope, unluckily for him, is the star of this show, and he dissolves slowly. By the end, in a magical moment of liberation, he swallows his sword and forgets about the structure moving forward and the difficult financial context and starts to speak human again.
But what of the school? Well, let’s not have spoilers, because watching Marlwood’s travails does cause you to wish it well as an institution, while also wondering about the logic of a system which reacts to symptoms of failure by withholding resources.
The chief executive of
the Castle School Education Trust, Will Roberts, whose corporate background is offered a s c o n tex t , is even more abstract with his language, suggesting that the pupils are “both the product and the customer”.
He talks flatly of the need to balance the books, and of “adverse consequences”.
Of Marlwood, he notes: “If this was a business, we’d put a big sign on the front saying: ‘We’re closing at Christmas, thank you for your custom.’”