O...

I had the joy of being interviewed by an Ofsted inspector yesterday afternoon. It was all painless enough in the end, it was a "monitoring visit" to make sure the school where I'm Chair of Governors has made sufficient progress since the last full inspection. And the feedback was positive, which was encouraging. The overall process is still dominated by statistics, proving with data that the children are making progress etc. Seems to reflect the obsession of some parts of our society with measuring things, then labelling them. "If we can't put a number on it, how can we know it's really happening" seems to be the attitude. And there's a danger that creeps into church life too. Not just in the obvious ways (bums on seats), but in subtle ways too as we try to "measure" where we're at spiritually and assess it against others. This approach definetely has value and can be helpful; but let's get it in a bigger perspective, in education and in church!