Review by Stephen Lockyer

It’s always a risk to see the TV or film adaptation of a book you’ve enjoyed. Your mind has already cast it, and it rarely matches up. The other way around, however, and the screen casts the book; Jackson Lamb is Gary Oldman, and that cannot be changed in my mind.

Some novels, however, cast themselves in such a way that you can see the book on screen, characters in play. So it is with Outstanding.

Its author, school behaviour specialist Steve Baker is a man who has watched over countless years in education and would be unlikely to let ITV make any of those gaffes we’re so used to seeing about schools: 12 children in a class, staff shagging in cupboards, teachers enjoying hot coffee. (NEVER watch a school drama with a teacher.)

The story of Outstanding centres around hapless headteacher Harry Flanagan, a man not so much right for the job as right in the middle of a disaster zone. Baker skilfully paints Flanagan as a man painfully out of his depth.

Throughout, he is surrounded by all manner of Machiavellian characters who between them embody  the vast majority of school tropes. Power-hungry governor? Tick. MAT CEO flying above, claws ready to snatch? Tick. Even the staff are checked off accordingly.

Stereotypes perhaps, but these have become tropes precisely by virtue of their being largely true, familiar and comfortable.

The cover rightly gives the impression of a light and lively farce, with pigs running amok. Outstanding isn’t weighty enough to become the Animal Farm of the educational world, but our porcine friends do make several appearances (along with their owner) and the book does (albeit gently) hold up the mirror of social commentary to our sector.

The number of characters without an agenda other than to see the school succeed is vanishingly small. Whether their drive is power, control, money or an extra TLR, almost everyone is driven by a force that isn’t actually to ‘improve the lives and opportunities for those in our care’.

The characters will no doubt mirror your colleagues past and present

So while the characters will no doubt mirror colleagues past and present for the educationally-experienced reader (and perhaps even themselves), it must have been a catharsis for the writer to lampoon them. Baker has clearly seen up close the damage that virtue signalling rather than virtue actioning can have.

The same could be said for the story-telling. It is a familiar tale, told well, with the droll wit of a Radio 4 comedy rather than a series of gags, and it is all the more enjoyable for that.

The plot concerns the countdown to an Ofsted inspection (and yes, they come under the magnifying glass too). Everything in the story arc suggests that it will be a resolute disaster, unless Flanagan and his (diminishing) allies are able to pull it out of the bag.

I’m not going to reveal what happens at the end. Perhaps ITV will indulge us with an adaptation for its light entertainment schedule, to which it lends itself. Better yet, read it yourself and cast it in your mind. You’ll no doubt have worked with plenty of pigeons to fill its pigeon-holes with.

Either way, it has both the levity for and empathy with education in general to provide a light-hearted escape from the job.

It was genuinely heartwarming to read a tale which ‘got’ schools so well, warts and all. We aren’t perfect machines, and we are filled with imperfect machinists. Schools are like bumblebees: physics suggests they just shouldn’t be able to fly, and yet they do.

While this book is dressed as a modern farce, it also shines a light on the fact that despite challenges, hiccups, the odd poisoned ice cream, the power struggles and personality clashes, schools can still be brilliant and beautiful places to be a part of.

I guess that’s why they remain such outstanding workplaces.