An exercise book is so temptingly inspectable. It sits there, solid and available, full of dates, titles, diagrams, worksheets, corrections, and comments in variously coloured pens. You can pick it up, flick through it and feel you’ve seen something. Lessons have taken place, work’s been done, a teacher has intervened, students have responded. All the evidence one could ever need to feel confident that learning is or isn’t proceeding as desired, conveniently packaged between two floppy, card covers.
Inspection, in all its forms, has become curiously vulnerable to book scrutiny. We want to know whether students are learning, whether teaching’s effective and whether the curriculum’s coherent, but these are awkward things to establish. So we reach for visible proxies: full pages, neat presentation, written comments, coloured pen, student responses, evidence of challenge, evidence of progress, evidence of pride. Before long, the proxy hardens into the standard, and books are no longer bein…
