CHAPTER XXIII
REPORTS
“All my reports go with the modest truth,
Nor more, nor clipp’d, but so.”—King Lear.
The annual inspection of a school ended in a Report. When the papers had been marked, and the Examination Schedules had been made up, it was time to search one’s note-book, and to rack the memory for facts, and therefrom to construct a report to Their Lordships, to be communicated to the managers, and by them to the teachers.
In the earlier days of inspection this was a comparatively simple affair: the really important matter was the number of children who had passed or failed in the examination. Upon this, unless there was conspicuous weakness, the greater part of the grant depended, and it was easy to fill up the forms with commonplace criticisms and suggestions. From 1876 to the middle of the ’nineties the pressure increased, until at last reporting became a serious strain on memory, judgment, and conscience; for there was a variable grant for half a dozen subjects, culminating in a variable grant for the general “merit” of the whole school: and each item required some thought. New code after new code relaxed the strain, until inspection arrived at the present effete condition, when the grant is fixed, and the criticisms of H.M.I. are like the bite of a midge; annoying for the moment, but transitory in effect.
Or, as my old headmaster would have said, “like the coruscations of the summer lightning, lambent, but yet innocuous.”
From one corner of my old domain comes a mimic blue-book, containing all the school reports for the past year. Here they are collected; and I look at them with some dismay. Of course I did not write all of them, but I edited all, and I am answerable for all. Some are strongly worded, for, if one does not shout pretty loud to a deaf man, one is not heard. Yet one does not want one’s shouts phonographed. How do the managers and teachers like the reports in print, scattered broadcast?
I search my memory for any parallel publication. The nearest that I can discover is a Cricket Directory, which I saw perhaps forty years ago: I quote from memory fertilised by imagination:
A. B. is a promising run-getter, but he too often forgets that a straight bat is a rudimentary necessity: his fielding is improving: as a bowler he has not been successful this year: his average is x.
C. D. bowled x overs for y runs last season, and took z wickets: this is his best record so far, and makes him a valuable acquisition to a county team. As a batsman he has still much to learn: his average last year was z.
These are complimentary compared with some of the school reports that lie on my table. But when I read them, or rather their prototypes, in that remote period, I was sorry for A. B. and C. D. Yet the writers were subject to the law of libel, and H.M.I., if not malicious, is privileged.