Myatt Gardens Primary School lies in a pleasant, if slightly shabby, street in south-east London. It's a 440-pupil school of a kind difficult to imagine in Ireland: only 40 per cent of pupils are white and English; the rest come from a kaleidoscope of backgrounds, with children of Caribbean, African and Turkish parents particularly numerous. Many come from deprived backgrounds - 42 per cent, double the national average, are eligible for free school meals.
Principal Glenys Ingham is a tough, cheerful woman clearly on top of her job. She admits she enjoys being in charge of her own budget. In her three years in charge, disruptive behaviour has all but disappeared.
She objected to no fewer than three teams from the feared Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) before Myatt Gardens was finally visited by six inspectors for a week last summer and everything - from finance and premises to teaching standards and curriculum delivery - was put through a fine-tooth comb.
From next September she must implement the latest in a long line of changes in the statutory national curriculum: prescribed new courses in literacy, numeracy, information technology and RE. This will increase to 11 the number of compulsory subjects. "It's a ridiculous workload - there is just not enough time in the week to deliver so much properly," she says.
Because budgets are now almost completely the business of individual schools, she has a full-time administrative assistant, a post undreamt of in Irish primary schools. Mike Suiter says his function is to "prevent her being swamped by administrative work."
The list of paper and form-filling tasks teachers have to do after a day's work in the classroom sounds close to swamping. Suiter lists some of this paperwork: national assessment tests at seven and 11, preparation for Ofsted visits, borderline assessment plans, teaching plans, reading tests, subject policy updates, numeracy and literacy training manuals, special needs reports, forms for custody cases and other child protection issues.
Ingham calls her staff "marvellous" for taking on this load, plus all the burdens of working with multiply disadvantaged children, and still having energy for running after-school sports, drama and music. She talks about the "unbelievable stress levels" caused by the Ofsted inspection. "If my brief was to unpick every single thing my teachers do, of course I could come up with improvements. The very private nature of the job - just you and the children in the classroom - means you often feel guilty, you feel that whatever you do it's not enough."
In the staffroom they list the four most stressful elements of their working lives - the paperwork overload, the constant curriculum changes, "continually being told we're crap in the media", and, in fourth place, the behaviour of some children.
"The paperwork in the weeks running up to the Ofsted inspection - and staying on until eight or nine in the evening to finish it - was worse than the actual inspection," said one. "It seemed to involve minute-by-minute explanations on paper of everything we do in the classroom," said another.
A third complained that she was sick of hearing politicians criticising teachers on radio. "Is there any chance of a job in Dublin," she asked, only half-jokingly.
