School portraits / The six weeks before a Year 4 start
Very Good Is Two Above Good
A father near Khalifa Park, two inspection reports from two different frameworks, and a daughter who had her own rating scale.
Daniel Ferreira had two PDFs, and the problem was that they did not agree, and the deeper problem was that they were not disagreeing about the same thing. One was the ADEK inspection of Brighton College Abu Dhabi, which said Very Good. The other was the March 2024 British Schools Overseas report, which gave the school the highest judgement on its own scale. His daughter Inês was due to start Year 4 in six weeks and Daniel wanted to know, before then, which document was lying.
Neither, said his wife, Leila, who worked in compliance and had the patience of someone who read frameworks for a living. “Different inspectors, different rubric, different year.” Daniel had printed both reports and laid them on the dining table in their flat off the Corniche, side by side, like a man comparing two translations of the same poem and finding that one had more pages. He had also highlighted. Leila noted that he had highlighted the word Good in a shade of orange usually reserved for warnings.
The ADEK history was the part he could not leave alone. Outstanding in 2018. Very Good since the 2022-23 cycle. Daniel treated this the way a football supporter treats a drop from first to second: not a fact but a mystery that required explanation, a change of manager, a scandal. He phoned admissions to ask what had happened in 2022. A pleasant woman explained that she could send him both reports. He said he had both reports. She said then he had everything she had. He thanked her and told Leila he suspected a cover-up. Leila said the cover-up was that a Very Good school was Very Good.
Inês got involved on the Wednesday. She was eight and had wandered in looking for a pencil and found her father reading the BSO report aloud. “What’s Very Good?” It was a rating. “Is it better than Good?” It was two above Good, Daniel said, which was a sentence he had not expected to say in his life. “What’s above Very Good?” Outstanding. “And above that?” There was nothing above that. Inês considered this and said it seemed like a short ladder.
That evening Leila did the thing Daniel should have done and read the recommendations sections, which were short and specific and concerned things like consistency in a certain phase, rather than the grand nouns on the cover. She read them to him while he washed up. He stopped washing up. The reports, it turned out, were more useful on page eleven than on page one, which is true of most reports and most fathers.
On the campus visit near Khalifa Park, in August heat that made the car park shimmer, Daniel asked his two prepared questions and got two sensible answers, and was faintly disappointed not to have uncovered anything. Inês asked where the drinking fountains were. On the way out, in the car, she delivered her own inspection in the ADEK style, which she had absorbed through the dining table. “Playground: Outstanding. Library: Very Good. Toilets: Acceptable.” Leila asked what was below Acceptable. “Weak,” said Inês, “and then Very Weak, and that’s for the car park.”
Daniel started the engine and did not argue. He drove home and put the PDFs in a drawer, where they joined the warranty for a kettle he no longer owned, and on the first day of term it was Inês who asked whether the school had been told it was Very Good, and whether it minded.