Post‐fabrication and putting on a show: examining the impact of short notice inspections

This paper explores inspection, performativity and fabrication within the context of two English schools. Case studies are employed to compare and contrast the inspection experiences of two teachers at different points in their career trajectories. The paper focuses on comments made by Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of the Office for Standards in Education (Of STED ), that schools were ‘putting on a show’ during inspections. Empirical evidence is presented which suggests that the key informants invested emotional, physical and intellectual capital into the perpetual readiness incumbent in high‐stakes inspection process—an investment which was anything other than putting on a show. The paper proposes that, in the cases in point, the changing nature of school inspections led to ‘post‐fabrication’, that is, inspection readiness was omnipresent to such an extent that it was not a fabricated version of events. The findings presented here have implications for teachers, school leadership teams, policy makers and all those interested in inspection.