Last day

“And they all lived happily ever after.”

She shut the book slowly and glanced out the window at the parents gathering in the playground. Then she looked down at the class and forced a smile. “Well, children, that’s it. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have been your teacher this year, I hope you all have lots of exciting adventures over the summer, and I just know you’re all going to do wonderfully well when you come back in Year One.”

She took a deep breath. “So, that’s it then. You can go and get your things from the cloakroom.”

The children milled around, bumping into one other, grabbing at bags and coats, shouting, giggling. Callum, ever confident, reappeared in the doorway, yelling “Bye, Mrs Peters!” Several other children crowded round him, shouting goodbye as well.

“Bye, Callum, bye everyone. Go on, now, out you go. Bye-bye.”

She leaned back against her desk. A hush gradually filled the room as the children’s voices faded then disappeared. She realised she was still holding the story book. A cartoon Big Bad Wolf snarled back at her from the cover, little realising his plans would end up foiled by pigs.

If only the wolves in real life were as easy to defeat, she thought. The one that came into her classroom, dark-suited, grey-faced and unsmiling, sitting, watching, eyes boring into her, judging. ‘Ofsted: raising standards, improving lives’, proclaimed the school inspectorate’s logo. “Ruining lives, more like,” she said to herself.

She opened a drawer in her desk, took out the things she had placed there that morning, closed it again. Her knee gave a twinge as she stepped onto the tiny plastic chair. She paused then took the second step up onto the desk.

At the third attempt, standing on tiptoe, she managed to swing one end of the clothes line over the beam and catch it. Carefully, she knotted the two ends together as she’d practised, noticing the slight tremble of her fingers. She pulled to check it was secure.

She looked towards the shut door of the classroom. Had she heard something? She listened hard. No sound. The room looked strange from this vantage point, smaller, far away, dreamlike. Ghosts of memories flickered. She blinked tears away, then shook her head clear of doubt.

She attached the sign to the front of her cardigan with safety pins, the thick red, felt-tipped letters glowing from the white paper: ‘REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT’.

It boiled down to those two words. The inspector sat in judgement over her for twenty minutes out of the whole year and proclaimed that she ‘required improvement’.

He didn’t look at her once as he delivered his verdict. “Not all of the children were actively learning all of the time. For some, their pace of learning dipped at times below the ideal. For this reason I cannot possibly grade you as ‘good’. I’m afraid, Mrs Peterson, that your lesson was nothing special.”

In the fevered and fearful lead-up to the school’s inspection, she recalled the horror stories of older teachers hounded out due to ‘capability issues’, to be replaced by younger, cheaper models.

She recalled the cards the children had written for her in their large careful letters. “Thank you for making school fun.” “You helped me with my numbers. Thank you.” “I love when you read us stories.” They didn’t think she required improvement, no parent had ever, not in forty-one years, had cause for complaint. How dare that man come in and tell her that, how dare he?

An angry satisfaction washed over her as she thought about the inspector being told the news. She imagined him crying, crushed by the knowledge that this was his doing.

She put her head through the noose and pulled it tight. The plastic was cold against her throat. She closed her eyes. Began counting. One, two, three, four, five. Six. Seven. Eight.

She opened her eyes and looked down. A small boy stared up at her, his mouth hanging open. She stared back.

“Hello,” she managed at last. “What’s your name?”

“Dylan,” he muttered, shyly, then more loudly. “I’m going to be in your class next year.”

“Oh.”

“My brother says you’re really nice.”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Jamie.”

“Jamie Harris?” The family resemblance was plain.

Dylan nodded and stuck a chubby finger up his nose.

There was the sound of footsteps and voices calling out. She felt stupid. What was she doing? Was she losing her marbles? She quickly wriggled her head out of the loop. “Dylan, could you please pass me those scissors from that pot? Good lad, thank you.” Determinedly she sawed at the line, which frayed then broke. She stuffed the noose in her pocket and ripped the sign off her cardigan as the footsteps arrived at the door.

“Dylan, there you are. Don’t run off like that.” His mother rushed over and hugged him. Jamie followed her in, laughing. “Dylan, you dingbat.” He grabbed his little brother under his arms and lifted him off the ground, Dylan giggling manically.

“Hi, Mrs Peters,” Jamie looked up at her. “What are you doing up there?”

“Oh, I’m just taking down the displays, Jamie. Getting everything ready for the new class. I’m looking forward to seeing Dylan next year. Could you give me a hand down, please dear. I don’t know what possessed me to get up there, I really don’t.”