The Queen, it is often asserted, must believe the world smells of fresh paint. In our days of reduced monarchic executive power this inaccurate view of the world has few consequences, other than a potential impairment to the royal olfactory senses. However, in the days when kings and queens held real and terrifying executive authority, imagine the impact that their rose-tinted perception of their kingdom could have: famine? Not here; everyone feasts like a king. Disease? Just call one of your many physicians. Decaying and backwards-facing education system? Nonsense! Just send your child to Eton, or one of our many equally fine comprehensives.

Have you ever wondered, though, what happens when Her Majesty's secretary of state for education takes it upon himself to visit a school? Some of you, doubtless, will have experienced that most debatable of pleasures. Perhaps your experience was rather like ours.

Recently the heads of faculty were summoned to the head's office and there solemnly informed that the school was to have a special visitor later that week. And that this special visitor was The Rt Hon Michael Gove.

The delight with which the middle leadership received the news was such that it rendered many of them speechless, it is said. It seems that the sponsor had invited the esteemed official to visit the school – sorry, academy – such were the strides it was making at the forefront of educational reform.

The news was to be strictly confined to high-ranking employees until the day of the visit, meaning that all staff and students were fully aware of The Event within 12 hours. Students approached teachers to enquire what forms of violent insurrection they could expect to witness on the day, as did a surprising number of parents.

The senior leadership went about the careful business of organising a typical day for Gove to witness during his short stay with us, and the first priority was to deal with bad behaviour. There could be nothing worse than allowing The Visitor to experience the sort of adolescent interactions his teachers have to survive every day. Therefore, the worst of our year 11 boys, whom the leadership attempt to control with the authority of a nervous rambler negotiating with an enraged bull, were taken on a minibus trip to the educational site called "a long way away". Apparently, this was the start of a programme that would finally deal with the sort of deep-seated self-esteem issues that cause youths to pay attention to staff only in order to threaten and insult them in a mumbled monosyllabic stream. Unfortunately, the programme lasted for only one more week after The Visitation, due to circumstances that have never been referred to since.

With the most likely sources of trouble being educated off-site, the next priority was creating a secure and sealed environment through which The Guest could walk, lest he should passively experience a modern school (or academy) by mistakenly coming into contact with a person without a public school education. It's a policy modelled on David Cameron's drawing up of his cabinet, I believe.

All members of the extended management team (management teams change and grow when you become a troubled academy) were called in. Many of these consultants are vastly experienced former headteachers and were immediately put to use guarding the route that Gove was to take. Each one was tasked with not letting any child through their appointed door and given a walkie-talkie through which to communicate the movements of any potential threat.

Once the security cordon had been established, thoughts turned from what Gove shouldn't see to what he should see. To this end, it was decreed that he shouldn't have his sensibilities risked by having to walk through any corridor that was not freshly painted, or that was furnished in a way that would have looked out of place on a programme featuring Kirstie Allsop. If we had been selling the school to the secretary of state, in fact, we couldn't have decluttered and neutralised the spaces any more successfully. Only the smell of baking bread was missing.

Finally, of course, He will expect to see some education taking place and this is where the best-laid plans can come apart. Teachers selected for viewing were of the quietly excellent or noisily subservient variety; there would be no aggression or dangerous reality creeping in to this utopian educational biosphere, free from the LEA jackboot of oppression.

So Gove came, and went, and no one was any the wiser. Far be it from me to posit an argument in defence of the most reviled education secretary in history (and English Literature for that matter), but if every school puts on this show for the man, he must think he is doing an excellent job, that his dream for a thousand shining Etons is at hand, and that he is on course to be prime minister of a country with top-class schools for bottom-dollar investment.

If only he could get rid of that smell of paint …

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