Ofsted is the official body that inspects schools in England. Inspectors visit, sit in lessons, look at results and at whether children are safe, then publish a report and a grade. For years those grades ran Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, Inadequate — and a poor grade could break a headteacher's career. English teachers talk about “Ofsted week” the way other people talk about an exam. The letters first stood for Office for Standards in Education. The official name later grew to cover children's services and skills as well, but everybody still says Ofsted. It is a government inspectorate, not a teachers' union and not the exam board. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have their own inspectors, so Ofsted is really an England name that foreign news treats as “the British school police.” The messy truth: it also looks at nurseries and some other services, but the word in ordinary talk still means “the people who come to judge a school.”