Outstanding education is a high-level policy narrative in England rehearsed by school leaders, politicians, policy-makers and inspectors alike. The "legitimacy" of knowledge, performativity and discourse-based analysis are mobilised to examine outstanding. The paper explores how informants in the English state secondary education sector described and experienced outstanding. From examining policy documents and empirical data, the paper suggests that outstanding has become a performative tool "hijacked" by inspection regimes. It concludes that, despite the informants' best efforts, the neoliberal and performative policy discourses which surround outstanding appear to increasingly wield a disproportionate, even tyrannical, influence upon the English education system.