This contribution republishes extracts from two important articles published around 2000 concerning the punitive accountability system suffered by English primary and secondary schools. The first concerns the inspection agency Ofsted, and the second managerialism. Though they do not directly address assessment, they are highly relevant to this collection for three reasons. Firstly, assessment data feeds into both: in other words, they constitute part of the "high stakes" of the present system. Secondly, the descriptions they provide of the educational and social damage caused by inspection and data-driven management is highly pertinent to the test system. Finally, these aspects of governance along with high-stakes assessment are explicitly located within a broader ideology and policy framework of neoliberalism which distorts educational aims.