The appointment of a new chief inspector from January 2017 offers the opportunity to re-set the relationship between Ofsted and the teaching profession. Both inspectors and teachers need to readjust their mindsets, if inspection is to be seen as developmental and principled rather than judgemental and arbitrary. Without claiming that it was exemplary or that it was not without stress for the inspected or the inspectors, this article argues that the approach used by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) prior to 1992 should be revisited and lessons learnt for the further development of school inspection.