The death of Irene Hogg was, in the normal run of things, a very local tragedy. The popular and apparently devoted head teacher of a small rural primary school was found dead in a remote area, in an apparent act of suicide. The shock resonated within the familes of her 81 pupils; flowers were left at the school and her local authority chief spoke of losing one of his most experienced and valuable staff. “The word ‘love' keeps coming though,” he said. “She was so highly regarded.”

And there, frankly, the story would usually have ended. The passing of a 54-year-old unmarried woman - a dedicated professional who lived for her job and a round of golf at the weekend - could easily be put down at the door of secret sadness, hidden depression: the myriad private disappointments and inner conflicts that can overcome people at a certain point in their lives. Very sad, of course, but none of our business, and of no larger significance.

But the ripples from Irene Hogg's death, which would ordinarily have stopped at the borders of her community, have spread. Because in the week preceding her death, two school inspectors came to visit for five days. The head had spent weeks beforehand in preparation, ensuring the school, which she had run for ten years, was at its best. It seems her best was not enough. At the end of their visit, the inspectors told her verbally of their criticisms. No one knows officially what they are, for the report on the school, in the Scottish Borders, will not be published until June.

A friend, however, has claimed that the criticisms were “silly”. They are believed to include that a wooded area at the back of the school was not used (when locals knew it was contaminated by dog dirt); and that Ms Hogg was to be reported to the council for not filling in a complaint form. Ms Hogg was apparently angered and “very disillusioned” by what was said to her, and she failed to reappear after the Easter weekend. Her body was found the next night in a lonely part of the hills.

Bad enough that one admirable woman, with 30 years teaching experience, who had steered countless children on a good course in life, has been lost to teaching. But even worse is the possibility that she was driven to take her own life by what seemed like unnecessarily aggressive or petty bureaucracy.

If this is indeed the case - and the conclusion is hard to escape - then Irene Hogg is not the first teacher to succumb to the modern culture of hypercriticism, but simply the most recent. A number of teachers have taken their own lives after negative inspections, destroyed by the institutional fault-finding that now passes as healthy standard-setting. It is what the NUT has described as an educational reign of terror.

Last December Jed Holmes, a 53-year-old head teacher in Peterborough, killed himself on the eve of an Ofsted inspection. The coroner commented: “We cannot exclude the proximity of the inspection. It was that which triggered off the action he took.”

The previous month, a 35-year-old teacher in Essex, Keith Waller, hanged himself after criticism by Ofsted officials. And in January 2007 the body of a senior teacher, Sarah Flooks, 50, was found months after she disappeared the day before an inspection which she had been dreading. In her diary she was said to have written of Ofsted “coming back for more” and said she was “fed up with everything”.

These are just the teachers we know about. There are countless others, we can safely assume, who suffer severe turmoil and stress from inspections, but keep going, shoulders bent beneath the weight of institutional menace. How many of us could imagine having our performance at work put under the microscope, relentlessly, for days on end?

The whole nature of modern inspectorates is that they are fundamentally hostile. The inspectors arrive less interested in positive things - warmth, kindness or inspirational teaching - than in inefficiencies and mistakes. There is always the implied suspicion of incompetence lurking.

I have seen brilliant, top-performing schools reduced to gibbering, defensive management-speak by criticism from inspectors. At schools so good you would cut off an arm to get a child into them, head teachers are made to create “action plans to take forward main points of action”; “initiatives to extend the range of teaching approaches”; and “improved self-evaluation and more emphasis to strategic management, with the aim of continuous improvement”.

And that's the tragedy. If a school's senior management team can cloak itself with an armour of impenetrable, meaningless language, and fill in all the forms, and tick all the boxes, and aim for annual growth targets like main board directors, it will probably get graded “excellent”. Irene Hogg, I imagine, was too honest, too down-to-earth, too good at her job and almost certainly of the wrong generation to play these sort of games.

Put it this way. Do we remember our own inspirational teachers because they filed their methodology reports on time, or because they made us laugh and excited us with knowledge?

This savage ethos does not end with education. Profoundly, this is what lies behind so much misery in our overinspected, fault-finding, glass-half-empty way of life. We have become a society that, when it smells roses, looks only for the coffin. We have lost the means of recognising positives, let alone measuring them.

A hypercritical approach, we now believe, is the only way to achieve. Hence the vicious cycle of impossible standards, false expectations and the communal sadism of beating up those who fail to reach them. Terminal Five, I venture, is a classic example of this syndrome.

How radical it would be if we stopped this destructive pursuit of mythical “excellence” and remembered the humans behind it. Most people can only do their best. It's counterintuitive, but by accepting second best, and doing so kindly, often we would get better results. Given, that is, that happiness is our ultimate goal.

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