Zenna Atkins hugs a very long and dull-looking document to herself with pride. “I was told to read this,” she says, to prepare for her present role, “and I did. Every word of it!”

One might not expect the chairwoman of the schools inspection authority, Ofsted, to take quite so much pride in having read the Education and Inspections Act 2006. But then one might not expect the head of Ofsted to have been illiterate at the age of 11, expelled from school and to have failed English O level – totally flunked it, with an unclassified “U”. Three times.

Ms Atkins’s academic career is marvellously inglorious – she left school with an O level in biology – for the woman now in charge of the nation’s educational standards.

Unsurprisingly, her mission is to get all children to read – and she is dismissive of the neurotic educational concerns of the middle classes.

Far too many children, she says, are abandoned to illiteracy. “One of the worrying things . . . is if you look at literacy. We are not producing children who are achieving the kind of percentages of literacy at nursery, at primary school, at secondary school, in the adult skills sector,” she says.

“And if we’re not getting those very basics right and we are not bringing the most disadvantaged up in literacy – you can see that we’ve lost a big piece of this.”

Ms Atkins, who is dyslexic, remembers her joy at reading her first book, while at secondary school. “Before that I hadn’t realised how isolated I was. You know I couldn’t read the back of a cornflake packet’s instructions . . . So I am a passionate crusader about giving people the opportunity to be able to read.”

Ms Atkins’s pedigree is colourful and mixed. It has given her a daring side, as well as an unexpected alter ego that is fluent in the evasive jargon of public sector bureaucracy, as we shall see.

Her father was an academic and spoke 17 languages; her mother was dyslexic and happier working on farms (the pair, although happily married, lived separately for many years in London and Cornwall). Her godmother is Shirley Conran, former wife of Sir Terence Conran and author of Superwoman. Her aunt, Vera Atkins, is believed to have been Ian Fleming’s inspiration for Miss Moneypenny.

Vera Atkins was the driving force behind the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, running covert operations in France, and her niece’s greatest role model. Vera and her two brothers were born in Romania, but as Jews, they fled to London before the Second World War, changed their names from Rosenberg to Atkins, and Vera, fluent in French, joined “Churchill’s secret army”, training young women to spy behind enemy lines in France. Ms Atkins was a kind of surrogate daughter to the childless Vera, and the old lady would ply her with champagne while confiding her war stories. “What made her remarkable is at the end of the war there were 117 female agents that she had trained and placed in France who had not been accounted for and she went and traced them all, bar one,” she says.

They were all dead. Aunt Vera, she says, experienced “the worst of the worst . . . Some of the transcripts of her preinterviews for the Nuremberg trials are mind-blowing.”

It was Aunt Vera who stepped in when her goddaughter was going off the rails. One of Ms Atkins’s earliest memories is of being shut in a cupboard in a state primary school in London and reading her stories into a tape recorder.

“It sounds diabolical,” she says, but it was in fact a kind act by a teacher who realised that she could not write and did not want to see her creativity stifled. When she learnt to read, at the age of 12, her mother moved back to Cornwall, and Ms Atkins took the 13-plus. “I failed. I mean not unsurprisingly, I failed cataclysmically. I just completely crashed and burnt.”

Her mother refused to send her to the local school – “absolutely frightful, it had recently been set fire to” – and tried to get her into a more distant secondary modern. Aunt Vera stepped in, paying for her to go to St Clare’s, a private school in Penzance that has since closed. It was a disaster. Two years later she was expelled, just before she was due to sit her O levels. She described herself at that age as “irritating”.

“I’d been to a big comprehensive school, and that was a very, very small school with a whole series of completely ridiculous rules. That I would challenge on a regular basis,” she says.

The final straw came when she had her hair painstakingly put into African-style plaits by a friend in London and refused to remove them when asked to do so by the headmistress.

“I was told to get out and never darken their doors again . . . my aunt phoned up and said that I would go back and sit the exams or she [the headmistress] would have my aunt to deal with. And so I did go back and sit some exams, which I didn’t get. I don’t have a glittering academic career. I can tell you about my success. I did get biology.”

The teenage Ms Atkins – and you can imagine her, all hair and attitude – went on to what she refers to drily as her “illustrious career” at Camborne technical college, to do a course on children’s residential care, a subject that is still an obsession for her.

She is pleasingly unsentimental about the system that failed her. “I didn’t fit into what the system was offering. Nor did I try ever at any point particularly hard to fit into it. I mean I can’t paint myself here as some wronged individual because I don’t think I was.”

She succeeded because the adults in her life were inspiring and encouraging. “I grew up quite easily believing that if I really wanted to eat the Eiffel Tower I probably could,” she says.

And there was Aunt Vera: “Ever so slightly scary . . . unspeakably opinionated. Could not be shaken from her opinion. But with a huge sense of moral justice. And that was quite a guiding principle for me.”

A month after her aunt died because of a hospital-acquired infection, Ms Atkins decided to work to improve things in the NHS, and became an unusually frank and radical chairwoman of a trust.

David Cofie, a close family friend, was the second big influence on her outside her parents. Mr Cofie was a children’s social worker and had a huge public row with the leader of Islington Council, Margaret Hodge (now a senior government minister), because she did not believe his claims about the existence of a network of paedophiles abusing children in care. His claims were subsequently proved horribly correct.

Ms Atkins says: “When you’ve got role models around you like that, you get a sense that it isn’t about where you stand in society, it’s about doing the right thing.”

All this sounds like she is gearing up to a trenchant and fearless critique of the present education system. She is the first chairwoman of Ofsted, a post created when it was beefed up last year to oversee children’s homes and services as well as adult learning.

This gives her an immensely powerful role scrutinising education from the age two to adulthood, and for the first time its chief inspector, the equally feisty Christine Gilbert, has a “line manager”. But here Ms Atkins seriously disappoints. She is at her most cogent in her dismissal of the middle classes, those parents who spend hours poring over every word of Ofsted reports on nurseries and schools, worrying about getting into the best one. Ms Atkins has little truck with this. “I don’t think it is going to do society much good if we rely on the small army of middle-class people to drive up standards,” she says.

Instead, it is the very fact that poorer families do not feel that they have a choice of school that makes Ofsted so important. She herself sends her two children, who are aged 8 and 12, to the local state schools in Portsmouth simply because, she says, they are happy there.

“Neither of them are academic geniuses, I’m sure,” she says breezily. “But they’re not deeply unhappy. They’re both functioning, reasonable kids.”

Despite working for a successful property development company (her husband looks after the children as she juggles a collection of jobs), seeking a private school didn’t cross her mind. “I genuinely don’t think I am different to the vast majority of parents. I mean, the vast majority of us couldn’t afford it anyway. I’m sure there is a small proportion of particularly middle-class England that do think this.

“But, actually, for the vast majority of parents, they’re not sitting there thinking, ‘Should I send my kids to a private school’. They’re hoping to God that the school in their area can provide an adequate education for their kids,” she says.

“This is why you need to have a very good inspection and regulation system that is focused on improvement, on making sure that the mainstream is good. Yes, there is an army of people out there doing exactly what you describe. But they’re not the majority. The majority of ordinary people use the services that are put there by the State, that they pay their taxes for.”

Which is where Ofsted comes in, and where she leaves us. A degree of tension between the role of Ms Atkins and that of the chief inspector might explain Ms Atkins’s extreme caution when discussing anything that might remotely be described as controversial, political or, er, educational.

The erstwhile rebel is a tower of a woman who speaks at the speed of an express train, and without full stops. But turn from the personal to the professional and it is like the invasion of the bodysnatchers: what happened to the plain speaker?

For a whole, painful half-hour she talks about a “broad brush piece”, governance, the “whole child”, “the value-for-money agenda”, “inspecting the pathway that children experience because of the new engaged and participating strategy”.

Oh, and the precise make-up of the various bodies that came together to form the new Ofsted: “I think we have to be clear that Ofsted isn’t a nondepartmental government body, it is a government department.”

It’s the sort of statement that the other Zenna Atkins would have howled at. And it’s a shame. The education system may not have managed to tame Ms Atkins, but Ofsted seems to have stamped the spirit out of her.

Zenna Atkins CV

Born: London, September 30, 1965

Education: St Clare’s school, Penzance; Cornwall College of Further Education

Career: At the age of 16 she co-founded Breadline, a charitable employment agency; 1991-93: founder and manager of a Portsmouth youth homeless charity; 1993-95: Portsmouth crime prevention officer; 1995-2000: founder and manager of youth justice charities; 1997: guest presenter, Channel 5; 1999-2004: partner, Social Solutions, promoting social entrepreneurialism; 2001-7 non-executive chairman of Portsmouth City Teaching Primary Care Trust

Current: 2004-chairwoman of Places for People, a property development company; 2005-chairwoman of the Royal Navy Audit Committee; 2006-chairwoman of Ofsted

Family: married, with two childen and two stepchildren

Interests: Portsmouth Football Club

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