We’ve all moved on, say school managers
AFLEDGLING Runcorn high school has vowed to bounce back from a flurry of blows including an ‘inadequate’ Ofsted inspection and closure threat from the Department For Education (DfE).
Sandymoor School’s Bryan Jones and Andrew Lockyer, parent governors, and Sally Jones, the vice principal (VP), spoke out about their determination to make the school succeed as they looked to dispel what they portrayed as myths about the severity of their situation.
They were eager to reiterate that the sharpest criticism in the recent Ofsted inspection related to GCSEs and that the school’s past two years of results were not representative of the secondary’s performance because of the high number of pupils who had transferred from other schools.
Mrs Jones said the results had been skewed also by the school’s decision to enter high-performing students for their maths exams while in lower years if they were deemed talented enough and it ‘was the best for them’.
Some parents had taken their children out of the school, but the numbers had been ‘minimal’, Mr Lockyer said.
They said the problems that beset older pupils had been alleviated for Years 7-9 and that was reflected in the education watchdog’s more upbeat assessment of its Key Stage 3 capabilities.
Mr Jones stressed that of the individual measures in the Ofsted inspection, only the outcomes category was graded ‘inadequate’ but that this was enough to determine the overall score.
He described it as a ‘dodgy Ofsted’ but pledged that ‘it will never happen again’.
Despite radical hopes of injecting a spirit of innovation into secondary education as part of the Government’s free schools programme, Mr Jones conceded that the freedom to set their own curriculum had led to it being untethered from clear guidelines to assess it.
Hopes are now pinned on the prospect of being absorbed into an multiacademies trust, which Mr Jones said will strengthen the ‘robustness’ of the curriculum and allow expertise to be shared.
Pupil numbers are also picking up, with Year 7 ‘nearly at full capacity’ and the school working towards its goal of 120 pupils per year.
Mr Jones hailed the work of school leaders, saying the ‘senior leadership team is incredible’, doing ‘exceptional’ work.
The governors and Mrs Jones, who is covering for principal Emma Simpson while she is on sick leave, were keen to look to the future.
Asked about staff morale, Mr Jones said staff are ‘excited’ about the future and felt as though they were ‘a team pulling together to solve a problem’, some children said it ‘feels like a family’, while the vice principal said the inspection report showed that pupils feel ‘safe and happy’. Mr Jones said: “A startup company is tough, a start-up school is ridiculous, particularly when y you’re building it. “We’ve been through a hell of a lot. “It’s still the best thing I I’ve done in my life. “There are times when I feel feel, you k know what I feel sorry for parents, they’ve got this label of inadequate for 18 months. “The sad thing is if we look at outcomes in two years time, if we’re looking at what we’re expecting to get, we will have outstanding outcomes. “We’ll be outstanding.” He added that parents were not alarmed by the Ofsted report and regarded the rating as a ‘label’ that ‘doesn’t reflect what’s going on’.
He said: “I’m happy to apologise to those parents who took a punt on us in the early days, but the parents of those kids don’t accept the apology.
“They knew what they were doing, they knew it was going to be tough.
“They don’t regret coming to this school. “They know it’s a good school.” Sandymoor School was due to provide its response to the DfE’s regional schools commissioner on Friday.