Tiny fee-paying prep school gets ‘inadequate’ Ofsted rating
A FEE-paying prep school charging some parents more than £7,000 a year has been rated inadequate by Ofsted.
Rosslyn School and Day Nursery is Birmingham’s smallest independent preparatory school.
The Hall Green school, first established in 1927, claims to “bring together tradition and innovation to prepare our pupils for the world of tomorrow through a near one-to-one curriculum”. Ofsted said it had 26 pupils of mixed gender ranging from three to 11.
A spokesperson for the school said it was “naturally disappointed” with the outcome of the March inspection.
They admitted bosses “got it wrong” and said they had changed leadership.
The Ofsted report said that while pupils enjoyed coming to school and relished the chance to develop leadership skills, they were not always supported to “gain the knowledge and skills that they need to prepare them for the next stage of their learning”.
The report read: “Pupils’ behaviour is often inappropriate. Incidents of disruption in class are too common. Pupils often show negative and disrespectful attitudes towards staff and each other.
“Staff do not have consistently high enough expectations of pupils’ attitudes towards their learning. This means that too many pupils lack focus and do not take enough pride in their work. This often goes unchallenged by staff.
“Staff do not have high enough expectations of what pupils can achieve. Pupils are not progressing as well as they should. Pupils’ learning is often disjointed within individual subjects and across the curriculum. This is limiting the amount of knowledge that pupils acquire by the time they leave the school.”
The report pointed to “weaknesses in leadership” and “substantial changes to staffing”.
“Overall, the curriculum is not fit for purpose,” the report added.
A spokesperson for Rosslyn School and Day Nursery said:
“We had known about our areas for improvement for some time but owing to numerous interruptions in our development throughout forced government lockdowns we were somewhat restricted in the changes we could make. We make no excuses, we got it wrong.”