Ofsted ranks academy as ‘inadequate’

Exeter’s Steiner Academy has been ranked “inadequate” with serious inadequacies in leadership, quality of teaching and safeguarding in a report by education watchdog, Ofsted.

But a new leadership team has pledged to deliver a new era of state funded Steiner education following the inspection and report which acting principal Paul Hougham said yesterday made “very sober reading.”

Mr Hougham was appointed to the post on October 11 this year, a day after Ofsted inspectors visited the school.

“This is a new era for the Steiner Academy Exeter and we are wholly committed to this school offering an excellence in Steiner Waldorf education whilst meeting the requirements of Ofsted and the Department of Education,” he said. And he went on: “At the heart of the reorganisation, already well under way, is a seismic shift in the consistency and level of rigour and responsiveness of our focus on the quality of children’s education and wellbeing.”

The two-day Ofsted inspection, on October 9 and 10 this year, raised serious concerns with leadership, quality of teaching and safeguarding at the 442-pupil school at Cowley Bridge Road, Exeter. The inspection came just one year after a previous report ranked the school as “requiring improvement” and followed reports of two six-year-old children leaving the school unaccompanied in July. An external independent investigation has since been conducted and new safeguarding measures were immediately introduced.

Mr Hougham is now working alongside a new academy management committee, headed by chairman Paul Jones, appointed following the resignation in October of the entire governing board and the school’s principal Alan Swindell.