OfSTED Inspection Report 2008
Thank you for your marvellous response to our Ofsted Inspection.
The questionnaires to parents went out, the inspectors arrived, and the administrator booked in for a couple of hours to open up the replies and log them on Ofsted’s database. 6 hours later she was on her knees. The database can only accommodate 500 responses, and no school, in her experience, had had more than 250 responses. We had over 800. Your response has broken all Ofsted records, by some. There was no precedent for such a level of response, and special guidelines had to be sought. We aren’t allowed to see the individual responses, but we were told that they were overwhelmingly supportive of the work of the school. Thank you.
We are delighted, and honoured. An overall judgement of outstanding on both the Ofsted (Section 5) and the Church of England (Section 48) Inspections is the stuff of dreams. Nationally, between 2- 3% of schools achieve an ‘outstanding’ judgement in Section 5, so we feel very proud. HMI’s letter to our students undermines just how impressive they are – and what fantastic ambassadors they were for the school when the inspectors were in. In the current framework, the effectiveness of schools is judged by the impact on the young people, and our students – your children – were outstanding.
However we are not complacent. ‘Outstanding’ does not mean ‘perfect’, and by that measure, we still have a long way to go, and we always will have, because our society and the demands on young people are changing so fast and so dramatically. But we are moving in the right direction. Inspectors praised teaching and learning as being ‘good’ overall, with some outstanding practice. There was nothing less than ‘good’, and we can build further on that. As we do that, achievement – the progress that students make – will improve further. Our ambition now is that next time Ofsted visits, we will achieve an ‘outstanding’ judgement on every aspect of their schedule.
The results of this report can be found in the Ofsted report 2008 in this Ofsted section.
