School Requires Improvement

It isn't funny when their grades are not so good because of instability and inadequacy in teaching and the inability of the SLT to put things right though! If your school is on the Bristol list (and some poor schools only go up to Y11 so miss the list, but GCSE results are dire) you may be OK, but often dire teaching does not drop one grade in one subject - it is much worse than that! Children not being motivated is only one of the consequences of teachers leaving or huge numbers of suply teachers in school. It is much worse than that.

My son's school burnt down and had severe staff issues. It ended in the head going on gardening leave suddenly, and teachers leaving left right and centre. It was woefully inadequate, not just by ofsted standards.
I took my son out. He was there for two years, and even now, after a year and a half in an outstanding school, he's struggling to get back on track.
I'll counter that by saying he has some SEN which were ignored by his previous school, which caused him to disengage. He was also bullied and the school failed him on many levels.
If you think your child will thrive whatever the environment, then keep her there, but if you have any concerns that her individual educational and social needs aren't being met, or that she needs additional support, then my experience would be that the sooner you move her the better.

AtomHeart you dont say what year your DD is in. My experience of a repeat offender school (back in Special Measures for the umpteenth time since I have been associated with the school) is that you have to get very selfish. Your DD will be there for only a few years with a very definite end game (GCSEs).

IME you have to be on your game, following up issues quickly. One of the mistakes we made was not recognising early enough that the high staff turnover meant that some important coursework got lost.

This may make useful reading.

Remember that your DD being at a failing school is not a disaster. If your DD is able to motivate herself then she can still achieve good results. These may be despite the school not because of the school but that doesnt matter.

Later on at A level there can be some hidden benefits for the self-starter. A number of universities make contextual offers (taking account of the school itself and the local area). As an example Bristol Uni's normal offer for Physics is AAA, their contextualised offer is AAB.

I rather suspect your location gives a wide choice of other schools for teachers to move to. I thought the whole inspection sounded some positive notes and that the Governors must challenge the Head more rigourously and not just accept poor progress and results. It appears they have reconstituted and now have the required skills so they should be expecting improvement and monitoring progress and outcomes very closely. How they are going to address the problems will be interesting and I think the school should pay more attention to parents!!!

I hope you did not mind me trawling Ofsted but reading the whole report does help when responding - otherwise it is just general comments which may be way off !

I think I have worked out which school you are talking about, OP. There do seem to be green shoots and the school management have recognised the problems, although very late in the day. If I am correct, the Report says the current School Development Plan is weak. This will need to be rewritten and strengthened post inspection (Improvement Plan as I mentioned above) so that it is fit for purpose. The Governors are also required to know that improvement has occurred, not just be told it has, so expect to see measurable outcomes included. At least when a school recognises where its weaknesses and under-achievement are, they can start to do something about it. It is always dangerous to have a "head in the sand" attitude and this be a feature of religious schools where attention can be focussed on ethos rather than results and ongoing progress of all children. Usually parents are supportive because they want this type of education and then fail to see the shortcomings, as have the leadership and governing body. (I may have the wrong school of course!).

I still think recruiting into the Maths dept will be troublesome as it is elsewhere. However, one good curriculum leader can do wonders, so hope for the best.

You may not be sent the detailed Improvement Plan but you can see a summary of it. The full one will be very detailed but parents should be in the loop regarding progress.

As I said earlier, Ofsted see lots of temp staff or supply teachers as a red mist! Generally it means standards will fall because continuity is not maintained and so much in education these days depends on ongoing assessment and planning teaching on the outcomes. It is almost impossible to do with constant changes.

Sometimes young staff will cut their teeth in a school and then realise it is not for them. Older staff are more expensive and a balance is necessary.

Ofsted will scrutinise the Improvement plan so it is worth getting a summary.

Based on the last couple of sentences, I think the school has actually been quite well treated by Ofsted. The school has not kept up with the new grading system and the Pupil Premium is not spent on the pupils it is aimed at, would in many inspections be getting a worse grade than RI, especially if you add in gaps in knowledge of pupils and nosediving GCSE results.

The key time will be when an HMI visits the school in about 6 months time, they will expect to see not only a viable plan but actions that have already happened. If they do not see that then the school will be on a slippery slope towards another inspection very quickly.

Sorry not being very positive here but there is no short term fix for this. The fact that the inspection ended up as RI, says that the inspection team thought by implication that the senior leadership team of the school were capable of sorting this out, which may be the most positive information to come from this.

The OP says it has RI in almost every aspect. Therefore it is highly likely that senior management needs to improve to stabilise the school. From what I have observed, schools that cannot keep staff are poorly managed and teachers feel unsupported. It is a particular problem in areas where there are not enough good staff to go round and Ofsted has highlighted that this is most often a probem in the North and Midlands. It is also clear that schools which do not have well qualified, highly performing and stable staff do less well for the children.

It may be that newly qualified staff are, in fact, good but lack direction from middle managers. It could be that lots of staff were older and have retired over the last few years leaving the school rudderless. At my DN's school, at the last Ofsted inspection, 50% of lessons were taught by supply teachers. As you can imagine Ofsted were not impressed.

It is extremely difficult to see where a quick fix lies with this. If management suddenly becomes dynamic, supportive, and turns the school into the destination school for good teachers, then there might be hope. If they drag along as present, it may take quite a while to effect improvement. It is imperitive to make the school an attractive place to teach so that the best people actually want to teach there.

You can ask to see a copy of the Improvement Plan (or a summary of it) when they have produced it to see how they intend to improve and what the timescale is. Ofsted or HMI will be back to check on progress as well in about 6-9 months.

Normally the RI designation on the school is the wake up call for the school to improve.
However you have highlighted a very specific problem in the school and it is not really a surprise if the school has a very high turn over of staff that the school has got the designation that it has.
The question is what is the reason behind this challenge for the school. Are they making the mistake of employing large numbers of Newly Qualified Teachers either because they cant get anybody else or because they have financial issues? If they have teachers joining and leaving in droves do they actually have an issue in the senior management and it is a case of 12 months is more then enough time to spend at this school?
Is there nothing else in the Ofsted report that suggests where the issue is, there quite often is a hint in the wording of the report, where the fault may lie?
Maybe the next step, assuming that the report has just come out, is to write to the Head teacher and the Chair of Governors asking what the school is going to do about the RI judgement and the very specific issue of teachers leaving the school.