What happens to a school after a notice to improve?

[yellowsubmarine41]

Just that really. Once a school has been given a notice to improve and then reinspected a year or so later, what are the best and worst things that can happen to it?

Best - it deals with whatever problems are facing it and improves within the year

Worst - it fails to make satisfactory improvement and goes in to Special Measures (which, depending on the reasons for the problems, can actually be a really good thing in terms of the support, funding and attention that the school then receives)

If it makes satisfactory improvement, would it then be classed as 'satisfactory'.

Or, if improvement was substantial, could it be 'good'?

Anything is possible. School has targets to achieve and massive support from LA but Gove cutting funding to LAs hinders this. Teachers under huge pressure and feel they are being constantly 'watched', which they are!

A school near my sister-in-law's has gone from outstanding to notice to improve within a couple of years. Will it make any difference to the children in the school? Not a bit, highlights the silliness of the current OFSTED system.

Whilst the Ofsted system is less than brilliant, I would have to say to Iamnotminterested that what you describe is actually Ofsted working. A school that everybody thinks is OK being inspected and the result is that it is actually not OK and needing it pull its finger out.

I agree with admission. 'Outstanding' to 'notice to improve' can't possibly just be about the new 'rigorous' statistic led framework; there must be significant problems for such a dramatic change.

A dip in SAT results

A school near my sister-in-law's has gone from outstanding to notice to improve within a couple of years. Will it make any difference to the children in the school? Not a bit, highlights the silliness of the current OFSTED system.

True.

Our current HT was Head of a school in a city for two years. It was OFSTEDed the summer before she began and graded 'Good'. She left to come to our school and that Autumn (last year) the school she came from was graded as 'special measures'. Naturally we were shocked and worried as our school was due to be inspected again.

Sure enough that Spring (Feb 2011) we were inspected. We were graded 'satisfactory' as last time but the lead inspector made it clear that she thought we were 'good' but could not award us it as the past three year's data was not good enough (i.e. not enough level 4s) and the fact that HMI were inspecting the inspectors and frowned on the mention of 'good'!?! Our inspectors even said that our children had surpassed their targets and making excellent progress.

OFSTED inspections are rather dumb! It depends on the team you get. I remember one inspector in 2008 telling me " I was in your lesson for 27 minutes and 53 seconds." EH? Out of an hour's lesson he was able to make a judgement and what the hell has the 53 seconds got to do with anything???

My school had notice to improve a few years ago. A year later the second team came in, gave us a really glowing report and doubted that we could have improved so much, so quickly and cast doubt on the reliability of the first judgement. (Won't go into detail about what the team did or did not bother to look at when making their judgement, but we put in an official complaint about the team to OFSTED).

My daughter's previous inspection was Outstanding across the board. They've just been reinspected and given notice to improve. As a parent I am more than happy with the education they receive. They are bright girls. If I was a parent of a child who didn't find everything so easy I would be more concerned. The report has yet to get to the internet, but I am guessing that their results aren't good enough. They have a dip in the % expected to receive the expected results between the end of KS1 and KS2.

New inspection framework: New rules.

This will probably happen to more and more schools as the increasing focus on percentages causes what seems like wild variations between years, but is actually only a few kids doing better/worse than the previous year/had been expected.

Applying % to small numbers and judging a school on that is insane - in a single form entry school, each pupil counts as over 3%, so 3 pupils make a difference of 10% in the 'scores'.