Any OFSTED experts out there?

[Lua]

Long story short.... DCs primary school received "notice to improve last year". They had some safety issues (CRBs not up to date), and this has been rectified. However this year's comment continues to be embarassing about many other aspects of the school and we got a "satisfactory".

Headteacher says that satisfactory is all we could get no matter what, so everything is fine.

Is this true? Is it not possible to get "Good" from "notice to improve" if the scholl has really turned around? is it not be possible to improve more than one category at a time?

Yes, you can get to "good" from "notice to improve", and I know of a school where this has happened.

A lot depends on what the head has judged the school to be. If the head judged satisfactory and only had proof of satisfactory then they would have known beforehand that OFSTED would pretty much agree. My old school was deemed good when the head judged it satisfactory but that is apparently very rare. The next time OFSTED came they said they wouldn't disagree with the head and dropped us to satisfactory.

Thank you!

I thought so . It annoys me that he keeps saying this, even in official letters! I think it just how bad he is really.

chiken, how frustrating of your school! On the bright side you do get a good school, no matter what the OFSTED says.... in my case, I suspect satisfactory is generous.

I wonder if there is any way I can dispproof him officially, is there an official site with policies that would make this point clear?

As long as your child is happy and making good progress I wouldn't worry too much about the label. We had not one parent complain when we dropped to satisfactory because their children were happy and doing well. We also had excellent SATS results in year 6.

We were a good school, just not good with putting paper work in place! OFSTED and the head were right in their satisfactory judgement. It's fab now.

Well, our school is in a real rut; unable to sort things out. The parents are in a bitter fight with head and governor's how keep pretending that we got a satisfactory because we couldn't get anything else, not because there are real problems to be addressed. Hence, my desire to proof this is not true.

That being said, I usually don't take OFTED too seriously and agree with you that happy children is the most important!

A lot if it is based on exam results now. If the exam results were in the satisfactory category it is virtually impossible to be given a higher rating.

Hummm.. this is interesting mnistooaddictive. But that would suggest that if we did had outstanding results we would have been rated higher, despite the previous notice to improve, right?

There are certain criteria that are limiting, such as exam results and safe guarding. As I understand it, the overall grade can't be higher than the individual grades in this area. The overall grade can be lower than the grades in these areas if necessary but not higher. If exam results are outstanding but everything else poor then you could get unsatisfactory. If exam results are ' satisfactory' then even if everything else is outstanding you can't get higher than satisfactory. Is that clear? Hope it answers your question.

Proving exam results can mean getting more children to register for free school meals as school are categorised according to % on free school meals and compared accordingly. A freak poor year can skew things enormously.

My dds school went from Special Measures to Good in 2 years! But the school cannot progress further than this because the percentage attendance is lower than government targets so it's not just about exam results!

mnistooaddictive is right - there could be hundreds of reasons. I see what you're saying about your Head and is frustrating that he is simply excusing himself rather than saying "great, we've improved! Here's what we're doing to improve some more..." but it may be that he has actually been told they couldn't get above satisfactory because of safe guarding or something.

Have you seen the report? This would give you the best indication of where the school is actually at and not just the Head's opinion. But I will echo what other posters say and say really don't worry about it. You proving him wrong wont get you anything except an annoyed headteacher.

It does sound like the head is being defensive, which isn't helpful and needs to be addressed.

Though he may be correct about 'satisfactory' being the top category available at the moment, as Ofsted take previous years' and KS1 SATS into account in their judgement and what happened previously can't be changed.