Hill House rated unsatisfactory

[jeanne16]

I was shocked to read this. Any parents from Hill House available to comment?

Lorry that might be a little unfair given that contacting press, complaining to ofsted, calling on MP's and staging protests are done in public and questioning the owners might very well be done in private from within the school community. I do agree I think parents need both answers and a lot more action. Blame where the blame is due and all that.

tom it's a pretty accurate figure.

not good then

The parents are more infuriated about the accusations of tutors being used and there not being a good mix of ethnicities at HH than they are infuriated that the school has little regard for their children's safety and does not support its teachers. That is just so bizarre.

I do not see many people having a laugh at HH parents at all. Cruik has been giving baby b some stick but all in the tradition of Toff/Chav bashing at which the Bristol appear to excel.

British I meant not Bristol!

I too think that any HH parent should not really worry about tutoring and whether or not the school is "international". The Ofsted report does not concern itself with these issues so, although annoying, it is not worth wasting more time arguing about this. I think you do need to realise, babyb, that you probably do not know whether the education your child has received has been really good, or not. You will not have any information about what your DC could have done based on their starting point. You simply do not know, but you can form an opinion based on your expectations.

I think parents do need to understand that it is newsworthy that such a well known school is now in serious trouble, if for no other reason than people are paying for it. I would strongly suggest that the parents need to consider if the leadership at this school can actually turn it around. The teachers are clearly worried and know they can do better with professional support. That in itself is probably telling you that Ofsted are correct.

I paid for my children's education and I am absolutely not laughing. I think it is a major problem for parents and children alike. However, you will be chip paper tomorrow and the hard work of improving the school will not be newsworthy. However, Ofsted will be back in about 6 months I suspect, so imediate action is needed.

I don't think it's just the fact that the school is a private one that has made it newsworthy. It's how bad that Ofsted report is. It's not quite the worst I've ever seen but there is a huge gap between it and the recent one from one of my local schools which was judged to be inadequate. There was no chance that the media weren't going to pick up on it.

Apart from a few notorious ones, have you really seen worse? I haven't. Hence my view that this is not a quick fix!

Only a very few. It is horrendously bad. At least one of those is probably one of the notorious ones. Like I said, there is a huge difference between the inadequate report my local school got and the HH one. Reading the two you'd struggle to see how the local one is judged inadequate. The HH one and the notorious ones possibly need a whole seperate category that goes beyond inadequate.

Turning it round totally won't be a quick fix. But there are some things that can be, and in fact must be fixed quickly. Sort those ASAP and create and begin to implement an action plan for the rest and they can at least convince ofsted they are going in the right direction and can turn the school around. They might have an advantage over a state school in that the doe won't want to close it down unless absolutely necessary, and I don't think forced academisation is an option here. Still inadequate but going in the right direction could just get them off the hook in terms of closure, giving them longer than you'd get otherwise to make a bigger difference. Albeit with regular inspections to monitor progress.

They really need to get the fire regs and H&S stuff sorted immediately though, or they really are screwed.

I read an Ofsted report about 15 years ago which gave an atrocious report on a local secondary school which was closed down shortly afterwards. The inspectors reported children wandering round the school in lesson time, unchecked, a near total breakdown in discipline, very poor teaching, high staff and pupil turnover - you name it, it was happening there. I hope there are few schools left as bad as that.

There are several coclusions to be drawn from this:

1. OFSTED judgements are not a good judge of a school.
2. State schools do a really good job without the benefit of such supportive parents, small class sizes and children from well resourced backgrounds.
3. The recent suggestion that state schools should learn from private schools is laughable as state schools do an incredible job and could teach private schools a great deal more.

4 Osfted really aren't fit for purpose. As proved in their quick change in their judgements of Birmingham schools in the Trojan horse debacle.

The information I see online suggest HH has already secured two private agencies to help address the deficiencies. I expect a quick turn around to the report within 6 months. Rather than a death knell this should be viewed as an opportunity for improvement. Assuming they have equal if not more options than state run schools I see no reason to expect this situation to remain as is. HH parents will vote with their feet, their eyes have been opened and options will certainly be examined.

I think Discovery New School lost a child during their inspection, didn't they? Turned up about an hour later without anyone realising he'd been missing.

Funnily enough, plenty of parents there were complaining that OfSTED had badly misjudged their school too.

whensmy I'd go with option 1 and 4!
It's an enormous and famous school and has been open for 50+ years. I'm sure if children had come to harm it would be common knowledge, so maybe Ofsted's Safeguarding obsession is just that, a misguided obsession.

Is that just luck though? And why should a pupil be harmed before normal practice to prevent harm is adopted? Learning lessons from elsewhere so your pupils aren't at undue risk of harm is a pretty basic thing that just about every other school managed. Including ones like Summerhill (also inspected by OFSTED).

But not here. If you look back through reports, there are running problems with the school not fixing identified issues (since about 2009). Now (finally) hiring outsiders, and have a string of recommendations to implement. So not just OFSTED finding inadequacies. And why did it take five years to take it seriously?

OFSTED isn't trying to force them to teach in a particular way, just do whichever way they choose adequately. And in safe premises, where they know who is present, and meeting fire safety standards.

As mentioned above, 20% of independent schools are inspected by OFSTED. They are not making findings like this in most schools.

This latest inspection was bound to be more in depth die to the serious Ci certs that were uncovered in the pupils survey last year and the emergency inspection that took place thereafter. I don't believe all the patents fund it impossible to accept. Rather than insisting the issues ofsted have uncovered do not exist, the parents should be more concerned with putting pressure on the owners rather than rallying to their defence.
It would not necessarily be common knowledge if pupils had been harmed unless someone leaked it to the press.

The teaching has never been rated more than 'good'. So yes it's slipped from box 2 to box 3.

Schools do change. It's clear from a number of the comments (and indeed the OFSTED report) that many pupils are happy there and benefit from being taught to pass entrance exams. Now pause and think what the school could be like if the teachers felt supported, had even a vague plan of what they would be covering each school year, and they actually knew how children were progressing.

Ofsted aren't looking so much at the teaching as they used to. It's much more focused on the learning and progress than it was even a year ago. They will have talked to children, probably heard them read and looked through their books to see how much progression they had made since the beginning of the year. In terms of teaching they are looking at teachers knowing what each child can already do and what their next steps are. This is where the teaching has fallen down, because the teachers didn't know that. There's much less interest in how you teach something and more in whether teaching is correctly pitched to what the children need to know.

I doubt any of that stuff was looked at in much detail in the May inspection because it was largely focused on the H&S issues they had been made aware of.

It was criticised for giving the same work to all the pupils in a year group, not tailoring at all to a child's abilities, therefore the brightest will get bored and the less bright despondent.

I actually disagree about Ofsted. I think the inspectors are mostly making the correct judgements. I suspect not a single judgement for HH is wrong. Most schools fall down on the quality of teaching and learning because the lessons are not based on the prior attainment of the children. This is one of the problems here and plenty more besides. Often state schools have realised they have a problem and have a leadership team that can turn things around. That is something ofsted believes is not possible here so it is good news the school has moved to address this. This school has lived on borrowed time and has not responded effectively to previous inspections. External help should have been sought a lot earlier. This, in itself, is a failing.

I think ISI mark schools down for setting the same work for an entire class/year group as well. It's what my old school got marked down for in it's previous inspection. So I don't think it's true to say that Ofsted have marked them down because they don't understand independent schools. It may well have been the same if they'd been inspected by someone else.

Its strange. Both DC have had friends who were at Hill House and other Central London prep schools. A small sample but the Hill House children come across as well adjusted, and well, normal. This is not the case with one or two other Preps. One at least seems to churn out a number of quite unhappy, and overly competitive, children, and I really would not touch them with a bargepole. I did not know that OFSTED inspected Private Schools. I wonder what it would make of some of HHs competitors.

That said on child protection paperwork, I think a number of schools including SPS, St Benedicts, Southbank and more have recently realised how important it is to take child protection seriously. Times have changed and most of us will have been shocked at the sheer extent and breadth of problems across society. I hope this has been a timely lesson, both for HH and other schools within the sector.

I hope HH survives. The gangs of children walking across Chelsea are such a London landmark.

I believe Ofsted are less of a push-over than ISI. Their inspection of my DD's school was a work of fiction. It read like a prospectus with lots of things mentioned that had not even started! The ISI team was headed up by a senior teacher at a specialist music school. Ofsted usually manage to get inspectors with relevant senior experience at the very least.