Riverhead Infants school - Sevenoaks

[Thinkingloud]

A year ago the head teacher changed.

It used to be outstanding and is now rated as good.

If anyone has kids in the school, how did you find the head teacher change?

Positive change or not?

And what has actually changed?

For one thing, the Ofsted framework has changed since 2009; many schools which were Outstanding under the previous inspection framework are now judged 'only' to be Good. The school may not actually be much different, just the various ways in which they are doing what they are doing are viewed / weighted differently under the current assessment

Also, even children who were only in Reception at the time of the Outstanding inspection are now 19 or 20 years old - e.g. out in the world of work, or part way through a first degree etc That's an awful lot of school years for things to change...

Thats very interesting… I didn’t know about the framework change.

Is it now much harder for a school to be outstanding than it was 15 years ago?

Also, I know this is irrelevant to my original question but we also have a local church outstanding school which was rated as outstanding just a year ago.

Would the “outstanding” inspection be enough of a reason to prefer that school?

We visited both schools and we are very happy with both from what we saw and we meet both admission criteria…so whichever we put first we will get an offer