Beechen Cliff Bath- 'Inadequate' Ofsted

[LovelyBath77]

Just seen this, doesn't look very good.

www.beechencliff.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Ofsted-2018-Full-Inspection-Report.pdf

and previously-
files.api.beta.ofsted.gov.uk/136520__4.PDF

The application seems a bit vague but it appears places are allocated by the local authority. It doesn't seem to specify the criteria by which applicants are accepted, though asks about things like connections with the school and siblings..

www.bcsboarding.com/year-7.html

I do think there is a place for state boarding Charliescar. It's long been common in rural areas or for military families. Officer families usually choose to board at independent schools but that can be uncomfortable for others due to military hierarchy. The number of boarding places is small.

When my son was there - there were boys from China 😱 boarding and Surrey , Portsmouth to name a few places - none local .Some of the boys that boarded had connections to Rugby and sport in Bath - that’s about it

It does mention in the boarding form about looked after children / free school meals so I wondered if some places were possibly used for local children that were in care. It seems probably not though. I understand children in care can sometimes benefit from boarding schools.

OP - I'd be very surprised if you are not a journalist.

As a parent there with several boys going through, my view is that the teachers and head are very, very good. OFSTED is right in that some things in the culture of the school are old fashioned and need to change but staff are very committed and it is an outstanding school.

Surely, if the effectiveness of leadership and management is inadequate, then the leader needs to go. The school has gone from Outstanding to Inadequate under the watch of one person. So I’d want to know just exactly what is/n’t he doing to have overseen this change?
My nephew is at BC. I teach in a secondary school in the NW. If the slave auction events that happened at BC happened in my school we would have seen expulsions of students, and police involvement. Not some kind of ‘brush it under the carpet and hope it goes away’ response. Where’s the discipline policy for staff to apply in their classroom? Is it left to each teacher to decide what is/n’t appropriate? And how on earth can management ‘not know’ how many students are suspended or on early study leave? That’s a very old-fashioned way of trying to hope a problem will go away. We update out Department’s Action Plan 3 times a year. This feeds into the school’s Action Plan.
What about the appraisal process for staff? I can expect to be set, by discussion, 3 targets regarding my teaching / student’s results / professional development per year, have 3 observations by senior colleagues a year with a review process after each observation. Instead BC staff seem to be left to their own devices.
I reckon there’ll be changes within the Senior Leadership Team, and the Head’s grip on the helm is very shaky at the moment. It doesn’t matter how many parents report happy students, how this report doesn’t reflect the school that we all know – it’s what OFSTED say about it that counts. BC will survive, it always will. But the structures in BC need a good kick up the backside. They seem to be stuck in a ‘Boys Will be Boys’ mentality that belongs to another era entirely.

BeechenMum,

The head has brought the school from Outstanding to Inadequate.

How can he be very, very good?

At least the Chair of Governors has had the decency to resign.

@BeechenMum I've just advance-searched the OP and there's no suggestion she's anything other than a parent who had keenly wanted her son to go to Beechen Cliff. If she's a journalist she's been laying her deep cover well. So well she started before the 'serious safeguarding incident' that the school tried to minimise to parents and the community.

No, I'm a parent. I hope you can see I'm trying to be balanced in the post. I do think there are lots of good things about the school. The Head seems very good and he was there at the last "Outstanding' inspection.

Hopefully things will get better with this in time. They are holding some meetings next week for the parents, I see prospective parents have also been invited and people can book a place on the website.

Of course it s stressful and concerning for parents at the school.

Tom, the Head did expel three boys and the police were involved. A small group of governors overturned the decision and reduced the expulsions to suspensions. This is quite unfathomable.

I don't think the Head will resign, I think the Chair and Deputy Chair of Governors have taken that hit.

I do agree that the school has a systemic old-fashioned machismo problem and that it is this that has likely led to the safeguarding failures. I hope they will address this properly, it will need to be complete and not superficial.

Regarding the previous post about a nursery, this is different because these boys were as I understand around 16 /17 - very different from small children.

Not too dissimilar in age to the students at university involved in another racist incident around the same time.

It seems such incidents have risen in the last year at universities and they are trying to find ways of dealing with it- it's not just schools.

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/racism-uk-university-students-campus-nus-incidents-a8390241.html

If you look at this you can see the universities have not been great at tackling it either:

"Of the universities contacted, around a third did not share the details of alleged racist incidents, with many citing the sensitive nature of the information. Meanwhile, some universities did not provide any information because they said they did not record incidents under the category of ‘racist’.

Overall, there was not one consistent approach to recording the data – with some universities citing they only had access to formal complaints, rather than allegations raised through other outlets."

Looks like something schools / colleges / universities in general need to tackle better. Sad about the rise, wonder if is anything to do with Brexit - you tend to think of universities being liberal places of tolerance as well.

You need to be slightly careful about assumptions around the exclusion saga. Yes the governors on the appeal panel for the 3 permanent exclusions could have been as described and had too many connections to the pupils concerned and fudged a return to the school.
The alternative, which you are not easily going to get to know about (especially after the head teacher went public in the aftermath of the exclusions) is whether in fact the governors did do their job correctly. The reality was that the head teacher made a decision to permanently exclude the 3 pupils when there was not sufficient evidence to substantiate 3 pupils being permanently excluded and a number of others only given a fixed term exclusion. The exclusions have to be fair, reasonable and proportionate to the offence and the evidence available. I do not know what was on the video that is supposed to exist or what other evidence was or was not available to be able to comment on the significance of the variable punishments handed down by the headteacher.
Having significant experience of Independent Review Panels on permanent exclusion I can only say that in most cases where the panel does not confirm the exclusion it is because the headteacher has not done their job well enough in investigating the incident(s). Did the headteacher do their job well in this particular incident, I have no idea.
The bottom line is that the racist incident is only one part of the issues identified by Ofsted. If this incident was the only issue at inspection, it would not be a big problem but I have to agree with TomNibbs. You have to question how many issues have been identified when the book did stop with the head teacher, so they have to accept the responsibility for these failings, not just talk about the good bits.

The reality was that the head teacher made a decision to permanently exclude the 3 pupils when there was not sufficient evidence to substantiate 3 pupils being permanently excluded and a number of others only given a fixed term exclusion

admission, do you know that the Head made a decision to expel three pupils without sufficient evidence or are you guessing? Is this a known thing, so to speak?

I'm inclined to think that in this case the Inadequate rating would have been given for that one incident alone. I completely agree though that it's likely, and certainly inferred in the report, there are many more serious issues than this one.

One of the most interesting things to me about this is the way that parents (myself included) have such a strong and almost tribal instinct to downplay and rally round in the hope that 'it's not so bad and everything will be okay in the end'. It would be much healthier, but harder, to take heads out of sand and have a long look at what is really going on here.

newdocket the point you make about the investment parents have in protecting their kids' school is very true. My sons are not at Beechen Cliff but I've seen this in play so often in different settings.

Nobody wants to think the school they fought to get their child into has such deep problems. And in the case of Beechen Cliff, while the extreme racist incident is new the Ofsted criticisms about vulnerable boys, SEN, equality and bullying are not new, and parents chose to ignore or minimise these. "Oh it's not that bad", "That's not my sons' experience" (alpha white males who excel at sport, no shit), "It's all exaggerated" and the classic "Boys will be boys".

You are right that parents need to get their heads out of the sand. I think there's a good chance the head could really use this crisis to improve the school beyond recognition, but the parents need to want the changes to be made.

LovelyBath77 I thought it was a group of nerdy Year 11s reenacting history and "'it got out of hand"? So 15/16 rather than 16/17.

I agree with Tom as well.
I live and work in neighbouring LEA, but used to teach in Bath, and think that there still is a place for all boys education within the state system. So given that this is the only state all boys option for parents, I hope that the school can learn from this report and move on in a positive way.
When my dds school went from Good to inadequate a few years ago the Head didn't want to resign, but was not given a choice as it was decided by the LEA that they had to go. The LEA had a new Head and governing body in place by September for the new academic year,
The trouble is that many of the factors that make a big difference as regards OFSTED aren't the things that parents see from day to day.
Yes some teachers may not be satisfactory but parents only notice that if their children actually have those teachers.
Unless your children are affected by bullying most parents wouldn't take much notice of behaviour/bullying and safeguarding policies.
The Head may be very good at engaging with parents, giving impressive speeches etc. but there are lots of behind the scenes issues that Heads and Leadership teams have to deal with as well.

No-one has picked up on my point about whether Ofsted inspections should be unannounced or not. To me, that is crucial when considering how BCS has gone from Outstanding to Inadequate. I have visited the school several times in its outstanding days, in my role with the NHS, and often wondered how it achieved outstanding. I then went on to work full-time at another school in the same city, which was also outstanding. There was no comparison and their inspection was a 3 day notice one, which is normal following a previous outstanding inspection. All we had to do to prepare was to double-check on recording such things as EAL, exclusions etc., were up to date, as they were. (Ok, there was a little bit of cosmetic work by the maintenance team, but nothing much, given that we had 3 days to prepare!). Maybe BCS were very good at getting things in place to get that Outstanding on the previous occasion, having been given the 6 weeks notice which was usual then, but were caught out this time.

If it reduces the opportunity to hide away problems then I think all inspections should be unannounced!

newdocket the bit about the governors overturning the head's decision is in the newspaper article linked to upthread by a PP - www.bathchronicle.co.uk/news/bath-news/bath-school-governors-refuse-expel-1333724

I'm being thick - where does it say that he expelled them without enough evidence?

Yes i think it was Year 11. I heard it was a kind of game with an established group of friends, and the child involved in being the 'slave' when online to say about how he wanted his friends back and it was all a game etc, but then that is just what I heard, and my child is not in that year.

I'm fairly new as a parent to the school so maybe I feel differently in a way about broaching this and that is needs explored - of course the (previous) Ofsted was something I looked at when applying and the fact that we have more than one son and it was the local state school closest to us, came into it as much as anything.

Just got the Bath Chronicle and it's all over the front page. Says parents in the school are writing to the new parents to assure them about the school etc. In the same issue is a "Goodbye to Culverhay' school as well.

Re: Oldfield taking pupils from Bath- I think it does more now? i know it used to be lots from outside Bath- Bristol perhaps.

Gareth Southgate- nobody should be fighting to get their kids in to that school - it’s a state run school for all

Thie schools parents will definitely bury their head in the sand 😨 they will not admit the school they all wanted to go to is now inadequate .
I am personally pleased they got this at ofsted and had a surprise visit . The head thinks he is running some sort of 1950s school . It is rife with bullying , racism and generally rich sporty kids that think they are superior , and unfortunately the some of the teachers are of that mind set .
They have tried to cull the less well off by making it so appealing to the well off . It is advertised like a private school around Bath. Even in The heads speech about the whole situation is staged with the Bath rugby van behind him. This school has become more and more elitist over the years when my son was there. I think it needs to take a look at itself - it is not a public school .

to Charliescar
here here to that, the website comes across as some parody of a public school for boys joining from "primary or preparatory school" and "day pupils" and boys playing chess or smoking pipes in the library. I don't know who's responsible for branding but no progressive independent would portray themselves like that. And it's a state funded comprehensive.