All schools are apprehensive when Ofsted ring up and at Sir John Gleed we got the call in the week before the Easter holidays.
We can’t reveal the result yet as the report hasn’t been published but we can say that it went very well for us and that it will be a huge leap forward for the school.
We think that the report will clearly show the outside world that things are very definitely looking up at the school!
Schools are inspected by Ofsted according to their current Ofsted rating.
Outstanding schools can go up to six years between inspections as long as exam results don’t ring any alarm bells.
For most schools inspections take place every two to four years.
At Sir John Gleed the last full inspection was in April 2013 and it didn’t go well – the outcome was that the school was put into a category called special measures and as a result we have been receiving very close monitoring by Ofsted.
So when we got the call on the Monday before the holidays it was a really big deal.
We didn’t feel that we are a special measures school any more as we know how much progress has been made.
Our students and their parents are telling us that things are so much better than they were back in 2013.
However, we were also aware that our last set of exam results were disappointing and even though we are expecting and predicting much higher this year we didn’t know how the inspectors would view this situation.
On getting the call schools go into overdrive – there is a lot of planning to do.
Ofsted give half a day’s notice and they also give you a long list of things that they need before the inspection starts and a set of things to arrange for their visit.
There isn’t time to “fix” things – you are either ready or you are not.
We had been expecting inspection so we were in good shape with just a few tweaks needed to key documents.
Five inspectors came to the school for two days and during that time they visited 40 lessons, met with key staff, met a range of students, examined our performance data and read lots of internal documents.
They looked at the Parent View survey responses and the results of our own surveys that we carry out on parent evenings.
At the end of the first day they allow the headteacher to sit in on their team meeting to see how they are thinking about things.
This was a nerve wracking experience and at the end of the meeting they gave us another long list of things that they needed to see.
Day one finished for us at about 9pm as we met as a team to make sure everything the inspectors asked for could be provided.
On the second day we started to get the sense that things were going well – they saw us at our best and as ever our students proved that they are our best adverts – they shone!
By lunch time the inspectors had seen everything they wanted to see and they started their team meeting to produce the very first draft of their report.
At the end of the afternoon we sat and listened to their feedback and it was then that we knew that it really was a good news story!
We know that we still have a job to do at Sir John Gleed to fully regain the trust of our local community – we think that they Ofsted inspection will help but it’s only one piece of the final jigsaw.
The next piece will be the exam results in the summer – students and staff are working so hard at the moment and we expect this hard work to pay off with a big lift in results.
The very final piece will be the next inspection which we think, on the back of good results, will finally confirm that Sir John Gleed is a great school!
