Outstanding schools: Holtsmere End Junior School

From inadequate to good in fewer than 13 months – Joe Carter finds out how staff at Holtsmere End Junior school overcame five years of stagnation in record time...

“You have to realise that, after Ofsted, everybody’s confidence was on the floor,” says headteacher Emma McGuigan, thinking back to February 2012 when Holtsmere End Junior school received the judgement that, in truth, many staff were expecting: ‘inadequate’. “It was horrendous. There were lots of tears and people were thinking about quitting teaching. The head at the time went off sick within days.”

Teachers who have undergone a similar experience may find Emma’s recollection causes the hairs on the back of their neck to rise involuntarily. ‘Inadequate’ – there can be few more demoralising words in the English language. It doesn’t just suggest something is below par, but deficient, unworthy. What’s more, it’s a very public humiliation. Ofsted’s verdict is there for all to see: your peers, your community and your children’s parents. “Everybody hears about these things. I’d go on courses and people would ask about which school I taught at,” recalls Emma. “I wouldn’t want to tell them. You wouldn’t put your hand up because you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself.”

From an external perspective, all members of staff are tarred with the same ‘inadequate’ brush, but a closer look at Holtsmere End’s 2012 Ofsted report shows not all aspects of the school were failing – which perhaps explains why, a little over a year later, its fortunes have been completely reversed.

Emma was the deputy head at the time things began to go wrong. When her predecessor left, she assumed the role of acting head and was simply never replaced, eventually interviewing for and accepting the job of substantive headteacher. “I felt guilty. I felt that I personally had something to prove,” she confesses; a sentiment echoed by several other members of staff who have remained at the school following the 2012 inspection. But, beneath the remorse, there was an undercurrent of optimism that things could be turned around. “I picked myself up the very next day,” says Emma, in typically robust fashion. “You adopt the mindset that anything you’re going to do will move the school forward, so it’s a win-win situation. It’s just about the length of time it’s going to take.”

1 Talented staff

Just 13 months after the turmoil of being labelled ‘inadequate’, Holtsmere End was reinspected and found to be ‘good’. It’s an astonishing turnaround in such a short space of time, but the potential for a quick recovery was always there. Many of the staff had been at the school back in 2006 when teachers were praised by Ofsted for their “well prepared” and “interesting” lessons.

“A good teacher doesn’t suddenly become inadequate, they are just struggling to maintain best practice through lack of CPD,” says Emma, seeking to explain the dip in performance. She is not alone in this assessment, either, as her thoughts are echoed by the 2012 report in which Michael Sheridan, HMI, writes that: “The school is not satisfactory because leaders have not demonstrated the capacity to improve the quality of teaching over time in order to accelerate pupils’ progress and raise their attainment.”

When pressed on the subject of the outgoing head’s part in the school’s decline, Emma gives an honest appraisal. “She was a lovely lady; the most genuine and kind person. But standards started to slip because of the lack of rigour and the lack of organisation. It certainly wasn’t due to a lack of commitment.” For the new leadership team, which includes assistant head Louisa Hawker, the challenge was to remotivate staff whose excitement about teaching had faded during a protracted period of inertia. “You knew in your heart of hearts you were doing the best job you could in your classroom with your children,” says Louisa, “but you were also aware of all the opportunities you couldn’t tap into. We were in a bubble.”

“It’s a big ask to push staff who have been in a really tough situation to try new things on a daily basis,” she continues. “It makes it difficult to maintain positive working relationships.” In order to bring teaching practices up to date without destroying staff moral, the leadership team found that a coaching strategy was necessary. For Emma, who never had ambitions of becoming a headteacher and for whom school management was uncharted territory, this meant drawing on the skills she already had. “My teachers and my TAs are now my class. That’s how I see them,” she says. “They all have individual needs; they all need to be challenged, encouraged and supported. I track the teaching profile of the school in the same way as I used to track children’s progress. It’s very visual and Ofsted liked that.

2 Taking risks

During the six-year period between 2006 and 2012, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Holtsmere End became a worse school; it just didn’t get any better. Ironically, fear of failure prevented the school from experiencing success as it paralysed decision making. With Emma having witnessed the folly of treading water, her leadership has been characterised by an altogether bolder outlook. “When somebody goes on a course and comes back full of enthusiasm, my response is to sit them down and ask them to tell me what impact it will have on our children’s learning, and to find out how I can support them. As a leader, it’s about capturing the passion of somebody who really wants to make a difference. “Before it was always a case of, ‘Now’s not the right time’ and people began to give up. Risk taking isn’t always easy, but you have to think – how big is this risk going to be? My response will usually be: give it a go in your classroom – then you can sell it to the rest of the school.”

Going out on a limb to encourage the proliferation of ideas has helped to invigorate staff, but so too has the redistribution of leadership. The scale of the task faced by Emma was such that she quickly had to come to terms with the fact she couldn’t do everything herself. “It’s about delegating the right roles to the right people,” she says. “For example, Louisa has been teaching here for 18 years. Now, in a short period of time, she has become assistant head and INCO. She’s had such an enormous impact and that potential has always been there.”

3 The road to recovery

Central to the improvements made at the school has been Challenge and Choice. This is Holtsmere End’s own blend of Cambridge University’s Learning Without Limits and Guy Claxton’s Building Learning Power, which encourages children to take greater responsibility for their learning and push themselves further in the space of a single lesson (more on which later). However, before this ambitious project could get under way, it was first a matter of re-laying the foundations.

Following the Ofsted inspection, Emma was supplied with a school improvement plan that she chose to follow to the letter. “Then, if we weren’t successful, it wouldn’t be my fault!” she grins. “We got out the plan at our weekly senior leadership team meetings and I would update our progress using different colours, so you could see the evidence of what we had achieved over time.” Evidence and accountability have become watchwords at Holtsmere End. In part, this a byproduct of the early days following the inspection when barely a week would go by without an outside agency descending on the school to check up on the staff, but it’s also due to an acceptance that standards had slipped because no one was challenging sub par teaching in a meaningful or structured fashion.

“Now teachers have pupil progress meetings every half term,” says Emma, “so they absolutely know they are accountable for children’s learning. Previously, the school was waiting until the end of the year to assess whether or not children might be falling behind. If an intervention didn’t work, there would only be four opportunities for staff to correct matters in the whole of KS2. Increasing the frequency of pupil progress meetings to every half term has expedited improvement. “There’s no period of waiting,” says Emma. “We look at whether what we have put in place for a child the previous half term has had an impact. If the answer is ‘no’, for whatever reason, we’ve only lost six or seven weeks and we can change the intervention.”

For Emma, the clarity of her monitoring and evaluation cycle is crucial. “Strategically planning things out is essential,” she says. “If you have your staff meeting or your CPD in the wrong place and you haven’t given yourself time to evaluate it and follow things up, it gets lost. It becomes an isolated staff meeting where you’re basically saying – ‘give this a go, but actually we’re not going to ask you how you got on and we’re not going to take you on to the next steps.”

4 In the margins

The aforementioned Challenge and Choice has been instrumental in Holtsmere End’s journey from ‘inadequate’ to ‘good’ and features heavily in the staff’s plans to achieve ‘outstanding’ at their next inspection.

Its genesis coincided will the arrival of supply teacher Paul Heskin. Paul had been part of the senior leadership team at a school that had adopted Learning Without Limits, and so came with the knowledge and experience to address the children at Holtsmere End’s lack of progress. In less than a month, Emma had persuaded him to take up a permanent post and become deputy head. From here, work on Challenge and Choice began in earnest.

A Challenge and Choice lesson presents children with three activities: the first is intended to support those children who may be struggling with the basic concept; the second is pitched to be achievable for most of the class; while the third is an openended challenge that really stretches children’s learning. It’s up to each pupil to decide which activity he or she would like to tackle, and there’s nothing to prevent him or her from moving up or down a level at any point during the lesson.

“It’s very powerful for children as they continually need to work on their risk taking and resilience,” comments Emma. “Having three levels of challenge empowers them to move on to a more difficult task as soon as they feel ready. We’re finding it’s having an enormous impact on our progress.”

Pupil voice

Thesh, Y6

“ The working walls are split into literacy and maths. They are displays with tips to help you with things like long division and multiplying. So if you’re trying to find the area of a triangle and you’re stuck, you can go to the working wall and find the success criteria that you need.”

Sophie, Y6

“I think I’ll miss the teachers most when we leave. They are really friendly. It’s a bit like secondary school already because we only have our class teacher for a small amount of time each day. We switch over into different groups in the afternoon.”

James, Y5

“Last term we did a topic about the Tudors and we had to write about a Tudor queen. My group wrote about Jane Seymour. We had to write an advert for King Henry that would help him to find a new wife.”

Ethan, Y3

“I’m looking forward to meeting our new teachers next year. We have Mrs Gardener and I am looking for ward to the changes in Y4. It’s going to be harder. Y3 was all right , but I want to become more confident with my learning.”

MEET THE STAFF

Emma McGuigan, headteacher

“We went to visit my previous school, which is outstanding. I wanted staff to see that it wasn’t that different, it’s not this unobtainable thing. But we’re only halfway on our journey. We’re going for outstanding on the next Ofsted, so things are different. Now it’s a case of – look at this outstanding school and how much better it is than ours. That’s what we need to get to.”

Paul Heskin, deputy head

“One of the most difficult things has been implementing so much change in such a short time. Now that we’ve been graded as good, it’s given us time to explore the theory behind the new practice. We’ve been asking teachers to try out new methods, but we haven’t had the time to sell them the benefits of that way of working. Our school development plan calls for teachers to reflect on what works for them.”

Louisa Hawker, assistant head

“With my INCO hat on, the most significant part of Challenge and Choice is that children are not pigeonholed. They don’t have to adopt the mindset that they always take on the lowest level of challenge, or that they always need help. Every lesson is an opportunity for them to prove they can do something they didn’t think they could do.”

Samantha Ledgerwood, Y6 teacher

“As soon as we had our Ofsted, we went back to learning objectives for the year and planned completely from scratch. As professionals, we need to recognise that we are well trained and we don’t need to rely on other people’s schemes of work. With Challenge and Choice it’s all about ‘how do you know?’ – all those open questions.”