Behind the Inspection Rating: Praise for hospital school revamp

Glance at the pupil headcount of the Royal Free Hospital Children’s School, which topped 1,500 in 2011, and it is easy to imagine a sizeable facility. But in reality, the school is a single classroom and an office housed on the hospital’s sixth floor.

Regardless of its size, the school has made an impression, securing a “good” rating in its most recent Ofsted inspection. One factor that helped it win over the inspectorate is last year’s £90,000 classroom refit. Head teacher Jude Chalk recalls that before the makeover the classroom was “very cluttered” and bathed in “awful fluorescent lighting. It just looked very battered,” she says.

Now the lighting has improved and the surfaces have been designed with infection control in mind – vitally important in a hospital environment. The children prefer it too, according to Chalk: “They now like being there, it’s like a real school, they say.”

Flexible design
The revamped classroom also provides the flexibility that a school teaching pupils of all ages, abilities and illnesses needs. “It was designed so that we had four areas within it,” explains Chalk. “There’s a bank of computers on one side like a computer suite, then the next wall has an interactive whiteboard, and the next has an ordinary dry whiteboard. The last has a smart board behind the cupboard doors; that way if we have primary children in the classroom we can open that up and they face in the opposite direction to the secondary pupils.”

This classroom mirrors a curriculum that caters for pupils of different ages and abilities even when they work on the same topic. “It’s been designed so every child can participate without it being obvious that they are doing work for a younger or older age group,” says Chalk.

While educational attainment is important, the school is as much about access to education. “I had one child where, for several weeks, she would pace the corridor outside and peer into the classroom but not come in,” she says. “I remember getting her into the classroom and sitting her at a desk near the others. You can’t expect the children we have to walk in, sit down and get on with it. There’s a fear of failure, they perhaps haven’t been to school for a year.”

Behaviour is also one of the school’s greatest strengths. Ofsted’s inspector heaped praise on the “excellent behaviour of students” and the lack of bullying. Chalk says this is partly the result of the school having a relatively high staff to pupil ratio, which enables staff-to-spend more time talking to the young people it works with. Another factor is that the school keeps in close contact with parents, speaking to them on a daily basis.

“We can often pick up from parents if there have been stresses so we know what to expect when the children come in,” says Chalk.

“Sometimes we stop the young people before they get to the classroom and see if they want to chat or need some time out. You can sometimes stop things escalating by giving them that space before they even start the ?day but you couldn’t do that unless you had spoken to them or the parent.”


FACT FILE